Against the grain

[April 11th, 2007] Anarchism isn't the first thought Pietro Ferrua's visage evokes. At 76, the local interpreter and founder of the International Research Center on Anarchism looks like someone's grandpa, seated in his downtown office packed floor-to-ceiling with books and movies. "I have great, great sympathy and affection for the punk anarchists," he says with a boyish smile. " It's an important movement in youth culture...the Sex Pistols. Of course, the anarchist movement is not a political party where there is...some rules and so on...you accept or don't accept a multitude of things." Because of things Ferrua did or didn't accept, he has been exiled from Italy, expelled from Switzerland and booted out of Brazil. Maybe with our rep as "Little Beirut," it's no surprise he ended up in Portland.

Ferrua, who lives downtown with his wife, Diana, has written books and articles in Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and English. He says he has interpreted for presidents, including Reagan and Clinton—never a Bush. Ferrua's now working on a book about anarchists in art, which includes PDX writer Ursula K. Le Guin (Ferrua lectures on the topic for the Portland French Club on April 12). "Art needs freedom of expression," he says. "That's the most important component of anarchism, so there is a relationship between art and anarchism already."

Ferrua began his dissent at age 10. When allied forces started bombing his hometown, San Remo, Italy, in 1940, everyone went into the basement when the sirens screamed. But, he explains: "I wasn't going into the basement anymore. That was the first act of disobedience that I performed." At 13, Ferrua found a book at the library: "[It] was about Bolshevism, anarchism, Freemasonry and socialism," he remembers. "Enemies of Humanity. It was against those ideas, but it attracted me."

As a teenager Ferrua worked as a runner for the war resistance movement. When he was called to serve in the military at age 18, he refused and was sentenced to 15 months in military prison in 1950. Upon release, he had 48 hours to appear in a military hospital to be conscripted. He didn't show up—and was later named Italy's first anarchist conscientious objector.

He escaped to Switzerland, where he studied at the University of Geneva. That's also where Ferrua met his Brazilian wife, Diana, and founded his anarchism research center.

Expelled from Switzerland for his beliefs in 1963, Ferrua and his family moved to Brazil, where he taught college. "At the same time I was an anarchist writing against the military, I was an interpreter for the government," he laughs. But, eventually, Ferrua landed in jail for public protesting in 1969. Ferrua's mother-in-law got him a job at Portland State University teaching Portuguese to get him out of Brazil.

Once in Portland, he organized the first International Symposium on Anarchism in 1980 and even curated the Portland Art Museum's Anarchists in Film series (2002-2004).

Thanks to political changes, Ferrua's now welcome in all the countries from which he was expelled, although he stays in Portland due to family ties. And he's never had a run-in with the law here—no effigy-burning or cop-baiting for him. Next up, Ferrua is working on a book on the ethics of anarchism. "Most anarchists think, 'My life is mine, I can do what I want,' but I'm in favor of preserving life," he says, gazing up at his bookshelf. "It's very difficult to write, because it's instructive, it goes against the grain of anarchism."