FROM SICILY AND BACK: LOOKING FOR DANILO DOLCI
Riggio, Eliana
For over a year, I'd been looking for Danilo Dolci. I'd searched all over Italy. I'd pored through major publications where news and photos of him used to appear. And I'd tried to get to know...
...Dolci applied his vision of universal planning in the grass-roots consciousness-raising that led to the construction of a dam on the outskirts of Partinico...
...In Latin, studiare (to study) means 'to desire.' There's no development without desire...
...In contrast to "the chaotic conflict-resolution syndrome where everything happens, as in the lottery, by chance," there is, according to Dolci, the world we can plan together in peace: "Humanity needs to realize its genuine organic unity...
...But, at the same time, it must be seen and studied, without any illusions, as a form of precision, the fundamental means of best integrating the individual, the group and humanity...
...Based on moral support and financial assistance from friends and international committees, Dolci's social work has suffered a series of near-fatal shocks when sources of aid have dried up or been diverged to areas more needy than Sicily...
...Through grass-roots consciousness-raising, the area's major problems were brought to life: unemployment, illiteracy, and the Mafia...
...Set up as an experiment with children, to deal with development problems at their roots, Mirto is still enmeshed in bureaucratic and financial troubles...
...The establishment of Mirto reveals the sorest points of Dolci's whole approach to development...
...Fathers and mothers brought children into this world undernourished, rachitic, debilitated from birth...
...From this kind of collective experimentation, Dolci has developed a vision of what he calls "human planning...
...And if you can't speak of affluence, you still can't ignore the beginning of a development that, in all its contradictions, is in tune with the kind Western civilization introduces to destroy traditional societies...
...A prolific poet and essayist whose writings have been translated into 15 languages, he has succeeded in bringing international attention to the trials of a forgotten corner of the globe...
...Along with Carlo Levi, Ignazio Silone, Rocco Scotellaro, and Danilo Montaldi, Dolci created a new way of writing history...
...No longer involved in dramatic actions like mass fasts or demonstrations, he divides his time between western Sicily, where he still insists on living and working, and the rest of the world, where he gives speeches and uses his poetry as vehicle of a message of nonviolence...
...Thirty-two years ago, a budding social reformer from northern Italy descended upon one of the poorest areas of western Sicily...
...Peace doesn't just happen...
...It's the quality of being strong and open, of existing as fully human...
...And so, via this striving for answers to everybody's problems, the method compelled all to understand their past and their present, and to envision a desirable future...
...The people had discovered that economic problems demand political solutions...
...Authoritarian regimes have proliferated...
...Dolci's work is fundamentally pedagogical...
...2) In 1953-54, Danilo and friends built a nursery school and a People's University for adult education at the Borgo of Trappeto...
...Working for grass-roots development through nonviolent methods of civil disobedience, he managed to regenerate so much popular energy and to win so much support from progressive intellectuals and politicians that in the brief span of three decades he has been credited with what Studs Terkel has called "near miracles": centers for childcare and after-school education, an elementary school for children of peasants and fishermen, a large dam self-managed by agricultural workers, a cultural retreat of international dimensions, and a "laboratory" where solutions to local problems are researched and carried out...
...Their nonviolent demonstrations and fasts led to the beginning, in September of 1962, of the construction of the Jato Dam...
...And when Danilo shouted, "Denying work to those who want to work, according to the spirit and letter of the Constitution, equals murder," the authorities decided to prosecute...
...The masses, with no previous vehicles of expression, begin to surface as human beings...
...TV and video games have invaded private homes and public places...
...Boston University has made a small step, but that's how we move forward...
...Among the latter are Erich Fromm, Aldous Huxley, Elio Vittorini, Carlo Levi, Gunnar Myrdal, and Lanza del Vasto...
...Dolci's initial action was what might be 310 called "first aid...
...Since then, this "Gandhi of Sicily" (to quote Aldous Huxley) has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times...
...And the state's only response, imprisonment, affected virtually all the male work force—and some women as well...
...Aware of being caught in a vicious circle, the people analyzed illiteracy as a cause and effect of unemployment, poverty, and depression— and they began to see how their analysis could take shape in action...
...What happens in the U.S.A., or anywhere else, can have reverberations for the work we do trying to change Sicily...
...Certainly, it's no longer as poor as it seemed in Dolci's early books...
...This final Dolcian experiment exists in the context of the 1980s, when Sicily is no longer a part of the Third World...
...Translated from the Italian by JUSTIN VITIELLO 314...
...Delinquency on a small scale was endemic...
...Local people have begun to control their own destiny...
...But the key event of this period, which made Dolci famous overnight, was the "strike-inreverse...
...As important as the dam itself was the organizing of the cooperative to distribute the new "democratic water...
...In a letter to the president, the prime minister, and local officials, they explained that "We don't fast out of despair but in the hope that Italy can become a civilized country...
...This is an essential question for all of us committed to working for peace and social change when we try to evaluate Danilo's concrete achievements, a dam and a school, and relate them to conditions in the world today...
...After the 1968 earthquake in the Belice Valley, Dolci founded at Trappeto a center to host serious researchers and people of good will from all over the world...
...The essential thing is that grassroots consciousness-raising proceeds to the point where it transforms itself into strength and action...
...Twenty years after the building of the dam, the cooperative is still the symbol of the people's greatest democratic victory...
...4) On January 30, 1956, on the beach of Ciammarita near Trappeto, fishermen organized their "Fast of a Thousand" to denounce the illegal fishing practices of large motor fishing boats...
...Our planning involves silence, improvisation, personal invention...
...Dolci put it this way: "If the 700 to 800 million lire reserved for police in Partinico's city budget were spent on the spot to save the Jato's winter waters, 8,000 hectares could be irrigated...
...In committing himself to struggle in the feared "Mafia Triangle" between Trapani and Palermo, Dolci was making a choice that would radicalize his whole life...
...Working day by day in the poorest sections of Partinico, Dolci developed a highly complex form of group work...
...So no essential problem could be confronted without facing the major question of the Mafia...
...For Dolci, peace is born with social justice, from the harmonious sharing of global resources...
...But in their piazzas where those not yet totally alienated by TV still met, in their schools where hangovers from the struggle for a new culture and politics were now isolated and docile, among the young and not so young, I'd found few traces of what was once the vast Dolcian universe...
...When the police intervened, the protesters sat down in the mud and remained nonviolent as they were dragged to the paddy wagons...
...The people had no other choice but to die of hunger, or become bandits...
...Stereotyped by official historians as peasantry and banditry, people involved in the communal struggle for bread and justice, survival and culture, acquired individual dignity, names...
...Inventor of new methods of political confrontation, like "the strike-in-reverse," Dolci has been committed, in spite of all risks, to a long-standing battle against the Mafia and to major anti-Fascist and peace initiatives...
...And as the fishermen, doomed to extinction, bring in their meager catch, the tourists flock to photograph them...
...Instead, it will embody an organic human unity...
...This is a world in turmoil...
...They discovered that their economy meant land, that land meant water, but that land and water usually meant Mafia control...
...In Dolci's vision, the new world will overcome all the divisions of the old and will not suffer any lack of coordination among its parts...
...Southern Italy's problems were finally expressed in terms of the pulse of daily life...
...Individuals realize themselves in groups...
...The heads of these "households," mostly peasants and fishermen, were unemployed more than half the year, every year...
...Whoever tries to stop us is a murderer...
...Because the people could see the moral strength of a fast by choice, not by chance, Dolci was able to impart his nonviolent methods into one of the most blood-stained areas of Italy...
...Using their documentation, he published books...
...Dolci's nonviolence is designed to solve problems, rather than to save our individual souls: Active nonviolence is a value in and of itself as a way of being...
...and the new world forms the new human...
...In contact with sympathetic foreign groups, he has been forgotten by the Italian media and is no longer supported by that postwar generation of enlightened intellectuals and politicians, most of whom have died without succeeding in leaving their legacy of ideals to the young...
...But after his arrest, the people of the towns where he was working began to trust this foreigner...
...What they envisioned was the construction of a large dam to collect the waters of the Jato River and thus to revive the local peasant economy...
...Gradually, then, through a kind of choral creation, each participant in this process stimulated every other to respond as a sort of midwife, in a communitary effort without any hierarchy of roles...
...Sicilians have a deep-rooted suspicion, based on their historical experience, that "liberators" are usually new invaders...
...The state had abandoned these people, and the Mafia was starving them...
...But, with all this, has Dolci realized his poetic prOject of what he calls "the terrestrial city...
...Although it would be naive to assume that the Mafia has packed its bags, it no longer controls the devel312 opment of agriculture...
...3) From November 27 to December 4, 1955, Danilo fasted to draw attention to the urgency of building the Jato Dam, while, at the same time, 1,500 people signed or made crosses below a list of demands asking for justice and the realization of the values guaranteed by Italy's constitution...
...Supported by the people who expressed their solidarity with gifts of bread and olives, he spent his time in jail collecting life histories of his "fellow outlaws...
...Managing the last of his big enterprises, the school at Mirto, Dolci encounters difficulties in the extreme...
...Still clinging to his vision of an organic utopia, he maintains that there is no separation between poetry in America, education at Mirto, and global development...
...In Ucciardone Prison (the famous hellhole of Palermo), Dolci refused to accept bail terms for criminal conspiracy...
...In the Italy of the '80s, Dolci is a memory, a personality who speaks to people of my parents' age...
...These oral histories were carefully coordinated with proposals for technical solutions to the problems documented in them...
...It's also worth remembering that Danilo's work has been supported by a vast global network of international committees that still function in England, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States, and that intellectuals such as Henry Lefebvre, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia have expressed solidarity with him...
...Speaking through Dolci, they became aware of themselves as essential parts of a community and as agents of change...
...But he continues to gain worldwide fame, especially in the U.S.A...
...Even in Dolci's world, we don't have to travel too far from the Jato Dam before we see newly installed cruise missiles that represent not only a threat to the survival of all humanity but also superpower control of local people...
...On February 2, 1956, asserting their right and duty to work in accordance with Article 4 of the Italian Constitution, a few hundred unemployed peasants and fishermen (along with Dolci and some trade unionists) gathered on the outskirts of Partinico...
...But, according to Dolci, it is also a question of imagination, creativity: "It's not enough to analyze and document our reality, what we've been and are...
...Fully conscious that they were breaking other laws, they began repairing the Old Mule Path, an impassable country road...
...His oral histories reaped the fully liberating value of the people's words...
...I n his scientific and literary productions, Dolci transmitted the results of his patient research...
...This experience shows how human planning is a delicate science...
...Some of the townspeople fasted with Dolci...
...They are testimony to a life of productive ferment...
...Still, today, according to Danilo in one of his latest essays, dream leads to desire, desire leads to creative planning, and so reality, as harsh as it may be, can still be transformed...
...Planning itself is an educational experiment...
...Without party affiliations, Dolci is political in the most profound way...
...Nonviolent revolution is not brought about through a sudden overthrow of institutions, but through a gradual maturing of consciousness, a continual process of self- and communal education...
...To show who was truly responsible for the problems of the South, Dolci encouraged the people themselves to talk openly about their local culture and to denounce their malefactors...
...Nonviolence is an active cure for the violence that surrounds us: "We must learn how to distinguish between naive, passive resistance and the nonviolence that is truly revolutionary, intelligent, strong...
...Its fragments, moving in their spheres of private interests, inevitably collide and produce chaos...
...where he has equated the dissemination of his poetry with peace work...
...We know that we work on the side of life...
...Via a self-managed peasant structure, with representatives elected yearly by all the constituents, this consortium still makes decisions concerning the distribution and cost of the area's priceless resource...
...In the two decades of its existence, the consortium has allocated water to peasants at a price significantly lower than the Mafia's...
...facts and figures and deductions can never tell us how we'd like to be...
...This process is dialectical: the new human shapes the new world...
...So, while the dam is a self-sufficient enterprise helping to sustain the area's economy, Mirto has always required contributions from without, and Dolci has had to bend to a state that he has always resisted in theory, practice, and principle...
...The moment of awareness thus has results—as an instrument of change...
...His experiments in nursery and adult education in the '50s, the founding of centers for research and initiatives all over western Sicily in the '60s, the building of the Jato Dam, consciousnessraising sessions and anti-Mafia activities, the construction of Trappeto's Center for Organic Planning—all of Dolci's achievements attest to his sense of the organic relationship between planning and education at the grass-roots level...
...Dolci came alone, with a stubborn desire to work for change...
...When Dolci arrived in Sicily, leaving his family and a promising career as an architect, he entered a disinherited world where, as Lampedusa would say in The Leopard, everyone struggled so that nothing would ever change...
...Since 1983, Boston University's Mugar Memorial Library has housed Dolci's rich collection of original materials: books, photos, articles, newspaper clippings, letters (from such friends as Fromm, Huxley, Russell...
...Local agriculture still provides fresh produce in abundance, but in the neighborhood stores people prefer frozen goods...
...Now, walking the streets of Partinico, Trappeto, Montelepre, you won't find a standard of living any different from those of other southern Italian towns...
...But to create, Dolci insists, we must understand the old world we wish to supplant...
...For that generation he is a phenomenon of their youth, their first awareness of a new world emerging, after 30 years of dictatorship, as a civilized and humane society...
...Through an examination of their concrete personal experience, individuals and groups derive a collective vision of their future...
...And I'd tried to get to know the people who worked with him, so that I could understand if he'd really reached the grass roots...
...And societies that call themselves democracies use media of mass manipulation to create colonies of coke, blue jeans, and 313 space odysseys...
...The houses had no windows, the kitchens no utensils, the beds no linen...
...He was accused of everything from resisting arrest and assaulting an officer to trespassing on public property, violation of the public trust, inciting to riot, and conspiracy...
...Despite the protests of some legislators and journalists and a public defense by the most prominent lawyers, political figures and intellectuals of the period, his trial ended with a verdict of guilty...
...He seeks to unify people on the basis of a new solidarity...
...and the groups shape new groups of ever-increasing complexity...
...Then the people could find work and there would be no more banditism...
...Dolci's communal fasts became particularly effective—literally, at a gut level, since they reached people who 311 often went hungry by necessity...
...The people, almost totally illiterate, were living in one-room houses with dirt floors...
...His answer revealed that the dreamer of utopias was limiting his scope: "Even if we don't realize it, everything is connected...
...Dolci's idea of peace represents a denunciation of the basic structural violence that generates all other forms of oppression and exploitation...
...SO, TODAY, WHAT HAS BECOME Of that area of western Sicily forgotten by men and gods...
...Now, more than ever, "it's urgent to educate ourselves to know how to dream by identifying our desires...
...Against the government's red tape and the Mafia's threats, finally the people prevailed...
...In the intense group work he initiated, the people gradually developed an awareness of political alternatives whereby they themselves proposed solutions to the problems of unemployment and emigration...
...We don't pay taxes so that our country, on land and at sea, can become a haven for those who abuse power...
...Simple folks, people of good will, and some of the most famous have been "friends of Danilo...
...He tried to plug up the biggest leaks...
...Of course, you'll glimpse colorful Sicilian carts, but downtown the cars overwhelm them...
...In 1985, the old world still spreads its poisons across the globe...
...This sequence of events dramatizes the process: (1) In October 1952, to awaken the public to the area's poverty and to pressure the authorities to create jobs, Danilo fasted in the bed of a child who'd starved to death...
...It means inventing the future...
...So it's no accident that you can study the essential message of Dolci's three decades of struggle 5,000 miles from its locus...
...The school he built at Mirto in 1974 represents one of his major achievements...
...It's not just a science: it's a work of intuition, the most complex kind of art...
...This is the new world that challenges Danilo's dreams...
...When I finally found Dolci himself, I asked him what he thought about the relationship between America's homage to him and Sicilians' everyday life...
...Now 60, he's less optimistic about global planning...
...Abandoned in the streets, these children had to face the stench of open sewers and the emptiness of classrooms deserted by their teachers...
...Thus they foster their own growth and humanity's collective health: "All grow as they become sources of love, action, responsibility...
...As he envisioned it, they could study together the origins of global violence and develop solutions whereby humanity could share all natural and human resources...
...As Carlo Levi said, Danilo captured "that intuition of those obscure authors of timeless stories wherein they rediscover the world by recounting their own histories and, by narrating, embody a kind of certainty that things last and have a universal value...
...Dolci sees education as the link between consciousness-raising and grass-roots action...
...Via collective planning, groups of groups will be able to invent projects of broader and broader scope to the point where this process can commit all people to work in harmony for a nonviolent world...
...In his vision, change must be willed by everybody, and all individuals have a responsibility to find their way to solutions...
...Thousands of people have come from all parts of the globe to contribute, with expertise or with bare hands, to his work...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
