Who is Candela Flores Amaya?

Who is Candela Flores Amaya, a friend of Ramona de la Roja?

(An essay where the boundaries of politics, history, Surrealism and Zen meet).

Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montaña. Con la sombra en la cintura ella sueña en su baranda, verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata. Verde que te quiero verde. Bajo la luna gitana, las cosas la están mirando y ella no puede mirarlas.

Green, how I love you green. Green wind. Green branches. The ship upon the sea and the horse on the mountain. With darkness on her waist, she dreams on her balcony, green flesh, green hair,
with eyes of cold silver. Green, how I love you green. Beneath the gypsy moon, things are looking at her and she cannot look at them.


Frederico García Lorca: Romance Sonámbulo (from Romancero Gitano)

Candela Flores Amaya was an Iberian Romani. Her ancestors had migrated, not from ancient Egypt, as the Greeks of Antioch had thought, but from Rajasthan. They were a nomadic people who had radiated north and west in a great diaspora, choosing Muslim-occupied lands where outcasts were less likely to be persecuted. As early as 1425 they entered Spain through Africa and, two decades later Cataluña. Candela Flores Amaya had Indian, Sephardic Jew, and Moorish blood. She exuded an air of mystery suspended between reality and dream.

Throughout most of Spain, Roma people had become homogenized. The gypsy had always had a lingering identity with the underworld - they were crossbreed traveling vagabonds with a criminal association who leeched off society. The Greeks had accused them of harboring Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus as they fled the murderous King Herod into Egypt. But from the 15th century, the Romanis in Andalucía, Castilla La Mancha, Madrid, Castilla Y Leon, and even the Basque Country, had nevertheless modulated and assimilated the Spanish word Egiptano and called themselves Gitanos.

Candela Flores Amaya lived in Sacromonte in the Valle de Valparaíso, on the main Christian pilgrimage route from El Albaicín after the fall of the Roman Empire, in the region the Arabs called Al-Andalus. It was the only part of Spain where the gitano inhabited a segregated community with a distinct personality of its own. If some gypsies still embraced a wandering lifestyle, migration was usually forced by pervasive xenophobia. In the fifteenth century, they fled into the mountains to escape the Spanish
Inquisition who supposed their religious practices permeated by superstition, voodooism, and taboo. Candela lived high above the city of Granada in a whitewashed cave overlooking the graceful Alhambra palace. Hers was the last Muslim stronghold on the Peninsula, falling in 1492 when the illiterate Christian armies of Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella reconquered the city after eight hundred years of glittering Islamic rule.

It was in the early dawn beneath a white, watery moon that Candela could see the dark hills covered with stiff agave plants silhouetted against the sky. She could hear the green branches of the olive trees rubbing against each other in the breeze and the black horses moving in the mountain. She felt an intrinsic connection to Spanish soil - to its primitive mythology of fecundity, bloodletting, and death - and it was from this that the art in her originated. When she sang the flamenco zambra it was as though the trail of tears left by her people was visible in sound-painting because it came from the deep experience of memory qualified by emotion. Frederico García Lorca, who kept a summerhouse in the city, called her “una manifestación pura del duende del Gitano en Andalucía” (a pure manifestation of the gypsy soul in Andalucía). What the Gitanos meant when they said Candela had duende was that she effortlessly embodied an authenticity that seized her like a demonic spirit and climbed up inside her audience inducing an almost unendurable feeling of pleasure. Candela Flores Amaya sang with the zeal of the earth and a spontaneous power that everyone felt but no one could explain. Her song was grounded in traditional forms deconstructed into their most basic elements. Propelled by rhythm and the meaning of words, it communicated at the level of emotion with an impulse toward artistic rebellion, and something created anew. If the substructure of Candela’s artistry went back even to her Oriental origins, her expression affirmed liberty without limits and revolted against the stagnant repression of Spain’s provincial society. She spoke of love and desire, always with their counterpoint of the potential for anguish, loss, and death. Hers was the Cante gitano that knew no geographic boundaries:

No tengo lugar y no tengo paisaje. Yo menos tengo patria. Con mis dedos hago fuego y con mi corazón te canto. Las cuerdas de mi corazón lloran. Nací en Alamo. Nací en Alamo. No tengo lugar y no tengo paisaje. Yo menos tengo patria. Nací en Alamo. Nací en Alamo. Ay cuando cantan, y con tus dolores nuestras mujeres te hechizan. Ay, ay, ay.

(I came from nowhere and I have no landscapes. I have no homeland. With my fingers, I can start a fire and with my heart, I sing to you. My heartstrings weep. I was born of love. I was born of love. I have no place and I have no landscapes. I have no homeland. I was born of love. I was born of love. Ay, when they sing with your sorrow our women enchant you. Ay, ay, ay).

(Spanish gypsy song from an original Greek folk song. The English version is an interpretation and not a strict translation).

Ramona de la Roja knew Roma women in Spain to be in a vulnerable, marginalized position. It was a subject rarely spoken of in the conservative circles of her family. To many of those from her privileged upbringing, gypsies were unclean by nature and no amount of washing could turn them white. The women were discriminated against on the basis of both ethnicity and gender, creating particular problems beyond those posed by racism alone. In a tradition that subjugated women, they were often deprived of access to basic health care, and their life expectancy was shorter than that of the general population. Even when they were admitted to clinics and hospitals they were typically segregated and became victims of hostility. Infant mortality among females had always been higher because, when they became sick, they were denied the care given to their male counterparts, whose lives were considered to be more important. Since Spanish law failed to recognize Roma marriages, women who were victims of domestic abuse remained unprotected and at the mercy of their despotic husbands. Roma women often dropped out of school at the elementary level and were declined access to employment. If they could not work as street vendors or domestic servants to the wealthy they could become destitute and homeless overnight. Large numbers were forced to resort to thieving and petty crime and as a result, made up a disproportionate sum of inmates retained in Spanish prisons.

Because Ramona de la Roja was a dancer of Spain’s most proclaimed art form she had Romani friends both in Madrid and in all of Andalucía. Under the Spanish Republic, Ashkenazim German Jews were flooding into the country ahead of the menace of annihilation by the Nazis. Ramona feared that the gitana would also be under imminent threat in a Civil War with Nationalist Fascists in Spain.

When she first glimpsed Candela Flores Amaya, Ramona de la Roja recognized a woman past the age of childbearing. The facility with which she affirmed her presence signaled courage borne of claiming truth and living according to its difficult demands. Her mellifluous body, tasting of salt, basil, and mint, had surrendered to a hundred lovers under the orange trees but she had never promised herself to one. She personified, not the freedom demanded by an entitled youth, but the freedom that comes with a certain age that no longer gives a damn. Candela was barefoot and clothed in a white ankle-length gown draped with thick golden cords. In between the verses of her song she whirled like a dervish, her long, black hair following the circle of her body’s every turn, her copper thighs iridescent beneath the gossamer of her dress. Candela was ringed by gypsy musicians playing Spanish guitar, violin, and cajón. Three turbaned Arabs played flute, bowl-backed Moorish laud, and a square double-skinned pandeiro drum with a bell inside it. In the gathering, a voice was heard to exclaim: “Viva el arte. Viva el flamenco. Viva el flamenco puro” (“Long live art. Long live flamenco. Long live true flamenco”). All present thanked the limitations of reason and were enraptured by the spell of Candela’s magnetism. Intuitively Ramona understood that Candela was helping to preserve the artistic treasure of her entire race. As she had been so instantaneously penetrated by the recognition of Sechmet’s enduring beauty in French Marrakesh, so Ramona acknowledged in Candela a fearless sagacity that would not be extinguished by any amount of prohibition. Warm lilies perfumed the air above the lemon groves as Granada sighed for the sea. Purple shadows lengthened beneath the quivering stars of oil lamps. A bright caravan moon hung in the gypsy night and the juerga (jam session) nudged the sunrise later into the Andalucian morning.

In her work with Mujeres Libres prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Ramona had come to believe that the advancement of human rights for Roma women could only be facilitated when the Romani women’s organizations that were coalescing were linked to mainstream women’s organizations. The advancement of women’s rights as a whole would only occur when their cause was independent of the wider progressive movements of the day. In the United States, the passing of the 15th Amendment in 1869 created a divide among feminists fighting for abolition because it gave the right to vote only to black men and not to black or white women. As a result, women’s’ suffrage was delayed 51 years until the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1920. If gypsy flamenco had its origin in the visceral need of a repressed population to cry out, Ramona knew that changing perceptions at the grassroots level, reformist government legislation and individual liberation through freedom of choice would empower and propel her female Romani compatriots into a better future. It was a difficult cause to contemplate with the cancer of Fascism threatening all Europe.

When Frederico García Lorca employed the quintessentially Spanish poetic form, the romance, he broke radically with literary tradition. The romance had previously been utilized as a means of telling heroic stories from Spanish history, with their conventional beginning, middle and end sequence and their immutable national values. All lovers of verse were familiar with its timbre and its meter. This made fertile ground for Lorca’s experimentation with an exquisitely new poetic form in which imagery was not tied to linear sequential reasoning. Salvador Dalí was experimenting in painting with visual elements presented in a way that belied traditional interpretation but that was about the emotional interplay between the perceived irreconcilable images. So too did Lorca’s surrealistic imagery negate the possibility of any definitive interpretation because it lacked the standard imperative of consecutive narrative elements that produce a cohesive storyline. The form of the traditional romance, with its significant literary underpinnings, is in tension with the improvisational, dream-like content of Lorca’s romance. By challenging the conventional use of the form, Lorca is by implication rejecting the prerogative of authority, specifically Catholic authority, in the turbulent social and political world of circa 1920 Spain. Frederico García Lorca’s friendship with Salvador Dalí and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, as well as his trips to Cataluña, always the most progressive region of Spain, placed him in close contact with the artistic avant-garde. He was in artistic rebellion as well as in individual rebellion against the constraints forbidding an unqualified expression of the personality. This included the sexual personality, which, even more than his written word may have been the catalyst for Lorca’s savage assassination by Nationalist militia in August 1936.

Candela Flores Amaya and Ramona de la Roja became fierce friends. Though Ramona said she did not believe in God, when she listened to Candela sing and saw her dance she felt the sacred mystery in the moment of it. Candela’s passion was inconsistent with her poverty, but Ramona received her wondrous, elusive meaning in the same way she experienced great paintings and the primal energies of Nature. Each was a meditation where the seen was only the seen, the heard was only the heard, the sensed was only the sensed and the thought was only the thought. Ramona did not expect the moment of it to fulfill her, but rather she allowed the moment to be the gift in itself, and it was in that secret zone that she felt herself to be in a state of Grace.

Red ~

Red, how I love you red.

Red voice.

Red skin.

Red Earth crying.

Red Earth rejoicing.

Deep song

Shadow cave.

Gypsy Moon.

Candela in the mountain

tasting of salt and olive oil.

Dreaming.

Jada Griffin, after Frederico García Lorca’s Romance Sonámbulo (from Romancero Gitano)

Jada Griffin, written in 2010 for Pearl Avant-Garde, Portland, Oregon

Candela Flores Amaya, original oil on canvas, 60 x 30” ~ SOLD