Ian Gibson: “I’d tell Abascal to do a saliva test, because he looks like a Moor”

Hispanist and biographer Ian Gibson (Dublin, 1939), who publishes his memoirs Carmen in Granada (Tusquets), criticized the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, for talking about Spain “which can become a multicultural dump” and recommending “taking a saliva test, because he looks like a Moor.”

“I don’t know him personally and I would like to talk to him. How can you say that about a multicultural dump? I would suggest a test because it looks very Moorish, which I think is great: if Spanish has all this multiculturalism in it,” he said in a press conference.

In fact, Gibson — who doesn’t consider himself Hispanic because he already has dual citizenship — thinks there’s “a lot more to do” in terms of Spanish studies. “It is the most complex country in the West because it has many identity problems,” added the Spanish-Irish author.

“I think there is a denial of heritage like Jewish or Muslim. It is crazy not to accept that there is racial mixing in Spain. Where is the problem, if we are all children of the same God?”, he asked humorously.

IN Carmen in Granada Gibson reflects on his years of apprenticeship and training in his native Dublin before coming to Spain and the impact his association with the work of García Lorca had on his time. One of the episodes dark of this book is an attempted sexual assault that the author himself experienced when he was barely 10 years old.

“One day I was looking at cinema posters to choose a movie and a man with a classic Dublin raincoat appeared and asked me if I wanted to go to the cinema with him. I didn’t have the courage to say no, and after two minutes of the movie, his hand started to rise, and I pushed it down several times. I ended up leaving and he gave me a coin, which I threw away as soon as I left the place of shame I had,” he said.

In another passage of the memoir, Gibson recounts the “serious tension” that arose with Lorca’s family as a result of the book in which he discussed the author’s homosexuality A bloody wedding and a subsequent interview with Dalí. “It was never overcome and Lorca’s remains were also a source of friction,” he added.

the threat of a lawsuit

The biographer recalled an interview with Dalí that led to a call from Isabel García Lorca assuring him that she would sue him. “I told him, ‘Don’t do it, we are in a different era and if Dalí comes to testify in court, it will be a huge publicity for all this,'” he recalled.

“They offered me to talk to Dalí one day, when I had to travel from Madrid to Figueras without thinking about it. When I arrived, I found Dali sitting on the throne, with a beret in white and a pipe and trembling. It was a great interview because they barely understood him and he mixed French and Catalan,” he said.

Gibson insisted that the painter wanted to “clarify his version” of his relationship with García Lorca, once the first part of the Hispanic book is published. “He told me strong things, that Lorca was in love with him and that he wanted to sleep with him: he had to give that interview,” he concluded.

This phrase still echoes in the head of the Hispanicist Ian Gibson: “What bastards the English are who come to criticize Spain, then go to their own country”, it echoes, but it does not hurt because, as he discovered during his professional career and in his recent biography, he was “useful stranger”.

This is how he dropped it during this Tuesday’s presentation Carmen in Granada. Memoirs of a Dublin Hispanist (Tusquets), the book with which he won the 35th Comillas Prize, and in which he takes the reader back to his childhood and youth in a middle-class family with an “exasperated mother and a self-conscious father” because of his short stature.

But it is also about some memories where this “foreigner” who “escaped” from his British lands claims not as a Hispanicist, but as a biographer of García Lorca, Machado or Cela: “I’m not Paul Preston, I’m Gibson, and I wrote books about Lorca. I know not everyone likes me, but it’s useful to have someone from abroad come to talk about Spain, and besides, I’ve had Spanish citizenship since 1984.”

Gibson begins his biography in 1985, when he lived with his family for a year in “carmen” in Granada, that typical house in the Andalusian city whose name, and thus it begins, comes from the Arabic word “karm”, which means “vineyard”. » or “closed garden”. The beginning with which he claims the Spanish “identity”, something that “complexes”.

“Hispanism is still important because there is a lot to do in Spain, it is the most complex country and that is why it is still the most interesting in Europe because, for example, the French have a defined identity,” he repeated. .

Convinced that after the publication of these memoirs, he will now be “more calm than before”, Gibson admitted that since childhood he had the intention to be “first”, to be “admired”, and that García Lorca “helped” him.

But, as shown in these pages, if Gibson is the best biographer of the poet from Granada, it is because he was the first to deal with his biography, entering into his personal life and not forgetting his sexual condition, which brought him into frontal conflict with his brothers author A poet in New York or dewy spinstertwo of the works that the Hispanicist recalled during his speech.

“Cela – he explained – was not the saint of my loyalty as a human being, but he has stellar moments as a novelist […] There are people in Granada who can’t stand Lorca, just like there are people in Ireland who can’t stand Joyce».

“Declaration of love for Spain”

Although this biography is also a “declaration of love for Spain”, because here she freed herself from the cultural weight of the most puritanical Ireland, as well as the “shame” carried by the concept of sex that she experienced in childhood and abuse. of alcohol in his maturity: “I was brave when I wrote my cowardice.”

A lover of Spain like few others, Gibson admits that this biography could have a second part, but it won’t because “it would be very inconvenient.”