All posts by KDSMurray

Italy – Who wants to be South?

27 May 2008 KDSMurray 2 Comments

Sicily has long been a place for imagining the wider world.

In 3^rd century BC, Archimedes developed the magic of levers to the point where he could speculate, ‘Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.’

In 12^th century Palermo, the court of King Roger II brought together the finest scholars of all religions. Under his patronage, the Arab philosopher Al-Adrisi created an atlas that represented the height of knowledge about the world. Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi’khtirdq al-Afaq (‘the delight of the yearner for the piercing of the horizons’) incorporated knowledge of Africa, Europe and Asia. Besides the absence of the Americas and Oceania, the major difference was the orientation of South. South was placed on top, rather would become the convention.

Sicily was a theatre for the struggle to define Europe. Initially part of Greater Greece, Sicily has been alternatively part of the Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Norman and Spanish empires. The French historian Jules Michelet saw the Punic Wars fought on its soil as a fateful battle between the Indo-Germanic and Semitic families of nations: the victory of the former enabled the West to emerge.

As Goethe witnessed on arriving in 1787, ‘Sicily points me toward Asia and Africa, and it is no trivial thing to stand in person on the remarkable spot that had been the focus of so much of the world’s history.’ For northerners, Sicily was an opportunity to clarify the cultural superiority of the West. In 1771, Baron Hermann von Riedesel noted in Sicily traits of ‘effeminacy, voluptuousness, and cunning, which is found to increase in more southerly countries’.

For many writers, this difference characterised Italy as a whole. John Ruskin’s essay on the Gothic begins with a panoramic journey from north to south, contrasting the ‘prickly independence ‘ represented in Northern ornament against the priestly mystification of Southern culture. The experience of the Grand Tour, from Dover to Naples, testified to the opposition between the sensible North and corrupt South.

This European fault line was internalised within Italy itself. Rather than contest this prejudice, the response was to scapegoat the Southern region. In 1898, a Sicilian criminologist Aliredo Niceforo published L’Italia barbara contemporanea (Contemporary barbarous Italy) which argued a phrenological difference between Northern and Southern Italians, based on the contrast between Aryan and Mediterranean types. The Northerner had greater capacity for social organisation, whereas the Southerner possessed a more perverse genius. Niceforo’s aim was to find ways of civilising the South.

The eventual unification of Italy began in Sicily, with the successful campaign of Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860. Garibaldi developed his revolutionary skills in Latin America. He had been head of the Uruguay Navy and joined in marriage to the valiant soldier, the Brazilian Ana Ribeiro da Silva. Know as the Mezzogiorno after the hot midday sun, Garibaldi saw the Kingdom of Two Sicilies as critical to the future constitution of the Italian nation.

Following Garibaldi’s campaign, a movement emerged to challenge the cultural prejudice towards the South. The school of meridionalismo included writings about the dire poverty of the south, such as Pasquale Villari’s Southern Letters (1875) which focused on the scandal of Neapolitan life. Rather than point the blame at the moral character of Southerners, writers like Villari accused the Southern elites of having little regard for their own people.

The communist Gramsci placed this on the international stage with his essay the Southern Question (1926), written in prison. Gramsci tried to create solidarity between Turin workers and Southern peasants. He argued that the lowly status of Southerners is due to bourgeois propagandists, who argue that ‘if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature.’

Elements of post-war Italian culture proved more sympathetic to the South. In cinema, Neorealism emphasised the life of ordinary people. Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers (1960) depicted the plight of Southern immigrants in the industrial Milan. In visual arts, Arte Povera introduced by Germano Celant in 1967 also provided a space for representing the pre-Industrial Italy in the use of found materials.

While there was a place for the South in the culture of the North, the dominant response in the South itself was to isolate itself from the North. Sicilianismo is a term use to describe a stubborn resistance to innovation, associated with a suspicion of more powerful neighbours. It manifests itself most famously in the mafia, of Arabic origin, which operates as a secret hierarchy in opposition to the state.

In the 20^th century, the mafia put Sicily on the global stage. Hollywood directors of Italian descent such as Martin Scorsese drew on the Sicilian experience to depict the lives of immigrants in America. In the Godfather series, Francis Ford Coppola used Sicily as a narrative kernel to underpin the violence of the mafia in the US. From Sicily comes the code of honour on which drives revenge and sacrifice.

It’s been noted that the Godfather series presents a distorted view of Sicilian life as exclusively patriarchal. The normal intense relationship between the Sicilian mother and son is completely absent. It could be argued that the Godfather films address a contradiction in American culture, between the modernising challenge to hierarchy and the celebration of male power in military and sporting life. Rather than locating patriarchy in the early fathers of the American Revolution, it is symbolically situated in far away Sicily. Al Pacino becomes the imaginary hero for ambitious men in board rooms and hard-headed sales meetings.

Eventually the modernising wins. The Sopranos series had an ironic relationship to patriarchy. The second season episode ‘Commeditori’ starts with the gang excited by their forthcoming trip to Naples to make a deal in stolen cars. They discuss their plans while trying to watch a bootleg copy of Godfather II. When they eventually arrive in the Italian South, the gap between the two cultures proves insurmountable and Tony has difficulties dealing with the woman who is in charge of local mafia business. Meanwhile, at home, the wives are carving up their husbands personalities.

In modern Italy, the north-south divide has been exacerbated by the rise of the Lega Nord, representing the interests of northern Italians from regions such as Piedmont and Lombardy. They consider the South to be a drain on the national resources. Their catchcry has been ‘Africa starts at Rome.’ The Berlusconi phenomenon is partly due to the support of the Lega Nord, though the target of Southern scapegoating has changed.

In the Berlusconi’s recent re-election, Lega Nord’s campaigned on a platform of anti-immigration. The spotlight is on the island of Lampedusa where refugees from Libya and Ghana arrive, eventually to find piece work on the farms, harvesting tomatoes for export to countries like Australia.

It seems that the only way to move beyond the North-South divide is to shift it somewhere else. Sicily no longer seems to far South as Libya. But there is an alchemy in Italian culture that can occasionally reverses this effect.

Recent attempts to build a bridge between the Sicily and the rest of Italy have been abandoned. The Straits of Messina continue to keep the two cultures different. These waters are also the scene for the mysterious Fata Morgana, an illusion of separate floating worlds, sometimes upside down.

The South can look back.

References

John A. Agnew Place And Politics In Modern Italy University of Chicago Press, 2002
Geoff Andrews Not a normal country: Italy after Berlusconi London: Pluto Press, 2006
Tommaso Astarita Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy W. W. Norton & Company, 2006
Timothy Brennan ‘Literary Criticism and the Southern Question’ Cultural Critique (1988) 11, pp. 87-114
Richard Drake ‘Meridionalismo, the Crisis of Liberalism, and the Advent of Marxism in Post-Risorgimento Naples’ The European Literacy (2004) 9: 4, pp. 481-5020
J.W. Goethe Italian Journey (trans. Robert R. Heitner) New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig. 1786)
Michel Huysseune Modernity And Secession: The Social Sciences And The Political Discourse Of The Lega Nord In Italy Berghahn Books, 2006
Nelson Moe The View From Vesuvius: Italian Culture And The Southern Question Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002
Martha P. Nochimson ‘Waddaya Lookin’ at?: Re-Reading the Gangster Genre through “The Sopranos”’ Film Quarterly 2002, 56: 2, pp. 2-13
John Ruskin Stones of Venice New York: Da Capo Press, 1960 (orig. 1853)
Fred Gardaphé Re-Inventing Sicily in Italian American Writing and Film MELUS 2003, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 55-71
See also a film about Gramsci introduced by Edward Said, describing the Middle East as a ‘North-South question’.

language, Mauritius, Mistake

Mauritius: Mistakes galore

22 May 2008 KDSMurray 4 Comments

The Mauritian writer Lindsay Collen has responded to the story of Mauritius as ‘an island of mistakes’ with a critical analysis of colonial myths. In particular, she critiques the way Mauritius is reduced, in terms of space and language. It’s a long piece, but worth presenting in full for the issues it raises more generally about the ‘small’ nations of the South.

Mauritius keeps on being a place for mistakes. After the most valuable stamp because of a typo, and after being a home to the mistaken creature the dodo, people, even the most sophisticated, even the most erudite, continue to make mistakes when they talk about Mauritius. Often real howlers. And the mistakes are often interesting, in that they are a bit like a social version of Freudian slips of the tongue. They unveil something hidden in the collective unconscious. Something awful. If we take a look at a few of these ‘mistakes’, we’ll find that they mask hidden political secrets and buried social pathologies. And we’ll also find that these secrets and pathologies are not hidden innocently. The hiding plays right into the hands of oppressors. The mistake then becomes a form of ‘identifying oneself with the oppressor’ or ingratiating oneself with him (usually a ‘him’). Let me explain by way of two or three examples.

‘Mauritius is a Small Island … ?’

People, even Mauritians, invariably start conversations about Mauritius by saying ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

Mistake.

A very widespread mistake, too. I did a little exercise with 112 A-level students at the country’s supposedly second-most-sought-after girls’ secondary school a couple of years ago when I was a guest speaker. I asked them to write a paragraph about their country for a visiting Martian or Venusian, differentiating it from other States. Over 90% began with the dratted phrase. ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

Mauritius, the country, is, in fact, made up of many islands: the Islands of Mauritius, Rodrigues, Agalega, St. Brandon, for a start, and if we pretend Mauritius is one island only, we are denying the existence of the human beings on the other Islands. Strange, cruel chauvinism. But there’s more to come. Mauritius consists of yet other Islands still. Tromelin, for example. It is occupied illegally by France. The Mitterrand political programme of 1982 before his first election promised the return of Tromelin to Mauritius. The promise stayed a mere promise. The Island itself is now hidden in our talk of ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

And stranger still. One hundred and twenty-four Chagos Islands were illegally excised from the Mauritian State by Britain in the run-up to Independence, and are occupied by Britain until today. This is against the United Nations Charter. But there you go. ‘Mauritius is a small island …’ . Stranger still, the main Chagos Islands called Diego Garcia is now the geographical location for a huge United States military base, the very base from which B-52’s take off to bomb, say, a marriage party on a road between two villages in Afghanistan, or a market-place in Iraq. But Diego Garcia is nowhere. It is not part of Mauritius. ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

So, when you say ‘Mauritius is a small island …’ you are covering up the illegal occupation of much of Mauritius’ territory by colonial powers, as well as masking who it is exactly who is, democratically speaking, responsible for allowing Diego Garcia to be a major trampoline for war and mass murder. And who is responsible for putting an end to the illegal renderings that Gordon Brown has confessed go on there? The British people? Why, they hardly knew the stolen islands existed until a few years ago when the displaced people began winning High Court cases against the British State in London. The American people? They may know about it if they have brothers or sisters, sons or daughters who are in the armed forces and have been stationed at Diego Garcia, or ‘DG’ as they call it, intuitively hiding its real name. Otherwise, Americans in general do not know that they are, democratically speaking, at least partly responsible for what goes on there. Mauritians know, but we, as you know by now, are a small island … There can’t very well be another island inside the first one, let alone an archipelago. And, so small we are that we don’t count. See the damage done to our minds! In this little phrase ‘Mauritius is a small island’.

If Mauritius is ‘a small island’, then who bears responsibility for having forced the Mauritians living on Diego Garcia off their home Islands, since by pure grammar, Diego Garcia cannot be in Mauritius? If Mauritius is ‘a small island’, clearly it’s not important that Mauritians mobilize to force our Government to put in a case for an Advisory Opinion before the United Nations International Court of Justice at The Hague, in the process of re-uniting Mauritius. How could you re-unite it? It is and always has been ‘a small Island’. So, if Mauritius is one small Island, it wouldn’t be our responsibility, democratically speaking, to get the base closed down forever.

So, the mistake is not an innocent one. It perpetuates the mysterious silence of the world on one of the major crimes of Britain and the United States. It covers them up. Behind words that look, to all intents and purposes, like ‘a mistake’.

Smallness also means insignificance. A country is its land area and sea area. Mauritius is a huge country if judged by its territorial waters. Nearly as big as India, according to the Indian army! But so long as we believe we are so very ‘small’, then how can we kick the huge British and huger still Americans out of Diego Garcia?

‘Mauritius is Francophone … ?’

The second sentence I’ll take as an example of a common ‘mistake’ is when people say, and this is even in the first page of the South site I’m writing this for: ‘Mauritius is a Francophone Island’. France says this in its Government propaganda, and France has a Ministry of ‘la Francophonie’, so they should know what they are talking about. However, the truth is that 3.2% of the Mauritian people claim (French is very high status so the figure is, if anything, an exaggeration) that they usually speak French at home. This is according to the last door-to-door census in 2000. If you say that ‘Mauritius is a Francophone country’, this false statement then must somehow mean that the Mauritian languages, Kreol and Bhojpuri, spoken by 92% of the people, are perhaps not really languages at all. And if a human society does not have language, or its languages don’t count, then there is an assumption that the people in that society are somehow sub-human.

‘Mauritian Kreol is derived from French …?’

Following on from this, when people finally give up on the ‘Mauritius is a Francophone Island …’ line, they then say Mauritians speak a Creole ‘derived from’ French. Fortunately most people have stopped saying Mauritian Kreol is a ‘patois’, ‘broken French’, ‘a composite of different languages’, ‘gutter French’, a ‘baragouin’ or ‘charabia’.

But the ‘derived from’ expression is still used by people who should know better. It is used even by academics – in all departments at Universities except for the theoretical linguistics departments. Even a socio-linguistics department may have academics in it that say Mauritian Kreol is ‘derived from’ French. Meanwhile, for over 50 years now, the 80 of so Creole languages that exist in the world have been known to have been born from a break, not from a gradual evolution like other languages. (Most Creole languages, by the way, exist in relation to English, which is also a little known fact, and then also to French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Arabic). Creole languages are the 80 languages out of the world’s 9,000 that are most clearly not ‘derived from’ another or other languages. Creole languages, including Mauritian Kreol, are born from a historical fracture. The ‘fracture’ which is covered up, hidden from view, by the euphemism ‘Mauritian Kreol is derived from French …’ is slavery. The process by which a new language is born quite suddenly, as Creole languages are, is that, as one generation of children grows up amongst adults speaking often dozens of different mother-tongues – having been thrown together by a holocaust like slavery – they use the innate human ‘language capacity’ that we all have and, within one generation, generate a brand-new, absolutely perfect language from the detritus around them, after this social holocaust called slavery. Such is the power of our shared human language capacity. When we say ‘language’ we are referring essentially to the grammatical structures of language (predication, syntax, etc).

But, since most people confuse language and think of it as lexical items, like beads that get strung together as if on a necklace, which it isn’t, let us look at the lexical items, anyway. Even the vocabulary is not ‘derived’ in any direct way from the colonial language, which the particular Creole language exists in relation to. ‘Get’ in Mauritian Kreol means to ‘look’, and people are very quick to take it as being ‘derived from’ the French ‘guetter’ which is ‘to lie in wait for’ or the marine expression ‘to be on the watch’. In French ‘regarde’ means to ‘look’, whereas in Kreol ‘regard’ is used uniquely in the negative meaning mind your own business. It’s hard to call this ‘derived from’, but it could be ‘in relation to’. In any case, to assume that ‘get’ comes from ‘guetter’ when one does not know the other 20 or more languages that were spoken by adults at the time of the genesis of Mauritian Kreol is clearly nothing but colonial presumption. Even educated people assume that ‘kurpa’ (‘snail’ in Kreol, which in French is ‘escargot’) going now into mythical attributes of snails must then come from the French ‘courts pas’ (short paces) or ‘court pas’ (doesn’t run), while they are unaware that there is a kind of snail in Mozambique called ‘kurupa’. The fruit in Kreol called ‘mason’ is assumed to be linked to the French meaning ‘mason’, when in Malawi people call the same fruit ‘masao’ (sounding just like nasalized ‘mason’ in Kreol).

The word ‘bann’ before a noun in Mauritian Kreol, has a function similar to the plural marker – a bit like an ‘s’ added on to a word is for English. So, all the colonial minds chant in unison: ‘This is derived from the French ‘une bande de’ meaning ‘a band of, or a troop’’. Maybe there is some vague and indirect connection, who knows? What we can say is that in good Mauritian Kreol, the plural marker is often assumed from the context and not expressed at all. Now that’s a fracture. In French you absolutely have to specify. That’s the most important point about the word ‘bann’, it exists in its suppression most of the time. Secondly, there is a plural marker in Nguni African languages that sounds just like ‘bann’ – but of course the universities in France are not full of people who know these languages. Many people may not know that ‘a person’, for example, in the Xhosa language is ‘umntu’ (pronounced nearer ‘mtu’), while the plural ‘people’ is ‘abantu’ pronounced quite near ‘bantu’ (hence in apartheid the word ‘bantustan’). Umntwana (pronounced near to ’mtwana) in the plural is ‘abantwana’ (pronounced near to ’bantwana). So, there are at least two ways to explain the choice of that sound as a plural marker, one rather more convincing than the other.

What is important about this particular mistake that Kreol is ‘derived from’ French is that as long as the Kreol language is considered somehow adulterated French, or ‘derived from’ French, it is easier to oppress it. In Mauritius the mother tongues spoken by 92% of the people are banned in written form in almost all schools until today. Recently Government subsidized pre-vocational schools have been permitted to use written Kreol, which is excellent, but note that it is so far only used … for the children who have ‘failed’. Thus re-enforcing the prejudice, in a way.

So, the mistakes continue. Until we stop them.

Just as we see that Mauritius was known, as well as for the erroneous stamp and the extinct dodo, for its sugar monoculture. Now that was a mistake for the people. And we feel it right now, as Mauritius plunges into an organic crisis, as sugar fails under new World Trade Organization rules. See LALIT’s website for details on this www.lalitmauritius.org

And today Mauritius’ economy is increasingly reliant on tourism. Another mistake.

Until we change it.

Meanwhile, the tourism ‘branding’ of Mauritius (like animals were branded long ago, and slaves, too) can teach us a thing or two about the power of the advertising industry to control our minds. Mauritius used — until about 1980 — to be seen from outside of the country as a generally filthy little overpopulated hell-hole of ‘an island’, Francophone, of course. It was considered smelly, too. All this was completely believed. At a time when Mauritius’ natural beauty was more stunning than now, of course. If you want to be reminded of the general impression people had of the place, you can read an eternalized version of it in the VS Naipaul short story, ‘The Overcrowded Baracoon’. But once the advertising boys (I think of them as men, which is unfair, but it is such a patriarchal, controlling profession) got their ‘magic system’ going to sell hotels, they have transformed the entire country into a paradise. A honeymoon paradise. A total paradise. Where the grass is rich lush green, but it never rains. Where there are no people, only stage props for the fantasies of tourists. Where everyone is happily living in multi-cultural harmony. Where there is no violence. Where there are no foul smells either.

And this is just as false, of course, as the ‘hell-hole’ view. One mistake has been traded for the 180 degrees opposite mistake.

Until we can share ideas and change it.

So, do read up about Mauritius beyond the tourist lies. The best history book to start with might be Daniel North-Coombes Studies in the Political Economy of Mauritius (Mahatma Gandhi Institute 2000) which is devoid of the prevailing prejudices. And there are lovely novels in French, Hindi and English as well as in Kreol.

Lindsey Collen

Australia, Pacific, texts

The idea of South: Australia’s global positioning

15 May 2008 KDSMurray Leave a comment

Issue 44 of Australian Humanities Review contains a number of important contributions to debate about Australia’s uncertain position in the South.

Margaret Jolly reflects on Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory. She contests the use of South as a theoretical position:

In my view, use of the language of the cardinal points of cartography to describe inequalities between nations or peoples tends to naturalise and dehistoricise difference, to associate the points of the compass with the body habitus of up and down, left and right. Clearly this is at odds with Connell’s avowed aim to stress relationality between peoples and the changing contexts of power and knowledge across time and place.

Jolly proceeds to identify regional identifications that seem to be independent of hierarchy, such as the space of the Oceanic.

Her criticism opens up an important issue about the idea of South. Cartography has a tentative relation to experience. There is nothing in our immediate world that is necessarily ‘north’ or ‘south’. But that hasn’t prevented these directions taking on direct meaning. Through this axis the world is aligned along other vertical dimensions such as head and body.

Accepting that this has happened as part of colonisation does not necessarily lead to resignation. To contest verticalism it is important to understand the symbolic operation of world-making, and its contingent nature.

The existence of autonomous creative zones like Oceania is in danger of being subsumed even more easily into the North-South axis. It can conform readily to exotic view of the South as a place of collective spirit where society evolves in organic fashion.

If you don’t take a global view, someone will take it on your behalf.

Lawless

From America’s Deep South…

11 May 2008 KDSMurray Leave a comment

It’s a quintessential example of south-phobia. Putting aside the issue of death penalty and international law, the magazine cover of this establishment university reinforces the image of the South as a realm beyond the law. You can include with this not only films of the South like Deliverance, but also other nightmares of southern violence such as the Godfather (Sicily) and Last King of Scotland (Uganda).

While there is definitely reason to believe that the subjects of these films are genuinely violent, there is still reason to ask why they are the object of such fascination in the law-abiding North.

Southern Hemisphere

Biggest in the Championship Hemisphere?

11 May 2008 KDSMurray Leave a comment

In English soccer, the play-offs for promotion to the Premiership league are currently underway. While it would seem obvious that any club would relish the opportunity to rise above Championship and play in the major league, it isn’t always the case. A nice article from Spiked talks about the reasons many would prefer to stay ‘below’:

It is much more fun challenging for promotion in a league that is genuinely competitive: dreaming the dream, if you like, rather than waking up to the over-hyped reality.

It’s interesting to consider the parallel situation globally, in the relation between the northern and southern hemispheres. Better to be the ‘biggest in the southern hemisphere’ than to be a minor player on the world stage.

The Idea of South