IN THE FALL of 2005, Associate Professor of Modern Languages Dieudonné K. Afatsawo presented the results of his research in literary and cinematic representations of two different wars.

In “The Riflemen from Ifni: Franco’s Moors and the Spanish Civil War,” presented at the 30th European Studies Conference at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and published in European Studies Conference Selected Proceedings (University of Nebraska, 2006), Afatsawo sketched the history of the involvement of the riflemen from the Spanish protectorates in North Africa. According to Afatsawo, as Spain prepared to commemorate the 70th anniversary in 2006 of the beginning of the country's Civil War, there seemed to be no particular interest in highlighting the involvement of the International Brigade, and much less the riflemen from Ifni, also known as “Franco’s Moors.” Through comprehensive analyses of the literary and filmic representations of the war, he pointed out the importance of the Moorish contingents in the collective Spanish experience of the war to underline the fact that the history of the Civil War will not be complete until the story of Franco’s Moors is rescued from its current status as footnotes of that history.

Another war, that in Vietnam, provided the focus of a paper by Afatsawo on the work of the exiled Spanish essayist, literary critic, novelist, dramatist, and poet Max Aub. The presentation, “Staging the Vietnam War: Max Aub’s Response in Retrato de un general visto de medio cuerpo y vuelto hacia la izquierda (fechado en 1968), was given at the meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in Atlanta and was published in Geografias (Fundación Max Aub, Segorbe, Valencia) in 2006. In the play Aub explores particularly the issues of Otherness, nationalisms, and American hegemony in world affairs as seen from abroad. From the creative standpoint, the play broaches the diffi cult relationship between documentary fact and creative fiction.

In the fall of 2006, at the 31st Annual Euopean Studies Conference at the University of Nebraska, Afatsawo presented “No te olvides de matarme: A Sentimental Portrait of General Franco as a Young Lieutenant.” The theatrical adaptation of Emilio Ruiz Barrachina’s novel No te olvides de matarme (2003) recasts the understanding of General Franco, the man behind the public persona. By focusing on Franco as a young lieutenant, the novelist and director Ruiz Barrachina takes the audience and readers to the early 20th-century Spanish Protectorate of Melilla, where Franco was posted, through his letters and postcards to the niece of General Aizpuru, the High Commissioner to Spanish Morocco. In those postcards and letters, not only are Franco’s obsessions, emotions, vulnerabilities and, as an inept lover, his inability to distinguish military protocol from matters of the heart revealed; but more importantly, the steps into the making of a stoic and enigmatic ruler are seen. The presentation discussed the paradox in other narratives while focusing on No te olvides de matarme’s unflattering attempt at filling in a crucial gap in Franco’s biography and Spanish historiography.

Last spring, at the Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages at the University of Cincinnati, Afatsawo addressed in a paper entitled “And in the 40th Year, He Died: Stories of the Many ‘Deaths’ of Franco” the failure of twelve assassination attempts on General Franco’s life and the frustrations resulting from those failures, as well as the intractable consequences of the long Franco dictatorship specifi cally for the Socialist government’s Ley de Memoria Histórica. The 2006 documentary Los que quisieron matar a Franco (Didac Films), reconstructed the twelve documented attempts on General Franco’s life. The frustrations for the failures to assassinate Franco, which had initial echoes in Max Aub’s fictional La historia verdadera de la muerte de Francisco Franco (Mexico, 1964), spurred other fictional attempts on the life of Franco in works by renowned authors: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Autobiografía del general Franco (1993), Antonio Muñoz Molina’s El dueño del secreto (1994), and Rafael Chirbes’ La larga marcha (1997). In Jordi Soler’s Los rojos de ultramar (2005), the story takes a generational and cultural leap when the Mexican-born author, grandson of an exiled Republican from Barcelona, decides to rescue his grandfather’s role in attempting to assassinate Franco from collective oblivion. As history tells us, he also failed because, as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán puts it, Franco chose to die on November 19 (1975).

Afatsawo arrived at the College in 2000 and was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2006. In addition to a Certificate, Diploma, and Licenciatura from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a Certificate from the Management Development and Productivity Institute, he received his B.A. from the University of Ghana and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty