Gomorrah, Part Two

The second part of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah delves into the mythos underlying not only the Camorra, but also the mythos underlying Saviano’s own resistance of the mafia. Saviano refers to the archetypal Don Peppino Diana and a young, female schoolteacher, both people in Camorra-owned southern Italy who defied and made declarations against the mafia. Saviano repeatedly calls on the power of “the word” as he brings his account to a close, detailing a visit to the grave of Pier Paolo Pasolini and invoking his 1974 “I Know” political speech. Saviano’s travelling to Pasolini’s grave, along with his accounts of Don Peppino Diana and other defiant figures, calls forth the power of a resistant Italy, a space of inspiration. In this way, Saviano waxes Romantic. The Camorra likewise delves into history, art, and film. One of the most striking lines of Part Two is in the chapter “Hollywood”: “It’s not the movie world that scans the criminal world for the most interesting behavior. The exact opposite is true” (250). The Camorra is not only the direct offspring of fierce economic competition and class inequality, but Hollywood. Saviano reveals an Italy built from inaccurate representations of inaccurate representations, simulacrum. The Camorra is hyper-real and much of its power seems embedded in that pure mythos of The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Tarantino. Saviano also speaks of the real, the dead, both human and ecological, that result from this potent mixture of the economic and filmic hyper-real, systems with no basis in reality that destroy the real and tangible.

Gomorrah, Part One

Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah depicts an Italy which criminal economics and the race for profit has stripped from the R/romantic mythos swathing the country of Rome and Renaissance, fine wine and high fashion, the ancient world and revitalized women in mid-life crises. Instead, Naples and the cities and neighborhoods haloing its dirty high-rises and skyscrapers constitute the central location of massive death tolls, experiments on heroin addicts, containers of Chinese corpses en route to home graves, red carpet-worthy sweatshops, and girls who catch boys as a career, landing young Mafiosi whose salaries go to girlfriends in case of death or imprisonment. Powerful families locked in deadly vendettas are not new to Italy, but the family-based mafias of Gomorrah’s exposé don’t provide the backdrop to a tragic love affair with poisons and daggers. The Mafias of the Di Lauro, La Monica, Quadrano, et cetera, families are reinforced with AK-47s. What is most striking about Saviano’s account is not the violence, though the violence is grisly, callous, and overwhelming; rather, it’s that the Camorra is at its basis an economic endeavor, a confederation of families committed to financial endeavors who turn criminal in order to cheat a failing system and who have, amidst incalculable murders, actually in some ways benefitting the Italian economy. In Part One of Gomorrah, Saviano impresses upon his readers the economic weight of the Camorra and the ways in which this dominance directly leads to Southern Italy as a mass grave.

Original Prompt 3, Week 4

“I want to find some left turn into dream/ or story, the next chapter, memory/ not saturated with regret, into/ a vision as unlikely as the mare/ with sweat-soaked roan flanks and a tangled mane,/dragon’s breath steaming from her flared nostrils/ onto a wind too sharp to call a breeze/ cantering riderless across the square/ opposite, between the children in the sandbox and the old men arguing/ on benches, in French…”

Marilyn Hacker, “A Sunday After Easter”

Left is sinister in Italian, and I want to find some sinister turn or hook or swing into another week, not my last in this country of impossible doors. In Venice, trying to board a vaporetto with only half an hour until our train pulls metal across metal to Bologna, it begins to rain, and we realize, breath-close to so many strangers, that we are not on the boat, but in a waiting room anchored into the canal whose bottom we cannot see through the green water. We ran until our faces filled with heat and the rich dank earth rose from our skin, through the rain, across slippery Venice, the water already lapping across the slate tiles by the Grand Canal, we thought we could follow it. We run to walls. A fork, a beggar sits cross-legged, head sunk into his shoulders (like his shoulders are the sea and his bald head his city), looks up, hard palms open to ring with coins, closes one, points left. “Santa Lucia? Stazione?” I burst, and his finger remains to the sinister left. There is no time to spill gratitude, no time to regret dropping the map into a canal, fumbling with my camera, no time to regret the old lady I sideswiped with my duffle, only burning in the rain in a labyrinth of a city built over a sea. There is only the bridge, white, rising to the left, over the Grand Canal, darkening in the rain, and Santa Lucia.

Original Prompt 2, Week 4

“The village spoke and said:/ Your roots are steeped in red,/ your bones are benches, mugs,/ a shawl, a hut, a tank,/ a densely carved-on tree./ Think back to splintered wood./ No name, no family./ The tale not fully grown,/ stories not understood.”

Rachel Hadas, “Codex Mirror”

Spoleto spoke and said: The moss will soften the stone, soaking it into itself, morbida, soft as death, soft as the dirt over the grave, the lawn over cheap clapboard. You know no stone or moss, only cinderblocks, fallen fig trees, indelicately named grapes. You know no ruin, only the sad belly of chain link fences, falling, know only disrepair. Your house that is only a century old isn’t bruised with time yet, shingles dissolve, don’t soak sunset like mold on terra cotta, your roofs built over roofs are young still, you don’t understand the solitary sweetness of decay, of the brandy-soaked body of a saint, the slowness of it. Think back to a slower tongue, mouth full of sweet, look behind you and turn not to salt, but stucco, let your face be framed in crushed lapis lazuli, to fade through centuries, and you’ll know the pleasure of ruins, which is only the need to crumble that rises up from the body until it makes the earth shiver in Assisi, lava throb in Pompeii. Or be quiet. Sit still and be burned by time, know why these trees twist and rot, sacred, penned in by dark iron, hardening in their own shade, know how the convent sinks into its own small ribs.

Image Junkyard 4, Week 4

Spoleto on Sunday afternoon. Little girls pull pizza apart with their fingers in dresses and tights. Poplar fluff rises and descends in the air, settles on the slate stones on a street with three cafes. Last night, I had a dream where I woke in front of a mirror, gray streaking my hair. The buildings, colored crème, celestial blue, seafoam, and blood orange gelato are crammed close together and into the sky, blocking Montelucco with windows spilling red flowers and rooftop gardens filled with vines, the green standing out in the midst of a maze of terra cotta.

Image Junkyard 3, Week 4

Venice is slippery. Until it rains, the maze of stone tiles and the rise of shops and homes piled upon each other into the sky seems like it could last forever, hand painted by street artists with tiny plumed paintbrushes and pastels. Then it rains, and people pour onto vaporettos to escape the beautiful sinking city. Bright green canal water laps onto the streets and ancient stone steps leading down into the water wave with seaweed and algae. And even though Venice is crammed with people, English, German, Russian, Italian rebounding off the stone, skidding the water, the city is quiet, confident, its own. Even when you're not in sight of a canal, you know you're in Venice. A bookstore, closed for lunch, is its own Venice of decaying paper and bruised book covers. A money box, inscribed with Italian instruction, swings from the door handle. Outside, books are stacked on books, two euro. Wooden stands bend under the weight of so many Italian words.