Why we’re not afraid of the pitchforks

January has been an emotionally intense month for me, and, as a consequence, I haven’t been on my blog a lot, as you might have noticed. Therefore, I haven’t been able to follow “the pitchfork movement” of Sicily, which seems to have been ignored by most mainstream media. Now that I’ve come back to Earth, I thought I’d translate an interesting piece of analysis that I’ve read on the ever excellent site InfoAut. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, or you need to refresh your memory a bit, have a look at these articles on Libcom and Struggles in Italy. And here is what the Palermo’s InfoAut crew had to say about it:

Respiro, (Breath), directed by Emanuele Crialese, 2002

Since moving to the UK I’ve felt the desire to re-discover my roots: Respiro is one of those movies I had heard a lot about when it first came out in 2002, but back then I didn’t feel the urge of watching it because I thought I had time to watch whenever I wanted. The time came when I was already living here. And what an emotional journey it was when I first watched it on an English rainy evening (I actually don’t remember, but being the UK I’m assuming it was raining…).

I 100 passi (The Hundred Steps), directed by Marco T. Giordana, 2000

Once lived a young man called Giuseppe Impastato, “Peppino” for friends. He was from a small town in Sicily called Cinisi. Cinisi was in the hands of the Mafia and Peppino’s house was only a hundred steps away from the house of the local boss, Gaetano Badalamenti.

My eyes lie at the bottom of the sea/ in the heart of the seaweeds and the corals (words by Peppino).

Peppino was an activist, an Antifascist and a Communist, but not one of those who do what the Party says and that’s it. He wanted to change Cinisi and Sicily, he wanted to challenge the locals’ terror  of the Mafia. He hated the Mafia since he was a kid, even though his own father was connected to it. So Peppino and his friends brought about a radio station, Radio Aut, on which they would talk about their everyday lives in Cinisi. They told tales of corruption and politicians’ connections with the Mafia, of illegal building developments and other dodgy maneuvers that were making the Mafia richer. Peppino was very ironic and loved to make fun of the Mafia on the radio. He called Cinisi “Mafiopolis”. He would say things like “the Mafia is a mountain of shit”.