Re-storying Mediterranean Worlds

New Narratives from Italian Cultures to Global Citizenship

Angela Biancofiore, Clément Barniaudy, Angela Biancofiore, Clément Barniaudy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501378942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire italienne

This book invites readers to think of Mediterranean cultures as interconnected worlds, seen in light of how they evolve, disappear, are reborn and perpetually transform. This perspective intends to build bridges between the Northern and Southern coasts of the sea in order to broaden and deepen our understanding of current evolutions in Mediterranean worlds, at the cultural, literary, artistic and geopolitical levels. As Paul Valéry suggested, we can consider this plural space from the perspective of the intense cultural, economic and human exchanges which have always characterized the Mare Nostrum. We can also consider Mediterranean worlds within an open enactive process, deeply exploring their evolution between nature and culture, examining the natural environment and the transforming relationships between humans and non-humans. The writers and researchers in Re-storying Mediterranean Worlds call for a dialog between the two coasts in order to connect what has been broken. In this volume, they highlight an intercultural and creolized conscience, traversing the Mediterranean worlds – including Italian, French and Tunisian cultures, but also migrations from, to and within the region – and transcending any idea of communitarian withdrawal. These essays express the urgent need to shift from an understanding of migration as suffering to the notion that mobility is an unalienable right, building foundations for a new idea of global citizenship.

1

Mediterranean worlds: Towards an ecology of creation

Angela Biancofiore

The long tradition that can be called solar thought, in which, since the time of the Greeks, nature has always been balanced with becoming.

ALBERT CAMUS (1965: 701)

The front of olive trees

There is a region in the south of France where olives are no longer picked: the olive trees are full of olives; the trees stand proud on the hills, but no one harvests the fruit anymore. The farmers interviewed say that it is too expensive and that it is better to purchase Spanish oil because it is cheaper than picking olives.

The forgotten tree, the olive tree, the symbol par excellence of the Mediterranean, is no longer a source of life or food; it is becoming a decoration for roundabouts and gardens. A front is forming, a border that separates the countries where olives are still harvested from countries that have forgotten how important the tree, the earth and its fruits are.

Mediterranean worlds seem to waver between a programmed modernity that distances them from their past and the renewal of certain archaic values. A double movement is appearing in literature and arts: the disappearance of ancient cultural worlds sometimes leaves a worrying void, where ancient values are not replaced by new ones or new collective projects (Biancofiore 2010). Moreover, in recent years the uprising of the people from the southern shores of the Mediterranean demonstrates their willingness to access democracy and a different management of the State. The Tunisians who sacrificed themselves in the 2011 movements were asking for more justice in the distribution of wealth and more transparency in the exercise of power, among other things. The Mediterranean people in Egypt, Syria and Libya also want to write another page in their history, regardless of the cost.

The ravages of a world without measure

Mediterranean worlds are also victims of excess: at the end of a tragedy, the Greek hero realizes that he dwells in hubris, but it is already too late. Mediterranean cultures can rediscover phronesis, the ancient measure that establishes harmony in relationships with the world. On this topic, it is interesting to quote the Mediterranean author Albert Camus, who denounced the abandonment of the cult of beauty through a process that he defined as ‘Helen’s Exile’: Greek culture knew how to fight in the name of beauty and it cultivated the contemplation of nature; yet our world has removed beauty and sees nature as nothing more than a reservoir of exploitable materials. Camus thus continued:

The Mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different from the tragedy of fogs. Certain evenings at the base of the seaside mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little bay, and there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished fulfillment. In such spots one can understand that if the Greeks knew despair, they always did so through beauty and its stifling quality. In that gilded calamity, tragedy reaches its highest point. Our time, on the other hand, has fed its despair on ugliness and convulsions. […] We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her. First difference, but one that has a history. Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred nor reason. (‘Helen’s Exile’, in Camus 1965: 853)

Camus clearly felt that there was a threat weighing down on our society ever since contemplating nature was replaced by the unlimited exploitation of natural resources. This action is only possible in a universe dominated by the worship of money and its abstract symbols. Camus precisely evaluated the nature of this danger, one that is growing within a society that is mainly founded on abstraction; this is what he proclaimed loud and clear during the speech he made after being awarded the Nobel Prize:

For about a century we have been living in a society that is not even the society of money (gold can arouse carnal passions) but that of the abstract symbols of money. The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the lingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man’s carnal truth is handled as something artificial. There is no reason for being surprised that such a society chose as its religion a moral code of formal principles and that it inscribes the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ on its prisons as well as on its temples of finance. However, words cannot be prostituted with impunity. (‘Discours de Suède’, in Camus 1965: 1082)

The liberal utopia, which imagines a limitless expansion of development, is heading towards catastrophe; this is why, today, economists and sociologists are developing alternative models, in order to initiate a process of decolonizing the imagination based on an ethic of decrease (see Latouche 2010 on this point).

We should start by decolonizing our Western minds with regard to our relationship with nature. Nature has become denatured and deprived of its ‘bewitching’ power; we are, to a certain extent, responsible for a process of disenchantment of the world that has taken place within an artificial universe built by humans and increasingly separated from the natural world. On this matter, Hannah Arendt’s voice helps us to better understand the condition of modern human being:

The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial,’ toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. […] This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. (1958: 2–3)

Similarly, Carolyn Merchant (1983), in her book The Death of Nature, condemns today’s mechanisms that have progressively consolidated the power of techno-science in the living sphere, starting with the philosophical theories of Bacon. To counteract this dominant trend that aims to appropriate living beings, Serge Latouche (2010), an economist who runs counter to official thought, suggested a Mediterranean utopia that is in harmony with the ideas of Franco Cassano (2005, 2012): the countries of Southern Europe, such as Greece, Italy, Spain and France, would be much more open to the idea of degrowth, maybe because of their relationship to an archaic, pre-Christian, pre-capitalist culture, as if the genes embedded in a culture are always able to resurface one day. The Southern thought, as formulated by Cassano (2005), focuses on a vision of the South that differs from the one that the North tries to transfer on it: it is the image of the South through its own eyes, based on its own standards, rhythms, ways of life and desire to meet others. Today, the south of Italy wants to rewrite its history; in fact, many historians and journalists consider it to be a colony that has been the overexploited by the North, starting with the process of political unification of the peninsula (see, among others, Aprile 2010). If we focus our vision on the ensemble of ‘Southern’ worlds, we are not only forced to consider the southern shore of the Mediterranean but also Africa, Latin America and India, regions that are now keen to assert their cultural and political presence in the world. New ways of thinking are being developed by the ‘Southern worlds’, with new analysis tools and a new imagination that opposes the rational, pragmatic vision of the Western world.

A message of considerable significance has recently been broadcast by Vandana Shiva, an Indian epistemologist who is drawing attention to the disappearance of rural agriculture. She denounces the deportation of the people of her country (and the rest of the world) generated by the exploitation of land resources. One of her books is The Seeds of Suicide; the title refers to hybrid cotton seeds which are distributed by multinationals. These seeds require large quantities of chemical products, pushing farmers into debt. As a result, the seeds have provoked an unprecedented wave of suicides in India. Shiva is convinced that we need to believe in the fertility of the Earth and that we need to upgrade the ancient terms of our relationship with the ground that the ‘green revolution’ (meaning the negative revolution that is the result of introducing chemical products into agriculture) has erased by imposing industrial agriculture (for more on this topic, see the film by Coline Serreau, Local Solutions for Global Disorder (2010) and the essay Ecofeminism by V. Shiva and M. Mies (1993)).

Believing in both nature and the possibility of harmony with its laws is the issue behind the fight for seed banks, a means of avoiding the expropriation of traditional knowledge by agri-food multinationals. Shiva’s theoretical and political commitment is a fight for life, a combat against the violence of technology and modern science that often carry out their activities at the expense of both nature and the body (for more on this topic, see also Illich 1973). One of the paradoxical outcomes of thought focused on the negation of nature is ‘off-ground cultivation’: we are now eating products that are no longer the fruits of the earth, products whose roots are no longer nourished by the soil but instead ‘artificially fed’, a sort of artificial nature under infusion.

Authors and the Earth: New ways of committing

Since the earliest days of Mediterranean culture, people have invented sacred places – sanctuaries – such as those near the tombs of Greek heroes, or later, of Christian martyrs. Many Mediterranean authors have lived and celebrated the fertility of their earth; one of these authors is Cesare Pavese, who, in the 1940s, clearly depicted the emergence of sacred and mythical places:

In the clearings, feasts, flowers, and sacrifices, on the edge of mystery that shows signs and threatens among the sylvan shadows. There on the border between the sky and the trunk, God could have emerged. Now, the character, – I’m not talking about poetry –, of mythical fable is the consecration of unique places, tied to a fact to a deed to an event. To a place, among everything, an absolute meaning is given, isolating it in the world. This way, places of childhood come back to memory to everyone; in these places happened things that made them unique, and distinguish them from the rest of the world with this mythical seal. (‘Myth, symbols, and more’, in Pavese [1940–5] 2002: 126)

Through the relationship with the earth that is built up within his pages, Pavese closely resembles Camus, who celebrates the nuptials of humans with the earth:

the season trembles and the summer slips away. The carob trees breathe the scent of love over all Algeria. In the evening or after the rain, the whole earth, its belly wet with seed that smells of bitter almonds, rests after having given itself, all summer long, to the sun. And once again, this fragrance consecrates the nuptials of man and earth, and arouses in us the only true compelling love in this world: a love both generous and perishable. (Camus 1965: 76)

Somehow, the authors are trying to recreate the sacred space that has been progressively marginalized – if not exiled – from our society. The reasons behind development and growth are radically opposed to the sacred because it represents a limitation to the programme for exploiting natural resources. The Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini perfectly analysed the destruction of sacred elements planned by capitalist society, openly denouncing this ongoing process in his articles and allegorically in his movies (Biancofiore 2012).

The image of Medea, interpreted by Maria Callas in Pasolini’s movie, solemnly pronounces the ritual formula during a sacrifice: ‘Dai vita al seme e rinasci con il seme’ (‘Give life to the seed and be reborn with the seed’). In the movie, the figure of the woman is intimately linked to the earth’s fertility: Medea is opposed to Jason, the archaic culture resurfaces against the pragmatism of the new world. By the rewriting of the Euripides’ tragedy, the filmmaker denounced the destruction of cultural worlds by neocapitalism. The persistence of the sacred link would prevent exploitation structures and the appropriation of living beings (Biancofiore 2016); this is why the imposition of new cultural models leads to banalization, secularization and disenchantment of the world through propaganda tools, namely schools, radio, newspapers, television and the cultural industry.

The westernization of the world – as described by Serge Latouche – derives from the perfect continuity between the imposition of a different culture through colonialism and the new methods of economic development, which result in the annihilation of local cultures. The concrete forms of this annihilation can range from de-culturation to genocide.

An ecology of creation

With her movie Biutiful cauntri (released in 2008, produced in 2007), the filmmaker Esmeralda Calabria had the courage to denounce the ravages of pollution in Campania: in practice, the mafia monopolizes the toxic waste treatment system, creating abusive landfills everywhere in populated areas. As a result, plants and animals are dying, humans too, with one of the highest cancer rates in Europe. The disappearance of natural species, determined by pollution, inevitably induces the destruction of cultural worlds; this will be the price to pay if we continue blindly down the path of unlimited development.

An engaged author, Roberto Saviano, is committed to the battle against organized crime in Campania. His writings are now inseparable from his political action, just like Pasolini in the 1960s and 1970s. In his inquiry novel Gomorrah, he described his native region, Campania, where the earth is concealed with cement: a land of waste, a land of violence, where the roads are obviously meant for trucks, devastated land, shaped by the new global economy that governs the activities in the port of Naples and its region (Saviano 2006). Saviano brings to light how the organized crime system functions, acting as a vast network of entrepreneurs at the international level: its action is harmful for both the citizens who live in the region and for the global ecosystem. In an interview published by Le Figaro, the author talks openly about the problems created by exercising his job as a committed writer:

Now I only think about the present. The idea of the future makes me anxious. What was planned could never be realized. There have always been contraindications. So, I live from day to day and I prefer not to think about the future. The truth is, I am very tired, because I have to fight two battles: one that concerns my lifestyle, which weighs on me more and more. The other one, even harder, is a moral battle. Because the ruling class of Southern Italy can’t stand me; they...