The broken tongue of the powerless

"If people who are killed can have no name, then everyone can have no name, even my characters," replied Palestinian writer Adania Shibli to journalist and historian Paola Caridi who, on the Mantua stage in Piazza Castello, asked her why no one was identified in her books.

Form is fundamental for the author of Sensi and Dettaglio minore (La Nave di Teseo), who claims a broken language. A language that stutters, that betrays, that abandons you. She recounts how they used to get angry, she and her siblings, because their parents, having lived through the nakba of 1948, did not tell them: 'We expected it, we scolded them, we were arrogant. Now I have the same difficulty they had. I who love the language and hoped it would return this love to me. It is painful. I can't, I don't want to speak, explain. After all, when we are in pain, the first thing we lose is language. It turns into lament, into something that precedes it'. He is moved thinking about 'this mutual failure between us and language, which is inevitable' and observes how instead 'official language proceeds swiftly and clearly, without hesitation'.

Literature, for Shibli, is a way of existing, of not becoming a monster, 'of maintaining my humanity, attacked every day'. And so, instead of talking about the dead, she talks about the migratory birds, which arrived in Gaza in their millions when she was a child, and which also orient themselves with topographical references. "How do they live with the fact that only rubble remains? The loss is on so many levels that it is impossible to understand the consequences of what is happening. Will they be found? Will they come back? You look at the sky and think that there is no place left for them either. We too experience total disorientation, just like the birds'.

Words fail even the Indian labourers who live in a situation of violence and exploitation in the Agropontino: 'It is the attempt to remain human that makes them, when they talk to their families in Punjab, not tell the truth about their lives, they pretend everything is fine,' says Stefania Prandi bitterly, author with Francesca Cicculli of the enlightening report-investigation Agro Punjab. Lo sfruttamento dei sikh nelle campagne di Latina (nottetempo) -. Even among them it is difficult to look at each other. Kiwis are treated better, they cannot be bruised'.

In a world where technology divides and dehumanises people, is it still possible to resist power? Ali Smith asks this question in her latest novel: Gliff (Sur), the story of a family of 'unverifiables' within a strictly ordered and controlled society. To explain who these unverifiables are, she recalls when a refugee showed her a piece of paper all screwed up and told her: 'if I don't show this piece of paper I am nothing'. "All we have to do is lose our passport and we are nobody, we are 'unverifiable'. As if the passport represented a person. We are human beings, we are multiple, layered with history and possibility, with originality,' says the Scottish author, recalling Calvino. In American Lessons he wrote that the writer's job is to find the voice for those who do not have one.