The Nameless Country
Writer and English teacher Barnaby Bouchard explores Valencian history and identity – and offers a view of a diverse future for the region
COMING into the city, it’s the station that you’ll see first.
Valencia Nord is a lavish modernist structure built in 1917 during a wartime economic upturn as lucrative as it was mismanaged.
It is here, among the iron girders and blinking departure boards, that you’ll see Valencian identity distilled down to its most bucolic.
The station façade is adorned sumptuously with hand-painted pink tiles, with white rice, with luscious oranges.
This, one might well conclude, is Valencia at its most essential and traditional: a sunlit land of straw-hatted farmers toiling merrily in muddy rice paddies or under the emerald shade of orange trees.
A land of rattling canes and sighing ocean waves beneath enamel-blue skies. A land destined, as the official regional anthem says, to ‘bring new glories to Spain’.
But let’s not get carried away. Look closer at this building, and you’ll find evidence of a far more complex and divided region.
The façade of the station is adorned not only with traditional farming scenes, but is also dotted with metal crowns flanked by the ‘Senyera’, a flag comprising five yellow and four red stripes, the unmistakable symbol of the old Kingdom of Aragón, under which all Catalan-speaking regions were once united.
Meanwhile from the handsome belltower in front of the station flies a flag whose difference to the Senyera might at first seem inconsequential. It too, after all, is made up of five yellow and four red stripes.
But towards the hoist is a blue stripe inlaid with intricate gold patterns. This is the confusingly named ‘Royal Senyera’, and don’t be fooled; the regions these two nearidentical flags represent are very, very different.
Most countries have one name; this one has at least three, depending on whom you talk to. According to their political inclinations, you might be welcomed to the Valencia region, to the Valencian country, even to the Valencian kingdom.
Accepted by most Valencians, and by Madrid, is the first one, ‘la Comunidad Valenciana’, made up of the three provinces of Castellón, Valencia and Alicante.
Three provinces, united by their distinct flag, their distinct language, and their socio-political loyalty to Spain that sets them proudly apart from their distant cousins over the border in Cataluña.
This, at least, is the story we’re told. Modern Valencian identity is founded on the Transition-era narrative of near-total cultural distinction from Cataluña.
Differences between the two regions, be they consequential or otherwise, are snapped up, trumped up, and served up to a complacent population.
This reassures them that, in the words of the Transition-era Fuerza Nueva party, they are ‘deeply Valencian, and therefore, deeply Spanish’.
While the far-right Fuerza Nueva may not have performed well electorally, their argument that identification with Catalanism is inherently anti-Spanish swiftly became mainstream in the late 1970s and early 1980s while the image of the new, democratic Spain was still
being established. The Valencian region was deliberately isolated from Cataluña, politically, culturally, socially, in an attempt to neuter any nascent efforts to move towards any union of the so-called ‘Catalan countries’.
In so doing ‘Valencian’ was cut off from Pompeu Fabra’s hitherto universally recognised standard Catalan, rendering it unregulated and therefore impossible to adequately teach or study.
A language unsupported by any academic body will not survive long, and only recently has the standardisation of the so-called ‘Normes de Castelló’ gone some way towards correcting this course.
In place of the links that had joined the two regions for centuries came the process of ‘Valencianisation’, the artificial and inherently anti-Catalan creation of a new, purely Valencian identity.
Both the media and the education system were designed, in the words of Professor Maria Josep Cuenca of the university of Valencia, to ‘direct thought’ (towards) a pro-Spanish Valencian nationalism’.
The best lies flirt with the truth. Catalan is a highly varied language, with almost as many dialects as speakers.
The word for ‘pepper’ alone has at least fourteen different variations just in the Valencian region.
But a language cannot be subdivided endlessly, and the overwhelming scientific and philological consensus is that the language spoken in the Valencian region is a variety of Catalan.
One more often than not finds that those who argue against this truth are also those who seldom use the language in the first place.
That Catalan is spoken here need not make Valencia less Valencian, any more than Australia is less Australian because it speaks the same language as England, Ireland, or South Africa.
Nobody is pretending that Valencia and Cataluña are one and the same simply because of their common language.
Ironically, it was Madrid’s belief in this very mistruth that essentially scared them into artificially separating the two regions during the Transition.
For centuries, regional languages have been seen as the greatest threats to the unity of the Spanish state.
Hence why it was illegal to speak them outside private settings during the Dictatorship.
The death of Franco brought the opportunity for a glorious rebirth of Spain’s linguistic diversity.
But, while great strides were made, this proved uniquely difficult in the bilingual Valencian region, and politicians in both Madrid and the Spanish-speaking inland areas of the new Valencian region sought to exploit the cultural dichotomy that had existed here since the days of the Reconquest.
This is why, though in Valencia we now ostensibly have our symbols and traditions clearly defined, more confusion than ever now reigns regarding what defines it culturally, what its people speak, and even what the region should call itself.
To quote Joan Fuster, ‘a question of academia has become a question of opinion’.
Surely, in today’s world of conspiracies and fake news, these are words we can all identify with. And if we can recognise the problem, then we can fight it, too.
In this case, the fight must take the form of a celebration of Spain’s cultural, social and linguistic diversity.
We all have a duty to reject the notion that a homogenised Spain is a stronger one.
In the words of the great Valencian poet Vicent Andrés Estellés, ‘there will come a day when we won’t be able to do more. It’s then that we’ll be able to do everything’.