Nomadic displacements
Nadia Gambilongo
This work has been written bits and stages, in different moments, many of which in situations of detachment from my place and passage to other destinations, as I was going towards other women's places. In these moments of displacement, of passage, I feel I can see inside myself with higher lucidity, I can better understand the places I go across, better understand the sense of this hard networking I have been doing for a while.
In these moments of suspension from the everyday, between a leaving and an arrival, I feel serene, I feel that the level of awareness within me is growing, as a tuning in with the world, as if I stopped to look at it without seeing it.
This feeling of easiness, of apparent lucidity gives me strength and actually reinforces my action.
In the transit places, of passage to other destinations, it is almost natural to think over what we left and what we are going towards. These are mind conditions in which you might find yourself naked in front of yourself, it is then that the body speaks to you. In these rare moments it is possible not only to see the daily oppressions, but also to visualize the obstacles.
When I am in Calabria, in my place, I am almost totally absorbed by the thousand difficulties of living in the South, difficulties that, in the latest period, with the worsening of the political and economic crisis Italy is undergoing, have increased a hundred times.
To live in these places, where the experience of feeling overwhelmed by a context that incredibly resists every change, has become a daily dimension which I sometimes find difficult to face.
What, in ten years of hard work, was tried to be built, here in the province of Cosenza, and I am referring to the creation of an area of advanced tertiary directed to the creation of innovative structures for formation and data transmission has, at present, the consistency of a sand castle on the shore of a stormy sea; until now the weather forecasts have not reported anything good, who knows tomorrow?!
And this `who knows' that you do not master, in which your acting seems unimportant or ineffective anyway, destroys the consciences, leaving permanent traces. But like the reeds which, struck by the wind, bend, wear out but do not break so I sometimes seem I can endure the elements and feel stronger after every storm.
A dangerously lived year, this one in Calabria.
Now I do not want to tell you how possible it has been to witness the inexorably advancing crisis, which is causing the clearing off, splitting up and reorganization of structures like the Consorzio per l'Università a Distanza, the Consorzio per la Ricerca ed Applicazione di Informatica, the Intersiel and other university connected companies, rare advanced realities in the territory of Calabria, and also of a national importance.
Streams of words will be written on how this could have happened, on the end of the Extraordinary Intervention in Southern Italy, on the cut in the Public Expenses for the Research, I myself will have my say in other occasions, but now I want to give you an account of the regression in the creation of public areas of women who wanted, here in Calabria, to get in contact with the rest of the world. In fact, it seems that the project concerning the creation of a Dipartimento Donna (Women Department) inside the CUD is vanishing, closely tied up as it is to the destiny of the structure; at the same time it seems to be more and more difficult to start, in this context, a Centro Editoriale Multimediale delle Donne; yet on this very project we have undertaken initiatives, both at a local and international level, which make us feel surer about its future.
The creation of this places would have allowed a lot of women from Calabria to enhance their work, their experience and mainly to let it settle down with time, leaving traces of its passage, of the links, the connections with other places, with other women. Without the support of these structures all this will be very difficult, as usual, and most of the work already implemented will be inexorably lost.
It is on the wave of this strong emotion that I am writing, sustained as I am by the networking with the other women, here and in other places; and this has allowed me to find ever new energies for me and my projects, and mainly to face up to new difficulties.
To give an account of the place from which you are speaking, of the emotions that take you, is part of the undertaken way; furthermore it gives a partial explanation of the delay of this issue.
The work started with Mediterranea2 sprang from the desire to start from me, from my South, in order to express a marked subjectivity, conditioned by the fact of being born and having chosen to live in the South.
`Marked', `conditioned' often refer to a vision, readings of somehow negative experiences; but the Mediterranea project intended to make the complexity of this experience, of life in these places emerge; condition which cannot be judged on mere valuation: positive if referred to a romantic vision of life in the South, or negative if referred to the most commonly emphasized things, of which I have just given an account. It was, and still is, the desire to make one's experience emerge even in its contradictory and partial nature, to compare it with other experiences, partial as they themselves are, marked by the fact of being rooted, or better located, in that place and not in another one.
I prefer to underline the word being located rather than rooted because it more immediately refers, merges with the act of moving, displacing towards other places, towards other women.
The different experiences, the different level of difficulties with which we confront in the search for freedom for ourselves and the others are, in my opinion, an inestimable patrimony, which finds strength and richness in the comparison. In this sense, in the search for freedom the I and we cannot be split.
When you feel weighed down by the context in which your bodies move, the comparison with other realities, with other lives, opens other views on the world and on yourself. The voice of the other expressing solidarity and support to your acting allows you to see and overcome the obstacles. This very experience, whose attempt to build, to plan has to come to terms with a not exactly favourable contest, paradoxically becomes richness, not only for the originality of the experience tied up with this particular place, to this biography, but also because in situations of serious difficulties, of conflict you often learn something unpredictable, unseizable, which you may understand later on, but which is of vital importance for your way. This we have experienced during the hard networking with the Israeli and Palestinian women, in the discussion groups in the Mediterranean area, as well as in meeting the Tibetan women and in many other occasions in which the conflict, the difficulties seemed insuperable.
The assuming a position, the responsibilities for one's position, allows to live one's time, to see the obstacles, to answer one's choices, one's way, since from that position it is always possible to look back and reconstruct the itinerary followed. I think I can see the obstacles, they are tied up with the asymmetries, disparities with which we relate, which depend on our being from the north, south, east and west, where it is always possible to meet somebody who thinks she/he does not need to "displace", feeling she/he is in a central, privileged situation, thus having the right to name the others.
"Scrivo per sostenere politiche ed epistemologie legate ad un luogo, ad una posizione e collocazione, dove è la parzialità e non l'universalità la condizione perché siano ascoltate le nostre proposte di sapere razionale. Sono proposte che coinvolgono la vita delle persone. Scrivo per sostenere la visuale che proviene dal corpo, un corpo sempre complesso, contraddittorio, struttutante e strutturato, scrivo contro la visuale dall'alto, da nessun luogo, dalla semplicità".
With these words Donna Haraway3 very clearly states her position, whose purpose is not the mere partiality of a restricted voice which expresses a confined position, but aims at "unexpected connections", at openings made possible by situated knowledge. The only way to get to a wider vision is being in a precise point. The joining together of partial views is a promise of a vision of how to put roots within the body slowly and limitedly, of life within limits and contradictions, that is the view from a certain place which, in joining other situated knowledge, gets strength and v(r)igour.
This was clearly evident in Beijing, and the feeling was even sharper if we compare the two events that overlapped one another in China: The U.N. World Conference on Women of Beijing and the NGO Forum held in Huairou.
It was there, apparently, before everybody's eyes, before the 30.000 women from all over the world met in a prominent site where women's empowerment4 was something tangible, palpable, noticeable.
But in order to see it you need woman's eyes, aware of their partiality, tied up with their specific position5, ready to take responsibility upon themselves.
There are various ways to narrate Beijing, both because the events overlapped6 one another during the two weeks time and because each of us had her own eyes to look at and feel, perceive what was going on. It is evident that the filter of our origin, our biographies, was very strong if compared to what we observed, perceived, but it is also true that in Huairou as well as in Beijing it was very difficult to feel in the centre of the world, to think of universal `things' that could suit everybody; everything needed necessarily to be measured, practically compared with the other women whom did not need to be imagined: they were there.
Richness was exactly in enhancing one's and other's differences.
To me Huairou has been the feast of differences that authoritatively (im)posed. By means of the different skin colour, the style of clothes, the sound of the various languages, (...) the unforgettable flavour of the small cakes made by the Filipino women, the amber smell of the Indian women, the differences related to each other, joined together, exchanged.
The differences were inscribed on our bodies, on which thousand tribulations could be read; and your look could stop on those bodies because the reciprocal curiosity was the norm. This cognitive dimension was great, we all used to record, film, take photos, in a great feast of colours, sounds, wishes.
All this took place at the foot of the Great Wall, symbol of irremediable divisions and conflicts between those who think to be in the centre of the world and those who are forced to live on the fringes.
This was only an apparent contradiction.
North, South, East, West, compass points, places of contrasting cultures, spaces in which the economic power governs, all this was sharp evident at the UN official conference in Beijing, a lot less in Huairou.
In the sparkling Sporting Centre of Beijing the atmosphere was very different - a thousand mile distant from the mud which swamped Huairou with its shaky camps, pulsating vitality - the carpet muffled the sounds, the governmental delegations from different countries were indistinguishable, all united by the same splendour, the western standard of luxury deadened the ethnic and cultural differences, omologation had god the better of them. From the Babel of Huairou to the global village of Beijing, this was the strongest feeling in going from one site to the other.
Though no longer the humid of the persistent rain beating down on the open-air stands in Huairou was perceived, all the same I felt shivering, because more than ever I clearly understood that the contacts that were established in that place were soaked with a horrible blend of dollars and blood. And it was the same evident that war is not localized in one place, solely confined in a territorial contest and absent elsewhere; war is not in the ex-Yugoslavia, in the Caucasus and nowhere else, war is among us, it seeps into our relations, relations among women, among men are deeply affected. Violence that shows in the war sites spreads at a global level and, from there, it comes back reinforced, in a circuit which makes it incomprehensible where the first spark started; in this circuit the disconnection in which the non-violence is practised, the search for possible mediations are still extremely rare areas.
The power relations among people and the institutions are expression of this. In the course of the UN Conference all this was very tangible. But there too - as a confirmation that complexity exceeds any judgement or attempt of a global analysis - happened that `unexpected encounters' occurred, there too it was possible to hear meaningful words.
In Huairou the atmosphere you breathed was very different, but there too the differences were rather evident; the numerous and well organized presence of some delegations, the American ones for example, very much clashed if compared to the small delegations from Nepal, who covered the journey expenses by selling the fabrics they had bro-ught from their country. The difference between the women who were there for the power and consistency of their work and those who were there with the power of their money was very wide.
The continuous commuting from Beijing to Huairou, from the Official Conference - where we had been accredited as `observers' and journalists7 - to the NGO Forum, underlined the contradictions, already very deep in themselves, between the women who represented the institutions and the women who belonged to associations, and emphasized the nomadic look. And in this context it had become stronger the idea that the image of sisterhood, in which the idea of a universal similarity among women dominates, had been given up in favour of the acknowledgement of the complex semiotic and material conditions in which women have to act8. It is important to move from these latter in order to build alliances, mutual plans, measuring ourselves in the political action.
We cannot imagine the other women, the way to freedom they have undertaken, we must actually meet them, to deeply exchange and change; and when this really happens we are no longer the same, after these moments of strong relation and exchange. And it is impossible to re-locate ourselves without taking the responsibility of the displacement that occurred9. It is important to understand the change that the encounter, the exchange have originated.
The positioning, followed by the displacement refers to the nomadic condition, where more than the traveller it is the availability to be put into question, to reverse the given conditions, which is a method to practice the change but is also a method of interaction, of knowledge; and it is in this context that the networking becomes networks of knowledge to understand, to better understand each other.
To start from a being rooted, or better being located to activate the displacement, this is the great confirmation I have found in Beijing: the reinforcement of the political practice of the et/et, of the importance of the struggle against the aut/aut rooted in me, in us.
But the attempt to deal with conflicts, the search for the possible mediation is not an easy way because it constantly clashes with the differences, the asymmetries, that often have the acrid smell of the money earned too easily, which leaves permanent traces in the relations, marked by the power concealed behind alleged authoritativeness, by the unwillingness to displace because certain of living in a central situation. But when, to the swap market, where the relations which create negotiation are put forward, you take what you are and not what you have10, the present differences, the different wishes, generate wealth, from which everybody can draw according to her needs.
And in the here and there work, in one's and the others' places you can take small steps forward in this direction. The hard mosaic work and the passion show the way, visualize the obstacles, in which the suffering of living here, the effort of displacing is the price to be paid, but also the means to change, to chance oneself. To continuously renew and yet be faithful to oneself, to the search for freedom which is born from the ability of modifying oneself, which in its turn can be acquired through the practice of negotiation to oneself and between oneself and the world.
1. Rosi Braidotti, Soggetto nomade, Donzelli, Roma 1995
Rosi Braidotti, Dissonanze, La Tartaruga, Milano, 1994
Rosi Braidotti, Il Paradosso del soggetto femminile,
femminista, in "La differenza non sia un fiore di serra", Franco Angeli, Milano, 1991
2. "Mediterranea. L'Osservatorio delle
donne", Pellegrini Editore, Cosenza, n. 1,
2, 3, 4 1990 e n. 1/2, 3/4 1991.
3. Donna Haraway, Manifesto Cyborg, Feltrinelli, Milano 1995
4. Con il termine empowerment intendo non tanto l'acquisizione di potere,
bensì un "rafforzamento di sé, l'acquisizione di consapevolezza, del proprio valore,
lo sviluppo di un più potente senso di sé in rapporto con il mondo" (Kiefer).
5. Adrienne Rich, Bloom, bread, and
poetry, Select Prose 1979-1985, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London.
Adrienne Rich, Segreti silenzi bugie, La Tartaruga, Milano 1982.
6. Basti pensare che solo a Huairou dal 30 Agosto a l'8 Settembre si sono
tenute circa 3400 iniziative tra manifestazioni , seminari, dibattiti e workshop.
7. La possibilità di partecipare alla Conferenza ONU con la doppia veste di
`observer' e di giornalista, mi ha consentito di verificare sia l'andamento dei lavori
nelle diverse sessioni che di registrare le informazioni che venivano date
all'esterno durante le conferenze stampa.
8. Teresa de Laurentis, Sui generis, Feltrinelli, 1996
9. D. Haraway, ivi.
10. "Sottosopra Rosso", Milano, 1996.
