I’ve spent half of my life in different cities, regions and countries from where I was born. I lived in Germany for eight years, France for eleven, Spain for a year and the United States for a year. I’ve spent months or weeks in tens of other countries and every time I felt at home. However, every time I arrived in a place, no matter how long I was staying, I was met by the question of where I was from. The answer was always the same. Wherever I went, a shadow, a face followed and accompanied me. I could travel thou- sands of miles. Go around the world. Another presence travelled with me. It wasn’t just a human being who arrived in Berlin, Freiburg, Barcelona, New York, Brazil or New Zealand. A country, a land, a portion of the globe of which I was inadvertently a sign and vehicle arrived too. Italy. I hadn’t done anything to take it with me. But there it was.
We never question this ability to take the area, the space, the piece of world where we were born elsewhere. It’s a strange form of inverted astrology. According to the ancient Babylonian myths, our bodies seem to be imbued with the portion of sky that observed our birth: we’ll always be the constellation that welcomed us into the world, that reciprocal figure of plants and houses. Likewise, it’s no wonder that the portion of soil that saw our birth – and of which we are effectively a superficial chemical alteration – seems to grant an identity we can’t shake off.
It’s this ability to take a second identity with us that we call diasporic power. It’s not so much, or not just the fact that we are else- where; on the contrary, it’s the inability to separate ourselves, once and for all, from a certain portion of soil. Diasporic power is a certain power of movement: the bodies that move on the earth are not only balls going hither and thither on a snooker table. As the daughter and form of Gaia, every living being expands the plate tectonics, moves the continent of which by birth she is the embodiment and expression, rede- signs planetary geography. Human migrations are a way to radically transform the planet’s facies. Italy, China and Spain are not just where the portion of land given these names exists. They exist in every place where one or two Chinese, Italians or Spaniards live. Vice versa, migration isn’t the arrival of an alien body in a place different to it: it’s always the meeting and blending of two or more portions of the planet, a sort of overlap that places the continents on top of each other.
This is because we recognize that human lives are not pure adaptive forms: they continually change and transform the environment. We’ll have to come to think the same thing about non-human beings too. Their movements, their migrations are not confused multiplications of their baroque anatomies, nor the extension of metabolisms closed within the boundaries of a body. They’re diasporic phenomena, just like human movements. A tree that migrates doesn’t just take its bark and its fruits elsewhere. It doesn’t just adapt to the world that surrounds it: it transforms the world, the climate, the space. It lets the climate, the soil, the life that welcomed it migrate with it. The Malus domestica, the common apple tree, is originally from Kazakhstan where its ancestor, the Malus sieversii continues to live. Maybe we should learn to recognize, to feel the Kazakh world every time that we eat an apple, every time that we see an orchard in Italy or in California. The Triticum aestivum, used to produce pasta and bread, is originally from the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates. We should learn to find the Mesopotamic or Babylonian flavour every time that we eat a plate of pasta or a piece of bread: because every individual grain carries the world of that portion of soil with it; it expresses that world in every portion of soil it lives in and in every food containing it. The Solanum lycopersicum, the tomato in our salads or in the sauce that tops every plate of pasta on the Italian peninsula, is originally from Central America and was an integral part of the Aztec diet. And it is this same universe of tastes, smells and colours that a ragu seems to blend with the local and European one. We should recognize the Aztec flavour in every plate of pasta. If we can’t grasp these undertones, it’s definitely not the plants’ problem: it’s above all our inability to see and feel the life of other species. But what also suffers is the scientific study of plants and ecology. Closed for at least two centuries in a metaphorical universe that seems to confine non-human life within a domestic and patrimonial space, every species has a precise habitant, an ecosystem, a space set aside for it and every movement of abandonment or movement makes the migrant into an “invasive species”. All The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, published in 1933, did in the end was draw a series of consequences from the assumptions that Linnaeus and Biberg had already expressed in Oeconomia Naturae, the treatise that marked the birth of ecology in 1749. It’s this geographical reductionism that prevents us from grasping how, as well as being a positive and active phenomenon, the migration of plants and animals is something that prompts those same mixes that enable human cultures to come into being and evolve. Just as contemporary Italian culture would certainly not have been possible without the contribution of Greek classical culture or the Middle Eastern culture transmitted with the arrival of Christianity, in the same way its ecological facies (which unites biology, climatology and soil science, etc.) is this strange convergence of South American, Middle Eastern, Kazakh etc. elements sharing the same habitat thanks to the coexistence of the plants and animals that at the same time populate and express the nature of that place. It’s the diasporic power of living beings that makes every ecosystem what Gilles Clément had called a “planetary garden”: it isn’t just plants or animals that coexist in a space, but biomes that merge, places that overlap. Migrations enable the planet to extend and contract, to transform into a dough whose nature keeps on mixing.