The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [129]
In the 1980s, the handmade espadrille started to lose its market to the less expensive factory-made one from Spain, and then an even less expensive one from China In 1981, France imported 3 million pairs of Chinese espadrilles. About eighty people still work on espadrilles in Mauléon, because no local would wear one from China or anywhere else if it was not handmade. The last traditional textile plant for espadrilles is outside town, and a few artisans still hand sew them. But the population of Mauléon is in decline, as people leave their Euskera-speaking world for employment on the French-speaking coast or in Paris.
Sabino Arana in prison wearing espadrilles. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)
WHILE THE SPANISH wanted the Basques to be the engine of their economy, the French provinces were of little economic significance to planners in Paris. The French, with coal, iron, and waterways to build great industrial centers in the north and east, could afford to let their Basques, ports and all, languish in benign neglect. The French state offered French services to the Basques and few opportunities for development. French schools were provided, were obligatory, and did not allow any language but French. Many Basques heard the French language for the first time at age five when it was forced on them in school. Under French administration, Basque culture had suffered a slow erosion over 160 years, but between 1965 and 1970, Euskera experienced a sudden, powerful blow: Television was introduced to rural France. For the first time in history, the French language was commonly heard in the homes of Basque farmers.
Daniel Landart, born in 1945, the son of Labourdine farmers, saw the disintegration of Euskera in his family. “During World War I my grandfather went to war and wrote my grandmother in Basque. During World War II my father was deported to a German labor camp and wrote my mother in French. They always spoke in Basque, but they wrote in French.”
Having grown up before television, no one spoke anything but Euskera in Landart’s home. But the language was forbidden in school. Some teachers let children speak Euskera during recess, but others were more strict. One teacher would force the student, caught in the act of speaking Euskera, to stand by the door holding a broom until he could catch someone else speaking it. The newly betrayed Euskaldun would then be given the broom until he caught someone else. The one holding the broom at the end of the class had to write fifty times, “I will not speak Basque.”
Landart said, “This created an atmosphere of denunciation and fear among us. The one who was denounced remained angry at the denouncer for life. It divided us.”
As a teenager, Landart could speak Basque, but he could only read and write in French, the language of his education. At sixteen, he began to teach himself to read in his mother tongue, starting with French Basque writers, because the dialect was easiest for him. In time, he was writing in Euskera. He wrote a sixty-four-page book of poetry and short stories and published 1,000 copies at his own expense. The 300 copies he sold in local markets paid the cost of publication, and the rest he gave away. Some of the poems have since become popular songs. He later wrote a novel and several plays, but the book for which he is best known is Aihen Ahula, (Weak Root), an autobiographical account of his search for his own culture. It is a search that many French Basques have been undertaking.
THE PERCENTAGE OF Basques throughout the seven provinces who speak Euskera depends on whose definition of a Basque is used. The official definition is someone residing in Basqueland. The Basque government considers any citizen of its three-province region to be a Basque. But polls have shown that Basques have wide disagreement on the definition. Juan San Martin of the Basque Academy of Language said, “This is not a relevant debate in the Basque language. It only speaks of Basque speakers. Someone