Robin Pickering-Iazzi discusses her new book The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and Their Geographies
How did you become involved in your area of research?
In the mid-1990s, I was designing a course on Italians and the mafia, with the idea of including history, novels, films, and different forms of public performance art. At the time, Italy was still reeling from the mafia’s Capaci and Via D’Amelio bombings that killed the antimafia judges Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Paolo Borsellino, and many of their bodyguards, and then the mafia bomb attacks in Rome, Florence, and Milan. In the wave of news about the mafia, as well as numerous films and novels, I came across the writings left by Rita Atria, published in a biography. She was raised in a mafia family, and after her father and brother were murdered she became a witness for the Italian state. In addition to legal testimony against members of Cosa Nostra, she kept a diary, private testimony where she describes living inside the mafia and her struggles to create a new identity. Tragically, one week after Borsellino was murdered, at seventeen years of age, she took her own life, convinced there was no one left to protect her. The intimate ideas, emotions, and conflicts that Rita voices about her relationships with her biological family, the mafia, the antimafia judges, and Italian state raised fundamental questions about Italian society, politics, collusion with the mafia, ethics, and socially committed resistance. Her personal testimony formed the beginning of a largely paper trail that led to often painfully beautiful novels, like Canto al deserto by Cutrufelli, mysteries, autobiographies, testimonies, and poetry, which posed similar issues from markedly different points of view, as well as works in history, sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies, that helped me develop my discussions about the mafia stories.
What inspired you to write this book?
Several factors inspired the writing of this book on the mafia in Italy. First of all, though Italy has a tradition of literature on the mafia that goes back to the 1800s, since the early 1990s literally hundreds of books and films on the mafia, created by numerous award-winning Italian authors and filmmakers, have come out. In other words, the mafia and the problems it produces for individual citizens, communities, cities, and the nation in local and global contexts loom large on the contemporary cultural panorama, and warrant serious critical attention. And I confess, I enjoy thinking and writing about well-crafted fiction that mingles rich invention with social commitment. Second, to my mind there was a need for this book, and others I hope, that informs readers about the mafia and the efforts to combat it so they can have a better understanding of trends in contemporary Italian culture, society, history, politics, and current events reported in print and online news media almost daily. Right now in Italy, a maxi-trial is playing out in Rome to prosecute some 40 defendants in conjunction with what has been dubbed “mafia capitale”—the capital mafia—a network of career criminals, some politicians, employees in state institutions, and business people, which, though not part of Cosa Nostra or the other mafia organizations, operates according to a violent mafia system of lucrative illegal activities. Last, the book was inspired by my desire to draw public attention to the ways in which the works of fiction, non-fiction, online social engagement, and practices performed by large numbers of Italians in their daily lives create a culture of legality that promotes truth, justice, human dignity, and working to better social conditions, while opposing all forms of illegality and the mafia.
What do you wish other people knew about your area of research?
The vast majority of readers may likely think the mafia in Italy is a fascinating topic, but not something that directly concerns their own lives and communities. However, the writings about the mafia, its members’ thoughts and actions, and the characters or historical people who have worked to defeat it speak to issues that do touch many of us in our everyday lives and cities—the conditions that create injustice and justice, forms of oppression and resistance, the values of truth and honesty, and most important, the responsibilities that each of us should assume to do our part to contribute to civil society and thereby become active participants, rather than passive objects. And though the defining elements of such crime organizations as Cosa Nostra in Sicily, ’ndrangheta in Calabria and Lombardy, and the camorra in Campania are distinct, the literary and citizen authors discussed present ideas that are highly pertinent to such current problems in contemporary societies around the world as violent juvenile crime, gang oppression exercised through physical violence and a culture of silence (don’t rat, don’t tell), white-collar crime, and political corruption. The stories in Italian life and literature enable readers to imagine and think critically about such problems, and perhaps invent ways to take part in remedies.
Do you have to travel much concerning the research/writing of your book?
This project required only a few trips to Italian archives in Rome. But I do research in Italy nearly every spring, prowling the smaller bookstores for books that may be out of print or the new releases. Many of the bookstores have a special section, usually huge, on mafia related books.
What was the hardest part of writing your book?
As readers may note, my speaking voice changes a bit in each of the chapters, because I alter it according to the aims and tone of the discussions at hand. In the beginning, the most difficult part of writing was creating my voice in the section on Rita Atria, since the project really began with her materials, which are now in the last chapter. The discussion posed particular challenges because at such a young age Rita Atria lived and struggled to work through deep trauma, caused by the horrific murders of her father and brother, to whom she was profoundly attached. Providing legal testimony against them appears to increase her trauma, which becomes unbearable with the killing of Judge Borsellino, upon whom she depended in a variety of ways. In analyzing her ideas, hopes, and pain, I aimed to speak about her voice not in the abstract, as might be typical in cultural criticism, but as the unique, irremediable expression of part of who she was. Toward the end of the book project a different problem emerged. I had read so many personal testimonies, biographies, court proceedings, and novels inspired by people who had lived, had family and friends, aspirations and dreams, and were killed by members of the mafia in acts of vendetta or what they accept as “common” tasks of their crime business, in order to increase their own profit and power. In the second mafia war alone some thousand people were killed in just over two years. And that doesn’t include the many public figures, children, women, and men who were killed in that war’s wake. There’s a risk of critical discussion giving way to despair. At the same time, this context enables a deep appreciation of the forms of social transformation among significant sectors of Italians, young people especially, that have been achieved by such antimafia organizations as Libera, a network of over 1,500 associations and groups that work to educate and engage individuals in ways to take personal responsibility and do their part to make society civil, and oppose all crime, corruption, and the mafia.
What are your current projects?
I’m currently finishing up the editing of an exciting collection of essays on the Italian antimafia movement, new media, and the culture of legality, which shifts full attention to the relatively unexplored yet significant ways Italians are fashioning hybridized everyday lives to put into practice the democratic rights, responsibilities, and values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice both online and offline. I’m also researching notions of spectrality and specters, as keys of interpretation for a new Italian novel, Vivi da morire, that conjures antimafia murder victims, mafiosi, and related figures in the Palermo soccer stadium, where they speak out again, their questions and thoughts punctuated by plays during the soccer matches. The mingling of fantasy and realism is truly provocative, and has prompted me to mull ideas related to the antimafia haunting of Italian national identity.
What do you like to read for pleasure?
I indulge in reading for pleasure every day, and alternate between psychological thrillers, such as those by Mo Hayder, Fred Vargas, and Laura Grimaldi, and novels by such authors as Elena Ferrante, Melania Mazzucco, and Dacia Maraini. Now I’m reading Suburra, a gritty novel by Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo that tells a story about the mafia system in Rome and Ostia. To choose one favorite book is virtually impossible—but certainly Elsa Morante’s La storia, also available in English as History. A Novel, and Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto. Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia are books that I can read over and over again, always savoring the richly crafted language and ideas.
If you weren’t working in academia, what would you be doing instead?
I would likely be working as a lawyer in Rome, where I was living before I decided to finish up my Ph.D. But I’d love to be an actress in the theater, with wonderful roles to play, maybe in something by Dario Fo or Dacia Maraini. Then again, wouldn’t writing a novel that moves readers to ponder life’s everyday trials and act to make them better give such pleasure?
