5. "The Nature of Blood" di Caryl Phillips

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1997
Genere: Romanzo
Paese: autore nato nell’isola caraibica di St.Kitts e cresciuto in Inghilterra, ma romanzo ambientato in Germania negli anni '30 e '40 e a Venezia nel sedicesimo secolo.

Sull’autore: vedi questo post

Trama: Due storie diversissime eppure in qualche modo connesse: una giovane donna ebrea cresce nella Germania nazista e vive l’incubo dei campi di concentramento e un generale africano ingaggiato dal Doge per guidare il suo esercito nella Venezia del sedicesimo secolo si chiedono che cosa sia l’identità e si trovano ad affrontare un’Europa ossessionata dai pregiudizi.

Alcuni pensieri: Ho tenuto questo libro sulla mia “reading list” a lungo ed ora finalmente l’ho letto. La cosa che mi attraeva di più era naturalmente la storia di Otello, personaggio shakespeariano che mi ha sempre affascinato. Phillips non modifica più di tanto la storia di Otello così come ce la presenta il bardo: non conosciamo con esattezza le origini di Otello, ma sappiamo che è sicuramente cristiano e che è stato fatto schiavo, prima di diventare un valente soldato e poi il generale dell’esercito della Serenissima.
Caryl Phillips ci descrive che cosa succede prima che si consumi la tragedia, quella gelosia estrema che lo porterà ad uccidere la sua amata Desdemona. Otello è appena giunto a Venezia e tenta di comprendere gli usi e i costumi della gente in città. Appare evidentemente affascinato dalla città lagunare e in particolare da una dama, a sua volta affascinata dai racconti di Otello. Mi è sempre piaciuto il passaggio in cui Shakespeare mette in bocca a Otello le parole “Rude am I in speech” (“Rude sono io nel parlare”), quando invece risulta essere molto più forbito e più affascinante dei nobili veneziani. Phillips sottolinea l’umiltà di Otello e la sua cultura, rendendolo un acuto osservatore della società veneziana (per esempio della sua dissolutezza ed ipocrisia), ma amplifica anche i pregiudizi a cui viene esposto. Mentre in Shakespeare il razzismo dei veneziani è implicito e subdolo (molto in linea con quello odierno inglese a mio parere), quello che ci mostra Phillips è un razzismo palese, evidente persino negli sguardi della gente. In Shakespeare l’unico insulto diretto arriva da Roderigo se non sbaglio, che chiama Otello “thicklips”, “labbra-grosse”, mentre il razzismo di Iago, che riferisce come Otello e Desdemona stiano facendo “la bestia a due gobbe”, implica ma non afferma l’oscenità del matrimonio tra un nero e una nobildonna veneziana, ma anche l’implicita straripante sessualità che emana Otello in quanto nero e africano. Phillips, invece, ci racconta di come Otello si accorga direttamente del pregiudizio nelle azioni dei veneziani, in particolare in quelle del suo accompagnatore personale, che lo disprezza e lo tratta malissimo. Non sono riuscita a capire se questo personaggio senza nome diventi poi Iago, colui che in futuro gli creerà tanti problemi, ma è molto probabile.
Vi propongo qui un passaggio, secondo me molto bello, in cui Otello s’interroga sulla sua identità e sulla rassegnazione a non essere mai pienamente a suo agio tra le braccia di Desdemona, veneziana dalla pelle color alabastro, affascinata dalla sua esoticità:

And so you shadow her every move, attend to her every whim, like the black Uncle Tom that you are. Fighting the white man's war for him / Wide-receiver in the Venetian army / The republic's grinning Satchmo hoisting his sword like a trumpet / You tuck your black skin away beneath their epauletted uniform, appropriate their words (Rude am I in speech), their manners, worry your nappy woollen head with anxiety about learning their ways, yet you conveniently forget your own family, and thrust your wife and son to the back of your noble mind. O strong man, O strong man, O valiant soldier, O weak man. You are lost, a sad black man, first in a long line of so-called achievers who are too weak to yoke their past with their present; too naive to insist on both; too foolish to realize that to supplant one with the other can only lead to catastrophe. Go ahead, peer on her alabaster skin. Go ahead, revel in the delights of her wanton bed, but to whom will you turn when she, too, is lost and a real storm breaks about your handkerchiefed head? My friend, the Yoruba have a saying: the river that does not know its own source will dry up. You will do well to remember this.

E ancora:

My friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal. Only the strongest spirit can hold both together. Only the most powerful heart can endure the pulse of two such disparate life-forces. After a protracted struggle, most men will eventually relinquish one in favour of the other. But you run like Jim Crow and leap into their creamy arms. Did you truly ever think of your wife's soft kiss? Or your son's eyes? Brother, you are weak. A figment of a Venetian imagination. While you still have time, jump from her bed and fly away home. Peel your rusty body from hers and go home. No good can come from your foreign adventure. A wooden ladle lightly dipped will soon scoop you up and dump you down and into the gutter. Brother, jump from her bed and fly away home.

L’altra storia, quella di Eva, una ragazza ebrea che cresce nella Germania invasa dai nazisti è, in confronto, una storia povera. C’è ovviamente l’orrore dei campi di concentramento e l’impossibilità di riprendere a vivere normalmente dopo una tale esperienza, ma niente di diverso dai racconti in prima persona che hanno fatto tanti altri sopravissuti all’olocausto, con la differenza che Phillips non ha mia vissuto quella terribile esperienza. Mah, forse sarà solo la mia ossessione per le tragedie di Shakespeare a farmi aspettare con ansia le pagine dedicate ad Otello e alla mia amata Venezia. Più interessante la parte in cui si parla degli ebrei di Portobuffolè, una cittadina a pochi chilometri da dove vivo io. Anche se sembrava presa da un libro di storia mi ha affascinato, perché non avevo mai sentito di ebrei che vivessero dalle mie parti, specialmente nel quindicesimo secolo. L’ultima storia, quella di una ragazza ebrea nera, probabilmente una fallascià etiope*, che cerca inutilmente un senso di identità e di appartenenza in Israele è invece molto interessante, ma solo abbozzata.

* Il termine “fallascià” è quello più usato al di fuori della comunità ebrea etiope, ma alle volte è considerato peggiorativo perché in amarico fallascià significa “straniero” o “esiliato”. Il termine corretto sarebbe Beta Israel.

“A Distant Shore” by Caryl Phillips

Date of publication: 2003

Genre: fiction, drama, travel
Themes: interracial relationships, migration, racism, loneliness, friendship, old age
Setting and time: 20th-century England and a nameless war-torn African country

Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003

About the author: Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and brought up in Leeds. He is the author of several novels and non-fiction books, but he has also written for film, television, theatre and radio. Much of his writing focuses on the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences for the African Diaspora in both Europe and the Americas. His novel The Finale Passage (1985) broke new ground as the first second-generation Black British novel to return to the experience of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’, that is to say the first post-war West Indians to arrive in England. Phillips is a diasporic writer, whose work rejects investment in national belonging, preferring instead the border spaces of the black Atlantic contact zone at which Africa, America and Europe uneasily encounter one another. Phillips is therefore concerned with ‘the gift of displacement’ and ‘the high anxiety of belonging’. One of his most interesting novels is called The Nature of Blood (1997) and tells the stories of a German Jewish girl during World War II, a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel and an imaginary Othello, portrayed as an African general in late-16th-century Venice. His most popular novel to date (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) is Crossing the River (1993), a series of journeys across the Atlantic and an exploration of the legacy of slavery. Because of his concerns for the narrative structure of migration, Philipps shares many similarities with other key diasporic writers, such as David Dabydeen and Salman Rushdie.

Plot: (*may contain spoilers*) It is the story of two people, an old English lady and an African refugee. Apparently, they don’t have much in common, apart from the fact that they both live in a new housing estate in the north of England. In reality, they are both extremely lonely and desperate to find somebody to talk to. They slowly bond, but are haunted by their past. Dorothy has just walked away from a thirty-year marriage, a couple of love affairs gone wrong and the death of her sister. Solomon has escaped his country because of the war that has killed his family and he hopes that his new country will provide him with a safe haven in which he might enjoy the decent behaviour and graciousness that he believes the English habitually practice. Unfortunately, Solomon’s expectations clash with the prejudice of the people in the small English village he has just moved to.

Some thoughts: The book is most of all an exploration of isolation and consolation, of friendship and loneliness. It is a sad story, even depressing at times. Postcolonial writers have explored prejudice and racism in all their facets, and yet there is much to write about it. Those of you who know the northeast of Italy may understand why the themes of the book are not unknown to me. Nonetheless, I feel that sometimes the whole thing is dealt with in a simplistic way: Solomon’s thoughts and opinions are often omitted or very briefly explained, while the thugs’ motivations for discriminating Solomon are completely left out. However, I liked the part about Solomon's journey to England as an illegal immigrant, because it shows the human tragedies that lie behind this phenomenon. I also appreciated the idea of a male writer using a female protagonist and the unusual connection between the loneliness of an old English lady and the same feeling experienced by an African refugee in a somehow-hostile English village. This relates with the title of the novel: England is ‘a distant shore’ for an African man, both in the geographical and the metaphorical meaning. The aloof manners of English people become a burden for both Solomon and Dorothy, who are unable to understand that they can help each other. And when they do, it is too late. I wonder why Phillips, a West Indian by birth, made Solomon an African man, though. It would have been much easier to use his own heritage and let Solomon have deeper thoughts on the differences between his country and England. In terms of style, the language is simple but the structure is a bit problematic. The story is not told in chronological order and the narration constantly shifts from one character to another, with the risk of confusing the reader. I’ve read that a complex narrative structure but a relatively simple language is a characteristic of Phillips's writing, so I take it as a stylistic choice, rather than as a fault of the novel. This novel was on a reading list for a university course on Black British writing alongside Small Island by Andrea Levy and The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon. Giving that, I feel that other novels by the same author might have been more enlightening on the subject. I really liked the idea behind the novel though, especially the unexpected and unexpressed link between the two main characters. I am very curious about The Nature of Blood, which also features some interesting connections between the characters. I have always been fascinated by Othello and how he came to live in Venice, so I'll put it in my want-to-read list.