Oriana Fallaci, her life beyond death | Women Writers
Exploring the Legacy of Oriana Fallaci: A Personal Journey and Cultural Reflection
Female Voices - Women Writers to Remember
by Alessia Pizzi
N.5 - September 2023
There are times in life when keeping silent becomes a guilt and speaking becomes an obligation. A civil duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which one cannot escape.
Oriana Fallaci
Writing about Oriana Fallaci is almost a duty. How to do it properly is a different kettle of fish. Maybe it is because, besides loving her as a writer, I celebrate her birthday every year along with my own. And this 29th of June that unites us has always made me feel close to her, even though I was only able to appreciate her after her death due to a purely age-related issue.
Do we need an excuse to talk about her? There is no particular occasion that leads me to write this article (which, I should point out, I hope is an article in the making since I have not, of course, read all her works), but I felt the need to share this passion of mine, especially with the younger generation, the generation after mine (the Z generation), which is perhaps beginning to be a little too distant from Oriana.
Google and Social Networks
According to Google Trends, since 2004, Google has recorded three peaks in searches for 'Oriana Fallaci'. The first, unfortunately, in September 2006, when she died of lung cancer. So perhaps this article starts in reverse, beginning with death. Who knows why how this or that person died is one of Italians' favourite Google searches. Even Google Suggest offers me 'Oriana Fallaci death, cause of death' among the suggested searches, and then I smile reading 'Oriana Fallaci husband' among the searches.
The second peak, no less sad, in November 2015, nine years after her death: it was after the Paris attacks that there was a new editorial boom for Oriana Fallaci. Phrases, quotes, aphorisms. This is sought after Oriana Fallaci, who has become a googling container of wisdom. Oriana's prophecies have even become a rather followed facebook page, which talks about something else, though.
And then of course, the related topic par excellence, 'Islam' comes up on Google Trends. And that "Excuse us Oriana", winged words on twitter that have given rise to a posthumous apologia.
The last interview before dying
You are a kamikaze, you die to kill.
Oriana Fallaci
Oriana struggling with the alien, lung cancer, says that she did not get treatment straight away because she had to finish translating her books into French and English. She was not satisfied with the translations done by the translator. Sontag accused her of being stupid for wasting valuable time, but she replied that her books are her children. And that a mother, between her own salvation and that of her children... always chooses that of her children.
Who was Oriana Fallaci, my way
Oriana was a pioneer. To women she offered a model, willingly or unwillingly, to be loved and hated, a reflection to be confronted with, a haunting ghost, a pain in the ass even in death. To men it has shown a new way of being freely female. To society she offered a small snub, which has atavistic roots and is expressed in the epigraphic expressions attributed to ancient women: wives of, sisters of, lovers of some more famous man. 'Bruno's niece' has reversed the tides. He is now called 'Oriana's uncle' (Bruno Fallaci, journalist, Ed.).
What to read by Oriana Fallaci, in my opinion
I was just a little girl when, lost in the mountains of the Marche (Italian region Ed.), I read Letter to a child never born for the first time. I don't remember much about that book except the emotions it gave me. I think I read that book because my boyfriend at the time suggested it to me, even though my mother had tried several times to get me to read A man, the book dedicated to her great love Alexandros Panagulis.
This is how my colleague Maurizio Carvigno recounts it in CulturaMente:
'An idyllic and at the same time raw and ruthless book, in whose pages flow life, passion and despair. An act of love, stupendously summed up in that initial dedication, in that 'For You', the tragic bequest for a man who in spite of everything turned Oriana's life upside down, a gift for a love burnt too quickly, which, however, lives on in the eternity of the Greeks, in that prolonged and shouted 'Alekos zi, zi, zi', (Alekos lives, lives, lives), which echoed on the day of the funeral, faithfully escorting the coffin of a man who wanted nothing more than to be a man and who became a hero, an example, a model and who knew very well that 'eternal Power never dies, that it falls only to rise again, equal to itself, different only in hue'.
Years later I would realise that the Oriana I loved was the one who told the truth. I admit that as a novelist she never made me crazy, I tried to read A Man, but I couldn't; I read Penelope at war, Oriana's first novel, but I remember almost nothing. I was at university at the time. I immediately fell back on If the Sun Dies and perhaps the real falling in love started there.
At 30 we are a ripe wheat field
It may be that I love space and I am passionate about everything that happens above us, but the story of the astronauts who have to go to the moon as told by Oriana Fallaci earns first place in my heart. Because, of course, this mission account goes far beyond the mission itself. It becomes an investigation into life and those men, who are heroes today, Oriana recounts in their humanity. One of the most famous sentences from that book, always etched in my mind, describes how wonderful thirty years is according to the writer:
We do not fear sin because we have understood that sin is a point of view, we do not fear disobedience because we have discovered that disobedience is noble. We do not fear punishment because we have concluded that there is no harm in loving ourselves if we meet, in abandoning ourselves if we lose ourselves: we no longer have to reckon with the schoolteacher and we do not yet have to reckon with the holy oil priest. We do them with ourselves, with our grown-up pain.
If the sun dies, Oriana Fallaci
Oriana Fallaci and women
If falling in love came with If the Sun Dies, true love is linked to a book that is perhaps less well-known, but no less valid. The Useless Sex. Oriana recounts the condition of women in the 1960s. I don't know how much I cried reading the passage in which the Japanese woman jumps in the train because her feet are too small to walk, due to the bandages imposed from birth to comply with a canon of beauty. But this is just one of the scenes in this text: Oriana describes how society makes women proud of these sacrifices.
There are women who would throw themselves into their husband's funeral pyre. And women who are honoured that their family chose a husband for them. These are points of view far removed from us, making us think we are superior, emancipated. But Oriana pulls up another veil of Maya, also investigating the lives of American women, in a country where matriarchy really exists.
And how well she succeeds in highlighting that it is our vision as Westerners to look for the retrograde component in these Eastern and Middle Eastern traditions; how well she succeeds in drawing out of this investigation the sense of happiness if not even the emancipated American women of the time manage to be happy.
As far as possible, I always avoid writing about women or women's issues. I don't know why, it makes me uncomfortable, it seems ridiculous to me. Women are not a special fauna and I do not understand why they should be a separate topic, especially in the newspapers: like sport, politics and the weather report. The eternal father made men and women to be together, and since this can be very pleasant, whatever some deviationists say, treating women as if they lived on another planet where they reproduce by parthenogenesis seems to me to be meaningless.
Oriana Fallaci
My presentation of the book “The useless sex”
This article was originally published in Italian on Culturamente.it