Flor silvestre: on affirming the sentiment of difference

FLOR SILVESTRE

Hermosa es nuestra fecunda lengua,

hermosa, ciertamente, cubierta de helecho:

¡ojalá pronto extraigas, Poeta,

de la flor silvestre, miel,

y del bosque, esencia vasca!


This fragment from Xabier Lizardi's poem raises a few interesting concerns about the intersection between language and place in regional literature.  Supposedly, as this text suggests, this composition produces some intertwined, botanical and human essence (esencia vasca).  At its most dangerous, such an essence becomes unbound from history, real objects and communities themselves.  At its best, such an essence, or identity, provides a possibility to read and unentangle such assertions.  What follows is a few words on the function of language in the "minor languages" in Iberia.

The cases of so-called peripheral nationalities in Iberia have been approached almost consistently as a tension of language.  This occurs even as authors working in minority languages resist this kind of classification.  And the language question is certainly an aspect of writing in any minor language.  Yet, it seems that this approach quickly politicizes texts in the polemics surrounding the rights and privileges of these "historic nationalities" in Spain.  Through my current work, I hesitate about the question of language as the sole point of departure for thinking about regional literature.  Instead, I am interesting in engaging the question of language through its relation to actual objects and geographies.  That is to say, to a kind of human and nonhuman geographies (much like what Levi Bryant has called "terraism").  

There are a few implications.  Such an approach pushes the reader to question what it is that a regional text might affirm or negate in its status as "minor".  Second, this kind of criticism becomes less about the literary institutions and more about the kinds of objects circulated textually (the quality and subjects of a given text).  To ask, for instance, does the text articulate a certain kind of identity (as opposed to simply affirming any essence carte blanche?  Is its framing device open, closed, or ambiguous?  Finally, it becomes more difficult to engage minor texts as objects composed in an isolated language (as if this were ever actually the case).  That is to say, instead of  the common rejection of, say, literature about the Basque country written in Castilian, I contend it is more productive to exam the relationality and circulations at work in the text itself.  This "esencia vasca", then, becomes very intertwined textually and ontologically.