By Loredana Lipperini
Eight years ago when Wu Ming (who still called themselves Luther Blissett) explained how they write as a group, they used this image: “It’s like with jazz: great collective spirit, group arrangements and individual solos.” From that method a first novel, Q, was born—and sold 250,000 copies. Employing the same philosophy (collective writing, renunciation of real names in favor of a pseudonym, no photographs, no television appearances) they followed Q with 54, various “solo” books and a screenplay, Lavorare con lentezza, or Radio Alice). And now the third and most ambitious test for the five writers, Manituana, recounts the war between Great Britain and its North American colonies from the point of view of the Iroquois Indians who sided with King George.
Why does a group of Italian storytellers decide to recount the birth of the American nation? Furthermore, why turn not only the conventional image of the Indians on its head, but also the later, “politically correct” one?
We rejected the second vision as well, the “alternative” one, partly because it was created for another historical and geographical context (the conquest of the west during the 19th century), and partly because we’re not interested in the cliché of the “innocent” Indian who’s in harmony with nature, technologically backward and a victim sacrificed on the altar of progress. Things were more complicated than that, and we tried not to simplify them. [run in or indent] At any rate, it’s completely within the Italian and European tradition to deal with America, pushing the boundaries of the cage of archetypes and stereotypes that America has constructed around its heart. And the gamble of working on a trans-Atlantic imaginary framework is certainly not “hardly Italian.” Sergio Leone and company found the philosophers’ stone within the western genre: they worked on the most worn-out clichés and transformed them into gold. A film like Once Upon a Time in the West–written, scripted, directed, photographed, edited and scored by Italians—is a potent narrative about and representation of America, of its conscience, of its quintessential nature. Today more than ever, with the Atlantic having widened due to the choices made by the Bush Administration, it’s vital to question ourselves on the complex relationship between us and America.
In Manituana the historical characters are transformed into literary heroes with great emotional force: how did you construct them?
In the initial phase of the documentation we found ourselves dealing with characters with complex biographies, novel-like, Romantic in the 18th-century sense of the term. Frontier lives, characters straddling worlds and cultures: it wasn’t difficult to transform these figures into literary heroes. And so the biographies served as a breeding ground for developing the nonhistorical characters, the imaginary ones. We tried to render on the page a sense of complex relationships on different levels; we searched for the common thread in existential and apparently divergent trajectories while looking for the motives for detachment and difference in those destinies that seemed similar.
Above all the women play a determining role, even from the political point of view. To what do we owe this homage?
We’re well aware that we’re an all-male collective, and we’re aware of the difficulties involved in our giving depth to female characters. In this case historical reality came to our rescue. The Iroquois society had very strong and deeply rooted matriarchal components. Clan membership—a foundation of the social organization of the Iroquois as it cut across tribes and nations —was determined by matrilineal descent. Furthermore, the Iroquois women wielded a precious and strategic prerogative: adoption. The fate of prisoners of war depended on them: they could decree their death, as compensation for children and husbands fallen in battle, or request their assimilation into the tribe, for the same reason. It was much more common for the latter to happen. These groups weren’t large populations; they needed bodies to work the land or to go hunting and fishing. But adoption rendered a prisoner to all intents and purposes a member of the nation and of the Clan, with every right and duty that that entailed. Many important leaders had been adopted prisoners.
What does a story set in the 18th century tell us about our present?
It’s difficult to reduce a novel to one key reading. In a sense, telling the story of the birth of the United States already means dealing with the present and with America as a global problem. You could say that Manituana recounts the story of the disappearance of a hybrid reality, crushed by the logic of the clash of civilizations and the birth of a new nation. The foundation of the Untied States didn’t occur at the expense of the “noble savages,” as an edulcorated version of history states, but at the expense of a hybrid culture, interethnic, politically complex and full of contradictions. If then we consider that the Americans of the last quarter of the 18th century were nothing other than Europeans who emigrated across the Atlantic, we quickly find ourselves grappling with the foundations of our own civilization, and therefore of our globalized present. This involved the West not only in the geographical sense, but in the political and cultural sense too. It represents, that is, the extreme consequences of the impact of “whites” on the world.
The use of an uncanny street slang in the book comes across as a homage to Anthony Burgess’s
We often quote Paco Ignacio Taibo II, according to whom experimentation has to be the invisible seam that holds the story together. There’s nothing unknowing in our method of laying out words and phrases, but our goal is not “pretty writing.” If you look closely at our sentences, you’ll see that we try to obtain a subtle alteration in the syntax, and shift the meaning of words, even just a little bit. Often it’s enough to remove a “me” or a “you” to obtain a sentence that “vibrates” and remains suspended like a hovercraft, a millimeter above the page. This should never be an end in itself, but rather functional to what we want to relay, done as discreetly as possible. The less the reader is aware of the strangeness of certain choices, the better it is. Often, later, it’s the translators who point out to us the difficulty of understanding some passages that in Italian seemed simple.
To tell a story is to discover a world. The pages of a book are one of the magic portals that open it up. You can chose to keep the other portals closed or to push all of them open, in a sign of hospitality. Once again, it’s about deciding whether to offer a universe to contemplate, untouchable in its presumed beauty and perfection, or to invite others to transform it, to develop its potential. It’s not just an aesthetic choice: if we believe that men and women together are able to better the world, we’ll do everything so that our readers can better our stories, by any means necessary.
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