Paradoxical Modernity: Pasolini and Israele

[Pier Paolo Pasolini walking in Palestine. Image from the author`s archive.] [Pier Paolo Pasolini walking in Palestine. Image from the author`s archive.]

Paradoxical Modernity: Pasolini and Israele

By : Nicola Perugini

The multifaceted work[i] of Pier Paolo Pasolini has largely been examined, and is still inspiring different disciplinary, epistemological, and political explorations and reflections inside and outside of Italy. However, his particular filmic and poetic engagement with Israel/Palestine has oddly attracted little attention.   

Pasolini writes his poemwork Israele (1964) during one of the most intellectually and humanly intense moments of his life. A lawsuit is in progress against him for "insulting the State religion" for the film La Ricotta (1963). He has been back from his first trip to India, which leads to his interest in the "Third World." As early as 1962, this interest takes him to sub-Saharan Africa and finds its artistic expression at least in Notes for a Film on India (1968) and in Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970). He has finished The Anger (1963), a film montage of media reports in which Pasolini manifests his ethical and political sensitivity for the independence struggles from colonialism and the international revolutionary ferment that in those years united the different African, Asian, and American situations.[ii] He shoots Love Meetings (1965) and works on the script of The Savage Father: a movie, never made, on the relationship, immediately after independence from colonialism, between a Western teacher and his class of African students. Meanwhile, the production machine that leads to his filming The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), and his trip to Palestine, is already underway.

In the ten pages of Israele, Pasolini assembles his observations and experiences from the trip to Palestine and constructs his political poetics through a series of oppositions between Jews and Arabs. He uses the latter term when referring to the Arab population in Palestine without ever employing the word “Palestinians” (he will do it later). As will become clear in a later work of his, the idiosyncratic film Location Scouting in Palestine,[iii] what “Arabs” embody for Pasolini is a marginal premodernity, a prebiblical Palestine, to use his own words. However, my interest does not lie in probing Pasolini`s questionable classifications and the dichotomy between tradition and modernity (although I will come back to this point).[iv]

Rather, what makes worthwhile revisiting Israele is Pasolini’s engagement with Israel’s paradoxical modernity in a very peculiar poetic way, as we will see, and in a very peculiar historical moment. In fact, this engagement takes place in the same years when interrogating the relationship between the Holocaust and the state-institutionalized Zionist settler colonial practices in Palestine still looked like a taboo among many European and Western intellectuals, even among the anti-colonial ones. Maxime Rodinson’s and Edward Said’s pioneering works on the intertwining between political colonial and settler-colonial forms, the concentrationary extermination of Jews in Europe, and the dispossession of Palestinians had not appeared yet. 

In his poem Israele, Pasolini observes a few “Arabs” strolling along a seafront, probably in the new Tel Aviv: a seafront that recalls other places in Asia and Africa, like Calcutta or Nairobi. They wear "blue jeans color carogna, e magliucce bianche, aderenti, sudice – come algerini condannati a morte" [blue jeans the color of carrion, and filthy, clinging sweaters—like Algerians on death row].

A few pages later, there are a couple of lines on “the little ones of the Arabs,” described like this:

I piccoli degli arabi, essi sì, ridono, ridono scioccamente, con una struggente stupidità, come i nostri poverelli; i cuccioli del popolo affamato, le bestioline con gli stupendi occhi umani [Now the little ones of the Arabs, they laugh, they laugh idiotically, with a heart-rending stupidity, like our own poor folk; the cubs of the hungry masses, little critters with stunning human eyes].

“Animal-humanist” empathy and identification from the heretical Orientalist.

Then, in a play of juxtapositions and contrasts that mark Israele, Pasolini verges on a modernity quite different from the other modernities that he deals with: namely, the new Jewish citizens of Israel, the traumatized brothers:

Non ce l’avete fatta più, fratelli—fratelli maggiori per dolore—segnati dalla grandiosità del male, e siete scappati quaggiù, siete venuti a raccogliervi quaggiù, come quando si vuol morire e non morire, ammucchiandovi come pecorelle che credono il calore delle sorelle coraggio. Il trauma, così passato di moda oggi nel mondo, di venti, di venticinque anni fa, qua lo conservate, avete cercato quest’area marginale, per preservarlo, istituzione di origine divina! [You couldn`t cope anymore, brothers – older brothers by pain—marked by the grandiosity of evil, and you escaped over here, you came to gather together over here, like when you want to die and not die, piling on top of each other like little sheep that believe the heat of their sisters to be courage. The trauma from twenty, twenty-five years ago, now so out of fashion in the world, you preserve it here, you looked for this marginal place, to preserve it, institution of divine origin!]

Drawing closer, his proximity turns into transference and transposition:

Tornate, ah tornate nella vostra Europa. Un transfert tremendo di me in voi, mi fa sentire la vostra nostalgia che voi non sentite, e a me da un dolore che sconvolge ogni rapporto con la realtà. L’Europa non è più mia! [Come back, oh come back to your Europe. A tremendous transference of me into you, makes me feel your nostalgia that you don`t feel, and to me from an ache that shatters all relations with reality. Europe is no longer mine!]

 Pasolini then continues on his journey from Tiberias toward the sea:

Ed ecco oltre gli ulivi israeliani, maculati di laboriosa polvere, le case di legno e latta, le felici bidonvilles [palestinesi]. Ma ecco anche, al centro della regione, come un convento benedettino in Ciociaria, l’edilizia concentrazionaria di un kibbutz [And now beyond the Israeli olive trees, speckled with hardworking dust, there are the houses made of tin and wood, the happy [Palestinian] shanty towns].    

 

      \"\"                                  [Pier Paolo Pasolini interviews residents of a kibbutz. Image from the author`s archive.]

Pasolini`s identification with the survivors develops in a very particular way, by and through comparing the incomparable, by opposing the unopposable: political and heuristic heresy. The fact is, for Pasolini the architecture of the kibbutzim preserves something. Torn by his transference, he calls it “concentration-camp architecture.” 

This is where Pasolini sets two elements side by side, without harmonizing them, without saying that they are the same thing—the kibbutzim are not concentration camps—without facile equations or syllogisms. He juxtaposes the founding architecture of socialist Zionism and the new Israeli political community with Nazi concentration-camp architecture (a term that Pasolini will later use to describe the Italian suburbs as well).

But there is more between these lines, a sort of juxtaposition within juxtaposition. This is what he writes in Israele to describe the kibbutzim:

Quattro magazzini, il silos, l’asilo, i dormitori come quelli di Dachau; e la pace di un villaggio del Centroeuropa, ambiguamente fusa con la pace coloniale [Four storehouses, the silo, the nursery school, the dormitories like at Dachau; and the peace of a Central European village, ambiguously fused with colonial peace].

How are we to interpret this enigmatic passage? The kibbutz bears the traces of twenty-five years earlier—the signs of modernity`s slaughter—and the signs of what he calls “colonial peace”. What does he mean by this expression? What kind of colonial peace is he talking about?

Pasolini apparently sets up a kind of “forbidden juxtaposition” in which two forms of apparently distant types of peace—as he himself writes—are ambiguously intertwined: the peace of Central Europe and colonial peace. What Central European peace? The peace in which the Holocaust took place? The peace that followed upon it. And what colonial peace? A vague peace of the colonies? Or the colonial peace of Israel? 

Something ambivalent ties together the three elements of this juxtaposition within juxtaposition. The modernity of Israel takes the form of a paradoxical modernity that Pasolini feels bound to develop through a series of contrapuntal readings.

What we have is a contrapuntal reading of the relationship between the new state where Pasolini would have liked to set his Gospel and the concentrationary reason.

It is a contrapuntal reading of the kibbutz in a period when the European leftists were visiting the kibbutzim in order to witness the construction of a socialist utopia. Pasolini distances himself from the kibbutz as commune and from the fascination for Labor Zionism, reading the utopia against the grain, in juxtapositions, tracing out forbidden parallels, through a bitter disillusionment. This counterpoint is not present in Location Scouting in Palestine, perhaps, but then it surfaces after the fact, after the trip to Palestine, in his poetry.

In the end, he gives a contrapuntal reading of the same dichotomies that he used to interpret the worlds of Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean in the process of decolonization. Pasolini attempts to contrast the “premodern” laughter of the Arab children with the sad, “modern” faces of the Jews; the “premodern” farming techniques of the Palestinians to the industrious kibbutzim. But then he fails to radicalize this dichotomy as he does in other contexts. Something fortunately does not add up.

In Israele, Pasolini identifies both with the “premodern” Palestinian Arabs and with the Jews traumatized by what had happened in Europe twenty-five years earlier.

He rails against modernity, but then he notes how the colonial modernity of the kibbutzim in Palestine, in which many of the survivors were in the process of rebuilding their lives, preserves traces of the modernity of the Holocaust and of a mysterious “colonial peace.”

The juxtapositions and dichotomies used elsewhere, in other colonial Souths, blow up in his face, as it were, and he is unable to radicalize them. These dichotomies get jammed in Israele, leaving the traces of a contrapuntal thought that might well provide us with a new point of departure.

 


[i] Films, poems, novels, and public interventions in the Italian and European post World War II debates

[ii] It would be three years before Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous The Battle of Algiers (1966), one of the reference models from the scant Italian anticolonial intellectual film production, would address militantly and in Fanonian terms the decolonization of Algeria. On Pasolini, Pontecorvo and decolonizations, see C. Casarino, “The Southern Answer: Pasolini, Universalism, Decolonization,” Critical inquiry (2010).

[iii] The scouting in Palestine was supposed to provide Pasolini with the first ideas for the film The Gospel to St. Matthew (1964), but then the director preferred to shoot the film in Southern Italy.   

[iv] These issues have been thoroughly examined and one need only reread a few pages from Luca Caminati`s Orientalismo eretico (“Heretical Orientalism,” 2007) to arrive at an excellent understanding of them, without resorting to facile reductionisms. 

Mar 13, 2016 Lebanon

On a Day of a March…

“In his eyes was the sorrow of an Arab horse that has lost the race.”

Yaşar Kemal

On a day of a March…

The three of us are sitting in a hotel garden right above a park. A jovial giant, a cheerful exile, a lucky me... Beneath a sky full of birds… The wind is blowing like a forgotten whisper; the smell of moss is arriving from distant seas. The jovial giant’s phone rings. “Only three people know my phone number: Mehmed, Selim, and the other is…” says the giant as he answers his phone and lends his voice to his dear wife.

The month of March, the year is 2006…

I have a cold. Brother Mehmed is healthy. The giant is happy. The words he utters on the phone, which he has a hard time placing properly onto his ear, are lighter than roses and mingle with the air as if they were mist.

The giant does not get along with his cell phone. Once he called me while my son was riding his bike. We had a long conversation as I followed with my eyes my son’s wobbly moves on his bike. With such excitement, he talked about a novel that might take twenty to thirty years to finish. His voice was cut off suddenly. When it came back, he asked “Who was the girl who spoke a second ago?” Then his voice was cut off again. There was a thing called pay phones back in those days. “Please insert more coins,” or something in this nature, would say a female voice.

Our first meeting was as exhilarating as this one… I was waiting at the Esenboga Airport in Ankara with a staff member and a car Bilkent University provided for us. The year was 2002. The 15th of May. The giant and Zülfü Livaneli emerged from the VIP room. As I was walking toward them in a rather excited mood, I saw the giant embracing with his left arm the leader of Saadet Partisi, Recai Kutan. With a euphoric voice of a tree that hosts a flock of birds from the sky, he said: “Say hi to Necmettin!” Then as I expressed my willingness, under the weight of words becoming heavier in my mouth, to accompany him during the symposium dedicated to him, he quickly asked in Kurdish “Are you Kurdish?” When I said yes, he pressed me against his chest tightly. I sat next to the driver’s seat as Livaneli and he in the back… It was either at the traffic stop or perhaps during the traffic jam when people walking on the sidewalks began to interact with the giant by way of beautiful gazes, waving hands, sending kisses. I thought this must be what it means to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

One day, a very long day, he came to visit my little family all the way from the other end of the city. When I told him I work on Kurdish poetry, he mentioned that he, with Cahit Sıtkı, worked on the early translations of Kurdish poetry. In the darkness of the 1950s, they would hide in some corners and recite Kurdish poetry to each other as they translated them. The jovial giant was thrilled when he heard about Ehmedê Xanî Library, the project of mine that is etched into my dreams. Joining me in my crazy dream project, he said: “I will donate all my books to this library. And you know, among them are the Gallimard encyclopedias.”

The PhD program at Bilkent University offered a seminar on Yaşar Kemal in 2004. Süha Oğuzertem, who taught this seminar, changed our understanding of Yaşar Kemal entirely. We learned that his language in each novel is significantly different from one another. In each novel, there is, as if, a distinctly new novelist. We invited him to the seminar. He came. As he was entering the room, he turned to my dear professor, the late Talât Sait Halman, and said: “Talât, accept Selim into the PhD program, because his father is a dengbêj!” “He is already in,” said Talât.

The day I returned from England. Winter, 2011… This time I called him from a frosty garden. He never wished to exhaust people yet had a voracious appetite for story telling. Witnessing that was such a great pleasure and honor for me. During almost an hour-long conversation, he mentioned again the plans on a novel that would take twenty to thirty years to finish, and the third volume of Akçasazın Ağaları… In fact, he had already told me the ending of Bir Ada Hikâyesi (A Story of an Island) in 2004. He would burn the island in the end! It was such a heavy burden not being able to tell anyone about the ‘end.’ This meant: he, who always put on strong emphasis on “the human” in his nearly sixty years of stellar literary career, would burn everything he had uttered to humanity during his own century. Then the fourth volume of the book came out: My son’s grandpa Yaşar could not burn his island. Yet the speech he sent to be delivered at the ceremony of the honorary doctorate degree he received from Bilgi University was his farewell letter to the world. He talked about literature as an act of responsibility toward the world. With this, he was bringing joy to his island for the last time.

A refugee, a stutterer after seeing his father getting killed, an orphan whose right eye was carved out with a knife, a poverty stricken person, a person who shivered often, an ill-treated Kurd, a revolutionary, a dengbêj, a bard, a mourning flâneur, a story teller, a solemn spirit, a genius of diegesis, a body who fills the world, a chest who embraces the world, a sea of smiles, an island of there-is-always-hope, a human being… he was.

We, three of us, in a garden in the middle of a peninsula on a day of a March were talking as if we all had hard candy in our mouths. The exile paused our convivial conversation with a serious sentence. “I am going to the South,” he said. “The Kurdish government is going to give me the state’s honorary medal. Do you have any message you want me to deliver, Yaşar Baba?” They stared at each other for a while then forgot about me, and the glasses of tea. Tears began to swell in their eyes. The silence lasted like a long winter.

“Tell them that I love them dearly!” said Yaşar Kemal, after a long pause. “I have,” he said, “about thirty novels. Tell them to translate all into Kurdish.” He then turned to me: “Selim can do the translations.” Turning back to Mehmed Uzun, he continued:

Tell them, a people can become a nation only when they pay their writers. I receive a lot more for English or French translations of my work. What I ask from the Kurdish government is $100,000. Ask them to send me this money. I would then go to the bank. There I would ask a bank teller “My daughter, Kurds have sent me money; let me have it.” The bank teller would put the money on the table. Then I would weep profusely while pressing the stack of Kurdish money against my chest. Then I would find your number in my phone list of three numbers. “Mehmed,” I would ask, “find me the bank account number of one of the organizations for the martyred peshmerga so that I can send them the money.

The three of us, on a day of a March in one year, were sitting and conversing in a place somewhere in a world. Now, two of us are no longer on this earth. One of them found out he got cancer on his way from the emancipated part of his country after receiving the honorary medal, then said goodbye to a thousand year old exilic condition and toppled down like a tree on a hillside near Tigris. The other entered the warm chest of the world, leaving houses, shadowy courtyards, plains, wild pears, the mountains with purple violets, nomads with poetry, azat birds[1], the songs of the fishermen, the library shelves, ants, apprenticeship of birds[2], the deer pattern on a kilim spread inside the tent of a dreamy tribe burned to ashes, the blue butterfly, chukars, winds that yellow the weeds, borders, prison doors, the frosty waters of early springs as orphans.

For all, I am mourning over the loss of both.

*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Radikal Gazetesi on February 28, 2015, and is translated by Öykü Tekten.

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, and editor living in New York. She is the co-creator of KAF Collective and pursues a PhD degree in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

  


Footnotes

1. Yaşar Kemal tells the story of “azat kuşları” in his novel The Birds Have Also Gone. The fictional characters in this novel would buy the birds near the places of worship only to set them free.

2. The phrase “apprenticeship of birds” (kuşların tilmizi) refers to the pseudonym of Feqiyê Teyran (1590-1660), a legendary Kurdish poet and writer. Kurds believe that Teyran spoke the bird language. He was also mentioned in Yaşar Kemal’s novel A Story of an Island.