Whenever, as a young person who was always protesting some
egregious injustice against citizens, I was detained and asked if I’d ever been
arrested, I would use satire in the form of Dante’s levels through hell, from
his Inferno or I would respond: “Which time?” Moments after an
officer would get a glint in his eyes, thinking he’d caught a harden criminal,
I’d add: “Fighting for the right to vote in Alabama; Protesting against
redlining in Bedford Stuyvesant – civil disobedience is a very serious
offense?” When viewed as a dissident, for simply exercising natural
rights, disarming government sponsored opposition by using “metaphors or
allegories “ from great writing, was the only defense I had – a way to telling them that my only crime
seemed to have been the ability to think, a skill I hadn’t found in a
majority’s job description.
I had utilized Dante’s witticism when I was politely removed
from a scene at the Fontana di Trevi in Rome. A man
had grabbed my rear end and I had promptly cold-cocked him with a bottle of
cheap, French wine.
“You a hit him
with a bottle a wine, not even a Italian wine,” scolded Polizia
di Stato, Gregorio La Trosciscana, smiling, after he had escorted me to the
passenger side of his little European patrol car and began navigating his way
through the narrow streets.
I wasn’t at all offended at being interned in a patrol vehicle,
I had run out of money and needed a ride to a chapel, about an hour away, to
meet Umberto, an artist friend who was working on the restoration of artwork.
“You a ever been in a
trouble in a Europe before?”
“Yes, I received a Level Eight, Bolgia #2, but I thought
it should have been Level Nine,
Bolgia #13,” I answered, locking eyes with Gregorio, then, looking away,
covering my mouth to hide a sly grin.
“Lasciate ogni
speranza, o voi che entrate qui,” chimed Gregorio after he had hopped
out of the car and held the driver’s side door open for me as if he’d just
chauffeured me to a fine restaurant. Fear gripped me, had I gone too
far? Was he actually going to throw me in jail? “You don’t a know it in
Italiano, no?” Gregorio had strutted up the steps of an old
building with Italian writing, holding open, yet another
door.
“Know, know what?” I asked, biting my nails and climbing the
steps with guarded trepidation. “Abandon
all hope, you who enter here?” “Wow, a cop who, not only can
read, but quote from Dante’s
Inferno, impressive.” Gregorio smiled, loosening the
bland, government issued tie around his neck, as he retrieved a chair, then
motioned for me to sit. “Where are we, by the way?” I asked, staring up at an
ornate ceiling.
“This is where my
grandfather was detained by Polizia, my grandfather was, how do you say,
protester, see that room, he had a old printer press – he was jailed for
writing a dangerous words, under Mussolini.”
“Wow, what a great man, you must have been proud of him?”
“When you no have food to eat, you no so proud.”
Gregorio leaned in close to my face: “I
want to go to a university so bad, but my family no money, I take care family,
I a read everything, I learn a English – but I no write – Dante, he say the
root of fraud – linguistic sin – linguistic sin is greater than murder, I think
I agree, no?”
“But
writing can dismantle power; writing can change lives, especially lives of
those without a voice.” “Why do you think they jailed your
grandfather?”
“I know so, so I read;
I think, but I don’t write thoughts.”
“But, think about it, if the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t,
slaves might never have been freed in America – it was rumored that her writing
caused the spark that ignited the American Civil War; Charles Dickens not only
gave the world a window into the underclass and the poverty stricken in London
but, attacked the judicial system for its discrimination against the poor; you
know how Americans got federal food safety laws?”
Gregorio shook his head front side to side, then took a pencil
and paper and began jotting down everything I said. “Upton Sinclair’s
“The Jungle”– it
described the deplorable working conditions, the diseased, rotten and
contaminated meat, shocking the American public.” Chinua Achebe told us
what the impact of colonization was on African culture in Things Fall Apart.” I was nearly
out of breath. “Thoreau’s Civil
Disobedience stated that the best government is the one that
governs the least; Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man argued that political revolution is a
justifiable action when the government fails to perform its duty of protecting
the natural rights of its citizen.”
Gregorio bought me dinner before dropping me off at the Chapel,
giving me thumbs up as he meandered his way, once again, through the
ever-crowded city of Rome.
Often times when I sit down to write or teach writing, I think
about that impassioned conversation I had had with Gregorio and watching
Umberto hang atop a ladder in chapels surrounded by the works of artistic
giants. Words are like an arrow leaving a bow; once shot, you can’t
take it back. So, as writers, we should, not only write well,
but we should write with purpose. Our goal should be to try and do what Baldwin
said writing ought to do: “Write in
order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but
also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your
aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world.”
Writing is hard; life is hell, but, good writing, now that’s dangerously
divine.
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