[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_64

Land of robbery, Giuliana saladino, 1977

Giuliana Saladino's civil novel is far from fantasy and invention. Land of robbery is a painful reportage. Saladino writes to tell another story about Sicily, not the one "dominated by the law of non-change, founded in the ancient sin of the Sicilians of feeling perfect ('We are gods' explained the prince of The Leopard to his English guests), which transforms history into the philosophy of an ever-changing circle,” to quote the description of the 2001 edition by Sellerio Editore. Saladino cites historical texts by her contemporary scholars and interweaves them with people's stories, bringing out the face of a greedy and short-sighted Italy, which has always profited from the miseries of its citizens, especially those in the South.

Saladino subverts the perspective from which crime is judged, quoting a fragment of "History of the Mafia" by Salvatore Romano, from 1966: "In the conditions of poverty, hardship, and suffering in which the Sicilian populations lived, the black market, to obtain the fundamental foods, flour or wheat, appeared rather as an elementary right of subsistence than as a crime to be punished by arrest, as the Carabinieri especially tried to do, in the application of the orders received, and were, therefore, more exposed to the aversion and resentment of the popular strata. Almost all the bandits of this period had begun to go into hiding due to conflicts with the carabinieri regarding the requisition of black market flour”. And then, trying not to omit the conspiracy of the Vatican State with the Italian political parties in power, she also quotes Francesco Renda: "The Christian democratic plan, however, only partly coincided with the intentions of the owner's landowners. The most interesting problem, from a general political point of view, was that of reviewing and modernizing the old southern power bloc (Marshall Plan, Cassa del Mezzogiorno and, limited to Sicily, also article 38 of the Regional Statute) and subordinating the peasant masses to that new form of clerical-bourgeois hegemony, which was supposed to isolate and beat the communists on their ground. To this end, an agrarian reformism was put in place, which formally seemed to accommodate the main demands of the peasants of the South, particularly the demand for land through an expropriation law... Evidently, on the Christian Democratic side, there was a tendency to create a band in the countryside of small-holder peasants, which would act as a containment and protection against the mass of landless people".

Poverty, backwardness, crime, unemployment, and emigration are not only the sad legacy of a distant past but also the fruit of evil - and recent - Italian politics, which played their power games over people's lives. Saladino heartbreakingly concludes on the peasant condition: "The thousand-year experience of the Sicilian peasant turns out to be a thousand-year sum of errors, their competence a bluff, their wisdom only fatalism, entrusted as it is to greater and unleashed forces, drought, the sudden frost, the sirocco, the generally absent and arrogant owner who teaches robbery of the land. Until the 1950s and beyond, wheat was cultivated as the Arabs taught, vineyards as the Romans taught, olive trees as the Greeks taught, and threshing was entrusted to the blindfolded mule and the wind […]. Experience does not accumulate; it never jumps from quantity to quality, false agricultural science passes from mouth to mouth, old to young, immutable, and Sicily remains unchanged. Centuries of agriculture piled up in vain. It seems like a civilization; today, it's just fatigue and ignorance [...]. On all this, the peasant movement, which is dying out, defeated, leaves an immediate sediment: no one is any longer willing to accept any conditions to their life, no one wants to hear about days that have a beginning and no end, no one is more willing to drag on endlessly - in the finiteness of one's life - an uncompensated effort. The world would truly change if Sicilian farmers had thought like thisat the beginning of the 1950s. They think this way to the point that they decide to leave if they don't have the land. They don't have it if they have it. They can't make a living if they bought it because they have to pay for it".

Like a photograph that does not censor the miserable corners of the landscape to show only the beauty but takes in the whole picture, Saladino's painting of Sicily is a bitter portrait because it is complete. Her are not words of condemnation but of profound understanding towards a land, hers, which, in addition to having been the victim of so much injustice for a long time, now also receives the blame.

If Saladino speaks only of Sicily with her heart, with her eyes, she looks at all of Italy: the so-called "Southern question" is not a problem that concerns only the South, but, today as then, it is everyone's problem.