I have never met Danilo Dolci. I would count it a great honour to do so. He is a man who believes in poetry and action, a man who has devoted his life to an uncompromising struggle against injustice and poverty, yet who is tolerant. Perhaps most important of all, he does not believe in saviours, only in catalysts.
Without Dolci this book1 would not exist. Yet it is not his voice which speaks through it. It is a book of voices that he has assembled and encouraged to speak: the voices of impoverished peasants and fishermen from around the village of Trappeto and of the urban poor from the Sicilian capital of Palermo.
In recent years there have been many books which, using a tape recorder, have recorded and collected popular voices. Such a way of recording has become part of sociological research. Some of these books are valuable. But this one is in an altogether different category. Dolci, who kept a record of these conversations over a period of thirty years, had no sociological ambitions. And the women and men who talked with him were not talking to an investigator, not even to a well-meaning one. The quality of Dolci’s life’s work in Sicily is reflected in the stories of this book without a word being said by him. What are these stories like?
The few interviews with the rich and powerful, although forming an invaluable point of comparison, are of course different. I am talking of the poor, those exploited by the rich and powerful, telling the stories of their lives. They are graphic storytellers. This has nothing to do with literary ability. Many of them are illiterate. It has to do with a practice which predates literature.
In all pre-industrial societies people have believed that living is a way of living a story. In this story one is always the protagonist and occasionally the teller, but the inventor of the story, the designer of the plot, is elsewhere. People who believe this, and who lead the story of their life in this way, are often natural storytellers. Just as, if they happen to be shepherds who spend a great deal of time alone, companioned only by animals and the spirit of the landscape, they are often natural poets: poetry being that form of language which addresses itself to that which is beyond speaking.
In many of the stories told in this book there is little or no hope. That is to say, there is no ground for hope in the events narrated. And yet they are never recitals of despair. Of bitterness, tragedy, injustice, hopelessness, yes. But of despair, no. How can one explain such a paradox? There is the inventor of the story and there is also the judge of the story. It is by no means clear that the two are the same. The distinction between them may be somewhat like that between the Devil and God.
This idea of an inventor and a judge of the story of one’s life is closely connected with religion. Yet no religious formulation completely covers this belief. The belief arises in the face of an enigma, not in the face of a set of answers.
The stories are not recitals of despair because, despite all, the telling of them is an appeal for judgment. The judgment for which the appeal is made is a multiform one: it is human, social, moral, metaphysical. Ultimately it is an appeal for a judgment made by a being who is comparable to the teller, but who is more powerful, who has more opportunities, more time, more peace within which to judge. Who or what is this being? God, you will say. Perhaps. It can also be history, other people, the dead parents who brought one into the world, the children who may survive one, the coexistence of everything on the other side of time, the listener to the story. I cannot give the ontological answer. I want only to describe the spirit in which these stories have been told, and hence their essential character.
Dolci’s role in the telling of these stories was a very special one. He was at the beginning of each story, in that he prompted it and then listened to it. And he was at the end of each story – the very end – in that in some way he was, not the judge, but an agent, a trustworthy, understanding agent, of that which would judge.
Last year I and my family drove in our small Citroën 2CV to Genoa. Just after the war the port area of this city had inspired me to make several paintings. Paintings made very much in the spirit of the early neo-realist Italian films, such as Open City, Bicycle Thief. ‘Let’s go and see if we can find a pizzeria that I used to know,’ I said. We left the car and went on foot through the narrow streets which are still like ravines, and in which you can still buy and be sold just about anything. The pizzeria had disappeared, but we ate in another, rather more modern one.
We returned to the car and drove off. When we arrived at the house of the friends we were visiting, I unlocked the luggage compartment of the car to take out our suitcase. And it was then that I saw that my haversack had disappeared. It had been stolen whilst we were eating our pizza. It had contained an electric razor, a camera, a pair of binoculars and a notebook. It was only the loss of the latter which really affected me. It was full of jottings for a story I was writing, and of theoretical notes about different forms of narrative. About the difference between bourgeois and popular narration, about how privilege or the lack of privilege gives a very different perspective to the narrating of events. Within half an hour the absurdity of either anger or regret became obvious to me. Occasionally the poor levy their own taxes in their own locale. And against this I was in no position to complain.
As you will learn from one of the stories here, it is quite possible that the band of two or three kids who opened the locked compartment of my car, skilfully, silently, and in full daylight, came from Palermo, on one of their professional tours of the mainland. As a result my notes on how they might tell the story of their sojourn in Genoa are no longer at hand!
Nevertheless I want to say something about their storytelling. First, however, I want to emphasize that what I have to say is not the most important thing to be said. Dolci himself describes what the telling of such stories can to do the consciousness of those who have lived them. And this is more important. Nobody reading this book can fail to be struck by what the stories reveal about the intolerable conditions, flagrant injustice and endemic violence imposed upon the lives of the tellers. What remains is the question how we, the relatively privileged, read such a book. The question how we translate these stories into our experience. For if we do not translate them, we shall read them only as exotica.
The annals of the poor. I choose the word ‘poor’ deliberately. I might say: of landless peasants and of the lumpenproletariat. The word ‘poor’ has a very long tradition to it, and it is necessary to recognize this tradition. And already we are hard up against the first problem. We have to recognize and respect this tradition, without, for one moment, falling into the revolting complacency which accepts poverty as an ordained component of the human condition. Personally I believe that Marxism, with its precise social and historical analysis, is an apprenticeship which the poor have already undergone or will undergo. Such an apprenticeship helps to train them to face the world as it is, and to contest it. Yet Marxism cannot draw a line under the centuries’ experience of the poor and thus close the account, as if thereafter this experience were no more than an anomaly.
With modern means of production, and given a radical transformation of existing social relations, a world of plenty is today possible. Yet what we actually see, for the most part, is a world of unprecedentedly violent poverty. Everyone talks of this, but this talk does not usually even begin to eliminate the poverty. When it does – as in Mao’s China or in the non-European republics of the Soviet Union – the improvement is hidden, at least in the minds of the West, under a barrage of political debate about other issues.
One could say that we are living the crisis of utopianism. The Utopian vision of a just world of plenty nowhere accords with reality. It is not my task here to lay out what conclusions should be drawn from this impasse. What does need to be pointed out is that the crisis of utopianism has absolutely nothing to do with the poor as they live their own lives.
Their crises are much more immediate and material. There is no need to list them. Likewise their hopes are both smaller and tougher, that is to say more persistent and longer-lasting. There have been educators, including revolutionary ones, who have explained this paradox of desperation and hope among the poor as the consequence of superstition and ignorance. But there are many systems of knowledge, and each one calls the other ignorant. The poor’s overall view of life is very evident in the pages of Sicilian Lives, but it is so far removed from the view that most of us have inherited that we risk not seeing its logic and coherence. And failing to see its logic and coherence, we risk being blind to its intellectual and moral courage.
First and foremost, life for the poor is an arena of struggle. Ceaseless, unremitting struggle in which only partial victories can ever be foreseen, and of those foreseen, only a fraction gained. Life is the arena, the stage, of this struggle; but not the struggle itself. That life is only a struggle for survival is a notion of nineteenth-century social and biological science. The poor could never allow themselves the luxury of such cynicism.
If life appears to them to be nothing but a struggle for survival, because they are living it and not merely investigating it, they conclude that life is a trial which, obscurely and terribly, must nevertheless have some other purpose. At the very least this purpose may be the grateful acceptance of repose at the end of the struggle. At the most, it may be that the eventual role of the poor will be to cleanse the world – at least temporarily – of evil.
And here it is worth remembering that this last occasional yet recurrent revolutionary vision was never utopian, for it was based, not upon a detailed vision of what would follow, but on a sense of the overwhelming justice of retrospective revenge!
The poor estimate that life is a trial: that pleasure is a gift and a mystery, perhaps the deepest mystery of all; that there are no final solutions; that all men are fallible; that events are more powerful than choices. The idea that life bestows a right to satisfaction and happiness is to them naïve, and furthermore, because somewhere such an idea implies an unrealizable promise, profoundly dishonest.
Such a view accords with many thousands of years of varied human experience, but it is in direct opposition to the life view of the privileged today in modern Europe and North America. And this opposition is part of the content of the most profound drama of our time.
It can be put very simply. On one hand an essentially tragic view of life; on the other hand a technocratic and optimistic view of life, which precludes the category of the tragic. And then, if we pass from theory to practice, the systematic oppression of those who have a tragic view by those who have a technocratic and optimistic one. Only the term ‘systematic oppression’ is inadequate. For this oppression is tragedy.
It is necessary to say this, for it is not what the poor themselves are in a position to say. But once it is said, it is to their evidence that we should listen, and in listening something different will also become apparent.
To say that the poor are closer to reality than the rich is a cliché. And a somewhat patronizing one, in that it suggests that reality is coarse, material, brutal, physical. And it suggests that reality is thus opposed to the spiritual, from which the poor are mostly excluded. Yet the true antithesis of the real is the abstract.
What is remarkable in the stories and reflections that follow is their lack of abstraction. And in the interviews with the rich and the Mafiosi, what is remarkable is the opposite. In poor societies abstraction and tyranny go together; in rich societies it is indifference which usually goes with abstraction. Abstraction’s capacity to ignore what is real (and the heart can abstract as well as the mind: unjustified jealousy, for example, is an abstraction) is undoubtedly where most evil begins.
Reality, as distinct from abstraction, is contradictory. Two-faced. (Is the limitation of the abstract the result of the fact that purely cerebral thought originates in only one of the two spheres of the brain?) The living of these stories has encouraged an acceptance of contradiction. From this acceptance comes truthfulness (an absence of simple self-justification), forgiveness, pity, humour, and-perhaps most notably of all – the capacity to reflect upon contradictions and their mystery. These reflections, unlike abstractions, are living thought.
There’s times I see the stars at night, especially when we’re out for eels, and I get to thinking in my brain, ‘The world, is it really real?’ Me, I can’t believe that. If I get calm, I can believe in Jesus. Bad-mouth Jesus Christ and I’ll kill you. But there’s times I won’t believe, not even in God: ‘If God really exists, why doesn’t He give me a break and a job?’
Then I remember I got kids, and don’t hang myself. Still, there’s times … When I can’t find work, my head just spins …
Skinning those frogs, I feel pity, but what can I do but kill them? I pity them but they got to die. This frog staring at me knows his time’s come. There in my hand I’m telling him, he’s got no doubt. How do I know it? Catching him by the legs before you apply the scissors, the frog pisses in your hand – like we’d do in the same fix – and more than once. That’s why I know how he thinks.
Looking beneath the veil of reality I’ve learned that women and men are nothing but scarecrows or feathers blowing in the wind. Women are movable objects, and man is so weak, generically speaking, that he exposes himself like a peacock. Savage beast that he is, man in the presence of woman is like a newborn lamb.
If human beings had the slightest inkling of the secret, that we’re only on this earth a fleeting moment, we’d cherish every day, month and year a lot more. We’d see time flow past and our life with it, which is all the more reason to cherish it and help each other out, physically, and be at one in peace of mind.
Truthfulness, pity, humour, the capacity to reflect upon contradictions, yes, yes. But there is another contradiction: every woman tries to abolish poverty for her child, every man for himself or for his family. This struggle must become a vast social and political world struggle.
1981
1 Danilo Dolci, Sicilian Lives, trans. J. Vitiello, London, Writers & Readers, 1981; New York, Pantheon, 1982.