Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, a long-time friend, is a historian who has worked tirelessly to document the history of Basques in the American West. One very visible example is his work on the arboglyphs Basque sheepherders left behind as they roamed the hills, valleys, and mountains of states such as Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon, but he has done much more. But, as with any attempt to document history, there are always holes that can’t be filled through evidence alone, and that is particularly acute for any and all things Basque. Thus, Joxe has turned to fiction to fill that void, rooted in his long years of study. Below is a trailer for his first novel.

Language Speaks Louder Than Bones: The Story of The Basques Naming Themselves, ca. 500,000 BP
A Trailer by Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe

Most of my life I have been a historian and a history-writer, until recently when I embarked in a new career as a fiction writer. I am young enough to undertake it, because writing fiction is less taxing than historical research. Besides, Saint Augustin says that fiction is another aspect of history, therefore I am not running away from it.

I am also a linguist, and though I do not have a proper university degree in linguistics, I have taught several languages at the university and college level.

My first novel is finished. It is not your run-of-the-mill novel that happens tomorrow or a century ago. Action is set ca. 500,000 BP.

What,? you might say; What do you know about life half a million years ago? Not much, but that’s the point. Is there anyone else who knows much about it? A lot has been written about our cave-dwelling ancestors, but the evidence comes from a few old bones and stone tools. The discovery of a new bone is enough to trigger someone to write a book demolishing all we thought we knew before.

I find it curious that no scientist ever attempted to use language to gaze into our deep past. Perhaps nobody thought that their language had any value, which might as well be true, but Euskara, the language of the Basques, does.

Appropriately, the title of the novel is Language Speaks Louder than Bones.

I am the narrator and thus an eye witness, which means I am there where the actions is. By the time I am done with the novel, I — and you — will probably know more than anyone about the cave dwellers. There are some — many — holes in my narrative, it happened so suddenly. I don’t know how but I found myself on a tree watching below a group of pre-Neanderthal hunters, or bears? At first I thought they were bears, until I realized that they were holding spears. Do bears hold spears?

I have still no idea where I was, but certainly somewhere in the Atlantic Europe. The huge discovery was that the dozen or so clans that I came into contact with, had some proto-Euskara words in their languages. The next finding was that these clans lived at considerable distance from each other, but they could communicate, because their languages shared some common basic words, of which some sounded like Basque.

The Basque language, Euskara, has words that literally take us back to the time when “gize” (humans) had four hands, so before they embarked their bipedal journey.

The gist of the novel is that I was at the meeting when eight clans came together to choose a common name for themselves. In fact, they ended up selecting two names, one picked by the men and one preferred by women.

It did not happen overnight. It came after the realization that they, the cave dwellers, were not any different from bears, but had some differences, for example, making tools and building a fire, something they didn’t see other animals do, in fact, all animals avoided fire. The other monumental discovery was the language, so let no one call them primitive or brutes anymore.

I haven’t decided where or how I want to publish; I may end up going the Kindle way.