Ocho apellidos vascos and the Poetics of Post-ETA Spain

The article takes as a starting point the idea that ETA’s ceasefire in October 2011 has allowed for the appearance of newly inflected cultural engagements with ETA in both Spain and the Basque Country. Among these, the blockbuster Ocho apellidos vascos is without a doubt the most significant exponent of a post-ETA poetics that engages with the present memory wars on the Basque-Spanish conflict from a state-aligned perspective on consensus. Such perspective is characterized by the use of soft metaphors related to (heteronormative) romantic or familial love as a way of condensing the complexities of Spain’s internal national conflicts; the privileging of individual forms of memorialization over collective ones; the fetishization of affects such as forgiveness and the erasure of politics and history. After an analysis of how these strategies play out in OAV and its sequel Ocho apellidos catalanes (2015), the article places these films in relation to a larger corpus of state-aligned post-ETA cultural products comprising, for example, the repenting ex-ETA member Iñaki Rekarte’s autobiography, published in 2015. By way of contrast, the article proposes that other post-ETA cultural products such as Ion Arretxe’s memoirs Intxaurrondo: la sombra de un nogal (2015), the art exhibition ‘Todo lo demás’ (Katakrak, Iruña-Pamplona, 2016) and recent Basque-language literature disrupt the narratives and metaphors of state-aligned consensus on the legacies of the Basque-Spanish conflict