I fell in love with Federico Garcia Lorca when I started to research the Spanish Civil War a few years ago. I fell in love with his poetry and his letters and the terrible anxiety he felt for most of his life, this inner angst that followed him throughout his plays and his poems.
I fell in love with his spirit because in spite of this inner turmoil he was as happy as a sprite and well loved by his friends.
When the fascists murdered him at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, many reasons were given, one of which that he was a "Red", and nascent communism was a global threat at the time. Lorca claimed to be a-political, he had friends on both sides of the political equation and was actually arrested at the home of his closest friend, a Falange leader in Granada, Spain.
However, Lorca pulled no punches when it came to speaking out against tyranny and cruelty and as the fascist general who signed his death warrant and consigned him to an unmarked grave famously stated, he did so because his writing was more dangerous than 10,000 guns.
I researched and wrote the Poet & the Angel in Granada, Spain. The book has now been released globally. I plan to promote the novella in Spain, among other venues. This is a country that is only now looking at the atrocities that arose from the war. They are lifting the "complicity of silence", a government policy dating from the days of Franco, that prevented its citizens from trying to find their loved ones buried in unmarked graves, like Lorca. Spain will never be able to heal until they do so. After Cambodia, Spain has the greatest number of unmarked graves. Thousands of bodies remain to be found.
I'm giving Lorca his voice back. I am doing so at this juncture of our history because of the alarming rise in neo-fascism around the world and the belligerency of the supposed "strongmen", a magnificent contradiction in terms.
Intellectuals within despotic regimes, Lorca in Spain, Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Jamal Khashoggi now, the list is endless, are greatly feared. They are feared because they see through the gauze of the despot's veneer, the absolute transparency of their demeanor, the shallowness that lies within them, their great insecurity and fear. Intellectuals and writers have the audacity to actually think for themselves and as such, they are considered dangerous by those tyrants that seek control over their citizens.
Tyrants are remarkably easy to see when you separate yourself from the allure and vacuity of much of what we see in the social media. Their actions can be readily perceived to be the absolute epitome of spiritual barrenness, almost vaudevillian in their aspect if they weren't so dangerous. One can clearly see that the "Emperor" has no clothes on at all.
But you can never eliminate a voice like Lorca's. "Justice", "Truth", and "Clear Seeing" travels through the ether unseen, within generations and from one generation to another. The baton is handed over ceaselessly, as we are all connected through the Universal Mind.
Collectively, we need to bring our stories forward and silence despotism through our pen, our songs and our art. We must fearlessly speak our truth.
This is why I have released this novella now.
You can buy the Poet & The Angel by clicking onto the Amazon link here:
