I just saw a series from another sad detective. All the plots take place on a remote island in Scotland. You know how these fictions work: many dead, ordinary people but not so many, and the dark green landscape. This time it reminded me of a trip I made to the Scottish Highlands a lot of years ago. We rented a car with some friends and traveled through lands where nobody seems to live. Territories where no one seems to live, cut down by cliffs. The last novel I’ve read takes place in a landscape like this, it’s called The colony, and it’s located on an island where monolingual Gaelic speakers still lived in the 1980s. This, in fact, is the main theme of the novel.

And once again, I remember that journey. A trip full of narrow roads, the sea, beautiful green, and very few people. If I were an army, I'd say the land was perfect for the conquest. Terra nullius, deserts... that's how the colonizers usually name the conquered lands. But, as the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer said, where you see the desert, a ledge is usually the world. On that trip we arrived at the Isle of Skye, the most Gaelic heard territory in Scotland, and when I went there I did not even notice that another language was spoken; I did not even notice it.

These days I am also reading another book about cultural problems on this topic, a doctoral thesis. This is what the author says: “Our territory is not only a landscape, but a place deeply populated and full of history. It is an integral part of our discourse, from which we understand the world.” Here's how it goes: “There were fourteen of us in my course (in the 1980s): eight boys and six girls. Most of us belonged to the peasant family. The 11 of us had at least one parent who spoke Gaelic; in the case of the five, there were two parents who knew Gaelic. But there was only one girl in my class who could speak Gaelic fluently, though I don’t remember ever hearing her speak Gaelic; and I’m sure she doesn’t speak it today. The truth is that no one else in the class spoke fluently, although many have since achieved it as adults. They studied Gaelic in the classroom, changing their outer shoes to enter the classroom.” I mean, they were studying Gaelic in a cold room full of shoes. “Recently, I remembered the memory of a day in that cold place. I thought the teacher was useless: what and how to teach Gaelic to a generation of children whose parents decided not to do it in Gaelic at home?” Has it become familiar to you? Aren't a lot of kids in this town thinking the same thing right now?

The thesis is called An analysis of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as a site of colonisation. In fact, Europe has been talking about internal colonization for a long time, even in academia. For example, in 1972 the Letter of the Verse was signed by a number of non-European peoples, and in 1973 Sergio Salvik Le Nazioni proclaimed: Guide to dieci colonie interne dell'Europa occidentale (Forbidden nations: A guide to ten inner colonies in Western Europe). In recent years, these discourses have been recovered thanks to the epistemological tools that decolonialism offers us. You will find experts, academics, disseminators who think about it in the Canary Islands, Andalusia, Extremadura, Valencia, Galicia... But in Catalonia and the Basque Country there seems to be a taboo around these terms, and I don’t know why... do you think why?