“The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have.” James Baldwin, a twentieth-century American writer, was forced to make racism his business—he was part of a people segregated at birth . . .
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“Borders were Made to be Crossed.” Marco Aime, Il Fatto quotidiano, 6 August 2017 He’d already said it in a poem from his collection Solo andata (“One-Way Ticket”): “Dry land in Italy is land locked down,/ We let them drown to drown them out.” And now, during a TV interview on Italy’s La7, he’s said it again. In . . .
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Aleppo, Syria from the WSJ (May 4, 2016).Photo: Karam Al-Masri/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Some twenty years ago, during the war in Bosnia, I walked into cities made somber by hunger. We unloaded packages for families found on the trip before: we distributed them directly, without intermediaries, storage sites, or stockpiles. I saw hunger in the . . .
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Genoa, July 1, 2016, Address to the National Meeting of the Italian NGO Emergency In a letter to his brother, the French painter Eugène Delacroix writes: “I’m working on a modern subject, the barricade.” His reference is to the famous painting, Liberty Leading the People, a commemoration of the 1830 insurrection. What would be . . .
Read MoreIn 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants made the perilous trip to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. In October alone, to beat the onset of winter and closing European borders, their number rose to nearly a quarter million, a record, and more than the total for all of 2014, as . . .
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To most people, the idea that lectures in literature classes have policy implications will seem laughable. Such people, I’m fairly sure, haven’t spent a good deal of time in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And they certainly don’t know its history. As for me, given recent headlines, well, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a . . .
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Refugees under police escort to Brežice last October.(Jeff J Mitchell, Getty Images, from The Guardian) During the month of October 2015, Hungary closed its southern borders and refugees crossing Serbia were diverted through Croatia and Slovenia. Each day some eight thousand refugees began entering Slovenia, a country with a population of less than . . .
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Jean Jullien, “Peace for Paris” (from @jean_jullien on Twitter) Every discussion about the Middle East today, understandably, turns sooner or later to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Talking heads may not have yet sounded this particular theme in connection to what happened in Paris on Friday, but it shouldn’t take long. The US . . .
Read MoreFinal Statement from the Defendant, Erri De Luca Tribunale di Torino, 19 October 2015 Even if I were not the writer on trial here for instigation, I would be in this courtroom today. Beyond the insignificance of my personal case, I believe the charges that I answer to are a social experiment, an . . .
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Le Monde, 17 October 2015 Erri De Luca didn’t make that trip he’d planned to the Frankfurt Book Fair on the October 14. He just didn’t feel like it … didn’t feel like talking about “that subject… in a marketplace atmosphere,” didn’t feel like hearing his case brought up, between one sale . . .
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