Chapter 2. ‘A Village Like So Many Others’: From Fontamara to Kanthapura 87
2.1 Introduction 88
2.2.2 Fontamara in the World: ‘A Village Like So Many Others’ 118
previous set of governors: the scene culminates in the brutal gang rape of one of the young women, Maria Grazia.
The second Fascist invasion of the village comes at the end of the novel. After Berardo has been tortured by Fascist police believing him to be the communist agitator ‘il Solito Sconosciuto’, the fontamaresi decide to write and publish a dissident newspaper entitled ‘Che dobbiamo fare’ (‘What Must We Do?’). While the three narrators of the novel go to a neighboring village to distribute the first issue, they hear distant explosions, and are told ‘there is war at Fontamara’. Specifically, this is a ‘war against the cafoni… against the newspaper’.235 In this war the vast majority of the novel’s characters are killed, and the
village itself destroyed. This is the final analysis towards which the novel is directed: the concept of Fascism as ‘a war against the cafoni’, an act of colonial violence.
Fascism is presented in the novel as an extreme form, an intensification, of the logic of internal colonialism already at work under a succession regimes. Describing Fascism from the position of the fontamaresi allows Silone to do two things. Firstly, it allows him to advance an economic analysis of Fascism as the political face of capitalist imperialism, in language that would have been immediately familiar to readers on the Left in the inter-‐war period. Secondly, it allows him, writing largely for a cosmopolitan readership located outside of Italy, to figure Fascism as coming from outside, an act of external occupation that is both familiar and unprecedented. To a large extent this is similar to the way in which Gramsci speaks about the ‘Fascist invasion’, as we saw in the previous chapter: ‘The Fascist organization, where it has managed to prevail,’ Gramsci wrote, ‘has become like the occupying force of an enemy country’. 236 In these two distinct but
overlapping ways, Silone, writing in exile for a diverse international audience,
elaborates an image of Fascism through the novel as the highest stage of Italy’s internal colonialism.
2.2.2 Fontamara in the World: ‘A Village Like So Many Others’
235 Silone, Fontamara (1934), p. 163.
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When Silone returned to the novel, and to Italy, after the Second World War, he made significant changes to the text. In a reflection on the revisions that he wrote shortly after in 1960, Silone compares the process of rewriting to renovating a painting: ‘I retouched the picture here and there’. He recognizes that some characters ‘have receded into the background’, nevertheless he maintains that ‘they are the same characters and it is the same story’.237 By far the most significant revision is the complete disappearance of a
major character (a cafone who moved to Rome and accidentally becomes one of the first Fascists) and the deletion of the chapter that tells his story, though he also toned down some of the brutality of the Fascist atrocities depicted in the novel’s pages. For the most part the differences between the editions are subtle: small changes of phrasing rather than wholesale alterations to the plot. Some of these minor changes, however, and particular those in the preface to the text, tell us much about the ways in which Silone sought to resituate Fontamara with its republication. Paradoxically, he attempts to make it appropriate for a Post-‐war Italian audience by reaffirming its status as an act of world literature.
In its new incarnation, the text is slightly more ambivalent about the historical veracity of the ‘facts’ it recounts, and makes a series of contradictory statements. The narrator seems to concede that he has created the name ‘Fontamara’, but implies that he is applying it to a real, unnamed location. He claims that he has since learned that similar events (and worse ones) did happen in other places, ‘although not in the same period or order’.238 This appears to be an attempt to link the text to later atrocities committed by
the Fascists and occupying Nazis in Italy during the war and particularly after 1943, in order to counter criticisms of the historical accuracy of the novel. This possibility, however, is called into question by the fact that the novel is set ‘last year’ and the preface is still signed off as having been written in 1930. This rewritten preface is the site of multiple equivocations designed to shield the novel from some of the criticisms it had encountered as it met with an Italian readership that had experienced the historical reality of Fascism first hand. We see this particularly in the way he repositions the village:
237 Silone, The Abruzzo Trilogy, p.4. 238 Silone, Fontamara (1953), p. 3.
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Fontamara somiglia, dunque, per molti lati, ad ogni villaggio meridionale il quale sia un po’ fuori mano, tra il piano e la montagna, fuori delle vie del traffico, quindi un po’ arretrato e misero e abbandonato degli altri. Ma
Fontamara ha pure aspetti particolari. Allo stesso modo, i contadini poveri, gli uomini che fanno fruttificare la terra e soffrono la fame, i fellahin, i coolies, i peones, i mugic, i cafoni, si somigliano in tutti i paesi del mondo; sono, sulla faccia della terra, nazione a sé, razza a sé, chiesa a sé; eppure non si sono visti due poveri in tutto identici.
Fontamara resembles, therefore, from many angles, every Southern village that is a bit out of the way, between the plains and the mountains, out of reach of traffic, and so a little backward and wretched and abandoned by others. But Fontamara still has aspects that are particular. At the same time, the poor peasantry, the men who make the earth bear fruit and suffer hunger, fellahin, coolies, peons, muzhiks, cafoni, resemble each other in all the countries239 of the world; they are, on the face of the Earth, a nation to
themselves, a race to themselves, a church to themselves; even if no one has ever seen two poor people who are identical in everything.240
This passage is remarkable for its hesitancy (… ‘resembles, therefore, from many angles’…) , and above all for the number of contradictions it contains: the sheer volume of ‘buts’, ‘howevers’ and ‘even ifs’ it accumulates in a few short lines. Silone repositions Fontamara on the site of these contradictions: simultaneously a symbol of anywhere in the Italian South, and a specific location with ‘particular aspects’. In doing so, he
positions the village inside and outside of the Italian nation, explicitly invoking the cartography of migrant labour that I suggested earlier underpinned the text’s original account of the fontamaresi. Here Silone goes much further, creating a nation, race and faith that unifies agricultural labourers across the globe.
Equally interesting is Silone’s decision to insert a short disclaimer on his use of the word
cafone into the text of the preface:
(Io so bene che il nome di cafone, nel linguaggio corrente del mio paese, sia della campagna che della città, è ora termine di offesa e dileggio; ma io
l’adopero in questo libro nella certezza che quando nel mio paese non sarà più vergogna, esso diventerà nome di rispetto, e forse anche di onore).
(I fully realize that the term cafone, in the current language of my country, both in the country and the city, is now a term of abuse and derision, but I
239 Paesi here could be translated as both ‘countries’ and ‘villages’, an ambiguity that it is
important to our reading of the novel.
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adopt it in this book in the certainty that when there is no more shame in my country, it will become a term of respect, and perhaps even of honour).241
Silone’s commitment to reclaiming a term of abuse, appropriating and reclaiming it, might be read as similar to the kinds of intellectual efforts taking place in, for example, the Negritude movement. The way that this passage is presented in parentheses makes it appear almost as if this is an idea coming from outside of the text, inserted into it. In this light, it is worth noting that Silone met and became friends with Harlem
Renaissance writer Richard Wright in 1948 (precisely the period in which he was reworking the novel) when Wright travelled to Italy for the publication of Native Son.
Silone is rewriting the novel in a markedly different world: the revised edition of the novel comes out after just two years before the Bandung conference that would
symbolize the immense growth of anti-‐colonial nationalisms across Africa and Asia, and several years after the formal independence of India in 1947. The changes to the novel reflect the ways in which Silone himself was becoming increasingly interested in anti-‐ colonial politics in the post-‐war period. In his recent biography of Silone, Stanislao Pugliese convincingly reconstructs a narrative of some of Silone’s engagements with anti-‐colonialism in the decades following his initial exile from Italy, pointing to a variety of occasions in which Silone used his journalistic platform (as a writer and as editor of the journal Tempo Presente) to discuss the injustices of colonial oppression and racism. He suggests that in particular ‘the independence of India and the French wars in
Indochina and Algeria turned his attention to the problems of colonialism, race, and Europe’s waning empires’.242 This was an attention that would bring him into contact
and dialogue with writers and thinkers resisting colonialism on a variety of fronts. In 1959, for example, he attended the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome (at which he met Frantz Fanon) and wrote an extended meditation on the discussions that took place there for Tempo Presente in which he demonstrates a familiarity with the work of a wide variety of anti-‐colonial intellectuals.243
241 Silone, Fontamara (1953), p. 5 242 Pugliese, Bitter Spring, p. 251.
243 Ignazio Silone, ‘Agenda’, Tempo Presente, 4:4 (April 1959), pp. 254-‐261. For an
account of the importance of the Rome conference for our understanding of Fanon’s work see Neelam Srivastava, ‘Frantz Fanon in Italy’, Interventions: International Journal
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Another, perhaps surprising, connection linking Silone to the politics of anti-‐colonial struggle that Pugliese reveals is through his wife, Darina Laracy. Darina was an Irish emigrant, and a staunch nationalist. She read Fontamara in Ireland as a teenager, and met Silone years later, eventually marrying him in 1944.244 Darina was keenly interested
in the politics of anti-‐colonialism, and was a friend of both Indira Gandhi and Leopold Senghor. In the interview with Pugliese, Darina claims that ‘Silone’s 1942 call for civil disobedience [in Italy, which caused him to be arrested in Switzerland] was inspired by her introducing Silone to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas’.245
Yet if the anti-‐colonial dimensions of Fontamara come into sharper focus in the post-‐war period and the Bandung era, they are, as I demonstrated before, already present in the earlier versions of the text. It is a novel that sought to locate Fascism within a broader context of colonial oppression, but also to imagine routes of solidarity between Italy’s laboring classes and the worldwide ‘nation of cafoni’ of which he later spoke. This is neatly displayed in a foreword that Silone wrote for a 1936 American English-‐language translation of the text that was never published, in which he explicitly addresses an audience of Italian Americans, both those who had settled there permanently and those who were passing through as migrant workers:
The sorrow, which is like a deep and bloody wound in the heart of every one of us southern Italians abroad, is not something individual and particular, but a great, universal sorrow. It joins us in fraternity with Negroes, Indians, Romanians, Poles, Portuguese, Slovenes, Jews, and all the others […] This is the message of Fontamara. This is its secret truth. You will be faithfully and truly Abruzzesi, Pugliesi, Calabresi, Siciliani, only if you are courageously rebels and internationalists.246
It is perhaps because of this internationalization of Italy’s Southern question, the idea that ‘true cosmopolitanism, in this world, must be based on suffering’, that Fontamara has had such a sustained afterlife in the world and was translated into twenty-‐seven
244 Pugliese, Bitter Spring, p. 163. 245 Pugliese, Bitter Spring, p. 179.
246 Ignazio Silone, ‘Notes to the Present Edition’ (1936). Quoted in Pugliese, Bitter Spring,
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different languages.247 The events the novel described and the way in which it portrayed
Fascism as a new form of colonial oppression resonated in all corners of the world. Of all of the text’s afterlives, however, none are so interesting as the influence it had upon Raja Rao’s Kanthapura.
2.3 Fontamara and Kanthapura: Influence and Anxieties
Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) is one of the most celebrated Indian novels in English, and occupies a position of major importance in the history of the genre. It tells the story of a (fictitious) village, the Kanthapura of the title, in the province of Kara. Like Fontamara, this village does not seem to appear on the map (‘I don’t think you have ever heard of it’, the reader is told in the first line), and sits in an uncertain geographical relationship with the rulers (the ‘Red-‐men’ who ‘so they say’ live the other side of the seven oceans’).248 Kanthapura becomes the seat of unrest after Moorthy, a young Brahmin,
begins to spread the political sentiments of the Indian National Congress. The growing political consciousness of the villagers brings them into conflict first with the
neighbouring coffee plantation, owned by the Skeffington family, and then with the British colonial police force. The novel ends with the destruction of the village after an attack by the police, and the flight of the surviving villagers, who go on to spread the word of events at Kanthapura.
There is not space here to map in detail the similarities between the two texts, but I would like to offer a brief sketch of some of the ways they resemble each other. Both of these novels create a fictional and eponymous village that functions as a symbol for events in the country as a whole. The collective consciousness of this village is, in a sense, the protagonist of the novel. At the start of the novel this village is cut off from the rest of the country, isolated from recent political developments and from modernity itself, but at the same time is the repository of an authentic and self-‐sufficient pre-‐ colonial cultural unit, home to a rich and unique (though typical) folklore. Rumina Sethi suggests that Kanthapura is part of ‘that endeavor to take the reader back to rural roots believed to be believed to be the true repository of Indian culture’, and we might say
247 Ignazio Silone, ‘Le idee che sostengo’, in Ignazio Silone, Ignazio Silone: Romanzi e
saggi, vol. 2, ed. by Bruno Falcetto (Milan: Mondadori, 1999) pp. 1385-‐91 (p. 1387).