The expression "cultural refugee"
doesn't exist. Yet.
When we think about refugees, we see war,
oppression, torture, violence. People who have lost everything and run for
their lives.
I agree with Nick Cohen (You Can’t Read this Book) when he says that we can't compare the
restraints we experience as citizens of Western countries with the horrors of a
proper dictatorship. But I also agree with the marxist theory of the western Nation as a new, capitalist tactic
to control people, using not guns but ideas, culture, values and models that we
believe to be universal.
So I end up
wondering what "life" means.
Being
alive, surviving, not being killed?
A lot of
people choose to be killed in order to defend what they believe in, though.
And anyway,
when you are not hungry or desperate, in which
way can your life be put at risk? What is it that sometimes makes you
feel lost, as if you should actually be running
for your life but you don't know why, or how? After all, we live in the most
privileged part of the world. What the hell do
we have to complain about?
Sometimes I
feel angry and not privileged.
I used to
pronounce hungry and angry in the same way when I
started to study English. I'd just put in a little gasp at the beginning of
hungry because I knew that the H must be sounded.
A couple of
decades ago, in Italy, several politicians started to promote this eerie idea
that when you are hungry (a metaphor that means unemployed), you don't need
culture, you need to be fed. The demonising
of culture is what has brought us to the collapse of part of the Pompei site, to the decline of our television,
to the dismantling of our publishing. And to even more thrilling consequences
of a dangerous idea which may put at risk if not our physical, our civilized
life.
In my
dissertation proposal I wrote:
"When
European newspapers depict Italy, its economic crisis and the noticeable
anomaly called Silvio Berlusconi – the man who's been holding media, political
and economic power in his own hands for over twenty years – their analysis
often seems to miss the worrying effects of this concentration of power, which
has modified people’s moral code, values and lives. In his book Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony, Paul Ginsborg wrote on the very
first page: 'Something important is happening in Italy, potentially quite
sinister, and the seeming normality of life serves to mask it very well'
(2004)."
Well,
that's why I'm angry - even if sometimes I am actually
hungry. And that's why, when I decided to join the PIGS (Portuguese,
Italian, Greek and Spanish people fleeing to the UK), I felt like a cultural refugee.
One day on the tube I cried because I saw a poem printed on a poster by Transport for London.
Culture on
the tube. Who needs it? I do.
I wrote
this post after hearing the news that the invaluable editor in chief of the
children's division of the largest publisher in Italy has been sacked with no
apparent reason. Rumour has it that she's being replaced with a professional
who's been working at Dukan Diet books.
In Italy
people who don't fit into the regime, disappear. Of course they are not
murdered. Only their skills and competence are vaporized.
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| "Pagnotta" (loaf of bread) is the term some Italian politicians and people use to define what you are supposed to need in life. You can't eat culture, so it's just a waste of money. |
