Italy went from fashion week to "fascio" (fascist emblem) week in an instant as the Milan shows closed and yesterday's election proclaimed the far-right coalition group as a winner. A sort of terrifying Cerberus, this multiple headed-beast that got the control of both houses of parliament with 44% of the vote, contains three entities, a screaming head, Giorgia Meloni, leader of neo-fascist Brothers of Italy; the zombie (and Putin supporter) Silvio Berlusconi, sadly undead leader of Forza Italia; and a cretin, Matteo Salvini, leader of The League party, who having stopped wearing random uniforms from the Italian police forces and directional psycho-geographical sweatshirts, is having an existential crisis.
The most dangerous of the three at the moment is Giorgia Meloni. About her we know that she's a Christian, a mother and a woman because she is programmed to scream it every time she opens her mouth. A supporter of Hungary's right wing prime minister Viktor Orbán and supported by Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist to Donald Trump, Meloni is a goblin (well, she loves "Lord of the Rings", a hit with the right-wing for some kind of reason…), so we won't feature any images of her in this post because goblins disturb and destabilise our inner beauty, especially on a Monday.
Like a bad comedy of the arts, Meloni doesn't have a political programme, but a set of canovacci (scenarios): she builds indeed her speeches around a selection of themes, such as God (but doesn't the "Exodus" state: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain"? Well, maybe she didn't read it…too busy reinventing Tolkien), the traditional idea of family (even though she's not married in a church, as you may expect, well, actually she is not married at all, but has a child with her partner), hate directed towards migrants and the LGBT+ community, and the slow yet persistent erosion of abortion rights (one step at the time, starting with the Marche region where it has become rather difficult to have an abortion thanks to the regional government led by Brothers of Italy). Now Meloni is set to become Italy's first female Prime Minister.
I'm Italian, I'm a woman and I’m toying with the idea of slashing my wrists: how did this happen? I mean, of all the intelligent, clever women Italy produced, a goblin bigot enters history as Italy's first female Prime Minister. My mind struggles to understand how this is even possible, so I'm taking refuge in art and I repeat in my mind the words of "I want a President", the 1992 poem by photographer, sculptor, feminist and queer activist Zoe Leonard.
Originally written in 1992 when her friend, the poet and activist Eileen Myles made a protest run at the presidency as an independent candidate alongside George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, the poem wasn't supposed to become an artwork.
It was actually written to be featured in an independent LGBT magazine. When the latter shut down right before publication, the poem started circulating as a photocopy. In 2006, on invitation from the feminist genderqueer journal LTTR, the artist revived the text as a postcard and, in 2016, in the run-up to the presidential election that was later won by Donald Trump, it appeared on a billboard at the foot of the High Line in New York.
I love the immediacy of this poem that, through its anaphoric structure, makes a list of the author's wishes and desires. "I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president," the poem begins.
There is a lot of bitterness and sadness in this poem, but there is also a lot of energy and anger, the kind of positive rage that can push somebody into action. The more you read what Leonard wants, the more you can identify in her demand for empathy and in the people she would like to see rising to the presidency. Because some of us - most of us - can identify in one or in more than one of those people, from the dyke at the very beginning to the person with AIDS, from the person who tended a beloved one in the last moments of their life to the one who ate that terrible hospital food.
In a few witty and emotional lines, Leonard managed to summarise collective depression and despair, but also our immense desire for empathy, humanity and inclusion, things that too many politicians don't even mention, because they are too busy screaming, shouting, hating, quarrelling and dividing people.
When the poem was installed on New York's High Line, Leonard spoke at the launch, stating, "This is not a text I would write today. I don't think about identity politics in the same way. That is, I don't think that a specific set of identifiers or specific demographic markers necessarily leads to a particular political position." Yet, we can still use the poem - that you find at the end of this post typed in English and Italian as well (in case our Italian-speaking readers want to send it to Giorgia Meloni...) - to open a debate about the future, make comparisons with other times, or as a question to ourselves about the political leaders we would like to have (and why isn't that possible? as Leonard wonders) and the society we would like to live in.
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"I want a President" (1992) by Zoe Leonard
"I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn't possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”
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"Voglio un Presidente" (1992) di Zoe Leonard
"Voglio una lesbica come presidente. Voglio una persona con l'AIDS come presidente e voglio una checca come vice presidente e voglio una persona senza assicurazione sanitaria e voglio una persona che è cresciuta in un posto dove la terra è così satura di rifiuti tossici che non ha potuto scegliere di avere la leucemia. Voglio un presidente che abbia abortito a sedici anni e un/a candidato/a che non sia il minore dei due mali e voglio un presidente che abbia perso la persona amata a causa dell'AIDS, e la veda ancora nei suoi occhi ogni volta che va a riposare, che l'abbia tenuta tra le braccia sapendo che stava morendo. Voglio un presidente senza aria condizionata, un presidente che è stato in fila alla clinica, alla motorizzazione, all'ufficio del welfare, ed è stato disoccupato, licenziato, molestato sessualmente, picchiato e deportato. Voglio una persona che abbia passato la notte nelle tombe e alla quale abbiano dato fuoco a una croce nel suo giardino e che sia sopravvissuta a uno stupro. Voglio una persona che sia stata innamorata e ferita, che rispetti il sesso, che abbia commesso errori e abbia imparato da loro. Voglio una donna nera come presidente. Voglio una persona con denti brutti e carattere, una persona che abbia mangiato quel cibo orribile dell'ospedale, una persona che si travesta, abbia fatto uso di droghe e sia stata in terapia. Voglio una persona che abbia commesso disobbedienza civile. E voglio sapere perché non è possibile. Voglio sapere perché diamo per scontato che un presidente sia sempre un clown. Sempre un cliente e mai una prostituta. Sempre un capo e mai un lavoratore. Sempre un bugiardo, sempre un ladro, e mai catturato."
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