Mantua Literature Festival. ‘We shall never be free if we seek to dominate’
Themes such as violence, the will to power and trauma – but also friendship and solidarity – recur time and again in this 30th edition of Festivaletteratura, which holds up a mirror to a world in the depths of crisis
‘For the birds to respond to you, to establish a dialogue, two things are necessary: hitting the right note, and keeping the volume a little lower than theirs. If you don’t dominate, then a response will come. Only in this way can you set the birds’ chorus in motion.’ Even from the most light-hearted of the events at Festivaletteratura, a warning emerges against violence and oppression, which are omnipresent in this 30th edition, a reflection of a world in profound crisis. Speaking is Jean Boucault, a bird-caller and artist who, together with his childhood friend and rival, Johnny Rasse, travels the world imitating birdsong in concerts of poignant beauty, sometimes accompanied by classical or jazz orchestras.
As children, thirty years ago, in a village on the Somme estuary in northern France, the two of them competed to see who could best imitate birdsong until one of the birds actually replied to them – an experience so profound that it changed their lives forever: they would never stop. And from one competition to the next – as they recount in *i* *Quando imparammo a cantare come gli uccelli* (translated by Giovanni Zucca, Salani) – they would eventually make this their profession and their art.
Johnny Rasse had started imitating birdsong in an attempt to win over his father, who had wanted him to become a hunter like himself, but the boy refused, he explains. ‘The worst thing today, however, isn’t hunting,’ explains Rasse, referring to the dramatic decline in bird populations in the countryside – 33 per cent in just 26 years – ‘it’s indifference, neglect and ignorance. So we must name them, the various species of birds, because when you name them, you get to know them,’ he says, letting out an extraordinary call of the blackbird beneath the cross-vaulted ceiling of the Church of St Sebastian.
Naming, telling the stories of, and giving a voice to the victims of these increasingly chaotic times is what almost everyone is trying to do this year at the Mantua festival. “Nomina” says Didier Fassin, a social and political anthropologist who, for five years, alongside Anne-Claire Defossez, worked on the border between Italia and France to gather and welcome – together with many residents of the Val di Susa and the Briançon area – the migrants who arrive here exhausted and traumatised, having endured every kind of violence during their journey: physical violence, sexual violence, but also legal violence, political violence, and state violence perpetrated by the border police (“they even destroy the documents of minors so that they cannot obtain the reception to which they are entitled”, he states).
It recounts the individual and collective stories of the people who have been displaced – people we call ‘invaders’, yet who are in fact merely fleeing, as he writes bitterly in *i* (Humanity in Exile). Chronicles from the Alpine Frontier (translated by Lorenzo Alunni, Feltrinelli), whilst in A Strange Defeat (same translator and publisher) he speaks of the war in Gaza as ‘a fracture in the ethical order of the world’.
