Interview by Asbel Lopez UNESCO Courier journalist
Antonio Tabucchi
“The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.” Above, Berlin police gesture Romanian gypsies to move on.
“Xenophobic violence is the most serious conflict in Europe today.”
Above, skinheads on the outskirts of Paris.
East Timorese lining up to cast ballots in the August 30, 1999 referendum on independence or autonomy.
If a politician’s job is to
soothe people, to show that all’s well because of his or her presence, mine is to disturb people, to sow the seeds of doubt. The capacity to doubt is very important for human beings. For heaven’s sake, if we don’t have any doubts, we’re finished!
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Keeping his options open Antonio Tabucchi is used to
writing his novels on hot, empty July afternoons in Lisbon, where he lives for six
months of the year. But this summer, he had other things on his mind. None of his
colleagues in the International Parliament of Writers was able to go to East Timor
to write about the referendum there in late August, a historic step in the Timorese
people’s fight for independence from Indonesia. He hesitated to go to this island
700 kilometres from Australia because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get back
in time to give key evidence in favour of a gypsy family in a court case in Florence. |
Xenophobic violence is the most serious conflict in Europe today, one which I think it’s imperative for intellectuals and writers to oppose in word and deed
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Bibliography Tabucchi’s works translated into English and published by New Directions include Pereira Declares: A Testimony (1996), Requiem: A Hallucination (1994), The Edge of the Horizon (1990), Indian Nocturne (1989), Letter from Casablanca (1986), and Little Misunderstandings of No Importance (1987). His Fernando Pessoa, written with Maria José Lancastre, was published by Pocket Archives in 1997. |
An Italian
novelist jolts the forces of complacency in the world of fact as well as fiction
The central figure in your best-known novel, Pereira Declares, A Testimony, is
an ageing and lonely widower who is in charge
of the cultural pages of a newspaper. Why did you choose an anti-hero as your main
character?
I’ve always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions. The more doubts
they have the better. People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive
and exhausting than others, but they’re more energetic–they aren’t robots. I prefer
insomnia to anaesthesia. I don’t go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.
In my books, I’m not on the side of the authorities. I’m with those who’ve suffered.
My first novel, Piazza d’Italia, was an attempt to write history that hasn’t been
written, history as written by the losing side, in this case the Tuscan anarchists.
My books are about losers, about people who’ve lost their way and are engaged in
a search.
What are they looking for?
They’re looking for themselves through others, because I think that’s the best
way to look for oneself. The main character in Indian Nocturne, who retraces the
steps of a friend who’s disappeared in India, is involved in such a quest. And so
is Spino, the character in The Edge of the Horizon who tries to find out the identity
of an unknown corpse. I don’t know whether these people are going to find themselves,
but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others
have of them. They’re forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage
to glimpse something of themselves.
After the success of Pereira Declares with the Italian public, there was some talk
of your running for election to the Italian Senate. Do you regret ruling out that
opportunity?
No, I’m happy to go on living the life I’ve chosen. I’m a university teacher
and I like my job. Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point
of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher. Literature for
me isn’t a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.
I don’t want to promote my own image either. I don’t like going on television or
mixing in literary circles. I live quietly at home among my family and friends. Besides,
there are politicians who do the job far better than I ever could. I think it’s more
interesting to keep a sharp eye on politics. My job is to look at what politics is
doing, not be a politician myself.
Your latest novel, “The Lost Head of Damasceno Monteiro” (1997), is based on the
story of a man who was murdered in a Republican National Guard police station on
the outskirts of Lisbon and whose headless body was found in a park. Why did you
use this real-life event?
I was in Portugal when this shocking act occurred. I was deeply revolted. When
a crime offends human nature, it offends us personally. You feel both horrified and
guilty. My emotions, sensitivity and imagination as a writer were moved by this event.
Look, I have here the documents drawn up by human rights investigators from the Council
of Europe in Strasbourg who monitor conditions of detention in European countries.
They talk about the relations between the police and citizens in police stations–places
of detention to which you or I would be taken today if we broke some law or other
in the street.
Did you use these documents when you were writing the novel?
Yes, I wanted to know about the situation in Portugal, which is rather concerning.
Reading other reports made me realize things are the same nearly everywhere else
in Europe, including in countries which seem more democratic. But democracy isn’t
a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.
I thought I had to go beyond the actual event and talk about it through a novel–to
give fictional treatment to this violent occurrence. In a novel, my feelings and
sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic
and applicable to many European countries.
What was the Portuguese public’s reaction to the book?
I didn’t get many requests for interviews. People generally don’t go in for self-criticism,
so I’m not surprised when a foreign writer is attacked for looking too closely at
this kind of incident. But when Sergeant José dos Santos, the killer, finally
confessed to his crime and was sentenced to 17 years in jail, the Portuguese press
asked me how I’d been able to predict the outcome of the trial in my novel, as if
I was a fortune-teller. I was in Istanbul at the time, and when I got back to my
hotel I found newspapers had faxed me lists of questions. But I don’t think I have
any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements
in hand, you don’t have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions. Fantasy and
imagination are also a kind of intuitive knowledge which doesn’t have much to do
with Wittgensteinian logic,1 as I said in my book “Plato’s Gastritis”. But
they are a form of knowledge, one involving suspicion and doubt.
This book continues your debate with the Italian semiologist and writer Umberto Eco.
What’s the root of your disagreement with him?
Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine
or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for
an intellectual. I claim the right to take a stand once in a while. When something
strange happens in the world or in your home, you have to look into it to see if
you can pin it down, work it out, talk about it and sound the alarm: “Look out! This
is happening in my home, in my town, in the world, which is also my home.” On the
other hand, an intellectual would be totally witless if he said: “Something terrible
is happening in my home but I can’t get interested in it because I’m putting together
a catalogue for an exhibition of paintings in my local museum.”
So what do you think an intellectual should be doing?
If a politician’s job is to soothe people, to show that all’s well because of
his or her presence, mine is to disturb people, to sow the seeds of doubt. The capacity
to doubt is very important for human beings. For heaven’s sake, if we don’t have
any doubts, we’re finished! An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example,
about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed
political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room
for doubt. Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because
when I’m given a shirt that’s too clean, one that’s completely white, I immediately
start having doubts. It’s the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.
Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.
Are you absolutely certain about this?
There are some fundamental values it’s impossible to be wrong about. Nobody can
disagree with the saying “do not do unto others what you would not have done unto
yourself”. That’s something basic, that’s part of human nature. I don’t have any
doubts either about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps some more
should be added to the list, but I don’t have the slightest doubt about human rights.
Doubts begin when political action is taken. For example, was it right or wrong to
undertake military intervention in Kosovo to stop human rights violations?
Yes of course. But remember that during the Kosovo war, writers could express
themselves freely, which I think was a very good thing. Many members of the International
Parliament of Writers (IPW) did so because we set up a network of newspapers, including
Libération (France), El País (Spain) and Corriere della Sera (Italy).
Every day, a writer spoke up. There were many conflicting viewpoints, but I think
writers’ opinions were expressed with great freedom during the war. Who were the
only people who didn’t have any doubts at the time? Politicians and the military.
But writers expressed one doubt after another. An article published by one writer
was completely different from and contradictory to that published by another the
day before. I think this is very important.
But politicians also have to make decisions. There comes a moment when doubts have
to be left behind.
Yes, but I still prefer politicians who listen to the doubts of others and start
having a few doubts themselves. It’s very useful when politicians have doubts because
there are so many choices to be made in the world. Unfortunately politicians in Europe
these days are more concerned with figures and accounts than with principles. They’re
like Eco’s intellectuals: political administrators and bureaucrats.
One of the most worrying kinds of violence in Europe nowadays is rooted in xenophobia.
What do you think about that?
Xenophobic violence is the most serious conflict in Europe today, one which I
think it’s imperative for intellectuals and writers to oppose in word and deed. It
has broken out in many countries, for economic and social reasons like unemployment
and clandestine migration. But we have to make a distinction between skinheads, for
example, who are simply the embodiment of brute force, and people whose speeches
and writings provide theoretical backing for racial hatred and attacks on minorities.
This is being done openly, with virtual impunity. In June 1999, Italy’s third-biggest
newspaper, Giornale della Toscana, printed an article entitled “Florence, the capital,
but the capital of gypsies”–note the use of the word “but”. In it, a columnist sneered
at seminars on gypsy culture that had been organized by the Michelucci Foundation,
of Fiesole, near Florence. Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated
in the Second World War–thousands of them in Auschwitz–we’re again preparing the
mass killing of this minority.
Why are gypsies so often the target of this kind of violence?
Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that
are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic
people are the first targets of this kind of aggression. Sometimes it isn’t physical
violence but violence in the form of intolerable, subhuman living conditions like
those the gypsies on the outskirts of Florence have to put up with. I’ve criticized
this situation in a report that was recently published in Italy2. Many gypsies have
fled their own countries and are nomads by necessity after escaping from the war
in Yugoslavia. A society which considers itself civilized can’t treat people like
that. It’s contrary to the notion of culture and hospitality, to the very spirit
of our civilization, which originates in Ancient Greece and European humanism.
What did you mean when you titled one of your articles “I am an Albanian”?
The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture. A civilization that’s closed
and inward-looking is sterile. Civilizations that are worthy of attention have managed
to incorporate a variety of ingredients and elements. As a writer, I’ve always been
interested in others. The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone
else, and this means creating a character. We all want to be someone else but without
ceasing to be ourselves. I think it’s very important to defend this idea in real
life too.
What has had the greatest influence on your political life?
It’s hard to say. Perhaps the story of my country, my childhood, my grandfather,
the First World War. My interest in human rights originates in anti-war feelings
that go back to my childhood. I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi
invasion of my country. I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about
the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst
massacres in human history. So this antipathy to violence goes back to my childhood,
to my grandfather and to the anarcho-libertarian and republican tradition of my native
Tuscany.
You’re one of the founders of the International Parliament of Writers. How did it
get started?
Three hundred intellectuals from around the world, including Toni Morrison, Günter
Grass and Octavio Paz, founded it in 1993 after the murder of the Algerian writer
and poet Tahar Djaout. The idea was to set up an organization to protect, almost
physically, writers and intellectuals threatened with death, persecuted or imprisoned
in their countries. A year later, we set up a council of about 50 members. Its first
president was Salman Rushdie, who was unfortunately not just a symbol but a living
target of such persecution. Our current president is the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka.
We have a network of about 30 “refuge” cities which offer writers and their families
a decent place to live and enough money to subsist and take part in the city’s cultural
activities–its libraries, schools and associations.
Are any of these cities outside Europe?
Yes, they exist in Brazil and Australia. Mexico City recently became a refuge-city,
in line with a tradition going back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the Mexican capital
took in many persecuted intellectuals from Europe. I went to Mexico City in March
1999 with the secretary-general of the IPW, the French writer Christian Salmon, to
sign an agreement whereby the Mexican authorities provided a refuge for two writers,
Vladimir Arsenijevic from Serbia and the Kosovar-Albanian writer Xhevdet Bajraj.
Both of them now live in Casa Citlapletel, a house run by the Friends of the IPW
association.
Has any IPW action given you particular satisfaction?
Everything it’s done has been useful. Our notion of a writer is a very broad
one. It includes Shakespeare and a journalist working on a newspaper in a remote
village in Afghanistan. But I’m very happy that Italy, whose only refuge-city so
far is Venice, will soon have three more such towns in Tuscany–Grosseto, Pontedera
and Certaldo. I’m very fond of Certaldo because it was the birthplace of Boccaccio,
the great medieval Italian novelist. They’re all quite small towns where writers
can get together more easily than in a big city.
The IPW organized support for the August 1999 self-determination referendum in East
Timor. Why?
When you have a foreign invasion–in this case by the Indonesian army–writers,
intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression. Xanana
Gusmão, the Timorese leader, is a poet and a journalist. In 1994, the IPW
voiced support for the self-determination of the Timorese people in the name of fundamental
principles of justice and civilization. More recently, we asked for the referendum
to be held without fraud and without violence by the anti-independence militias which
are conniving with the Indonesian regime. I think the international community, the
United Nations, will have to insist and bring pressure to bear so a military power
like Indonesia doesn’t crush the people of this little island. So I agree with Nobel
Peace Prize winner José Ramos Horta when he says that if you call for troops
to get out of Kosovo, you must also demand the withdrawal of Indonesian troops from
East Timor, even though the public seems to think that a European country is more
important than a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. People have a right to live, even
on an island which seems insignificant to most people.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born British philosopher (Vienna 1889-Cambridge 1951), was one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. “The limits of my language constitute the limits of my mind,” he wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In “Plato’s Gastritis”, Tabucchi criticizes this logic, which he describes as “very sensible but very limited” because “it only allows us to talk of what is known”.
2. Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento, Librerie Feltrinelli, April 1999.
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