The time of nature is no longer our time – English
The time of nature is no longer our time
It’s not every day that you find space for silence. Silence as a place where notifications, messages, or emails cannot reach. Silence as being: the warm embrace of thoughts and the free flow of words.
And that’s exactly what happened to me during the writers’ residency in St. Andrews, in an unusually spring-like February, when the clouds move swiftly, the mist stretches gloomily from the sea, and the temperature, too high, announces a nature already in bloom. And a humanity in free fall.
In this silence, at times unsettling, I allowed myself to be pampered. The silence of the library, a place that transported me to carefree university days and days immersed in books. Ah, cursed nostalgia!
And what about the silence of the office? Another delight! For the first time, I had a workspace, all to myself, outside of home.
For those unfamiliar with the thrill of being freelance, everything boils down to three simple things: an endlessly precarious life, the absence of a workspace and home space, so everything becomes one object, namely work, and finally, availability always and anyway, 24/7, day and night, Christmas and August. Because if you’re freelance, you have to be there.
And yet, in St. Andrews, I chose not to be there.
I sniffed the winter-churned sea, upon whose undulating notes, fat seagulls and other friendly birds dangled. One of them was even attacking my packed lunch, strictly vegetarian-industrial, bought at a bakery in downtown St. Andrews, dear as a never-owned jewel.
In St. Andrews, I observed the river full of youth about to explode. The brightest, most creative, revolutionary minds – here too I heard “free free Palestine” – but also the most prone, timid, and conservative.
And yet, despite everything, I thought: what a wonder youth is! And what a wonder the space granted to it. Granted? Let me correct myself already.
It seems so strange to me that young people are given space! And the first word I use is “grant,” as if rights were favors, exchanges granted in return for something: “I give to you and you give to me.” How barbaric!
And yet, it’s not surprising. Italy is now in the hands of a bourgeois, white, staunchly reactionary class entrenched in positions of power and privilege. A generation made up of failed ’68ers and Berlusconians, generating an individualistic, patriarchal, and conservative culture.
And we – myself included – are largely children of that generation: working class, low, middle, or high – Italian migrant or extra-Italian migrant – who had to be workers first, and then consumers.
The truth is that we are children of a patriarchal, colonial, extractivist, and individualistic culture, inserted into a larger framework: the economic one of capitalism, of infinite growth, of profit accumulation. The key to life is success, money, social recognition. Work, consume, and die. There is no other God outside consumption.
And yet there are those who resist. In Italy, as in the world. And it is precisely this resistance, too little narrated, that I wanted to bring to this week of residency in St. Andrews. The resistance of Ivan, Antonio, Teresa: people who have chosen to return to cultivating wheat, founding a social cooperative that respects the rights of people and the environment.
They are the protagonists of the documentary “The Earth Holds Me,” a journey through the seasons of wheat, a reflection on life and death, and on us, human beings passing through this Earth, to whom we should only bow. “The Earth Holds Me” is a tribute to those who have left, to those who have chosen to stay, to those who are imagining and putting into practice a new world, made of relationships, care, and respect for the rhythms of nature. Yes, because the time of nature is no longer our time. We have lost that fragile, symbiotic, vital relationship with nature, starting from the food we eat, produced in a standardized way, like any bolt.
And yet there are those who resist, in Italy, as in the world.
There are those who return to making good and healthy food, to taking care of the soil and aquifers.
There are those who defend the right to water, like the young Iraqi environmentalists who fight and risk their lives to protect the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They too came to St. Andrews, thanks to the “Decolonize Narrative” workshop held during this residency week.
And along with them, in St. Andrews, came the stories of Tunisian women who recover traditional native seeds to fight against the climate crisis, producing food sustainably. But also the voices of young Lebanese, Iraqis, Algerians who in 2019 took to the streets to demand social justice and rights.
In short, there are tiny stories that make the world more beautiful and that are already trying to re-imagine it. A world of people, often on the margins, who are writing history. But for history to truly change, these tiny stories must be told. And the narrative must be “decolonized,” the language. By putting at the center the care of ourselves – as a community – but above all the relationship with the ecosystem of which we are part. And to do this, we must start again from the time of nature.