Up Close and Personal: A chat with Begoña Echeverria, singer-songwriter of “Bonbarazi Du Gernika”
Begoña Echeverria, author (The Hammer of Witches), playwright (“Picasso Presents Gernika”), and singer-songwriter, has released a song and music video named “Bonbarazi Du Gernika” in honor of the 85th anniversary of the bombing of Gernika on this day, April 26th.
WHY WE LOVE THIS
The song is poignant and important, and the video is beautiful. Not only that, but her perspective below has given us an even deeper, richer appreciation for this performance. You’re not fluent in Basque? No problem – Begoña provides English translation towards the end of the video.
OUR CHAT WITH BEGOñA
BEO: Begoña, thank you for taking the time to delve a bit more into your work. We know the video was beautifully choreographed and performed by the Basque dance group “Kimua,” and that you wrote and performed the song in this video. In my opinion, the lyrics are straightforward, yet enormously complicated. We’d love to unpack some of your thoughts on this.
Begoña: Thank you so much for your kind words about the video, and for this opportunity!
BEO: You’ve described this song as an “exploration of the evacuation of Basque children to England,” and with that, the song is written through the lens of a widowed mother after the bombing. There are so many different perspectives to take from any horrific event; what inspired this one?
Begoña: When I lived in Donostia in the early ’90s, I had a British neighbor whose father was evacuated to England after the bombing, along with his brother. Eventually, their mother called for the brother to return to Spain, but not my neighbor’s father. And he never learned why she made that decision. That was the jumping-off point for the song. I tried to imagine what it would be like for a widow to make that wrenching decision: does she keep her children with her, having just lost her own husband? Or does she send them away, hoping that they will be safer elsewhere?
BEO: After the widowed mother sent her children to England, the children were returned to the Basque Country because of the outbreak of World War II and England’s involvement in that war. Can you talk a bit more about this?
Begoña: I learned about this from Dorothy Legarreta’s The Guernica Generation and www.basquechildren.org.
About twenty thousand children were sent away to countries like Great Britain, sympathetic to the democratically-elected Spanish government Francisco Franco eventually overthrew. Once World War II began, there was pressure to send the refugee children back to Spain from England, as they had their own children to worry about. However, there were Britons who argued it would be cruel to send children back to a dictatorship, so they continued to support the Basque refugee children.
BEO: At the end of your song the widow asks for her son back, but not her daughter begging the question, “Will you have a better life?” This is a complicated and perplexing decision. What leads the mother to make the painful decision to request her daughter to not only stay away from home, but in a country that was at war?
Begoña: An excellent point! The mother does make the decision while Great Britain is still at war, but that country has a long history with democracy, and Spain does not. I imagined the mother would be hopeful that Great Britain and the Allied coalition would prevail against the Nazis. So, she ultimately decides that her daughter would have more opportunity in a democracy, even in a foreign country, than in a dictatorship in her own. Or, at least, that is her hope.
RESOURCES
The Guernica Generation by Dorothy Legarreta
The website of BCA ’37 UK, The Association for the UK Basque Children, www.basquechildren.org
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