The new Barça uniform for the 2024-2025 season
FC Barcelona revealed this Thursday the kit that its players will wear during the 2024-2025 season. In a video that has received numerous praises, you can see a series of cultural icons such as bread with tomato, castellers and the señera. This representation shows Barça as a national benchmark in football, whether winning or losing.
In these times of national retreat, it seems that the symbols that support our collective identity are increasingly scarce and, at the same time, more symbolic and less committed. No nation in the world thinks that in order to survive it must give up its symbolism, but in the case of Catalan identity, we often reduce our identity to common symbols that are so acceptable that being Catalan never implies a renunciation or discomfort. Even the most anti-Catalan person in the country can welcome a simple pa amb tomàquet. The risk is to think that, even those of us who have gone backwards in order to move forward again, are doing so on pillars that do not hold up beyond gesture and sentimentality.
Reflections on identity and nation
Recently, in an interview conducted by Andreu Barnils with Miquel de Palol in VilaWeb, the writer, whose book ‘El jardí dels set crepuscles’ (1989) has resurfaced, expressed a clear idea: ‘If you want to be a nation, you must be a country . And if you want to be a country, you have to demonstrate it with your cultural and identity foundations. There is no need to fear the concept of identity. If you don’t have an identity, you have nothing. Otherwise, we will be just four provinces that try to maintain traditions like the sardanas and some books in Catalan.’
These words make me think that one of the consequences of vigorous political repression, especially when it is recent, is that, in order not to renounce your identity in a way that does not expose you dangerously, you unconsciously empty it of any content that can be extrapolated to the political field. Superficial symbols also define us, but they do so because of everything behind them, because of what gives them meaning and has made them representative.
The risk of a shallow retreat
In a moment of withdrawal, we must be aware of what we are withdrawing from. Bread with tomato does not protect us against the persistent Spanish-speaking dynamic, and neither do human towers. They are common that make us feel part of this political community in a superficial way, but for a deep understanding of our identity, we need something more. This week a tweet by Paul Skallas went viral urging the economic elites to take Barcelona because it is ‘too beautiful to be left in the hands of the natives’. A response to this tweet complained that the blocks of Cerdà’s grid were not exactly square, that is, that the chamfers were cut out.
Behind Cerdà’s grid there is a way of thinking and doing things, a character that is partly his and partly ours. We recognise ourselves in this collective way of thinking that is reflected in the chamfered grid. Beyond the caricature and the defeatist perspective, the identity emptiness of the years and the repression have disconnected us from a Catalan nature that structures our thinking and way of being, which still filters into everything that represents us. This is solid ground to which we can return and retreat, if it is now inevitable to do so.
The impact of Catalan history and culture
Behind the ‘Hyparxiology’ of Pujols, the clairvoyance of Rodoreda, the pioneering of Monturiol, the prose of Pla, the eccentricity of Dalí, the shapes and colors of Gaudí, and the peasant zeal of Irene Solà, there is a community that supported his thought before his works became part of the common imagination. Catalanness forged at least part of his character, and from that forging we have extracted some fruits that have enriched our sense of identity.
Today, identity has become detached from its character. Although we identify our nation with certain symbols, identity has landed on something more concrete and superficial. There is no solid national retreat behind a sausage from Casa Tarradellas or television series, although they also define us. To deploy with all our strength, we must reach the core of who we are, which is what history and occupation have denied us because the only thing that really has a political extrapolation that questions Spanish submission is our way of understanding the world of own way.
A challenge for the future
Every time the difference in attitude has been transferred to the political sphere, repression has tried to eliminate it. It is in this apparently abstract identity characteristic where we find the only withdrawal sufficiently broad and substantial to avoid becoming a mere risk-free defense. It is here, I believe, where we need to return collectively and as an identity.
