The Freedom to Dissent
- By Erri De Luca
Editor’s Note: Three weeks after the recent events in Paris, as an article in yesterday’s Guardian points out, it’s hard not to make comparisons. Tana de Zulueta, a former member of parliament in Italy and a board member of Articolo 21, an Italian NGO supporting press freedoms, comments, “After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the march in Paris which was supposed to display international solidarity over the right of free expression, a court in Turin is about to test the limits of free speech in Italy.”
In Turin this morning a trial began, with one of Italy’s best-known writers, Erri De Luca, in the dock. De Luca has allegedly incited the commission of crimes, with statements he made in support of the NO TAV resistence movement and their opposition to the construction of a high-speed train line (or TAV) between Lyon and Turin.
Outside the courthouse today, De Luca’s supporters distributed free copies of the author’s La Parola contraria (A Dissenting Word, Feltrinelli 2015), a book-length essay offering his own views on these charges.
In solidarity with this spontaneous action, and in unwavering support of the free exchange of ideas, we offer the following selections from A Dissenting Word:
“As a reader I haven’t had any real preference for literature particularly attentive to social and political themes. The erudite labyrinths of Borges opened my third eye wide, suspending me over the depths of myths and sagas.
I read Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales in much the same way, learning infinite patience and resistance from a prisoner in a forced-labor camp. Literature is a goal that doesn’t respect either genres or themes. It comes into the world, and, when it does, it’s a feast for whoever reads
As a boy I became an anarchist after reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I chose my side at an age that contains all possibilities. And the sentiments of that allegiance haven’t changed.
For those who stumble into a serendipitous reciprocity between life and reading, literature works at the level of nerve fibers. You can’t book such appointments in advance, nor can you recommend them to others. Every reader deserves to be astonished by the sudden interplay between his days and the pages of a book.
Yet Orwell didn’t kindle even a small spark in me with his novel 1984, in which he invented the character of Big Brother, misappropriated by a television show. Instead, Orwell changed my life’s course with his Spanish anarchists of the civil war, in which he fought voluntarily.
It’s possible that my emotive Neapolitan education predisposed me to resist authority. It’s possible that the city that surrounded me was a factor, instilling me with a sense of fraternity more with the Spanish anarchists than with the Russian Bolshevists.
Homage to Catalonia was the first stake planted to anchor my tent, pitched outside any party or parliament.
The death of the anarchist railroad worker Giuseppe Pinelli, who plummeted from an open fourth-story window of police headquarters in Milan on December 15, 1969, reinforced that stake with another blow of the hammer. In the years that followed, my generation fought for the innocence of the anarchists accused in the massacre at the Banca dell’ Agricoltura in Milan on December 12, 1969. And we won: the anarchists were exonerated. We also lost: no one who was truly guilty went to jail.
In recalling who I was at that age, I’m trying to imagine what might move a youth today to throw himself into a struggle that has been denigrated and suppressed on a massive scale, like that in the Susa Valley. A young person from elsewhere in Italy would have to risk name, reputation, and a criminal record in order to take the side of the NO TAV movement in the Susa Valley.
Perhaps such a person doesn’t need an Orwell telling stories of epic battles waged by the people. For such a person to join in, just knowing there are people with the civil and popular will to resist is enough.
But if, on the reading list, there does happen to be a present-day Orwell priming the fuse, I would like it to be me.
Exactly that. I would like to be the writer encountered by chance, the one whose pages mingle with nascent sentiments regarding justice and form a young citizen’s character.
Thus, I introduce as best I can the accusation made against me: instigation.
To instigate a sense of justice, one that already exists but hasn’t yet found the words to express itself and therefore to be recognized.
And that makes you suddenly stand up, dropping the book, because blood is rushing to your face, your eyes are stinging, and you can’t go on reading.
That sends you to the window, which you open, but looking outside you don’t see a thing, because everything is happening within.
That makes you breathe deeply, and feel, along with oxygen, the circulation of a new form of will.
That initiates your apprenticeship to a new form of justice, one formed deep down, one that clashes with all that other justice, seated at the bench in a courtroom.
To instigate, as happened to me with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
[. . .]
In 1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot directed a film in black and white, The Wages of Fear. In Italy, its title was Vite vendute – ‘Lives for Sale.’ Four desperate men agree to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerin along a long and winding trail, accepting deadly risk in exchange for a big pay-off.
Both the original title and the Italian one fit the bill.
Whenever I see workers forced to labor in conditions lethal to their health and safety, I think of that film. Every day, whether tunneling deep in mines or on scaffolding built over thin air, they confront such risks in the stubborn hope of making it through the day. Occasionally I’ve found myself in similar straits. Once I even wrote about it.
The Susa Valley has begun to receive daily doses of asbestos powder, belched out from a sample excavation. The first people to get this, in concentrated form, are the workers on-site, as well as the uniformed brigades in charge of its defense. It’s not surprising that the Minister of the Interior ignores the dangerous health conditions of his subordinates. The police unions, on the other hand, are justifiably worried about it, though the only remedy they’ve been given for the contamination is watering the streets around the worksite. Perhaps some inane authority has convinced them that asbestos is water-soluble. Instead, the terrible truth is that there’s no safe level of exposure to asbestos, no minimum threshold that’s harmless.
‘Knowingly and in willful neglect’: with this pronouncement the directors of ILVA in Taranto were sentenced for having dispersed asbestos among the workers and citizens in neighboring areas. Preferable would be to stop it in time.
Misfortune likes to travel in pairs, and so it is that the mountains the drillers plan to perforate contain deposits of pitchblende, as well. This radioactive material is more concentrated than the depleted uranium used by the military and responsible for tumors in our soldiers deployed in the Balkans.
Whether these men know it or not, they’re in a bad remake of Clouzot’s movie. They’re chasing wages of fear, and they’re doing it for only modest pay.
Unlike other forms of risky work, where at least one can hope to get through safely, whoever absorbs asbestos dust has no chance of escaping, or of being cured.
Halting that dig will prolong lives that risk ruin just to earn their pay.
So here I am, on trial. If I’m convicted, the sentence will vary between one and five years. Even faced with the worst possible outcome, I won’t call myself a victim. I’m not hapless, in this case; it’s not like a tile fell on my head as I was walking by.
On the contrary, I’m a witness and a defendant pressing charges for damages to my constitutional freedom, guaranteed by Article 21. “Everyone has a right to profess freely their own thoughts in words, in writing, and in every other means of circulation.”
I expressed my opinion and they want to convict me for this. For now, the real victim is Article 21 of the Italian Constitution.
I am, and I will remain, even if convicted, a witness to sabotage. Namely: to the hampering, obstructing, and impeding of the freedom to dissent.”
