Manituana

The Guardian: '...with a heart challengingly worn on the sleeve'

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Todd McEwen reviews Manituana, 7 November 2009

The novels of Wu Ming (Chinese for "anonymous" or "five people") might be the best ever written by a gang. Most efforts of this sort have been intent on producing bad novels – Naked Came the Stranger? The horror, the horror! Wu Ming, on the other hand, squeeze every potential for incisive, rabid adventure they can out of the popular novel. Their books sizzle with a kind of lefty jazz: they're linguistically and culturally hip, historically astute, with a heart worn challengingly on the sleeve.

54, set in postwar Italy, was filled with rollicking, stupefying conflations of fact and fiction. Manituana, on the surface, is a straighter story: that of educated, enigmatic Joseph Brant, leader of the Mohawks during the American revolution; of his sister Molly, who "dreams with great strength"; and crucially, the loss, for humanity, of the confederation of the Six Nations. After the French and Indian wars, there was a time of cooperation between native Americans and the English – William Johnson, head of the Indian Department, hoped there was "room for everybody" in the beautiful Mohawk Valley. Wu think of this time and place as "Iroquireland" – an all too brief shading of tribes from the old and new worlds. They tell this sad, salient story as that of the violent dismemberment of one polyglot society by another.

"Manituana" means the Thousand Islands of the St Lawrence river, in legend a paradise, the birthplace of the Mohawk tongue. Wu's narrative is particularly concerned with language: Mohawk, the Dutch and German of old New York, the talk of Cockneys and of the Court of St James. Shaun Whiteside's brilliant translation of the many voices and ventriloquisms of this novel is slick and savvy (despite one's doubt that a woodpecker, though an omniscient Mohawk spirit, knows the word fo'c'sle). Wu deftly explore the collision of Indian and European languages: "In the language of the Empire, every cause was followed by a consequence . . . on the contrary, the language of the Mohawk was full of details, run through with doubts refined by constant adjustments. Each word stretched and expanded to capture every possible meaning." These are arresting pictures of how Joseph and Molly Brant's minds must have worked – rich in Mohawk images and energy, shrewd with western ideas. Along with languages, superstitions collide: what, after all, is "civilisation" but the superstitions that make you comfortable?

Manituana unspools mesmerisingly like an old Hollywood movie, ducking the common mishaps of the historical novel – there is not a single longueur. The descriptions of American abundance are worthy of Washington Irving, with a fall chill punchy as a stanza of Longfellow or a Remington painting of woods. The story is governed by the Indian sense of time, always returning to the reckoning of autumn. But events develop and are communicated at surprising speed: messengers are hunted bloodthirstily through forests, and in Molly Brant's powerful, ornate telepathies Brant and his comrade Lacroix learn the fate of their people before it occurs, although Brant refuses to accept it.

As in 54, violence (and it's appalling) is a natural but also a supernatural force. Lacroix's prowess with a tomahawk is described with the flavour of an antique children's book, but to this Wu add the unthinkable mayhem of a computer game: "The shot cleanly detached his head and sent it flying . . . panic stopped him shooting straight and he found his guts between his feet, his hands groping to try and keep them in . . . When the tomahawk broke his arm with a dry sound he froze, staring at the limb that dangled from his shoulder . . ."

Brant was complicated, a Freemason and a slave-owner (facts soft-pedalled by Wu for their own purposes, but then who remains a hero until his dying day?). By the time the war turned in favour of the colonists, he'd become "ubiquitous", in Wu's word, intent on fulfilling, against his will, a hero's destiny. On the warpath against Europeans he'd previously counted as neighbours, he'd become "the most hated Indian since the days of Pontiac". General Washington ordered that the people of the Six Nations be captured, their villages and crops destroyed.

But in 1775, Brant still believed the English would save the Indians. He travelled to London for an audience with George III. This part of the novel heaves with historical observation and play: like a crazy scene in a Gillray, theatregoers at Drury Lane are astonished to hear Lacroix supply a missing line in Romeo and Juliet. The backstabbing of the court is brutally anatomised; Wu's favourite evil businessmen are described in the most hackle-raising way. Their lickspittle tabloid journo is also nauseatingly up-to-date. An enterprising band of thuggish East End "Mohocks" send a letter to Brant movingly describing the anguish and oppression of the London poor in terms similar to his own, and ask to be recognised as the Seventh Nation of the Iroquois. And at a lavish party in Brant's honour, some waggish Italian pyrotechnicians grab a chance to make fun of the English: a Georgian "mansion" bursts into flames, and from it emerges a stark, Masonic pyramid, chilling sign of the whispery capitalists and their plan for America – the plan that won, of course.

Wandering around London, which disgusts him now he has seen the whole of it, Brant comes upon a poor family so weak with hunger that they cannot bury their little dead son. The Mohawk chieftain lends his strong back to dig the grave, only to be roundly abused by this bunch of ingrates for being a Catholic. Wu have now out-Dickensed Dickens, and when you read this novel, you will become aware of a faint buzzing noise. That will be James Fenimore Cooper, spinning in his grave.

Todd McEwen's Who Sleeps With Katz is published by Granta.

The Independent: 'Let's hope that many moons will pass before we see the last of these mysterious Mohicans'

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Boyd Tonkin reviews Manituana, 6 November 2009

As a literary project, it looks at first glance like a giggly stunt positioned in some mischief-making space midway between Monty Python and the Sex Pistols. In 2000, a quartet of cultural pranksters and gadflies from Bologna published Q, a historical novel of adventure and ideas set in the 16th century. They chose as their first sobriquet "Luther Blissett": improbably enough, the name of a Watford striker subject to racial abuse after a transfer to Italy to play at AC Milan. Following a quizzical reaction from the real-life Blissett, the group recruited a couple more anonymous writers, picked for their next incarnation "Wu Ming" "no name" in Mandarin and continued to develop a unique brand of intelligent period fiction, with 54 also translated into English.

The cabal's greatest, most mesmerising trick of all has been to fashion novels of true originality and page-riffling appeal. How do they do it? The official version speaks of the sturdy virtues of co-operative work, with each individually-authored section given close scrutiny by other members of the collective until a final draft pleases the whole pack. Whatever the hidden formula, a mystifying alchemy turned Q into a rattling, multi-levelled yarn of Protestant dissent and state conspiracy across Europe in the early decades of the Reformation: fans of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, grab it now. As for 54, it somehow conjoined the Italian underworld, Cold War intrigue, the failure of postwar idealism in Yugoslavia and a delicious cameo from Cary Grant.

Now Manituana takes us back to 1775, and the Indian lands of the "Six Nations" alliance in British north America. Once more twisting the lens of mainstream history so that marginal or forgotten figures and movements come into brilliantly sharp focus, Wu Ming tell the story of the gathering rebellion in the colonies mostly through the eyes of the Mohawk people loyal to King George III, the "Great English Father" across the seas. At the core of a sweeping, cinematic narrative, which pans between Indian village life, authentically grisly battle scenes, diplomatic manoeuvres in high places and even an extraordinary interlude in London, stands the real-life war chief, Joseph Brant. A Mohawk leader by skill rather than ancestry, he has forged a long and strong alliance with the ramifying clan of Sir William Johnson: the Irish Catholic "superintendent" of Indian affairs for the Crown.

Mohawk, mixed and European, Johnson's mingled brood of followers and relatives defend the hard-won harmony of the Iroquois federation against the inroads of insurgent white settlers who seek "the breakdown of the balance". The authors gleefully revise orthodox history to present the loyalist Mohawks as victims of canting, racist rebels who march into battle under banners such as "Civilisation and death to all savages". But there is nothing smug or glib about this rivetting reversal of two centuries and more of textbook and big-screen platitudes.

Brant and his people keep their side of a firm pact to support the Crown in spite of their outsider status. Indian warriors, Irish and Highlander Catholics, "Papists and pagans" alike fight for King George as "two tribes of masked men". But fight they do, in the face of British equivocations and compromises. Yet in one bloody and colourful skirmish after another, the Indian nations' "Longhouse" begins to crack under the rebel onslaught. George Washington and his raggle-taggle bands of chancers, predators and bigots so far from the upstanding heroes of America's deepest myth seek to drown an ancient culture in "lakes of tears and rivers of blood".

What saves the Wu Ming crew from romantic sentimentalism is a trademark sophistication about political ideas and their impact on both words and deeds. Philip, a French captive who has literally gone native to become the Mohawk's fiercest brave, reads Voltaire and Rousseau and reminds a patronising lady that "many European things are circulating in the American forests". Exploring this already hybrid world, Manituana dismantles the delusion of the simple "noble savage" as shrewdly as it debunks the usual patriotic pageantry of 1776 and all that.

A virtuoso middle section (again rooted in real events) sends Brant, Philip and Johnson's son-in-law to London, where they aim to reinforce the Indian alliance of equals with the Crown. Fawned over as a "ceremonial beast" in salons and palaces, Brant also brushes against the squalor and despair of the capital's poor. With a firework display of thieves' cant and gang jargon, an electrifying high point of Shaun Whiteside's swift but subtle translation, the "Mohocks of Soho" who actually existed hint at the grim underclass destiny that lies in store for defeated traditional peoples all around the world. Wu Ming do sometimes graft the preoccupations of today onto the events of yesterday. Philip, for example, has a vision of "a London as big as the world", where free-market individualism has gobbled up the planet and its once-proud communities. Mostly, however, Manituana shuns anachronism as it sets about delivering a fast-flowing, densely peopled, richly decorated story of a precious way of life, and thought, on the brink of the modern abyss. As for Wu Ming and their bewitching fictional fellowship, let's hope that many moons will pass before we see the last of these mysterious Mohicans.

CounterPunch (USA): Manituana , a fourth world novel

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Ron Jacobs reviews Manituana on the most famous radical newsletter in America

Imagine a historical novel about an indigenous confederation of nations faced with the loss of its lands to European colonists. Now imagine those colonists in rebellion against their government overseas because of its demands to curtail and tax the colonists' trade. Where does that leave the indigenous peoples? Should they side with the overseas government that has treated them with a certain respect expected of honorable men or should they side with those colonists who they know are stealing their lands? After all, both the overseas government and the colonists are part of the original project to establish their presence on land that is not their own.

Now imagine this novel being written by a collective of Italian fiction writers. Sound far-fetched? Impossible to pull off? Just plain impossible?

Let me introduce Manituana. It is a story set in the Mohawk nation in the 1770s. Joseph Brant, Mohawk war chief and his family, friends and enemies are the primary characters. The Royal Court of England and a group of London ruffians who "dress up" as Indians play supporting roles. Brant, facing threats from aggressive Indian-hating settlers intent on carving up the land of the Mohawks and other member tribes of the Iroquois Confederation and the defection of member tribes and individual members to the side of the American rebels against the Crown of England, undertakes a journey to negotiate the crown's support for his people in return for their support against the rebels. Included in his entourage is the great warrior Philip Lacroix or Ronaterihonte, the son of Englishman William Johnson and Mohawk shaman Molly Brant, Peter Johnson, and the captured Ethan Allen, one of the first of the American rebels to attack the Confederation's lands. After gaining the Crown's support and witnessing the meaningless and corrupt antics of the Court, the entourage heads back to America to engage the rebels in battle on the side of London. From thereon, this is a story of war, flight, and the death and misery that accompany these phenomena.

Manituana is a true fourth world novel. It pits the original peoples of a nation against those who come to colonize it. It is the story of the multiple indigenous nations that existed on the American continent before the Europeans came and destroyed them. It is the story of India and the British Raj and it is the tale of the Algerian people and the French Republic's colonization of that land. it is also the story of Israel and its ethnic transformation of Palestine into a Western settler state. In short, it is the tale of every people that has seen its land taken over by a European people as intent on making it their own as its original inhabitant are on preventing such an occurrence. This is also the story of America's indigenous people being manipulated by the European colonists for the Europeans' own ends. We see a mirror of this situation in today's manipulations of the indigenous peoples in the lands the west wants as its own today: the Shia vs. Sunni conflict in Iraq and the manipulation of tribal conflicts in Afghanistan are but two examples that come immediately to mind. Manituana evokes the dangerous conceit of men who believe it is their destiny to rule the world.

When one considers that this novel was composed by a collective, they might hesitate. The project sounds unworkable, after all. This group of five Italian writers in Bologna who call themselves Wu Ming has written two previous novels as a collective and produced individual works, as well. Both previous novels by Wu Ming received critical acclaim and one, titled Q, reached the bestseller lists. Manituana also reached into the top ten on Italian bestseller lists. As interesting as their works, the collective currently consists of Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1), Giovanni Cattabriga (Wu Ming 2), Federico Guglielmi (Wu Ming 4), and Riccardo Pedrini (Wu Ming 5). They consider themselves part of the New Italian Epic movement in Italian literature and come out of the politically-inclined prankster traditions of the avant-garde Luther Blisset phenomenon. Named after the first black Italian footballer, the Luther Blisset movement (if that's what it was) ran from the mid-1990s until 1999, when its members around the world committed symbolic seppuku.

Although Wu Ming do frequent public appearances and have collaborated on films and with the Italian rock band Yo Yo Mundi on an album, they refuse to be photographed and consider the cult of the author to detract from the written word. "Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble... A photo is witness to my absence..." they stated in a 2007 interview. "On the other hand my voice - with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations - is witness to a presence even when I'm not there..."

The first novel of a trilogy that Wu Ming is calling the Atlantic Triptych, Manituana is virtually seamless and the translation is impeccable. It defines what the booksellers mean when they list something as literary fiction. It is a quality story that includes characters of depth, a good deal of action, a consistently thoughtful context and thought-provoking concepts--all presented in a fictional form.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

From Bookslut (USA), one the best reviews we ever got

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

by Jacob Silverman, Bookslut.com, 4 September 2009

It is difficult for a novel about American Indians during the Revolutionary War period to be anything but elegiac. Certainly, such a book can be many other things, but this time period was a particularly difficult one for American Indians. The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy -- the dominant Indian confederation in the colonies -- were torn between the rebel colonists and their erstwhile British allies. The war shattered the confederacy, splitting an alliance that had maintained peace for hundreds of years. But the Revolutionary War was also tragic for the Iroquois because it was a war for which they had not asked; it demanded they take sides; and it permanently destroyed a relatively idyllic mixed community of natives and white settlers who lived in the Mohawk Valley in New York, east of Lake Ontario.

The novel Manituana proudly wears this mantle of elegy, while also presenting a thrilling adventure-drama of conflicted peoples fighting for their homeland. It is a gorgeously wrought novel, whose story takes between 1775 and 1783 and is told in short, finely diced chapters that demand adjectives like ‘cinematic’ and ‘panoramic.’ While the narrative occasionally slips into melodrama and has a tendency to cast its American Indian protagonists as mystical, spiritualist noble savages, even while attempting to refute that worn archetype, this is a very fine book that challenges the popular romantic notions of America's birth. It delves deeply into a complicated period of history, returning to the surface with a fascinating trove of cultural details and historical anecdotes.

Manituana portrays prominent figures of the time with an urgent vitality, such as Joseph and Mary Brant, likely the two most famous Indians of their day and the sibling leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy. There are also cameos by numerous other figures, minor and major, including famed English actor David Garrick, King George III, General Ethan Allen, Samuel Kirkland, General William Howe, and even the Mohocks, a violent gang of Mohawk admirers who terrorized London and were sensationalized in the press. None of these people are extraneous; each adds to the novel's sense that history moves through a broad, interconnected matrix, abetted by actors who sometimes are unaware of their roles.

Expertly researched, cognizant of its erudition without being preening or didactic, Manituana centers around Joseph Brant, who rises from a translator in the British Indian Department to become a chief and war-leader in the confederacy. Also known as Thayendanega, Brant is aided by his sister, Molly, dream-seer and widow of Sir William Johnson, a legendary former Superintendent of Indian Affairs who inspired a period of close cooperation (and occasional intermarriage) between Indians and European settlers on his massive holdings in New York. Also featured is Philip Lacroix Ronaterihonte, a wraith-like man, born Indian, raised French, later returned to his roots, whose tragic family history and unmatched abilities as a warrior earn him the sobriquet Le Grande Diable.

To summarize the numerous other appealing characters in this book, both historical and invented, would take too long, but the plenitude of them -- and each one's impressively lucid representation -- is evidence of the startling talent of these writers. Yes, writers: Manituana is the work of Wu Ming, an avant-garde band of four (formerly five) Italian writers who have collaborated on many works. This is their third novel translated into English; their regular translator Shaun Whiteside ably grasps the novel's protean lexicon and syntax, which often alters as the narrative shifts its focus among characters and regions.

Wu Ming's works are paragons of the self-described New Italian Epic, a slice of literature, beginning in the early 1990s, that combines innovative narrative forms, an eschewing of ironic detachment, a critical engagement with history, and a pop attitude that yields complex, entertaining works of fiction. Their aesthetic is characterized by sardonic wit and lyricism, best expressed in Manituana by multisensory nature descriptions that border on animistic. But Wu Ming are multifarious in their talents. Take this passage in which Philip walks through an unfamiliar London:

Suddenly he was aware of a presence below him. A monstrous creature touched his knee, emitting incomprehensible sounds. It was a man, or what was left of one. Its trunk rested on a plank of wood, moved on little wheels propelled by its hands. A compact coating of scabs and colorless rags covered its body, and you could hardly make out eyes, mouth, a few fingers. Philip felt an instinctive urge to chase away the horror, but remained motionless, enthralled by the immensity of such ugliness. "Our earthly trial." The creature stank and spoke, a singsong chant, obscure except for two words: "Sir" and "Excellency." At the end of its twisted fingers it held a little tin plate. The creature was asking for charity.

Manituana is the first chapter in a promised "Atlantic tryptich" taking place during the Revolutionary War period. Other volumes are expected to play out on both sides of the Atlantic, much as Manituana's action travels from New York, to Canada, to London, and back again. Undergirding this novel is a probing consideration of both the origins and righteousness of the Revolutionary War -- even a shadowy group of free-trade advocating London merchants get a voice. There is also a provocative questioning of what constitutes a massacre, whether such a horrific act could ever be justified in the defense of one's people or homeland. After all, Joseph Brant was often called "Monster Brant," but Wu Ming's book delicately explores the difficult choices Brant faced, particularly when rebel militias and George Washington's army were rampaging towards the Longhouse, the broad region the Iroquois Confederacy had called home for centuries.

To begin one chapter, the authors use an order from General Washington to General John Sullivan to "lay waste all the settlements" in "Indian Country" and to "not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements." The order is, of course, genuine, the command that launched the Sullivan Expedition, which destroyed dozens of Iroquois villages and sent bands of starving refugees to Fort Niagara. It was the end of the confederacy.

Wu Ming have admitted that this novel, written between 2003 and 2007, is inspired in part by the actions of the Bush administration during the same period. (Those aforementioned free traders could be seen as analogues for 21st-century multinational capitalists who would, given the chance, use warfare to open protectionist markets.) But irrespective of its contemporary echoes -- found in comments like "declaring an opinion on everything, especially things one doesn't know about, is one of the sicknesses of the age" and "there was no room for the past in America" -- Manituana stands on its own in its wrestling with a difficult period that too often is reduced to myopic patriotic narratives or slogans regarding taxation.

Describing a spectacular fireworks show on the Earl of Warwick's estate, performed by a group of Italian showmen, the narrator jests that "the Italians built their own glory on the embellishment of ideas born elsewhere, adding a flamboyant, clownish touch." It is a self-referential comment, even a self-effacing one, but it belies the splendor of this novel. Perhaps the four men behind Wu Ming have built their glory on others' ideas, occasionally with a novel flamboyance, but they have made these ideas their own by imbuing them with a sublimity that powerfully elegizes a devastated civilization, while also challenging us to reconsider the historic narrative we often hold as self-evident.

The Manituana international tour, September - November 2009

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Le Monde (France) on Manituana

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Parisian newspaper reviewed our novel on 27 August 2009

Manituana: With the Mohawks, history told from the side of the defeated

by Fabio Gambaro

Wu Ming loves the history of the defeated, especially its least known pages. The amazing Italian collective (five authors hiding behind a chinese alias that means “without a name” or “five names” according to pronunciation) already proved it with Q, a sort of adventurous crime novel on the backdrop of 16th century peasant revolts.
Now they confirm their taste by publishing Manituana, a rich, flourishing novel dealing with a key moment in the birth of the American nation. In the second half of the 18th century, after having fought the French, English settlers decided to separate from the British Crown. Wu Ming tell us this troubled story from the point of view of Mohawk indians, those free and brave spirits who paid for the war of independence by losing their lands. Along with other Iroquois nations in the northern borderlands, they chose “the wrong side of history”, the side of losers, in this case the English who remained faithful to king George III.
Grounding their story on real characters and facts, always with great care for context and detail, the five authors adopt a very effective montage to evoke the events that, from 1775 to 1779, brought war and destruction to [the land] where the Mohawks had lived in peace and established fruitful relationships with white settlers. The main characters of the novel are often half-breeds balancing between two worlds and two cultures, like Joseph Brant Thayendanegea, the Mohawk interpreter and war chief, or Philip Lacroix Ronaterihonte, a legendary warrior and reader of Shakespeare's works. And let's not forget Peter Johnson, the son of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and Molly Brant, the Indian woman with supernatural powers. They will fight with both intelligence and ferociousness, trying to save their freedom and their land. They will even venture to the other shore of the Atlantic, to London, to make their voices heard by the King and English society.
In the pages written by the Italian collective – to whom the writer is an “artisan of narration” dealing with collective creation and re-elaboration of mythologies – history is never simple nor reducible to pre-fixed schemes. Manituana, a book that miscegenates and successfully reinvents both historical novel and adventurous romance, does not depict “good indians” on one side and “evil whites” on the other. Reality is much more complex and tangled, and every character has gloomy facets, weaknesses and contradictions. No-one is neither completely innocent nor completely guilty, and one's legitimate battle for liberty and independence may bring about the loss of someone else's independence and liberty. Which adds even more strength and significance to this tragic epic on the disappearance of a world and the birth of another.

Publishers' Weekly on Manituana , August 2009

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Fiction Book Reviews: 8/24/2009
Manituana Wu Ming, trans. from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside. Verso, $26.95 (392p) ISBN 978-1-84467-342-1

After tackling the cold war via Cary Grant in 54, the Bologna, Italy, writing collaborative Wu Ming's third production is set amid radical conflict between the British Empire and American colonies in the late 18th century. After a string of duplicitous moves aimed at undermining and stealing from the Mohawk tribe, Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant must decide who to side with as the colonial militia marches through Massachusetts toward Canada to confront the British. As the escalating turmoil reverberates into the Mohawk River Valley, Brant, with his family, comrade/hunter Philip Lacroix and an immense convoy of warriors, sets out on a journey plagued by misfortune and bloody rebel attacks. From dry river beds at Fort Stanwix and the momentous capture of Ethan Allen in Montreal to the streets of London, dread eventually sets in by 1777 as the group disbands in an attempt to counteract its imminent defeat. Though this is a more cumbersome read than Wu Ming's previous (and more enthralling) works, the vivid scenery, well-developed characters and crisp translation are immensely satisfying. (The story is being continued on the group's Web site, with an open invitation for readers to contribute.) (Oct.)

Stewart Home pre-reviews Manituana

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The British novelist has something to say about our book

[That old fellow traveller of ours, the novelist and cultural terrorist Stewart Home, blogged a few interesting things about Manituana, which we duly reproduce. He also reviewed Q some time ago. By clicking in the right column you can listen to Stewart declaiming his short story Cheap Night Out, live at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, August 28th, 1997 (mp3). The main character and narrating I is none other than Luther Blissett. ]

Manituana by Wu Ming

Following on from Q (authored as Luther Blissett) and 54, comes a new novel - Manituana - by the Bologna fiction collective known as Wu Ming. Verso are publishing Shaun Whiteside’s English translation, the proof copies were circulated last month, and the book will be available in both the UK and the US shortly. Like the earlier tomes by the same authors, Manituana is a heavily researched historical novel that speaks as much about a future we have yet to make, as the past in which it is set. The main action takes place around the ‘American War of Independence’, with the focus on the alliance the Iroquois Indians made with the English.

Interview on Manituana from Spanish daily paper Publico

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Publico, Madrid, May 17th, 2009
[...] Why write a trilogy on the American Revolution? Wasn't one book enough?

Originally, in fact, it was one book with three sub-plots, but then the sub-plots got bigger and bigger, they became more and more complex, and the choice was between writing a 2000-pages book or three 600-pages books! We call it "the Atlantic Triptych", it is a saga on the relationships between Europe and the US. It will take several years to finish it, also because we won't write the 3 books one after the other. We'll write other books in between.

Boyd Tonkin recommends Manituana in his weekly column

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Independent, May 15th, 2009

“For page-riffling ingenuity attached to historical heft and narrative muscle, no recent conspiracy epic comes close to the Reformation romp Q by “Luther Blissett”. In this case, the book’s back-story surpasses in improbability anything that takes place on the page.

Named in tribute to a former Watford striker who suffered racist abuse while playing at AC Milan, “Luther Blissett” was the sobriquet of a quartet of anarchist cultural pranksters from Bologna. For some still-mysterious reason, they turned to subversive historical fiction – and succeeded mightily.

Changing their name to “Wu Ming”, the group followed Q with 54, which wittily permed its knotty Cold War plot with both Cary Grant and Marshal Tito. In July, “Wu Ming” will release another show of period pyrotechnics in Britain: Manituana, which promises an Indian-centred alternative history of the American Revolution. Why wait for an emetic binge with Brown with such tasty and robust helpings of Bolognese sauce already on the table?”

READ MORE…

Manituana Haiku - Wu Ming interview the poet Rossano Astremo

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

About a rewriting of Manituana in the form of a poem, a haiku for each chapter

On his blog the writer and poet Rossano Astremo writes:

One of the good suggestions of 2008 will be the completion of a work begun a few months ago, a kind of verse rewriting of Manituana by Wu Ming. To dedicate a haiku to each chapter of the book. To contain the epic nature of a choral story in the short breath of a poetic composition. I offer a taster of it here, pointing out that in the choosing the haiku and not respecting the syllabic scansion that characterises it, I am making Jack Kerouac’s words my own: ‘A "Western Haiku" need not concern itself with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that the "Western Haiku" simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language.’

By way of illustration, Astremo has published the first 13 haikus, which concern the prologue and the first part of the novel. To take one example, these lines correspond to chapter 34:

In the trajectory of opaque rainbows…
Dreams invade the mind…
Drops of water on Joseph’s lips.

Intrigued by this project, we decided to interview our colleague. Below, our email exchange. As always, for the printable version, click ‘Print’ at the foot of each page.

Roberto Saviano, «I side with the Indians»

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The author of Gomorrah, the biggest Italian best-seller of 2006-2007, reflects upon Manituana. Excerpts from a stream-of-consciousness piece published in L'Espresso magazine, # 16, Vol. LIII, April 26, 2007

[…] What Wu Ming have been developing for years, as an ongoing project, is the new possibility of putting together different languages, new syntaxes, unexplored ways of communicating. It’s a path that has nothing of the elitist or vanguardist about it: as they did with their last novel, 54, they are able to construct stories that are articulated within the tendons of history. And the alternatives to the passage of history aren’t naïve or impossible game play […]

[…] [Wu Ming] do not invent new destinies; rather, they uncover trails that haven’t been trodden, or perhaps completely blazed. This is how the long journey through space and time that is Manituana begins, transporting the reader along the trails and among the villages of the great Iroquois nation, on the eve of that war of American independence that decreed the birth of a new power and the definitive freeing of the “rebels” pitted against the colonial empire of George III of England. They [Wu Ming] started from the classic “What if…,” asking themselves what would have happened if the loyalists had defeated the settlers led by George Washington. Maybe things would have gone the way they did in Canada, where the indigenous peoples suffered many difficulties under the British crown, but weren’t marked/targeted for extermination, as they were in the United States.

But Manituana isn’t in any way a book on the history of the native Americans; it’s not the umpteenth text about the Indians. And it’s this fact that is, perhaps, the secret behind the necessity for its existence, behind the word of mouth that’s allowed the book to circulate. It’s a story of a new dimension, of new eyes cast over a fundamental moment in history, when that which would determine the fate of the world over the following centuries was about to be born. It’s the telling of the gestation period of the modern world, the historic pregnancy that would give birth to the world we know today. A gestation that also could have generated something else. An “other”: drowned, aborted, but retraceable in that which did happen. Manituana isn’t cowboys and Indians, not the evil scalping Indians versus the good settlers, bringers of civilization. And neither is it the good Indians versus the evil Americans. Atrocities occur on every front. Manituana is for many pages the meeting of worlds; it’s a seismic graph of the rumblings of conflict and the bastard, hybrid fusion that the convergence of different cultures generated. […]
There’s nothing in this fantasy that’s already consolidated elsewhere. My sense is that the new novel by Wu Ming seems in some way a cryptic dialogue with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. It’s with this book that they seek dialogue, rather than with The Last of the Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper. The beating heart of that which brought Europe to the Shoah lies in the history of enlightened reason, and so Wu Ming, following the trail, show that the fathers of American democracy themselves were the founders of massacre: they were the ones who constructed the pretexts (and not just those) for not embracing the energies being generated in the meeting of Indigenous peoples, for not recognizing in the half-caste the origin of the United States. Rather, the founding fathers supported an idea of civilization and civility that could be a model capable of legitimizing the new colonial aristocracies committed against the English and French aristocracies of the Old Continent […]
From the wrong side of history, says the trailer of the book. The “wrong” side is wrong because it wasn’t realized; it's the wrong side because it’s less told, considered reactionary, wrong, the losing side.
And that’s how it was for the enemies of Washington’s “revolutionaries,” who would have had a model of civilization different from extermination. But, as always, the unrealized is able to weigh on the realized, and Benjamin Franklin’s federalist idea—the one for which he’s still venerated as a great political statesman was taken directly from the Six Nations of the Iroquois.

[…] You need to be trained for a marathon to appreciate Manituana’s more than 600 pages, but you find your stamina as you read, through a journey that seems a spiral: once you enter, if you decide to enter, it’s difficult to leave. There’s no beginning or end. Manituana is being continued online (www.manituana.com), an initiative that’s completely coherent with the project of the book. The Web is never definable: it represents the possible, the progressively constructible. Your ability to follow the paths of Manituana on Google Earth expands your ability to imagine the book in a concrete way, a kind of materialism of the imagination. It’s an effort to put all instruments in the service of the novel, one at which written-word purists will turn up their noses […]

Manituana isn’t just a story of that which could have been, but a map of the possible, a literary tool kit with which you can dismantle the apparatus of history, a capability that can only be nurtured by keeping on the wrong side.

Translated into English by Jason Di Rosso

The Perfect Storm, or rather, The Monster Interview

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Or better still: The Best Q & As from…
...Pulp n.66 (March 2007), Il Mucchio n. 633 (April 2007), Tribe n.101 (April 2007), Carta n.12 (Year V, 31/03/2007), Off (23/03/2007) and ilveronese.it
Interviewers: Alessandro Bertante (Pulp), Maura Murizzi and Aurelio Pasini (il Mucchio), Lucia Fabrizio (Tribe), Giuliano Santoro (Carta), Monica Mazzitelli (Off), Jonathan Zenti (Il Veronese)

Translated into English by Jason Di Rosso

a. Ad originem
b. The historical research and the writing
c. The setting, the characters, the style
d. The website
e. The here, the now and the here on in
f. Literature and the role of the writer

The Nameless

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Article by Jacopo Guerriero in GQ (Italian edition), n.91, April 2007
It all began with Luther Blissett. Then came Wu Ming. Behind that signature a group of authors who changed the way writing is done. And who now return with Manituana.

by Jacopo Guerriero

This revolution is faceless! No photographs, no authors. The author is a commonplace of consumerist perversion invented to make you read happily, but with your pockets empty and your brain fogged by romantic inventions. Step back: western Europe in the early 1990s, was the time of the appearance of the web, of the ‘no-copyright’ movements, the start of a new transformation of the culture industry. You found a mysterious signature that appeared everywhere, in station toilets, in graffiti on the walls, on the tables of a pub or, as was written at the time, ‘on the sea walls, on the pole of the American flag, on the moon, on the Wailing Wall and plenty of others’: LUTHER BLISSETT.
Yes, like the English footballer of Afro-Caribbean origin, who played in the Italian championship for while in the Milan jersey. A sesquipedalian washout. Even today no one knows the reasons for the coincidence: Luther Blissett – as a signature – didn’t represent anyone. It was the collective name of anyone who wanted to opt for guerrilla warfare, lies and subversive falsification. Everyone was free to use the multiple name as they saw fit. The story starts there: with para-sciences and borrowed philosophies.
It was in 1999 that the first novel signed Luther Blissett appeared. It was called ‘Q’. ‘In an age devastated by the wars of religion, a student of theology chooses the cause of the heretics and the disinherited.’ That was what it said on the cover of the most gripping story that had been told hereabouts for twenty years. The narrative of the mortal struggle between the many-named Survivor, the heretical captain Gert and his mortal enemy Q, busy playing a cruel game on the chessboard of Europe. Q was, altogether, a thriller, a spy story, a historical novel, a political pamphlet. To quote Bakhtin: it created new neighbourhoods between things and ideas. It was a publishing cause, a scandal. In the pure style of Luther Blissett, obviously. Metropolitan legends circulated about the identity of the author. Then it was discovered that there were several authors, disciples of Eco, certainly, or perhaps not, it was Eco who had written it. Things like that…
Lots of people are still confused, so I fear I will have to tell a well-known story once again. Keep these names in mind: Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Luca Di Meo, Federico Guglielmi. The names aren’t important, they would say: the writers aren’t important, what’s important is the stories they tell. But they were the four components of the ‘band of novelists’ who conceived and wrote Q. They were joined, at the start of the third millennium, by Riccardo Pedrini, the ex-guitarist of Nabat, a cult band on the Italian punk-skin scene, already the author of impure essays on the martial arts and revolution, on street styles, of a portentous novel, Free Baku Now, constructed with a sci-fi modus operandi.
In parentheses: I remember meeting Riccardo months later, in a bar near Bologna station. He had very few of the clichés of home-grown intellectuals. No typewriter or thoughtful black-and-white photographs, so you know what we’re talking about. It was the hottest summer of the century, with the air of a preacher he talked about James Ellroy, African music, narrative to be reconfigured ‘like the parts of a cow before they are eaten’. They were years full of squabbles and unfamiliar reactions. To take one example, in 2001, when Pedrini’s new solo novel was published, he was incomprehensibly accused of plagiarism by another writer, Giuseppe Genna. The other members of the band, according to Roberto Bui, expressed their wish that Genna should end up being treated by Professor Veronesi [a celebrated oncologist – Translator’s note]. Then mutual apologies and peacemaking followed. The group, however, remained t the centre, playing with myth and identity was at the time the real mainstream literature, polemics and positions rained down, an urban legend circulated about a photographer being beaten up by our fellows. These were the first years of the Berlusconi government, the left was craven, these people were demonstrating optimist, avoiding the litanies of defeat, rejoicing and talking about copyleft and bookcrossing. They were rebuked by more moderate colleagues, they wore their partisanship as ostentatious banners. Very unliterary things. At any rate, with the arrival of the fifth element, the group that had assumed the open formation of Luther Blissett became the narrative studio Wu Ming. ‘Wu Ming’, you can read on the five men’s site, ‘is a Chinese expression: it means “no name", or “five names2, it depends how you pronounce the first syllable. The name of the band is understood either as a tribute to dissidence (Wu Ming is a very common name among Chinese citizens asking for democracy and freedom of expression), or as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine, on whose mountain ranges the author becomes a star.’ That’s why there are no photograph. That’s why, every time a journalist tries to take one, they come up with the legend of the beaten photographer. The first work by the extended collective was 54. The more difficult novel to support, the second choral work that couldn’t be outdone by the rhizomatic capillarity of the first. On 14 May 2005, after its Italian triumphs and reprints, the London Times spoke of it in these terms: ‘Like Q, it is a sprawling epic, although the setting is modern. With the exception of a brief prologue, the action takes place entirely in 1954. The plot is a formidable feat of imagination that moves restlessly between Bologna, Naples, California, Moscow, Dubrovnik and Marseilles.’ Among the thousand stories told, ‘the most daring […] imagines Cary Grant in retreat in Palm Springs, sick of the movies and considering retirement, but being persuaded to undertake a secret mission to Yugoslavia to talk to Marshal Tito about making a film of his life — all with the aim of buttering up the dictator and drawing him away from the Soviet Union.’ And again: ‘The new novel is a more accomplished piece of work. In Q the characters often seemed dwarfed by the huge historical events going on around them. 54’s scope is no less ambitious, but has a refreshing lightness of touch.’ A consecration, in short.
Today, after three different solo novels by various members of the collective, we hav reached the third episode, the third fresco written by five pairs of hands. For a few days Manituana (Einaudi), the latest work by the Wu Ming writers’ collective, has been in bookshops. This time the protagonists are handsome and wild, they come from the land of forests. Call them heroes. And before approaching them, scour your memory. You remember La Longue Carabine and Cerf Agile? They were the protagonists of the legendary novel by James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans. Lucky the ones who approach those pages for the first time. Lucky the ones who, still as adolescents, set off on the trail of Indians and love stories, if they pass through the gate of childhood, the elementary nature of myth and adventure last for ever. Now, a century and a half after Cooper, five writers have taken it into their head to write the impossible sequel to the story of the Mohawk people, to resume that tale of violence and passion where Cooper himself had abandoned it, after the end of the civil war in the Iroquois lands between the French allied with the Hurons and the English flanked by the Mohican tribes.
Manituana. The name indicates both a physical place and a place of the mind. The final destination of the family and the people of Warraghiyagey (Sir William Johnson is his name as a white man and an Irishman), father of the Six Nations, the eastern Indian land, to the south of Canada, loyal to the United Kingdom. The novel begins his death, with the vicissitudes of his descendants and allies.
A tale of original injustice, and hence a political story. The continentals, under the command of George Washington – at the end of the 18th century – bore the words ‘civilisation or death’ on their banners. Manituana is the tale of the birth of the united States of America, the revelation of the violent roots of the American nation. And, by contrast, it is the story of the resistance of Chief Joseph Brant, the most hated Mohawk Indian, who didn’t like war but became cruel while fighting against the German-American Jonas Klug. Of Philip Lacroix, ‘Le Grand Diable’, an invincible warrior who, in the forests of the north, stared into the eyes of death in solitude.
It is a story of women with the gift of the ‘shining’ – in the spark of dreams they can predict the crossing of destinies. Molly Brant, Sir William’s Indian wife, immediately knows the beginning and the end of each event, and is the key character, capable of looking straight to the place of final destination, Manituana. Still a future storehouse of legends because the Indians who survived, as Stan Steiner says, have created a way of saving the earth, through the simple fact of their existence. Even if that existence is a hard, very hard life…

When the Indians invented punk two centuries ago

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Article by Marco Philopat published in the journal XL, no. 20, April 2007
The first young people with Mohican cuts? They appeared in 1776, copying the native Americans. The story is told in Manituana, the new book by the authors of the Bologna collective that nearly drove our Philopat mad.

As soon as I’d finished reading Manituana I wanted to cut my hair into a Mohican, like in the old days. Set before the revolution that brought America into being, Manituana is a story from the wrong side of history: the Indians. Published these days, the latest collective work by the literary clan, writing workshop, cultural and political project of Wu Ming, the ‘no names’ of Mandarin Chinese, had the same effect on me as the first punks in Portobello in the late 1970s.
‘I want to have a Mohican cut again!’ I said to everyone I me. ‘But you’re out of it, Philopat, there are some things you’re too old for!’ ‘Try and read the latest Wu Ming, then you’ll understand,’ I told him. It’s true, I do go in for easy enthusiasms, and this novel, set in the land of the Six Iroquois Nations, may have got me more involved than it should have. Thayendanegea Joseph brant, the Mohawk war chief, a real character who was received in London by the King of England in 1776, is the protagonist, along with his sister, a woman with shamanic powers. She will dream the escape route to Canada, to the Garden of the Great Spirit: Manituana, where your eye always meets ‘water, trees, land and light’. Impeccable from the historical point of view, the book opens many windows of reflections, not least upon the modern age, and its narrative structure recalls those adventure books about Indians that I read when I was sixteen. Every time Ronaterihonte Philip Lacroix, nicknamed ‘Le Grand Diable’ for the courage and ferocity of his fighting, appears, the reading of the pages is as fast as a tomahawk thrown to smash the skull of the enemy, but it was the London emulators of the Mohawks who drove me out of my mind. In Manituana, when the delegation of the Six Nations land in England, the authors describe an outlaw street gang terrorising the fat and opulent London of the 18th century with bows and arrows: the Mohawks, the sons of the poor who paint their tufts of hair, yelling their war-cries. But then the metropolitan Indians and the punks have had descendants, I thought in my delirium. Perhaps the signature Wu ming conceals the five representatives of the new Iroquois nation! In spite of my insistence, I didn’t manage to get my hair cut in a Mohican, not at home, not in the office and not in my favourite bar… I was desperate, how could I restrain my desire for a great indigenous alliance? I took the train and went to see Wu Ming to put myself forward as the representative of the sixth tribe… They came to pick me up from the station. First they took me to a sinister loft, then to a bar dominated by distracting advertisements for tomato products. I wondered if it had all been staged to keep us from talking about the Mohock Indians. I couldn’t expose myself by immediately suggesting a tribal union, so we started talking about Manituana. They explained the concept of the logical reconstruction of a historical episode, its slow transformation into a novel and why it was that they had chosen that particular scenario. ‘The Mohawk territory bounded New York at that time, connections between natives and settlers developed the embryo of a multicultural society. We took that consideration as our starting point, trying to ask ourselves how the Mohawks saw it in the period preceding the revolution, at the moment when the novel’s protagonists faced very difficult choices.’ The talked to me about their manic work on chiselling away at the text, then the research, months and months of it, into a pile of archived texts, films and books. ‘Most of the volumes we consulted were published in the last four or five years. We too were surprised. It’s as if the Americans, after September 11, asked themselves some questions about their own warmongering origins, about the source of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the subsequent extermination of entire peoples. The Iroquois Nation is very different from the Sioux or Cheyenne Indians of the second half of the 19th century, about whom there is a flourishing literature and filmography. For example, there were absolutely no horses, no bison-hunting, and certain self-destructive practices were absent. The Six Nations had a very advanced constitutional form, so much so that the American version was to a certain extent inspired by it. And all of this immediately after General Washington’s order, that cry of ‘civilisation or death’ that wiped out every Iroquois village.’ From here, Wu Ming set off into the detailed description of native society. ‘Within the clans there was a matriarchal organisation, then there were the meetings at which the sachems and the elders were very important, and it was only if there was a battle going on that the war chiefs were important, otherwise their vote had the same value as anyone else’s. Also, they had developed a great capacity to welcome half-breeds and subjects of other races who could also have become war chiefs.’ As it was all starting to take rather a long time, and I was pondering the problem of how to introduce the topic of my holy affiliation, I asked: and the Mohocks? The metropolitan Indians who wanted to join up with the six Nations?’ ‘We took our inspiration from a true event related by Jonathan Swift, we also talk about it on our website (manituana.com) in a parallel downloadable narrative.’ He remained tight-lipped and I had to insist. But wasn’t there a direct descent to punk? As if the generations had passed on that rebel gene, an underground river that reappears every now and again in the course of the decades and centuries?’ ‘Bah! A distant one, perhaps… The punks were born in London in 1976, exactly two centuries later. In fact that’s a coincidence that might make you think about some kind of astral connection. Then there were bands like Flux of Pink Indians and Chumbawamba who drew inspiration from the Indian imagination. But nothing more than that. The few Mohawks who survived the extermination sought refuge in Canada… We will write about what happened in our next novels.’ At that point I was completely defeated, and talking about sans-culottes, charcoal-burners, the urban proletariat, Empire State Building tightrope-walkers and the shock-troops of the people, partisans and metropolitan Indians. Nothing doing… We said goodbye on the way to the station. In the train on the way back I began to understand my post-reading hallucination… Ok, I won’t redo my Mohican, I haven’t signed any alliance, but I’ve achieved a better understanding of the friends I’ve been following attentively for a long time. Q, published when they were still called Luther Blissett, 54 and Asce di Guerra [Battle-axes] are books that I have devoured and which filled my historical lacunae. Together for almost 15 years, the first preoccupation of Wu Ming is to take us out of our ignorance, driving forward a unique and precious project, always on the side of the disinherited, the poor and the losers. A project entirely dedicated to the great people of the nonconformist Nation of Letters, the true one, this time, not one that has emerged from my chaotic illuminations.

Manituana, the clash of civilizations and George Bush’s ancestors.

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Interview from “Il Venerdi di Repubblica” March 23, 2006.
A novel set at the end of the 18th century in America, about the Indians who experienced the War of Independence on the losing side. The young collective that broke through with Q returns with a plunge back into the past—the distant past.

By Loredana Lipperini

Eight years ago when Wu Ming (who still called themselves Luther Blissett) explained how they write as a group, they used this image: “It’s like with jazz: great collective spirit, group arrangements and individual solos.” From that method a first novel, Q, was born—and sold 250,000 copies. Employing the same philosophy (collective writing, renunciation of real names in favor of a pseudonym, no photographs, no television appearances) they followed Q with 54, various “solo” books and a screenplay, Lavorare con lentezza, or Radio Alice). And now the third and most ambitious test for the five writers, Manituana, recounts the war between Great Britain and its North American colonies from the point of view of the Iroquois Indians who sided with King George.

Why does a group of Italian storytellers decide to recount the birth of the American nation? Furthermore, why turn not only the conventional image of the Indians on its head, but also the later, “politically correct” one?

We rejected the second vision as well, the “alternative” one, partly because it was created for another historical and geographical context (the conquest of the west during the 19th century), and partly because we’re not interested in the cliché of the “innocent” Indian who’s in harmony with nature, technologically backward and a victim sacrificed on the altar of progress. Things were more complicated than that, and we tried not to simplify them. [run in or indent] At any rate, it’s completely within the Italian and European tradition to deal with America, pushing the boundaries of the cage of archetypes and stereotypes that America has constructed around its heart. And the gamble of working on a trans-Atlantic imaginary framework is certainly not “hardly Italian.” Sergio Leone and company found the philosophers’ stone within the western genre: they worked on the most worn-out clichés and transformed them into gold. A film like Once Upon a Time in the West–written, scripted, directed, photographed, edited and scored by Italians—is a potent narrative about and representation of America, of its conscience, of its quintessential nature. Today more than ever, with the Atlantic having widened due to the choices made by the Bush Administration, it’s vital to question ourselves on the complex relationship between us and America.

In Manituana the historical characters are transformed into literary heroes with great emotional force: how did you construct them?

In the initial phase of the documentation we found ourselves dealing with characters with complex biographies, novel-like, Romantic in the 18th-century sense of the term. Frontier lives, characters straddling worlds and cultures: it wasn’t difficult to transform these figures into literary heroes. And so the biographies served as a breeding ground for developing the nonhistorical characters, the imaginary ones. We tried to render on the page a sense of complex relationships on different levels; we searched for the common thread in existential and apparently divergent trajectories while looking for the motives for detachment and difference in those destinies that seemed similar.

Above all the women play a determining role, even from the political point of view. To what do we owe this homage?

We’re well aware that we’re an all-male collective, and we’re aware of the difficulties involved in our giving depth to female characters. In this case historical reality came to our rescue. The Iroquois society had very strong and deeply rooted matriarchal components. Clan membership—a foundation of the social organization of the Iroquois as it cut across tribes and nations —was determined by matrilineal descent. Furthermore, the Iroquois women wielded a precious and strategic prerogative: adoption. The fate of prisoners of war depended on them: they could decree their death, as compensation for children and husbands fallen in battle, or request their assimilation into the tribe, for the same reason. It was much more common for the latter to happen. These groups weren’t large populations; they needed bodies to work the land or to go hunting and fishing. But adoption rendered a prisoner to all intents and purposes a member of the nation and of the Clan, with every right and duty that that entailed. Many important leaders had been adopted prisoners.

What does a story set in the 18th century tell us about our present?

It’s difficult to reduce a novel to one key reading. In a sense, telling the story of the birth of the United States already means dealing with the present and with America as a global problem. You could say that Manituana recounts the story of the disappearance of a hybrid reality, crushed by the logic of the clash of civilizations and the birth of a new nation. The foundation of the Untied States didn’t occur at the expense of the “noble savages,” as an edulcorated version of history states, but at the expense of a hybrid culture, interethnic, politically complex and full of contradictions. If then we consider that the Americans of the last quarter of the 18th century were nothing other than Europeans who emigrated across the Atlantic, we quickly find ourselves grappling with the foundations of our own civilization, and therefore of our globalized present. This involved the West not only in the geographical sense, but in the political and cultural sense too. It represents, that is, the extreme consequences of the impact of “whites” on the world.

The use of an uncanny street slang in the book comes across as a homage to Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This is one of the indications of a very considered linguistic effort: could you explain the way you worked on your language?

We often quote Paco Ignacio Taibo II, according to whom experimentation has to be the invisible seam that holds the story together. There’s nothing unknowing in our method of laying out words and phrases, but our goal is not “pretty writing.” If you look closely at our sentences, you’ll see that we try to obtain a subtle alteration in the syntax, and shift the meaning of words, even just a little bit. Often it’s enough to remove a “me” or a “you” to obtain a sentence that “vibrates” and remains suspended like a hovercraft, a millimeter above the page. This should never be an end in itself, but rather functional to what we want to relay, done as discreetly as possible. The less the reader is aware of the strangeness of certain choices, the better it is. Often, later, it’s the translators who point out to us the difficulty of understanding some passages that in Italian seemed simple.

Manituana doesn’t end with the book: it’s accompanied by “parallel” short stories online, and others will come, some even written by readers. Not only this: the site integrates the writing with sounds, images, maps. What’s your aim?

To tell a story is to discover a world. The pages of a book are one of the magic portals that open it up. You can chose to keep the other portals closed or to push all of them open, in a sign of hospitality. Once again, it’s about deciding whether to offer a universe to contemplate, untouchable in its presumed beauty and perfection, or to invite others to transform it, to develop its potential. It’s not just an aesthetic choice: if we believe that men and women together are able to better the world, we’ll do everything so that our readers can better our stories, by any means necessary.