Strangers in a Strange House: Spanish
Youth, Urban Dystopia, and Care Santos’s Okupada
Jason
E. Klodt
University of Mississippi
The
image of youth has come to epitomize the image of Spain (Graham and Labanyi
312). Young Spaniards embody the nation’s exuberance and freedoms in their
renowned and at times infamous nightlife, and they are a highly educated and
diverse workforce that represents the nation’s future as an integrated European
democracy with a market-driven economy. And while Spain does have the youngest
population in Europe at the close of the 1990s (Allinson 265), the image of
youth as a representative culture for contemporary Spain belies the
demoralizing social and economic problems that Spanish youth face following the
1992 recession. Despite years invested in university educations and advanced
degrees, young Spaniards face a frustratingly high unemployment rate, which at
times reaches 30% (Rodríguez 21), and a dispiritingly impenetrable labor market
without the “enchufe” of nepotism. Spain has one of the highest unemployment
rates in Europe among university graduates (Sánchez Juárez 33) and only 40% of
those graduates hold jobs that reflect their level of studies and training, a
disparity that for many young people that devalues higher education (Jiménez
Barca). Those young people that do find employment lament the lack of equitable
salaries as they face a de facto earnings glass ceiling of 1,000 Euros per
month. This generation of “mileuristas” express uncertainty about their future,
a weariness of living day to day on limited incomes, and a disillusion with
government to produce meaningful change. Moreover skyrocketing urban housing
prices and the burden of a mortgage on limited incomes curb youth’s
emancipation from the family household until well into their thirties. Despite
youth’s continued cohabitation with their parents, ties to family are
straining. Once glorified as a prototypical national institution under Franco,
the contemporary Spanish family is fractured by divorce, parents’ increasing
time commitments to career responsibilities, and youth’s desires for increased
autonomy (Jones 388-90). The economic and labor realities that prevent young
people from establishing independent lives for themselves bode poorly for the
future of the family and indeed for the population in general considering
Spain’s steadily declining birth rates. The duality of the image of Spanish
youth—as a vibrant national symbol and as a stagnating underclass—sets the
stage for its problematic representation in literature.
Spain’s youth narrative of the
1990s, commonly referred to as “la generación X,”1 provides an
equally disillusioning image of youth and a grim outlook for Spain’s future.
Novels such as José Ángel Mañas’s Historias
del Kronen (1994) and José Machado’s
A dos ruedas (1996) portray a
disaffected and apathetic youth that engage in a hedonistic lifestyle of sex,
drugs, and rock-n-roll to numb the pain of failed relationships and
interpersonal disconnect. Etxebarría laments the pervasive cynicism, an “estado de ánimo de una juventud que no conoce otro estado de ánimo que
la desesperanza” (Eva futura 131). Estranged from friends and
family, in this literature home is merely a waystation between “marchas” for
Spain’s youth (as Miguel mentions to Carlos in Historias del Kronen, “Cada vez que llamo a tu casa, o estás
durmiendo o no estás” [181]). Drained
of optimism for career success or meaningful relationships, youth drop out,
rejecting the world of corruption and unemployment that they inherited from
their parents. In Mañas’s Ciudad
rayada (1998), Kaiser bemoans, “ki si la corrupción, ki si
tenemos una sociedad enferma, kon un kuartenta y cinko por ciento de paro
jubenil y una educación de mierda kon la ke kerían konbertirnos a todos en mano
de obra barata” (143-144 [sic]), which he explains while
unsurprisingly high on drugs, and hence his freestyle orthography. Spain’s Generation X novel
ultimately underscores the consequences of its protagonists’ hedonism, since
their continual escapism into drug and alcohol induced stupors produces
radically unstable identities.2 Reacting
to the pervading pessimism and disillusion, youth retreat inward, recoil from
family and friends, and sever interpersonal communication. In contrast to the
“ensimismamiento” in other Generation X novels—as seen particularly in Lucía
Etxebarría’s Amor, curiosidad, prozac y
dudas (1997) and Beatriz y los
cuerpos celestes (1998)—Care Santos’s Okupada
(1997) approaches the youth problem by examining
the role of collective identity among
this amalgamation of fiercely independent and alienated young people. Okupada surveys Spanish youth culture by
following a group of 17 to 22 year-old social outcasts as they stage an
“okupación.” These youth band together in an appropriated house to construct a
utopian microcosm of tolerance and acceptance. The novel’s representation of
youth exemplifies the theory of strangers who, as society’s undecidables, resist social hierarchies and thus, being
“strange,” their very presence causes disquietude and disorder. Vis-à-vis the
perpetual uncertainty of youth as strangers, Okupada
asks if identity can transcend the individual’s immediate whims to encompass
the dynamics of a group. Might alienated youth3 find sanctuary in
community? In the face of disintegrating families and fleeting interpersonal
relationships, is a sense of belonging, unity, or community possible?
The identification with youth has
come to define, and to an extent confine, Santos’s early novels. Alba Editoriales markets both Okupada and her first novel, La muerte de Kurt Cobain (1997), under
the category “literatura juvenil.” Both novels, like other Spanish Generation X
narratives, emphasize the correlation between readers and protagonists; young
people reading these novels seemingly identify with its twenty-something
characters, recognizing their own disillusion and alienation in those of the
protagonists.4 Yet the challenges that the protagonists face in Okupada—abandonment, homelessness,
self-preservation (they must scrounge for their own shelter and food), drug
addiction, threats of violence, death—demonstrate a fight for basic human
needs, which points up the paradox of the “literatura juvenil” label attached
to Santos’s novel: the protagonists are youths in age only. In contrast to the
“pijos” of Historias del Kronen and Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes in search
of escapism, Okupada reframes youth
as a struggle for survival. A nurturing, emotionally well-adjusted home and
upbringing are laughably anachronistic notions for Santos’s protagonists. Forgoing
the teenage rites of passage of La muerte
de Kurt Cobain, Okupada portrays
young people who no longer have the opportunity to be young.
The novel’s namesake derives from
“la okupación,” or squatting, in which marginalized young people take over an
abandoned building or apartment. While an okupación addresses the basic need
for shelter, its implications typically transcend the physicality of the four
walls of a building to articulate a political cause. In particular, a “casa
okupada” tends to be a neosocialist,
pseudoanarchistic living experiment modeled after the commune lifestyle.5
These terms—neo-socialist, pseudo-anarchistic—are inherently vague since in Okupada there is no rigid ideological
framework that defines this okupación. Rather,
the okupas’ philosophy incorporates a hodgepodge of socially progressive
slogans (“Somos los herederos directos del anarquismo...para
defender valores como la ecología, el antimilitarismo, la insumisión”
[36-37]) and a borderline stereotypical youthful idealism (“No somos adultos ni tenemos ganas de serlo. Somos ciudadanos
libertarios, antiautoritarios, revolucionarios, pacifistas, contrarios al
sistema y casi mayores de edad, aunque esto último no nos preocupa demasiado,
como casi nada que dependa de las leyes que dicta el poder establecido”
[13]). The okupación
combines an atmosphere of tolerance for social outcasts with a tacit agreement
that its members pool resources (money, food, skills, education) for collective
benefit. In order to serve their community they host
a series of “talleres” in which, for example, Beatriz teaches music, Begoña
teaches painting, Oswi-Wan teaches poetry, Alma conducts aerobics classes, and
the flamboyant Óskar gives lessons in “el dragqueenismo,” the delicate art of
being a transvestite. Their duality of purpose distinguishes the okupas
from the low socioeconomic threshold of only being homeless, and while an
okupación typically entails poverty, unemployment, and social marginalization,
it establishes political positions as well, as in the case of family politics
(the runaway), local politics (the anarchist), and national/global politics
(the immigrant). Thus while an individual joins an okupación partly out of
necessity—s/he does not have a place to live, is economically disenfranchised,
or is thrown out of a home—s/he also does so as an act of social defiance. The
okupas in Santos’s novel further seek a space in which to belong and feel
wanted. In essence, theirs is a community building project; the decision to
leave a place no longer considered home emerges from
their distinct backgrounds: two teenage runaways, a drug addict, a Cuban exile,
a bohemian artist, an Iraqi Kurd seeking political asylum, a homosexual shunned
by his parents, and an anarchist university dropout. As members of socially ostracized groups the okupas in effect challenge
their marginalization, establishing an alternative space in which to
address physical (survival) and emotional (belonging) needs.
The
choice to “okupar,” however, does not occur everywhere under the same legal
conditions. Northern and central Europe provide a figurative open door to
squatters. In Amsterdam a dwelling left uninhabited for 18 months is legally
available for habitation by squatters. While the legal precedents for squatting
in urban Great Britain establish that it is a violation of civil law, squatting
enjoys a de facto legal and social tolerance (Prichard 166). The city
government in Geneva even directs the phenomenon, known in French as “le
squat,” through the establishment of officially designated squat houses. While
such a sanctioned counterculture is perhaps an oxymoron, le squat’s overt
organization contrasts with the lawlessness and disorder of the okupación in
Spain.6 Article 245 of the Spanish Código Penal prohibits squatting
and leaves no ambiguity that okupas are lawbreakers. In fact, the concept of an
organized or government sanctioned okupación according to the Swiss model would
be antithetical to the Spanish okupa. Their rallying cry is
antiauthoritarianism, to wage a “batalla al odioso poder establecido” (Okupada 59), whose social establishment—government, police, capitalists, and
particularly property owners—is anathema to their itinerant lifestyle. The okupas base their fragile community on the property owner not
discovering their presence: “Para entrar a okupar, es imprescindible
que no te vea nadie, que la pasma no te pille in fraganti cuando estás entrando…Por eso lo mejor es okupar de
madrugada, cuando los vecinos duermen y, si se puede, hasta cortar el tráfico
para que no te pillen en plena faena” (38). The illegality of the okupación forces its
inhabitants to live a nocturnal existence; to take possession of their new
abode the okupas in Santos’s novel sneak through a garden door, always entering
and leaving by the same clandestine route under cover of the night. Their
relationship with darkness produces a duality of existence, both practical and
symbolic, in that the night serves to hide them (a form of protection) while it
simultaneously keeps them hidden (a form of isolation) from the rest of
Barcelona.7 This living in darkness pushes them underground—out of
sight of property owners and law enforcement—but also further marginalizes
these outcasts from society at large. They assume the role of the trespasser
who, according to Begoña, straddles the fine line between a “ciudadana correcta”
who has a home and a “delincuente común,” the homeless okupa (142). As
trespassers, they are unwanted and unwelcome wherever they stay, and regardless
of the space they inhabit, such that their occupation continually works to
ostracize them. Although the okupación provides them shelter, the okupas occupy
a gray area between being in an appropriate space and belonging to a makeshift
community.
Transience and instability mark
the social and physical spaces that the okupas inhabit, and indeed a sense of
certainty is anachronistic in the postmodern era. Home, family, community,
career, marriage, and friendship, once trusted as long-term sources of
stability have now been transformed into relationships of convenience. Each is
disposable, stripped of the guarantee of stability, and according to Zygmunt
Bauman, are couched in until-further-notice clauses (Postmodernity 24). As the
individual’s experience and skills run the risk of being outdated at a moment’s
notice, continual renewal is paradoxically the only constant in life. Long term
planning, pursuing goals, or leading a principled existence, once the
foundation upon which to base personal growth, is now considered superfluous
baggage for the postmodern citizen. A totalizing life project is incongruent
with the world that now surrounds the individual, as reflected in the
uncertainty of Spain’s volatile job and housing markets and the youth defeatism
portrayed in Generation X literature. For Spain’s youth the concept of home
itself lacks stability and permanence. In the face of uncertainty and the
impossibility of depending on any person or institution for the long term, the
individual must remain independent, flexible, and keep his/her options open.
Subsequently the perception of reality—rather than a trajectory of an
interconnected past, present, and future—now contracts to a series of vignettes
and short-term opportunities. Currie refers to this contraction as “a flight
from the present…to hurry everything into the past even while it is still
happening” (97). Time has become fragmented and disjunctive such that one must
live day to day, even hour to hour, and thus life lurches forward as an
ever-evolving contingency plan. Identity itself is not immune to this pervasive
instability. Douglas Kellner affirms that “postmodern identity is an extension
of the freely chosen and multiple identities of the modern self that accepts
and affirms an unstable and rapidly mutating condition, which was a problem for
the modern self, producing anxiety and identity crisis” (158). Postmodern
identity is chameleon-like; it morphs to exploit the moment, like a reflex or a
survival mechanism, in which external stimuli dictate one’s actions and belief
systems. It is no longer a question of having the vision and fortitude to
weather adversity while sticking to one’s morals and beliefs. Reliance on
institutions (family, career, community) and hence a fixed notion of identity
is potentially detrimental, since as the individual becomes fixated, stuck in
any one concept of the self, s/he cedes the ability to spontaneously bend and
change, and hence loses his/her survival mechanism.
The
inherent instability of postmodern identity reduces the life journey to that of
a tourist itinerary. One feels pushed to see, to quickly assimilate the
experience, and then move on, never staying in any place nor fixating on any
act for too long. In essence, the postmodern era sends the message that the
individual must pass through life as a vacationer; what one experiences in the
here and now must remain in the here and now, as in the tourist cliché, “it’s a
nice place to visit, but I would not want to live here.” Bauman suggests that
“like everything else, the self-image splits into a collection of snapshots,
each having to conjure up, carry and express its own meaning, more often than
not without reference to other snapshots” (Postmodernity 24). The postmodern identity is
essentially a series of superficial images, constructed piecemeal, even
randomly, and the order of these identity snapshots is of little importance as
long as they do not impede an individual’s flexibility. Yet as one lacks the
metanarrative to string together identity, the fragmentation breeds further
uncertainty.
Wandering
through this fog of uncertainty is the stranger. As society’s undecidables,
strangers resist categorization into social orders. The other, in contrast, is
based on dichotomies and hierarchies, such as man/woman, citizen/immigrant,
insider/outsider, and good/evil, where the former exercises control over the
latter. The stranger, however, falls into ambiguity, as s/he is neither wholly
inside nor outside, neither dominant nor submissive, neither friend nor foe.
Consequently, their identities are unstable and unclear, their stranger status
coming from “their tendency to befog and eclipse boundary lines which ought to
be clearly seen” (Bauman Postmodernity 25). And while strangers inhabit
an ambiguous space, they must necessarily be located somewhere, and thus they
muddy the divisions between belonging and being cast out. Similarly, the Spanish okupa lacks the foundations of
identity construction (home, family, community) and the legal grounds to occupy
a private space. In Okupada, for
instance, Óskar is ostracized from his family who is intolerant of his
homosexuality, Mustafá flees his home in Iraq to escape political persecution,
and Kike, a professional okupa, experiences the perpetual transience of the
okupación movement, stating, “De hoy a mañana te han echado de tu casa. Te
sientes como una basura” (37). Since they live with a sense of permanent
uncertainty, their concept of home is an estranged place. Madan Sarup explains
that “unlike an alien or foreigner, the stranger is not simply a newcomer, a
person temporarily out of place. S/he is an eternal wanderer, homeless always
and everywhere” (11), and like the stranger, the okupa manifests the absence of
home and roots, unable to fit in anywhere. Oswi-Wan and Mustafá would face
political persecution if they were to return to Cuba and Iraq, respectively,
yet as illegal immigrants they are strangers in Spain as well. Inge, a junkie,
pusher, and drug trafficker, cannot feel safe at any point along her drug route
(from Morocco, through Spain and France, to her native Germany) because the
narcotics that define her identity pushes her to the social and legal
peripheries wherever she may be. Thus strangers are home-less, both without
domicile and without the building blocks of identity that a home implies. Even
the other, while marginalized, can in fact go home; s/he has a place to call
home, a space of security and protection. The stranger, on the other hand,
suffers the uncertainty and instability of lacking any place of refuge.
In addition to being out of
place, the stranger produces ripple effects throughout society. Strangers are
contaminants. Since they cannot be easily classified—neither inside nor
outside—they disarrange neatly constructed social hierarchies of everyone
remaining in their right place. As appropriators of others’ property and space,
squatters like Kike, Kifo, Begoña, and Óskar inherently violate the social
contract of allegiance to private property and as such, Santos’s strangers must
move about at night. Strangers’ lack of a clearly defined place throws a monkey
wrench into society’s order-making machinery, and therefore their presence is a
threat. An orderly society, as Mary Douglas argues, is one free of dirt, which
“offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive
effort to organize the environment…In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating,
tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively
re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea” (2). To reestablish
an ordered, hygienic environment society must cleanse its impurities and put
people in their places, or as Julia Kristeva explains, “it is thus not lack of
cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system,
order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4). Consequently, the
stranger’s violation of order fosters a dream of purity, producing the
reactionary rhetoric of “if we could only get rid of (a certain undesirable),
our problems would be solved.” This dirt elimination project implicitly
establishes hegemonies—pitting insider against outsider, the clean against the
dirty—and proposes a utopian project in which the hegemonic power seeks a space
that is either uncontaminated and stranger-free, or in which the stranger turns
into the other and fits neatly into the social order. As portrayed in
Generation X literature, Spain frames its own youth as strangers, whose
ambiguities—between carefree adolesence and responsible adulthood, between
economic dependence and gainful employment, between social blight and the
future of the nation—strain social order.
Okupada posits an alternate perspective
to the stranger problem and the subsequent dream of purity in what one could
call the stranger’s revenge by contemplating the dynamics of a space if it
consisted of nothing but strangers. The okupas construct a space of belonging,
their own private alternative utopia. Off the streets and in their own house,
the home-less are now, literally, inside and are no longer strangers, rather
they constitute the majority. With the structure of
the house serving as a partition from the rest of Barcelona, they are empowered to define the inside from the outside,
the insider from the outsider, and who belongs and who does not. In the
teeming, consumeristic landscape of the Barcelona portrayed in Santos’s
novel, the okupas declare their house a free space
(19, 52) and work to transform their dwelling into a utopian micro-society, an
urban “locus amoenus” of freedom, tolerance, equality, and mutual respect. In
fact the okupas even recreate the dream of
purity by constructing their own space of cleanliness, a purification
that is quite literal in the novel. The eight strangers converge on a house in
a state of decay, abandoned for twenty years to an accumulation of grime, and
Alma narrates the clean up effort: “Todo estaba asqueroso. De cualquier rincón salían sopresas desagradables: preservativos
usados, jeringuillas, mierdas como catedrales y hasta un carburador y una
batería de moto…llenamos bolsas y bolsas con escombros que habían caído por
todas partes, pedazos de puertas y muebles podridos” (28,
29). Upon their arrival, their house lacks a reliable structure, with rats
infesting the basement and “una buhardilla que, literalmente, se caía a
pedazos…y podía pasar que el suelo cediera o que el techo se desplomara sobre
nuestras cabezas” (26). Through
a physical cleaning and reconstruction, they transform the dwelling from a
space in disrepair into a utopic space. Kike pirates electricity from
powerlines in the street and throughout the house’s floors they designate
spaces in which to construct a bar, a concert hall, and bedrooms. The project
transcends the act of construction and represents a movement larger than their
own self-interests, an act of community that forges a collective identity, and
the house serves as a metaphorical framework upon
which to build this identity. No longer the strangers, within its protective
shelter they are free to express and develop their personal identities.
Through their workshops (music, painting, poetry, aerobics, and of course “el
dragqueenismo”) their particular signs of identity
may flourish. Alma, for example, seeks “un ecosistema original y divertido en el que me
apetecía mucho quedarme a echar raíces” (28). As is
common in Spain’s youth narrative, like Historias del Kronen, Beatriz y
los cuerpos celestes, and Loriga’s Lo peor de todo
(1999), parents and family are largely absent from
Okupada, and Alma observes of her
parents that “ninguno de los dos está nunca en casa
porque sus múltiples obligaciones les mantienen entretenidos” (89). An okupa like Alma looks to the collective identity of the
okupación as a surrogate family, since Alma’s family unit disintegrates when
her parents divorce while she is participating in the okupación. Mirroring
Alma’s desire to “echar raíces,” her fellow okupas seek a sense of belonging
and the stability of a space in which to found an identity. Finally, in
distancing themselves from their parents and an adult world they consider
hypocritical and irrelevant, the okupas reveal
what Manuel Vázquez Montalbán would call “el peterpanismo” (385). Their utopia is a “culto de juventud” as they declare, “no
somos adultos ni tenemos ganas de serlo” (13) in a desire to stave off
the inevitable: adulthood and presumably maturity.
For that reason, their utopian
vision is short-lived, even doomed from the beginning. While the itinerant
strangers of Okupada find shelter in
an abandoned house, they do not find a home. By taking up residence in the
house they unwittingly replicate the power structures—the outsiders become
insiders—against which they are ostensibly rebelling. The group christens their
run-down dwelling “Bákinjam” after the British royal palace of the same name.
Adopting the name of the house of Windsor, center of a monarchical and formerly
colonizing world power, is an ironic choice for a supposedly collective,
neo-socialist living experiment. Yet it also signals the hypocrisies into which
they fall and the disintegration of their utopian microcosm at the hands of
abused authority. The okupas replicate the same dream of purity that drove them
from their previous spaces (the streets, broken homes, intolerant families,
Cuba, Iraq) to occupy Bákinjam in the first place. By creating a utopia for
Barcelona’s strangers, they reproduce the project that necessitates the drawing
of boundaries, the establishment of order, a “clean” space free from the
stranger. Their rigorous cleaning evolves into a crusade to rid their
microsociety of its unwanted, the disorderers among the strangers themselves.
Namely the presence of Inge, the German drug pusher, represents a faultline
along which the okupas divide themselves. Despite their declared tolerance and
ostensible acceptance of outsiders, Begoña condemns Inge’s drug addiction as
immoral (117) and Oswi-Wan attempts to exclude Inge from their house, alleging
that “Inge no era de los nuestros” (131). Their utopia reproduces the need to
purge the unclean, singling out the stranger among strangers. As their
confrontations multiply, the okupas abandon their utopian idealism and fall
into the same trappings of power they had fiercely criticized in the Barcelona
outside the okupación. For example, once they claimed unwavering loyalty to
their ideals: “las ideas no las desalojarán jamás. Esa es
nuestra fuerza…Nuestra lucha es social y libertaria y no vamos a renunciar a
ella ni dentro de cuarenta años” (40-41). On two
occasions Kike affirms that, “somos pacíficos y
detestamos cualquier acto violento” (46) and this pacifism, “no debemos olvidarlo bajo ningún concepto, pase lo que pase”
(131). Yet their
interpersonal conflicts escalate into violence among the love triangle of Alma,
Kifo, and Inge who fight each other at knife-point (110-111). Furthermore, Kifo
defends the okupación with growing violence, fending off the invading police
force with molotov cocktails. As mentioned above, a principled existence is
futile when faced with the vicissitudes of the postmodern world, and similarly,
hypocrisy infiltrates the core values of the okupación and rips at the fabric
of their pacifist movement. The romanticized community splits apart and the
spirit of equality and tolerance splinters into petty individualism as the
okupas become ever more self-involved. Begoña, for example, the longest serving
okupa, expresses disillusionment with their movement, claiming, “la okupación
es un modo de vida alternativo sólo apto para falsos idealistas” (157) and
abandons the okupación for a lucrative job. Inge and Kifo withdraw from the
collective and retreat into drug-induced escapism. Their microcosm reproduces
the “us versus the stranger” dichotomy that the movement sought to upend, and
thus the okupas’ utopia crumbles.
Marin notes that a
utopia (from the Greek “ou topos,” or “no place”) degenerates due to the contrast
it implicitly draws between utopian and non-utopian spaces (286).
The euphoria of utopia turns into disillusionment when one goes “back to
reality.” In Okupada, the difference
between the utopian (the okupación) and non-utopian (Barcelona) spaces is
similarly unsustainable; the okupas’ ideals of unity and equality cede to the
grim reality of capitalist greed and xenophobia when they leave the
protection of the okupación. Attempting an anarchist public relations campaign
(Kifo says, “Yo propongo movilizar a la opinión pública…hacer algo que llame la
atención de la gente para que nos conozcan y estén a nuestro favor” [93]), the
okupas scale the Ayuntamiento and, in a move reminiscent of a band of pirates,
pull down the Spanish flag and in its place hoist the black flag of the
okupación (105). Yet their symbolic act—the flag serves as a mark of identity
and as a rallying point—lasts an underwhelming three and a half minutes (106).
Rather than rally public support for their cause, the flag-raising incident
provokes a police invasion of Bákinjam to force out the okupas. Like the
ideological emptiness of raising their flag, their socially compromised
identity—the okupación—is hollow; the okupas show that they can easily discard
their dreams and goals as circumstances fluctuate. As
the okupas’ act of social resistance turns against each other, the
metanarrative of the okupación is overturned and the promise of utopia
degenerates into dystopia.
The collapse of the okupas’ house parallels the breakdown of their
collective identity. As the identity of the stranger is uncertain and unstable,
Okupada reproduces this instability
as identity shifts from solidarity to solitude. Beatriz conveys the sense of
hopelessness and detachment in her view of interpersonal relationships: “Estaba
convencida de que nunca viviría en pareja una larga temporada. ¿Para qué? ¿Para
herir y que me hieran?” (102). Her cynicism reflects the ephemeral nature of
postmodern identity, as it is located in the imminent present, rejecting the
modernist notion of an interrelated past, present, and future. Indeed the
attempt to give identity a structure—relationships, family, home, career—is
detrimental in postmodern life. Structure, like the foundation of a house, is
useless when facing the tectonic shifts of a world of radical uncertainty. Thus
identity cannot be evaluated for the long term, rather like the drugs that Inge
injects, it is a quick fix. As the community in Bákinjam implodes, the okupas
shift and change out of a stagnating, collective identity and reaffirm their
autonomy. To construct and trust in a metanarrative such as “collective
identity” or “group unity,” indeed any commitment beyond the self, handicaps
the individual, and as such s/he burrows ever deeper into self-involvement and seclusion.
Sarup comments that “amid the universal homelessness [of the stranger],
individuals turn to their private lives as the only location where they may
hope to build a home. In a hostile world, what can one do?” (11). Santos’s
okupas are caught in a tension between belonging and exclusion and as such,
their identity is unstable: “Instead
of constructing one’s identity, gradually and patiently, as one builds a
house—through the slow accretion of ceilings, floors, rooms, connecting
passages—a series of ‘new beginnings,’ experimenting with instantly assembled
yet easily dismantled shapes, painted over the other; a palimpsest identity” (Bauman Postmodernity 24-25). In Okupada, Bákinjam’s lack of architectural integrity and stability
reflects their shaky community. Indeed the collapse of collective identity accompanies the physical collapse of the house: in the
climactic confrontation with police, amidst escalating violence, the structure
fails, floorboards crumble, and Kifo falls to his death.
The okupas attempt to extend
their collective identity through the narrative structure of the novel itself,
writing the text as a testament of their short-lived community. Each
protagonist adds one chapter to the story of the okupación, democratically
contributing to a collective identity, telling their own story in their own
words. They also declare a metatextual rebellion against the
hegemony of a singular narrative voice: “No
estamos de acuerdo con esos narradores cretinos que a menudo aparecen en las
novelas, que son uno solo y que fingen saberlo todo de todo el mundo,
narradores oligárquicos, manipuladores y fascistoides” (14). The okupas’ rejection of
authority appears as an orthographic rebellion in the purposely misspelled
words scattered throughout the novel (i.e., introdukzión klarifikadora, ke,
okupas, Óskar). But like the drug-induced orthography in Mañas’s Ciudad rayada, the changes are a
superficial transgression, an artifice that purposely draws attention to
itself, breaks the pact of verisimilitude, and lacks the profundity to inspire substantive change. The narrative structure
of Okupada, like the structure of
their house, is also unstable, as captured in the textual chaos of Mustafá’s
unintentionally comical chapter. Truly an inhabitant of a tower of Babel, his
inadequate language skills necessitate a hybridized usage of Spanish, French,
Italian, English and at times Arabic:
Yo le digo que to travel es molto facile para kurdos,
porque sonno pueblo nómada, de artesanos, ganaderos y agricultores (Alma me
ayuda con las palabrotas) y es exacto lo que soy moi: vivo de entallar
power-rangers y otras cosas, I travel como mis antepasados (los del arca, por
ejemplo), plantuve tomatos y náscaros na mi window y si no teno cabras es
because en Barcelona no hay. (79)
The
multiple narrators create a textual schizophrenia by narrating from subjective,
contradictory, and ultimately self-serving points of view. Who is to blame for
the okupación’s failure depends on who is narrating. Under the guise of a
collective project, the structure of the novel itself undermines the okupas’
attempt to construct the okupación as a metanarrative. To paraphrase
Baudrillard, the medium becomes the message as the okupas condemn themselves
for a superficial adherence to their principles. Dorca
affirms that Spain’s youth narrative reflects a crisis of values (320), and
indeed Okupada intimates that unity
is a liability, permanence is detrimental, and commitment is meaningless.
The identity problem for the okupa is that the construction of
home is impossible. In a resounding pessimism, both sides lose. On the one hand
Okupada criticizes the materialistic
society and the stranger-segregation project of the metropolis outside
Bákinjam, and demonizes the police for using excessive force. And on the other
hand the novel critiques the alternative lifestyle of the okupación as the
okupas’ hypocrisies strip their project of ideological renewal and humanistic
transcendence. They lose their battle against the police and authorities, and
the okupas’ quest for a more enlightened existence results in failure. In
effect their struggle produces no substantive change. Later a politician,
Avel•lí Pi Sureda, appropriates Bákinjam’s collapse to pose in front of
television news cameras to further his political clout. And adding insult to
injury, it is a “humanitarian” organization called
“Techos para todos” (directed by Alma’s own father, no less) that enlists
police force to evict the offending okupas so that the house can be made
available for the homeless, while of course, the okupas are themselves
home-less.
Care Santos’s Okupada shows the disintegration of
youth communities and the failure of collective identity, questioning if unity
is at all possible among contemporary Spanish youth. In a novel directed Spain’s
youth, Okupada lambastes this same
youth culture’s superficiality, egotism, and self-involvement, and chides youth
for playing at being revolutionaries, a game that they abandon when they are no
longer having fun. Despite its apparent antiauthoritarianism, the novel is a
cautionary tale for contemporary Spanish youth who betray their own search for
identity. For them, home is an ephemeral place, and as society’s
unclassifiables, these strangers in a strange house can only find shelter in a
space of uncertainty.
Notes
(1) This generation of young
novelists ranges from the canonical José Ángel Mañas, Lucía Etxebarría, Ray
Loriga, and Pedro Maestre, to the largely overlooked Caimán Montalbán, Daniel
Múgica, Gabriela Bustelo, Violeta Hernándo, José Machado, and Care Santos.
Studies by Carmen de Urioste, Germán Gullón, and Toni Dorca debate the terminology,
define the characteristics, and explore the meanings
of this narrative. While Gullón celebrates this literature as an
act of freedom and autonomy (x-xi), these three critics do coincide in that it
unmasks a disturbing portrayal of reality for contemporary youth. As Urioste
points out, despite being surrounded by the population of a major European
capital—Madrid—protagonists cannot tolerate being with others and they
consistently retreat from meaningful interpersonal relationships (470-471).
This antisocialism manifests itself in Santos’s Okupada, as well, in the lack of cohesion and communication among
urban youth.
(2) The modern identity was often
related to the other, and associated with empowerment
or vindication on the part of the marginalized (Kellner 141). The modern identity constituted an interactive
process in which one’s interpersonal relationships were forged alongside one’s
relationship to him/herself. Identity is no less a concern in the contemporary
Spanish youth novel than it was under modernism, but the uses of identity have
shifted such that now postmodern identity is
interiorized and subject to change according to the whims of the individual,
without consideration of the effects on interpersonal connections. Whereas
principles, morality, and dogma were once to remain constant in the face of
life’s adversities, now the allure of instant gratification takes precedence,
as seen in the drug abuse in Mañas’s Sonko
95: Autorretrato con negro de fondo (1999) and Caimán Montalbán’s Bar (1995).
(3) Youth, according to Hebdige,
is a series of struggles in the lives of young people that impact identity
formation (68-80). Similarly Epstein views youth culture as essentially a space
of identity formation in which young people experience a tension between
childhood and adulthood that produces alienation (4-21). Through its
estrangement Spain’s contemporary youth culture becomes apathetic to its
present and future, which further defines
the youth experience as downward mobility. This conceptualization of youth
culture ties closely with the definition of youth subcultures, in which the
individual feels isolated due to a pervading sense of meaninglessness (Hebdige
72). Thus the young person is drawn to subcultures as a space in which to
construct meaning. However, a key to subcultures is that subcultural resistance
to hegemonic culture affects only those engaged in the subculture and has
little if any effect on society at large (Epstein 11), a parallel that Okupada draws in its denouement.
(4) Specifically Santos addresses
a post-adolescent audience in La muerte
de Kurt Cobain. The 15 year-old protagonist Sandra is unusually
independent, has curiously adult sensibilities, and confronts an adult world
that is distanced and uncaring of her intense emotional plight. Sandra rejects
traditional notions of family and adulthood—“Nosotros creemos que eso de
casarse es una mierda y que lo que hay que hacer es vivir la vida” (30)—and as
in many of Spain’s youth novels, Sandra’s parents are absent from her life,
vacationing in idyllic Czechoslovakia, a nation whose internal collapse mirrors
the unraveling family structure in Spain’s youth novels. In La muerte de Kurt Cobain pop music and
film serve as reference points for reality; songs by Nirvana—“Come as You Are,”
“On a Plain”—provide a soundtrack for the novel’s plot points and the narrator
alludes to hip filmmakers—“Aquel discurso era intenso como una peli de
Tarantino” (44)—to provide exposition. In addition to its pop culture
references, the novel identifies with its youth readership by portraying
teenage disenchantment and the value of solidarity among teenage girls. While
in retrospect Santos expresses misgivings about publishing this early novel
(“Entrevistas”), the way the novel presents this coming of age story underlines
its connection with young people by speaking youth’s own vernacular.
(5) The okupación has an
electronic corollary in “la ciberokupación.” As identity on the internet is
linked to user names, domains, and URLs, one can appropriate virtual spaces by
being first to stake a claim to an internet name and then profit from reselling
it. For example, Tunisian student Anis Darragi purchased the domain name
“www.repsol-ypf.com” and, like other “pícaros virtuales,” attempted to exploit
Repsol for millions of pesetas upon news of its proposed merger with YPF
(Iglesias). Yet despite similar terminology and a common link to the question
of identity, there is a fundamental difference between the ciberokupación and
the street okupación. Like the landgrabbers or Sooners of western American lore
of the 1850s, profit and economic advantage drive the ciberokupa, whereas the
okupas in Santos’s novel (as well as nonfiction okupas throughout Europe) would
reject such a capitalist enterprise. Their okupación originates from a
quasi-socialist philosophy in which profit is neither a goal nor even a
consideration and any resources are shared equally with the group. Yet despite
the rejection of materialism and the slogans of unity, Santos’s novel reveals
the okupas’ allegiance to these ideals is half-hearted at best, thus offering a
cynical vision of Spain’s urban youth.
(6) In Okupada, Óskar further specifies the difference between Spain’s
scrappy, downtrodden okupas and the rest of Europe’s squatters, who he
dismisses as “okupas con pedigrí” (59).
(7) In contrast to the
Madrid-centric narratives of Generation X, Santos sets Okupada, as well as the aforementioned La muerte de Kurt Cobain, in Barcelona. Whereas the novels that
take place in Madrid by Mañas, Etxebarría, and Loriga downplay urban Spain’s
increasing ethnic diversity and burgeoning immigrant populations, Okupada mirrors Barcelona’s pluralistic
image. The diversity of protagonists’ nationalities and ethnicities–Inge the
German drug trafficker, Mustafá the Kurdish refugee, and Oswi-Wan the Cuban
exile—reflects Barcelona’s reputation as an international crossroads and as a
destination for immigrants, yet simultaneously emphasizes the paradox of their
marginalization. Like their young Spanish counterparts that struggle to find
affordable housing (Galindo and Mars 38), immigrants are also pushed to the
legal periphery to have a place to live.
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