Roberto Saviano, sentenced to death by the Neapolitan mafia, invites us to a game of mirrors in his new voluntary essay Shout it!. By signing 30 portraits of men and women — from ancient Greece to the present day — for whom commitment has often been synonymous with sacrifice, the Italian writer and journalist recounts his own destiny marked by constant police protection. He has been forced to live in hiding since the publication, in 2006, of his first explosive book, Gomorrah. In the empire of Camorra (Gallimard), a cruel and mind-blowing odyssey on the Neapolitan mafia, several times adapted for the screen.
Like Saviano, the personalities who make up the work have all refused to be silent, which has earned them opprobrium, threats and lives of exile. Some died of it, like the philosopher of Antiquity Hypatia of Alexandria, assassinated by religious extremists, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaïa, shot dead in 2006 in her stairwell in Moscow, or even Martin Luther King, shot dead in 1968 as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
For Saviano, it’s all about fighting for the truth, no matter what the cost.
The black and white portraits illustrated by the Italian Alessandro Baronciani follow one another in a litany that seems endless… the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the writer Émile Zola, the actress Jean Seberg, the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the launcher of alert Edward Snowden, so many figures with strong convictions embodying civic courage. The book also highlights several anonymous destinies. The Syrian girl gassed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime or the Chinese worker from Shenzhen demonstrate the fierce human will to hope for a better world.
For Saviano, it’s all about fighting for the truth, no matter what the cost. Because at the heart of this vibrant plea made of injunctions and confidences, the author of Piranhas (Gallimard, 2018) warns against the main dangers that threaten societies: intellectual apathy and single thought are among them. The 43-year-old writer addresses his double, the young man he was, and at the same time to young people in general.
He thus invites future generations to mobilize while speaking out against fear and the consequences of manipulation, whether political, ideological or social. It pushes the reader, whether he lives in a democracy or not, to wonder about censorship, propaganda or the cruelty of the contemporary world against the weakest. “Today, for me, History is that of people who fought with words, who built and tried to change things with words,” he writes, the sword of Damocles overhead.