On February 24, an engaging meeting and Q&A took place at the Italian Cultural Institute with the participation of multiple-awarded writer Dacia Maraini, who has been giving a series of lectures in prestigious campuses across California and Texas.
Both literature students and lovers from these two States had the unique privilege to hear from a writer, an intellectual, a woman, whose career spans over five decades and whose latest work Chiara di Assisi. Elogio della disobbedienza (Clare of Assisi. In Praise of Disobedience, 2013) sheds light on the Saint’s life.
Dacia Maraini is a native of Fiesole, a small town in the province of Florence, Tuscany. It was also home of the so-called three crowns Boccaccio, Petrarch and, Dante, and where contemporary Italian language hailed from.
Dacia’s parents were Sicilian Princess and artist Topazia Alliata di Salaparuta, and Florentine ethnologist and photographer Fosco Maraini, who traveled to Tibet and Japan, documenting the natives’ die-off in those areas.
Thomas Harrison, UCLA Professor and professor of Italian; Dacia Maraini, multiple awarded writer
Thomas Harrison, UCLA Professor and professor of Italian; Dacia Maraini, multiple awarded writer
In Japan, Fosco used to work as a teacher, particularly in Hokkaido (1938-41) and Kyoto (1941-43), but after Italy signed the armistice with the Allies on September 8, 1943, the Japanese authorities asked him and his wife to endorse Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. They refused and were interned with their three daughters in the Nagoya concentration camp for the following two years.
The youngest, Dacia, was only two years old at the time, and this dramatic event affected her deeply. During the evening at the IIC, she compared the absolute poverty voluntarily embraced by Clare to what she and her family suffered in the camp. She also shared with the audience her difficult experience in the aftermath of WWII in Bagheria, Sicily, when she and her family had nothing and their only clothes were those donated by the U.S. Army.
Besides the shared destitution, Dacia Maraini identifies Clare’s uncompromising will as the second main reason to dedicate a novel to the Saint from Assisi. Indeed, Clare proved to be a free spirit very early, refusing an arranged marriage. Later on, she repeatedly rejected any donations to her convent from the Church’s pontiffs, contrary to the medieval customs.
Clare’s leadership position as Abbess of the Order of Poor Ladies – later renamed the Poor Clares – was very unusual for a woman in the Middle Ages. In addition, she also composed the Rule of Life, the first monastic rule ever written by a woman.
Dacia Maraini illustrated some of Clare’s rules, such as forbidding individual and communal properties, including any pets in the convent. Only cats were at some point tolerated, to keep mice at bay. According to Clare’s nuns, when the Saint became very ill and unable to walk, she was once in need of a napkin and a cat, which seemed to understand, fetched it for her.
The author also narrated some of the most remarkable among the Saint’s miracles: when an army of Saracen mercenaries under Emperor Frederick II attacked the town of Assisi, including Clare’s convent, she knelt with her sisters and prayed for the town to be saved. Suddenly, a furious storm arose, scattering the soldiers’ tents and causing such a panic that they retreated.
During the conclusive Q&A, Dacia Maraini was asked about her criteria in choosing her female protagonists. She explained how sometimes the characters “knock at her door” and, if they stay with her overnight, touching the right chord, she starts to flesh them out in her writing. Other times they don’t appeal to the writer and just leave her. Urged by the moderator, she also revealed why she prefers female over male protagonists: every writer can empathize more with his or her own gender, and the best characters usually confirm that.
With all due respect, I partially disagree with her, because writers tend to be “neuter” in their artistic expressions. Ironically, we can find such an example in the work of Alberto Moravia – Dacia Maraini’s significant other from 1962 to 1983 -, who gave voice to a wonderful female protagonist in La romana (The Woman from Rome, 1947).
However, she revealed that her next book will feature a male protagonist, proving herself eager to experiment and take on new challenges.
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