The radicals' hunger strike seen by Adriano Sofri

ABSTRACT: "Of all the forms the radicals have practised and offered to others, this strikes me as the most significant and fecund", says Adriano Sofri, recalling the time in which the hunger strike was considered, at best, a "capricious form of defeatism". After analysing forms, contents and values of the hunger strike as the radicals' non-violent weapon, Sofri then recalls that "morbid alternation" of the "relation between the radicals, the radical hunger strikers and the the media and their public". Now that "the hunger strike has gone its own way", "it is no longer [...] a radical weapon". Sofri then makes a subtle digression on the subject of the hunger strike: "the history of the radicals' hunger strikes is also a chapter of the history of the excess, of the difficulty and the diffidence towards moderateness and sobriety..."

(1994 - IL QUOTIDIANO RADICALE, 29 October 1993)

In Florence, as I write this piece, the headmaster of a high school, to protest against the strike and the students' occupation of the school, is going on a hunger strike. Three hurrays for the headmaster: his colleagues of 1968 would have typically called the police in the same circumstances. An authority who reacts by going on a public hunger strike is a good sign of bad times. Obviously it could point to the worst: governments that go on hunger strikes against their subjects, entrepreneurs versus employees, parents against children. Perhaps there will be a time when the hunger strike will become a ritual, and the blackmail of the weapons will be replaced by the weapon of the blackmail. But in the meanwhile, ordinary people are going on hunger strikes: miners from Sulcis, unemployed people sitting on chimneys, relatives of prisoners and the prisoners themselves, women clad in black and Franciscan friars. Of all the forms the radicals have practiced and offered to other people, this seems to me as the most

significant and fecund. I am old enough to have lived through a period when the voluntary and "political" hunger strike was considered to be the most ridiculous, if not offensive, of eccentricities. A life style accompanied by the nightmare of an empty stomach and of hunger; and a combative way of thinking that wanted others to be hungry for once. Hunger strikes were considered good for nail-eaters or fools, or at best a capricious form of defeatism: that was how hunger strikes were regarded. Obviously there were canonical forms of it, the hunger strike of the sick person, to purify the body, and the hunger strike of penance, to purify the soul. Or the example of the extreme situations with no solution, the desperate situations: in the hands of a fierce and unworthy enemy even a combatant could let himself starve to death. The Irish irredentist prisoners did it throughout the century.

The radicals - I was tempted to say Pannella (1), as if there hadn't been others, with their intelligence and courage. But is is a comprehensible distraction; Pannella seems to be designed for hunger strikes, as massive as Gandhi was tiny. Pannella always reminded me of Peeperkorn, the bulky character of Mann's "Zauberberg". The radicals have transformed the hunger strike into a positive instrument, a way, with one of the formulas they adore, to give body to hope. And even when their struggle became dramatic - and this happened several time, despite people's malicious hinting that they feasted on cappuccinos, they maintained this positive quality, and with it the decision to assume the responsibilities for other people's deficiencies or evils. The pictures of the skinny bodies were annoying pictures, just as the ideas they embodied were embarrassing: conscientious affirmation against clandestine abortion or marriage as a life sentence, the inevitability of starvation or the insuperability of ideological bar

riers. Those pictures were normally censored. They are censored despite their sensational nature: just as the skeleton-like bodies of the people dying of hunger are sensational at first and then immediately set aside. The radicals were like street beggars, with their wounds and their stench, who are given either money in the hat and then forgotten. Invisible and embarrassing. They were perhaps right, but what a way of doing things" (non-violence was much more scandalous and heretical than violence. In fact the latter was extremely heterodoxical). I imagine and I can sense it from the radicals' resigned accounts that this sense of invisibility has permeated them, forced them a thousand times to touch themselves and wonder whether they were alive, and ask themselves who they were, and why other people seemed not to notice them.

The obsessive attention of the media for the radicals has an external motivation - there is no effectiveness without information - but also an interior one: that without communication one is deleted and deformed, and that information is the mirror that allows us to distinguish the living from the ghosts. It is a deforming mirror, clearly. To the point in which the radicals' actions - but after how much time and at the price of what excesses of zeal! - became too evident, then the mirror suddenly focused on their figures and reflected them everywhere, multiplied, ubiquitous and omnipotent. Then the light turned off again. The same thing has just happened.

The relation between the radical hunger strikers, the media and their public has been based on this morbid alternation. Within them the determination and the narcissism of some and the cynicism and patheticism of others has grown. Today that the hunger strike has gone its own way, between workers and Franciscans, prisoners and headmasters, women in black, it is quite normal for the radicals to watch it go with pride, and perhaps with a touch of jealousy and regret, as with one's dearest brainchild. On the other hand it is likely that the hunger strike is no longer, or will hardly ever be, a radical weapon, and that its force - intact - will be valid only to the few or many that resort to it than for the desired purposes. Above all, it is a way of gathering forces, and this is already very similar to a practical effectiveness. It is true that our world has not changed, the scandalous figure of the hunger striker no longer overlaps with the real or rhetoric one of the person who is dying of hunger. Not close a

t any rate. The hunger striker of the rich country in the name of the starving ones, or of the temporarily peaceful ones in the name of the besieged population of Sarajevo or Mostar, repeats the scandal but goes unnoticed, as we saw. Therefore his action will be valid only for himself. On the contrary the civil hunger strike mingles with the universal threat of obesity and the meticulous cowardice of the slimming diets and the sacred and cursed protest of anorexia.

Rather, the history of the radical hunger strikes is also a chapter of the history of the excesses, of the mistrust for sobriety, measure, mediocrity, compromise. Things get mixed up. Of the alternation between long, rigorous hunger (and even thirst) strikes and voracity: literally and metaphorically, and of the parallel alternation between clandestinity, removal (and deformation) and overexposition. Who should say how much of this has been imposed and how much has been chosen, how much is the fruit of other people's narrow-mindedness and how much the result of a personal vocation, how much other people's prejudice has become distracted or deliberate? Each person should try and answer for himself, for their personal life, those of us who lack the sense of measure and do not conduct an orderly life. Over the lines and above the lines. I once knew a man who lived in a small town. In the afternoon he would leap from one slab of the boulevard to the other, faster and faster, until he stepped on a line. At that p

oint he would shout "line!" and he started again by way of punishment. People called him "Line". A funny man, a man of order. I don't know what happened of him, whether they redid the pavement of the boulevard. After all, the question is growing up without becoming grown-ups. When we were small, the real question was, "What do you want to be as a grown-up?"

Translator's notes

(1) SOFRI ADRIANO. (1942). Leader of a left-wing Italian movement called "Lotta Continua". Journalist and writer. He was tried and convicted to twenty years of prison as the presumed organizer of the assassination of police commissioner Luigi Calabresi. Author of a lucid and disillusioned memoir.

(2) PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.