My relationship with the Mediterranean was first and foremost carnal, unconscious, untheorised. I realised this when I left this sea and the countries and peoples surrounding it. Once abroad, while I was discovering other horizons and ways of living, I understood: the Mediterranean is above all a way of being in the world. Mediterraneans, no matter what country they come from, instinctively recognise each other in the similarities of culture and behaviour, or rather temperament. Is it because the sun shapes us in its image and makes us at times luminous and enchanting, or at times destructive, towards ourselves above all? Is it because the oranges and peaches, and sweetness of their juice in our mouths, imbue our eyes with a tender pain and teach our hands the value of sharing? Is it because deprivation and hunger, sometimes the harshness of our countries, our institutions, the Mediterranean wasteland, teach us solidarity, the fact of not expecting anything from civil servants, the need to get by, with and against everything, against everyone?
But here I am in the mythification of what the Mediterranean soul would be. Does it simply exist? Is it not a nostalgic construction by those who leave as opposed to those who stay, and the landscapes of another time? Or, as in a mirror, an imaginary of those who stay, unconsciously refractory to any change brought about by those who left, whose relationship with the world has been inevitably modified? The Mediterranean is above all a movement. Leaving. Returning. Leaving again. The obligation to leave one’s land or the desire to go somewhere else, to a better future, fleeing or willingly, is always, in our Mediterranean lives, regardless of the country, language, religion, era, a story of departure and arrival. This can happen throughout a life, several generations, a nation. The Mediterranean is complex because of these mixtures, and is free thanks to its gaze always turned towards the horizon. This sea on a human scale, sometimes a tomb, sometimes a legend, continues to be perhaps a world where identities are increasingly fixed, where everyone is huddled in their community, a hope and at the same time a cemetery because it poses the question: what is humanity?
Far from theories and figures, from philosophies or abstract and cold strategies, this sea calls us to save the Other or to let him drown. And to define ourselves, with respect to him: who is the Other? A face, a different look? But in these Mediterranean lands where even the faces merge, the same black curls, same skin and eye colours, how can we be sure of our differences? Brought up on the stories of conquests and invasions, which linger on in our veins and in our stones, full of tales from our childhoods that simultaneously recall the East and the West, the North and the South… yes, how can we be sure that the stranger, the one who is so easily designated as the enemy, is not from my family, is not my ancestor, my child?
What a Mediterranean. Free from any anchorage, indifferent to the borders that men have always wanted to draw. We only need to go back in time to realise that a Moroccan, a Spaniard or an Italian of today was, yesterday, Roman, Andalusian, Arab, Jew, Norman. That the enemy with an absent gaze was yesterday my brother, and tomorrow will be my lover.
What a Mediterranean. This merging is our fate, but we must be aware of it. Perhaps herein lies the difficulty of the century in which we live, and the responsibility of the artists of our time. Our era forbids us from behaving as if we see nothing, because we are suffering the return of exacerbated nationalisms, of radicalised and politicised religious communitarianism, the tendency to withdraw and reject the foreigner who is considered the bringer of all evils.
It seems that History teaches us nothing.
Scapegoat. Caper emissarius. “The scapegoat sent out.” The sacrificed one that we load with all our sins and that we expel into the desert. Or that we let drown in the sea, our beautiful Mediterranean. It is very similar. From similar to the same. Myths have a long life!
But who is this Other, the one who is sent to certain death? Perhaps it is the only question worthy of a Mediterranean myth that needs to be constructed, or perhaps deconstructed. Because the very essence of the Mediterranean Sea is movement, since its youth live it or dream of it every day, since our parents have too often left with nothing to offer us a better future, and sometimes dream of returning to die near the sea or on this land where ochre and white are so present that they invade us, since within us flows this peach juice, this blood orange juice, and Mediterranean pain and salt continue to live despite the distance, since on our faces, beyond our religions and our supposed belongings, we find the same features, the same laughter and the same tears, let’s deconstruct these walls that separate us from each other, these beliefs that make our brother the enemy. The commitment of the Mediterranean artist now lies perhaps simply in the requirement to be free, from any border, from any dogma, from any supposed community. I am a writer. I am Mediterranean. I am a Mediterranean writer. And the horizon that I give to my writing is a Mediterranean horizon, which nothing hinders, inhabited by the taste of salt and sea, of honey and the sweetness of my grandmother’s laughter, who taught me, at the same time, two languages, which apparently have nothing in common.
What a Mediterranean. It is in this merging of supposed opposites that our opportunity lies. We carry within us the memory of the ephemeral triumphs of some and then of others. We carry within us this merging, this complexity that is offered to us at the moment of birth, the only myth worthy of note, to rediscover, or discover the Other in us and, in this way, our humanity.