GRAFFITI ALA PALERMITANA – PART FOUR OF FOUR

The inscription on this mural by the graffiti artist Basik, located a few blocks from our apartment says, "She devours her own and feeds the foreigner."

 
The inscription is a take-off on the inscription found on the base of a marble statue called Il Genio di Palermo (the Genius of Palermo) located inside the Palazzo di Praetoria (city hall).  

A genio is a genius loci, a deity that protects a specific place.  It typically takes the form of an animal-turned-human.  This pagan god, along with Santa Rosalia, a Christian saint, protects the city and takes the form of an old man wearing a crown sitting in a golden bowl (the Genio's gift to the city) with a serpent wrapped around his body, biting into his breast.  

The Latin inscription on the statue reads:  Panormus Conca Aurea Suos Devorat Alienos Nutrit.  This translates roughly as “Palermo devours her own agricultural bounty to feed others.”  At one time, the entire expanse of Palermo from the sea to the semicircular surrounding mountains was covered in citrus groves.  Many of them remain.

Il Genio may have Carthaginian antecedents but certainly has Roman ones.  One hypothesis is that the Genio derives from Saturn, the Roman divinity who is a symbol of abundance and a protector of agriculture.  Saturn is often represented in the act of devouring his young.  The serpent is associated with land and rebirth.  Reading this iconography and the inscription together, we have the figure of the snake of renewal feeding on an old man wearing a crown, a symbol of power, who is himself a symbol of abundance and annihilation.  In sum, the Genio refers to the continual cycle of creation and destruction, waxing and waning, death and rebirth.  With respect to Palermo itself, the Genio refers to the historical cycle of invasion and renewal of the multi-ethnic city by people coming from different cultures, both as conquerors and as welcome guests. 

However, the meaning of the inscription on the mural seems to me to be more ambiguous.  Its iconography is quite different from that of the Genio.  Here we have a pair of hands silhouetted against a flat black background that offer to an unseen recipient a golden bowl in which sit a crowned skull, crossed arrows, calipers (which measure the distance between opposite sides), and an olive branch in flames.   

Is the message in opposition to that of the Genio, warning that foreigners are devouring Palermo?  Or is the message a warning to foreigners that Palermo will devour them?  Or is the message a warning that the city, should it turn its back on foreigners, will betray its pagan protector at its peril?  Perhaps the mural is giving all three conflicting messages to call into sharp relief just how fraught is Palermo’s relationship with its recent migrant flows.

It's complicated, as these data points and graffiti paste-ups I found around our neighborhood  illustrate.

The most southern point in Sicily is farther south than parts of the Tunisian coast.  Sicilians like to tell you they’re really African.

The distance between Tripoli and Lampedusa, the most southern island off the coast of Sicily, is 184 miles, less than the 228 miles between Havana and Miami.

The first patron saint of Palermo was San Benedetto il Moro (above), born near Messina in 1526 to African slaves.  He was replaced by Santa Rosalia when she delivered the city from the plague.

Between 2014 and mid-September 2018, about 650,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Italy, many of them disembarking in Sicily and eventually finding their way to Palermo, a city of about 700,000.

Based on figures up to mid-September 2018, one in every 49 people who arrived in the EU via the Mediterranean died in the crossing.

Our neighbor here recently retired as an admiral in the Italian Coast Guard.  He was responsible for dispatching migrant rescue ships from Palermo to the southern Mediterranean.  He found this period in his service extremely stressful.  He says migrant traffickers had his cell phone number and would call him whenever a boat left Tripoli for Lampedusa.  In 2017, Italy stopped rescuing migrants at sea, leaving the job to NGOs and commercial vessels.

In June, 2019, Italy passed a bill drafted by Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right, anti-immigration party, now the largest party in Italy, that punishes NGO rescue boats bringing migrants to Italy without permission with fines of up to €50,000 and possible imprisonment for crew members.  This is an unimaginable, yet acceptable, risk for a Sicilian fisherman who encounters a rubber dinghy taking on water, dangerously overloaded with migrants, and cannot in good conscience refuse to help. Guardian Sicilian Fishermen

In response to Salvini, Leoluca Orlando, leftist mayor of Palermo, declared Palermo an open city saying, “We have no migrants in Palermo. If you ask me how many migrants are in Palermo, I don’t reply 100,000, 120,000.  I reply, No one.  Who lives in Palermo is Palermo.”

Waves of migration are not without tension here, as these recent articles in The New York Times NYT and in Medium medium-airbnbmag recount.  The most recent migrants to Palermo are Bangladeshis and Nigerians, who live side by side in Ballaro', a very poor neighborhood with a vibrant daily street market that is on every tourist's list of places to see.  The Nigerians have teamed up with local Mafia in cocaine trafficking and prostitution, creating a significant crime problem for the Bangladeshi shopkeepers and putting a damper on tourism.

Unemployment figures are hard to come by and for the most part unreliable.  I haven't found any that specifically address migrants.  That said, depending on the source, the unemployment rate in Sicily is somewhere between 21.5% and 35%.  But when underemployment is added in, and many Sicilians are underemployed--particularly migrants--the rate can jump to between 42% and 55%.  We met an immigrant from Ghana who has worked 70 hours a week for 16 years in a very nice vivaio (nursery) in Palermo.  He earns about €300 per month.  That's unconscionable exploitation of an experienced employee and certainly not a living wage.

But, despite these challenges, migrants create an opportunity for reinvention and rejuvenation, both for themselves and for Palermo.  Sicily has withstood many past invasions--Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, French.  But instead of resisting the newcomers, Sicily absorbed them.  “We don’t say, when we were invaded by Arabs or invaded by Spanish. We say, when we were Arabs, when we were Spanish.” 

Palermo has always possessed the genius to devour itself in order to feed the foreigners, thereby reincarnating the metropolis as a new animal.  The fragments of majolica tiles above the doorway to this small African social club in Ballaro' incorporate the sentiment of inclusion and fraternity:  "One Love Big Brother."  Or as a Palermitano might say, "When we were Africans."

   

Keep it real!

Marilyn