What do you do before you launch a brand new podcast about trauma and collective silences? Well, if you are independent podcast maker Isabel Cadenas Cañón – creator, host and producer of We Don’t Talk About That (De eso no se habla) – you invite members of your future audience to dinner, where you have a heartfelt conversation over a glass of wine and the meal Cadenas just cooked for you about what silence means to them.
Cadenas spoke about her most successful project on the second day of the “Listen up – vol. 2” podcast festival, organized by the Association of European Journalists in Bulgaria. Recently, the storyteller has been invited to start leading Spanish daily El Pais’ audio team and will now have to move to news-making.
The podcast of the Spanish audio journalist started as a response to a personal trauma she had to endure in her youth – the loss of her mother, which was rarely discussed in her own family. But it was not the only topic that was a taboo: “I work on the aftermath of the Franko regime and I was shocked how little we talk about it in our society. There is huge collective trauma – over 140,000 people remain unidentified in mass graves across the country, it is underground. But people have learned to stay silent if they wanted to live. Although I myself was born in a democracy, I was taught by my father to stay silent, to not get involved in politics,” she shared.
Cadenas describes the project as a “cross-generational conversation” in which she mostly talks to people from the so-called “transitional generation” in Spain – 50-60 year old people, who grew up in the interregnum between the fall of the Fascist Francoist regime and the establishment of liberal democracy in the 1970s. At the time, words such as “cohabitation” and “forgiveness” were flying around often, but it was all a charade for the journalist.
“The transition period was marked by a pact of silence that a lot of people in my generation have started questioning. I myself started realizing a weird thing I never thought I could understand – it is hard to talk to your kids about some subjects. In families, parents want to protect their kids and they don’t talk about some things,” she says.
The main reason for the success of her podcast (beyond her stellar communication skills) is the fact that it was produced independently, with no deadlines and clear instructions by editors. “There was no established model. We had to find the best way to tell a story – thus some stories are highly narrated, while others were direct interviews. Some stories were essays,” Cadenas says.
As for communication, Cadenas says: “To me it is not that much about interviewing as much as about having a conversation. People felt safe talking to me – and you can feel it in the podcast. They knew that I will not use anything they are uncomfortable with on tape, and they could trust me.”
One of the signature stories of De eso no se habla is about Cadenas’ own small hometown of Basauri, which had been hiding a curios uncovered story. It all started with her finding a small plaque with ten names in the town square. “I come from a small town next to Bilbabo, a working class town. During the 1970s, right after Franko died, 10 women were put on trial because they had abortions. Their trials took ten years and ended in 1985, with the feminist movement using the case in the meantime to start a public debate about abortion. In 1985, they were found guilty, but at the same time, a month later, a law allowing abortions was passed,” Cadenas says.
The women never spoke in public, but their effort was commemorated with a plaque in their town square by activist – unbeknown to the ten heroines of the story themselves. “I started looking for them and one woman agreed to talk, I showed her the plaque – that she did not know about – and it was all on record.” This story took Cadenas an entire year – something she says would be impossible to pull off in a “normal” media.
“I always say my podcast is very populist – I want people who don’t care about the topic to start caring. Like the one about prisons – I wanted to make them care. Mainly for me is to make empathy to people you would never feel empathetic with. And to think how our democracy is faulty and how we still live in a society that is silent about things it shouldn’t be silent about,” the podcast journalist concludes.
