One recent stop on Saviano's pellegrinations was in fact the European Parliament, where we were able to interview him. He is a remarkable character, deeply admirable for what he has done, something which took a level of courage very few in the world possess. So when, this summer, I was sitting at a bar outside a bookshop, it crossed my mind to go and seek out the book. I read it in Italian, but you can find it easily in English too, and/or watch the box-office hit film made based on it.
Gomorra does something fundamentally quite simple - it tells it like it is. Of course, in the streets of Naples and its hinterland, telling it like it is is actually very far from simple and probably amounts to a death sentence. For this is an account of how the Neapolitan mafia - the Camorra - utterly dominates economic life in the region, maintaining its grip through ubiquity, a deep-rooted culture and pitiless, extreme violence. The smallest offences against the "System" can earn their perpetrators massively disproportionate punishments, meted out by a seemingly inexhaustable supply of young men willing to be the "soldiers" of the clans, from "warnings" (a shop sprayed with kalashnikov fire, a burnt out car, a beating) to death in many varieties, from a simple shot to the back of the head (judged by some kids in the book as the "best" way to die) to exemplary and very nasty forms of execution.
The book stuns with its frank description of the violence, but is much more than a catalogue of brutality. It delves deep into the sheer pervasiveness of the System in the economic life of the Campania region, of Italy as a whole and indeed outposts around the world (including, bizarrely, Aberdeen). Entire economic sectors are wholly controlled by the Camorra, existing completely outside the structures and laws of the state. Arms, construction, high fashion, refuse disposal, agriculture, retail, transport, drugs, restaurants, the port of Naples - all are in the hands of the Camorra, and most of this activity, controlled by clan bosses who see themselves first and foremost as businessmen, is simply absent from national statistics. People too: Saviano describes armies of Chinese workers, for example, who simply don't exist officially, but who, amongst much else, are responsible for about half the freight passing through the port of Naples. The book opens with a shocking account of the accidental opening of a container being loaded onto a ship, sending the frozen corpses of dozens of Chinese workers tumbling forth onto the quayside. These are workers who died in Italy and are being returned clandestinely for burial in China, to be replaced by a new group. Tellingly, at the time this episode passes unnoticed by the authorities, with the local Camorra cleaning up the "mess" in no time at all and the crane operator who related the event to Saviano obviously too terrified to denounce the occurence to any authority.
The power of Saviano's book is in its myriad anecdotes and its insistence on placing people and events precisely in their context. He always names names (except for some sources) and, because he belongs himself to this territory, he is initimate with the real places where events take place. (More than once he had me reaching for a map to locate the municipalities of the Naples hinterland: Secondigliano, Aversa, Sant'Antimo, San Cipriano d'Aversa... places living according to a completely different set of rules.)
A 5.00 am outing in speed boats to unload contraband trainers from a ship, being taken to a refuse-covered beach by his father to learn to shoot a gun and "become a man", the ambulance crews who know not to try to assist the victim of a hit until the killers have made sure their victim is dead, the expert but anonymous black economy tailor who sees a dress he made worn by Angelina Jolie on Oscars Night, kids showing off the bruises they have acquired through being shot while wearing bullet-proof vests (an indispensable part of their "training"), cutting his fingers on the absurdly neat round bullet holes left by kalashnikov bullets in a shop window, Roma kids used to set light to toxic refuse to make way for more in illegal dumps in the countryside around the city, the boss' wife murdered on her doorstep to where she was lured by a teenage friend of the family, the innocent teenage girl caught in the crossfire of a gun battle in the middle of Naples, the clan boss who builds himself a house precisely modelled on Al Pacino's house in the movie Scarface...
The stories go on and on, placed diligently in their context of a world apart, but one which has infltrated "our" normal world in so many ways. This is not, Saviano makes very clear, the "traditional" Sicilian mafia, which its rigid hierarchies and residual "code". The Camorra he describes is a more fluid thing, with numerous competing clans and bosses, constantly shifting power structures, short shelf lives even for the most powerful bosses, swift recourse to violence (referred to as "military" action), a decentralised economic model and no ethic but the maintenance of power and the pursuit of profit. The costs, in human, economic, environmental and political terms are of course vast. It is hard to see how the state and "normal" economic activity can ever shift or replace such an all-pervasive system, for all the sporadic successes of trials against mafia bosses and (repeated) dissolution of entire municipal authorities for mafia activity. It is all too clear that there is nothing to replace the Camorra but another part of the Camorra - there is simply almost no legitimate economy left to fill the gaps.
So an entirely pessimistic view of the destiny of Naples and its people? Saviano finds flashes of hope: the odd person prepared to stand up and tell the truth, such as the murdered priest to whom he devotes a section of the book. He himself believes the only thing he can do is to tell the truth, use the power of words to break the silence of fear and acquiescence which is the Camorra's greatest asset.
Saviano's book is not an academic study, not structured research, but a personal howl of fury against what he has seen. Some of the prose is rather purple, passionate in a way which contradicts the supposed ideal of the detached journalist. But in fact this matters not one jot, the overwhelming sense is of one man prepared to stand up and say what everybody knows. It is a measure of the power of the Camorra, that simply to do that is an extraordinary act of courage, and reason enough for as many people as possible to buy and read this book.
Gomorra: another world, but our world
Another cracking review. Thanks again.
ReplyDeleteJohn