MAZZERISM AS CULTURAL RESISTANCE Jean-Claude ROGLIANO
The island was emptying of its last man-books, those who pronounced an imperfect French, sometimes illiterate, but who, in their language, possessed the magic of the verb. Some spoke of a story that was ours, one that we had carefully hidden. Others took us farther, making us go through night mirrors in search of ourselves. It was the right moment, because suffering the ablation of what remained of our beliefs and fears, we would have joined the multitude of standardized peoples, sterilized as amputees of their history, their language and their stories of the supernatural. In the course of a quest for these scattered elements that would allow us to rebuild, two arose that we would have thought definitively buried in the common grave of oblivion. Despite the battering and erosion of several decades of acculturation, escaped from our collective unconscious, they have recovered their place in our memory. The first is a gigantic chestnut, whose hollow trunk gives birth to the entities that populate our ancestral fantasies. It's called Mal'Concilio. The second is a human whose carnal presence connects us to all the other entities that are landmarks of our identity. It is the mazzeru, a mere mortal, but before which the doors on the other side of the night sometimes open. Both defy time: the gigantism of Mal'concilio, its disembowelings, its wooden cavern, the innumerable wrinkles which furrow the trunk lend to believe that it has no age; the presence of the mazzeru is believed to be found through skeletal forms engraved on certain multimillenary menhir statues. The timelessness of both, their emblematic scope has gradually _________________________________ PASSEGHJI
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