Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

The collapse of grand colonialism did not end the ‘othering’ of liminal cultures and the concomitant discursive erasure of mythologies from peripheral spaces. This holds true for pockets of Europe where distinctive cultural communities live alongside dominant national linguistic-cultural identities. A notable example is the Basque Country, which straddles the French and Spanish borders and which has emerged as a locus of thriving literary distinctiveness from active suppression and marginalisation of its unique language and traditions. What Gorka Mercero describes as a ‘planetarity’ in Basque literature that is evidenced in Bernardo Atxaga’s 1988 Euskera language book Obabakoak and its multiple translations is arguably amplified in Montxo Armendáriz’ 2003 screen adaptation Obaba. This paper suggests that the complex expression of cultural interconnectedness between the Basque people and the wider world has evolved from Basque mythological representations or lack thereof in prior literary and filmic artifacts, as equivalents to fossils in the archaeological record. A search for traces of myth reveals an incremental evolution of ownership and broadcast of cultural specificity in place of erasure. Despite appearances to the contrary, key to this is the fulcrum provided by Pierre Loti’s 1897 novel Ramuntcho, which was staged for theatre in 1908, and adapted for film in 1919, 1938, 1947 and 1959. The equivalent for cultural transposition is conspicuously absent in comparable texts such as Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s 1979 film adaptation Apocalypse Now, which have much wider currency in the dominant English-language canon.