The Head, The Face, The Mask: A Love Story Beyond the Beautiful monster by AA School

The Head, The Face, The Mask: A Love Story Beyond the Beautiful Monster

Prologue The Legend As per folklore traditions, these types of stories do not have a fixed written version and tracing the origin of the first storyteller is impossible, its storytelling lies upon people’s way of passing it down orally from father to daughter to son, and their interpretation is hence idiosyncratic. I will then tell my own version of the “Moor’s Head”, the way my parents told me: “During the year one thousand Palermo was under the Islamic domination of the Aghlabids, the Arab dynasty of the emirs of Ifriqiya. In a neighbourhood of the city called Al Khalisa, which means “the chosen one”, there was a young Sicilian girl who dedicated her days to the care of her plants on her balcony. One day, a “moor”, seeing this girl from the street fell in love, and through the chant of his words and seduction, the young girl returned it. The Sicilian and the moor started a passionate relationship, but what the moor was hiding behind his sexual greed was a wife and children in his homeland, to which, one day, he would have returned. It was not long after, that day arrived, and when the young girl learned the truth about the moor and his family, hurt in her trust between the walls of her house, that night while the man was sleeping, in an act of madness, she deadly hit him. Still, in love with the man she let in her house, she urged the need to keep the man with her forever, so with a knife she cut his throat so that she could keep his head, his face. She opened the skull and emptied of the soft organs, making it look like a vase, where she potted a plant of basil. She placed the head out on the balcony and watered it with her tears every day. Passers-by looking at the flourishing plant in that peculiar vase shaped like a moor’s head began to make clay posts resembling the girl’s one to display them in their own balconies. A tradition we still have today.”

Multiple Monsters The legend of the Moor’s Head is a critical component of the folklore of Sicily; defining and undefining simultaneously its culture. Seeing it from the point of view of the monstrosities suffered and caused by its characters the story becomes schizophrenic and ambivalent. The line between monstrosity and pureness is extremely fine, one could say that they are two sides of the same coin. The young girl represents beauty and pureness but simultaneously in an act of madness she becomes the monster; insanity lets her believe the chopped head of the lover belongs to her, in the psychotic action of sawing the head to transform it into a vase. At the same time, the moor represents

seduction, exoticization and foreignness initially, but his symbolism shifts suddenly to deception, otherness and invader. The other, which is a scary, ugly and corrupt entity, marginalized and not accepted, develops monstrous characteristics in the eyes of the self. Its ugliness is seen as a complete absence of order in contrast to the self, which represents beauty, unity and control.1 Monsters are relegated to the dark spaces of the house because the self has always known that aesthetics is the avoidance of ugliness and the cultivation of beauty at all costs2, but a fundamental issue in their relationship is that dark spaces are as much part of the house as spaces in light. The inability to see what is in those dark spaces generates fear and eeriness. And so, monsters, that are not otherworldly but domestic, dwell in the same space where the self and “all the beautiful things” are. For these characteristics the elements of the story could be described as “uncanny”. As discussed extensively by Sigmund Freud, the uncanny is native to those objects and scenarios which are composed of a duality, if not a multiplicity of almost contradictory elements which creates confusion, uncertainty and fear. To be more exact the head is the heimlich, i.e. the German word for uncanny which can better explain the parallel. Heimlich in German can be translated as familiar, tame and cosy, but a second meaning is translated as concealed, obscure and kept from sight. The opposite of this word, which in the German language is constructed like in the English one, unheimlich translates as uneasy and “something that was hidden and is now visible”.3 Both heimlich and unheimlich in English are translated as uncanny as if the two words are actually representing a duality of things, a different perspective of the same object. The meaning of heimlich and unheimlich, seemingly the same and opposite, are neither, they are not contradictory nor a tautological pleonasm; they belong to the same whole but they show different perspectives of it, they are not opposite elements but rather opposite parts of the same entirety. Similarly, it can be argued that ugliness is not the opposite of beauty, but it has its independent place in the category of aesthetics.4 The monster, that constantly threatens the self with its presence, becomes the other, who blurs the lines of the identity of the self and shows its imperfections. The self is not aware of these imperfections, it believes to be a beautiful subject because it perceives its form clear and distinct, its exterior and interior separated by a sharp boundary,5 it thinks to be a finite, contained and diligent being that opposes the other, the ugly, the uncanny, the disordered and the disturbed. When it becomes hard to retain the monster from the dark spaces, fear for the uncanny arises, a fear that comes from the fact that we know 1

Roblin, Ronald E. "ON BEAUTY AND UGLINESS IN ART." Journal of Thought 11, no. 2 (April 1976): 101-09. 2 Cousins, Mark. “THE UGLY [Part 3].” AA Files, no. 30 (1995): 65–68. 3 Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." In An Infantile Neurosis: And Other Works, 218-53. Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press, 1919 4 (Ibid., Roblin, Ronald E.) 5 Cousins, Mark. “THE UGLY [Part 1].” AA Files, no. 28 (1994): 61–64.

the monster is in the darkness of the familiar room, but the moment it comes out we are dreadful and confused. The uncanny, the other makes the self’s boundary confused - “unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich”.6 Detecting where the monster is, becomes difficult, it could be here at any point. It becomes frightening and fascinating simultaneously to catch a monster, to cage it and put it back where it belongs, or better, to kill it, eradicating the feeling of discomfort it creates in the self once and for all. This obsession to catch the monster begins to turn into a tireless search, it becomes, even more, a defining part of the self; emulating the monster's behaviour is the easiest way to annihilate it, know your enemy to be able to defeat it. At once the monster is caught and killed, an epiphany strikes in the self, who is the monster anymore? Me? It? Both? None? The weapon? Fear, but this time not of the monster but of the acknowledgement that the self has assimilated the behaviour of the monster, its otherness. The agonising self realises that beauty was only a conformation to ideals and not an absolute truth.7

(Ibid., Freud, Sigmund.) Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Donald M. Jr Leslie and Carl R. Lovitt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 7

The Head The Fluidity of the Monster The moor’s head and its legend carry ambiguity which is extended to cultural values and identification of the self and the other. The symbol of the head, the most recognisable part of the body, the one which can be easily identified, is what the young girl keeps of her former lover, and it shapes the way her balcony, one of the few elements of the house visible from outside is altered according to the other, opening a conversation on the identification of the other as alien and simultaneously as the creator of identity. The symbol of the moor’s head is peculiar in the transliteration of the folklore story; its beauty today is represented by the form of art and aesthetics it creates as decoration. It is a symbol of Sicilian culture and it represents its roots as an artefact of “beautiful” craftsmanship. And yet, there is something peculiar with this artefact, which comes from the understanding that the story belongs to something familiar and yet horrific, something “uncanny”. The head as the object exemplifies the relationship between what is heimlich and what is unheimlich; the head is seen as a meaningful artefact when taken in the context of a symbol of liberation, and to some extent, cultural assimilation (in its positive connotation), but the same head in the story can quickly shift to symbolise invasion, otherness and mistrust. The head is uncanny in the duality of its being and yet not contradictory; this behaviour, typical of the monster that we cannot predict and that bewilders us, represents the discourse around elements which, linguistically speaking belong to different spheres, but logically are parts of the same whole. The heimlich swings back and forth in the room until comes to be unheimlich, and it is at this point that we begin to understand that their difference is apparent, their flexibility in shifting suddenly from one to the other, the feeling of unease it creates, mirrors what happens with the symbolism of the moor’s head: its familiarity and beauty as an artefact shift to becoming the embodiment of death of the invader: this sudden shift of things is what the idea of monsters embody. The head is fluid, an element which is hard to comprehend. Let us think of the features of the artefact: the dark skin, the golden hoops, the Islamic headgear with gems embedded, the opulent exotic necklaces, are all details that in the collective imagination bring us to tales of the Middle East. However, the moor’s head is contaminated by imagery of Sicilian geometric and floral patterns decorating the headgear, jewellery combining foreign gems with local corals, garlands with citruses decorating the shoulders of the artefact, all symbols that together produce a head not completely true to the moor’s culture nor to Sicily. In the tale, the moor’s head could be seen as the defeated Islamic world, but in reality, it becomes a vessel that when sitting on a balcony or on a window’s sill manifests its hybrid identity - it is Sicilian. The fluidity of this symbol allows the viewer to read into it multiple and paradoxical stories and histories:

from Arab to Sicilian, from emeralds to corals, from dark skins to light skins, the craftsmanship of the heads has often been hectic and historically imprecise and for this, it has produced a dynamic symbol.

A typical Moor’s Head with pomegranates and chilli peppers headgear (courtesy of Terra e Fuoco)

The Other, The Muslim The legend of the Moor’s Head seems to strongly demarcates a line between the self and the other, between what is known and what is unknown, but in reality, its fluidity allows the artefact to smudge the edge between the two. The moor is counterposed to the Sicilian girl as a distorted mirror that pushes the self to deny the scary idea that the other has taken a role in its identity. The symbolism of the head becomes fluid in referencing many aspects of the island history and the perception the islanders have of the other. Ugliness, uncanniness, the other, all describe the sentiments of the subject in feeling overwhelmed, the subject fear of being eliminated, “I cannot be here, the object takes all”8, this fear is soon turned into an act of salvage, disassociation from the object. Ugliness and otherness represent the possibility of ending the subject’s identity, and in doing so the subject feels the need to anticipate the other’s moves and eliminate it, swinging itself between beautiful and ugly, purity and monstrosity. The way we judge and condemn monsters is schizophrenic, the acts of the Sicilian girl and the moor are, in their own different ways, monstrous, the Sicilian girl unable to bear with the other, its secret and its true identity takes the form of the monster , the same monster she feared earlier. The story of the encounter between Joachim of Fiore and King Richard, both characters strongly entangled in the religious faith and history of Sicily, is of help in understanding the perception and perspective regarding the Saracens, the “moors”, on the island. In their meeting Joachim tells the king about the story of the antichrist’s seven-headed dragon, explaining as the seven heads belonged to symbols and ambassadors of Islam.9 Therefore in the eyes of the Sicilians, there was a strong relation and association between Muslims and the forms taken by the Antichrist. This would help clarify the reason why the story is so positive regarding the death of the moor and why people are jubilant in decorating their balconies with vases that represent a moor’s chopped head. The significance of the head as a source of inaccurate monstrosity in culture and religion can be further supported by the Borgia Map of the world, where the Saracens were portrayed through the legend of Ebinichibel described as “the Saracen Ethiopian king with his dog-headed people”, where a monstrous head is the element that describes the “other”, the non-christian. This represents one of many instances of how the “blasphemous” extremes regions of the world were depicted as grotesque and non-pure. The perception of death comes to be reversed: instead of being seen as a melancholy part of life the death of the other becomes the only apparent option for the Silician girl, for Sicilians in general to free themselves. Their delight in showing off the heads on the balconies is the first symptom of the corruption of their being; what was monstrous to them is becoming themselves. 8

(Ibid., Cousins, Mark. [Part 3].) Uebel, Michael. "Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity." Edited by J. J. Cohen. Monster Theory: Reading Culture, January 1997, 264-91. doi:10.5749/j.ctttsq4d.16. 9

The legend’s timeline coincides with Christian Europe normalising the idea of killing in the name of faith, killing in the name of defeating the other. Death and its monstrosity, initially preached by the church as incompatible with the faith and the commandments, become the tool for stronger faith, for a stronger “self”. The story and the history parallelly describe a condition where the holy rules are reversed and become malleable to the point that “Thou shalt not kill” done with a “good” reason can give access to heaven rather than the opposite. In the legend, the ceramic heads on the balconies of the Sicilians are not seen as monstrosities, but as proofs that the antichrist has been defeated in the name of a God. It takes a monster to kill a monster. The strong propaganda against the other in Sicily owes its origins to the four-century domination that came before the Aghlabids: the Byzantine, who strengthened Christianity on the island as a fundamental part of life. Christianity, which had been known as the true and powerful faith was now faced with another religion from the outside. Islam became the anthesis of Christianity, defining and simultaneously limiting and threatening its borders and identity. Saracens were monsters for creating confusion on the imaginary border of Christianity, they posed a question on the importance of dichotomies that seemed to be exclusive and absolute, Islam-Christianity, Muhammad-Christ, Koran-Bible, Muslim-afterlife-Christian-heaven; they made the imaginary boundaries of Christianity blur. The figure of the moor under the spotlight of Christianity becomes even more controversial, it represents its apparent "opposite", something indecent, but in today’s context, it tells a new story, a story of acceptance, a story of flourishing architecture and culture for the island, a period during which Sicily witnesses the co-existence of different religions and populations. The story that sees for a moment the Christian and the Muslim as one, as lovers, builds hostility quite suddenly, because of the process of infiltration and corruption that converts the characters in monsters that appreciate no differences. It is the concept of the border that allows us to think of a shift. While a border is a made-up concept to determine where something finishes and another thing starts, this imaginary line triggers a thought: you are on one side or the other. The story might underline how hard it is for us to imagine anything without borders, we have always asked ourselves on which side we are standing, and the opposite side has to be the enemy.

The Borgia Map of Africa, Italy and Spain (from The Borgia/ Velletri World Map 1410 - 1458 )

The Other, The Border The other, here in the form of the Muslim, was seen as an entity capable of contaminating the space of beauty and purity, leaking into the subject and bursting its boundaries.10 Its location, exterior to beauty, represented the will to penetrate its interior as the other, for its innate condition, is seen as a threat no matter its actions. The monstrosity of the other was not merely a theological matter, the Christendom perceived this “other” as a danger to its physical and logical boundaries. To the understanding of Christianity, the limits of Islam coincided with theirs; Islam started where Christianity ended11 and this aspect of Islam being exterior to its limits, harmful for its boundaries, is one of the characteristics of Ugliness entering Beauty and taking the form of the monster that needs to be repelled. This leakage is seen as a direct attack on identity, when the subject is permeable its limits become unstable. The boundaries of Sicily so open to anyone in the Mediterranean Sea become pervious to penetration from the other creating an exchange. How could Palermo, the city “All Port” protect itself? With the arrival of the Arabs by ships, the port of the city and its borders were gaps easing a new population into the Sicilian reality. The moor’s head, strongly symbolizes Sicilian culture, for its transgressing and violating the subject's limits, not only by leaking its essence inside the subject but also by reshaping its boundaries. The ugly object is voracious, it will consume the inside of the subject; the object sees the “space of the subject” as part of its own12, something that the subject convulsively rejects. Christianity shaped Islam as a distorted mirror reflection, a game of doublings, an other that attacks its boundaries and blends the limits of its identity. The idea of mirrors in the artefact is further augmented by the custom of pairing the moor’s head with a Sicilian girl’s head. How is this? Some sources go back to the legend and explain how the Sicilian girl, of noble origins, was also beheaded because of the love she developed for a Muslim man, a repulsive act that could not be condoned. However, the context might have influenced this artefact's craftmanship as two heads facing, mirroring and contraposing each other could be the analogy for the two fighting worlds: Christianity and Islam, the two faces that have equally marked Sicily. The male and female heads, produced with the same decorations and headgears, eventually have lost the respective characteristics that initiated the story, they are nothing more than two mirrored heads. Imagining the other necessarily implies the imagination of the self’s borders that contain and enclose its identity. The other wants to dwell in the self, and this is unthinkable, and yet for the theory of the heimlich and unheimlich, the other is already in the self, being integral parts of each other by definition. The paradox of the border being at the same time demarcation and separation is what allows Sicily to 10

Cousins, Mark. “THE UGLY [Part 2].” AA Files, no. 29 (1995): 3–6. (Ibid., Uebel, Michael.) 12 (Ibid., Cousins, Mark. [Part 1].) 11

start shaping its urbanity and its domesticity around the invader, there is no way of protecting oneself from exposure, monsters become the symbol of displacement, their dwelling on the border is a continuous threat of integrity because they make limits fragile. The radical operations of the ugly object towards the subject’s space, make violence the direct response of the subject towards the object,13 a defence mechanism, which without being said, lets the subject come in direct contact with the object, hence corruption and infection begin.

The Other, its Annihilation The propaganda against the Saracens, particularly in the first crusade, was transcoded in the imagery of monsters and dismemberment of the body; this is not only referential in the Moor’s Head legend, but it connects to the a greater concept of the body as a metaphor of the institutions and hence the political tangle of Sicily at the time. Humbert of Moyemnoutier in his Adversus Simoniacos depicts the Church as a pair of eyes, the nobility as the chest and arms and the masses as the lower limbs14; representing body dismemberment as the metonym of Islam meant to the eyes of the faithful that Muslims were the sources of anarchy and disorder, the infection and contamination of the Christiandom. The moor lies to the Sicilian girl, it breaks her trust, alluring her with fake promises. The Saracens cut open pilgrims on the holy land to see if they had swallowed gold to hide it. The Sicilian girl hits the moor and cuts his head to keep it as the prize for her love. In the Crusades, Christians disembowelled Saracens and loot their land. These chiasmic behaviours show the way the initial “monster”, transpassing the boundaries of “beauty” has infected it; the corrupted “beauty” emulating “the monster” has integrated it within and it is now clear that the boundaries dividing the monster from the pure lacked of veracity. The behaviour portrayed in the Christian propaganda against the Saracens is the same the Sicilian girl embodies, she detaches her image from the symbolism of purity. She is the monster. She has annihilated the other just to realize the demarcations of her identity have been compromised all along and she herself is the other, her tears are not only for the lost loved one, but for the lost identity. The process of amalgamation of the other and transformation into a monster is finalised; all that is visible are different perspectives belonging to the same whole. Either one had to perish in order to survive. In reminding us of the failure of coexistence, the legend denotes how the subject is more similar to the object than they could possibly imagine, and only after one’s annihilation, this becomes clear. In Sicily, with the succession of the next dominations, it becomes obvious how the Islamic domination left a strong imprint on the culture of the inhabitants. The 13 14

(Ibid., Cousins, Mark. [Part 2].) (Ibid., Uebel, Michael.)

annihilation of the other left the self reflecting on the affinities the two shared and exchanged; this lonely silence of awareness makes the self desperately aware of whom it has become. This exchange between the self and the other, the girl and the moor, Christianty and Islam, is a fluid area of exchange seeing Sicily at its virtual and physical centre, integrating and identifying with the Arabic culture. The Moore's head in is not anymore a mere decoration, the other bred the young girl. Its offspring? The Hybrid, the purest of all creatures. Sicily is the Hybrid, child of innumerable parents, Greeks, Byzantines, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Swabian and Aragonese; a child that necessarily witnessed the dismantling of borders and the disembodiment of culture, a perpetual cycle of shifting, violating, assimilating.

The Face The house, the Facade The story moves from the domestic space to the outside, into the publicness of the city. The act of placing the chopped head in the balcony takes a dual meaning, pride for winning over the invaders and display of forced cultural assimilation. Privacy becomes public, familial conditions become part of the urban space through the annihilation of the moor; now that the Sicilian girl is the monster her realm is disturbed and confused. There is a metamorphosis of people and spaces, the monster is not there anymore, but its ghost will haunt her forever. Once she let herself fall in love with the man and let him in her house, her identity has been penetrated and with no recovery. Her domesticity has been compromised and this is clear from the outside, from the facade of her house, that, amongst all of the other pots and plants she cared for, now displays the most conflicted one. Her limits, once effective, collapsed under the forces of the other, showing the naked hybrid that it produced, the changed urban space. The struggle between the character of the girl and the character of the moor have resolved with the domestication of the monster, but as such, it has become part of the reality it infiltrated; the system of the ugly has left a trace in the system of beauty, confusing the two to the point that they are indistinguishable. The effort of eradicating the other has produced the disruption of the interior of the Sicilian girl; the phenomenon of monsters not only defines the self, but it marks and demarks new boundaries that separate interiority from exteriority. The action of placing the monster’s head out in the world, out of the domesticity, implies that the ghost of the monster can freely play in its ostracized realm, it just makes it evident to the passers-by; “something that was hidden and is now visible”.15 The fact that the head is out of the walls of the house is a last desperate action from the girl to remove his traces from within her boundaries, but it is too late for that. The moor slept in her bed and moved within her house, infiltrating her boundaries: pushing the monster out is only an apparent liberation. You cannot get rid of the monster, the monster will never die, the monster will live through the house forever; in this sense, the head represents an other that will endure, it will not leave. Turning the moor’s head into something that resembles durability, like an ancient greek pot that survived until now, is the final act of the fight between the ugly and the beauty. Despite to this day very few buildings from the Islamic domination have survived in Sicily, moor’s heads perpetuate that memory, they are the core embodiment of this historical and architectural period of Sicily. With the arrival of the Normans, the island saw a flourishing architecture charged with characteristics of the Islamic world that created unprecedented examples such as the Palatine Chapel or 15

(Ibid., Freud, Sigmund.)

the St John of the Hermits church, Christian infrastructure built with Islamic architecture. The understanding that the Arab colonisation had left important traces behind was finally accepted and embraced making the moor’s head a celebration of hybridisation. The new moor’s heads appearing on balconies, visible from the street, signified both that the invader was not there anymore but that simultaneously a new hybrid era was beginning, a new Sicily that was Arab in its facets. The longevity of such a tradition until today tells the endurance of the pride of becoming free individuals with a strong and yet contaminated urbanism.

Moor’s Heads and Sicilian Girl’s Head as decorative pieces on the balcony (courtesy of Dario Marizza)

The Mask Behind the Mask The abnormalities and ambiguities of monstrosity can be seen as very thin lines dividing the self from the other, the beautiful from the ugly, the heimlich from the unheimlich and the monster from the pure, and so are they really opposites? or they are describing the same condition through its multiple masks? This folklore story, belonging to the uncanny, employs the duality of the visible and the concealed, as the sources of monstrosity itself. The self is in a state of unawareness and obscurity and the act of revelation, of possessing and sharing knowledge with the other makes the self identify with it, the self becomes confused because of the novelty of this action that was thought to be impossible. It is the other that defines the self and makes it aware of its identity and its characteristics and it simultaneously disintegrates the fictitious identity of the self. The story is a compilation of masks: the other is able to disguise the self’s perception of things to the point the self is not even aware of these until the other, in contraposition, allows the self to discover with horror its own repressed characteristics. The self is wearing a mask, a mask it is not even aware of and when it annihilates and removes the other’s mask all the self sees is its reflection. The self acknowledges that its identity is not pure and defined anymore, but its newly-discovered porous body has transformed it. The legend employs masks as tools of the uncanny, we see masking in the dismembering of pilgrims' bodies by the Saracens in search of secrets16, the Sicilian wears the mask of purity, the moor, just for being the other, wears the mask of the monster, the moor’s head, representing the new assimilated culture and the new face of Palermo, wears the mask of the invader killed and displayed outside. The monsters have moved from the dark to the light and have changed the balance that was keeping them separated from purity, everyone is wearing a mask, wether they are aware of it or not. Ugliness and monsters have a strong relationship to the idea of masks, they “can take the form not only of what is there and should not be, but of what is not there and should be”.

We are afraid of the

monster because we know that behind it, something is hiding, “suddenly the phantasy of depth is shattered by the perceptual registration that there is a behind [...], far from supporting the experience of depth, it projects the stuff of another order, or disorder. ”18

(Ibid., Uebel, Michael.) As Ubel explains, Pilgrims found in the Holy Land by Saracens were robbed and killed. Often Christians, as part of the pilgrimage, not possessing anything valuable, would have been dismembered and disemboweled by Saracens in search of gold thinking they swallowed it. Christians used the knowledge of these horrors in the propaganda saying that Muslims would have cut you open in search of secrets. 17 (Ibid., Cousins, Mark. [Part 3].) 18 (Ibid., Cousins, Mark. [Part 2].)

One of the greatest Sicilian authors Luigi Pirandello underlines this condition of wearing a mask as part of a process of integration and assimilation within the space and the community. To Pirandello, the mask is the veil that separates illusion and different realities, what it seems it is not and it is at the same time. Masks are devices that create counterfeit realities of the self; the self that denies the other is also denying the self because it does not exist if not in relation to the other. The Sicilian girl is “pure to herself” and completely unaware of her mask before the moors disembark on the island, but the moment she comes in contact with him suddenly her mask is visible. The moment the two cultures come to touch and interact creates a bond that is not soluble; one culture will not truly exist without the other and denying each other will mask reality. “The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a "mine," that is to say, that was not for me!)—a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate—this idea gave me no rest.”19 The moment the self attempts to annihilate the other for it is repulsive, the mask of the other will attach to the self, “it became clear that so well had he assumed the mask that he murdered in accordance with it, and was sealed within it forever”.20 The Sicilian girl will be forever the murder of the moor, that same action that was attributed to the Saracens and Islamic culture. In the sorrow of the realisation, she is unable to do anything but accepting it, the story ends passively, there is no other action taken from the girl, her last act in the story is her image in tears outside on her balcony, she has accepted the fact that she was the other all along. But the mask is also the moor’s head in that it is a fictitious representation of the reality of Palermo and Sicily, an urban fabric that has assimilated the other and embedded it in its walls, in its balconies. The beautiful monster is created, its decorative quality is nothing else than a mask that wants to conceal an amalgamation, a truth. And today splitting the self and the other is impossible, the mask is the Arabic culture that has been imprinted in the fabric of the island permanently. The world of monsters, where the unheimlich fights the heimlich and the Ugly fights Beauty, is just an illusion mobilised by the fear of losing the characteristics that identify us. Pirandello acknowledges the illusionistic reality the individuals mask themselves with, but argues that masks are so powerful that they finally affect, direct and become reality.21 Crusades, anti-muslim propaganda, hatred, are all actions born from the illusionistic mask that the other can be eliminated, but in reality, the self begins to work, live and identify in function of the other.

Pirandello, Luigi. One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Translated by William Weaver. Marsilio Publishers, 1992. 20 Fiskin, A. M. I. "Luigi Pirandello: The Tragedy of the Man Who Thinks." Italica 25, no. 1 (1948): 44-51. doi:10.2307/476716. 21 (Ibid., Fiskin, A. M. I.)

The heads become multiple masks that intermittently juxtapose normal and abnormal, they are an expression of realms populated by monsters attacked solely for existing and jeopardising the identity of “all that is pure”. The real moor’s head, stripped of its decorative mask becomes a tool for the advocation of the existence of the other as equal to the self, rather than as its villain nemesis. Cori Amenta, an artist native to Sicily chooses to investigate the moor’s head as an artefact intrinsic to all these values that represent controversy in the understanding of the self, creating parallel, equal stories for the monsters that have been hidden in the dark and contributing to the symbolism this Sicilian craft carries beneath the surface. “The Queer Moor’s Heads” proposed by the artist have the same unmutated formal elements of the moor’s head, but they reinterpret the artefacts in modern and socially-contextualised manners. The heads of Cori Amenta are employed as tools to unhinge the precarious and illusory perceptions of how to define the self and do demarcate its borders, they bring together the similarities of the self and the other fading the certainties and creating ambivalence. Every head, which represents the face of the artist herself, talks about an uncanny duality of the self. References to the Greek myth of the monster Medusa are associated with octopus tentacles hair instead of snakes, referring to the idea of “purpu” (octopus) a derogative term in the Sicilian dialect for gay. A head that splits in two, half man and half woman represents the inadequacy of society to understand the fluidity of genders. These heads are all equal to the moor’s head in achieving an appearance of beauty and essence of monster: the legend can be re-told as many times as there is a self restraining an other to darkness.

From Top to Bottom: The artist Cori Amenta and her Queer Moor’s Heads; Moor’s Head of Medusa; Male/Female Moor’s Head (Courtesy of Vogue Italia, 2021)

A Love Story The head, the face and the mask are now all exposed. The head conceals something inside it, the moor’s face becomes a mask that hides the assimilation of another culture. As David Foster Wallace would have said: “Every love story is a ghost story”, falling in love is inevitably a projection of ourselves onto the other, that is the ghost of the self’s love, but it is the self itself and a part of the other. The ghost, in the form of the vase, will haunt the subject, and Sicilians, forever; the Sicilian girl’s sorrow comes also from understanding that the ghost of the invader (in the form of cultural assimilation that is the moor’s head vase) will haunt her until the end, and in doing so her identity as it was will be dissipated, she will abandon herself to the memory of an existence which has ended. 22 When talking about the ugly and the beautiful, the sublime and the banal, words become more fluid and lose part of their meaning. The monster is disgusting, but the disgust does not only repel, it pushes one to look closer, to understand better, to create the circumstance of mutual understanding between the ugly object and the observing subject. And yet all of it is in a constant fragile balance which could transform disgust from curiosity to fear suddenly. Inevitable a love story, even when it reaches an end and it becomes hatred, it will have created exchange between the parts. The Moor’s Head is a product of an allegorical love story, a love story that began in the 9th century between Sicily and the Middle East. The Islamic process of pottery glazing shared with Sicilian craftsmen at that time, was a technique which allowed for bright colours to be imprinted in the ceramics ( turquoise, green and golden) and that made it impermeable, both qualities essential for the moor’s vase. The shared knowledge of this love story also saw a flourishing production of majolicas, Sicilian tiles that recalls typical Islamic motives such as swirls and floral patterns. The vernacular ceramics production and style of Sicily never fully disappeared over the Islamic one, but it continued to merge and evolve with it. This is the real love story, or “love history”, of the island, the capability of integrating so well other cultures within its own.

(Ibid., Cousins, Mark. [Part 2].)

Beyond the Beautiful Monster And the Basil Plant?

Basil, itself is The ambiguous element of the story that instigates contrasting and confusing feelings. This plant has been widely used all over the world and particularly in the Mediterranean basin for cultural and religious purposes, taking very specific meanings and symbols in different cultures. The emphasis of the symbolism the role basil has in the folklore story is found in its origins; the plant originated between Asia and the Middle East, but it was diffused amongst Mediterranean countries by the Arabs with their territorial expansion since the 7th century.23 The plant was diffused by the Arabs, who most likely were the ones introducing it in Sicily during the colonisation, which corroborates the way the moor’s head is a representation of the culture that was integrated into the island. The plant becomes the symbol of cultural assimilation (through imported flora), to the point that it is the norm to see this plant on the balconies and patios of Sicilian homes. Throughout history, the meaning of Basil has shifted from hatred to good wishes. The scented plant’s symbolism has had a strong presence amongst the Mediterranean, with a duality of grief and hostility, in Ancient Greece and love in Ancient Rome and in medieval times it was transliterated as the plant of courtship in Italy as it was gifted from women to men as a marriage seal.24 It is peculiar to mention that Sicily, apart from the Arabic colonisation, was also a colony of the Magna Graecia and part of the Roman empire; the duality of the monster is hence seen also through basil at multiple levels. In the story of the Moor's Head, the plant represents the hate of the Sicilian woman towards the other, towards the invader but also towards the broken trust, hate because her island was taken, once again, and forced to adjust to the new, but it is also a depiction of the love story, the love for the man she once thought would have remained with her. The choice of this plant in the image of the folklore of Sicily is not spontaneous, its strong symbolism, but particularly its schizophrenic meanings, embed the story with historical importance. The apotropaic power of basil in the Mediterranean culture and its folkloristic and religious components are pivotal in the understanding of Sicily and its multiculturality, intended as an acceptance and assimilation of several diverse cultures; the basil is “uncanny” in the sense that its meaning is both purification from the evil which is already here and protection from the evil that will come.

Dafni, Amots, Theodora Petanidou, Irini Vallianatou, Ekaterina Kozhuharova, Cèsar Blanché, Ettore Pacini, Matin Peyman, Zora Stevanovic, Gian Franchi, and Guillermo Benítez. "Myrtle, Basil, Rosemary, and Three-Lobed Sage as Ritual Plants in the Monotheistic Religions: An Historical–Ethnobotanical Comparison." Economic Botany 74, no. 3 (2019): 330-55. doi:10.1007/s12231-019-09477-w. 24 (Ibid., Dafni, Amots,)

Another further understanding of the “flower dearest to the folck”25, when directly related to the sphere of religion, particularly in Christian Southern Europe, presents again a duality of meaning. Basil was used as an inhumation plant, hence its plantation in the moor’s head recalls to the sphere of the dead and talks about the end of an era, the end of the invader in the island and the prospect of their people after the end of the Arabic reign. But it was also used in ceremonies of birth and weddings and sacred rituals, representing the young love between the two and their carnal relationship which alludes to the assimilation of one another, in the culture and the urban fabric, the rebirth of a new Sicily.

Folklore The legend of the moor’s head, which by now, should have been sufficiently explanatory in underlining how the monster carries cultural values and helps form the boundaries of identity, is not an isolated case in the island's folklore. Colapesce, the story of the Sicilian boy half fish and half human; Betta Pilusa, the queen who travels around Sicily under the cover of a donkey skin; Rosso Malpelo, the misfortunate boy who represents the evil or La Fata Morgana, the story of Morgan le Fay and her use of conjuring in Sicily, are all important folklore legends and novels native to the island. They are embedded with the monstrous and the ugly and, ultimately, they are fundamental parts of the culture of a place known for its dualities and contradictions. Folklore is fundamental for a community in retaining their own heritage, traditions and distresses, which have described their identity. Folklore, in the South of Italy, but particularly in Sicily has always been a controversial topic, it was initially seen as an anomaly in the system, an obstacle to the unification of the nation, something repulsive. However, not long after that, as Lamberto Loria mentions, particularly during fascism, the view on folklore shifted and was used as a tool of internal colonisation26, a device to subjugate the South and its customary laws. Newly formed Italy thought that understanding southern folklore would have ensured the unity of the state, illustrating once again the duality of the use of folklore itself.

(Ibid., Dafni, Amots,) According to Tasić the reason for using basil in church rituals is because it is considered “a flower dearest to folk.” 26 Nuccio, Lucrezia. "Sicilian Folklore - a Reevaluation of Local Culture and Identity." Review of Historical Geography and Toponomastics VI, no. 11-12 (2011): 57-67.

The End The self falls in love with the other, but the corrupted self turns into a monster that breeds a hybrid otherself. The monster is not really there, or better it is there but its monstrosity is defined by the self's identity, it is the fear of an individual to degenerate, of its interior to burst out and show its horror and it is also the fear of the exterior penetrating the border and leaking into the interior. The monster cannot be killed without damaging the self, the monster has to be accepted as a sub-self with a mask; in the eyes of the self the monster is everything that opposes it, everything that needed to remain obscure and repressed; the self projects its fears of losing its identity on the monster, it attempts to make it tolerable and assign it a place so that interiority and exteriority remain neatly defined; the failure to do so is the uncanny. “Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don't somehow construct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don't construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don't construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.”27 The mask is removed, the Moor's head is Islam, is Christianity, is the Sicilian girl, is the metamorphosed urban space, is a love story; the moor’s head is me.

(Ibid., Pirandello, Luigi.)

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