Truth, justice, freedom: The trial as an emancipatory narrative framework in the cultural actions of Giuseppe Fava

Abstract

In the late 1950s, after a brief career as a lawyer, Giuseppe Fava (Palazzolo Acreide, 1925) became a journalist. The exploitative activities of Cosa Nostra in the tragic aftermath of the Second World War made clear to him Sicilian society’s urgent need for progress towards greater social justice so that violence could be prevented. Fava developed an ethical conception of journalism and, by extension, of literature and theatre. ‘Where there’s truth’, Fava wrote, ‘justice can be done and freedom can be defended’. This article shows how Giuseppe Fava put his intellectual impegno into practice in order to provide the Sicilian public with a means of interpreting and understanding the mechanisms behind the Sicilian tragedy, and an incentive to take up their collective responsibility. In order to illustrate how Fava translated his journalistic and intellectual impegno into cultural actions ( Freire, 1998a ) of an emancipatory character, it focuses on his use of the criminal trial as a metaphor for his journalistic investigation into the ills of Sicilian society in his essay Processo alla Sicilia (1967), and as a narrative framework for the closing chapters of his novels Prima che vi uccidano (1976) and Passione di Michele (1980) and for his courtroom dramas La Violenza (1969) and Ultima Violenza (1983). It shows how, by literally co-opting the audience as jurors in the trial – a technique which is in many respects reminiscent of the methodologies for conscientisation developed by Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal – Fava stimulated the Sicilian public to pursue their own freedom and dignity through the creative and continuous transformation of their contextual reality.