WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

rethinking europe

Emphasis on origins and on the continuity of a timeless tradition is the most ordinary way to think about identity. Foundationalist myths give a sense of authenticity on which the West’s heart of darkness draws in order to create hierarchy and boundaries. Thus, we need to situate the debate about identity around all those historical developments which have disturbed the relatively settled character of many cultures, above all around the global processes of free and forced migration in the post-colonial world. The question Where have we come from? necessarily entails an irrevocable answer to Who are we? So, let’s transgress the shadow which separates us from our silent identifying features and ask ourselves What might we become? How have we been represented? and How should we represent ourselves?

CARMEN, AS SHE LEAPS AWAY

   Don’t miss the opportunity Europe is giving us to rethink new forms of identity and political belonging! Beyond arguing if the Christian roots are more European than the universal rights of the citizens, Carmen could tell us much more about the darkness upon which the European identity is founded.

   | Mauro Turrini (Bologna). “Carmen we all throng after you! Carmen, be kind, answer us at least!” shouts the crowd of young men who follow and surround Bizet’s “Carmen”: the incarnation of the irresistible attraction of femininity. It is the opera which is interpreted more than any other on the world’s stages, the opera which Nietzsche described as a natural opera which appeals to all, it is not merely a simple gesture of voyeuristic love for all things exotic.
   It is the mythology of the imaginary colonial west, an extraordinarily intense and fertile place, conceived by Merimée in 1845 and subsequently interpreted in the theatre, in dance, in the cinema, in music and in literature. Carmen is a worker in a cigarette factory, but she is also a Gypsy who cannot adapt easily to life in a factory and prefers to steal, predict the future or live a life among criminals.
   She is a hyper-realistic image that crosses the tropes of the other world: she is feminine, ethnic and subordinate. It is a polarised vision crammed with stereotypes (giving rise to the expression “Yo soy la Carmen de España y no la de Merimée!”) but which is still capable of representing the complexity of colonial desire towards primitives.
   The killing of the Gypsy by the man whom she tore away from a quiet life as a soldier with her magnetic personality and then abandoned, is articulated in the opposition that governs the feelings of love which are spurned. Fear of and desire for foreignness dominate everything. Carmen openly shows her weapons of seduction; an illusory opening of her heart is what follows her disturbingly provocative ways, an apparent approach accompanied by the actual, overwhelming detachment.
   What makes her irresistible is her ability to escape any attempts to tame her, so to prefigure the horizons of unpredictable freedom. The declaration of freedom is, however, transformed into a declaration of supremacy, a force that opposes discipline because it challenges her possession of don José. Amorous tension reveals the passion which forces the lovers to take on the parts of the cat/hunter and the bird/victim, thus bringing on the desire to die as the origin of perennial cycles of destruction and regeneration.
   Here don José reveals himself as the true protagonist, who, chasing the birdlike rebel Carmen, as she leaps away, is actually chasing a mirage: Gitanos’ ancestral, natural liberty. At the same time he discovers the hidden, shadowed side of this mythical virtue, experiencing in first person the exercise of power aimed at annihilation, predestined to defeat and solitude.