Madagascar: Sticky Tongues

Lizards are stealth predators. Motionless, they blend in, turn invisible. They crouch into oblivion, waiting, suspending time. Why hurry? the Madagascan poet Raharimanana wrote, watching a gecko on the ceiling of his room. Things are bound to happen. The fly won’t know what hit it when the reptilian tongue darts out, faster than lightning. There is no escape from its sticky grip.

Ny vava tsy ambina no ahitan-doza – an unguarded mouth spells danger – is a Malagasy proverb. The people of Madagascar live up to it. They speak with deliberation. They avoid confrontation. They search to agree. Even though the twenty different peoples of the world’s fourth largest island share one language, the Malagasy prefer to leave many things unsaid. It’s an eloquent silence. On this island of natural marvels and unique biodiversity unspeakable things have happened.

Zebu-power in Toliara on the West coast

The language Malagasy, originating in Melanesia, from where a few thousand years ago the first settlers arrived, holds traces of Arab and African languages, and English and French. As if history had added syllables like rings of a tree, the words are long, sinuous, and dizzying. Ambohimanatrika, Fianarantsoa, Ampandrasoatanimbary, Analamitsivalana, are typical names of typical towns that huddle along the National Road RN7. Running from the capital Antanararivo in the center to the sea town Toliara on the West coast, it is one of the island’s few tarred roads, an anachronism in a society that mostly relies on sandaled feet for locomotion, and cattle-pulled carts for transportation. There are no traffic jams on the RN7.  The overloaded trucks or climatized tourist cars that manoeuvre around the potholes move with slow consideration. As the RN7 winds up high mountains, passing by the intricately laid out rice terraces, street vendors and cattle herders, then descends straight into the fairy tale formations of the canyons of Isalo and finally reaches the palm studded beaches at the Mozambiquan channel, it girds the fishermen on the coast to the cattle herders in the South to the rice farmers on the highlands like a dark, dead snake.   

RN7

Men are like the creeping stem of the pumpkin and if traced they are found to be one. The Malagasy adage is expressed in the concept of Fihavanana, which, not unlike its African Bantu counterpart Ubuntu, defines the individual but as a part of the group. Fihavanana can loosely be translated as solidarity or interdependence: People help each other when in need, lend a hand when the fields must be tilled, or the rice planted, or a zebu cattle was lost. As charmingly altruistic as this sounds, it is a solidarity confined to family, or those regarded family. Life in Madagascar is lived along bloodlines.

At the Market

Lineage is paramount. The Malagasy adhere to a strict hierarchical system that places age and ancestry on top. It decrees the young to serve the elders and the elders to serve the ancestors who in return offer guidance, protection, and identity.

The Malagasy spend their lives in closest proximity to their dead. Villages are laid out around family tombs. Lavishly decorated, painted, sometimes colourfully tiled, they stand by little rice plots, or in the midst of vast grazing fields. In the rocky canyons of Isalo, caves up the holy mountains serve as family crypts. The deceased family member lives on as part of the family, albeit one of elevated standing. Death is a step up the social ladder.

A family tomb towers over the terraced rice fields

Almost half of the world’s species of Chameleons are endemic to Madagascar. The gecko’s spectacular lizard-cousins famously change colour, although not according to background, as it is commonly believed, but to their emotional state. They turn dark in fight mode, and bright to assert dominance. To attract a mate, they transform their scaly skin into an enthralling kaleidoscope. Colour is their only means of communication, for they are completely mute: chameleons possess no vocal cords, no words. Their eyesight, however, is excellent. Equipped with the uncanny ability to swivel their eyes 360 degrees in their sockets, each eye individually, they see all. The Chameleon sees the future with one eye and the past with the other, another proverb goes. The Malagasy believe chameleons to live in the world between tomorrow and yesterday, between here and there. They’re regarded ambassadors of the dead. Most Malagasy fear chameleons.

Threatened

It takes years for a deceased to enter the ranks of the ancestors, a status, which, due to its proximity to God, instils them with divine powers. The progress of decomposition of the body is therefore closely monitored. Every three to seven years, the bodies are exhumed, and their silk burial shrouds exchanged. Extreme importance is placed on this so-called turning of the bones, or dancing with the bones – Famadihana – a ritual for which even émigrés regularly return from abroad. In 2017, during an outbreak of the Plague, the government searched but failed to outlaw these reburial rituals, a failure which purportedly claimed the life of several hundred people from contagion.  

To constantly renew the bond with the ancestors is essential. Ancestors are still invested in the here and have the power to interfere should they be displeased: The harvest will fail. The rains won’t come. A zebu will be stolen. To be dead is a position of ultimate power, a power that is invisible, ubiquitous, and omniscient.  

To recapture a stolen or escaped Zebu is a group effort

As the dead appear alive and the living dead, paralyzed in constant fear of admonition or malediction, time is suspended. The past bleeds into the future and drowns it.

Immobility is an impossibility, Raharimanana writes, still watching the gecko on the ceiling, the transparent skin, the large eyes, the foetus face; an oxymoron, born from all that’s impossible. A living dead. A fast stillness. A visible invisibility. The Gecko is everywhere, in the folds of sleep, in the fear he induces. And yet, the Gecko eats mosquitoes.

Communities define themselves through their oaths, their symbols, their ordeals, the late American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber wrote in his seminal work “Lost People.”  Before he became a figurehead of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, Graeber studied the communities of the Madagascar highlands. According to Graeber, in Madagascar a king didn’t rely as much on military success as on his ability to gather everyone regardless of descent and make them agree upon his rule. In the beginning, people became a people by agreeing with each other.

Betsilea people in the central highlands

Graeber argues that Malagasy societies were hence an early form of enlightened democracies – contrary to the Western belief that concepts like democracy and enlightenment were brought to Madagascar (and Africa) by Europeans who arrived from the sixteenth century on, in form of traders (from Portugal), missionaries (from England), pirates (from the Caribbean), and ultimately colonialists (from France).

This idea might explain the typically Malagasy avoidance of the slightest conflict or disagreement even in the face of severe discomfort or disadvantage, which to a visitor is often disconcerting . But it could also be, Graeber concedes, an expression of a society kept at bay by fear. (It is equally surprising to a Western visitor how openly people admit to their fears in Madagascar, be it arachnophobia, bovinophobia, or xenophobia.) It is possible, Graeber says, that people purely recognized someone as a king due to his power of having brought them together and agree in the first place. It was a power they considered otherworldly. In the beginning was the word, and the word was magic.

Mango vendor

Magic still plays an important role in Madagascar, and even Western-educated Malagasy will surprise a visitor with their belief in the supernatural and their belief in oaths, taboos, and charms. While more extreme expressions of what the Western world calls superstition, or paganism, like animal and human sacrifices, ordeals, witch trials and floggings, are certainly a thing of the past, charms are still in use.

Every object, animate or inanimate, material or immaterial, can be instilled with magic powers and act as a charm. A stone, a tree, a bead can be instilled with a person’s fears and desires, the rain, the wind, nature, can all be but extensions of a single person. And mostly so the word. The island of Madagascar is not a place of natural wonders, but of ultimate human agency.

All magic is political. Malagasy traditional life went within strict social strata that drew their legitimacy from spiritually influential ancestry. The top class of nobles who claimed direct ancestry from the founding kings benefitted from many privileges, like wearing red beads or tiling their family tombs, but most importantly from Fanompoana. This was the obligation of the lower class of commoners, whose royal descendants lay more than seven generations in the past, to perform free services and works for them. The commoners themselves could rely on the free work of the lowest class, those who didn’t have family tombs and couldn’t claim any royal descent at all, for they had been brought against their will: slaves.

Madagascar’s history of slavery is long and complex. Thousands of years ago, when the first settlers arrived in Madagascar, they raided the surrounding African coast for slaves, and continued to do so within the island. Kidnappings happened between neighbouring villages and kingdoms, the captives were then traded in highland slave markets, purchased for labour on the rice fields, or exported to the nearby French and British colonies, Mauritius and Réunion. In 1895, when the French annexed Madagascar, dismantled the monarchies and in 1897 abolished slavery, the complex societal pyramid toppled. The nobles fled and took on administrative jobs in the capital or in Paris; the former slaves took over the rice fields and, at least in the fertile areas of the North, reached relative wealth.

Urchin. Poverty is extreme in Madagascar

Graeber argues that to some extent, colonialization had a unifying effect on Malagasy society. Those who remained identified as a single people, made equal by a common oppressor. They suffered equally from an exhaustive colonial tax system and the corvée – the unpaid work for the colonial power. Yet, the deep dividing lines within village society itself remained: the line between former slave owners and slaves. Although no one talked about it, nobody could ever forget it.

To this day, Graeber describes in Lost People, Malagasy people are proud of a noble descendance yet afraid to come across as a slave holder, as a person who has the power to command another one. Slavery remained – as an invisible, intangible silence. A word not uttered. An impossibility.

As a species, chameleons have been around for hundreds of millions of years. While it is believed that there are still undiscovered species hidden in the wild, many known species have already gone extinct. Forty percent of all Madagascan reptiles are threatened. It hence came as a pleasant surprise when in 2018 Furcifer Voeltzkow was rediscovered, a little, green chameleon believed to have gone extinct one hundred years ago.

Furcifer, the scientific name for the genus of chameleons endemic to Madagascar, translates into yoke bearer, which was derogatory term for slave.

Voeltzkow’s chameleons have a tragically short life span. They spend the biggest part of their life enshrined in their eggs, then die four months after hatching.

Almost a century into the Anthropocene, the era of human interference into our ecological system that caused the fastest mass extinction ever faced by this planet, the tiny, ephemeral Furcifer Voeltzkow seems to be laughing open-mouthed into the face of modern humanity. But this might just be its physiognomy. Chameleons don’t laugh.

Malagasy bibles for sale in Antananarivo

Madagascar stumbled into independence in 1960. But the ancient hierarchies that had dominated social life for so long remained at odds with modern notions of democracy. The island’s post-colonial past was characterized by instability and military oppression, the country dogged by corruption and poverty. In the 1970s, the government took on vast loans for development which it could not service. The results were insolvency, dependence on the IMF, austerity measures that slashed the state budgets and led to the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside. Impoverished rural communities became “temporary autonomous zones,” where police never went, nor the fire brigade, nor the tax collector or public schoolteachers. There, magic took over the reins, again.

Gold Dust Day Geckos are sometimes called living jewels for their colourful skin. Their tongues are forked, and like their snake-cousins they flick them to taste the air and so track down their prey. Their eyes are 350 times more potent than human eyes, but they lack eyelids. Condemned to see all, they clean their eyes with their tongues.

The Madagascan Day Geckos are currently under threat of extinction due to loss of habitat through deforestation and mining activities. When in January 2013 conservation groups protested against the Mandena titanium mine run by the Canadian company the Rio Tinto (QIT-Fer and Titane, Inc.) in Taolagnaro, the military used tear gas to dispel the protester. In 2021, uranium levels downstream were at 52 times the WHO drinking water standard, lead 42 times.

Emerald mine

Words, Raharimanana writes on the flap of his book “Les Cauchemars du Gecko,” are his passion. Born in Antananarivo in 1967, as a child he often stayed with his grandmother in Northern rural Madagascar, where he became entranced by the tradition of oral story telling. “I cherished the words in my mouth. I cherished my listeners, keeping them glued to my lips.”

Malagasy didn’t have a writing until British missionaries put it on paper in the early 19th century. Raharimanana bemoans the stiffness and inflexibility of the written, official language – a language that to him reflects the brutal military oppression of the Ramanantsoa presidency that incarcerated his father. He left Madagascar to study literature in Paris. Now he writes in French, the language of the former colonial power. Though an official language in Madagascar, many Malagasy refuse to speak it.

Participation at a political rally (here for the 2023 presidential election) is often remunerated and therefore abundant

Raharimanana says, once he too was lost for words: The gap between the beauty of nature and the stark political reality was unbridgeable. Unspeakable things have happened. He searched for a language, for the distance of another language – not the cumbersome language of politics, of ancestry. All Africans are condemned to being bilingual, he says. Or we are destined…

In his poems, Raharimanana uses words like tools he etches from stone, like weapons. He attacks them, he grinds them, he mixes them until their musicality penetrates the reader and absorbs them, it says on the flap of his book. Apparently, that’s how he cleanses them from the past, instills them with meaning, and saves them from extinction. Words have died, buried by slogans, he writes. Rahirimanana turns the words. He dances with words. He exhumes them and redresses them.  

We don’t name things anymore, we have drowned in a pre-fab language that reassures, flatters, that kills time, that makes one forget death and masks our fall.

Nothing is more important, than words that carry death with them, and the fear of death. Nothing is more important than the cold lucidity of fear. To be alive. To be of this world. To inherit the foolishness of the centuries. To stuff oneself with words and die laughing.

Children working in rice plots

Venice: Mal De Mare

Ladies, you who find yourselves still free and unbound

            by those strings of love

            in which I and so many others are entwined.

If you long to know what this 

            Love is, who made himself Lord and God

            Not only in our, but in ancient times.

It’s a burning affliction, a vain desire

            A deceptive shadow, a wilful deceit

            for whom you forget yourself and your own good;

a breathless quest for a little pleasure

            that you never find, or if you do,

            will only cause you sorrow and ruin.

The Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa was born 500 years ago. In her lifetime she was hailed as the greatest female voice of the Italian Renaissance: a sought-after singer and performer at the accadamie, the literary salons, she was dubbed a “Sappho de’ nostril dì” (a Sappho of our days) not only but most notably by fellow poet Benedetto Varchi. Like the ancient Greek singer, Stampa too was a poet of love, of loss and recollection, and like Sappho’s, her poems were of great musicality: to be sung and performed. Her only published work, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, which tell of her suffering from an unhappy love affair with a noble man, appeared in 1554, six months after the aforementioned lover had announced his marriage to another woman, and six months after Gaspara Stampa’s sudden death at thirty-one.

All the fires of hell together

next to my great flame

are nothing, or little;

for where hope is gone

the soul, bound to always part,

accustoms itself to a grief that never changes.

My torment is greater

because it tastes of yesterday’s joys

thanks to hope;

and this wavering pattern 

            of joy and torment

            makes my suffering all the greater (300/231)

The book was published in a hurry – most likely to benefit from the scandal her presumed suicide caused in the Venetian society. Stampa was only thirty-one, childless and unmarried. The parish register of Santi Gervasio e Protasio recorded the cause of death as mal de mare, seasickness.

Despite the book’s instant success, Stampa soon fell into oblivion. When she was re-discovered, in the late 18th century, the literati of the early enlightenment romanticized her as the devoted, suicidal lover, or discredited her as a courtesan; in any case they belittled her work. With the honourable exception of R.M. Rilke, it was only within the last two decades that the multi-layered grandezza of Stampa’s work been rediscovered, and her name restored as a confident, idiosyncratic poet. Stampa was not (only) a female, but a feminist voice that addressed the obstacles women faced then, and half a millennium later, still do.

San Trovaso today

Weep, Ladies, and may Love weep with you, since he who hurt me does not cry.

Stampa’s legacy has too long been overshadowed by the question of her sexuality. Much energy has been put into proofing that a woman who writes as beautifully and lovingly could not have been a courtesan. But to answer this question, after 500 years, we must pose many more questions, and most importantly ask ourselves: Why do we need to know so urgently?

Like her contemporaries, Stampa wrote in the Petrarchan tradition, but undermined the patriarchal codes through female agency and sensuality. Whereas Petrarch adored his Laura from afar, Stampa lay in her lovers’ arms. Whereas Laura was voiceless, Stampa spoke as a woman to women. While Petrach’s gaze was male, Stampa did more than gaze: She lived. She lived in Venice, a city embedded in the sea.

The little fish

that only in water lives, and breathes,

expires, the moment

he exits the water.

View from Stampa’s home – where later Rilke stayed.

If the city of Venice is shaped like a fish, then Stampa’s neighbourhood, now called San Trovaso, is the gills. Indeed, water in all its forms plays a vital role in her poetry: tears, rain, fountains, waves, and, of course, the Adriatic Sea.

My life is a sea and the waves are my tears

the winds are breaths of sighs

my hope is the ship and my desires

the sail and the oars, that chase it forward.(40)

Stampa’s Venice is not the city of lavish, stuccoed palaces, but the foggy lagoon. L’umor, liquidity, represents the female, the nurturing, the all-embracing element. In its progression, from spring to sea, water symbolizes life, and in its eternal spiralling outwards, self-realisation. As pelago, the stormy sea, it stands, in Stampa’s poetry, for love, death, and oblivion.

You women who have recently embarked

upon these waters full of treachery

and full of error, love’s deep and boundless sea

where so many ships have been snapped in two,

Beware! And don’t go out too far,

or you’ll loose your chance of ever escaping;

Don’t trust in calm waters or favourable winds

that change course so quickly, as happened to me. (64)

The Lagoon

Water, like life, like love, is ungraspable. But to Stampa, a highly educated Renaissance woman, water was not bestowed with any magic or divine powers, as it was according to the hitherto popular (medieval) teachings of Natura Magica. Nature was not governed by occult celestial forces anymore, but had become explainable, calculable, comprehensible through our senses.

Wicked Woman, turn your face to me

My lord cries out, suspended from the cross,

And my blind senses fail to grasp

His angry voice that’s mingled with pure pity.(279/307)

A century before Galileo, Venice had pushed God from the pedestal as the “unmoved mover, il motore immobile already. The Venetian Republic was pioneering in natural sciences, as the long list of inventions – from double-entry book-keeping to quarantine laws to the first factory line – proves.

Philosopher and scientist Bernardino Telesio, teaching at the time at the near-by university of Padua, then the most renowned university of the Western world, postulated that the world was made up of two forces – the sun, hot, and the earth, cold. Water, he said, is the only state for us to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In the run of 310 poems that make up the collection Stampa’s identifies her lover as the nobleman and mercenary Count Collaltino di Collalto. That Stampa positioned her alter ego Anasilla as the active, desiring lover in a consumed, yet unrequited love affair with a real man, demonstrates the oxymoronic standing of women in Venetian society.

O night, to me more luminous and blessed

than the most blessed and luminous of days,

night, worthy of being praised

by the rarest geniuses, not just by me,

You alone have been the faithful minister

Of all my joys, all that was bitter

in my life you’ve rendered sweet and dear

and placed me in the arms of the man who bound me. (104)

The city was torn between a stark catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary and of Venus Anadyomene, the goddess rising from the sea, who served as the city’s icon. In the 16th century, the long tradition of eroticism in Venetian art culminated in Titian’s portraits of the Belle Veneziane, Venetian Gentlewomen with their breast exposed, or Tintoretto’s Gloria del Paradiso at the Palazzo Ducale, which alludes more to an orgy than to an angelic convention. Even altar pieces and church ceilings were peopled with saints in the throes of passion: Taunt skin over bulging muscles, as seen in the Fumiani’s ceiling painting at church San Pantaleone, or in Titian’s assumption of the Virgin Mary in the chiesa Sta Maria Assunta, where he depicted the angels flanking Virgin Mary in the throes of passion.

Arousal seemed to be the end of Venetian poetry as well, as demonstrated in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, or the obscene writings of Pietro Aretino. If Stampa wasn’t as explicit as these two superstars of the 16th century literary scene, she left no doubt:

Since every hour I learn new delights

            In love along with joys unusual,

            Ever seeing in that angelic beauty

            Some new pleasure or some new miracle.

Venice’s Virgin-Venus-dichotomy can also be expressed in numbers: For a population of 180,000, there were 138 churches, and, as an English traveller in the 17th century wrote home, 11,000 courtesans. The number of courtesans might have been exaggerated. Not all of the so-called honourable or honest Courtesans, cortigiane oneste, were listed in the “Catalogo di tutte le principali e piu honoreate cortigiane di Venezia,” a kind of telephone book for upper class men, or a travel guide for noble gentlemen from abroad. Gaspara Stampa’s name is not in the book.

Instead, Stampa likened herself to Mother Mary. On the occasion of Christmas 1548, which happened to be the time she met her lover, Count Collaltino for the first time, Stampa allegorizes her heart to the virginal womb:

It was near the day the creator

came in human form to reveal himself

when he could have stayed in his lofty domain

issuing forth from the virginal womb,

that my illustrious lord, for whom

I have scattered so many laments,

and who might have lodged in a place more sublime,

made himself a nest and refuge in my heart. (II)

In this stanza, Virgin Mary is not merely the vessel, but the a virginal creator, the single producer of God’s human form. Stampa depicts her heart as a womb that cradles however not a lover, but love per se – an important distinction: while Mary is sanctified as Mother of God, Stampa makes herself Mother Of Love: she places love above the lover.

In a reversal of traditional roles, her male lover becomes her muse, and not her Lord. While she gets to speak, to write, to act, her Count Collaltino is not given a voice. He goes down in history as Stampa’s doubtable lover.

Bellini at the Accademia

Apparently, Stampa never hoped for a child. In her time, pregnancy was a life-threatening state for a woman. Aware of the high risk of death during childbirth, women wrote their will with every pregnancy – starting at an early age and writing many wills in the run of their fertile years. Stampa never wrote a testament – her poetry is testimony enough of her suffering:

I burned, I wept, I sang, I weep, I burn

I sing, I’ll weep, I’ll burn, I’ll always sing

(till death or time or fortune dissolve my wit,

my eyes and heart, my style, my tears and fire. (XXVI)

Stampa’s poems are of an extraordinary passion – rivalling Rumi in his heart break, and yet, her suffering does not lead to spiritual delivery or heavenly assumption. Her suffering is immediate, physical, existential.

Those hot tears and those sighs that you see me

          expelling so forcefully they could bring

the storm-tossed sea to a sudden halt

when it’s at its wildest and most violent. (58)

Detail at S Pantaleone

In a mercantile society like the Republic of Venice everything was purchasable. Art, faith, and love were business like any other, in form of commissioned art, sacral art, arranged marriages and prostitution.

Prostitution was regarded a source of income for the city. The courtesans’ taxes filled the city’s coffers, and, with tourism already a major economic driver, their fame and the prospect of sexual adeventures attracted noblemen from all over Europe. Besides, the image of the honest or honourable courtesan, a beautiful, sophisticated, and independent woman, served Vencie well flaunting the legendary personal liberties the city supposedly afforded her citizens through everlasting peace and democracy.

The courtesans’ social standing differed wildly from that of the lowly prostitute. Courtesans were highly educated, polyglot, trained musicians and fashion-trendsetters – often charging for their services (conversation, music, or sex) separately. Honest courtesans were unaffordable but for the highest echelons of Venetian circles and more often than not hailed from wealthy families themselves, the mother acting as go-between for her daughter. Forming part of intellectual circles, and often hosting salons themselves, they were well-known socialites, performers, poets, and musicians in their own right.

Tintoretto at Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Although in earlier centuries prostitution had been heavily regulated, the city administration changed its policy in the 16th century due to a rise of homosexuality within the population. Considering female prostitution the lesser evil of the two, they started actively supporting brothels. At the Ponte delle Tette (Bridge of tits) prostitutes were decreed to advertise themselves bare-breasted, a sight believed to convert young men to heterosexuality.

Homosexuality was not the only thing on the upswing in the 16th century. So were book publishing and vernacular literature. The rising number of independent printers and publishers made literature easily accessible, also for those traditionally barred from education: women.

Oh Love, what strange and wonderful fits:

one sole thing, one beauty alone,

can give me life and deprive me of wits (Rime 28)

Titian at Sta Maria Assunta in Canareggio district

While social mobility and personal freedom in a mercantile democracy were indeed greater than in the aristocratic or feudal city states, women were excluded from politics and public life. Only men were citizens; only men bore arms; only men could be lords or kings. Women were subject to their fathers, then to their husbands or – since the costly dowry system afforded even in patrician families only the first-born daughter to get married – a convent. Sumptuary laws explicitly regulated women’s outfit, from hairdo to jewellery and clothes, precisely indicating their marital status. A woman was but a daughter, a wife, a nun.

Love, how can you put up with this? While you insist

On my fidelity

I’m left with no mercy-

No, without life, myself in the balance! (310)

While men were famously granted great liberties in Venetian society, women were expected to live in taciturn chastity. In fact, the entire system relied on women’s chastity. A household would only be continued if men could rely on the legitimacy of their offspring; A man had to be sure of his daughter’s chastity to transfer her to another man’s household. As property, women were not worthy of erudition.

Stampa was lucky as were few Venetian women. Born into a well-off bourgeoise family, after her father’s death, she and her sister received the same education and training as her brother. It was her mother who made sure of it. In her salon in Santi Gervasio e Protasio, which was frequented by leading artists and intellectuals, Stampa was early on introduced into the artistic circles of Venice. Later, she became a member of several other literary salons, accademie, where she was praised for the beauty of her voice. An acclaimed singer and influential socialite she was high in demand by various writers and composers who hoped to gain fame and access to higher echelons if she interpreted their works.

Titian Fresco at Fondamento Tedesco, now Accademia dell’ arte

Apart from some but by no means all convents, the demi-monde was hence the only place for women to achieve erudition and self-realisation. Outside the restrictions of society, as courtesans, they could live in economic independence at least for their working years.

It was however a freedom that came with precarity: Exposed to sexually transmittable diseases, to scorn and contempt, to rape and violence. With no set of laws to protect them, they were at the mercy of a protector, a wealthy man, who might change his taste in women any day. If as lovers they were desired, as wives they didn’t qualify – something hasn’t changed, at least not until Pretty Woman.

My destiny is harsh, but harsher still

Is that of my Count; he flees me

I follow him; other men consume themselves for me,

I  can’t look at other beauties.

I hate the one who loves me, and love him who scorns me

If he submits to me, my heart protests

While I submit to the one who gives me no hope

To such strange taste have I educated my soul (310)

Lagoon

Count Collaltino famously married someone else, but Stampa didn’t die from a broken heart as the romantically inclined would like it. Her alter ego Anasilla indulges in her suffering, but then finds herself a new lover in whose arms she lies in the final poems of the collection.  Poem 57 reveals an astonishingly ambivalent picture of her adoration:

Why do they wear themselves out.

Painting you on canvas, sculpting you from marble

All those who made a name of themselves in this art

Like splendid Buonarotti, or Titian?

When I have sculpted you openly and plainly just as you are

In every piece of my heart and my mind

So your image will never fade

Whether you’re near or far.

But maybe you would like to be depicted

As loyal and gracious, which I how you appear

In all your acts and dealings with others.

Whereas, alas, I can hardly tell you

I carry you around just as I see you

A little inconsistent and disdainful. (206)

Recent research has revealed that many of the love poems believed to be addressed to Count Collaltino, where in fact directed towards Giovanni della Casa, whom she tried to flatter by calling him count. Della Casa had recently published “Il Galateo”, a popular and influential book on formal etiquette and good manners. Indeed, Stampa’s writing was to a much greater extent geared towards improving her social standing, expressing the hope of being embraced by society and not by a specific, single man. She demanded the standing of a man, not a man.

It is probably in this sense that one must read her solidarity when she warns other women — and probably courtesans — of the moody waters of the lagoon: that the moments of equality were short and limited to soirées at the accademie.

At various occasions Stampa addresses her bassezza, her lower social standing (Egli è nobile, e bel, tu brutta, et vile/ egli larghi, tu hai li cieli avari: he is noble and handsome, you are ugly and base, with him the sky is wide open, for you depressing) and it is through talent and wit and erudition that she in her poems puts herself on par with Vergil, Petrarch, and Sappho. As Rilke would later put it, she earned her gravitas, dignity, through her passion for the infinito – the infinity of her suffering, but not from a broken heart, but from a broken world – a blurred distinction in both poets.

Stampa’s mental health was reported to become increasingly fragile, and short before her sudden death, she suffered a nervous breakdown, or, as it would be called today, a burn-out.

Love has made me like one who lives in flame.

To the world I’m some new salamander;

Nor less strange than that eternal creature

That lives and dies, its nest and pyre the same. (206)

Despite the overwhelming beauty and passion of her writing, Stampa’s emancipation and continuous self-empowerment, her breaking into a male dominated world, her trying to advance in society by her own merits, was probably the most outrageous aspect of her work, and still is. As a woman writing for women, Stampa championed women’s rights. In her poems, she overcame the irresolvable dichotomy with which women are confronted to this day: She was Venus and virgin, lover and beloved, fire and water. And most likely, she was a courtesan, a most honourable profession.

For lack of evidence, the question whether Stampa was a courtesan or not remains unresolved. But if there is a lesson to be learned from her poetry than it is that the answer to this question is irrelevant. Gaspara Stampa died early, unmarried, and childless, in or from a world where carving out a room for one’s own was a matter of life and death.

Sund set in San Trovaso

Paris: Cherry Blood

Car l’heure de la chute est l’heure de l’orgueil; Because the hour of downfall is the hour of pride, Victor Hugo wrote in the May section of his poem “The Terrible Year.”

The terrible year was 1871. Spring wasn’t marked by the sweet scents of cherry flowers that May, or by lovers strolling along the Seine, but by the bloody and violent smashing of the Paris Commune. In an unparalleled massacre, the French army gunned down thousands of ordinary citizens, men, women, and children alike, flooding the cobblestoned streets of Paris with the blood of the Communards, or of anyone suspected to be a sympathizer. French President Thiers, safe in distant Versailles, had given his soldiers carte blanche for on-the-spot executions – and they performed them with remarkable brutality and hatred. The so-called Semaine Sanglante, the bloody week of May 21-28 1871, cost the lives of more than 20,000 Parisians, and remains a grim example of state terror and popular resistance: of how far a government would go to protect itself against its own citizens, and to what cruelties the dehumanisation of the opponent can lead.

A Street in Paris in May, 1871 by Neo-Impressionist Maximilien Luce; Musee d’Orsay

The Paris Commune lasted for only 72 days, but its spirit still resonates: as a first socialist uprising, as the realization of a social utopia, as a state run by workers in their own interest. Although its many laws were quickly revoked, the commune kept inspiring the political left in Europe and beyond. Engels called it the first dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx wrote: ‘Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.” To a modern ear, however, the commune’s decrees don’t sound radical at all: Municipal democracy; obligatory schooling for all children; the separation of state and church; equal rights for illegitimate children; women’s right to divorce. Some demands remain pressing today, like the dedication of vacant buildings to homeless people, or access to art for all.

At age 70, Victor Hugo eyed the Commune with sympathy, yet caution. To the elderly politician and social activist, the communards appeared too radical, too heedless, too militant. They were indeed a motley crew of revolutionaries that mostly met in coffee shops, socialists and anarchists, among them many artists and writers. Their economic and political views were widespread, but what united them was a profound distrust of the church, and a passion to end the hair-raising economic injustice and social inequality of the Belle Epoque. 

Montmartre as seen from the Musee d’Orsay. Neither the museum nor the cathedral on top of the Montmartre hill were around at the time of the Commune. The Cathedral was built in spite of the Communards’ Anti-catholicism, because the neighbourhood was a Communard stronghold. The museum was established to unite the painters of the 19th century, those who opposed and those who supported the Commune.

The 19th century was a turbulent time for France, marked by many political upheavals. The last revolution, the one of 1848, had ended with Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon Le Grand, as the first elected President of France. Backed by small group of wealthy supporters, he had quickly established himself as an authoritarian ruler, and in 1852 declared himself emperor Napoleon III of the second Empire. 

The second Empire had brought wealth to the city and seen the rise of the bourgeoisie. Technological progress had turned Paris into a centre of industry, finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts. Factories sprouted in the city’s East and attracted thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside. The city grew not only in size to its present boundaries, but also in population, doubling to two million within a few decades. 

Napoleon had two railway stations built, and many public parks; a new Opera House for this wife, the Opera Garnier which however would remain unfinished until after the Commune, and a flashy glass palace as a new central market – Les Halles. He gave the Royal Gardens (the Tuilleries) and Royal Palaces an overhaul to make them glitter and sparkle like in their heydays. Numerous museums attracted tourists, as did the absinthe-serving cafés, the établissements, and the courtesans: the alluring demimonde of male phantasies come true. 

The courtesan Apollonie Sabatierat in full frontal display at Musee d’Orsay

Il est grave : il est maire et père de famille.  

Son faux col engloutit son oreille. Ses yeux  

Dans un rêve sans fin flottent insoucieux,  

Et le printemps en fleur sur ses pantoufles brille.  

Que lui fait l’astre d’or, que lui fait la charmille  

Où l’oiseau chante à l’ombre, et que lui font les cieux /  

Et les prés verts et les gazons silencieux ?  

Monsieur Prudhomme songe à marier sa fille.   

He is serious. He is a mayor and family father 

his faux collar swallows his ear, his eyes 

in an endless dream wander without worries 

And the flowers of spring sparkle on his pantoffles. 

What is the Golden Star to him, what the hornbeam 

where the bird sings in the shade, and what the skies 

and the green meadows and the silent turf?

M Prudhomme dreams of marrying his daughter.

In Paul Verlaine’s satirical poem Monsieur Prudhomme of 1863, Paris is a pair of pantoffles. Spring has moved indoors. The wildflowers were tamed and domesticated, a deceitful embellishment on a container of a not so well-fragrant inner life. For if the bourgeois were comfortable in their chic apartments, they were also petty, catholic, and strictly hypocritical. 

Before he became the famous poet of his later years, Paul Verlaine, of privileged, catholic background himself, was a married clerk in the townhall. He wrote poetry only in his spare time as part of a lively literary scene in the Salons and cafés when the revolutionary movements were gathering momentum. During the Commune he became and Communard, joining the National Guard, and kept his post at the town hall as Head of the Press Bureau, though it is not clear what he actually did there. Only after the Commune’s downfall, would another revolutionary heart and an unbound love affair derail him from his brilliant career. 

Homosexuality was not illegal, but frowned upon.

The recent architectural changes had highlighted the division between the beaux quartiers in the affluent West of the city and the sordid, industrialized East. Although Napoleon had installed several social reforms that increased workers’ rights and made education accessible to girls, the fabulous splendour of Paris remained off-limits for most of the Parisians: The workers, crowding the hilly and densely populated quarters Montmartre in the North and Belleville in the East of the city, and Le Marais in the centre, scarcely made ends meet. Wages were low, and women got half the salary of their male counterparts. Although workers fueled the industrial revolution that brought riches to the rich, they themselves didn’t benefit from it. 

By 1870, half a million Parisians, a quarter of the population, were living in extreme poverty, and the narrow grey streets of central and Eastern Paris were still gloomy and excrement-ridden as in medieval times. Appalled by the squalor of the workers’ quarters, Hugo started writing Les Misérables. Despite the many revolutions, the conditions of the poor had always remained the same.

Belleville is coming down the hill‘ was a wide-spread fear in the beaux quartiers. The growing number of poor people worried many Parisians, as one could expect from devout Catholics. Ambling through the ménagerie of his Jardin des Fleurs maybe, admiring the elephants or the leopard, even Napoleon was appalled by the filthy conditions of the workers’ quarters. So he assigned Baron Haussmann to make Paris Great Again and have them bulldozed. 100,000 apartments and 20,000 buildings were destroyed for the creation of the palace-lined boulevards that still cut straight, starshaped lines into the city.  

Opéra Garnier

Hausmann’s ‘beautification’ of Paris was a costly undertaking financed through the augmentation of taxes on goods and custom barriers, (plus a little proxy-bond-scheme that would later fail and get Hausmann fired from his job). Of course, the ensuing increase on prices on daily goods on top of the housing shortage, further aggravated the living conditions of the working poor. But, so Napoleon had schemed, the new boulevards would prevent a popular uprising: by running through possibly insurgent quarters and hence hamper the organization of insurrection, and, should that fail, by making for an easy access route for imperial troupes. 

That Napoleon had sensed that a revolt was in the air had nothing to do with political or economic insight. He had been informed by his numerous police spies, the so called mouchoirs, that had infiltrated the intellectual and artistic circles of Paris. The 2nd Empire was in fact a police state. But ultimately, Napoleon knew, that what he really needed to gain public support, was a wide-spread sense of patriotism. In other words: a war. 

Luckily, the Prussians were at hand, and he swiftly declared war on Bismarck over a minor matter. Bismarck gladly accepted the offer. (He could use a war himself to solidify the new North German Empire.) But if Bismark, as history would prove, was an astute military strategist, the only talent Napoleon III had inherited from his famous uncle was an oversized sense of entitlement. As a military leader at least, he was not the brightest candle on the chandelier, or as the famous painter Gustave Courbet put it, he was ‘an idiot.’ 

“Monsieur Napoléon has declared a dynastic war for his own benefit and has made himself generalissimo of the armies, who is proceeding without a plan of campaign in his ridiculous and criminal pride.” Courbet wrote home to his family on the countryside.

The well-equipped and excellently trained Prussian army found an inferior opponent in the disorganized French army that lacked everything from maps to ammunition. Within weeks, the Prussians were in Paris, laying siege and starving the population. 

“We are passing through an indescribable crisis.  I do not know how we shall come out of it.”  Courbet wrote. A few months later, he was a leading Communard whose claim to fame was not only the opening of museums and theatres to the poor working class, but the destruction of the Column of Vendome – to him a symbol of imperial barbarity. To others, even among the sympathizers of the Commune, it was just an old piece of architecture. It was radical characters like Courbet that alienated moderate socialists and like-minded dissidents like Hugo. But at the time being, Hugo and Courbet were equally suffering from the Prussians’ siege of Paris. Hugo noted in his diary:

Oct 16: There is no more butter. There is no more cheese. Very little milk is left, and eggs are nearly all gone. 

Oct 22: We are eating horsemeat in every style. 

Nov 23: It has been raining for two or three days. For two days Paris has been living on salt meat. A rat costs 8 sous.

Nov 27: Pâtés of rat are being made. They are said to be very good. An onion costs a sou. A potato costs a sou. 

December 2: It is freezing. The basin of the Pigalle fountain is frozen over. The cannonade recommenced at daybreak. 

Jan 2 1871: The elephant at the Jardin des Plantes has been slaughtered. He wept. He will be eaten. 

With the French army destroyed, Napoleon didn’t know what else to do than distribute rifles to the civilian population. As Franc-tireurs, they were to take the defence of Paris into their hands. It was a surprising move from someone who had previously relied on spies to monitor his own citizens – and a crucial move for the Communards, who would never turn in their rifles. 

But while the People’s Paris, as the working class East was dubbed, held up against the Prussians, starving, dying in the bullet showers of the modern Prussian machine guns, Napoleon surrendered himself, then resigned, and swiftly fled the country. “Napoleon le Petit”, is what Hugo called him.

This was the end of the 2nd empire. Its successor, the third Republic, under the conservative President Thiers, would immediately surrender to the Prussians. The terms of the armistice were harsh – 5 billion francs – and most direly felt by the by the poor: Not surprisingly, the Parisians, who had fought so bravely against the Prussians, were not willing to accept the armistice, nor were they accepting the new government, especially since Thiers was rumoured to install a (Bourbon) monarchy in France again. “It is no longer an army you are facing. It is monarchy, it is despotism,” the revolutionary paper Le Rappel wrote. In defiance and in possession of rifles and cannons, the Commune of Paris constituted itself on March 18, 1871. The declaration read: Paris has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free.

Immediately after the Prussian army had withdrawn from Paris (yet remained close by), President Thiers tried to crack down on the Commune immediately, but failed: his soldiers had fraternized with the Parisians population instead. Thiers went as far as asking Bismarck for help in invading Paris, but the latter preferred to remain neutral. Hence Thiers withdrew to Versailles, where many of the wealthy Parisians who did not identify with the Commune followed him. Soon, Versailles was so crowded that accommodation was hard to find. 

In Paris, all the while, the Communards were busy forming a governing body and setting up an army, drafting all male Parisians between 19 and 40 into the National Guard. As it was a democratic grassroots movement, this went painfully slowly. The Communards were stuck in laborious decision-making: in panels and committees and delegations and other intricate forms of bureaucracy. Although a vast number of laws was quickly implemented, it was the lack of hierarchal structure that would later prove fatal. But for now, the Parisians were living their dream: Spring was in the air – it was the time of the cherries. 

Jardin du Luxembourg

People from the poor quarters strolled through the fancy neighbourhoods in the west, into which they had only set foot before had they been employed as domestic workers – or had they been displaced by Baron Hausmann, pushed to the peripheries. Now they reclaimed their space. And they did so with a lot of joie de vivre.

On Easter Sunday, the Jardin du Luxembourg was crowded with everybody and their neighbour. Ah! Citoyenne, Au, citoyen, Parisians from different social classes greeted each other. In the Tuilleries, where only weeks ago Napoleon and his wife had sauntered, a band played the Marsaillaise and other revolutionary songs. The Louvre and the Bibliotheque Nationale were open to all, and the cafés were crowded. Only Napoleon’s unfinished new Opera stood vacated. It had been turned into a storage facility for food. 

“Paris is a true paradise… all social groups have established themselves as federations and are masters of their own fate,” Courbet rejoiced. As a member of the Commission on Education and President of the Federation of Artistes, he was “…up to my neck in political affairs. I get up, I eat breakfast, I sit down and preside twelve hours a day. My head begins to feel like a cooked apple. But despite all this turmoil of the head and my understanding, which I’m not used to, I’m in an estate of enchantment.”

Maybe the most striking aspect of the Commune is how promptly the situation for women improved. Many women took pride in their role as citoyennes, and their demands were addressed in the meetings, and reflected in the laws. Not all communards thought favourable of equality among the sexes, though, but enough did. Most notable among the prominent citoyennes were Karl Marx’s daughter Jenny and his friend, the Russian activist Elisabeth Dmitrieff, writers Natalie Le Mel and André Leo, and, who was probably the most ardent and charismatic among the Communards Louise Michel.

“If equality between the two sexes were recognised, it would be a marvellous victory against human stupidity,” she wrote. “And so far as rebels go, there are quite a few of us now, simply taking our place in the struggle without asking for it.” 

Once the stronghold of the Commune, Belleville is still a synonym for counterculture.

Yet, the question of how to feed the poor remained pressing. The Communards received the modest sum of 700,000 francs as a loan from the bank of France. Not to take control of the bank of France, was, as Engels later pointed out, their main error and the ultimate reason for their downfall:

“The most difficult thing to understand is, indeed, the sacred respect with which the Commune reverently stopped before the portals of the Bank of France. This was also a portentous political error. The Bank in the hands of the Commune – that was worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the entire French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in the interests of peace with the Commune,” Engels wrote in 1891. 

He was right. The Communards had essentially enabled the Bank of France to finance its enemies. The bank of France gave Thiers 258 million Francs to reconstitute an army and on April 2 the Versaillais began the bombardment of the city. 

Thiers had not only relied on military weapons to prepare for his attack on the Commune. He had long enlisted the press and the church to whip up hate against the Communards within the population. Communards were depicted as dirty, lazy, immoral – as subhuman, a pest in a moral society, best exterminated. Their anti-clerical stance – let alone their eventual execution of the archbishop of Paris through the radical Communard leader Rigault – made the Communards especially suspect for the devout rural population from where the majority of Thiers’ soldiers stemmed. As did emancipated women who were regarded as a threat to public order, (or God’s divine order), especially women uniform or in pants: since 1800 the wearing of pants by women had been forbidden by a law. (This law was only overturned in 2013). 

That the commune was not (only) a political insurrection, but a counter-cultural one, is best expressed in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. A teenager in the rural and strictly catholic Charlesville, he dedicated many poems to the commune. 

The famous Portrait of Rimbaud as Graffiti.

Although he never joined the fight on the barricades, his poetry, unbound in its defiance of bourgeois standards and catholic values, and in its indulgence in life in its utmost physicality and emotionality, captured the spirit of the commune. The eternal teenager, the poet Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud famously abandoned poetry at the age of 20 and became a quite different, rather misanthropic adult) is still a kind of patron saint to the Belleville of today: Paris 20ieme arrondisement is now a multi-cultural hot spot of subculture, and the cradle of French punk. Les Rita Mitsouko gave their first concert at the Bataclan. ISIS chose the concert venue for their attack on the “Western way of life” in 2015. Once the stronghold of the Commune, Belleville is still a hotbed of insubordination and anti-religiosity, its name a synonyme for counterculture, a thorn in the side of any totalitarian regime.

He, hair pomadé, on a desk of mahogany,  

Read a bible with cabbage-green lithography.  

Each night in his alcove, he suffered through nightmares.  

He did not love God, but men, who in the fawn-coloured airs  

of dusk returned to their quarters, in blackened smocks;  

where town criers, with three drum rolls, made people flock; 

Je est un autre – I is another – surely is Rimbaud’s most popular quote, referring to the gap between the inner and the outer self. But in his solidarity and identification with the insurgent workers of Paris, whom he likened to women and suppressed people of the colonies, this could be understood as well as ‘I is the other”, anticipating the both the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and the anti-colonialism of Frantz Fanon. 

“When the unending servitude of women is broken,” Rimbaud wrote, “when she lives by and for herself, when man – until now abominable – has given her her freedom, she too will be a poet.”

When the Versaillais troups at last attacked, it took them only a week to take Paris. This was not merely due to the fact that they outnumbered the Communards’ National Guard by far, and that they simply sidestepped the barricades by entering the buildings; and that they were helped by Parisians who did not sympathize with the Communards: The Commune’s lines of defence suffered primarily from a lack organization, discipline and military hierarchy. Communard officers were notoriously unorganized unreliable, as they were mostly drunk and/or still caught up in some panels and committees where they were more engaged in jealousies and rivalries than actual fighting.

Among the last ones fighting for the lost cause on the barricades, were not the Communard leaders, but ordinary men, boys, and above all women. Some fighting from sheer desperation, having lost their husbands, or others driven by rage and revenge, having lost their brothers, fathers, or sons. Many from conviction to never again lose their newly gained freedom as a woman and citoyenne. 

In his poem “The Hands of Jeanne-Marie, Rimbaud wrote: 

They are pale, they’re marvelous,

In the great sun of love and ambition 

On the bronze of the mitrailleuse

In the Paris of insurrection

These could have easily been the hands of Louise Michel, whom combat didn’t seem to frighten: not “the red teeth of the machine guns flashing on the horizon… It wasn’t bravery, I just thought it a beautiful sight. My eyes and my heart responded, as did my ears to the sound of the cannon. Oh, I’m a savage all right. I love the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but, above all, I’m devoted to the Revolution.”

Louise Michel as Graffiti

The so called Petroleuses, a kind of early female suicide bombers, were rumoured to set Paris on fire whenever the Versaille troups had advanced, reducing half Paris to rubble and ash. Even though there is no evidence for this, their fame reached almost mythological dimensions, both as heroines and public enemy.

It is a matter of fact, however, that Communard women weren’t spared by the hatred by the Versailles soldiers, but received even harsher treatment: humiliation by exposing their breasts or naked bodies, and rape, both before or after getting shot.

In Belleville, where the final fighting took place, the blood shed was outrageous. The Versailles troupes had the Communards stand in double file against the walls, (as the wall of the Fédérés at Cemetery Père Lachèse commemorates) so executions would go fast and efficiently, as a single bullet could kill two – uniting two bodies like a pair of blood red cherries. 

Spring in Cemetery Père Lachaise.

The Communard Jean-Baptiste Clément had written the song “Les Temps des Cerises – the time of the cherries” in 1866 already as a simple love song, but in the midst of the massacres, he dedicated the song to the Commune as their blood dripped from the barricades like ripe cherries falling from the trees in May. 

Mais il est bien court, le temps des cerises, 

Où l’on s’en va deux cueillir en rêvant 

Des pendants d’oreilles. 

Cerises d’amour aux robes pareilles 

Tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang. 

But it is short, the time of the cherries 

When the two of us gathered them pretending they were earrings. 

Cherries of love in identical red robes 

Falling from the leaves in drops of blood 

To this day, it remains a hymn of freedom and justice of the political left in France. For the rest of France, it is still the anodyne love song of lovers with cherries on their ears.   

Delacroix’s Marianne at the Louvre

During the Semaine Sanglante Gustave Cobert had managed to go into hiding, then was imprisoned for six months, after which he went into exile. Paul Verlaine, too, survived the week in hiding. He met Arthur Rimbaud in summer 1871 only, and, in summer 1873, after a tumultuous love affair, shot at him. He was subsequently was imprisoned for attempted murder.

Louise Michel survived the carnage. Caught on the barricade, she demanded to be shot like the others, but, for fear of martyrization, she was taken prisoner and deported to the colonies in New Caledonia, where she promptly solidarized with the locals and organized an insurrection.   

The commune was only a short chapter in the history of France, but the blood shed was not in vain. France is a laic republic now, and the French are still notoriously revolutionary and prone to strikes and demonstrations. But quickly, the Parisians turned the page. The cafés filled again, and the theatres, the Louvre and even Opera Garnier was finally finished.  In 1800, after a general amnesty for all former communards, Louise Michel returned to Paris.  

   “We lived in the future, in the time when people would be more than beasts of burden whose work and blood other people made use of,” she said, looking back.  

Austria: All Quiet on the Southern Front

On the mountain top, two salamanders are making love. They are of the Alpine species, entirely dressed in black, including their large protruding eyes and their grinning, fleshy mouths. That and the fact that they are changing position so quickly, twirling each other’s bodies around, rubbing their heads against each other, entangling their long tails, holding on to each other with such fiery passion, make it impossible to tell them apart, male from female, or friend from foe: one could easily take their love making for a struggle for life and death, for they are not on a flowery meadow, but inside an old war trench.

The mountain peak, Kleiner Pal, constitutes the border between Austria and Italy. During WWI, it was part of the frontline, where the two armies of the new Republic of Italy and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire held each other in a tight grip, from May 1915 till the end of the war in November 1918, without ever changing the frontline, without having any effect on the outcome of WWI, but at the tremendous cost of the lives of almost a million soldiers. Austrians, Italians, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and many more unknown soldiers, now lie buried at the various Heldenfriedhöfe, or under the eternal ice of the Alpine glaciers.

Boundary stone between Italy and Austria today

Before WWI, the so-called Karnische Alpen, a mountain ridge between Italy and Austria, were a popular hiking destination, as it is now again. The terrain is steep and demanding, the mountain tops a challenge for the experienced hikers and climbers. In the peaceful tranquillity of high peaks and (seemingly) pristine ice-blue lakes it is hard to imagine the smoke and rumble of mortars, of shooting and shelling from a century ago. And yet, trekking by the exuberant pink shrubs of blooming Alpine roses, along the well-maintained hiking paths, one frequently comes across dilapidated garrisons, trenches, or dug out caves that once functioned as barracks, as shelters, as loopholes, or as storage spaces. The hiking paths, now called Friedenswege – trails of peace – were in fact trodden into the steep terrain as a military supply line, where horses pulled ammunition, food, and equipment to the trenches on the top. Until the horses died from cold and hunger, and were replaced by cable cars, quickly built by night, often under hostile fire. From then on, only soldiers marched along the paths.

This Southern stretch of the Alps was one of the most brutal and inhuman battlefields of modern European history. Covered with snow for three quarters of the year, sometimes more, it is a terrain so tricky and precarious that one third of the soldiers there died not from enemy attacks, but from natural causes: avalanches and mountain slides, and the freezing cold that brought pneumonia or kidney inflammation.

Kleiner Pal shrouded in clouds

“Any soldier’s worth less than an animal.”

Infantry soldier Karl Außenhofer wrote into his diary (published in 2016). A Tyrolean, he felt home in the mountains, but he suffered from malnutrition – by 1918, the average weight of the Austrian soldiers was 55kg – and inadequate outfits. Uniforms were of a heavy fabric that, once wet, dried slowly; with Italian attacks imminent, the soldiers at the frontline were ordered to sleep with their clothes on.

“Undressed for the first time in three months tonight. Couldn’t sleep from the pleasure…” Karl Außenhofer wrote. The soldiers were also ordered not to scratch their itches, to prevent infections and skin diseases. In vain.

The Habsburg monarchy had not been prepared for a war. Their weaponry was technically outdated. The turn of the century had brought technical innovations – industrialization and motorization – but outside its glamorous capital Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still an agricultural economy, a Catholic, authoritarian monarchy, stuck in the past. Yet, Emperor Franz Joseph had rushed into the war in megalomania and bloodlust. The assassination of Arc-duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb was a mere pretence to declare war on Serbia. The Vielvölkerstaat – the multi-ethnic empire – had long been troubled by rising tensions among the many peoples of the vast, sprawling empire. Now, the Kaiser wanted to deal with nationalistic, emancipatory tendencies once and for all in a short hit-and-run attack on a minor South Eastern neighbour.

Heldenfriedhof – war cemetery in Kötschach Mauthen near the Kleine Pal: A Czech, a Hungarian and two unknown soldiers share a grave.

“I caught lice from the Galicians,” Außenhofer wrote in his diary.

Ironically, in the trenches the different nationalities were for once united. But even in the face of death the tensions didn’t subside. Too long had prejudices been instilled into the minds of the “Austrians,” resulting in a social and economic gradient from the German speaking West to Slavic speaking East. Galicia, the utmost Eastern province, what is now Poland and Ukraine, was at the bottom of the scale. The discrimination of the Tschuschen – a pejorative term for Slavs sadly used to this day in Austria – continued in the military and was so harsh, that even Außenhofer felt pity when he wrote on July 17th 1915: “These poor Galicians don’t have shelter to lie down, poor devils, today it’s cold like midwinter, it’s raining so everyone gets wet to their skin.”

Vienna had tragically misjudged the Russians, who had vowed to support Serbia, and misjudged French loyalty towards Russia. Now their only elite regiments, the Tyrolean Standschützen, were involved in the unexpected heavy battle in the East, where they suffered great losses in a relatively flat terrain. Even though the monarchy had been able to draw 3.35million men at their general mobilization in July 1914, a year into the war, they were already lacking men. Then, in May 1915, Italy attacked from the South.

trenches at the Kleine Pal

The Italians sent their elite regiment, trained for the Alpine battle field, the Alpini, who now faced on the Austrian army of mainly Czechs and Hungarians: young men who often hadn’t seen a mountain in their lives before, and whose military training was as rudimentary as their equipment. Not surprisingly, the desertion rate was as high as the death rate, and at one point all white handkerchiefs were confiscated and exchanged for colourful ones.

Außenhofer, whose morale was also declining in the run of the war, did however not approve of the Czech deserters. A learned Austrian, the soldierly values of patriotism, duty, obedience, and bravery were deeply ingrained in his thinking – planted especially by the strict Catholic school system that was run military-style and featured physical and humiliating punishment. Disease and cowardly death were regarded as weaknesses, as failures. The brutality of war made Außenhofer even more detached.

“Today another mis-hap. A Standschütz took the cable car from Corvosa to Stern; when entering the station, his head was ripped off. Went to the Gasthaus at night, always full of people there.”

Natural border

The Gasthaus, the inn, Außenhofer mentions in his diary, is the Gasthaus Löwe in Galtür, which, by the way, is still operating to this day. Gasthaus Löwe was, like other inns, pensions, or hotels, where soldiers were accommodated when not serving at the front line. Ernest Hemingway, too, mentioned the Gasthaus Löwe in his short story “An Alpine Idyll.”

The American writer had arrived at the frontline in the final year of the war, in 1918, as a volunteer orderly for the Italian Red Cross, apparently in search of adventures, both amorous and heroic. His story about two Americans on a skiing trip doesn’t cast a favourable light on the Tyroleans. Hemmingway calls them beasts – but who wouldn’t, given a plot that involves a widower using the frozen corpse of his recently deceased wife as a hanger for his lamp? Who wouldn’t, given the merciless brutality of the war? But Hemingway only arrived at the very end of the war, and maybe the village people he describes were so callous and detached because they had been tested by hunger and loss of loved ones for four long years. For Austrians, the war was not an adventure.

View from the Kleine Pal

But, maybe, Hemingway had a point. The archaic societies of the inaccessible Alpine valleys were notoriously taciturn and rough, a demeanor that seems to come with the rawness of the scenery. Tyroleans were incomprehensible to the Viennese as well, both in their dialects and manners, and so held considerable exotic attraction, as was the case for Austrian writer Robert Musil, also stationed at the Gasthaus Löwe.

End of July. A fly dies: Worldwar, he wrote in his diary on July 28 1914, the day of the declaration of war. Like most upper-class men in the monarchy, Musil had attended military school and therefor held the title of officer. He immediately signed up for the front – albeit benefiting from an officer’s privileges: better pay, better accommodation, better food rations.

War. On the mountain top. In the valley peaceful like a summer holiday. Behind the barriers of the patrols one walks like a tourist, he wrote in 1915. The combination of the overwhelming beauty of the Alps and the adventure of war must have made for an intoxicating cocktail. Or was it rather his love affair with a certain “Gretel” from the village that impressed Musil, whose experience at the front differed so wildly from that of an infantry soldier. Yet, the ongoing cross-fires soon wore him out.

Big projectiles, not too high above our own posts, their sound making the air swell into a rumbling, a roaring with a metallic timbre. So it happened yesterday at Monte Carbonile, when the Italians were firing from the Cima Manderiolo to the Pizzo di Vezzeno, and the Panorotta above us to the Italians. It made the impression of an eery uproar within nature. The rocks were rumbling and roaring. The feeling of an evil futility.

A Griffon Vulture crossing the border to Italy.

Musil survived and went on to become a major European writer. He was however one of the very few writers dispatched as soldiers to the front. Contrary to other nations, who lost a whole generation of writers on the battlefields, the monarchy was aware of the importance of artists to boost morale within the population. Two institutions were established for writers to dodge the draft: the Military Archive, and the Pressehauptquartier, the military press headquarters, the latter a euphemism for propaganda, where acclaimed writers like Stefan Zweig, R.M. Rilke, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal eked out their lives. In safe distance from the front, and with varying degree of enthusiasm, they fabricated their eulogies.

“Victories, only victories; you never read of defeats,” infantry soldier Außenhofer wrote in his diary. He never experienced any heroic victories the field newspapers reported. Miraculously, Außenhofer survived the war, unlike nine million soldiers, unlike the emperor, who had passed away in 1916, and unlike the once proud Austro-Hungarian Empire, which disintegrated in 1918.

In local folklore, a salamander, is associated both with rain and fire, and the sky above the Kleine Pal is indeed growing heavy with dark clouds that threaten to bring both. But for the love-drunk salamanders, the trenches are deserted now. The Kleine Pal has become an Open Air Museum, where tourists can inspect the posts, the trenches, the caves, and even the old, rusty cable cars. But the museum, which is free of charge and not supervised, is scarcely frequented. The hike-up is steep and hazardous, so the signs at the bottom of the mountain warn, and should only be attempted in proper hiking gear and in perfect weather conditions. High up, seven Griffon Vultures are circling. Once hunted into extinction, they are a thriving, re-introduced species. Some Alpine swallows are plunging and rising, a marmot whistles in the distance. These are the only sounds. No rumbling, no roaring of rocks. Descending on the other side, one will be in Italy. No passport is required.

Friedenswanderweg with the Friedensglocke – the Peace Bell

5-YEAR RECAP

Tanzania, 2018

I started this website, wanderwarbler, in early 2017 not only to document my travels, but to contemplate and venture into terra incognita philosophically, by means of the books, the poems, the lores and legends of the places I visited. My research deepened my understanding of geography, biology, and of humanity as a whole, as art and abstraction always reveal the truth hidden underneath the banalities of travel schedules, or of daily life.

In the beginning I questioned the moral rightfulness of travelling in a world where travelling was a privilege reserved to a wealthy minority, yet equally a chance for the under-privileged to make a living in tourism-related jobs. I believed in respectful, openhearted and openminded travel, traveling beyond the pitfalls of mass tourism and neo-colonialism. The challenges and experience of travel no doubt made me a wiser, enlightened person. But would my tales and travels change this planet for the better?

Makokoba, Zimbabwe, 2019

My hope was to build an argument for cultural diversity in a world ever more McDonaldized, H&M-ized, Hollywood-ized. Wanderwarbler could make a case against Club Med, but support the family-run Beds and Breakfast’s. In short: emphasize the difference between tourism and travel, which means to respect and to treat every place as somebody’s home, and not a entertainment park.

For five years I kept travelling, learning, researching, writing, but not exclusively for my readers. I kept writing to come to terms with what was hard to bear, or witness: social injustice, scars of wars, the irreversibility of death.

Great Zimbabwe, 2019: 1000-year old stonewall

Obviously, I am not a war reporter. I shy away from war torn places, or countries in turmoil and civic unrest, and my destinations are those everyone could visit without fearing for their lives. Still, wherever I went, on or off the beaten path, I came across poverty and illiteracy, pollution and destruction, and screaming injustice. I held on to the thought that sharing my experiences could change the world for the better, at least on some homeopathic level. Five years later, the world has changed dramatically.

Five years – in terms of planet Earth are nothing, but in terms of social dynamics, a lot had changed. Demagogues – the Trumps, Orbans, and Bolsonaros of this world – scarred communities. Social media didn’t knit us into a tight fabric of humankind, but entangled us in alternative facts and half-truths, in the fake, misogynistic, beauty-filtered world of Instagram. The pandemic and climate collapse, and with it the rapid destruction of habitat and disappearance of wild life, and the commercial conquest of outer space, have widened the gap between rich and poor, between left and right, between those who will have the means to save themselves, and those who won’t.

Franz and Innozent show off their Vogueing Poses in Maltahöhe, Namibia, 2018

For the last two years, Corona travel restrictions have prevented me from travelling far. My trips nowadays are mostly restricted to neighbouring European countries, and to journeys into the past, again and again revisiting those moments that in their intensity, and sometimes in their perilousness changed my life. It’s the African episodes of my travels that keep springing to mind most prominently, like lessons for life.

I often remember Lovemore, whom I met in the streets of suburbian Johannesburg. A tall, lanky man in his early thirties, Lovemore worked as a 24/7 security guard in one on the richest neighbourhoods where the streets are lined with blue blooming jacarandas and the sweet air filled with bird song. He spent his days in his little hut outside an electrified wall, which blocks the view of the villa behind, the pool, the lush garden and the luxury limousines that park in the drive way. Lovemore himself lived in the notorious Vodaphone tower in the city center, a sky-rise that after the fall of apartheid had been taken over by squatters, lacking of electricity, running water, and garbage disposal: a stinking hell in the hands of armed gangs. But Lovemore smiled. On his phone with the cracked screen, he showed me photos of his children, his wife, his family. He talked about the brother- and sisterhood of all people. And how people are misguided, abused, by politics. I wouldn’t be like Lovemore, I thought then. In his shoes, I’d be Loveless. But Lovemore appeared happy. He seemed to live a fulfilled life. We are still friends on facebook and maybe, today, I believe, I love more.

And I remember a journey through remote Tanzania, the Landrover staggering along the dusty red dirt road when we passed by a funeral procession. My driver, Salim, a Muslim, and my birding guide, Emanuel, a Christian, stopped the car, jumped out and ran to hug the grieving family, then shouldered the coffin and helped to carry it along. When they later got back to the car, I asked them whether they knew the deceased. “No,” they said. “That’s what you do. You pay respect.”

Tanzania, 2018

Of course it was those moments that exposed the transience of life that challenged me most in my morals and responsibilities as a human being.

I remember the night I got lost in the Kruger Nationalpark in South Africa. Shaking with fear from lions and buffaloes, I had to walk back to the camp after our car broke down in the middle of the savannah. The Milky Way sparkled above me, a tiara of zillions of brillilant stars in the black of the night, as my feet kept sinking deep into the lose sand, slipping with each step on fresh elephant dung. And I remember, years later, fearing for another creature’s life, when I got to observe three regal lionesses stalking an antelope in the bush of Botswana.

Botswana 2020

I was transformed when I reached the camp in the Kruger unscathed, and I was transformed when I watched the antelope look the lionesses in the eye with defiance. The lionesses abandoned the stalk and lazily lay down in the sun. Life, I learned in the wilderness, is a brittle little thing, and yet it’s only this brittleness that bestows value on it. Only when it seems to slip away, we want to hold on to our lives. Some with fear, some with defiance.

If we all realized that the world as we have known it – a planet filled with animals and birds, with trees and snow-capped mountains – is slipping away between our fingers like desert sand, and if we realize this means our lives, our memories, our values and even our possessions, all we’ve ever owned, will fade as well, will we love our planet, hang on to it like to our lives, fight for it, with fear or defiance?

A Tsessebi, Botswana 2020

No matter where I travelled, I was never alone. There were always other beings around me, humans and non-humans, and I realized that we’re all sitting in the same boat, struggling through troubled water. We all belong to the same ecosystem: a system that’s changing for sure, as we do in a lifetime, and one that’s as brittle as our lives are, and as unique. It is after all the only eco-system in billions of years that brought about human life. Maybe, if I keep telling about the lionesses, whose families are as organized complicated as ours, about the elephants and wild dogs, who take care of each other with love and tenderness just as we do, or the birds, whose songbook exceeds the Bach-Werkeverzeichnis, will it be evident that we are all the same, but speaking in a different language.

Family of Egyptian Geese, Tanzania, 2019

I had to travel to the other side of the world to realize that the life of dung beetle like Sysiphos forever rolling its ball is just as meaningful as mine. Travelling has taught me that I am just a tiny speck in this world, but that I am an important, essential part of it: That I am part of nature, part of humanity, part of every tribe in this world, part of every species. Everywhere is home.

In Matera, 2021

Italy: And God Created the Bicycle

Up a steep mountain road from the picturesque lakeside-town Bellagio, where a forest-covered hill reaches far into the crystal blue waters of Lake Como, there stands against a backdrop of high Alps a little church. Inside, there are no pews. Instead, there are old bicycles attached to the walls, with nametags like “Fausto Coppi,” “Gino Bartali,” or “Alfonsina Strada”. Underneath, the walls are covered with the yellowed portraits of men looking sternly into the camera: Italians, who, like martyrs, have lost their lives in (or off) the saddle.

Madonna del Ghisallo is not simply another church in Italy’s most cosmopolitan tourism hotspot. For centuries celebrities from the Shelley’s to the Clooney’s and even the Pope have set up summer residence at Lake Como in Northern Italy’s Lombardy. The little church, erected in 1623 in dedication to the Virgin Mary del Ghisallo, patron Saint of all travellers, really is a pilgrimage site for the disciples of Il Ciclismo. Cycling is a highly political and religious matter in the Italy’s history, where the fate of riders and races have mirrored that of the nation.

The bicycle was one of the most revolutionary inventions of the 19th century. When mass production of the “anti-horse” picked up in the 1890s, providing mobility and freedom to the poor, it had greatest impact on Italy’s economic and democratic development.

By the turn of the century, the young Italian state (the peninsula was only unified in 1861) suffered from political instability and economic inequality. Italian was rarely spoken in Italy as local dialects prevailed, a sense of identity still lacking. Opposing political currents like socialism, liberalism, anarchism and nationalism competed, often resulting in violent clashes. While industrialization drove the North towards democracy and wealth, the South remained stuck in feudalism and poverty. Bike – and tyre-making factories like Fiat, Bianchi and Pirelli were driving the economy in the North, but in the agricultural South, where there were hardly any roads, the bike found no footing. In the former Kingdom of Naples and Sicily the slow, obstinate donkeys remained the peasants’ means of transport, while the the bikes gave sped up the workers’ movement.

As the bicycle industry provided both the jobs and the means to commute, working was soon linked with owning a bike: to work was to pedal. The socialists were first to recognize the opportunities the bicycle offered when it came to organizing protests, strikes, unions, and blocking off strike-breakers. Soon, the “red cycling” movement was born. Brands like Carlo Marx-tyres catered specifically to the Italian “Comrades and Cyclists”, and low-priced Avanti!-bikes, that came with red Avanti!-shirts, were produced for workers on a large scale.

The bicycle not only became a symbol for the political left, but for women’s emancipation, and for social, individual freedom – and therefore was swiftly condemned by the conservative establishment, who framed it as catalyst for delinquency – bikes providing fast escape from police – and moral decay – the idea of women in saddles being too evocative. For a while, bikes had to carry license plates, and riding bikes after sunset was outlawed. The Vatican forbade their clergymen the use of bikes altogether.

Lake Como

On the other hand, cycling as a sport gained momentum. After the first Tour de France in 1903 a veritable cyclemania had taken hold of France, the Benelux, England, and even the United States. Italy, too, searched to establish its own national bike race and in 1905 the Italian sports daily “La Gazetta dello Sport” organized the first Giro di Lombardia/Tour of Lombardy. To this day, this race remains one of the world’s hardest and most prestigious one-day races.

Dubbed for its date in October, Il Mondiale di Autonno, or: The Race of the Falling Leaves, it challenges the riders not only by the irregularity of its course, from the foggy plains of the river Po to vertiginous Alps at the border to Switzerland, but also by its cold, rainy, in some years even wintery, weather conditions. Whoever, after having criss-crossed the waveless plain of Lombardy, bounded by the vaporous air, islanded by cities fair, in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, could still pedal up the steep Ghisallo was blessed by the pastor of Madonna del Ghisallo in person – and cheered by the masses that throng the road on this day.

Opposite the church Madonna del Ghisallo, where the view of the mountain panorama is best, there is a monument. Two riders, one on his bike with an arm outstretched in a winner’s pose , the other devastated, on the floor by his bike, having presumably crashed. Cycling is not for the faint of heart, and it was even less so in the beginning of competitive riding. In the run of a century many tales were written on the road leading up to Madonna del Ghisallo: dramas, epics, and even comedies.

In the long canon of male cyclists that raced up the Ghisallo one name stands out: Alfonsina Strada. She was the only woman having successfully competed in men’s races, from the Giro di Lombardia, which she signed up for when the race was still open to anyone, to the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, where Tsar Alexander presented her with a medal.

Alfonsina Morini was born the ca. tenth child into an impoverished family in a sleepy village in central Italy, in 1891, when women on bikes were sneered upon, and girls discouraged to even leave the house by themselves. Yet, the stout, boyish girl rode her brothers’ bikes anyway, outracing the other boys in her village, dreaming of a career as a cyclist. When she met the aptly named Luigi Strada (strada meaning road in Italian) a fellow biking enthusiast who supported her unladylike cycling ambitions, she married him and moved to Milan, a cosmopolitan city and a much more liberal place than her catholic village.

Alfonsina rode the Tour of the Falling Leaves in 1917 and 1918, when World War I, which cost Italy a dead toll of 600.000, was raging throughout Europe. But even then, under food- and gasoline rationing, and despite the horrors of the near-by frontline war, the North Italians were craving for the drama on the mountain.

Signora Strada, who “unashamedly showed off her muscular legs,” as a local reporter wrote, and had her hair cut short “bébé-style,” like Coco Chanel would later wear it, finished last in 1917, having crashed (the current ruling was that crashed riders were to receive no assistance), and she finished third to last in 1918.

During WWI Italy had made good use of the cycling-craze. Cycling volunteers were called into the army for transportation of supplies, and twelve cycling battalions were deployed in the conflict. These war-time cyclists made for good heroic epics, which the starving and battered state of Italy desperately needed.

After the war, bike races came in useful: the rivalry, the suffering on the ascent, the crashes on the descent, the pain and the blood of the riders were to become the glue to bind the Italian people into one nation. The Ghisallo was the perfect stage.

Alfredo Binda was from a humble background: a Lombardian family too poor to feed all their fourteen children. As a teenager, Binda emigrated to Nice to work as a plasterer. There, the poor emigrant took up the bike, and, by training hard with this uncle, he became the best rider of his time.

But Binda’s fame didn’t solely rely on his winning – in fact he won so easily, he rendered races boring and was finally paid for not competing. Binda made his name by winning with unmatched elegance and ease. He was a dandy, always dressed to the nines, a lady’s man who attracted a largely female public to the races; an eccentric who smoked, ate large quantities of eggs, infused his water with coffee or wine during races, and even had enough breath to play the trumpet after winning the Giro di Lombardia in 1927. The year before, in 1926, when the Giro di Lombardia was held on a chilling and rainy day, he won by twenty-seven minutes to the runner up. By the time the last riders were crossing the finish line, Binda, having long ago collected his prize and showered, was already on his train home. Some riders claimed that the thirty-four eggs Binda had eaten during the race should have accounted for doping. But that word had not been coined yet.

But the heroic image of the cyclist – a strong mind in a muscular, healthy body – also fit in too well with the ideals of the budding fascism. Soon cyclism was usurped by the right-wing nationalists under Mussolini, who had established himself as dictator in 1925. And, fascism found followers among the riders. Alfredo Binda was one of them.

Because of his allegiance with the fascists, and because of his dominance of the cycling world, Binda was nicknamed “il dictatore.” Until, at last, a rival came along, who would challenge and ultimately beat Binda.  

Learco Guerra was born into poverty, too, and just as disciplined and head strong. Yet, unlike the flamboyant self-made man Binda, the learned bricklayer Guerra was a down-to-earth socialist. In his native city Mantua in central Italy, a socialist hotbed at this time, he campaigned actively for the dominant socialist party, and he was involved or witnessed the violent clashes between socialists and fascists. When the first world war broke out, Guerra signed up as part of the cycling battalions, and, upon return from the frontline, he took up professional cycling.

The competition between the elegant “dictatore” and the socialist superman Guerra, who was nicknamed “il locomotive” for his brutish endurance but lack of strategy, divided Italian cycling aficionados into “Bindarini” and “Guerrini,” but united the country. Even in the South, where cycling was still notoriously unpopular they inspired inspired the poor and underprivileged – especially Guerra – as the anti-fascist writer Carlo Levi remembered in his memoirs.

Mussolini, who didn’t care much about cycling himself but recognized its myth-building power, saw in Guerra’s 1934 victory over Binda a symbol for the superiority of the Italian man, and hence claimed Guerra for the fascist movement. It is commonly understood by historians that Guerra was merely exploited by the fascists – but following this bizarre twist of events, Guerra was suddenly the fascist poster boy, and the more refined Binda won fans among the oppositionists. Italian politics have always been complicated.

In 1938, Binda and Guerra became eclipsed by another rider. Gino Bartali, a devout catholic from poor background, nicknamed Gino Il Pio, Gino the Pious, won not only the Giro of Lombardia, but more importantly the Tour de France. Mussolini, sensing an opportunity to prove the world that Italians, too, belonged to the master race, asked Bartali to dedicate his victory to him. The cyclist refused. Rather, Bartali became a partigiano. As part of a catholic network he helped Jews to flee from Nazi rule in Northern Italy by couriering forfeited documents in the frame and handlebar of his bike.

Throughout WWII, as roads were damaged and petrol lacking, the Italian partisans relied on the bike for transport and communication. Often it was women who, like Bartali, rode their bikes at highest personal risk on behalf of the resistenza, the anti-fascist movement. The Germans, who occupied Northern Italy in 1943, saw bikes as a subversive danger: ‘every cyclist . . . a rebel ready to shoot’.

In 1945, when post-war Italy was still in rubble and ashes, and most Italians had to go hungry and homeless, the Giro di Lombardia resumed. (1943 and 1944 being the only years the race had not taken place). Now, in the newly built Republic of Italy – the monarchy had been abolished by plebiscite – former partisans rode shoulder to shoulder with former fascists, catholics and communists. In a peloton of cyclists, who only months before, would have shot at each other, the drama on the Ghisallo was heightened to the maximum.

Among post war Italy’s strongest riders were Fiorenzo Magni, who had fought with the fascists (and was briefly banned from racing in the Giro for this matter), and the communist Vito Ortelli, Gino Bartali, the arch-conservative catholic partisano, and Il Campionossimo, the bon vivant Fausto Coppi, who won the Giro di Lombardia five times.

During the war, Coppi had been deployed to Northern Africa, where he had become Prisoner Of War by the British. But the record-setting champion of all champions went down in history not only for his victories, but for his scandalous extra-marital love affair with Guilia Ochini. He was banned from cycling for two months for that matter. Even the pope implored Coppi to return to his wife – unsuccessfully.

His love affair with Giulia Ochini cost Coppi the victory of the 1956 edition of the Giro di Lombardia. His main competitor, Magni, had crashed, and, in his own words, wouldn’t have had the strength to continue had not Ochini passed him by in a support car and sneered at him: “Coppi is best!” Magni got so enraged that he jumped back up on his bike and beat Coppi at the finish line. 

Yet, it’s Coppi’s bust that stands at the church Madonna di Ghisallo, with an inscription below:

‘God created the bicycle for men to use as an instrument of effort and exaltation on the hard road of life.’

Like most riders of this time, Coppi was born into a modest background and the bike was not merely a means of transport, of exercise or competition, but a means of pedalling out of misery. And maybe it’s the trials of cycling, the suffering and endurance of life in poverty that cycling represents, that the bicycle has become the pride of the underprivileged, the proletarians as well as the pesants.

In 1948 the church’s pastor, Don Ermelindo Vigano, had the idea to dedicate the church to the cyclists, and make the Madonna the patron saint of all cyclists worldwide. Pope Pius XII, who also remained notoriously neutral during WWII, kindled in his palace in Rome a flame, which was then carried by car and bicycle to the church, making it the most iconic place in cycling.

As a pilgrimage site, the church soon proved too small, and a giant museum was built by its side. The modern building holds cycling memorabilia that make the hearts of cycle aficionados beat faster, and dedicates the entire basement to the an exhibition about Fiorenzi Magni without mentioning his role in fascist Italy. Either the Madonna of Ghisallo has absolved him in, considering his deeds as a rider only, or he has atoned for his sins on the steep ascent of the Ghisallo.

80 years of peace and the economic stability granted by the European Union has also freed cyclism from its political undercurrent. If cycling has become troubled and political again, it is undoubtedly a self inflicted damage through doping. A fact that might have something to do with the race routes becoming ever more longer, steeper and demanding.

In 1960, an addition had been made to the Giro di Lombardia: an ascent so steep it is called a muro – a wall – in cycling lingo: the Muro di Sormano. At a length of less than 2kms, the road overlooking the city of Como ascends at an average of 15%, but peaks at hellish 25%. The incredibly steep slope is highly controversial, having led to many crashes and many riders have to get off the bike and push.

From 1974, when cycling was again dominated by an overly powerful rider, the Belgian Eddie Merckx, nicknamed the Cannibal, stems a funny anectode that might or might not be true. At the Giro di Lombardia, Merckx was challenged by his compatriot Order de Vlaeminck. De Vlaeminck had escaped early in the race, but later decided not to go for a solo ride. He hid behind a bush and waited for Merckx to pass, then rode up to him, asked him, whom Merckx was actually chasing, then sped off and won the race ahead of Merckx.

This Saturday, October 9th, the 114th edition of the race from Como to Bergamo, passing by the Madonna di Ghisallo, but not the Muro di Sormano, will be held again. The riders will face six climbs, completing a total elevation of 4500 meters during the race.

Even though cycling has changed so much in the slightly more than hundred years of its existence, many things have remained the same. Those who have chosen cycling as a hobby, let alone those who pursue it as a career, know that it is, despite all the gossip and politics involved, a lonely sport. No matter the quality of frame and tyres, no matter the steepness of the road, or the sting of the headwind,  it is a humbling, meditative exercise, that strips the rider to the core. Once out of breath, once the legs have tired, there is nothing left but will, or, in other words, faith.

In the museum at the Ghisallo there is a quote by Albert Einstein. Life, he said, is like a bicycle. One needs to keep pedalling not to lose balance. And in the church, suspended from the wrought iron gate before the altar, there is the cyclist’s prayer:

O Madre del Signore Gesù, we beg you to help and protect our cyclist activities. We ask you to make the bike a vehicle of brotherhood and friendship, that can elevate us ever closer to God.

Amen.

Italy: A View of Paradise

At last, after a long losing streak, the tables are turning. For three years of soaring unemployment, of closed shopfronts, deserted beaches, and soup kitchens, the future looked bleak. Now the golden sun sparkles on the turquoise waters of Lake Lugano again, the trees don’t shiver, but sway dreamily in the early summer’s breeze. Once again everything seems possible. Once again, the people of Campione d’Italia are gambling for high stakes.

Campione d’Italia is a little Italian town located at Swiss Lake Lugano. With stunning mountain views and clear waters, cypresses and palm trees, and dolce fa niente, the Italian enclave is indeed a piece of Italy in the middle of Switzerland. The name goes back to medieval landlord, Campione, who left his estates to a monastery in Milan. A Papal State that remained Italian when the Helvetic Protestants took their oath, Campione was for decades spoilt for success.

The rise of Campione started in 1917, during WWI, when with the sole purpose of spying on foreign diplomats, a gambling licence was granted to Campione to open a casino. After the war, the Casino di Campione was closed again, and the town fell back into provincial slumber, but in the 1930s, Mussolini, recognizing its strategic importance in the middle of neutral Switzerland, not only added “d’Italia” to the former name “Campione” in an imperialistic gesture, but he reopened the Casino. Tax-exempted, all profits were to go to “Campione d’Italia”.

The Casino soon became a hot spot of international intelligence. The US Office of Strategic Services – the precursor of the CIA – opened an office there, and, with diplomats of all sides rubbing shoulders at Roulette and Black Jack, the little town saw a fair share of secret service intrigue and 007. After the war, when Italy lay shattered in ruins and ashes, Campione d’Italia kept prospering.

The Casino provided jobs to a quarter of the 2000 locals, and a steady inflow of foreign currency. With the roulette’s wheel turning until 6am, nightlife was vibrant, with concerts and music festivals all year round. Restaurants, hotels, gyms, and boat clubs and upscale boutiques were flourishing as international High Society and VIP’s promenaded along the lido, the lakefront.

Campione had the best of both worlds. With Italian verve, it outshone luxurious, but staid Lugano on the other side of the lake. Cappuccino was ordered in Italian, but paid in with Swiss Franken. Telephone numbers were Swiss, as were car plates, and insurance policies. From rubbish collection to schools, municipal services were reliably provided by Switzerland, and paid for by the Casino. With gambling prohibited across the border, fortune smiled on Campione. Money kept rolling in and Champagne bottles kept popping, real estate prices soared.

But the rich didn’t flock to Campione simply for the fun.  With a moderate income tax, no inheritance tax at all, nor gift tax or VAT Campione d’Italia was a tax haven.

Then Campione started pushing its luck.

In 2007, Casino was rebuilt. At the cost of more than 100 million Euro, Swiss star architect Mario Botta designed a block-shaped 36,000 square metre colossus that offered 56 tables and 1,000 slot machines to 3,100 gamblers at a time. Sitting at the lakefront, the ochre monster dwarfs the old town up the steep slope behind it. Instead of Italian charm or Swiss understatement, the Casino di Campione d’Italia oozes Sowjet megalomania.

The redesigning came at a bad time. The same year, new Italian laws allowed for gambling machines in bars and café, stealing Campione its unique selling point. Then Switzerland unexpectedly permitted gambling and soon three casinos opened near-by, one of them in elegant Lugano on the other side of the lake. Then, unforeseen online gambling became a thing. And really no one in Campione had thought about the possibility of the Swiss Franken gaining in strength against the Euro. Relying on Swiss services, Campione started amassing enormous debts.

So the unlucky streak began. When the Casino failed to come up with the maintenance costs of its high-priced municipality, one after the other, the city offices, the nursery schools closed down. The mayor resigned, and clerks were left waiting for months for their pay checks in offices they had no fuel to heat.

When finally, in 2018, the Casino declared bankruptcy and closed for good, the boutiques first lowered their prices, then the scrollbars. The gyms shut their doors, then the bars. Then the restaurants closed, and the soup kitchens opened.

But then things got worse. In 2000, after long legal battles, Campione was forced to join the European Union, an unwanted “Brexit al contrario.” Italy finally revoked Campione’s old tax exemptions. From one day to the other, people of Campione had to report to Como in Lombardy, crossing EU borders to get new car plates, telephone numbers, even to collect their amazon parcels, which were now delivered by Italian postal services. They realized with horror that no one in Campione had a tobacco license. For each package of cigarettes, they had to cross borders into Switzerland now.

Just when it looked as if couldn’t get any worse for Campione, the Corona virus spread over Europe, holding Lombardy in a tight grip. Cross border traffic between Switzerland and Italy came to a halt, bus service was suspended. The only way to get to Como was now to walk to the Italian border, and to quarantine.

Rien ne va plus.

“S-O-S. Campione is dead.” A banner the local Lion’s club had mounted on the lido read. People now had to rely on meagre Italian unemployment cheques, others went without pay. Debts to Switzerland counted 175 Million Franks. Neighbouring Swiss communities helped their suddenly impoverished neighbours with warm food and clothes. But while some felt desperate, it was a moment of catharsis to others.

“If you eat too much caviar, you will get sick,” the starred chef Baptiste Fournier said in an interview with the BBC. He saw a new beginning, a chance to re-organize the economic system, become independent from a single employer, or from another country. There is, after all, much more to Campione d’Italia than Baccara and Black Jack.

There are palm trees softly rocking in the breeze, there is the sweet scent of the ancient cypress trees in the ear. Red kites are whistling as they cross the cerulean sky, and flocks of black-headed gulls come sailing in to rest on the calm, turquoise waters. A group of old men are playing cards by the lake front. One of them, turned away from the group, is singing the old Italian song Volare, flying, in the delicate falsetto of old age. He looks across the lake, to Paradiso, Lugano’s cosmopolitan lakefront, the elegant lido against a backdrop of high mountains.

Then, luck turned.

This June, a court in Milan approved a refinance plan. By the end of the year the Casino is scheduled to reopen, people are re-employed, restaurants re-opened. The sun shines on Campione again, and again Campione d’Italia is counting on Fortuna. The ball is rolling.

AUSTRIA: COSSACK LULLABY

Slumber sweet, my fairest baby,

Slumber calmly, sleep-

Peaceful moonbeams light thy chamber

In thy cradle creep;

I will tell to thee a story,

Pure as dewdrop glow,

Close those two beloved eyelids-

Lullaby, By-low!

In June 1945, in the outskirts of Lienz, a sleepy town in the Austrian Alps, British soldiers found an abandoned new-born in the shrubs. Certain of her mother being dead, drowned in the near-by river Drau, they handed the baby girl to a local family where she would grow up a “wolf’s child.” A cossack brat. The off-spring of the wild Cossacks.

WWII had ended less than a month ago, on May 8th. The British had arrived in Eastern Tyrol as a victorious army, the Cossacks only days before them. 25.000 Cossack men, women, and children had crossed the stormy and snow-covered Plöckenpass from Italy.  It was a hazardous crossing, for they had travelled in their traditional Russian one-horse carts, which were suitable for the vast fields of the Eastern steppes, but not for the steep Alpine roads. The Cossacks had brought along all their possessions, their instruments and incomprehensible songs and wild dances, their jewelry and copper kettles, and a sheer uncountable number of horses, cattle and camels. The Eastern Tyroleans, in their inaccessible valleys had so far been spared from the horrors of war. Now, outnumbered by the strangers, they were in awe and fear.

Austro-Italian border, the Dolomites in the back

But the Cossacks hadn’t come as invaders but to meet up here with the British. Before setting out on this hazardous mountain crossing, in Tolmezzo, Italy, they had struck a deal, that the British army would take them as prisoners of war. The British, in God’s name, should take them, and not the Sowjets, who were advancing from the East, and who would execute them for treason, or the Italian partisans in the South, who had sworn revenge for what had happened in the war. Alas, it was the British who would fail the Cossacks in what would later be remembered as the tragedy at the Drau.

Valley of the Drau

Grievous times will sure befall thee,

Danger, slaughterous fire-

Thou shalt on a charger gallop

Cubring at desire;

And a saddle girth all silken

Sadly will I sew,

Slumber now my wide-eyed darling,

Lullaby, By-low!

The Cossack graveyard of Peggetz sits nestled in a tranquil residential neighbourhood in the outskirts of present day Lienz. Those who visit usually stumble here by chance and find themselves alone with the orthodox tombstones and Cyrillic inscriptions. The lush panorama of the serene Alps, the arias of the blackbirds and the soft gurgling of the river Drau belie the drama of the past. The inscriptions, translated into German “Unbekannte Kosaken” are all the same: “Unknown Cossacks”, and bear the same date, June 1st, 1945.  Those buried here aren’t soldiers, a white print out at the gate informs, but at least three hundred women, children, and civilians, who had committed suicide when it became clear that the British were not keeping their promise, but handing them over to the Sowjets, where certain death in Stalin’s gulags awaited them.

Stemming from the wild fields, the vast uninhabited steppes of what is now Russia and Ukraine, the Cossacks were originally – some 1000 years ago – a loose community of freemen: anyone could join them, peasants fleeing the oppressive feudal systems of Poland or Russia, Jews or Christians alike. In the run of the centuries, their originally liberal culture was moulded by their role as eternal outcasts: By fending off frequent Tartar attacks, they gained their adroitness on the horse back and their military organisation. By standing up against Polish catholic oppression, they became fervent orthodox Christians. Organized in Hetmanats, democratic entities, the Cossacks soon started expanding their territories engaging in countless battles with the Ottomans, venturing far into the East, into Siberia and beyond.

Their military strength and ruthlessness soon became notorious. The great powers from the Russian tsars to the Austrian Habsburgers, and even the Vatican relied on Cossack merceneray armies. It is safe to say, that the Cossacks fought in every European war – they defeated the Ottomans when they besieged the Habsburger capital of Vienna in 1683, Napolean when he tried to invade Russia, the Prussians spoke in horror of the Cossack winters of the 19th century.

When I see thee, my own being,

As a Cossack true,

Must I only convoy gice thee-

“Mother dear, adieu!”

Nightly in the empty chamber

Blinding tears will flow,

Sleep my angel, sweetes dear one,

Lullaby, By-low!

The Cossack’s present day representation as national emblems of patriarchal, autocratic and nationalistic societies of Ukraine and Russia stands in a stark contrast and perversion of the Cossacks’ tolerant, democratic origins, and their role as oppressed minority in these very same countries. In fact, the Cossacks were outcasts, tolerated at most but never integrated in Poland and Russia. But the Nazi-chapter and British betrayal of the Cossacks may play an important part in this interpretation of Cossack identity. There is, however, another side of the story. Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish writer of the Tsarian Russia, called the Cossacks the protectors of the Jews. “When we hear the word Cossacks, we grow a new skin. We feel safe, and fear noone,” he wrote in his short story “Wedding without music”, in which the Cossacks prevent a Jewish Pogrom.

It was especially the Russian tsars who used the Cossacks for their political goals. In exchange for tax exemption and personal freedom, the Cossacks served the tsar as soldiers and police force, often exerting cruelty against political opponents and dissidents. There were however, both in Poland, Russia, and the protectorates poor Cossack peasants, who instead of fighting for foreign powers remained free and – oppressed. Accordingly, in the October revolution of 1918, the Cossacks were the first to fight the Bolsheviks – searching to keep their privilege – and the first to join the Red army.

In the USSR, the Cossacks were an oppressed minority because of their involvement in the October revolution. As aresult, when Nazi Germany pushed Eastwards, they offered Hitler support. Reluctant at first, Hitler installed Cossack battalions from 1942 on, as did the Sowjets. Doubtful that the Cossacks would fight and kill other Russians, the Germans deployed the 1st Don Cossack Battalion in the West Balkans to fight the Tito Partisans.

Thy return I’ll wait lamenting

As the days go by,

Ardent for thee praying, fearing

In the cards to spy.

I shall fancy thou wilt suffer

As a stranger grow

Sleep while yet thou nought regrettest,

Lullaby, by-low!

The fighting in the Balkans was abhorrent. The Don Cossack Regiment committed war crimes like mass rapes and executions, decimating the number of Tito partisans by the ten-thousands. Yet, with the Allied forces gaining upper hand in the war, the Cossacks had to withdraw. In another historic absurdity, the Germans now promised them a state of their own, in the Northern Italian region Friaul, right across the border from the Austrian Eastern Tyrol.

Dispossessing local Italian farmers, they established Kosakia in the steep Italian dolomites. Cossack families moved in from the East. Believing to move in for good, the Cossacks set up infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and orthodox churches, making the little town Tolmezzo their new capital. If they weren’t before, the dispossessions turned the local Italians into partisans who fought the Cossacks. 

I will send a holy image

Gainst the foe with thee,

To it kneeling, dearest being,

Pray with piety!

Think of me in bloody battle,

Dearest child of woe,

Slumber soft within thy cradle,

Lullaby, by-low!

When defeat became inevitable in April 1945, the Cossacks packed their carts and fled to Eastern Tyrol, which was under British control. There, they set up camp in Lienz and waited to be taken to Great Britain as promised. Lacking a common language and mores, they had little contact with the local population. Some traded food, others medical help. But all in all, the Tyroleans remained sceptical of their uninvited guests.

In the meantime however, the British, fearing for their own prisoners on Sowjet territory, decided during the conference of Jalta, to hand the Cossacks over so as not to anger Stalin. When the news of their impending deportation East not West hit the camp, mass panic broke out.

In an act of passive resistance, the Cossacks held mass when the British arrived. The soldiers found them immersed in praying and singing. Some children from Lienz witnessed what happened next:

“We saw, how the British soldiers rounded up the Cossacks. And at the near-by rail road tracks, we saw the wagons waiting, and then only we heard the screaming and shouting and praying and when we looked closer, we saw that they had locked their arms, forming a tight circle around their pope who held up high a cross. And then we saw, how they pulled them up on the wagons. They were covered in blood.”

The British shot and beat those who resisted. Some Cossacks shot back, but most committed suicide, by shooting their children and themselves, by throwing themselves and their children into the waves of the Drau. Some escaped into the woods, where they were later found hanging from the trees. A few hundred lucky ones escaped to the snow covered high mountains.

At the end of the Day, June 1st, there were no Cossacks left in Lienz.

A handful of wolf-children grew up in the villages of Eastern Tyrol, strangers from the wild fields they had never seen, lacking the words to tell the story, unable to hear their mothers’ lullabies.     

CRADLE SONG OF A COSSACK MOTHER  by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, translated by Martha Bianchi Dickinson.

Bell of peace at the Austro-Italian Border

Book Review: Woman Africa – Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Triptych of Zimbabwe

As a child in Southern Rhodesia, Doris Lessing used to listen to her mother playing Beethoven and Chopin on the piano, and at the same time the drums playing in the compound. She didn’t see any reason why these two kinds of music shouldn’t be played together. “You had to be much older to understand that African drums and Chopin weren’t really a part of the same phenomenon.“

The teenager Lessing, whose family had moved to the British colony benefiting from the Land Appointment Act of 1930, was beguiled by the endless sky, the cascades of the rains, the melodious crescendos of the kingfishers, and the traditional mbira-tunes of the African work gangs on the maize fields, but appalled by the piercing racism, the narrow-mindedness and the strict social confinement of the patriarchal European society. Like her alter ego Martha Quest, the protagonist of her Children of Violence-series, Lessing left Africa, to pursue a life as a writer and free woman in London. Africa remained in the dark, a tragic, mysterious continent under Western yoke.

Tsitsi Dangarmebga’s trilogy Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book Of Not (2006), and This Mournable Body (2018), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, also focuses on the coming of age of teenager girl in what was Southern Rhodesia then, but is Zimbabwe now. The writer, one of a growing number of black Zimbabwean voices is, next to Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, Novuyo Tshuma, NoViolet Bulowayo, or Panashe Chigumadze, one of the most prominent writers to shed light on the female African experience in the 20th century. Yet, unlike Dangarembga, who, like Lessing left Africa to study in Europe, and who names the Nobel laureate her literary idol, the trilogy’s protagonist never got the chance to leave.  

The girl Tambudzai Sigauke also suffers from the injustice and confinement of tradition and patriarchy, but unlike Martha Quest rarely mentions the unlimited Africa sky, or the beauty of rains and kingfishers. For the Shona teenager from a rural village trying to make her way in or out a colonized country, from the 1950s to the year 2000, when Rhodesia turned Zimbabwe, the oppression is total.

Dangarembga’s trilogy zooms in on the lives of the women under oppression, under patriarchy, and most importantly the unerasable effects of colonialism. For all the gold and diamonds extracted from the sandy African soil, Christianity and Western erudition have been imported, turning post-colonial Africa into a battleground of two clashing cultures.

Property and Real Estate, the bible, self-fulfillment and the one-directionality of progress and growth stand opposed to Hunhu, the Shona equivalent to South African Ubuntu, an ancient spiritual view of the world shared by the Bantu tribes. In this belief system, history is multidirectional as the past, present, and future melt into one state of consciousness and the deceased live on as good or evil spirits. Empathy and respect must be offered to all other human beings, those of the past, the present and the future, since an individual can only exist in relationship to the others: their kinship, their family, their ancestors and off-spring.

If, by the British colonialists the Bantu tribes were regarded subhuman, and therefore property, like animals, it was because of their inseparability from nature and the supernatural, from animals, birds, trees, and spirits. And it was this lack of respect for fellow human beings, which cleared the whites off their humanity in the eyes of the Madebele and Shona.

Uri munhu here? Kuita kwemunhu here? Are you a human? Is this how a human being behaves?

Aiwa, murungu. No, it’s a white person.

It is of course an anodyne and only partially correct representation of Bantu culture as egalitarian or non-belligerent. The 1000-year old predecessors of present day Shonas, Zimbabwe’s biggest tribe, built the mystical Great Zimbabwe, which now stands in ruins near the city of Masvengu, were strictly hierarchical, wasteful and prodigal – traits which are believed to have led to their demise.

The long history of colonialization, which started in 1488 with the arrival of Bartholomeo Dias at the Cape of Good Hope, did not leave the tribal Bantu societies unchanged in their philosophy and view of the world.

Missionaries, most notably Jesuits and Domenicans, gradually displaced traditional teaching and medicine, and the ancient belief systems, and Hunhu, faded. Oppression, violation and traumatization have shaped the Shona, Zimbabwe’s biggest tribe. The struggle for liberation has become part of their national identity.

The spirit of Mbuya Nehanda, a woman who is said to have fought against the Portuguese when they invaded Southern Africa in 1530, has returned again and again in Shona women, who then became spiritual guides in the liberation wars, from the first against Portuguese invaders, to the first Chimurenga of 1890 (the liberation struggle against the British) against the Rhodesians during the second Chimurenga of the 1970s. Currently, Mbuya Nehanda is believed to possess a child in rural Zimbabwe.

The spirit keeps haunting Tambudzai Sigauke in Dangarembga’s trilogy, as the cultural rift doesn’t run between black and white, or oppressor and oppressed, but within those born into post-colonial Africa. The teenager Tambudzai, like Martha Quest a few decades before her, dreams of becoming a heroine, a self-possessed free woman, a European woman. But Tambudzai will remain an African heroine, inseparable from her culture and people, lost in the ubiquity of history.

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in 1959, into colonial Southern Rhodesia. After spending her early childhood in Britain, where her parents pursued academic degrees, she returned to Rhodesia at the age of six to attend a private English speaking school. Her first language was English, she says, her native Shona the second. Only after hearing a beautiful Shona poem recited at a graduation celebration, did Tsangarembga realize that with Shona tradition being an oral one, not a written, there was a need for African writers and African literature with which she and other African women could identify. The experience was as enlightening as it was painful, she said: to think we’d lost so much of it.

Tambudzai is not Dangarembga’s alter ego, unlike Martha Quest was to Lessing. Rather, Tambudzai’s life story mirrors that of Zimbabwe as a country: Born as a colony, a unilateral declaration of independence from the mother country, a violent struggle into liberation, and a troubled adult existence in a failed state.

The rational, the political and the historical intersect in the personal, Dangarembga recently claimed in an interview with the BBC. In her three books she clearly locates this intersection in a woman’s body, the neuralgic breaking point of a generation, or a country. So much so, that Tambudzai is indistinguishable from Zimbabwe, from the land and history of the Shona people. The trilogy can be read a parable of how the subjugation of nature and of a nation, is the violation of women, of humans, of humanity itself.

Nervous Conditions starts with a shocking declaration, one sentence entirely at odds with anything Hunhu.

I was not sorry when my brother died.

At thirteen, Tambudzai, growing up in a village, has but one wish: getting an education, like her brother. But in traditional societies of the 1960s, only boys are educated and prepared for being the next family patriarch. Lacking other brothers, Tambudzai manages, after some considerable struggle, to take his place at her uncle’s missionary school. This uncle, once an excelling student in Europe himself, values academic merits as highly as family tradition. Gladly Tambudzai trades her calloused soles for patent leather shoes, the Mango tree and lantana shrubs in her family’s homestead for Latin declinations and mathematical equations, and the lazy winding river where she used to skinny dip when she was done with laundry, for the paved road leading up to the Sacred Heart. At this catholic convent Tambudzai, after being the best student at the missionary school, is one of only a handful of African girls chosen to receive a Western education.

I was infatuated when we turned into the school gates. The grounds were majestically spacious. I never did discover how many hectares of land those nuns owned, but to the eye it looked like hundreds. We drove, slowly, because there were humps, up past the tennis courts and the netball, yes, netball courts, to a thicket of conifers that seemed to signify that within this rich kingdom we had left the province of the physical and entered the realm of mental activity, because beyond these trees was a roundabout at the top of which stood the school buildings. The dormitories, bright and shimmering white in the clear summer sun, stretched towards us on one side of the roundabout, the classrooms stretched down on the other. Between them was an archway, supported by ornate plaster pillars in, I was to be told, the Greek style, not the Roman.

The Tambudzai of the first two instalments is an overly ambitious student, eager to grow, and willing to erase any trace of African heritage to transform herself into a vessel for Western erudition. This ambition and focus on career, to trade the past and present for a glorious future, and to make a name for herself stands in opposition to the traditional values of Shona society, where women are named after their firstborn.

Her family’s homestead is not a place of nostalgia to the student Tambudzai, but a dark past, a birth defect. Returning for a brief school holiday, Tambudzai observes:

The only affection anyone could have for that compound had to come out of loyalty. I could not imagine anyone actually wanting to go there, unless, like me, they were going to see their mother. This time the homestead looked worse than usual. And the most disheartening thing was that it did not have to look like that. The thatched roof of the kitchen was falling out in so many places that it would be difficult to find a dry spot inside when it rained. Great holes gaped on the crumbling mud bricked walsl of the tsapi, and the hozi was no more than a reminder of shelter.

As a village girl, Tambudzai is thoroughly African, instilled with the gentle African mind set of Hunhu. She is uncritical of the West since her experiences of injustice stem from her own village. From her family’s point of view, especially her mother’s, her striving for enlightenment, for rationality and science considered internal colonialization, a nervous condition, like Stockholm Syndrome.

Tambudzai’s mother is represented as passive-aggressive, a character suffering from her husband’s emotional absence, a woman falling short to fulfil the traditional chores of a mother: to provide nutrition for the family, which was historically a woman’s domain. The racist husbandry laws of Rhodesia, which attracted white British families like the Lessings, made land cultivation impossible for the natives. While white immigrants were assigned the fertile land, African families were relocated to dry and barren lands that yielded too little. Her daughter Tambudzai’s failure to recognize her as a role model represents a further humiliation.

“The business of motherhood is a heavy burden, she tells her daughter. …When there are sacrifices to be made, you are the one who has to make them. And these things are not easy; you have to start learning them early, from a very early age. The earlier the better so that it is easy later on. Easy! As it it is ever wasy. These days it is worse, the poverty of blackness on one side, the weight of womanhood on the other. Aiwa! What will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burden with strength.”

The problematic relationship between daughter and mother remains a central point throughout the trilogy.

“In Zimbabwe, we are faced with multiple oppressions. We go back to traditional society and conservative patriarchal society in which women are not really expected to have a voice so that again is working upon women to silence them. And then you come into this postcolonial state where the material circumstances are such that women are heavily burdened in just managing that situation.“

To her mother, Tambudzai has become a Murungu, a white person. But in Rhodesia, she remains an African, a second-class citizen.

The second instalment, The Book Of Not, focuses on Tambudzai’s late teenage years at the convent, and the last decade of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. The white politician unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent from Great Britain in 1965.  The hair-rising structural discrimination of blacks in this internationally shunned state, leads to banalities, such as missing sanitary installations to dispose of hygienic products, posing unconquerable problems to Tambudzai with dramatic outcomes.

The situation was this: I was in two aspects a biologically blasphemous person. This became interestingly clear as I walked, my head low, to the first lesson. My corporeal crime indicted me on two counts. First were the secretions that dripped crimson into the toilet bowl, or, stopped with cotton wool, clogged the school’s waste system. Then there was the other type of gene that made me look different from the majority of pupils. Even if these others ran the risk, as I did, of rendering the waste removal systems dysfunctional, at least they were different in appearance. How was I going to redeem myself, I wondered miserably?

The solution Tambudzai comes up with is simple: Work harder. With radical determination she immerses herself in her studies to make up for her two short-comings: being female and being black. Her idea of Hunhu gets sprinkled with a catholic sense of repentance and Mea Culpa. The thought of revolution doesn’t cross her mind, not as mortars are exploding in the nearby mountains as the liberation struggle gains momentum, not when one of her classmate’s father is being lynched by guerilla fighters, not when her younger sister Netsai, who joined the liberation struggle, steps on a mine and loses a leg.

In the 1970s, the second Chimurenga, the liberation struggle against Rhodesia, was in full swing. It was a decade of violent bloodshed. Revolutionary armies frequently held moraris in the villages, revolutionary night-time gatherings to boost morale and recruit fighters, or terrorize villagers by executing those who they believed to collude with the Rhodesians or a rival revolutionary army.

However, the Shona culture is traditionally non-violent, so much that the colour red, as it is the colour of blood, is shunned. Yet the Book of Not is blood-soaked – arterial blood, menstrual blood. Dangurmebga makes a strong point subtly linking womanhood to victimhood.

Despite all the bloodshed, Zimbabwe’s independence wasn’t gained on the battlefield. In 1980, following British intervention, a treaty was signed in London, granting political majority rule to Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party, whom the British wrongly regarded as the least radical of the revolutionaries, but maintenance of economic power for the white minority of landowners.

The Book of Not begins with the fear and confusion of a violent morari, and ends in the new Zimbabwe, after 1980, in the euphoria of new beginnings, of first independence and hope. The pain simmering in the pages comes from the reader knowing long before Tambudzai that the doors on which she so desperately knocks will never open to her.

The third book, This Mournable Body, short listed for the Booker Prize in 2020, is written in the urgency of Present Tense and the second person PoV. This can be read as an emphasis on the universality of Tambudzai’s story, but also as Tambudzai’s further estrangement from the world and more importantly from herself. If The Book of Not, could be understood as a tale of African female self-erasure, now the “I”, the identity of Tambudzai and Zimbabwe, are lost completely.

Set in the last decade of the 20th century, a sense of doom lingers over the book, over Tambudzai and the country. After a short phase of euphoria, Zimbabwe experienced from 1990 on a steep economic decline. White structural privilege had not disappeared, but Robert Mugabe and his winning ZANU-PF had installed a system of corruption and personal enrichment. Fifteen years of war and genocide against the Ndebel nation, Zimbabwe’s second biggest tribe, had left the country traumatized as the horrors of the past remained present.

“There’s a whole question of what is self,” Dangarembga says, “We had a self that was, and still is to some extent, part of a tribal structure. But this nation self was born in violence, and we haven’t confronted that.”

In the book, Tambudzai is in her late forties and still living in a cheap students’ hostel in Harare. Her world is a brutal social wilderness, devoid of any Hunhu, of solidarity or empathy. Instead, in the first pages unrolls a shocking rape scene of Tambudzai’s young and beautiful roommate Gertrude, in which the protagonist plays a doubtable role.

They throw her onto the ground where she sags with shock. The crowd draws in a preparatory breath. The sight of your beautiful hostel-mate fills you with an emptiness that hurst. You do not shrink back as one mind in your head wishes. Instead you obey the other, push forward. You want to see the shape of pain, to trace out the arteries and veins, to rip out the pattern of its capillaries from the body. The mass of people moves forward. You reach for a stone. Your arm rises in slow motion.

Rape has many layers, many perpetrators. A scarcely clad young woman is lynched by a mob to reinstall a patriarchal system. But as a metaphor for the raping of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo rivers, first by Cecil Rhodes, then by Ian Smith, and finally by Robert Mugabe, the question of personal complicity remains. History books are written by and for victorious men, women are eternally victimized and omitted, their story not told, nor remembered.

Like a wounded animal, Tambudzai roams the quarters of Harare in search for shelter and an income, some dignity. After all these years, she is still trying to make a name for herself. Desperation governs her actions. Haunted by spirits that crawl on her skin like invisible ants, or laugh like hyenas, she is driven into madness.

“The political trajectory in Zimbabwe has been so negative. If you have a negative trajectory the space for people to operate shrinks and everybody is pushed into this very narrow tunnel.” Dangarembga explained in a BBC Hard Talk interview in April 2021. “If the trajectory had been positive there would have been so many possibilities for a character to develop that I could have had many different stories but because everything has shrunk and everyone, one way or the other, is fighting to survive, it meant that was the story that could be told.”

There is, however, one economic branch flourishing in Zimbabwe, providing both jobs and perspectives for the dominantly rural population, as well as for African fauna and flora to recover from a century of exploitation: Ecotourism. National parks and lodges are drawing capital into the country while investing into wildlife conservation and sustainable lifestyle. Yet, as Tambudzai seizes the opportunity and is hired by a Safari agency catering to the European market, another can of worms is opened. Now blond, pink-skinned tourists armed with high tech photo gear and expectations of exotism, are arriving colonial style; management hierarchy goes along racial lines; racial stereotypes and even slum tourism are promoted.

Nonetheless, in the trilogy, we meet other Zimbabwean women, who dealt with history differently. There are those who joined the army, like Tambudzai’s aunts and sisters, those who were lucky enough to escape to Europe, like her cousin Nyasha, and those who stuck to the traditional ways of living, like her mother. Tambudzai is not merely flotsam in the currents and undercurrents of politics and history. Instead, it seems, that it’s her obsession with success, or rather a specific, European kind of success, set against the ancient African values, that keeps Tambudzai fighting upstream.

Again, after long absence, she visits her homestead where she wants to set up accommodation for foreign tourists.

A couple of dogs are asleep in your family’s homestead. Their bloated tongues spill onto the earth. They pant with shallow breaths. Ribs expanding like the hoods of cobras, which gentle motion nevertheless does not disturb the flies that buzz about the animals’ sores. Neither animal barks at the Mazda’s wheels, nor bays to alert a family member. Your vehicle stops under the old mango tree, gnarled and drooping now, that had stood guard over the family members’ arrivals and departures for decades.

 “Ewo, Tambu,” she greets you. “You of the years. Isn’t that right, so many years? If this womb agreed, this mouth would say you are one from afar, nothing but a foreigner visiting. Only the womb knows better.”

You swallow your frustration, smile and embrace her again. Patience is both weapon and victory. How much of it have you deployed in your life? Come what may, and soon at that, whether the people here know it or not, you will be queen of the village.

In 2017, after a successful coup in 2017, geriatric dictator Robert Mugabe was finally replaced on the grounds of human rights violations and hyperinflation by Emmerson Mnangaga from the same party, ZANU-PF. However, Mnangaga’s prominent role in the Ndebele genocide is not forgiven, and with climate change, droughts and corruption still adding to the mix of already overwhelming troubles, the country cannot recover. The Corona pandemic has finally dealt the last blow to a brittle economy and a barely existent health system. The toll on women and their bodies again heavy, with hunger, illegal prostitution and AIDS becoming widespread problems.

Zimbabwean society, Dangarembga finds, has long turned away from Hunhu and towards a transactional society, where not solidarity is a person’s main concern, but the question the personal survival, if necessary, on the cost of the next one. It is, in fact, a deeply capitalist society.

With the character of Tambudzai’s cousin Nyasha, Dangarembga has written herself into the book. Like Nyasha, Dangarembga studied in the United Kingdom and at a film school in Berlin, and, having returned to Zimbabwe with a German husband and trilingual children, she now lives as a writer, film maker and political activist.

After an arrest last July for protesting the government, Dangarembga has withdrawn from politics, as did most of Zimbabweans. The dire daily situation which consumes all energies makes it impossible to further invest oneself, as do corrupt political structures. Instead, like cousin Nyasha in the book, Dangarembga relies on the force of creativity, on filmmaking and storytelling to instill power into people and most importantly women by giving them a voice, and most importantly, their narrative.

“The lives of black women are mournable, although society doesn’t mourn,” she says. “We are still trapped in a colonial past. It is important to experience oneself not as a second class citizen – be it as a person of color, a woman, or an older person. The engaging from a perspective of recognition, of oneself, of the other will do that, no matter what country. A people – not angels but not rudimentary souls either.”

Doris Lessing was a fan of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s. In a BBC special from 1993 she praised “Nervous Conditions” to the British public. In an interview with the New York Times, in 1982, the school drop-out Lessing said:

“I’m glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Euro-centered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got.”

Nervous Conditions – ayebia 1988

The Book Of Not – ayebia 2006

This Mournable Body – Gray Wolf Press 2018

Photos were taken during a trip through Zimbabwe 2019

My Nature

I was born in Vienna, in a grey, treeless quarter close to the main train station. The parallel steel trails cut through the blocks of run-down, four-storey high apartment buildings like a wild ravine, lined with prickly shrubs that bore like berries the trash tossed from the whistling trains, and teeming with wildlife, with rats and martens, and fluttering pigeons. The cobbled streets were thronged with parking cars, and at night, when the street lights lit up like stars, in their yellow light columns I could see from my window the ladies in thigh-high boots smoking cigarettes between red-tipped fingers.

Naturally, when we were little, my sister and I weren’t allowed to play outside. We were confined to our apartment, which we only left for our short way to school, for a shopping trip to the fresh food market clutching my grandmother’s hand, and for the tramway ride to our ballet school in the city centre. But even in our urban seclusion, where the vast world was televised, but not experienced, seasons did not pass unnoticed.

Winters were humming radiators, and school commutes in the dark, and the constriction of winter coats and lined leather boots. Spring was the freedom of light clothing, the bouncy walk in ankle-free slippers, and the morning air soft and warm against our pale cheeks. Summer was the nauseating odour of dog turds baking in the midday sun, and light gauzy curtains flapping in the breeze. Autumn was chills and colds, and icy rain seeping in by the collar of my between-seasons coat. Seasons were a question of outfit.

Yet, I was always aware of this other world called nature, where there were trees and flowers, mountains and rivers, and wild African animals, where there were floods and avalanches, draughts and volcano eruptions. Nature was an abstract word, like war or hunger, which I had never experienced either. And even though nature had a beautiful connotation, something pristine and biblical, like the garden Eden, it was ultimately a place of danger. Nature was wilderness, like the world outside our windows, full of rats and cruising cars, and strange men I must never ever talk to. Safety was an apartment with central heating.

Since this was the only world I had learned to live in, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. As a teenager, I looked down on the country children, who didn’t have the privilege of cinemas, punk concerts and coffee shops. As an adult, my life, a dancer’s life, was strictly indoors.

It was only in my forties that my world changed. On a tour through South Africa, I decided to offer myself a short holiday, and booked, unknowingly, a cabin at a self-sustaining, permaculture farm in the endless, wind-beaten semi-desert of the Karoo. My cabin at the far end of a bumpy dirt road had no address, just GPS data. It had no electricity either. The nights, illuminated by the brilliant Milky Way, were filled with the bawling of baboons and giggling of jackals. The days I spent squatting at the door of my little cabin, staring at the bushes, where weavers were busy building their intricate nests, and koorhaans strutted in the dry grass, displaying their beauty under the yellow Southern sun. It was there, nibbling on a pomegranate, ignored by the weavers and the koorhaans, that I realized I was part of this world. I wasn’t barricading myself, I wasn’t invading anyone’s space. Nature, I felt, welcomed me.

If environment moulds a person, if landscape is imprinted on a child like a native language, then this is what I am: a creature of the urban jungle. The rattling as the tramway passed by below our window was my ocean surf. The light beams of cruising cars running across the ceiling were my meteorites. The flickering blue glow of the windows of the building across the street was my night sky.

Now, in the second half of my life, I redefined my world. I find in the bird song, in the whistling of the wind, in the immensity of the night sky unobscured by light pollution the peace of my child hood home, the night in wilderness as exciting and alluring as the streets below my window. Nature is not a place of good or evil. Nature is home.