ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in collective memories of the Basque conflict, across national and political lines, political violence often appears 'outside history', something whose origins are obscure, and which threatens to stretch endlessly into the future. In theory, women's traditional roles as mothers are most highly valued in the radical nationalist community, and in Basque society as a whole. The women's interviews, through their own 'wrong' memories, point to the gendered gaps common to the collective memories, and also to their shared strategies of remembering certain violences while forgetting others. Collective memories, as expressed for instance in political speeches or popular literature on the history of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), are likely to be constituted as a series of coherent and chronological events. Conversely, the personal memories of anti-terrorist violence expressed in these interviews with female ETA supporters rarely respect chronological order, and are often characterized by rupture and pause, one set of memories sometimes collapsing into another.
