When the Indians invented punk two centuries ago

Article by Marco Philopat published in the journal XL, no. 20, April 2007
The first young people with Mohican cuts? They appeared in 1776, copying the native Americans. The story is told in Manituana, the new book by the authors of the Bologna collective that nearly drove our Philopat mad.

As soon as I’d finished reading Manituana I wanted to cut my hair into a Mohican, like in the old days. Set before the revolution that brought America into being, Manituana is a story from the wrong side of history: the Indians. Published these days, the latest collective work by the literary clan, writing workshop, cultural and political project of Wu Ming, the ‘no names’ of Mandarin Chinese, had the same effect on me as the first punks in Portobello in the late 1970s.
‘I want to have a Mohican cut again!’ I said to everyone I me. ‘But you’re out of it, Philopat, there are some things you’re too old for!’ ‘Try and read the latest Wu Ming, then you’ll understand,’ I told him. It’s true, I do go in for easy enthusiasms, and this novel, set in the land of the Six Iroquois Nations, may have got me more involved than it should have. Thayendanegea Joseph brant, the Mohawk war chief, a real character who was received in London by the King of England in 1776, is the protagonist, along with his sister, a woman with shamanic powers. She will dream the escape route to Canada, to the Garden of the Great Spirit: Manituana, where your eye always meets ‘water, trees, land and light’. Impeccable from the historical point of view, the book opens many windows of reflections, not least upon the modern age, and its narrative structure recalls those adventure books about Indians that I read when I was sixteen. Every time Ronaterihonte Philip Lacroix, nicknamed ‘Le Grand Diable’ for the courage and ferocity of his fighting, appears, the reading of the pages is as fast as a tomahawk thrown to smash the skull of the enemy, but it was the London emulators of the Mohawks who drove me out of my mind. In Manituana, when the delegation of the Six Nations land in England, the authors describe an outlaw street gang terrorising the fat and opulent London of the 18th century with bows and arrows: the Mohawks, the sons of the poor who paint their tufts of hair, yelling their war-cries. But then the metropolitan Indians and the punks have had descendants, I thought in my delirium. Perhaps the signature Wu ming conceals the five representatives of the new Iroquois nation! In spite of my insistence, I didn’t manage to get my hair cut in a Mohican, not at home, not in the office and not in my favourite bar… I was desperate, how could I restrain my desire for a great indigenous alliance? I took the train and went to see Wu Ming to put myself forward as the representative of the sixth tribe… They came to pick me up from the station. First they took me to a sinister loft, then to a bar dominated by distracting advertisements for tomato products. I wondered if it had all been staged to keep us from talking about the Mohock Indians. I couldn’t expose myself by immediately suggesting a tribal union, so we started talking about Manituana. They explained the concept of the logical reconstruction of a historical episode, its slow transformation into a novel and why it was that they had chosen that particular scenario. ‘The Mohawk territory bounded New York at that time, connections between natives and settlers developed the embryo of a multicultural society. We took that consideration as our starting point, trying to ask ourselves how the Mohawks saw it in the period preceding the revolution, at the moment when the novel’s protagonists faced very difficult choices.’ The talked to me about their manic work on chiselling away at the text, then the research, months and months of it, into a pile of archived texts, films and books. ‘Most of the volumes we consulted were published in the last four or five years. We too were surprised. It’s as if the Americans, after September 11, asked themselves some questions about their own warmongering origins, about the source of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the subsequent extermination of entire peoples. The Iroquois Nation is very different from the Sioux or Cheyenne Indians of the second half of the 19th century, about whom there is a flourishing literature and filmography. For example, there were absolutely no horses, no bison-hunting, and certain self-destructive practices were absent. The Six Nations had a very advanced constitutional form, so much so that the American version was to a certain extent inspired by it. And all of this immediately after General Washington’s order, that cry of ‘civilisation or death’ that wiped out every Iroquois village.’ From here, Wu Ming set off into the detailed description of native society. ‘Within the clans there was a matriarchal organisation, then there were the meetings at which the sachems and the elders were very important, and it was only if there was a battle going on that the war chiefs were important, otherwise their vote had the same value as anyone else’s. Also, they had developed a great capacity to welcome half-breeds and subjects of other races who could also have become war chiefs.’ As it was all starting to take rather a long time, and I was pondering the problem of how to introduce the topic of my holy affiliation, I asked: and the Mohocks? The metropolitan Indians who wanted to join up with the six Nations?’ ‘We took our inspiration from a true event related by Jonathan Swift, we also talk about it on our website (manituana.com) in a parallel downloadable narrative.’ He remained tight-lipped and I had to insist. But wasn’t there a direct descent to punk? As if the generations had passed on that rebel gene, an underground river that reappears every now and again in the course of the decades and centuries?’ ‘Bah! A distant one, perhaps… The punks were born in London in 1976, exactly two centuries later. In fact that’s a coincidence that might make you think about some kind of astral connection. Then there were bands like Flux of Pink Indians and Chumbawamba who drew inspiration from the Indian imagination. But nothing more than that. The few Mohawks who survived the extermination sought refuge in Canada… We will write about what happened in our next novels.’ At that point I was completely defeated, and talking about sans-culottes, charcoal-burners, the urban proletariat, Empire State Building tightrope-walkers and the shock-troops of the people, partisans and metropolitan Indians. Nothing doing… We said goodbye on the way to the station. In the train on the way back I began to understand my post-reading hallucination… Ok, I won’t redo my Mohican, I haven’t signed any alliance, but I’ve achieved a better understanding of the friends I’ve been following attentively for a long time. Q, published when they were still called Luther Blissett, 54 and Asce di Guerra [Battle-axes] are books that I have devoured and which filled my historical lacunae. Together for almost 15 years, the first preoccupation of Wu Ming is to take us out of our ignorance, driving forward a unique and precious project, always on the side of the disinherited, the poor and the losers. A project entirely dedicated to the great people of the nonconformist Nation of Letters, the true one, this time, not one that has emerged from my chaotic illuminations.

11.04.07 · on recensioni