Description

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Oral history as theater—the theater of memory, trauma, and torture.

Multivocal and anonymous, A Strange Adventure is oral-history-as-theater—the theater of memory, trauma, and torture. A play with neither named characters nor stage directions, it is a reckoning with the immediate past: a group of women recount ten days of torture, in 1974, just after the Spanish state rounded up Basque nationalists and other activists it could conveniently incarcerate. This stuttering yet lucid text—written by Eva Forest, who was held in Yeserías Prison in Madrid from 1974 to 1977 without charge or trial—is as urgent today as ever, transcending its context of Basque struggle and Francoist fascism. Emerging from a space and time that many prefer to forget, A Strange Adventure is testimony to the resilience, humility, and power of a group of women who refuse repression, who find life in collectivity, who speak in echoes, silences, and screams.

About the Author

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Eva Forest (1928–2007) was an activist, writer, politician, publisher, and psychiatrist. Born to anarchist parents in Barcelona, she studied medicine in Madrid. Together with her husband, Alfonso Sastre, she became actively involved in the anti-Franco struggle, which led to imprisonment and a brief exile in Paris. In 1962, she was arrested and incarcerated, with her newborn daughter, for organizing women for the Asturian miners’ strike. A lifelong activist, she created the Vietnam Solidarity Committee in 1967, and in 1970, with her commitment to the Basque people intensifying, she established the Solidarity Committee with the Basque Country. After her imprisonment in Yeserías Prison, from 1974 to 1977, she, along with Sastre and their three children, moved to Hondarribia in the Basque Country, where they founded the publishing house Hiru and she continued her political struggles and internationalist fight for oppressed peoples. The author of many books—including Operación Ogro (1974), Tortura y sociedad (1982), and Los nuevos cubanos: la vida en una granja del pueblo (2007)—it wasn’t until 2007, the year she died, that Una extraña aventura was published.