DACIA MARAINI, La seduzione dell’altrove (2010) Presented by Margherita Heyer-Caput at the Italian Cultural Institute, San Francisco, on March 9, 2011

Widely translated in eighteen languages, and the recipient of numerous and most prestigious literary prizes, Dacia Maraini is one of Italy’s most significant authors. Her multifaceted works across genres indicate the essential connection between the search for her literary identity and her continuous participation in the deep changes that Italian society has undergone since the 60s, and particularly in the involving experience of the feminist movement. Always intent at making the silenced subjects of history heard – women, children, migrants - she has been a fearless voice of literature as a poiésis (the Greek etymology indicates writing as “making”, poiéin), as poetical creativity and political activity at the same time.

The threads of journey and memory weave together the fabric of Maraini's writing. The theme of the JOURNEY becomes particularly central in her last works.

It is precisely the unquenchable desire to continue the quest for meaning through traveling that defines Maraini’s latest book, “La seduzione dell’ altrove” (Milano: Rizzoli, 2010). The brief narratives gathered here take us on paths of reflection that span from tribal life in Central Africa to polluted peripheries of grand capital cities of South America, from the blue mountains of Yemen to the green lawns and sheltered privilege of American private education in Middlebury, V ermont, from a Somali village erased by drought and emigration to Zurich, Switzerland, where cultural globalization respects and nurtures linguistic and religious differences. Maraini involves her readers in her multiple quest, and we are, with her, seduced by this multi- faceted elsewhere.

The pieces gathered in “La seduzione dell’altrove”, written between 1992 and 2009, suspended between journalistic writing and poetic prose, indicate that for Maraini traveling has taken on “different meanings, related to the knowledge and experience of “the other”, without sweetening and vagueness” (“Il mio viaggiare ha preso altri significati, quelli della conoscenza e dell’esperienza dell’altro, senza addolcimenti e vaghezze,” p. 11). A traveler by birth – “Io sono nata viaggiando,” p. 14 -, Maraini has con- sciously woven the voyage into her life as the “destiny of an itinerant thinker” (“il destino di una ragione itinerante,” p. 16).

For her the voyage is an essential aspect of the creative process, first because “it extends time” (“viaggiando si allunga il tempo,” p.16). And then because the voyage is the founding metaphor of narration, from Homer’s Odyssey to Dante’s Comedy and beyond. Yet the acme of any existential and narrative journey is the “longing to go back” (“la nostalgia del ritorno,” p. 17), in order to “start again, every time a story is finished, with another story” (“Per ricominciare, ogni volta che una storia è conclusa, con un’altra storia,” p. 17). This two-faced, Janus-like character of the voyage combines attraction for with fear of “the other” and, inevitably, pleasure with pain.

Maraini’s ability to look beyond appearances unveils the contradictions of our myths, first of all the “American myth.” While travelling throughout the US during the 2000 electoral campaign, Maraini’s eyes stumble over a huge billboard entering New York City.

This improbable welcome sign reads, “Money, Sex and Spirituality” and makes Maraini – and us - reflect upon “the success of this great country, which is very good at monetizing reality and sexualizing market, and has a special talent for inventing a language of spiritual seduction” (“La prima cosa che vedo entrando in città è un cartello che dice: Money, Sex, and Spirituality, il che appare davvero come un invito all’arroganza della contraddizione. Ma poi mi dico che proprio in tale contraddizione sta probabilmente il successo di questo grande paese che è bravissimo nel monetizzare la realtà, bravissimo nel sessualizzare il mercato e geniale nell’inventare un linguaggio della seduzione spirituale,” p. 95).

Aware that “others’ contradictions astound us because they look new to us, while we don’t see ours any longer” (“Ma è pur vero che sono le contraddizioni altrui a stupirci perché ci appaiono nuove, mentre le nostre non le vediamo più,” p. 88), Maraini looks at the contradictions of our “Cara, vecchia Italia” (p. 115) from the slanted perspective of “the other”.

For example, Maraini underlines the rising interest in and passion for the Italian language everywhere in the world, as a 17-year-old student in Jakarta, Indonesia, tells her, “Yours is a great cultural power” (“La vostra è una grande potenza culturale. Non economica, si badi, non militare, non industriale, ma culturale. Non sarebbe il caso di investire in questo futuro?” p. 126).

Maraini’s repeated pleas for a stronger governmental support of the Italian Cultural Institutes in the world, the precious mediators of “intelligente mobilità culturale” (p. 133), go along with thought-provoking reflections on our own relationship to the Italian language.
The burning topicality of many articles in this book is always balanced through the continuous presence of literary references. Maraini’s altrove is so seductive also because it goes beyond the mind-numbing standardization of global tourism. It is literature that enables her to “re-invent” a country while experiencing it.

MEMORY, thus, becomes a key element of Maraini’s existential and literary journey and intertwines past, present, and future through writing. Not by coincidence, the last section of the book is entitled “Memoria e memorie” and includes pieces that go back to Maraini’s memorable – indeed – travels to Africa and the Middle East with Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini and to her first experience of the “altrove” during her childhood years in Japan.

Yet the last article of the book is devoted to Auschwitz, for, as its title says, “Memory is a moral act” (“La memoria è un atto morale,” p. 171). Looking with her piercing blue eyes at the orderly labeled suitcases of Auschwitz victims on display in the concentration camp museum, Maraini goes beyond these mementos through her imagination and memory.

This profoundly ethical aspect of Maraini’s writing, which runs throughout her works, emerges forcefully in this book inter- twined with the pleasure of travelling and writing: “I go. Because I always feel like telling about a new seduction” (“Io vado. Perché ho sempre voglia di raccontare di una nuova seduzione,” p. 18). It is with this nomadic and creative spirit that Dacia Maraini, once again, has seduced us. Reminiscent of the etymology of this Latin verb, seducere (from se/sed=without, away, apart, and ducere=to lead, to take), she is taking us away, elsewhere, and to her, through “La seduzione dell’altrove”.
Margherita Heyer-Caput