A perpetual Renaissance

On October 25th, at the seminar that the Grup Blanquerna holds every year, Damià Pons said a few words that are still bouncing around my head. Although he was supposed to be participating in a panel on the forty years of the 1986 Linguistic Normalization Law, he ended up talking to us (I don't quite know why now, but it made all the sense in the world) about the difficulties that political Mallorquinism has historically had in taking off. Our luck, he said, was having the exceptional circumstance that, between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, some of the clearest minds we have ever had coincided in this country of ours: Miquel dels Sants Oliver, Joan Alcover, Gabriel Alomar, Antoni Maria Alcover, and Costa i Llobera.

And he was right. How is it explained in a society like that of Mallorca at that time? With illiteracy levels bordering on 80% and political elites perfectly integrated into the State's power structures. If you were a trained, comfortable, and well-positioned person within Mallorcan society, reclaiming Mallorca's own political personality was not only an attitude difficult to explain sociologically, but also in terms of individual incentives. Why would you question a system in which, as a journalist, lawyer, or prestigious intellectual, you could live perfectly well?

These intellectuals, from diverse ideological positions, shared the conviction that Mallorca was not only subjected to interests that were external to it, but that it had assumed this subordination by having lost the memory of its past and by internalizing a cultural self-hatred that made Mallorcans want to be something they were not. Thus, overcoming that political and cultural alienation was essential.

But while they struggled to popularize these ideas, preaching in a desert, Mallorcan poets and writers were triumphing at the Floral Games in Barcelona without that literary splendor necessarily translating into a political claim. A culture that achieved prestige beyond the island could perfectly well coexist with a society and institutions fully integrated into the dominant political Spanishness.

This was lamented by the far too little vindicated Miquel dels Sants Oliver when he criticized the lack of a militant impulse in Mallorcan letters, an attitude he associated with what he called the insular temperament. It was not that there was a lack of good writers, but that that literary vitality did not quite turn into a collective will for political transformation.

If you will allow me, I believe that today we live in a situation that has many similarities to that one. Catalan culture in Mallorca is going through a moment of extraordinary vitality, in very diverse fields and with an editorial production that, and as Professor Pons himself also said, has reached figures never seen before. But this cultural effervescence coexists with a meager and hopeless political dimension. And I am not just talking about political parties: I am also talking about the lack of broad consensus on self-government, the language, and the future of the country.

Not everything is the same, of course. Now many of us know how to read and write our language. Also, those of us who see Mallorca as something more than a «little rock» are a group that transcends the intelligentsia and that, despite being a minority, is conscious and militant. But the fundamental challenge remains the same as it was more than 120 years ago: how can we avoid the dissolution of our collective personality and end up becoming a large beach urbanization? How can we take advantage of this cultural moment without following in the footsteps of our Occitan brothers? They also experienced a great literary renaissance, including a Nobel Prize for literature, which did not prevent the subsequent decline of their language to a situation of great fragility. In short, how can we be a country?

In the same way as Miquel dels Sants Oliver, today I also lament this Mallorcan cultural “Renaissance” that does not quite translate into politics. And I do not blame the writers, who today are one of the few sectors that we clearly have in our favor. The problem is deeper: a society that, despite having an extraordinarily alive own culture, still has many difficulties recognizing itself as a political subject. To assume that Mallorca is something more than a territory over which others decide and that without this collective consciousness we will hardly be able to defend our interests.

As long as we do not take this step, we will continue to experience politics as something distant, we will sink further into hopelessness, and we will become impoverished. But there is a path we have not yet explored sufficiently: that of overcoming Spanish nationalist impostures and embracing a renewing Majorcanist project that allows us to think about the country from here. Shifting the gaze we all have toward the continent and valuing what we have here without constantly thinking of ourselves as an appendix.

It is with this intention that we are launching Xaloc, a new magazine that aims to contribute to this ideological recovery and offer a space from which to think about Mallorca and its future. Right now, we are conducting a crowdfunding campaign on Verkami to make it possible.

There is work to be done, and we are still in time.