“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Expecting mirages to take us where we want to go is madness.”
Morgana is the deceptive fairy who distorts reality through strange visions, making hallucinations something we must necessarily confront. The treatise on imaginary ethnography that Celati presents us does more or less the same thing: it forces us to immerse ourselves in the lives of a nonexistent people, describing their habits, stories, and characteristics, mocking a certain colonial descriptivism and leaving us lost and bewildered in a valley of mirages.
We can’t proceed in order, so let’s start by saying that this is a very boring book.
And: brilliant. Not to mention: hilarious. If that isn’t magic.
The people described by the narrator, in turn quoting the tales of others (consistent with the indigenous custom of always speaking only in reference to the Being of the Great Breath), are the Gamuna. These are people who, at an unspecified time, took possession of an abandoned city and then remained there, inventing genealogies of ancestors and isolating themselves from the world thanks to the great desert on one side and the mountainous massifs on the other. Nothing happens. The adult Gamuna males are fearful and depressed, the women quarrelsome and flirtatious, the children violent thugs. For them, life is an iridescent spark, the ephemeral moment between the creation of the world and its end. The passage of time is meaningless. Cartography is meaningless. Some things happen, but only in the realm of Boro Trai, the gigantic dictator of sleeping life, which the Gamuna consider “more authentic, more real, and less hallucinatory than waking life.”
Celati’s flat and melancholic prose plays with the exhausting immobility of Gamuna’s existence, imbuing the book with an impertinent, sharp, and good-natured irony, while simultaneously revealing the ridiculousness of a world that, in an unusual way, becomes a mercilessly parodic reflection of our own: not only of those who arrogantly narrate a previously unknown Other, but also of our own ineptitude, our own hallucinations, those we are unable to recognize as such and which we still chase, presumptuous in our civilized concept of “knowledge.”
In the company of ghostly characters like Sister Tran or the unpredictable Wanghi, the reader is drawn into the perversion of all (apparent) common sense and falls victim to the “heavy enchantment” that haunts and overwhelms Gamuna Valley, where the grotesque and the ordinary suspend time and space, leaving everyone confused and disoriented. Thus, the “morning litanies” (curses) take us back to the beginning of each workday, the “medicinal chatter” to evenings spent with old friends, the deceitful merchants tickle our consciences, and marital skirmishes ridicule every epic we write about love.
It’s a long journey that can’t be undertaken without packing at least half of Celati’s irony, a healthy supply of self-criticism, and a pinch of absent-mindedness that, perhaps, will protect us from the not-at-all-seductive but very powerful mirages of the Fata Morgana.
Written by Delis
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Gianni Celati, Fata Morgana, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2005