Previous: Across the Pond and Into the Warren
Dear Diary,
Not too long ago, we tried to throw a journalist under the bus by comparing his “Zizians” coverage to Italian daytime television. We meant to say that his love for ✨sensationalism✨ was overtaking all else, & we don’t retract that judgment. No— we are awake & writing this, at barely four in the morning, bc we have just had the strangest dream.
We dreamt we were in our family crypt in Basilicata, & all our relatives were out of their graves. We were having so much fun hearing their brigandry stories— when suddenly, our great-grandmother appeared, & led us off to a corner by our elbow. “For shame, Drosselmeyer,” she said, “You have just taken a lazy potshot at Italian daytime television when you could have said sthng rlly interesting.” We were trembling, speechless, so she continued: “You could have said, ‘This journalist w/ an Italian last name could have respected his heritage more if he’d staged Jamie’s open letter to the world less like it was true crime on a morning show, & more like it was testimonianza’” 😮
We told our great-grandmother that this journalist’s family may have come from the north & not from the south of Italy, in which case her recommendation would be inexact. If, however, they had come from the south, this indeed held much weight, & cast Jamie’s letter in a chilling light.
***
What is testimonianza in southern Italy (ISI)? Well, it’s personal storytelling but this hardly scratches the surface. Lots of personal stories ISI are told performatively— that’s not to say w/ fabrications; that’s to say they are emotionally maximalist.
Their goal is not just to present information, but to make listeners feel what the storyteller has felt. That’s also to say: they have a goal of entertaining; even— especially— when the subject matter is deadly serious. Petty feuds & gossip are elevated to moral epics, while grave injustices are dragged for their absurdity. Disputes may be staged publicly, & performed as an extravagant, tragicomic rendering of justice— even while the stakes remain v. real, & even if no practical “justice” emerges.
In all this brouhaha, the storytelling form "testimonianza" may appear like the subdued, unassuming cousin at an extroverted family reunion; but its appearance is misleading. Its appearance hides chasmic moral & existential depths.
Testimonianza refers to tales of personal suffering, in which the storyteller is not just giving an account, but is bearing witness: usually under conditions of oppression and/or social marginality. It means telling one’s story not for entertainment or for prestige, but as an act of ethical responsibility.
***
Unlike journalistic or legal discourse, testimonianze do not claim to prove the facts of their stories. This may legitimately make a cold shiver run down the spines of many! How, in the absence of “proof”, do you know what to believe?
This is ofc evaluated on a story-to-story basis; but, speaking broadly, here is the testimonianza heuristic: who is speaking? How do they speak? What does the community sense is at stake?
The truthiness of testimonianze may be weighed in terms of:
1. The emotional toll of telling the story: does the speaker start to weep? Do they fall silent mid-sentence? These are considered signs of felt truth.
2. The emotional impact of hearing the story: does it feel true in the body of the listener? When receiving testimonianze, one attempts to feel w/ the speaker, & to discern if & when they touch on sthng deeply human, painfully real, and/or morally urgent. One’s own involuntary reactions— eyes welling up; feeling speechless— are a useful guide.
3. The ache or dignity of the words coming thru before the details: most testimonianze are not neat. They may be nonlinear, fragmented, full of pauses, or not logically explained. When they ring true, the truth is often felt before it’s understood.
4. The life experiences of the speaker: classically, elders, women who have experienced losses, exploited workers, & the otherwise traumatized are all good candidates for belief.
5. The resonance of the speaker’s experience w/ communal experiences: does it mirror the shared experiences or silent knowledge of the community?
6. Is it an act of resistance— a refusal to accept imposed narratives? If it aligns w/ authority, it is often deemed less credible. In southern Italy, the powerful are typically assumed to be either indifferent or complicit.
7. The risks or cost to the speaker: the courage to break silence despite the consequences is considered an important sign of truth.
***
What is the point of listening to a story whose truth-claims may, forevermore, lack objective evidence?
Is it to be a sap? Is it to be sentimental & soft? It is a little more practical than that. One listens to testimonianze, in southern Italy, w/ the goal of creating some vitally-needed space for the lived truths of ppl whose reality has been denied, minimized, & erased by many or all of the "official" channels.
These are often stories told in the absence— in the impossibility— of formal justice. This, we suspect, is the crux of what our great-grandmother was getting at, & it’s drawn our attention to a strange problem we in America seem to be entangled with.
***
We in America are suspicious of stories which do not or cannot prove facts. We maybe feel that, if they lack cold, hard evidence, their speakers are trying to pull a fast one on us. Maybe they are malingering in order to win our sympathy & support when they do not deserve it. On the one hand, this shows a caution which to us seems reasonable & intelligent. We at zizians.co love cold, hard evidence. We hold a pizza party whenever we can find some, amidst the press’s dross, hearsay, & unasked-for personal opinions. But this brings us to our other hand.
We in America may talk a fact-loving, evidence-based talk; yet, in all our months of coverage, News on News has rarely seen us walk a correspondingly objective or verifiable walk. News on News has instead seen a strange double-standard.
We have seen the press pull many fast ones on us. We have seen journalists be unwilling & seemingly unable to provide facts. In the absence of evidence, we have seen them fall back on speculation, conjecture, opinion, & the occasional rapture of mytho-poetic reasoning.
How has the fact-loving American public taken this?
Are they on X, calling the press “unhinged” & blaming it for causing “chaos”? Are they leaving disdainful comments under its articles, dragging its loaded language & cheap rhetorical tricks? No! They are spellbound at its “Zizian” coverage. They are sharing its dubious news w/ heartbreaking enthusiasm. They are leaving harsh, disdainful comments only abt this story’s subjects— they have, it seems, no complaints abt the unempirical silliness which the press is serving w/ a straight face.
We in America seem fine w/ unempirical stories if they are backed by An Institution: for ex., by a big, fancy newspaper, or by a talkshow w/ millions of subscribers. We seem to mainly put our skeptical hats on for one occasion: for those times when individuals— acting independently & lacking institutional permission— sit across from us & try to tell their personal stories.
Suddenly, we are a bunch of keen-eyed detectives. Suddenly we are all cross-examiners. We assume bad intent, & tear thru their stories looking for inconsistencies & non-corroboration. If our storytellers are marginalized, this armchair sleuthing may grow into a national craze: discrediting them becomes, for a short time, just as trendy as dancing to Gangnam Style or collecting beanie babies.
This is not critical thinking; this is an appropriation of critical thinking tools in defense of the status quo, & at the expense of vulnerable ppl. It erases space for those whose reality has been denied, minimized, & memory-holed. It creates a problem: if & when our formal justice system fails these ppl, we don’t frequently turn around & question our justice system (OJS). Instead, we reaffirm OJS as an exemplary arbiter of truth; perhaps, in part, so that we can feel confirmed in having been right all along: they really were “guilty”, “faking” “exaggerators”.
We seem to feel safer when we withhold our belief from vulnerable ppl— somewhat as if we feared we might, otherwise, be duped into letting them unleash chaos upon our country. Southern Italians get a lot of flak for being gloomy; but, in this instance, they tend to see the glass as being more half-full. They tend to think that many good things can come from believing the marginalized & the lowly. For ex.: it is an opportunity to break complicity w/ imposed narratives. It is a chance to participate in a political act. It is also an invitation to experience v. earnest human connection: to open oneself up to emotional resonance w/ another. To believe someone else’s testimonianza is to accept a kind of responsibility (KOR)— but it’s the KOR that makes life feel lighter & less burdensome. One may feel empathy, one may feel sorrow— but the real responsibility lies in deciding that their story matters: that it shouldn’t be forgotten, denied, or dismissed, & that you will do what you can to give it meaning.
***
Southern Italy, like every other place, has many problems— but it tends to get one thing right: it tends not to defend the status quo. By that we mean: it tends to loathe & work steadily to undermine the fancy, self-important institutions which have imposed themselves upon it for centuries. As thanks, it typically gets called backwards, obstinate, lazy, & self-defeating...
...but this seems a small price to pay. At least it does not get called a “death cult”!
It has, overall, eluded one sand-trap we fear America has fallen into: it has not mistaken institutions for attachment figures. It does not cling to the wire mother of opaque, emotionless institutions; it has instead prioritized, as a cultural value, the exciting responsibility of maintaining connections to real, live human beings.
There is indeed a place in southern Italy for rogue individuals w/ personal stories to share. There is a cultural structure for taking these stories seriously— for accepting them w/ gratitude. This brings us back to the q. we will crib from our great-grandmother: what might it look like if we, in America, had a cultural structure (CS) equivalent to testimonianza? How might it have received Jamie’s letter differently?
***
This CS might have received Jamie’s letter from w/in a paradigm that asserted: “Personal accounts are not inferior to institutional, legal, or even journalistic accounts. They are instead crucial expressions of survival. They matter just as much as formalized history.”
It might not have opened Jamie’s letter wondering, “Will this be, at last, our Zizian manifesto?” Aware that it was reading testimonianza, it might have accepted that this was one (1) person’s cri du coeur— not a representation of “a system”; not a missive from Zizianopolis.
It might have qualified this: “Testimonianza sometimes speaks for those who cannot speak themselves— maybe they are dead; maybe they have been discredited in an overwhelming way; they have, at any rate, been rendered voiceless. Maybe, when Jamie talks abt Ziz, they are trying to speak on behalf of a silenced person— not making a show of loyalty to their cult leader.”
As it reported on Jamie’s letter, it might have had, in the back of its mind, this thought: “It feels dangerous, even sacrilegious to deny someone's account of their own suffering or history— no matter how strange or inconvenient this account may be to others.”
Instead of asking itself, “What is Jamie trying to pull here?”, it might have thought, “The goal of testimonianze is not to assert authority, or seize power from others; it is to reclaim dignity. It is an act of resistance against erasure.”
Instead of saying, “Gotcha, Jamie! You haven’t named the killer of your parents! Who, if not you, could it be?” it might have acknowledged: “Testimonianza does not aim to persuade w/ data, & is often given w/out hopes of justice, recognition, or restoration from institutional powers. It aims to acknowledge trauma more than it aims for closure.”
Instead of calling the letter a “Shaggy-dog story of abuse allegations”, it might have thought to itself, “Thru writing this, Jamie’s experience of trauma has become shared, creating the possibility for both understanding & solidarity.”
It prob. would not have been so quick to “balance” Jamie’s tales of medical neglect against a reassuring denial from the jail’s official spokesperson. It might have thought, “Centralized ‘voices of truth’, like jail spokespeople, have rarely served the periphery.”
It might have taken in stride the fact that Jamie’s letter positions itself against official narratives— those of the state, & those of the Rationalists. This might have been another cue that it was reading testimonianza— not seized upon as a sign of Jamie’s “conspiratorial” eccentricity. This might even have been interpreted as an act of bravery: “Jamie’s letter has taken a lot of effort to write, & carries personal risk. They, nonetheless, have decided to challenge the very systems which sought to silence them.”
***
We lamented to our great-grandmother all these American trials, tribulations, & tomfooleries. She asked us: “Have you caught malaria in America? No? Well, that’s an improvement.” & w/ that, the dream was over!
What shall we do abt this?
We have written it down to show our cartomancer, & we’ll see what she makes of it. She will hopefully hook us up w/ the right oils & waters to seal this dream’s message firmly in our mind, or maybe even to act upon it— act how?
How to smuggle this Italian import into America?
Our cartomancer’s uncle’s coworker has mob connections. Maybe some of his friends can slip it inside jars of tomato sauce, so that we can distribute testimonianza consciousness through America’s pizza restaurants— at least those along the eastern seaboard. We’ll table the q. for now, & ask our cartomancer’s opinion in a few hours. Meglio una brutta verità che una bella bugia ☺️
