The spiral and the scene of the crime
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My grandfather, Giovanni Baptiste, seemed impervious to starting again, even though for him as well, his life was enacted across several continents. But in his head he was always returning to the scene of the crime, in the shadows of Chiesa dell’ Immacolata Concezione e Purificazione di Maria de’nobili in Montecalvario, a killing, the husband of a woman with whom he had a child, unclaimed by both he and the husband, a virgin birth, a birth refused scale. A birth that my grandfather referred to as “the beast.” The husband was purportedly an important Camorrista, my grandfather a pretender, orphaned at a young age from a lower bourgeois family, bringing himself up on the streets of Quarteiere Spangnoli.
He ended up a day laborer in Cicero, the self-incorporated, and, at the time, all white township in the heart of Greater Chicago. Cicero acted as the common back yard for rackets across the city and a haven for factories needing to launder money and skirt unionization. At night, he rented out his violence to collect overdue loans, parading around in borrowed suits and cheap cigars.
As he resented the fact that my father was his mother’s confidant and frequently protector, he started imposing his secrets upon me early on, secrets that were never otherwise acknowledged by other kin or associates. After all, he had inexplicably made it to America, a man with little money, few connections, working as a dockworker in colonial Tripoli. He kept telling me that I had to return to the scene of the crime, to find out what had happened to the child he didn’t want to have anything to do with, to determine whether it was time for him to return home, whether people remembered him even though he couldn’t be specific as to exactly what minds he wanted the memory of him to occupy.
Although he never earned much, had ten children to support, he constantly threw his money away pretending to be a boss in games that already had too many bosses. My grandmother, on the other hand, with largely Mazzini sympathies, pulled her entire side of the family out of the Catholic Church and started a Protestant one. She pursued lost causes, such as the racial integration of this once bulwark of white homogeneity and the curtailment of municipal corruption. I rarely heard my grandparents speak to each other, and most of the words my grandfather uttered were directed to somewhere far away, certainly to no one in the present vicinity.
The center of gravity was elsewhere, and in some ways every place becomes the scene of a crime. That is perhaps what places have in common, that allow even the far away and the suppressed to have something to say about everywhere else. There is no need to deliberate about the relevance of messages carried by the wind or waves from remote corners; for they played their part in whatever happened. The crime spreads like dark ink, creating distorted images invoked to tease out the unconscious connections to the outside long repressed. All of the containment and erasures, all of the ruined ground cannot deter a spiraling of remainders that eventually land some place, that lure the attention of those who would rather turn away.
Those present may already always be somewhere else, may have abandoned ship even as their bodies register a corporeal presence. Others may have long been gone but who have left traces behind that can’t be erased. Our fascination with forensic evidence is the fascination with the possibility that crimes have been committed even when there is no discernible indication of them. I have been many times to the steps of the Chiesa dell’ Immacolata, preferably at dusk with a splif in hand, and all I note are the wild rides of young girls and boys on Vespas up and down the steep inclines, indifferent to whatever is in their way, even as they may recognize that there is no way out, that all martyrdom is cheap, that history has hemmed them in, but they don’t care, for them there is no crime.
Jason Pine (2012) has written about the notion of contact zones as a means of elaborating the atmosphere of Naples, and the epistemological and ontological murk through which figurations of the Camorra emerge and recede. It is that murk in which multiple claims to sovereignty are made, various social strands and networks enrolled, and convoluted territories configured. Through his repetition of a popular expression, who am I for you and who are you for me, he amplifies the indeterminacy of clear categorizations of what is criminal, political, informal, formal, licit or illicit. Neapolitan history has long demonstrated ways in which multiple contestations of political power are narrated through reification of the divisions between bourgeois and the dangerous classes and the ways in which the actual entanglements get done.
While there are established discourses that enable the clear identifications of who people indeed are for each other, strivings to enfold seemingly divergent practices, styles, actors, and backgrounds into enhancements of collective force and personal sovereignty tend to elide and circumvent definitive determinations. “Truths are made by the pressure these melodramas apply to the surface of real situations. These melodramas happen in ethnographic atmospheres—in the jangle of loud melodies, jarring words, flamboyant gestures, pressing bodies, and them and me sizing each other up. These atmospheres hover with potential, hang like a fog, or simply dissipate. They don’t allow events to be followed to their completion or depletion. We make our way using the melodramatic mode of attention. And with a sliding scale of irony, we reach for personal sovereignty.”(247)
Each place becomes the site of a crime, an infraction, a disavowal of prevailing moral terms, as each place slides away from precise designations and ordering. Something is disrupted in the very act of attempting to cohere a place or to find one’s own place within a given situation. Whatever forensic tools we might bring to the scene to examine the invisible traces of the critical event, there can be not recuperation, no returning the scene to a situation of clarity. Such recuperation would only accentuate the vulnerability of the seemingly innocuous and innocent to a transgression beyond reason.
For it is only in the transgression that we familiarize ourselves with ways of occupying a space beyond all of the imposed definitions. For the lure of place, that which is its gravitational pull, its wealth of secrets, is not located in the place itself, but rather something else besides, ever so near, but a nearness that cannot be measured in the customary indicators of distance. After all, for some place to exist on its own as detached from any prevailing interpretive gaze it will have to ensure that what it points to as its own singular contributions are kept far away from investigators scouring each corner for clues.
Pine talks about how people who do not know each other gauge the possibilities of having something to do with each other, and about how they locate themselves in a web of connections that doesn’t stand still, that spirals out the more they attempt to feel each other out. In some way this is about finding out what the interlocutors have in common. But the historical account is not really interesting to them in its own terms, for what is more important is the range of things they might have in common, about what their relationship might be.
This is an investigation that commences in a specific place or set of persons but is not interested in remaining there, but rather in the ways that place or set of persons might reach the here and now of the people beginning to talk to each other through rituals of verifiable familiarity. Do they indeed have something in common, besides the conversation now; something in common that is sufficient to act with a sense of commonality somewhere else, some time in the future? Can the citations of the past spiral into something else?
So in Pine’s account: if you know Gigi the glassmaker, then you must also know old Luisa, his neighbor the sansara (DIY apartment broker) who’s been doing his washing since his wife died.3Still more, you of course would know that great pizzeria just two doors down from Gigi’s shop, you know, Nennella, where they make the best capricciosa (lit. capricious, meaning pizza topped with prosciutto, mushrooms, artichokes, and olives)—No, I’ve never had one there, I’ll only eat a margherita (named after the Savoy queen for whom it was invented upon her visit in 1889)—Well, when I want a margherita I go to a place on Piazza Sannazzaro (grinding his knuckles in his left cheek as a gesture meaning Madonna, that’s good food—The one that serves mussels?—Yeah, that one; Giorgio the pizzaiuolo is my wife’s nephew—You mean the bald guy with the missing tooth? I go to him on Mondays and Tuesdays when he fixes cars—No, that’s the restaurant next door—Oh yeah, yeah, I know, you’re talking about Da Enzo where there’s that young kid, the one who’s father … (realizing now that his interlocutor’s brother-in-law is the guy who was nabbed last month for armed robbery)—Uh-huh, that’s him—Oh, so then you know Elena, his girl. She works in the handbag factory in Campanelli with my wife. She’s the one who told us about the mussels.
But also at some point, investigations exhaust themselves. They turn inward and eliminate everything in their way as the original crime sucks in everything around it. Gomorrah, the popular Italian television show about the Neapolitan Camorra, points to a different type of spiraling, a kind of violence, mutual indebtedness, and attachment to place that spirals out of control, where inhabitants of highly defined yet fought for territories increasingly become ghosts.
At the end of Season 2, the only two figures left standing are the two protagonists that attempted to take each other out at the end of Season 1. One is Gennaro, son of the don, Pietro, who was imprisoned, feigned dementia for years, escaped and who then was secretly holed up in a "fake" apartment in one section of Naples trying to reconsolidate his lost power in Secondigliano by fostering divisions in the "alliance”, an always makeshift collection of different crews, none of which could consolidate overarching control in his absence.
Gennaro, who miracuously survived an attempt on his life, went to Honduras to make drug connections and then established himself in Rome, always trying to avoid getting sucked back into Naples politics and the authority of his father. But he does not really become part of the Roman family, even though he marries the daughter of its chief, and then sells him out to the police, because he wants to be what he calls his own "protagonist", neither "here nor there."
The second figure, Ciro, the guy who almost killed Gennaro, is the maniacal brains behind the “alliance,” who loses both wife and young daughter to the local wars. He is the last of the alliance to still be alive, and the guy who Gennaro "lets live" after being ordered by his father to kill him, and who refused to take his revenge. Upon his defeat by a resurrected don Pietro, Ciro realizes that he has to leave Naples, leave the scene behind. Yet, with Gennaro's complicity, Ciro kills the father, the don at just that point where Pietro re-emerges into public.
Naples, in the intensity of its obsession with locale, with blood, betrayal, passion, family, faith--the way local leaders no matter how rich they become continue to live in its dilapidated social housing-- in the end, endures only its abandonment. Only the two figures that then are no longer there, who abandon its scale are capable of "living with it" but not "of it", not inhabiting it, but yet able to endure "as it" in some place that is neither refuge, exile, or death.
In Pasolini’s Petrolio, the crime has been generalized everywhere. The passionate strivings of local vernaculars and mythical certainties of the proletariat have been subsumed into a routinized eroticism and lethargic but obsessive consumption. The subsumption of life into metadata reflects the capacity of capital’s incessant reformulation, its indifference to policing the borders between life and non-life, and the constitution of the natural as simply the source and playground of fuel.
Only through the non-seamed profusion of details, fabulations, incantations, and doubled subjects does Pasolini see a way of unraveling a world where “the inert Desert with its imaginary of species extinction, and the Animist with his ability to see and bring animation into any form of being, are key “governing ghosts,” political demons not bound by the partition of Life and Nonlife, the contemporary and the archaic” (Luisetti 2017, 9-10). Pasolini’s Rome becomes an ever mutating series of intersections and enfolding that occur simultaneously with the sexual metamorphosis of the main character. Rome’s periphery becomes Damascus, which in turns becomes an inverted center of Rome, marking a spiral of incantations, hoards, mythological monsters and profuse physical encounters.
In what could be mistaken as the shadows of Chiese dell’ Immacolata Concezione e Purificazione di Maria, Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète began writing projects in the early 1960’s invoking the form of the spiral as an aesthetics. This aesthetics attempted to both “bore into” the political dread of living in Duvalier ruled Haiti and served as a way to exceed all the trauma of Haitian post-revolutionary culture. It was as if the potential of a revolution traumatic to the rest of the world, thus “inviting” years of repression, could be lived differently in place. Unlike many of their literary compatriots, the Spiralists never left Haiti. Fignolé in fact served for several years as mayor of Les Abricots, a small fishing town in the northwest.
The literary work avoided statements, instead opting for cultivating landscapes full of remains, full of detached details not easily integrated into any program. For, the spiral was the antithesis of articulation. The gathering up in its equilibration between centrifugal and centripetal forces is not an account, not a line of valuation, not a device that places things in a respective or respectable position.
Fignolé s two primary works of fiction center, Les Possédés de la pleine lune and Aube Tranquille, on Les Abricots, long considered somewhat apart from the rest country. In these novels the town is not so much inhabited with ghosts or spirits but multiple times that remain unresolved or relegated to a distant past. Each resident embodies the ongoing reiteration of events that could still go many different ways. So all of the turbulent phases of Haitian history—its times of slavery, revolution, terror, flourishing, and ravishing live on in the midst of and through the doubled names, complicities and peculiar struggles of the town’s inhabitants in a fleshy concatenation of enduring matters of concern and singular strivings (Glover 2010).
The residents find themselves simultaneously in many space-times. The divisions of public-private-personal are continuously inverted so that the separations between secrets, memories, everyday performance, individual torments and joys can also no longer hold, thus opening up spaces of continuous encounter, confrontation, and renewal. This is not a clarification of events or a remaking of an old order, but rather a spiraling interpenetration of disjunctive chronotopes. No one is innocent since each resident is affected by and affecting of blinding bitterness, self-preservation and dissolution. Here, every resident works with each other in oscillating waves of harmony and disharmony no matter where they come from or how they designate themselves or are designated by others. Speech comes and goes, and no perspective is confirmed as more accurate than any other.
In these novels, Fignolé goes beyond the specificities of a vernacular capable of accounting for the historical and present realities of the Caribbean. He is interested in the specificity of mobilizing Haitian religion, politics, and vernacular as a means of saying something about a larger world, or more precisely of configuring a space without a world, something that cuts across all possible methods of demarcation and bounding.
At one and the same time, his characters are completely diminished and trapped, but also simultaneously present and productive in a space which in its details certainly remains Les Abricots, but which also encompasses spaces and times that render it an infinite surface. The most localized events derive from or impact upon pasts and futures on transcontinental airplanes, the high seas, African cities, and invaginations of Caribbean towns, mystical undergrounds, and banal European quarters. He writes not to figure out a new place for Les Abricots in a global world, but to deploy the town and its doubled and tripled embodied citizens as a means of deferring any possible congealing of a world to situate a place within. For example, in talking about the main character of Agénor, a mysterious fisherman, whose death, and that of a double who looks just like him, open Les Possédés de la pleine lune, the villagers account for his life in terms that know no boundary or resolution:
Agénor didn’t have any friends in Les Abricots. Has anyone known of any enemy brave enough to confront him head-on, even at night? Yes! The seven headed beast. Agénor always boasted that he’d chased it away! I wouldn’t be surprised if it came back to avenge itself. Possible, Ti-Georges, but the village would have heard the violent noise of the beast and its breath would have swept away the houses. That’s true. But don’t forget! Agénor always brought up the fact that the monster’s eighty-four eyes regularly followed him during his nocturnal journeys. Hogwash, Andriss! Why was he always the only one to ever see them? Agénor was just bragging. Maybe the deed was done by Louiortesse. What? Edgard! Go on! That piece of garbage! I just don’t see how. I do! Ti Georges, vengeance increased his strength tenfold. Do you really think he had any left whatsoever after the thrashing Agénor gave him? And the coffee-drinkers burst into laughter upon calling to mind that memory. They asked questions. Their answers fused together in laughter and rum. Each one of them might have been a certainty. Not one of them was the truth. (9–10)
At the very same time, Fignolé faces head on and with brutal directness the intensity in which Les Abricots is immobilized in the “real world” within which it is inscribed. He wants us to know the capacity of Les Abricots to become a universal force, a platform through which past and futures are inverted. He wants us to see how worlds can be turned upside down and precluded from restitution. But he avoids any trace of apocalyptic sentiment, replacing it instead with a narrative tone that simply accounts for the way “things are” and “might be”, not as a future promise, but as an adamant reminder of the simultaneity of the “many” in the present. At the same time, all of this does not make Les Abricots into some romantic vestige or sufficiency to come. In fact, its power as a universal deployment comes from the very fact that Fignolé makes no promises:
Les Abricots, as if anesthetized, vegetates in a benumbing misery. The days pass without compelling us to do anything, nibbling away at the time we have left to live without us paying any attention. Left to ourselves, in the depths of a helplessness that no longer has a name because it has turned into an edifying resignation, we do not know the weight of the day nor that of the hours. Time is irrelevant to us (152–53).
It became absolutely impossible to calculate the months and the years in those regions where its ruthless breath had raged. People everywhere got used to preferring that life be calculated as the time of our submission and of our abasement. As the time of the beast (73).
The scene where there will be no crime, for it has already spiraled everywhere.
Fignolé, Jean-Claude 1987 Les Possédés de la pleine lune. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Glover, Kaiama 2010 Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Luisetti, Federico 2017 Pier Paolo Pasolini's Political Animism. In Luca Peretti and Karen Raizen (eds.) London; New York: Bloomsbury.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 1997 Petrolio Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Pantheon:
Pine, Jason 2012 The Art of Making Do in Naples.. Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press.