co-authored with C. Zamboni, M. Spagnolli, G. Longobardi, E. Jankowski. Translated by Caterina Diotto.
Originally published in italian here.
In the war in Ukraine we recognise the expression of a particular clash in the symbolic, between world-forms and languages, which pervades our time and represents a political threshold between the realisation of one world or another.
Because of this, and because of the confusion of words and media propaganda that continues in our country, we felt the need to declare another space. To speak another discourse, to return attention to the larger problem, to speak those words that actually reflect the majority, to highlight all those aspects that have been rendered invisible and thus bring complexity back to the discourse. That is why we decided to write these pages, which have the spirit of a Manifesto, in which we propose our own cuts of the real about what is happening. Not to provide a unifying and ideological vision, but to highlight certain relationships between things in a general framework and make the symbolic space of a different discourse powerfully visible. We believe that many and many will recognise themselves in this.
Caterina Diotto – Watching (your) back
This war in many ways represents a resurfacing of concepts, attitudes, ways of doing and speaking that no longer inhabit our present and no longer reflect the sensibilities of those who do. I am not talking about the long stretches of history, geopolitical conflicts or economic interests. I am not talking about the weapons, the violence, the destructive delusions that always inhabit and have inhabited our realities in multiple ways. I am talking about the ideas, the words, the ways of thinking, reading and interpreting the world that are the matrices, the keys, the forms through which these conflicts and movements are realised, made materially real.
I will therefore speak of these forms as if I were turning to look over my shoulder, to see something that is past and at the same time is trying to return in a new way. Although past and residual, these forms are not disconnected from our present and some of its dynamics, nor are we “safe” from them. If they succeed in their intent, that is, to convince us that they are still relevant, that they reflect the way so many people feel and interpret reality, then it becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and these forms will return in their own right. But first they must convince us, and therein lies the political space. Nothing is already decided.
I look over my shoulder: what I see is a reactionary tailspin that seeks to throw us back into a world-form (a way of interpreting things and reacting to them) peculiar to Western countries during the Cold War. An ethnocentric world-form, therefore, that wants to put a certain type of the West – patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist, nationalist, identity-driven, aggressive and belligerent – back at the centre of the world’s geopolitical dynamics “what it does” and “what it says”, which would like to make this type of form a “model” for international dynamics and, along with it, its own countries.
It is a world-form whose deep logic is based on identity and splitting, a continuous distinguishing, separating, drawing lines between what is equal and what is other, as well as on establishing hierarchies between identity and otherness. As Hèléne Cixous wrote in Sorties, it is a hierarchy by pairs of opposites, whose second – the other – always has an inferior or negative value. Thus is the logic of patriarchy, capitalist competition, identity nationalisms, colonialism and war.
To wage war, one must first prepare a cultural battlefield. You have to draw a line between “us” and “them”, and then establish which characters identify us as us and them as them, which goes along with delineating why we are the “good” and they are the “evil”. Thus a country like Ukraine, where bilingualism and mixing of cultures was the norm, was taken and divided – Russians on one side, Ukrainians on the other. The definitions of good and evil, then, want to appeal to History: not to History in its entirety, no, but again to a certain interpretation of it, which draws arbitrary border lines. For example, it starts from when the “enemy” attacked. What was there before does not count. Finally, since “us” and “them” are different, and increasingly essentially split as the conflict progresses along with cultural propaganda, the war must aim at the destruction of all “them”. Since they are evil, it must be ensured that “they can do no more harm”. War has a logic of annihilation: do-nothing to that which is other than me, so that only “me” remains, that which is equal to me. It is evident that as long as this logic is followed, both in combat and in propaganda, no negotiation is possible.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on community dynamics are extremely timely: a community is made up of centripetal and centrifugal forces, forces that push towards identity and forces that bring change and multiplicity. When centripetal forces take over, the community becomes deadly through war: the destruction of lives in the name of an assumed “spirit of community” – its identity – in the name of which everyone must sacrifice. A community spirit that is made to coincide with arbitrarily selected aspects: territory, (a specific) language, (a type of) religion, (an ideological) “race”. Thus it happens that a community, a people, is led to its own self-destruction if those who lead it give precedence to ideology over reality.
What I am seeing is the fierce attempt to return to the hegemony of the logic of splitting. I will now say instead about what I see around me, here and now, against which this logic tries to return. Globalisation and the pandemic, as well as the digital revolution, are historical events that have made clear the extent of interconnectedness between humans in all countries, as well as between humans, non-humans and the environment. If capitalist globalisation had the intention of connecting places and people only in certain directions in the name of “First World” profit – from North to South for exploitation and pollution, from South to North for goods and privileges -, reality has overstepped these boundaries, giving rise also to reciprocal movements, changes of direction and unexpected contaminations. The pandemic, besides demonstrating with vivid rawness how close we all are, has shown the real permeability of borders, bodies and species. This opened up another space of discourse, rooted in the substance of what we live, in the experience of many and many.
Feminism, environmentalism, ecofeminism, anti-racism, decolonial movements, indigenous knowledge, have long since created a fertile cultural ground for change that goes beyond the logic of splitting and opposition to approach an interpretation based on relationships, interconnections, being part of an integrated ecological system. On a planet conceived as Gaia (according to Lovelock and Margulis) nothing is absolutely “other”. Even more, what happens to the other affects me, as part of chains of common relationships. On a planet like Gaia, the annihilation of the other means the annihilation of a part of ourselves.
From a political point of view, over the last four years the urgency of the ecological question had gradually taken more and more space in the discourse, both national and international, of the West, despite very strong resistance, especially economic resistance. Movements, activisms, people’s sensitivities, everything had finally led to the realisation of those steps – the fact that the European Union had declared a state of ecological crisis and had envisaged a series of measures to initiate an energy transition – which, although still few in number, seemed to have finally moved the Great Animal onto a different path. Europe represented an international trailblazer in this, thanks to the relationship that had been created between ecological movements and institutional politics, leading to new laws, restrictions and regulations in trade and environmental exploitation. A culture of peace, cooperation, multiculturalism and respect for the environment is increasingly spreading across the visible plane; a culture deeply rooted, judging by the strong resistance to war and its propaganda. It is a direction, a path in the making still fraught with danger and resistance, much still needs to be addressed. But this is the path of feeling undertaken now.
The outbreak of war in Ukraine brought European ecological and feminist discourse to a standstill. It was like jumping backwards, as if everything that had been done, said, gained, suddenly became invisible. The focus on ecology disappeared from institutional discourse, supplanted by the problem of energy needs – “we might have to open coal-fired power stations”, “let’s go back to nuclear power” – pursued through conservative policies. The necessary independence could have been a push for the change we had already decided to undertake, instead the discourse was sidelined.
The initial risk of a nuclear disaster through bombing – through a desire for destruction or simple human error – did not stop the war machine, nor did the killing of thousands of people and the destruction of the environment and cities. Instead, we have witnessed the cultural crushing of propaganda (especially in the first two weeks of the war, but still present today) on opposing positions devoid of any critical sense or historical depth, inculcated to the tune of political aut-auth and cultural imperialism (we are democrats, we “civilise” the world by bringing democracy) and pornography of pain on the skin of the victims – killed twice: by the instrumentalisation of war and by the instrumentalisation of the media.
This world-form is no longer in the majority. It has become a residual interpretive structure, a cultural structure that no longer has a substratum, a basis, in the current sensibility, in people’s feelings. It exists by cultural tradition, by inertia even, but it is about to disintegrate like a temple whose pillars have fallen. As Elizabeth Jankowski writes, we have educated young people differently, the culture has changed and so has the feeling. The very young are in the streets for the climate, young people consider war an unacceptable, unthinkable situation, Italy is against war, the sending of weapons and the rearmament demanded by NATO. Instead, we want to invest in health and education.
Knowing that there is a conflict in culture and politics between these two world-forms, two ways of interpreting reality, is fundamental so that the reactionary attempt to return to old, patriarchal, capitalist, warmongering politics and discourses does not go unnoticed. It is not taken for granted or considered “normal” to go from one direction to the other.
This is a political moment, in which to give words to the reality we want to live. We cannot accept that this discourse, detached from reality as it is, can take root again. We cannot accept the rearmament and further cuts to health and education foreseen in the Draghi government’s plan for ’24-’25. We cannot accept that the real problem, the ecological issue, should pass by in silence, because there is no more time to lose. We cannot accept that Italy and Europe continue to passively absorb the diktats of a blind and imperialist country, in the hands of the arms and fossil fuel lobbies, prone to the multinationals of intensive agriculture and livestock farming, bent on overturning the international chessboard to its own advantage. Not when we had taken the path of ecological and political leadership, as international mediators and creators of virtuous solutions. It is time to look over our shoulders and leave behind what belongs to the past.
Maddalena Spagnolli – On War
Faced with the invasion of Ukraine and what this war evokes in us, I echo the words of Annamaria Ortese in Corpo Celeste:
Question: What do you find most unacceptable, or at least inexplicable, about living on earth? I can quote a page from Ionesco: on violence. Violence… is precisely the horror lurking in universal life… One has the feeling of something foreign to the world, coming from outside, like a spectre… Death camps are eternal.
The pinnacle of this violence is war itself.
I find it increasingly difficult to think/speak about reality in terms of nouns such as “war”, as well as ideal nouns such as “freedom”, “democracy”, “equality”, “justice”, “peace”… words that we also need to give shape to our highest aspirations. But among these universal nouns there is also “war”. What is “war”? Is it what is sometimes considered the “engine of history”, as if it were the raison d’être of humans on this world? Is war normal, natural, part of human nature? How can we talk about war?
When we utter this word, we immediately hear an echo, a vague image of what it entails, but as such it reveals itself to be an abstract concept, even though we know how concrete it really is and how striking its destructiveness is. To bring order to this contradiction, I return to Hannah Arendt’s reflection on action:
Not one man, but humanity in the plural inhabit the earth and in one way or another coexist. But only action and discourse refer specifically to the fact that living always means living among men, among those who are my equals. Consequently, when I enter the world, it is a world in which others are already present.
Living and acting “among men”, to quote Arendt, means “in its most general sense, taking an initiative, beginning, as indicated by the Greek word archei, or setting something in motion, which is the original meaning of the Latin agere”[3]. But an action without a name, without a “who” to accompany it, is meaningless[4]. It is therefore in the light of this “who”, of the subjects who are actors and who are involved in the action, that I can bring order to the abstract concept of war, that I can try to unfold its meaning: from what perspective are we speaking when we talk about war? From that of those who order it, those who wage it, those who suffer it, or those who watch it?
Those who order it: often (especially in modern wars) those who order it are not directly involved in the armed conflicts; and the decisions of those who “order war”, in this case decisions of strategy and tactics, derive from what Arendt defines as a “purely speculative” process. In fact, Arendt writes about war as “the continuation of politics by other means” and, referring to “the constant growth in prestige of certain experts or groups of experts with a scientific mindset”, she adds:
The problem is not so much that we are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable”, but rather that they “do not think”. … These gentlemen make calculations based on the consequences of certain hypothetical constellations, without however being able to verify their hypotheses against real situations. The logical flaw in these hypothetical constructions of future events is always the same: what at first appears to be a hypothesis … immediately becomes a “fact” on the basis of which they give rise to a whole series of analogous non-facts, with the result that we end up forgetting the purely speculative nature of the whole enterprise.[5]
And since, as Arendt writes in Vita activa, “every action produces not only a reaction, but a chain reaction; every process causes new, unpredictable processes”[6]; in fact, “predictions of the future are nothing more than projections of the automatic processes and procedures of the present, that is, of things that are likely to happen if humans do not intervene and nothing ‘unexpected” happens [7]. Following her reflections, we can say that those who order/command/start wars are therefore entangled in the consequences of decisions made with the presumption of having control over the course of events, which in reality we do not have.
Those who wage war: as Hegel writes and Carla Lonzi reiterates, are old men who order wars to break the bond between young men and their mothers by sending them to fight. Those who wage war are generally obliged to do so, but there are also those who do so by choice, to defend themselves from aggression (and here we often find women too, such as the Kurdish women of Rojava); but there are also those who choose to fight out of a desire for heroism, for an ideology, or for a rather masculine “pleasure” in the military and war experience. Combatants find themselves in conditions where they often experience extreme situations which, as accounts and studies on the realities of soldiers testify, can create everything from heightened forms of solidarity and charity among comrades, exaltation and “eroticising” experiences, to experiences such as desertion, confusion, trauma and fear, delirium, etc. Many of those who leave, excited by propaganda and ideology, lose all enthusiasm when faced with the material and terrifying reality of war, death, mutilation and the loss of all human compassion. Memoirs of both the First World War (e.g. Vera Brittain’s The Lost Generation) and the Second World War (e.g. James Jones’s unabridged version of From Here to Eternity) are full of such “shocks” in the face of reality, as are memoirs of more recent wars such as Vietnam (e.g. Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried).
Those who suffer it: we know, through empathy, how much horror and inhumanity those who suffer war have to endure; how much destruction of places, homes, communities and lives that had until then been lived in peaceful coexistence between different languages and cultures are wiped out because of the choices and actions of other powers (for example in the former Yugoslavia). Differences that until recently were not a problem and were often resolved in the daily management of coexistence become a cause of conflict; a management of coexistence often guaranteed by women, as recounted in a beautiful and exemplary 2011 film, Where Do We Go Now? by Nadine Labaki. Those who suffer from war only realise that differences are a problem when others decide so, differences that become irreconcilable contradictions for those who order war. Perhaps only those who suffer from war know how to respond to what causes it, know how to oppose violence, which is “action without argument or discourse and without calculation of the consequences”[8], with the necessary mediation between differences in real life.
Those who watch it: we in Western Europe in particular, since – especially since the Gulf War of 1991 – war has become spectacularised, entering our homes via our television screens. Whereas what we saw of the Gulf War were flashes in the night sky, now we see much of what is happening, we see more and more destruction of cities, massacres, mass graves, despair and the cries of women, men and children, lives reduced to mere survival.
The contradiction of those who watch war lies in the divide between the power of images and reality: we do not experience it, but by watching war thanks to extensive media coverage, we experience a sort of identification and alienation at the same time. The contradiction also lies in the false immediacy: we know how much the images give the illusion of it, and how much they are always constructed, selected, edited by someone and invalidated by ideological perspectives. We are here today, in this perspective, talking about war, in a sort of disconnect between the images of destruction that reach us via the airwaves and the reality we experience. And we feel torn inside between devastating feelings and a (generally) peaceful daily life. This has not just started now, but has been going on for 30 years, since the end of the Cold War.
We are witnessing, as Pope Francis says, a third world war, which, I might add, has been going on for thirty years: a war, or wars, that began in the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, not to mention all the wars in Africa – Algeria, Congo, Mali, Yemen and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (wars that are rarely mentioned). A single war that has spread across the Mediterranean and Asia and is now returning to Europe, to Ukraine. Wars that began and never ended: how many wars of the last 30 years have not yet come to an end? An “endless war”, as G. W. Bush said back in 2001, made up of wars that break out every 6-7 years: the years it takes to renew military arsenals.
This raises the enormous question, which I will not dwell on here, of arms production and technological development in this sector, the ever-increasing investment by states, the power of the arms lobby and its economic, social, ecological and political impact.
During this 30-year-long Third World War, something else has also been happening that is changing the world: globalisation, a phenomenon that, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our human coexistence on this earth. Globalisation forces us to realise even more cogently how interrelated and “connected” we are in our condition of plurality, individuality and human otherness, and we are becoming increasingly aware of how obsolete the logic that governed our world until the last century is, and which still inspires those who wage war (and not only them).
We are in a different era and we can no longer think about the world of the 21st century without taking into account that it now moves according to three closely intertwined horizons, which I will only mention briefly: the spread of feminism, understood as the worldwide struggle of women to assert their freedom; the ecological problem as a key issue for our survival on this planet; and digitalisation, as an unstoppable revolution in the forms of communication. These are fundamental axes of change that cannot be stopped.
We are in a new era and perhaps we should start shouting loudly: war must be banished from history (as someone said) if we do not want to destroy each other and destroy the earth that hosts us.
Chiara Zamboni – Schizophrenia
When Russia invaded Ukraine and the Ukrainians defended themselves, something stopped me from asking about the how and the interests involved, or about the forces in the field and the deaths and resistance. I was stopped by a question that did not concern the paths that led to this war, which ties it to the long history that has seen so many wars and armies fighting each other. The question was rather: what is war? What is its deep root, which cannot be reduced to historical causes alone, which vary over time?
I returned to the pages of Carla Lonzi and Luce Irigaray, who reinterpret Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in a gendered hermeneutics. Carla Lonzi is particularly clear in Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel) when, referring to Hegel’s text[9], she says that war is desired by old men, who use war to distance young men from the pleasure of life shared with women[10]. It is the old men in government – the adults who have been in power for some time – who leverage the value of young men to found a community on death and the sacrifice of life. It is only the death of young people in war, beyond the individual and his or her history, that strengthens and unifies a community towards the outside world and therefore also within itself.
I could add that, on the contrary, bonds of life and trust open the community up to other things, because they are manifold, plural, cross boundaries, and break down the inside and outside.
Instead, powerful old men found communities on death, sacrificing young people.
Carla Lonzi also writes: “Male thinking has ratified the mechanism that makes war, leaders, heroism and intergenerational conflict appear necessary”[12] and has established this mechanism as a safety valve for its own internal conflicts, which are not those of women.
Lonzi and Irigaray give a gendered interpretation of war. I agree with their explanation, because otherwise war seems to me to be nothing more than the immense destruction of human lives, things and goods, completely useless in terms of economic principles linked to enrichment and well-being. These goals can be pursued much more effectively and with much greater wealth through economic and diplomatic exchanges. Of course, mediation in both trade and diplomacy implies a reduction in the narcissism of omnipotence that is inevitably present in those who wage war either directly or indirectly, with external aid.
War is such immeasurable, disproportionate destruction, so closely linked to the annihilation of lives, things, goods, culture and the breakdown of bonds of trust, that it can only be explained as hubris taking the form of a death wish. It expresses a profound hatred of life, which is entrusted to the fragile network of mutual pledges and generative acts.
The pandemic first and then the war between Russia and Ukraine were so close in time that they brought into sharper focus a contradiction that runs through our world. We have seen medical staff: women and men committed to saving lives and treating the sick. And we have seen, without interruption, war, which is the mass destruction of lives. The waste of death. How can we reconcile the contradiction between the images of hospital staff trying to save lives and those of aeroplanes bombing hospitals?
It is a schizophrenic, painful condition, as if humanity were living in two mental and imaginary spaces that do not communicate with each other. It is a schizophrenic state that seems to me similar to what we experience in keeping together, on the one hand, the commitment to a profound law of human civilisation that forbids killing, so much so that laws punish murderers, and, on the other hand, the obligation to kill in war. If you do not kill, you are punished, while if you kill, you are a hero, and in any case, you have the blessing of the various forms of power on which you depend.
In the photos and stories of women and men living through the war in Ukraine, I recognised something similar to the stories of my parents and those elderly men and women who told us about the war of 1945. Some of them told us firmly: there must be no more war. They committed themselves to their words so that we, in turn, would inherit the commitment to avoid a new war. I still seem to hear their words, the faith that guided them and bound us to them. It is as if, in some way, we have not respected the pact.
Looking at the photos of this war, I realised that today the meaning of suffering has broadened. We suffer for our species, yes, so hopelessly prone to repeating the mistakes of the past, so tormented. But we also suffer for those houses half-destroyed and blackened by bombing, those roads where chasms have opened up, bridges blown up, trees blackened and animals with anguished eyes. The sky greyed by smoke. War leads to the destruction of places. Fields that suddenly become deserts and are reduced to the outskirts of bombings.
When things, buildings, fields and trees are damaged, we too are damaged because of the unconscious bonds we have with them and which constitute us.
Giannina Longobardi – War and a Feminism for All
Games played by males who have power: who can throw the furthest? You’ll see how far mine goes. And then you know it’s all mine. At two years old, there is certainly innocence in waving sticks around, throwing objects that then fall and go boom. Even at six years old, it’s still just a game: when, after so much angry destruction, I suggest to my grandson that we now build a hospital to treat the wounded, he looks at me with such astonishment that I think I’m wrong, that I shouldn’t intervene with realistic elements in what is only a symbolic game. That I shouldn’t scare him, that I shouldn’t say there will be blood and death. Of course, he throws bombs and I build houses and fences, putting beds and little animals inside.
What affects us and what does not. We are at war, but most of us, citizens of this country, do not really believe it. Something that was clearly possible still seems impossible to us. We measure the limits of our sensitivity, our imagination, our attention. We are only sensitive to what affects us directly: one lone voice has been warning for some time that the Third World War has been going on for years, but his words have not been widely heard. After all, how can we be moved by Aleppo when we pay for Syrian refugees to be kept locked up in concentration camps? If we pay the Libyans to protect us from refugees? If we allow human beings to drown in our seas. We have given up on humanity, on human rights, on love, on compassion, on solidarity. We have placed no limits on the violence of power. Now this violence is turning against us.
Feminism is for everyone. As feminists, we have declared our estrangement from power, which historical exclusion has placed us in a position to take advantage of its absence. This gives us a historic opportunity to speak a truth shared by billions of human beings threatened by war, famine, hunger and environmental destruction. Billions of living beings are threatened by the greed of those who think that everything is theirs. Feminism is for everyone. Feminism does not believe in democracy: the function of representation, if it ever had one, is over. Nation states have very little room for manoeuvre; the government obeys the strongest: finance, the EU, NATO. Parliament represents neither the interests nor the feelings of men and women: it has renounced all its functions. To avoid electoral confrontation, parties renounce all objections and continually accept the blackmail of confidence. There is always some decision already taken years ago, some agreement already signed, some budgetary constraint, some debt already spent, which makes discussion futile. Simone Weil, who advocated their abolition, taught us that political parties are only concerned with the good of the party, and those who become their representatives cannot think or speak freely. The good of the party has now been reduced to very little: simply put, today in Italy, those who sit in Parliament do not want to risk their seats. I expect nothing from the women in government, nor from the men. Anyone who dared to tell the truth, to demand the common good, would be ridiculed and immediately sidelined. We do not know the democracy that we should “export” to other countries in our own: without ever wanting war, without ever thinking about it, we have slipped into war. Into war in Europe. It is not only the desire for peace that finds no voice at the political level, but also our most material, most selfish, most consumerist interests: still having heating, a job, an income, being able to move around, being able to meet, having clean air, curbing the consumption of natural resources and caring for the environment, a functioning school system, efficient hospitals. Those who really matter, those who even profit from war, do not want war in their own backyard, but somewhere else. And they make others fight it.
Life without an umbrella. Jamila, a Moroccan friend hosted by Caritas, a single mother with a severely disabled daughter, a migrant seeking medical treatment, tells me that the organisation that helps her asked her to fill out a questionnaire on the causes of poverty. ‘And what did you say?’ I asked her. ‘That poverty falls from the sky on the heads of some people.’ I then began to visualise those protective umbrellas that, I said, some people thought they had over their heads to protect themselves from poverty: welfare, pensions, insurance, savings. Even NATO was a big umbrella against communism. And communism itself was a great bogeyman: the symbolic reference that underpinned social conflict. Since its collapse, we have seen an unregulated labour market, the progressive impoverishment of workers, the corporatisation of public services, and the ever-increasing privatisation of health and education services. What still remains will be eaten away by debt in the coming years.
Freedom and emancipation: free to sell ourselves. We all sell ourselves to make a living, perhaps the only difference is the price. With the end of a totalitarian and oppressive regime, the populations of Eastern European countries entered the free European market. Just one image: ships overflowing with Albanians who enthusiastically crossed the Adriatic en masse. A friend of mine was welcomed and then enslaved by a shepherd in Puglia. She stayed with him for a couple of years because, as she told me, she thought, ‘They told me that Italy was capitalist! But the Albanians were only the first. With the loss of secure, albeit poorly paid, jobs and the privatisation of higher education and healthcare, low-cost construction workers, seasonal workers ready for the harvest, and full-time carers arrived, far from their families for years, even decades. Ukrainian, Moldovan, Romanian: children raised by others and many gifts to compensate for their absence: computers, mobile phones, video games, Nike shoes and sweatshirts. Poverty and an overabundance of consumer goods. Some, however, have also thought: better to rent out your womb, a job at home that lasts only nine months, than to emigrate and sell your life for years. In Ukraine, the only country in Europe where this is possible, 2,500 babies, white and perhaps even blonde, were born every year before the war.
Who stands to gain? Rich countries have waged war on Covid in favour of big pharmaceutical companies and, in Italy, without investing in a healthcare system that collapsed in a short space of time. Who will profit from the war between Russia and NATO? Arms manufacturers and sellers, of course, but at the moment the profits that are “flying”, as they say, are those of sellers of fossil fuels, gas, oil and coal, whose sales were threatened by the green revolution. What we do not want to see is a war against all living beings. It is a war against the possibility of a future for life. It is not the planet that is threatened and that we must save, it is life that is under threat, at least in the form we have known it. This is of no interest to the wealthy few who have hoarded all the wealth and power.
Elisabeth Jankowski – War and Language
Remove War from History
‘The policy of equality leads to demands for more women in the army,’ I hear and read. It is not women who should be able to become soldiers or generals, but the army that should disappear because it is based on the idea of strong men defending the community from attack or attacking other communities, even on behalf of women. The idea and necessity of defence, not of a territory but of a community, must take on completely new forms.
The current conflict brings back to life an old vision of the relationship between men and women: the separation of men and women. Where women are sent away with children and the elderly (with few exceptions) or decide to flee themselves, the complexity of viewpoints can never come into play. Only by making decisions together can a certain political balance be guaranteed. The old scenario of men defending their homeland and women waiting for better times in shelters or far from home is reappearing. We cannot abandon men to this dirty work. We must involve them in our thoughts and feelings. We gave birth to them, we educated them, we defended them, we protected them in body and soul. Now we must demand that they return to their fragility.
Of course, women who leave their country to men and abandon their strength surrender women’s weapons and renounce their own power to bring peace.
Motherlanguage and the geography of feelings
A burning issue for me is the resurgence of nationalism. After the politics of globalisation, we are returning to our national enclaves, which inevitably lead to purges and rejections of sections of the population that are not considered sufficiently suitable in terms of origin, language and tradition. The issue of motherlanguage and second and third languages is therefore becoming essential again.
The motherlanguage is necessary for all human beings to enjoy closeness to their mother, to assimilate her thoughts and to become capable of facing life’s challenges. But the mother tongue must never become a blunt weapon to defend a right to land. Land is where my home is – which is often not a real house but a small flat, where I, born in this place, feel “at home”. That “my home” (or Heimat) is not just made up of walls but rather a place of feelings and relationships that can also do without the physical location.
Like language, home is also a place of our beginnings that then becomes a spiritual place that guides us and gives us a position in life, not necessarily in a specific place or in the same language: most of us have practised other languages and other places where we have felt “at home”.
In societies with multiple languages, such as Germany before Hitler, Ukraine or the former Yugoslavia (and almost every country in the world), ethnic conflicts can easily erupt after many years of peaceful coexistence. It seems incomprehensible, but in my opinion it is proof that reality and its complexity must be nurtured on a daily basis. Trust in others and respect for cultural and linguistic diversity can never be taken for granted.
However, the discourse on linguistic and cultural diversity is often a false problem. In the current conflict, as in other conflicts, it is clear that behind this discourse lies the power over resources. Cultural conflict is the “opium of the people”. People are pushed to take sides, thus dividing them without difficulty. The conflict of cultures becomes instrumental: divide and rule, as the Latins used to say. Cultures and languages in themselves are never divisive but unite and grow by mixing.
The tolerance of other ‘regimes’
We need a new way of thinking about political judgement. We who live in an imperfect democracy with poverty, inequality, and exploitation of bodies and minds have no right to judge others. The word “regime” does not facilitate relations between countries. Not only that, it creates humiliation and negative reactions which in turn worsen relations within individual countries. Every culture follows its own logic and should not be forcibly influenced from outside. The citizens of every country are capable enough to make their voices heard: a country’s government is not everything. We know this. There is also politics before politics, that is, the politics of women, families, communities, such as good neighbourly practices. I want to follow these human traces more and the geographies of political power less. The politics of care, mainly that of women, will have more and more followers in the world of the future.
The new awareness
‘How can you wage war?’ says the baker, shaking his head.
‘We can’t wait to go out for dinner with our friends and think about our next beach holiday.’
The Ukrainian woman interviewed by a television station says:
‘We had everything. We lacked nothing. I don’t know what the Russians were supposed to liberate us from.’
I see a profound reflection in these statements. A thought that arose when the war broke out in Ukraine. The human catastrophe, with all the pain of those involved and the destruction of homes, even the most humble ones, suddenly brought daily life to a halt: a look back, the conviction of having lived happy years. A moment of awareness that makes us realise the richness of shared daily life, the value of small things.
This pause and deep breath to ward off the fear that assails us in the face of war also opens up something new: the strength to want to achieve this previous state of happiness again, to banish war forever. But we cannot stop there. Anger and dismay drive us to take control of our own lives and, with that, the lives of others.
A few years ago, a Finnish friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook of a forest with an entire underground area where the roots of individual plants were connected by a dense network of communicating roots. This image, which I found surprising, has always stayed with me, and to this day I find it a perfect representation of what language and culture are, as the result of our ability to speak and relate to one another.
For us, it is not fungi and bacteria that bring us into contact, but words. I have always sought an image that could demonstrate that our language is not purely superficial, but has an invisible side that anchors our words in an underground sphere, which is of a different quality: no longer words, but meaning and a place of nourishment, like the roots of trees. This area of plant and language life is almost more active than life on the surface. It guides and restrains us without our consent.
Of course, every single tree is different from the next; there are birches and oaks, just as there are languages: English and Kiswahili, for example. But deep within the earth (or within meaning), they are connected and interact continuously. Deep within the earth, water flows, invisible to our eyes and uncontrollable by our actions. In the depths of the earth, the roots of trees are intertwined and communicate continuously. The natural world is connected and speaks the language of minerals, the language of waves, the language of the earth. We ignore this world without boundaries and without appropriation. In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh talks about fresh water and salt water mixing and forming an invisible river that runs a long way into the sea. I feel I can embrace this invisible mixing, step by step. The peaceful and creative coexistence of women and men must be cultivated like a plant that needs to be watered every day.
On 14 May, in Montorio, a suburb of Verona, the small municipal library organised a small event to inaugurate the recently cleaned-up garden, with a programme that I found invaluable. Some foreign women from the neighbourhood recounted a piece of their lives, their thoughts and their memories. They came from Burundi, Colombia and Ukraine. The stories were interspersed with songs by the Casa di Ramia choir, providing a break and a rest for the audience. The first story, by a Ukrainian caregiver, was about the rituals surrounding the death of a family member. We were surprised by the sad opening theme, but then the emotional participation was great: it reminded us of the rituals of our own cultures, perhaps no longer practised but still in our childhood memories. We all felt very united and wanted to recount the rituals of the past ourselves. Women place themselves on a level of encounter that does not concern the nation but, on the contrary, the life of relationships, that is, the rituals of everyday life. And this is the level of a possible closeness that overcomes distances and creates shared emotions.
“Falling feathers learn to fly”, the (italian) title of Usama al Shahmani’s book, inspires me greatly. Let us try to transform falling into flying. The dramatic times of war and the geopolitical balance of power, well described by Giannina Longobardi, must not stab us in the heart. We are women who know about a culture of mediation. We know how to do the job of languages that take, learn and transform the raw material of sound. The warlords only win if they defeat us too.
Originally published as:
Chiara Zamboni, Maddalena Spagnolli, Giannina Longobardi, Caterina Diotto, Elisabetta Jankowski, Pagine di lavoro sulla guerra, Per Amore del Mondo n.18 – 2021/2022 Il mondo stringe ISSN 2384-8944
Caterina Diotto 