Duilio Giammaria: the Afghan journey of an old-fashioned reporter

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In the critical field, merits and demerits, Pier Paolo Pasolini reminds us, are always axiological: yes or no. The essay/reportage by Duilio Giammaria (The magnificent gate, a country called Afghanistan, Marsilio, pp.304) is a yes. The reason is in many reasons.
First of all because it fits in the line of a story – modern Afghanistan – without giving in to the prevailing and cloying editorial trend of writing popular books that proudly and incomprehensibly embrace centuries and centuries of history.

Freely faithful

Fortunately for us, Giammaria has given himself a precise temporal perimeter – that of the American war which goes from after 11 September 2001 to the present day, that is, to the umpteenth fall of Kabul – and which coincides with his direct experience in the field. Witness of one of the most significant battles of the US operation (Anaconda) which could have changed the fate not only of the conflict but also of regional and perhaps global balances, Giammaria narrates things through the eyes of a sentient traveller. In fact, he moves out of the cage of the modern embedded reporter, thus proving to be freely faithful to a noble line of models (always unattainable, otherwise what models would they be?) that goes from Kapuścińki to Chatwin.

This general approach is followed by the correspondent-writer with a sober story in the alphabet and exposition. In short, it spares us from the lyricism of many authors who, believing themselves to be Tennyson, perhaps without having read him, illustrate their reports with descriptions of exotic sunrises and sunsets (for provincial Italian culture, the exotic begins just outside the comfort zone), turbans and veils feminine, as if the poetic vein ennobled the geopolitical analysis instead of distorting it.

Kabul

For the fashionable Western sensibility that remembers Kabul only on the occasion of its sad anniversaries, this essay-story is therefore an excellent antidote. The chapters dedicated to the Anaconda operation, as mentioned, are among the densest. They tell of the mother of all battles (on the jihadist side) and of all debacles (on the American side), namely that of Shah-i-Kot where the Rumsfeld doctrine ran into the second defeat after the failure of Tora Bora. The fugitive of Bin Laden, protected by mountain refuges and then fled to Pakistan, will last another ten years. Between Kushan art and geographies, military tactics and political indolence, and a Kabul that falls, rises and falls again, the pages of the “magnificent porta” open to instances of debate caught in the always crucial passage, twenty years after the facts, of the news to the dimension of History; a very delicate methodological junction, to be treated with ethics and culture, to avoid the risk of crippling the former and trivializing the latter.

The archives, after all, are collections of organized testimonies and this work is a candidate for recomposing tiles of a mosaic that the frenzy of modern media neglects, preferring the emptiness of the permanent and very up-to-date connection, but often without further study. Giammaria’s conclusions have the touch of the twentieth-century traveller. They leave open the question about the future of Afghanistan without moralizing or borrowing algorithmically rhetorical vulgar narratives from a generalist cultural insert. In short, a good book: a piece of the old school.