My Invented Spain

My next installement in my op-ed column, Camino a Ítaca in el HOY. What it's like to approach a new country from afar. 

Spain first existed for me in books. I first saw the country through the eyes of characters like Jake and Lady Brett and as my curiosity grew, I dug my way through whatever I could find until I reached characters like the ingenioso hidalgo. From my home on the frozen prairies of western Canada, the country seemed to me to be about the furthest away I could get from the boring ice, snow and frozen smiles that surrounded me for the better part of the year.

I imagined a somehow familiar place with wide-open spaces running into mountains with rivers full of trout. Yet, unlike home, after a day’s fishing you could spend the evenings drinking excellent local wines and eating wonderful foods amongst the most cosmopolitan crowds in what seemed like a neverending fiesta.

As many travellers do, before ever stepping foot in a country I had already created an imaginary version in my mind. No matter how much I read, I still had what Chimamanda Adichie has called the single story.

My invented Spain was one-sided and it’s this lack of diverse perspectives that creates stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are necessarily untrue, but they are imperfect and incomplete. They don’t reflect the whole and more voices are needed to complete it.

My first visits to Spain were in the early nineties playing the Blues in Madrid. My imagined Spain was suddenly set against real life and while there were similarities, the pictures didn’t match.

The food was indeed good but if you weren’t careful you could also end up with a paella that wasn’t even worth calling rice with things. The cosmopolitan crowds I had imagined were in fact remarkably uniform and the streets of Madrid had the air of a Ralph Lauren ad, all pastels, top-siders and sweaters on shoulders.

I would discover more and more on each successive visit until eventually one day I felt so comfortable that I simply stayed. That, however didn’t mean that I had nothing left to learn. The more I talked to different people, the more I realized that there is never a single story. My Spain became a wide panorama of first-hand accounts of colleagues and those I met in bars. People who might think differently than me but who shared stools at the bar.

Then one day it all stopped.

The beer kegs stopped pouring and conversation fell quiet. Since then, I have been looking out my window. My perspective has once again become one-sided, an echo chamber of like-minded views on social media with politicians reducing complex issues into simple fables and stories stained by political correctness. Each side embracing the one story their team insists on being true, their official version.

Today we step out into tabla rasa, a Spain none of us knows. The first wave of the storm has passed but it’s far from over. Ideas need to be raised about how the new Spain should look but if we only use the single story, the tropes and stereotypes of the past will become false truths. Leaving the lockdown dreams of change that everyone desires to become as distant as an idealist tilting at windmills.