The Ship and the Compass: The Sinaia and Its Logbook as a Chronotope of Exil
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Abstract
This article examines the ship Sinaia and its newspaper as a chronotope of Spanish Republican exile, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory. The voyage from France to Mexico in May and June 1939, carrying around 1600 refugees, becomes a transitional space-time marked by ambivalence between freedom and control. The ship’s newspaper, published in 18 issues, not only documents the journey but also shapes a community in the making, blending political projections, collective memory, and tensions between traumatic past and uncertain future. Through its periodical format, the newspaper synchronizes the voyage’s present with the global world via news and maps. Yet the ship’s paper also functions as a phantasmatic topography of memory that never ceases to evoke the civil war and the concentration camps. The Sinaia thus emerges as a “hetero-chrotonope”, a hybrid space where multiple memories, political projects, and power relations converge, demonstrating that exile cannot be invented from a void but only from a complex entanglement of networks of transportation, communication, and human bodies.
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