WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Sicilia Libertaria, Oct-23: Palermo, terrible male, male to avoid (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

The ferocity that swept through Palermo during the summer just passed is
a ferocity that always returns the same, but which every now and then
provokes reactions different from the usual resignation. This is what is
happening this year, perhaps because the fires affected urban areas and
inhabited centers more, perhaps because they were an almost continuous
band, leaving us a few days of respite between the peaks, forcing us to
guard estates and plots, gather together in family to decide how to
manage the holiday homes, take shifts, bring the elderly and children
back to the city and end the summer at the height of the season. Perhaps
because if the land is communal - as in the past when fires mainly
involved forests, reserves, mountains and collective assets - it hurts
the heart, but one easily ends up with phrases like "Nature always wins.
Within a few years everything will return to how it was before", while
when the burning earth is one's own, the mourning and the wallet are
inconsolable. The human deaths, then, gave the final blow to the dismay.

Perhaps also because social issues have been added to environmental
issues, in a particularly violent and bitter Palermo, an inhospitable
Palermo for many people, certainly for every woman: the Palermo of rapes.

So in this round the citizens were not helpless by watching: they took
to the streets to demand respect, freedom, security, fairness and to try
to put alternatives in place. The public assembly Enough fires was born
to address the emergency and create a network among the most damaged
people. The feminist movements gathered for an evening demonstration in
the nightlife area to shout No more rape, No more fear!

But in both circumstances, both shouting Enough! who came out into the
street? She needs to look herself in the face with honest looks.

On which streets is the protest taking place? Who really lives those
streets every day? The mapping, when done, screams in the ears the name
of a profound discomfort, which is never addressed.

Palermo is not just one, just as no city is. The peculiarity of his dual
being comes alive in these moments of anger and strong aggregation in
which we always find ourselves among the same people, essentially among
active, engaged, aligned people. It is a pale participation in all
respects, which tells of two Palermos who don't speak to each other, who
don't even speak the same language, who don't have a means of getting
closer and who travel the same streets, calling them and meaning them in
such different ways that the one makes the passage of the other is
invisible. A blind indifference, imbued with contempt, in which each one
has a life of its own and it seems that no duel takes place, but only
two parades: one vertical, lacquered and presumptuous, the other that
rears, skids and goes fast on the horizon line .

One Palermo acts as a specter to the other, unleashing mutual evils,
which condense into misdeeds, violence, calamities and death. And they
stage a chase in which there is no room for prey and predator: the
self-destructive movement is clear, like a body that attacks itself and
no longer recognizes itself.

In this scenario, fires, fights, killings, rapes, accusations, conflicts
between neighbourhoods, as well as ethnic and class conflicts are not
easy to resolve because the possibility of dialogue is in all respects
lacking, we keep at the optimal distance for the perfect ambush. Contact
is kept to a minimum and when it occurs it is bone breaking. The
institutions do nothing but underline this war distance by throwing
ethically obvious and dusty words from the mouth of their cannons.

The only trait that the two city profiles have in common is the
patriarchal imprint, different and similar, if not identical. A trait
that makes Palermo masculine in all its variations, which tells women
and gender claims that under no circumstances will it be a homeland for
them.

The painful episode of the girl raped at the Foro Italico on the evening
of July 7th by seven boys tells us this perfectly, and was forced to
speak out to silence public opinion's chatter about her alleged consent.
As well as that of the two sisters from Monreale, a few kilometers from
the capital, abused throughout their childhood by their uncle and
grandfather, with the complicity and silence of their parents.

This is confirmed by the sentence on the Nigerian woman who was a victim
of trafficking, left to her own devices, to whom a certain freedom of
choice of her habits and customs was attributed, a greater freedom than
the force of international dynamics, of colonialism, of the use of
bodies of those who are "ill-born".

This is highlighted, again, by a mother who proudly defends her rapist
son as if to explain to us what a woman who wants to survive in this
city must be like: turned inside out like a sock by a culture in which
sexism and delinquency are seen as rites of passage, tests of strength,
signs of virile thickness.

Palermo, a terrible male, a male to be avoided, becomes an enormous
geographical and social stain, taking on the face of rapists, violent
fathers, indifferent judges, arsonists, of all those people who,
belonging to one of the two cities, are nevertheless in a privileged
position compared to those who only get to be mangled, the ugliest
flowerbed on which to let the dog piss, throw away the waste paper, to
be kicked open and replaced with another of identical "intended abuse".

The map of the city collapses, is neurotically rewritten until it
becomes a lake of ink and blood, a lake at the deadly bottom of which
all the invisible people are heavily held.

Palermo, which has nothing of the solidarity we need, how long will it
continue to tell us about the violence and social ghettoizations in
which we are submerged*?

Or is there still the possibility of thinking of a plural city and
therefore capable of making everyone's voices and idioms emerge from its
stagnant waters without them getting lost in the wind? To recreate
basins of knowledge and areas of true alliance in its streets?

Abandoning the claim to speak to a particular Palermo, an individual and
collective reflection is necessary to escape from the duality of fake
respectability and the folkloristic underworld, of the crumbling
strongholds of offices and clubs and of the anomic nightlife, full of
fear and death, of the events cultural and apocalyptic ones, of the
streets for the rich and the unapproachable alleys, of the wealthy
Palermo and the sub-proletarian one, of the sunny worldliness and the
dark parks, of the sectarian associations and of suicidal smuggling. To
build penetrable layers together, the only urban means to avoid the
socio-cultural defeat of a place that has so much to give on postcards
and takes everything away on its concrete.

Liberation of all Palermo and those who live there, of all the women and
people who cannot find a home in it.

Désirée Carruba Toscano

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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