An Iraqi in Italy (July 2003)
A couple of months after the intervention in Iraq began, an Iraqi author, Younis Tawfik, came to give a conference at the school where I teach. A book of his entitled, “The foreigner,” had been assigned to several classes by one of the Italian teachers who decided to take advantage of the fact that the author lives in Turin to invite him to come to speak with our students. Having seen Tawfik on television and having read interviews he’d given regarding the war in Iraq, I was curious to see if and in what manner his talk would pass from literature to politics.
I must say that almost up to the very end of the conference he only spoke of things regarding his book and matters that readers are often curious about: how a book is born and the connections between its contents and the private life and experiences of the author. He told us how he had gathered a myriad of stories from a variety of foreign residents in Italy in order to create his work of fiction. He explained the difference between what he called first class immigrants, those who had immigrated 20 years ago in order to study at a European university, as he had done, and second class immigrants, those who have been coming more recently looking for work and a refuge for their desperation. He compared the second-class immigrants to the Italians who had emigrated from southern Italy to the industrial north in the sixties and the seventies. However, he failed to mention that northern Italians treat today’s foreign immigrants much better than they ever treated their own southern compatriots.
He recounted several episodes of his life to help us understand the essence of his work: How he came to Italy because he wanted to study a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy without the expurgation of the government censors. How he had planned to return to his country after he received his degree in philosophy from the University of Turin. How he chose not to do so for two reasons: The first, having lived with and acquired as his own the rights and liberties of our society, he couldn’t conceive of returning to a life under dictatorship. And the second, if he had returned to his country in the mid-eighties, he would have been forced to brandish a weapon and fight in the war against Iran, something he felt incapable of doing.
Only at the end of his discussion did he cross over into politics, provoked,
as it were, by a question from one of my students: “Do you think
that studying literature from different cultures can help people to understand
each other and learn to live in peace?”
At first, it seemed that in his very long answer to her question, he
was going to fly high above the polemics of the military intervention in
Iraq. Instead, at a certain point he declared that he was against
this war because he was against all wars. Then, he said that the
important thing was to look toward the future and that he hoped that the
Europeans would have an important role in the aftermath because “as everyone
knows the Americans know a lot about making war, but they know nothing
of culture.” And with that trite triviality he earned himself a resounding
round of gratuitous applause guaranteed to anyone who criticizes the United
States. Then, he recounted that he planned to return to his country
as soon as it was feasible in order to fulfill his life’s dream:
the creation of an Iraqi-Italian cultural center.
At that point, of course, I could no longer keep my mouth shut as I had hoped to, having spent and exposed myself in that school much more than is my nature in the days before and during the war. I got up and went to sit closer to the podium next to a group of my students who, as soon as they saw me said, “Prof, you are going to say something, aren’t your? You can’t let him get away with this.” “That’s exactly why I’m here,” I answered. So I asked for the microphone and the first thing that I said to him was, “I’m an American,” just to set the record straight! “I’ve lived in Italy for as long as you have. And like you, the reason why I came to Europe was because of my insatiable appetite for culture. I highly commend you for the nobility of your project, the creation of a cultural center in Iraq, and I sincerely hope that you will be able to make it happen as soon as possible. However, without those Americans that are so good at making war, as you say, I wonder if you would ever have been able to even dream your dream.”
And for that statement I gained a much less resounding, but totally unexpected applause. Tawfik constructed a very long reply to my statement that began with “I’m not at all anti-American.” His words were probably sincere, if not true, and I must admit that I forced him into doing some semantic summersaults. One of the many things that he finally admitted was that without military intervention, it would have been impossible to overthrown Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, he criticized the way the intervention was handled, neglecting the involvement of the Iraqi people. By saying such, he demonstrated his own ignorance of the facts. For months Washington and its think tanks had been consulting with the spokesmen for the 300,000 Iraqi exiles in the United States and the 4 million spread around the world.
In short, for the sake of diplomacy, he said everything and its opposite. How can you admit the necessity of military intervention and simultaneously declare that you’re against the war? He also claimed that it was impossible to export democracy. That’s a fashionable statement these days. Those who make it forget, however, that that’s exactly what was done in Germany and in Japan after the Second World War, and with rather worthy results! And as far as the United States having no culture to teach, well, we’ve got the culture of freedom. Paraphrasing Montesquieu as I often do: Liberty is the one good without which we can’t enjoy any of the others. As Tawfik should know from his own experience, that includes culture!
Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi is an American commentator from Boston. She teaches Law and Economics in Turin, Italy. She also writes for the Roman daily, L'Opinione della Libertà and was awarded the Mario Soldati Prize for Journalism and Criticism for 2002.
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