💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anonymous-banished-experiences.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 19:48:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Banished Experiences
Author: Anonymous
Date: Autumn 2019
Language: en
Topics: clandestinity, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #5, Incognito
Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 5
Notes: First appeared as Esperienze bandite in In Incognito. Esperienze che sfidano l'identificazione (new edition by Cassa Antirepressione delle Alpi Occidentali), 2014

Anonymous

Banished Experiences

They have a black flag at half-mast for hope

And melancholy as their dancing partner

Knives for slicing the bread of friendship

And rusty weapons, so as not to forget

- Léo Ferré, Les anarchistes

I had the chance of experiencing in vitro – for rather short periods,

all considered – some different forms of banishment: in hiding, in

prison, in exile. Although all these conditions were imposed by

repression, these experiences differed quite drastically from each

other. Here I will talk about them as experiments in freedom.

Rather than on the practical aspects, however, I will focus on some

thoughts that surfaced in such situations. I will reference a more

“internal” dimension, in order to draw some more general conclusions.

This is the approach that suits me the best. In fact, from all of the

situations I have experienced, my own nature would be more inclined to

remember the ideas that emerged and what I would refer to as emotional

tonality. Here however, I will have to resort to storytelling, to the

most elaborate line of reasoning, to the scattered note. I will

sometimes mention the words of others, but only because those words had

for me, in a specific moment, a decisive importance. Only an echo –

albeit distant – in the experience of the reader, will be able to

distinguish these pages from a simple literary exercise.

The most extreme experience that I ever lived is not tied to a

deprivation of freedom nor to fear. In a poem written while at war,

Ungaretti describes feeling one day like “a docile fibre of the

universe”. Something similar happened to me. The poet, however, uses

that expression to describe a sort of communality with the universe,

while for me it was an overwhelming disorientation. However, I remember

that those words immediately struck me as the most apt. (While your

heart is pounding, certain mental associations seem to push ideas into

the strange universe of intuition.) For my own pride, I changed “docile”

into “fragile”, trying to convince myself that this was the word that

the poet actually meant. Yet, I did not consider myself only “fragile”;

I really felt “docile”. Why?

I once got lost in the woods. While trying to find the road, I fell into

a ravine. Thankfully my backpack broke my fall and prevented me from

breaking my neck. I still remained paralysed because of the pain, and

for one night and one day a dried up riverbed was my resting place. Soon

after I found myself without water nor food; as I spent entire days

climbing, trying to locate a landmark, passing one night under the rain.

After four days I began to notice, apart from hunger and exhaustion, the

presence of a strange internal dizziness. At a certain point, the

different sides of my personality began fighting each other, as if they

had turned into distinct people. These dialogues were so intense that

each time I would wake up after having dozed off, with my legs threaded

through a tree branch to avoid falling, I could hardly remember if those

encounters really took place or if it had been a dream. Amongst all the

voices, two were the most recurring: the one of the pessimist and the

one of the optimist. The former was raging against the naivety of the

latter, with arguments that I will never forget. The clash especially

revolved around the relationship between man and nature. The optimist

would interpret the shapes of the woods (some branches, some paths

through the bushes) as signs, perhaps the indication of a passageway,

and his heart rejoiced. The pessimist mocked him, his reassuring

anthropomorphism, aware of the fact that the forest wasn’t giving signs

to anyone – it simply existed. But the optimist wouldn’t give up,

creating little spirits that would accompany him on his path. When I

almost tripped over a sloping rock, a few hundred metres high, was the

moment that I felt like a “docile fibre of the universe”. I understood,

all of a sudden, that freedom was a matter of... balance.

Many desires, many projects, many discussions about the strength of the

individual who transforms his life: just a step few centimetres further,

and it would have all been over. Pathetically, I regretted not being

able to write anything about this to the world of my peers, on whose

fragile boundaries I was still treading with uncertain step. I had the

acute realization that words are a drug (in the double meaning that this

term had for the Greeks, as medicine and as poison) that keeps us away

from the absolute other that is Nature. Wild nature, unlike the imagery

of illustrated primitivist magazines, is a terrifying place because it

is “mute” – a place of the most sublime communality and also of the most

perfect solitude. Even extreme solitude is a drug, because it is a

relationship in which others participate – by their very absence.

I found myself, lying on those rocks in the dried up riverbed, imagining

the words that under such circumstances my comrades would have said to

me, and I laughed, a full and serene laugh. My comrades... Words as

drugs. One of my most intense moments with theory was an evening when,

out of necessity, I lit a fire with a book about Hegel. It is hard to

describe my hesitation in ripping out those pages, or the thoughts that

came to me in the company of the fire, or how Hegelian dialects appeared

to me then, bowed to such an unusual use... By no coincidence it was

then that I understood Heraclitus the Obscure: he saw in the flames the

tactual expression of coming into reality.

Logic cannot resist against someone who wants to live, once said Kafka.

I promised myself to always remember what I had felt on that rock, each

time I would talk with confidence about struggle and radical choices.

Life, on the other hand, with its necessary illusions, often keeps this

awareness of “docility” at a distance. With a similar awakened

consciousness, in fact, it would hardly be possible to act. What to

destroy and what to build, if we don’t know whether we’ll even still be

there the next step? Even when I was in prison or in exile I promised

myself to do many things when I got back, but of course many of these

intentions were never fulfilled. Life sucks you in and helps you forget

the blows you’ve received. Yet I am aware that this sense of

everything’s emptiness has slipped into me as a note that secretly

follows me in any convinced affirmation. If I listened more to that

rocky demon, I would speak a lot less. On the barren rocks, where the

eagles build their nests, I have tasted how much strength the

possibility of suicide can instill. The idea that, at any moment, you

can wish goodnight to the music, makes life wonderful. “Go ahead, keep

daring, nobody can force you to live!”: with the obstinate voice of such

a demon, we can confront all enemies, because on the sharp tip of this

consciousness all blackmail crumbles.

On the edge of an inviting precipice, in the absolute of emptiness,

where all fiction falls and only what counts counts, I have known

unconditional love.

In other words, the optimists, for reasons that reason cannot grasp,

won. I felt inside the most uncontrollable euphoria when, at night and

under the rain, some kind of cosmic voice (my own personal

Mephistopheles) proposed a pact: “If you renounce to your ideas, I will

get you out of this forest”. I mentioned euphoria because I declined the

offer. Rhetorical even in your delirium, some would say. Be that as it

may, even our hallucinations reveal who we are. It might seem strange,

but, for the greatest part, for me living in hiding is contained in the

story I just told. The rest is a series of details. We really only

remember what has shaken us.

I understood, by listening to my different selves, while they were

quarrelling in the forest, the meaning of the Nietzschean affirmation,

according to which the definition of “I” is only a grammatical illusion,

our lives being a space crossed by many powers in conflict with each

other.

After this moment, I have often found myself thinking about the concept

of identity.

What really scares us is the absence of control over what surrounds us.

I have no doubts about the fact that the few days lost in the woods

marked me much more than the months I spent in prison. In prison –

within the conditions that I experienced – everything is, or seems,

under control. Of course you are deprived of your freedom, you feel the

hatred for your jailers, yet you are on your side and them on theirs.

Everything repeats itself, allowing you to plan some – even minimal –

projects. There are some codes of behaviour. Between the prisoner that

completely internalizes them, becoming a full part of the institution

and the rebel who stubbornly refused to adapt to them, the differences

are huge. However, even the most resolute rebel makes use of certain

protocols. In other situations instead, our codes completely fall

through, because nothing, not even our lack of freedom, is certain. I

believe the absence of any guarantees brings you closer to madness. In

this respect, I got a better glimpse to the real weight of a radical

anti-psychiatric critique.

I often woke up startled by the fear of not having any water (in those

cases it was an indescribable pleasure to have a bottle of water close

to my bed); however, I hardly ever dreamt of prison.

Earlier I talked about identity. Living on the run is an extraordinary

experiment in the discovery of this topic, much more useful than many

philosophy books. Coeurderoy said that we should have the possibility of

changing our name each day. It is the same thing I repeated to the cops

that were questioning me at the Ministry of the Interior, adding that

the concept of identity is an authoritarian concept. The extent to which

the world of domination relies on the police’s classification of

identity, was proven to me in the uneasy reaction of the cops to my

words. What is identity?

Within our daily relationships we show a constructed image, put together

by many elements. Our past history, what others know about us, are

assumptions we rarely reflect about, because we are used to them. When

we get close to someone we open up our most precious part, feelings and

ideas that have their own stories. The clandestine, instead, has to

continuously recreate for himself a new identity, whose impeccable

coherence is crucial to not raising suspicions. To nonchalantly get used

to a name that is not your own, to the story that you have created, is a

very singular experience, for some unsustainable (perhaps because it is

too close to the I is another, as expressed by the outlaw of poetry,

Rimbaud). An interesting and worthwhile aspect of such a condition is

that it pushes you to develop a particular capacity, the one of being

able to talk about yourself, sometimes with extreme sincerity, while

avoiding references to details of your life. I would not call this a

capacity of abstraction, rather a capacity of transforming lived

experiences into a brew of thought and emotions. A different concept of

identity is perhaps what remains after this distillation process. What

is thrown away after such an internal alchemy can be very important, I

would say painfully important. For me, for instance, it was quite hard

to give up the public aspect of subversive activity, because of my

experiences and actually also because of my “personality” (I use the

quotation marks because I cannot forget a phrase from the notebooks of

Valéri according to whom what we call personality is only

periodical...). Certainly a constant thought of a comrade on the run is

how to remain bound to the projects of other comrades, the identity that

is at stake (do they remember me?...). Coherence, which in social

relationships is also a guarantor of “correctness”, protecting us from

the fear of chaos, often much less “gratuitous” than it seems, gains a

unique dimension. Here the tension between theory and practise follows a

much more personal thread. It becomes a sort of loyalty to oneself. This

coherence is attained often at the expense of one’s affections. I, by

choice, did not set up a clandestine life with such rigour (as a visit

from the police showed a few months later...). However I can sense how

in certain aspects one can tend to close themselves up, in a vortex of

incessant precaution, while in others there can be an opening. I

understand the comrade that says that they only lived authentic freedom

in clandestinity, travelling incognito through places and alongside

people. I had a small taste of this one evening on a hill, observing the

lights of a city from the distance of a fugitive. Those who are banished

can reverse their situation and become bandits.

Learning how to pay attention (to the territory in which you move

through, to your appearance and behaviour, to your contact with comrades

not actively wanted by the law) is not something that can be improvised,

as it requires adequate time and energy. This can probably be better

explained by other comrades, as they possess more wise experience on

this subject.

As far as your own perception of your identity, there is a big

difference between being on the run and in prison. In prison you are

there with your story. I remember the profound joy, even euphoria, when

in my cell I started writing to comrades with whom I had not been in

contact since a long time. Writing with “my own” name, receiving

correspondence, talking about past experiences and future projects, all

this filled my heart and my days. The comrades talk about prisoners,

organize solidarity events, make their ideas public. Those underground

are often much more isolated. Their coherence is much more difficult and

proud, as it does not have external gazes. May the wanderers be

remembered.

Clandestinity is an experience of intense relationships, great

complicities, but also deep solitude. Often the demon of nostalgia

visits, who awakens memories that you believed buried. A long lost

childhood friend, the smell of the bakery you used to go to as a kid, a

first love as a teenager on which you embellish a much greater story,

perhaps doing the same to yesterday’s cute passer-by; and then words,

places, songs, everything seems plotting melancholy. What a strange

world the one of nostalgia, that can even melt the heart of a wandering

anarchist to a silly Sanremo song [televised music competition]...

I think everyone knows, by personal experience, the difference between

sadness and melancholy. The latter is a dark feeling, but a darkness

that nourishes. Have you ever noticed how the melancholics have their

own sort of kindness, so diligent yet distracted? Overtaken by the

nostalgia of their past, they develop a particular sensibility for

strangers, almost trying to transform the void into a promise of

happiness. Exile is also a bit like this.

Only recently did I pay attention to the verses of the Leo Ferré song

quoted at the beginning, finding them recently, in a peculiar

coincidence, also written with a marker on a wall. It’s curious how the

song portrays anarchists as melancholic, don’t you think? “They have a

black flag at half-mast for hope / And melancholy as their dancing

partner”... I think clandestinity has transformed this in me: since then

my unwavering optimism has become more melancholic, as if it were

accompanied by a sweet gypsy melody.

The massification of activities and gestures renders the critical word

increasingly inoffensive. We often get the feeling that talking means

quite little. Also from this point of view prison and clandestinity have

been quite different experiences for me. In prison I experienced the

power of the word. To speak in a certain way to the screws, to the

warden and to all the administration workers, or with the fellow inmates

during yard time, has practical effects. Words of rebellion are closer

to the possibility that they could transform into action; and thus are

scarier.

As a clandestine this power of the word is often limited, and this not

only for obvious security reasons.

It could happen that you hesitate to speak because what you say could

assume the tone of a lecture, given that openly speaking cannot become a

shared practise with other comrades (for instance if others expose

themselves publicly, while you cannot). Then you prefer to remain

silent, unless you can find a way to be complicit toward a common

project. After all, you are even more free to act, since you have an

advantage on your enemy: he does not know where you are...

In some native communities still alive, there exists a form of

punishment, which its members consider the harshest.

It’s neither physical torture, nor prison, nor exile. Confronted with

particularly serious and deplorable acts, the community reacts by

treating its author as if he didn’t exist. Not looking at him, not

talking to him or about him, the tribe considers him, for a period of

time, as if he were invisible. They say that this is an unbearable

punishment.

Our individuality is built and sharpened on a continuous play of

communication and reciprocal recognition. We become invisible to one

another when we lose our very presence, rendered cumbersome and

anonymous by a massification that prevents us from determining our

relationships and sincerely expressing ourselves, without mediations.

This is similar to the situation that millions of clandestine

individuals are faced with today in the world, mostly economic

immigrants of the capitalist massacre. They are rendered invisible,

obliged to slither like shadows along the streets of the metropolis, to

atone for the crime of being poor and foreign. The clandestine scares us

because we recognize through his uprooted and precarious experience, our

own, same condition. Submitted to an enormous productive and

technological apparatus, we control nothing. Tossed around from one

material need to the next, any meaning completely eludes us.

I am happy to see that in this book [Incognito] there is included the

experience of somebody that has known and knows what it’s like to be

clandestine, but for reasons that are different from the ones of many

comrades.

By this I don’t mean to flatten the differences, but to begin to

formulate a radical critique of borders and documents, on a more social

scale. Unfortunately the subversion of the categories of domination

(worker or unemployed, citizen or foreigner, documented or undocumented,

innocent or guilty) is mostly our own discourse, and not a general one.

In struggle any separation should actually be forgone, but it is not

enough to just say that these categories are not there. At this point,

the practically global condition of millions of men and women legally

inexistent, as they were defined by a well-known and servile Italian

political scientist, could be simultaneously a painful and formidable

occasion to overthrow all authoritarian and collective identities.

Often, however, those rendered invisible, being deprived of their speech

and mutuality, look for a sort of protective community in which to

blend. This is where fundamentalism comes into the picture, as a

symmetrical product of capitalism that systematically negates this

similarity. A reflection on its social causes is more than ever urgent,

given that it is certainly not with the intellectual proof of the

nonexistence of god that one can formulate a practical critique of

religion. The need of a community, in a world where the only accessible

community is based on consumption, is increasingly strong and

manipulated by the latest nationalist or fundamentalist hypes. The

numbers of invisibles, who only find themselves surrounded by animosity

and indifference, keep growing each day. Men and women who are

constantly faced with an ultimatum: either submit or be expelled, either

coerced integration or deportation. To create common spaces of revolt,

starting from immediate needs in order to push beyond them, is much more

than simple solidarity; it’s a path that concerns our own freedom,

because the powerful sirens of temptation, able to transform the

possibility of social war into the certainty of a “racial” war, are

relentless.

It is in the overwhelming chaos of languages and cultures that new

directions and new unions can be experienced and experimented...

How to remain invisible to power and its lackeys – how to challenge any

identification – while remaining socially visible? This seems to be the

question of any comrade on the run. I only presume that beginning from a

more widespread wandering, we can begin to speak about our wandering

comrades, and shortening the distances.