FROM THE RICKETY WINDOWS OF HISTORY – Mario Bellizzi

FROM THE RICKETY WINDOWS OF HISTORY

People walk across the desert
jump over  barbed-wire fences of concentration camps
dodge guards and traffickers
following the routes of herons and cranes
in the Mediterranean Sea.

[…] many are swallowed by the sea
sucked like doves’ eggs
So especially for these unlucky people
there is no need for the presence of Keraaman and Khatebeen
angels that the Koran places
on everybody’s right and left shoulder
to  record the good and the bad in our daily deeds…
Can’t you see that they are dead?
Their bodies sunken
to  the dark-blue seabeds
mixed in with wrecks, amphoras and bronze statues
Let’s make sure that the heads are pointed towards the Mecca
as imposed by topology and religion
their limbs undoubtedly washed an odd number of times and more

The survivors with their Dàimon / hafaazah
arrive to plains that look like carpets 1 / sajājīd
in the fertile Magna Grecia 2 of bygone times
and camp out in sheds between the train tracks of Croton
in dilapidated houses in the countryside of Metapontum
in the katoi 3 of the villages on the hills of Sybaris
They are nothing but hands/new slaves
in citrus groves, strawberry fields picking first of the season fruits
under the fierce sun, scattered among archaeological digs.

[…] in this strip of land
edge of what was once the bountiful cupboard of the South
threshold of the universe of the philosophers Hippasus and Archytas 4
where for the first time
man examined the harmony of pitch
and incommensurate magnitudes

Being Citizens of those polys 5
was a great honour even for the gods 6

[…] Here, the Wretched of the earth, without land,
multitudes sometimes praying sometimes rising up
due to extreme poverty and wars
ask for a house, the right to asylum
as the Danaides in the Aeschylus tragedy
This is the hybris 7 that keeps
the people chained to hunger and commodities free to roam.
The existence of migrants is a shame
that throws mud on the arrogance
of the High Priests of the Temple of the Global Market
Bodies and souls have forever been marked by
“an irreducible limit in the ownership of life”

[…] exhausted swallows
in cartographies torn by silence
pass the baton to migrants
while peoples 8 arriving on old galleys
with their Illyrian alphabet, papades 9 and icons, keze 10,
they too on the run during the XV century
now leave fireplaces, the concentric circles of the gjitonie 11 as dowry
as well as eastern liturgical chants and “the funeral banquet” among the graves
that you call ‘asha’al mayyit‘
other men gift you with the struggles to occupy the land
the blessed yeast of our villages 12.

[…]let  the circulation and the production
of myths continue
accompany in procession
the gods of heaven and earth
with bagpipes and drums
Let everybody dance for the Great Mother
for the sensual love
for Ishtar-Astarte-Aphrodites-Venus
Hecates for the fertility of women
and for  Demeter and Persephone
for the fecundity of the fields

[…] When the season to plant
ancient roses comes
we will be there with you
to water them
with mysterious karstic rivers

The essences of those peculiar flowers
rooted in the memories of peoples and in the depths
taste like deserts and river beds

Many swear they can smell those essences
coming out from the rickety windows of History

(Translated by Gino Bellizzi, reviewed by Pina Piccolo)

1 Prayer rugs;
2 Ancient Greater Greece, the geographical area of the southern Italian peninsula which was formerly colonized by the Greeks from the 8th century BC;
3 Dark, windowless rooms located on the ground floor;
4 Hippasus an ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician who discovered  immeasurable quantities and irrational numbers. He was killed for revealing  what today is called the theorem of Pythagoras, the golden ratio. Archytas was ancient Greek philosopher, mathematician and politician. He became interested in science, music and astronomy and studied mathematics with Eudoxus of Cnidus; he was the first to suggest grouping together canonical disciplines (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) into the quadrivium, the ordering that was later attributed to Boethius in the Middle Ages;

5 City-state in ancient Greece;
6 The public court of Thuri, the new Sybari of Magna Grecia, in 379BC., through a decree bestowed honorary citizenship, a house and a plot of land on the god Borea because he blew so hard as to block off the ships from Croton that wanted to invade and loot. It was the first time in the history of human civilization that being granted citizenship, being accepted by a community, was considered a privilege even buy the gods;
7 A topos of Greek tragedy and Greek literature, also present in Aristotle’s Poetics. It literally means “arrogance”, “excess”, “pride” or “prevarication”. It refers in general to an unjust or impious action in the past, which produces negative consequences on people and events in the present. It is an antecedent that counts as an upstream cause that will lead to the catastrophe of tragedy;
8 Coming from Albania and the many Albanian communities of Morea and Ciamuria, today in today’s Greece, they settled in Italy between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, following the death of the Albanian national hero George Castriot known as Skanderbeg and the gradual conquest of Albania and, in general, of all the territories of the Byzantine Empire, by the Ottoman Turks. These Albanian refugees settled in southern Italy and Sicily, in various waves, even today they speak the old language, which was preserved by oral transmission.
9 Priests of Christian religion, with a Byzantine rite celebrated in the Greek language;
10 Wedding headgear, here like royal crowns;
11 Neighbourhood;
12 In Southern Italy, the laborers and landless peasants, millions and millions of people, men and women, were protagonists of the struggle for land rights. They peacefully descended on the fields, “armed” only with their own poverty and despair, against the great landowners. The feudal lords of ancient and historical “lineage”, exploiters who lorded it over the peasants  in many regions of Italy, largely settled in the South. The peasants’ century old struggle  was a long, troubled and heroic “epic” that sought to erase the centuries-old medieval practice of serfdom that still characterized many areas. There are reports of periodic forms of protest and claims by the peasants, from the 1700s and the 1800s when, especially after national unification, hundreds of peasant families went to the landed estates demanding distribution. In Calabria the climax of the struggles for the land occurred in the years 1943-1950. Scores of  peasants were killed by the army of the Italian State: real massacres of innocent, hungry people demanding their rights.