Off the Map: A Mediterranean Journey

["We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling Is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees."

…………

We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone.

We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel."]

—Mahmud Darwish, We Travel Like Other People ¹

Si fa presto a dire mappa, che poi è un termine che deriva dall'arabo e significa un pezzo di stoffa con il quale si avvolgono le cose per portarle dietro in un fagoto.

["It is only too easy to say map, a term that comes from Arabic and refers to the cloth in which objects are wrapped up in order to be carried around in a bundle."]

—Franco Farinelli ²

The fundamental failure of political and historical intelligence that characterizes the contemporary horizon is not merely the result of an institutional ignorance of other worlds and cultures; it lies, above all, in the failure to appropriate one's own history, culture and "self" in a critical manner. To opt to remain within the immediate comfort of dead metaphors (which are increasingly also metaphors of death) that seemingly secure us in "our" culture is, as Judith Butler has recently and so incisively explored, to refuse to enter into an encounter that invites us to go beyond our selves.³ The political and cultural repertoire that is mobilized in defense of "our way of life" and "civilization," involves abstractions that are so general in their unilaterality and so vague in their homogeneity as to brook no critical reply or interrogation. To criticize such generalities, and to be exposed to accusations of betrayal, is seemingly to commit cultural suicide. Beneath the banner of "freedom" that the media-sustained carnival of political leadership and power unfurls—which should also include freedom from a series of political, economical and cultural restrictions as well as freedom for the exercise of personal and communal liberty—the concept is rendered largely ineffectual. Freedom and liberty are now terms that are rarely able to respond to the mounting disregard of the state for democratic rights; rights that are increasingly subsumed in the agenda of national security and homeland defense. Here all forms of dissent and opposition are destined to be harvested beneath the billowing clouds of the threat of terrorism. In this scenario, critical discourse is increasingly denied a home. So, for example, if we read a recent work such as Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, we cannot help but be struck by the wordly point that such an imposition of acceptable sense, accompanied by a regime of violence that girds and limits the public space, is not only characteristic of many states in Africa, or Asia and Latin America, but increasingly also of occidental democracy.⁴ The abuse and excess of this unilateral management of language, so that it always reflects the positivity of those in political power, is constructed on a cultural amnesia whereby both the past and other presents are not permitted to interpellate such language and its "imaginary institutions of society."⁵

With this in mind, and bending attention to the questions and prospects that might emerge between the shores of diverse languages, cultures and histories, I wish to turn to the Mediterranean; that is, to a historical and cultural space which also happens to be the apparent origin of so much of the present day discourse on "democracy" and "civilization." What attracts me, commencing from my own personal location in this particular zone, is the simultaneous sense of division—in particular, the sea as a seemingly divisive barrier between, on the one hand, Europe and the modern "north" of the world, and, on the one hand, Africa, Asia and the south of the planet—and connection; after all, so much of the formation of Europe was, and is, intrinsically dependent upon this negated elsewhere. It is in this mutable space—profoundly marked by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical and...