Senza se, senza ma

On protests, community, and faith.

By Henry Astor

All names have been changed.

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

In the early days of my study abroad, I found myself in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. It was one of those days where you remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, what the weather was like, who you were with. The island-city was sweltering, lugging through the last of an atypically long summer, even for mild-tempered Italy. I had risen early that morning to catch the train from Bologna with my roommate Matt, stumbling our way to the station so clumsily that he forgot to pay the bus fare and was swiftly ticketed by a no-nonsense cop. 

While Venice’s better-known sites, like Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Ponte Rialto, were as crushed as ever with tourists in the waning high season, the Ghetto was empty. I passed through the hole in the wall that marks the Ghetto’s boundary—a semi-permeable membrane sieving the silent quarter from the throngs without. How fitting, I thought, to pay a visit to the Ur-Ghetto at the time the world’s largest, Gaza, was desperately struggling to be one no more, imagining if it could shred its own membrane and obey the laws of diffusion. Instead, despite the millions of screams so piercing you could practically hear them from across the Mediterranean, silence: one that would reverberate within me for many days thereafter.  

4,000 miles from home, in a country with barely enough Jews to fill my hometown, I was as far away from Judaism as I had ever been in my life. I knew this already; in choosing to study in Italy, I was after not my father’s Ashkenazi Jewish roots—prominent in all aspects about me—but my mother’s Italian ones, more heavily obscured by the cultural sandblast of middle American assimilation. No invectives like basta or cretino in our home, but plenty of chazerai and schmuck. I knew that this country, although it had nourished my forebears to life at some point in the fading past, was effectively a wilderness to me.

With barely a word of Italian on my lips in that burning epilogue of summer, I was stumbling through this place with the only other American I knew, all the way to the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, where I was struggling to find some reminder of who I was. Wandering amongst the quiet, boarded-up synagogues and former homes of notables, I couldn’t help but feel as empty as the Ghetto.   

…

Venice is beset by the ghosts of Crusaders and the chunky New Balance sneakers of the tourists who trample over them, pounding the island inch by inch back into the Adriatic. It is beautiful, but it is dead. Bologna is not only alive, it is the beating heart of Italy. All roads lead not to Rome, but to the statue of Neptune in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore. It is a place on the way to, ensnared in a tangled web of autostrade and high-speed rail lines. South comes north for better jobs. North comes south for sunnier skies. I came from the sidelines, oblique to these converging currents. 

Bologna’s relative life is an aggressive, indignant one. Under those bridges and catenary wires and hundreds of miles of graffiti-smattered portici is a sprawling underground. Squatting—“occupying” they call it—is the city’s favorite pastime. Earlier in the semester, I had met Angelica, a graduate student in sociology, who had introduced me to some of her friends in the scene. These included Franco, who leads an autonomia—an autonomous “communist youth organization” whose decentralized structure and disdain for elections mimics similar formations that flourished during Italy’s so-called Years of Lead. In any case, I was honored that Angelica, Franco, and a third friend, Giorgio, thought to invite me to their salon-like discourses on Mediterranean homosociality in the smoky courtyard of the sociology building, if only as a mute observer. 

But little things would bring my voice back out. At an outdoor karaoke competition in the neighborhood park, Giorgio taught me the lyrics to songs by Italy’s Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen in one man: the illustrious Lucio Dalla. For the rest of the semester, Dalla would pound my eardrums through every trip across the railroad tracks to the grocery store and every thumping bus ride through the cobblestone streets to my lectures. He was the city, a born and bred Bolognese whose lyrics clung to the ruddy sandstone facades, as much as the sandbags piled under windows when tanks were barreling toward crowds of student autonomists during the uprising of ’77. Giorgio had given me new eyes with which to see the city, had bestowed me with a sense of place. But I still wanted more. 

…

Outside of these fleeting moments, my mind was consumed entirely by Palestine. A Vaudevillian stagehand was pulling at my neck with a comically long cane, reeling me back to the empty, plucking me out of Italy and into Beit Hanoun and Shuja’iyya, teleporting me back into Morningside Heights as demonstrations on campus exploded across my Twitter timeline. Days disappeared like this, the great void within me filled with nothing but horror and disbelief.  

Having circumnavigated Bologna and re-encountered the three autonomists, I soon began to protest with them. At least once a week, Lucio Dalla’s streets were filled with desperate cries for the children of Gaza to live, that not another city should be menaced by tanks and sandbags and bombs. A brass band would play Bella Ciao, the anthem of the antifascist partisans who liberated Italy in the final years of World War II, after which  Mohammad Assaf’s “Ana Dammi Falastini” would blast from a loudspeaker. 

Italy, which was then making headlines for its cruelty to migrants disembarking at Lampedusa, was for a fleeting moment showing its best. Septuagenarian veterans of the Years of Lead linked arms with Tunisian mothers. Grubhub couriers marched with university professors. During one protest, a little boy named Samir was separated from his father in the mass of demonstrators. In tears, he sidled up to one of my comrades in the autonomia. She put him on her shoulders, bounced him up and down until the tears subsided, and they began to shout his name until his father came rushing back out of the throng. 

At another demonstration, while protesters were stalled on the Ponte Stalingrado, the autonomia opened up the megaphone to the crowd. Zaynab, one of the protest marshals, went up first. A Moroccan-Italian hijabi woman who had come all the way from Parma, she spoke about the takbir, her fear of being cast out of the only country she had known since she was a little girl, her confusion that her declaration of her love of God should somehow earn her the epithet of “terrorist.” Italy was her home, and she would do what it took to stay there, not just in body but in conviction. She refused to let “Muslim” and “Italian” contradict one another. 

After some encouragement from my comrades, I took the fore and, in as good Italian as I could muster, revealed my identity as an American Jew, here to simply do my part. Zaynab embraced me afterward. “Grazie.” What for, I wondered. This had all felt like an incredibly selfish exercise in expiation, all at the risk of my student visa. It took me some time to figure out why she did it: We showed one another that we belonged there. 

…

Following a call to action in the autonomia’s WhatsApp group, I found myself participating in the seizure of a campus building in a bid for divestment from Israeli universities and corporations. In this place where solidarity with Palestine had brought us all together, I was at last able to slip out of the inhuman rigidity I had felt since leaving the Ghetto. There was just as much partying as politics in the occupied building. Teach-ins and film screenings were interspersed with pizza, beer, and techno music, plus the occasional fire alarm triggered by someone’s cigarette. University delegates would show up periodically to threaten us with a sgombero – a forced evacuation at the point of a policeman’s baton, the weapon of choice in the bel paese. Organizers stood their ground every time.

I chatted at length with Roberto, a fellow history major who had traveled far and wide across the United States and was thrilled to finally have an English speaking partner. Luca, a sociology student, did me one better: he had visited my hometown in Tennessee, and asked if I knew some people in the music scene there. He evidently knew it better than I did. 

I also met Lama, one of the organization’s spokespeople. She, too, is at a place in between; her father is from Somalia. She skirts away from self-identifying as Italian, but her voice booming across the Piazza Verdi firmly cements her as one of Bologna’s main characters regardless. She belongs there. 

There was also a group of guys who seemed to be there mostly because they liked the smell of spray paint and the sound of techno. “Communism is a full-time job,” one of them told me. “Gotta kick back a little or else you’ll go crazy.” 

Franco was always the most excited to see me. I would call him the uncle of the group—he was about 6 foot 4, a grad student built like a steelworker. He and Lama were a funny pair, the two always designated to speak with any passerby or university representative. He never liked the epithet, though. “You all make this organization what it is,” he remarked in the middle of what was probably our 10th protest. Here with this rag-tag crew of chainsmoking punks, surrounded by moms and dads and kids and old folks from every corner of the Mediterranean and beyond, I had found my tribe. Arabic flowed into Italian which flowed into English senza sosta. The echoes of my self-reflections in the empty Ghetto had been replaced with the calls of a community I was proud to be a part of. 

…

Before that same protest, the organizers had given out at least a hundred Palestinian flags. I’ve kept mine. The most beautiful colors in the world, I couldn’t stop thinking. The colors of a home so precious that many who’ve never seen it are putting everything down for it. It was late November, one of the last pleasant afternoons before the sun began disappearing ahead of aperitivo time and before the smog set in. Those of us in the autonomia led some chants and responded to others, all experts by now. At one point, we got stuck in the Via Irnerio just before the Piazza VIII Agosto, named after the 1848 battle when the Bolognese beat back the troops of the Austrian occupation. Perhaps it was an intentional 15-minute rest, or maybe the police hadn’t moved their barricade up the street yet. In this uncertain pause, I heard a small voice, like a bird before dawn, crying out over the din of impatient chatter. It took a moment to find its source: a young boy, head wrapped in a keffiyeh, perched on the shoulders of a sister or aunt and surrounded by his family. Cessate il fuoco! Ceasefire now! Giù le mani dai bambini! Hands off the children! Soon the whole march was at his command. Israele fascista, stato terrorista! They were words a child his age should never have to know, but we followed him loyally. “Free, free Palestine!” in English. Each time it seemed like he might stop, his well of energy proved endless. I thought about the chorus to my favorite Lucio Dalla song, a letter to a friend jailed during the repressions of the mid-70s.

Vedi, caro amico

Cosa si deve inventare

Per poter riderci sopra

Per continuare a sperare?

E se quest'anno poi passasse in un istante

Vedi, amico mio

Come diventa importante

Che in questo istante ci sia anch'io?

— Lucio Dalla, “L’anno che verrà,”, 1979. 

“Do you see, dear friend // what we must invent // to be able to laugh it off // to keep our hopes up? // And if this year were to then pass by in an instant // do you see, my friend // how important it is // that I be here in this instant too?” 

The march began to move.