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You are here: Home / Politics / Bailouts in the Land of Duende

Bailouts in the Land of Duende

June 22nd, 2012 by Sallie Bingham in Politics, Travel Leave a Comment

From the series: Spain

My trip to Spain: June and July, 2012.

Belen Maya

My understanding is superficial, a tourist’s, no more, and yet it seems to me this momentous news (in the eyes of the rest of the world) has little effect here; the protests go on in their cheerful way, the streets are closed (we can’t get back from our shopping trip to our hotel!) and the underlying iron and fire of the Spanish character remains intact.

Flamenco in Sevilla: we whiteys will never be able to do more than stare astonished, glimpsing something we will never possess or even understand. The dire quality of this dancing and singing—hardly dancing and singing at all, in my context, but open-throated shouting and violent stamping—has no place in our determinedly superficial, and determinedly cheerful, music-and-dance as we know it from Broadway musicals and pop songs; even the music of the counterculture (if there is any…) seems feather light by comparison.

Perhaps like our long ago immigrant forebears we still believe we have come to the land of light, or brought it with us; no amount of slaughter and collapse, economic or moral, will turn that light into the coat of iron that underlies Spanish performance.

Today’s Spanish newspaper announces that the bailout from the European Union, a sum of money too large for me to imagine, is going to happen, although a woman I spoke with yesterday says no one knows where the money is really going-probably to the banks, as in the U.S.

That woman dancer’s arched back, her glare of angry defiance, that man’s snake-like twisting, the total absence of smiles, that couple dancing like a pair of snakes, writhing—is this a nightmare or a dream?

It doesn’t really matter because in either case it is entirely out of reach. Instead we have fields of golden grain, white church steeples, gas-colored sunsets, the West as our only hope of open space—and my West is deeply shrouded in the smoke from our biggest ever wild fire.

But the sun shines through, as we make our compromises and move on, always hoping, as Edmund Wilson wrote when he was eighty, that there is still something exciting around the corner—good talk, he thought, or a party.

But not the essential darkness of tragedy—or of dance.

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In Politics, Travel Sevilla flamenco dancing Music bailouts

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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