Then one morning.
This piano music, out of the blue.
A piano solo.
On the radio, as I go inside the terminal at the port, with its plastic, salt-encrusted chairs, women all in black down to their ankles, and the men, with that hazel-brown skin, some in tunics, others not, but all speaking a language that doesn’t resemble any of the languages I know. One is reading the Koran. Women on one side, men on the other. And that music is Satie.
Erik Satie.
Gymnopédie No. 1.
I could play it from memory even now, and all I can think is— out of the blue, all I can think is, how did I end up here?
When I came to the Middle East more or less ten years ago, barely out of college, we were all afraid of Hamas; today you interview an official of Hamas and you talk about taxes, about electricity, about broadband and business incentives; today you sign your book for a member of al-Qaeda. How did I end up here? In the midst of this music that evokes an entire world, my world before this one, before the Middle East and September 11, before Syria and Iraq: the world before the world, when I studied piano and read Philip Roth and rode around on a Vespa, when at night the cities were lit up, because nobody was bombing them, and they had book shops, they had cinemas. You could dress any way you wanted, meet whomever you wanted, say whatever you wanted, so why am I here now? Talking about nothing but Islam, Islam, Islam, with one side or another, with those who attack it and those who defend it, and all the while the roles keep switching, constantly reversed, and there you are, crushed between two obsessions, between two propositions, because they all want certainties, nothing but certainties, while you’re here trying to explain the jihadists, trying to understand their reasons, you who in Syria, and everywhere else, live by watching your back, here too, explaining the jihadists while keeping close to the walls: What sense does it make? On the other hand, even in Europe it’s the same thing, given that Muslims, all Muslims without distinction, are now the blacks, the Jews of this century, who apparently don’t have a single quality, not one decent, positive thing to teach, nothing: they apparently are a problem, period, in this Europe in which if you try to explain the jihadists, you too are a terrorist. Where you are forbidden to even write the words “Islamic State,” because to do so, they tell you, would mean acknowledging it and legitimizing it. It would mean accepting it—just as Islamists, who are now seventy years old, still talk about the “Zionist entity,” convinced that if they don’t name Israel it will one day vanish. The same thing.
The same but opposite. And you in the middle.
In this world that is never your own.
How did we end up here?
I’m a little embarrassed to be here at the boarding dock for Thilafushi. Because Thilafushi is an artificial island: it’s a dumping ground for the Maldives. Landfill, not sand. The soil is garbage. And yet, according to Lonely Planet, you shouldn’t miss it. So here I am, waiting for the ferry, sitting on my faded plastic chair. The others are mostly men—men exhausted from working, in T-shirts and fake Nikes, with those laborers’ hands from which the grime can never be washed off and the lifeless eyes of those for whom tomorrow will be the same as today, and the day after, and even the day after that; and this is their entire life. They’re carrying copper cables, car batteries, bags of cement. Paint buckets. But for Lonely Planet, all this is an attraction for the tourists. The kind who take selfies in Scampia, at Le Vele, the ones who spend the night at the City of the Dead, the inhabited cemetery in Cairo, or book a tour of the demolished homes in Hebron, or visit the refugee camps in Lebanon—naturally telling themselves that it’s the only way to really know a country.
Because these are the real Maldives, right?
Thilafushi, a little over 4 miles west of Male, is a narrow strip, 2.2 miles long and just over a tenth of a mile wide. It is growing by about one square yard per day: 330 tons of waste are dumped there daily. The Maldives do not have an incinerator. It costs too much.
An incinerator costs around $15 million: as much as ten new rooms in a resort.
And those 330 tons, among other things, are mainly produced by tourists. Each tourist produces nearly 8 pounds of trash per day: five times more than a Maldivian.
Actually, it all started with Thilafushi. A few months ago, I happened to come across some photographs by Francesco Zizola. And in one of them there was this little girl with long, black hair and a red dress, on a yellow slide: in a neglected field, barefoot, on this old slide, against a magnificent sunset. I thought she was a refugee. But then I read the caption: the Maldives. And then there was another photo, right after that. A man, in a cloud of dark smoke, like a fireman, on something that looked as if it had collapsed. Thilafushi. And yet another one, a boy, with a striped shirt. A corpse. In the water. In that transparent water. And I said to myself: The Maldives?
And then I thought: In fact, what do I really know about the Maldives?
I don’t even know where they are.
And so I did a Google search: I found a piece by Jason Burke of the Guardian, one of the top experts on al-Qaeda. He was writing about the jihadists of the Maldives. And I said to myself: The Maldives? Because we always say that the foreign fighters come from all over the world. And it’s true. But from what world?
A person comes from Rome, okay. But does he come from trendy Trastevere or Tor Bella Monaca?
These are the sort of things you can’t write about, because they’re so obvious. But that’s how you end up one day with a situation where a person who comes from the Philippines isn’t a Filipino by birth but by occupation.
A Filipino by fate.
Thilafushi today is also the industrial area of the Maldives. It has a cement factory, shipyards, a plant for bottling gas cylinders, and a number of small machine shops and wood and aluminum yards. They’re all workers here. There’s no asphalt on the ground, or sand either, only this pale mud that is a little bit of everything: soil, sand, water, cement, filled with scraps of iron, pieces of cardboard, chunks of plastic, sometimes a clump of grass, in an air that’s dense with dioxin. It looks like Taranto, Italy.
It looks like the ILVA steelworks in Taranto. What you breathe is cancer.
With those shacks of asbestos, the windows broken in their rusty frames. And along the streets, beat-up vans, fishing boat hulls, old cement mixers, ancient cars—a shrub with yellow flowers sprouting beside the driver’s seat instead of a gear box. And the workers sleep here. They live here, in the back of the workshops. Or on the boats. On the boats they repair. The vessels are open, the cabins falling apart; inside you can see the laundry laid out to dry. And they all have safety boots, a hard hat and a polo shirt with the company logo; they look like ordinary workers, hired in compliance with the law. But only because the bosses need strong, healthy men. The employers pay for the hard hat. They pay for gloves, so a worker won’t cut himself and miss a week. But otherwise they live like that, on the beach. Without even a faucet for a shower.
After all, there’s the sea.
The only thing that’s safeguarded here is their ability to work.
They’re all workers—and they’re all from Bangladesh. Many don’t speak English, or Dhivehi either; they’ve never even gone to Male. And they’ve been here for years. For years. Every day the same as any other. And not only do they find all this normal, they feel fortunate. Because in Thilafushi they have practically no expenses, so they can send the families their entire earnings of $250. The jihadists don’t come from here, from the poorest of the poor, who, as always in history, are too poor, too busy surviving to fight for a better life, or even just to imagine one. No. Not only is there no outrage or frustration here. There is no resignation. There is no sense of defeat, because there is no sense of battle.
On the contrary. They offer you tea, cheerfully, they explain how you check that a rudder is working.
Because that’s life, period.
Even if you can hardly breathe.
“It’s a bit hard,” a young man in a blue polo shirt tells me. He is planing planks that another guy strips of paint and passes to him, the air smelling of sea salt and turpentine. He’s twenty-seven, and expects to return to Bangladesh in fifteen years, more or less, and to buy a house there. “A beautiful house,” he says.
“What will it be like?” I ask.
“It will have three rooms,” he says. “It will have everything. It will have a refrigerator,” he says, “it will have an oven.
“It will have windows,” he says.
He smiles at me, and goes back to planing.
He doesn’t know that in fifteen years he’ll be dead.
Which to some extent is actually the story of the Maldives themselves. Because the Maldives are practically at the same level as the water. The highest point is 7.9 feet above sea level: they are the lowest country in the world. Five feet, on average. And according to UN predictions, according to minimum estimates, by the end of this century the sea will rise by 1.9 feet.
Submerging everything here.
Because of climate change caused by others.
With revenues from tourism, the government is considering buying land in Australia. Because at the end of all this, they will all be forced to simply move elsewhere. Seculars and Islamists. Yameen and his enemies.
Those who stole and those who were stolen from.
In the end, everyone will have lost everything.
Meanwhile it’s already hard to breathe here. A few dozen yards from the factories and boatyards, Thilafushi dissolves. Literally. It dissolves: abruptly, everything turns white. White and acidic. Garbage is being burned, heaps and heaps of it, in air so toxic that despite tons of all kinds of scraps, there isn’t a single stray cat. Not one seagull. Not a dog, a rat. Nothing. Only these workers with their scooters, pickups, bikes, who ride into the fog and vanish, whistling, three, four of them, cheerful, with their red coveralls and yellow hard hats. Though the danger here is certainly not that a brick might fall on their heads. One of the guys turns around, waves at me. While behind him everything is burning, he makes the victory sign from his pickup, the way a jihadist once did inside Aleppo’s old mosque, in its ruins. That same expression, in the midst of rubble.
Everything leveled to the ground, destroyed. Snipers behind him.
And there he was, smiling.
With that same expression.
After half an hour, you start to feel sick. To experience shortness of breath.
A metallic gray off-road vehicle pulls up alongside me. They are employees of the Thilafushi Corporation, the company that manages the island. They patrol the yards like watchmen: they keep an eye on the workers. “What are you doing here?” one of the two asks me. I show him the Lonely Planet.
The other one, who doesn’t speak English, asks him: “Al-Jazeera?”
“No,” he tells him. “A tourist.”
I cough.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Italy,” I say.
“Go to the beach,” he says. “What are you doing here anyway? With what the Maldives are costing you,” he says, “you come to Thilafushi? Besides, it’s not suitable for women to be here.”
It’s not suitable for anyone to be here, in fact.
I spit blood.
Every twenty or thirty minutes, a seaplane flies overhead.
And I always think of Bauman. Zygmunt Bauman. About his books on globalization. On industrialists and workers. On how they depended on one another, at one time, because they shared a country, a region. So while the industrialists certainly had power, much greater power, it was not an absolute power, because they still needed workers in the end: workers who could not only produce, but also buy what they were producing. Now it’s different. Now capital is free to move; factories are free to relocate. To impose their own terms and conditions.
Because industrialists and workers no longer live in the same space. In the same world.
And while they scuffle over Illy and Lavazza down here, the water is rising.
The water is rising. It’s rising, plain and simple.
While they fly over your head, hunting for new islands.
What does it matter if these islands sink?
There’s nothing here on Thilafushi. Only a small grocery store. Selling orangeade and potato chips. The few who have a house, instead of a mat at the work site, live among pieces of wreckage, in tiny rooms with no windows, walls that are a cobweb of cracks. The kitchen is a camp stove, a couple of plastic dishes. An old pitcher. You work and that’s it.
You get sick, and that’s it.
“But in the evening,” I ask a young man, “when you’re done working, what do you do? Where do you hang out?”
He points to a small, low, light-colored building in a grove of trees. A café. With a red-tiled roof, and piles of cushions at the entrance.
I go over to it to buy some water.
It’s not a café, it’s a mosque.