“When you are away from the coast, to escape is often the only way to save the boat and the crew. Moreover, you will discover unknown shores appearing on the horizon of the waters, once the calm returns. Those unknown shores will be forever ignored by those who have the illusory chance to follow the route of cargo and oil tankers, the safe route imposed by shipping companies. Perhaps you know that boat called "desire"
Henri Laborit,Éloge de la fuite (1976)
There was a time, approximately twenty years ago, when topics like exile and escape were addressed in generous and original ways in the Italian culture. There was the cinema of Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo, Marrakech Express) "dedicated to all those who are running away", and that of Mario Martone (Death of A Neapolitan Mathematician,War Theatre), filled with characters defeated by life. There were bands like 99 Posse, Almamegretta, Daniele Sepe & Rote Jazz Fraktion who celebrated the roots of militant anti-fascism, while suggesting desertion from Western society. And then, the nomadic literature of Pino Cacucci (Puerto Escondido), the anti-militarist comics of Sergio Bonelli (Tex, Dylan Dog) and Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese) and overall in any field of the arts you could feel the influence of post-1977 counter-culture. In very different ways, those voices were describing a generation unwilling to enter ‘capitalist’ adulthood and to finally become ‘bourgeois’. They were talking about virile friendship, human cowardice, disgust for the so called ‘return of the Private’ (or ‘Reflux’) of the 1980s.
Now, all that sounds like a romantic memory. The years between the G8 in Genoa and the financial crisis of 2008 saw the resurgence all over Europe of a mythology that we believed to be extinct forever: Leftist Patriotism, the myth of the Flag, the fetishism of the Constitution, the ‘Law & Order’ literature. Against the plague of political corruption took place an industry of civil rhetoric, which, although sometimes necessary, was most often solely based on judicial issues and political scandals. One of the worst memories of my sorry generation is that bunch of teenage fans of Berlusconi who sieged one of his trails carrying the banner: “Intercept us all!” Not to mention Facebook-based activism: have you seen this ghost?
The word escape seems to have succumbed to the praise of ‘Resistance’. But what kind of resistance is this? Everyone feels somewhat resistant, in these days of staggering certainties: from those who do their duty going to work, to those who don’t waste their time on unsettling protests but “Keep Calm and Carry On”, to those who don’t want to leave their small community and who want to fight for change. The ‘resisting subject’ is the old anti-fascist militant, as well as the young intern who spends his days clicking “like” on the news of the arrest of a Mafioso.
What’s the human and political substance of this resistance? I am sometime persuaded by the personal stories of those who engage in this trench war because of personal needs or affection. And I am moved by those who try to help out with their work outside the circuits of mainstream fame, out of the spotlight, out of manipulation. Often enough, however, the warning against escapist solutions is used as a pretty cheap weapon: a morale baton, waved by those who, after all, are feeling great while in the ‘trenches’. Many of them have found a peaceful way, their own dimension to live in a world of collapsing hope. And they have everything but the intention to end up with street guerrilla – Greece or Turkey style - in their backyard. And there are those who, on a higher level – journalists, intermediaries, theorists, academics, local politicians – while remaining in the ‘trenches’ have managed to create their own little micro-universe, with their own micro-court and micro-courtiers.
Nevertheless, the Resistant Citizen steps in line and soberly marches towards the catastrophe: ‘responsibility’, ‘austerity’, ‘sobriety’, ‘solidarity’ are his watchwords. No surprise that these words are propagated by the same power that sends him towards certain defeat. This is a grim process of self-repression, in which a twenty year old seems unable to find another way to take part to the process of insurgency, than the spiral of virtual indignation and facebook sharing. A suicidal whirlpool, since, with the exponential increase of available information – and the tools to mediate it, – our twenty-year old will only see his/her technological addiction increasing with time. That, and not his/her concrete – physical, personal, vital – participation.
Isn’t one’s right to desert head-on battle with an unjust system, one of the fundamental achievements of contemporary society,? Isn’t the possibility of temporarily liberating some spaces from the rhetoric of mainstream media – by taking advantage of the many interconnections of radical groups that already exist, here or elsewhere, – one of the most important privileges of out time?
Sadly caught between rapid technological changes and the permanent social need of adaptation and acceptance, dissenters are sometimes prisoners of petty territorial values: the bell jar of the bourgeoisie, under which they can refuge during identitary confusion. The consequence is that ‘the right to flee’ assumes a massively negative connotation, becoming synonymous with renunciation, surrender, and cowardice.At the same time, and revealingly, migrants are transformed from actors of their own change into victims who deserve be pitied. Unless, as it happens, they are seen as contributing factors to the Crisis.
There is, of course, the question of class, and the necessary distinction between voluntary exile and forced migration, between nomads and travelers. It is up to each individual to decide which is the best way to organize their escape, which is the best language to use with other fellow runaways, which sacrifice they deem to be worth suffering, or even whether plain desertion can be their only possible alternative. Inany case, even mere, self-centered and coward fleeing is preferable to the game of a suicidal resistance offered by the oppressor.
We could think back to Max Weber and his studies on young German immigrant farmers (who fled en masse to reject a patriarchal regime, but also to escape from the despotic regime of the landowner) or we could re-read the great speech which the writer Vera Linhartova gave in 1993, after twenty years of voluntary exile in Paris: the pleasure of “being a small fish in an ocean”, she mentioned “rather than a big carp in a pond.” In this discourse I find all the beauty of fleeing as stepping forward, in the trajectory of emancipation.
However, what happens today is that the “right to desert" is demonized, especially by a certain segment of the middle-class whopretends to be fighting in the trenches for the liberation of us all, while they actually care only to save themselves, and to reiterate a system of collective exploitation and premature senility. And here is how the word ‘resistance’ is semantically distorted: it becomes a synonym of activism in the language of mainstream media; or worse, a synonym for a mediocre Restoration.
Figures like the migrant, the nomad, the deserter, truly possess something extraordinary: they are the enemies of boundaries, the mixers of knowledge and experience. Living proofs of this practice are people like the anti-Italian Errico Malatesta, or Ernesto Guevara in his tormented on the roadjuventud, or the members of the International Brigades in Spain – tragically transformed into a metaphor of beautiful losers – or Tom Joad saying goodbye to his mother and joining the laborers struggle with the words: "Wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there is a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there..."
"Our homeland is the whole world," sang Tuscan anarchists over a century ago, and Internationalism is probably the healthiest and most beautiful form of resistance in this ocean of conformity.
Everyone must have the right to choose his/her battlefield, the ‘tribe’ s/he wants to connect to, and each tribe should have the right to migrate and create a new communitas wherever they please. Everything else, including the pain and sense of loss which inevitably accompanies every migration, comes after. The pro-Palestinian activist Vittorio Arrigoni used to say, "Stay human”, and what form of resistance could be more important than this? We have only one life, and to remain within the limits of a human life, before it can harden and shrivel and estrange itself from the rest of the world, is the main act of sabotage that we can accomplish.
