Pier Paolo Pasolini and me

By Saleh Addonia

 

Mamma Roma

1985, and Mother returns to our refugee camp in Sudan to take us to Saudi Arabia after many, many years of absence where she was working as a servant to a Saudi princess. On our way to Khartoum, we stop for a few months in the city of Kassala. We know no one in the neighbourhood. I beg Mother for money for the cinema to watch an Indian movie. I am 12 years old and Mother refuses. I keep begging all day, to no avail. Then I heard about Ashaabia, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, organising their annual party in the town. Parties were used to find new recruits to fight the war of independence against Ethiopia. 

I tell Mother, it is either the cinema or Ashaabia’s party. Mother panics and gives me the money. On my way to the cinema, I think of Mother, and how she had forgotten I was deaf, that Ashaabia would have had no use of me. But in her eyes I was perfect.

In the open-air cinema, Mamma Roma who was away working many, many years earning from men’s pockets, is back, sitting on a concrete slab.

She is tired of her shoes, or perhaps, the shoes are tired of her. Of this, only Mamma will know. The high heeled shoes helped earn her keep, but Mamma got stuck with them or they got stuck on her feet. Mamma is tired, tired of it all and hardly recognises her son. Or they don’t recognise each other. And so, the son asks, did she think he would have stayed the same? For Mamma forever imagines him as her toddler riding a toy horse.

But time’s only trick is forgetfulness. The son also forgets Mamma. The son doesn’t know Mamma as mummy. The son does not know Mamma’s everyday life, Mamma’s past, nor does Mamma know of the son’s. The son doesn’t know of the sacrifices she made for him. 

Is Mamma a prostitute or a servant for Arab royalty? In the eyes of many, it is a loss of honour, but for Mamma it is a way to make a living and secure the future for her son. 

Late at night lying on my Angarêb, a low wooden frame bed with a palm fibre grid stretching across it, and with dreamy eyes, I say, ‘Mum, I saw Mamma Roma. I sensed you.’

 

Arabian Nights

 

‘And the truth lies not in one dream, but in many dreams.’ A verse from One Thousand and One Nights and the opening film’s epigraph.

I put the DVD on. I watch what I assume to be either an Ethiopian or an Eritrean woman bathing naked in a pool. I pause. I wank. Because it is the first time in my life I see a woman of this ethnicity naked and in a such an erotic setting. I return the DVD. I borrow the film another day. I watch the same woman being spied by the King, naked in a pool. I recall my neighbour whom I fancied for a long time but never saw naked. I pause. I wank. I renew the DVD rental. I watch again the same woman covering her pubic hair with both hands. I recall how, as a boy, I fancied my mother’s beautiful cousin. I pause. I wank. I return the DVD. After one too many wanks, I borrow the DVD again but only lasting until the two youths, a girl and a boy, are asleep in the tent watched by the woman and King. And so I continued with my struggle to watch The Arabian Nights. 

Watching the film again after 15 years, I couldn’t imagine the film without its explicit yet beautiful sexual scenes, all of which are directed by Pasolini with such sensuality and innocence. Pasolini shows one penis after another. Black penises and white penises, erect and flaccid, alongside nude female bodies, breasts and nipples, pubic hair. This imagery reaches a climax when Aziz launches an arrow with its head in a shape of a penis towards the seated Badour, with her legs spread wide open, and BAM! the arrow lands in her vagina. But I soon shut my eyes as Badour chops off Aziz’s penis. Still, Pasolini’s visual composition and erotic suggestiveness makes watching The Arabian Nights so pleasurable. Pasolini speaks of our primal instincts. He wants to say that nothing has changed. We have never been as modern as we might think we are. He wants the body to speak – or rather the body parts – without any grammar or rules imposed by exterior forces on the human psychology. 

Seeing all those body parts and sexual encounters, I assumed they were creations born of Pasolini’s eccentricity and peculiar style. It later dawned on me that this was not quite the case. The first copy of One Thousand and One Nights that I had read in Saudi Arabia when I was 15, was in fact a heavily censored version comprised of only 2 volumes. When I next travelled to Sudan, I was determined to find the original. A street book seller convinced me that what he had 4 volumes of the original, uncensored version. I didn’t have time to check his claim, but bought it anyway. Upon finishing the 2nd volume back in London, I realised that this version, too, was censored because there were no explicit sexual encounters – not even a mention of a penis or its size, nor the shape of vaginas, as I was led to believe. To this day, I am furious at this act of vandalism that the Arabs wrought on one of their greatest literary creations. 

I still haven’t read the original and I wonder what sort of language the medieval Arabs – and I love classical Arabic – were using to describe the sexual imagery in the stories. I am always guessing. Perhaps it is like the poet, in an early scene of the film, sitting on his knees opposite three naked young boys in a hut. He kisses them each on the cheeks, one by one, and then muses on choosing between “two desires: one for the minaret of Baghdad, the other for the land of the two mosques.” 

One Thousand and One Nights is one of my favourite books but as a black person, I found its racist imagery discomforting, particularly when reading it for the first time. I always tell female friends to prepare themselves for the worst when reading One Thousand and One Nights because no matter how strong women are portrayed, they all end up in the service of men. After so much promise, to the point where I thought it could have been a feminist film. Such as when Zumurrud chooses her own master at the slave market and the various women helping Nur ed-Din in search of Zumurrud and asking him a favour, shamelessly, in return. And when Zumurrud, disguised as a man, becomes a king, and marries a young girl. The girl, as if in a female solidarity, agrees to Zumurrud’s request to keep her identity secret. And that is why the ending of Arabian Nights the film is understandable. But in the end, Zumurrud gives herself away to Nur ed-Din. Had Pasolini chosen a different ending to suit the times, I’d have thought him a liar. 

I stumbled upon a photograph of Pasolini behind the camera filming The Arabian Nights. He was in dark glasses, wearing blue 70s trousers – high waist and wide leg. At that moment, I realised that a white man was filming The Arabian Nights and that the ideas were interpreted by a European male director, framing among others, black bodies. But then the Arabs wrote down One Thousand and One Nights stories, and they too are light skinned and once had their own colonial and powerful civilisation. And we, all black people in the stories, are always slaves. In the stories, we were often framed as other or as exotic objects. I repeat what I once told an Ethiopian friend: Until we are masters of our destiny, we are conditioned or even obliged to rely on our former masters’ archives.

 

Teorema

 

Do you like the film?

Yes.

Do you like the subject?

Kind of.

Do you like the family?

No… But…

But?

A scream is a scream. But… 

But?

Why should I care about the predicaments of an upper-class Italian family?

Why not?

The father. Since the film was shot in the early 70s, I thought of the father as a retired colonialist of Eritrea or an ex-fascist general who may have taken part in killing millions of Ethiopians. I see him as my grandfather’s master and coloniser. He should be the subject of my eternal hatred. But…

But?

I read somewhere that Nietzsche said, ‘I wished to conquer the feeling of a full irresponsibility, to make myself independent of praise and blame, of present and past.’

And?

The film poses a problem.

What?

The visitor, perhaps God or Lucifer or even Jesus enters the lives of this family and throws all the characters into crisis. And according to Pasolini, the “demonstration” of this disruptive force creates a problem that is not resolved. 

Is this a good problem?

Yeah! Because if the problem is solved then it’s no longer a problem. Lucifer or God. I want him to be God. But let’s settle for Lucifer. Lucifer gives them what they want. He fucks them all, one by one. He fucks the father and the mother, he fucks the son and the daughter, and he fucks their maid too. They didn’t know what their deepest desires were before he arrived. They didn’t even know what they wanted, blinded by their boredom. Lucifer unlocks those desires, the selves beyond their bourgeois paralysed masks. And all five react in a different way to Lucifer’s fuck – to their newfound impulses or rather, to their approximation of freedom. And…

And?

Am I allowed to have opinions about the characters?

You are.

Take the son’s reaction to Lucifer’s fuck. He begins a new life as an artist, he pees on his painting. Nihilism leading to creative transformation inside insular bourgeoisie ivory tower where a pee becomes a revolution.

And the daughter?

Was she trying to free herself from her father after Lucifer’s fuck? I don’t know, but when she reached the exit door, she should have opened it. Instead, she chose to play with time in circles and ended up frozen in an insane asylum. 

What about the mother?

She should have fucked even more and shown no guilt. She, the living embodiment of boredom, priest-dependant, money-spending and stuck-up housewife. Everywhere riddled with Italian-mediocre guilt…

The maid?

A tragic option for the poor. I mean from one fuck to performing miracles to becoming a martyr and a possible future saint for the meek and powerful alike. No more fucks for her now while she is levitating in the air above the church.

The Father?

Into the volcano, into the volcano. But…

 

“Mamma Roma” was commissioned in the context of the project Whose Wor(l)d Is This? Diverse Voices in Urban Literature in the UK and Italy, created by SPAZIO GRIOT and Inua Ellams and supported by the International Collaboration Grants of the British Council.

“Arabian Nights and Teorema” were first published on “Specimen. The Babel Review on Translations” http://www.specimen.press