I love questions. Asking them. Hearing them. Answering them, when I can. Questioning is inherent in storytelling: who is the main character? Where is this character? What will drive the plot? But when we look at history, it is not characters, but people. It is not just plot, but real, genuine conflict.
Our tour of Spain is revealing to me and not just the power of storytelling but the reverse- the lack of storytelling. What happens to a person or people when their stories stop being told? How do we learn about such people? I told you I like questions. It is this phenomena, this erasing of people, and equally important, the erasing of their stories, that I am most noticing here in Spain. I’m pretty good at noticing these aspects in my own culture, in American history, but I’m realizing now how much of world history is truly missing from our human narrative.
Paul keeps telling us to think about “the presence of the absence.” Obviously he’s a good tour guide, educated historian, and he has created the most appropriate of phrases for our time here in Spain. Today in Seville, we saw an incredible example of this. We visited the Church of Santa Maria de La Blanca. This church is an active one. It is relatively traditional-looking with rows of pews facing towards an altar. There are traditional images that you find in many Christian churches, but it was an absence that caused us to visit this one of many churches in Spain and Europe. Because this church in a previous time was both a synagogue and, even before that, a mosque. Years ago when restoring this church, they found the remains of the Ark from the synagogue. It was fully intact, you could see the Hebrew writing, and the architecture was that of a traditional Jewish synagogue. During the same restoration they also found an Arch facing towards Mecca, and thus, this church had also been a mosque. In one building, in one holy building, we can see the history of Spain all at once.
Some might say that this building is a masterpiece of history. It shows how a conquering people acted towards the conquered. It shows the history of a single city within a single territory within a single country. But after the restoration of this church the remanence of the Jewish synagogue was covered by a painting. And the arch which represented the Muslim Mosque was closed off from the public. And thus, what should be, from my perspective and others, an example of tremendous history, is effectively erased. And here we are back again at the presence of the absence. The absence of the Ark, the absence of the arch, and the actual and physical covering and restricting of these aspects.
Later in the day we went down into a parking garage. Yes, you might think a parking garage is a strange place for s classrooms without borders trip to venture, but we did just that. We walked around a row or two of cars and found our way to corner in this parking garage. There was a see-through plastic wall, and we gazed over and saw pile of stone with a tiny Star of David on top. The Star of David on a piece of metal was probably no more than a few inches in diameter. Our guide Moses told us that when this car park, as he called it, was being built in the 1990s, they found 192 remains of bodies. They sent these bodies to an archaeological Museum for testing, and they found out that the bodies were from the 13th century and the based on the placement of how the bodies were within their graves, they realized that this was a Jewish cemetery. And so, as you might expect, they kept digging the parking garage and the Jewish cemetery was erased.
As an English teacher, I’m fascinated with stories. My entire curriculum is based on stories. It is based on the characters in those stories, their experiences, their emotions, and their conflicts. But those stories, which I hold so deeply, can’t be told, can’t be shared, if they are covered by a painting, destroyed by a parking garage, and erased from human existence.