The fundamentalism and integralism of West
Sommary
di Imma Barbarossa
I believe that in order to say words that make sense it is necessary to know to whon one is speaking and to define and name oneself. I tink it's interesting the definition suggested by some friends from Bologna: "women trying for years committed for a just solution the conflict", that is a process to individuate "a process of creating exchange between women and a process of examining closely the reflection on gender", a process marked by the relationship between women and by mutual recognition. Nevertheless, if the method satisfies me totally (relationship between women, mutual recognition, a closer exan of the reflection on gender), I feel that the first definition is a bit narrow (a just solution to the conflict). I define myself as one of the women that have a passion for understanding and changing the world starting from themselves and from a political practice of their own relations. Why change? Why transform the existent? Because the existing social order is not based on the relationships between individuals, genders, or people, but it is established on oppression and on exploitation, on wealth and poverty, on pleasure and hardship, on power and hierarchy, on alienation of the body and mind, and on the fact that the pleasure of some women/men is provided by the hardship of other women/men. To change the social order by starting from the ways of freedom of individuals, genders, and people: this is the meaning politics should have. After having defined myself, I will name the position from which I speak, in which I matured my reflections. It involves a lot of positions, all equally important and meaningful and all materially and historically definable: the pacifism of "the women in black", women of the difference of gender, southern women, and communist women. They are all positions that require analysis, criticism, and conflict. A conflict that does not cause war, cancellation of other women/men, a conflict as a way of life, not death. Being the women in black, in fact, we make our mourning for the war, for death, and slaughter visible, with our bodies and our clothes. We began by protesting against the occupation of Palestinian territory, then against Gulf war, then for the people of the ex Yugoslavia, lastly against the massacres by the Mafia. My city is located on the southern Adriatic coast where live groups, with Albanian, Greek, Slavic origins and language; a city of frontiers that in August of last year was sadly noted for the violent welcome which the governors reserved for 20,000 Albanians at the port and in the stadium in Bari, (in the old stadium, otherwise the mega-stadium would have got dirty). A city where organised crime is strong and widespread; in fact we are the fourth righ-risk region. Being "the women in black", on the 8th of March, in my city, we decided to cross the border' which divides lawfulness from unlawfulness, freedom from non freedom: prison, a difficult place'. Just as "the women in black" and after Capaci, we dressed like Rosaria Costa, the widow of agent Vito Schifani, they wanted to silence in the cathedral in Palermo. I consider the difference of gender to be a political category to look at this world and change it; it, too, demands the conflict, that of sex, as criticism of that universal neuter-masculine which - even though it is partial - defines itself as the human gender, and has built, for its own gender, a genealogy for material, social and symbolical dominion. To think and practice the difference of gender in the South of Italy means many things. It means starting from the analysis of a material condition of oppression and building up a conscience starting from the yearning for freedom. We southern women passed from backwardness to modernisation. For the old southern women freedom didn't exist (as it still does not for many today); they were citizens without citizenship, victims or assassins; for the emancipated southern women today it seems as if freedom would be a goal that must be reached through repudiating oneself, heading on towards a brilliant future of "new professional skills", maybe even in highly ranked military carriers, made accessible through positive actions. The last position I speak from is the critical analysis of the communist tradition. This criticism demands conflict too; I believe that Marxism has been the greatest criticism moved against middle-class universalism and against the capitalistic social order, in which the patriarchal order was and is so comfortably rooted. But Marxism didn't produce - and it couldn't - sexual criticism of the patriarchal order and thus has not led to female liberty. Fundamentalism and integralism: let's clarify the terms. We are dealing with a social order and behavioural codes that are rigidly coherent with some principles, values, that are considered data, not historical but natural laws and data. Within intergralism such values regulate each aspect of individual and collective life. These terms cannot be considered in the abstract; they must be examined together with their contents. But the reality of our times warn us that it's not a matter either of backwardness or of characteristics of the Islamic world. There is a fundamentalism in/of the place where one is. Fundamentalism is whatever makes out of one's partiality a totality, a model that tends to exclude or homologue, colonise, and reduce to one's self. It is the denial of independence of individuals and the cancellation of differences. But we would be misleading if we thought of fundamentalism as a residue of the past. It penetrates into modern social formations and it combines with "progress" and "development". Fundamentalism becomes a form of modernness. Just as Integralism is a world phenomenon, and, as far as we are concerned, we can consider the integralism of the West; end the integralism of Southern Italy, today, within modernisation. It's not external to politics, but internal, or rather it's a modifying element in politics. From the Crusades against the unfaithful to the violent cancellation of people and culture in the American continent, the capitalistic West slowly was structured into a model of political form, culture, and civilisation. It created the dual concept civilisation/barbarism, progress/backwardness, assigning itself the characteristics of laicism versus religious fundamentalism, of tolerance versus integralism, of religious freedom versus fanatism. It considers itself the pillar of the civilised world. It needed wars to impose its model of development, its values, from the nation-state to the redefining in ideological terms of the West as a model of civilisation, up to the ideological-cultural interpretation of the world's geography. This for the Mediterranean region has meant the division of the area into rich countries and poor countries, developed and backward: a division in ideological terms. Suffice it to consider the situation of southern Italy: archaeology reveals a mercantile, with cultural exchange; peaceful character of the ancient Apulia, the Apulian crypts are rich in Byzantine frescoes and Basilian art. Apulia was a merchant and cultural linking area between the East and the West. Today Taranto and Gioa del Colle are NATO bases; the hillsides of Murgia are militarised; the entire southern Adriatic and Ionic seas are frontier zones; our coast is watched to avoid the landing of Albanians who are found, clandestine and hungry, and then sent back. Moreover, there are wise citizens in Bari who wonder about the tragedy in Somalia: "Weren't they better off as an Italian colony?". Now southern society is invested by a great process of modernisation forcing young people from the ghettos to become drug couriers and leading workmen for the Mafia, and women to complicity and connivance. The West and the Northern world have imposed their model of development, based on the production of goods and on the undifferentiated exploitation of natural and human resources in order to accumulate. This development model has imposed a life style all focused on production cycles and often on the machinery's cycles themselves; suffice it to look at the working hours, night jobs, lunch breaks, holiday distribution, double jobs, and social devaluation of work. Such a model has produced the so called Marxist alienation, that is a loss of consciousness, of knowledge, and power in the individuals that produce, whereas in countries with another type of development, hunger and poverty are spreading, with at most humanitarian intervention, of welfare, of homologation: of exportation of the so- called civilisation models, consumption, firearms and political forms. Our development model lacks the sense of limits, the awareness of its partiality; it is the lack of limits and of relations with other women/men that characterises fundamentalism. To consider waht is useful for oneself as an absolute model. How important for the fundamentalism is the concept of belonging? Certainly a lot, but I think that the two terms do not coincide or that a distinction must be made. There is the belonging to an ethnic group, that is very strong principally in case of threat, aggression, cultural and actual invasion. We can think here of Rigoberta Menchy and of her biography. Ethnic belonging is a defence against various racism that characterise, in more or less violent and subtle ways, the well-being of the time. Ethnic belonging can be very strong in women, without destroying however the identity of gender. Ethnic belonging is transformed into fundamentalism only in the case of an ideological, political, religious, or other over-structure'. The belonging to a State-nation is something else, a modern and western concept or imported from the West: refer back to the defence of values of the great American nation, such as the one shown in the last republican convention last August. Belonging gives safety, protection, sense of excellence. That explains the rising number of religious sects, clans and metropolitan gangs in North America. For this reason I believe we must pay particular attention to southern society, in Italy; the big families, in the patriarchal sense of the word, clans, families of organised crime. In my opinion, in this entire matter there are some key-words that linguists should thoroughly examine. The first group starts with the word patria, abstract concept, ideological, totalling; the patria requires denial of others; killing the enemy, the invader or conqueror, it also requires the annulment of oneself, sacrifice. Therefore patria: killing / sacrifice Killing and sacrifice leave no room for fear, therefore they require a hero. The patria through the hero falls into death. The hero asserts himself denying or denying himself. All our culture (and literature) is based upon these concepts. When Christa Wolf reviews the myth of Cassandra through the reading of Eschilo's Agamemnon, she actually reverses the hero's message, the message: when Scamandro's women remind Pentesilea that "between killing and dying there's a third way, living", they say it in opposition to an ideology of death that Pentesilea has incorporated from men's war; Scamandro's women say it starting from a feminine "extraneousness", that isn't non- belonging to tolis, but a criticism of a political form that cannot but precipitate to war. The second group of key-words, typically southern, is connected to the sense of honour. It's a typically male concept, that has its origins in the defence of one's own privileges and property; among which are women, their bodies, their sexuality. One kills because of honour, otherwise one "loses face". Honour implies a total submission of women, up to the point of complicity and "protection" of male values that are given as legitimate and superior, as natural characteristics. Men and women kill themselves, also, because of honour. Thus, even honour precipitates towards death. In this sense, within the family clan a very important place is occupied by the mother, the mother matriarch, bound to her male son by a tie of pride, possession and, at the same time, subalternation. Evaluation of the male gender and devaluation of feminine gender: ideology submitted to daughters and daughter-in-laws. If it's true that women of the South have done great things on a civil and political level (Palermo), it's also true that they occupy court rooms to defend rapist-sons, they build up a barrier in working-class neighbourhoods against police to defend male criminals, they carry drug in between their breasts to help men, they tolerate that their daughters are raped for years, and before their very eyes, by their husbands, they give away their daughters to lovers even for a bet based on sweets. The family thus becomes a cradle and a nest of fundamentalism and integralism, up to the point of annulment and to death. A very complex point regardis fundamentalism that can be found within female and feminist groups. Even though many accusations of fundamentalism or self-referenciality are quite malicious or suspicious and corrupted by male integralism, nevertheless I believe that those of us who think that difference of gender is not a philosophical trend or a sector of literature or linguistics, but a theoretical category to re-interpret the world and a political activity dwelling in conflicts and history, we cannot get rid of the clothing of criticism not even with respect to women's thought and politics. Not even with respect to that thought of difference that had that explosive force in cutting out categories of emancipation and claim, equality and parity that covered - without damaging it - women's symbolic misery. As a matter of fact I'm not convinced about the hypothesis of a female genealogy ontologically parallel to the male's, external to history and mystically tending to create an idea somewhat divine, sacred, all feminine, that would be expressed through myth and writing; such an hypothesis, far off from being conflictual towards male totalitarianism, is based upon an idea of power built upon founded feminine mediation, upon disparity. A disparity that comes out of the acknowledgement range of value, of construction of female liberty for many, possibly for all; this type of disparity - entirely idealistic - ends up creating hierarchies because it powerfully effects the symbolic but it doesn't have - and often doesn't want to - any efficaciousness for criticising power. Instead, I believe that all Carla Lonzi's iconoclastic charges in desecration/criticism of a symbolic and material order constituted on material and symbolic oppression of women through conflict and criticism, until the construction of women's liberty may not be imposed by a model or scheme; and is confronted to cultural, social, political differences among women (for example, to consider the abolishment of hijab as a progress is a colonial violence, from which Islamic women may defend themselves as if it were an attempt to homologation, and during Intifada, it was considered a symbol of women's political commitment; wearing the veil to please men, why should fill us with indignation more than parading naked in beauty contests? and I believe that the practises of sexual human rights violation (infibulation) should be abolished, but starting from the discussion with women that are subject to it, for example voluntarily); norcover, the establishment of feminine freedom has to become in addition a powerful changing incentive of the existing order; it doesn't hawe to be trapped by the bachofenian presumed existence of a female meta-historical category (gentleness, peacefulness, matter versus virility, war-mongering, male spirituality). I spoke about female fundamentalism to speak from a bias; but I believe that historically male gender has self-founded itself symbolically on exclusion/homologation of female gender, precisely of the "second" sex. In order to assert itself it needed a hierarchical power, words, ideological sublimation of itself totalling and mystifying; it has built a self-representation of itself, of a subject that builds its own image and its own liberty on the denial of the liberty of the female gender. In "our" world women are bestowed parity, equality, homologation; female freedom at most is indicated in parties' and trade-union's programmes as a social matter. Such a system of values historically stood on women's subalternation, on their social oppression, and therefore on silence and the missing independent representation of itself, on symbolic misery. Like any fundamentalism, even that of the male needs boundaries. They are boundaries of exclusion of the other, fences within which male identity is built and evaluated, just, that safety that falls into crisis as soon as it "collides" with a strong subject, feminine independence, a force of criticism arising from consciousness of gender difference. Fundamentalism therefore cannot be considered an archaic form, a chapter of underdevelopment or a characteristic of the Islamic world; it can all be noticed in modern forms of connivance, cultural expressions, social and political organisations, symbolic representations. It can be noticed in the exaltation of boundaries and belonging, not intended as places and communities, but tending to exclude or crush minorities and/or diversities. It is within the state/nation and in its exaltation (homeland, defence of the homeland, sacrifice, hero, killing, death). It's in the assertion of national and imperialistic power, in each colonisation, in each conquest, in each aspect of the myth of virility, in each propaganda, in missionary intervention. In tools of propaganda. Even within the communist tradition, when Marxism developed from an instrument of analysis and criticism of the capitalistic social order into a system of values, ideology, dogma, economic model, state form, regime. I belong to those men/women communists that placed a hope in communism: that it would be able to reverse the relation between powerful and weak, that it produced a criticism of alienation setting the foundation also of a political form and of a community. That's why, it should have reversed the concept of power and dominion, and change the relation among individuals based on proxy of the most to the few (perhaps, in the name of proletariat). I believe the most powerful metaphor about this fall of hope is that invented by Christa Wolf in Kassandra: what was and should have been peaceful Troy, city of connivance and civil community started to consult oracles, to send ships to the West, ships loading booty, prisoners, false priests, women, ghosts of women. And before the Greek warriors, aggressors, before the emergency Troy had become a police state. Where, to see is considered a fault, a gesture of high treason. Cassandra sees the future because she's free inside, because she knows how to read the present, and does not renounce to see not even on the victor's ship, that, across an Aegean, turned into a bloody sea, takes her to the walls of Mycenae, where a Greek woman will kill her for honour. In order that the Mediterranean becomes a sea of peace we have to undertake to go beyond boundaries, beyond belonging-separations, and forms of dominion. Forms on which for millenniums each power, each dominion was built. We have to know how to read the present, and to read it we need to build new theoretical categories, of female gender, political categories able to go beyond boundaries that are not ours. We also need that relations among women cross the borders of homogeneous groups in advance, to sail upon the seas and oceans, to cross the deserts, cities, walls, with the thrust of women's desire and passion.