A Strange Adventure

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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.Eva Forest (1928–2007) was an activist, writer, politician, publisher, and psychiatrist. Born to anarchist parents in Barcelona, she studied medicine in Madrid. After living in exile in Paris, Forest returned to Francoist Spain in 1962, where she was arrested and imprisoned for organizing women for the Asturias miners’ strike. Forest spent time in Cuba, forming solidarity groups and writing on the socialist cause. In the 1970s, her militant commitment to the Basque people and their cause solidified. After her three-year-long imprisonment in Yeserías, she, along with her husband, Alfonso Sastre, and their three children, moved to Hondarribia in Basque Country, where they founded the publishing house Hiru. The author of many books, it wasn’t until 2007, the year she died, that Una Extraña Aventura was published.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. Her latest translations include The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada (2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (2023), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (2022), Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (2022), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022), and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (2022). A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. As a poet, her work has appeared in the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology, The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Massachusetts Review, and other journals.US

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