In the heart of a Middle East crossed by millenary stories and still open wounds, Paola Caridi’s voice It resonates like that of a narrator capable of restoring dignity and depth to what often remains invisible. We met her in Cosenza, where with «The Gerusalem mulberry. The other story told by the trees “(Feltrinelli) won the Sila 2025 prize, economics and company section.
The XIII edition of the prestigious and historical recognition ended on Sunday with three days of cultural events of the highest profile that transformed Cosenza and the Sila into an extraordinary literary stage. The inauguration He saw the journalist to dialogue with the historian of art Tomaso Montanari, in front of a very large audience, in a meeting that has been able to combine cultural reflection and civil commitment. The second day At Palazzo Arnone celebrated the female excellence of contemporary literature: from Nadia Fusini’s Lectio Magistralis on Shakespeare and Cervantes to the award ceremony conducted by Ritanna Armeni, who crowned the three winners: Nicoletta Verna for the literature section with “The days of glass” (Einaudi), Caridi itself, and Nadia Fusini insigned for his career. The grand finale In Camiglitello Silano he saw the writer Viola Ardone and the writer and critic Emanuele Trevi confront the theme “weave the stories”, a worthy closure of an event that confirmed Calabria as a land of culture capable of attracting the great protagonists of Italian narrative.
A particular bond unites Paola Caridi to Calabria: His father was Calabrian, “he had left this land at 17, for hunger, during the Second World War,” said the author. With his book Caridi invites you to look at the history of the Middle East from a new and surprising perspective: that of trees, silent witnesses of conflicts, migrations and rebirths. In a time when the news seems to overwhelm the memory, his gaze tries to write an unpublished story suspended between the strength of nature, the earth, and the fragility of man. With Montanari on May 24, Paola Caridi was promoting the initiative “a Sudden for Gaza” to remember the innocent victims of what they clearly call a genocide, a concrete example of how culture can transform from thought into tangible gesture of solidarity …
Through the perspective of the trees, the history of the Middle East appears less schematic and more human. What can this change of gaze teach us about understanding the conflicts and identities of the region?
«It can teach us a lot, because it doesn’t only change your gaze, the chronology changes. Change the boundaries that do not exist. Change the role of humans themselves, because you can see them from another perspective. And through this gaze, perhaps, our idea of the future also changes ».
His book intertwines natural memory and historical memory. How can the narration of nature help to reconstruct the collective memory of peoples marked by wars and migrations?
«First of all, the change is precisely in the story, in the sense that it is not said that what we know of a conflict or a crisis, of a question such as the Israeli-Palestinian one corresponds to reality, to what happened on Earth. And the second thing is that we focus on humans, peoples and communities, but not on earth. Yet those communities, those peoples, act and live on that land of which we know very little. This is already a fundamental change in narration ».
Together with Tomaso Montanari, he promoted the initiative of the white sheet to commemorate the 50 thousand deaths of Gaza …
«First of all it is the symbol of genocide. And I don’t say it, we do not say it, that is Tomaso Montanari, Micaela and Micaela, Evelina Santangelo, Claudia Durastanti, Francesco Pallante, Giuseppe Mazza. But for example, the photographers and the Palestinian cameramen of Gaza say that they made the Southaries the symbol of the genocide. So it is not our appropriation, it is not our reading. We only read what others had told us and described us. And the reaction of the community of Italians is a partly anticipated narrative. We had caught what we call the whisper. This need to say enough, to say not in my name, to say it is not possible to accept such enormousness, but we did not expect such a choral reaction. It is precisely a choir, also in the sense of the Greek tragedy. And this choir is just like a sound carpet that imposes on politics and decision makers not only to say but to do, not to be accomplices. In order not to be I had to run the genocide ».
Gaza’s situation today represents one of the most serious humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean. What is the role that the narrative – literary and journalistic – can have in contrasting indifference and in promoting greater public awareness?
“There is no indifference on the part of citizens, there is complicity of a part of politics. The fundamental role has the artistic narrative. We put everything inside art: literature, music. Art widely understood. That goes deep. Where the news stops. And not because there are no journalists who tell Gaza: at least 225 Palestinians from Gaza have been killed and showed us the genocide. Art, literature changes the paradigm that forced us into these limits and within this frame for too many decades. Not years “.