The
Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature by Robin Pickering-Iazzi
Pickering-Iazzi
has written an insightful book that lights up a dark area that very
often is treated superficially, in fiction, in movies, in bigotry.
Although
not exaggerated as the main selling point of the book,
Pickering-Iazzi focuses on the women, and the young people, involved
in the mafia, as active members and as family members, and as
anti-mafia activists. But it’s not feminist in the strident sense.
It’s feminist only in the self-respect sense. If Sicilian men are
expected to keep their mouths shut, Sicilian women are expected not
only to keep their mouths shut, but to be invisible.
This book makes Sicilian women visible.
Have
you ever wondered how mafiosi see themselves, live with themselves,
create their contexts, explain to themselves their motivations,
justifications, reasoning and involvement?
What
does a mafiosa tell herself, as she’s falling asleep at night,
about the time her brothers killed her son because he was an
anti-mafia activist? What does she remember of the stories her
grandmother told her of those men of honor, creating a fairy tale
that the average child never hears? What goes on in her mind as she’s
approaching, often in spite of herself, the conclusion that the only
way to fight injustice is to kill the unjust and the only way to
eliminate oppression is to eliminate the oppressor?
I found Rita Atria’s story particularly moving. A seventeen-year-old
girl who served as a witness in anti-mafia prosecutions, breaking
omertà and violating the mafia codes of behavior she’d been taught
as a child, the discussion of her experiences and internal agony
include excerpts from her diary, excerpts that show Rita to be, not
only a young girl, but an old woman.
Written
in the kind of academic style I appreciate the most—uncomplicated
but insightful, reader-friendly but elegant, unambiguous but
profound, decorous but not squeamish—it’s a good book for
intelligent people who want to get at the essence without having to
plow through a lot of useless clutter.
Besides
the information itself that it provides, and the writing style, I
like the way the book is constructed. The first four chapters each
present a novel, written by a woman, which is given its context, and
the fifth chapter tells us about Rita Atria, often in her own words.
There’s overlap, but there’s no repetition. It just has all those
maneuvers, highs and lows, flowings and jarrings, and a crushing and
defiant conclusion that settles the matter while reaching out to the
future with hope, kind of like a symphony.
If
you’re a person of normal intelligence and sensibility, if you’ve
ever found yourself wondering what psychology or philosophy, what
emotional and intellectual beliefs, could possibly pass for
justification of mafia murders and terror, but you just don’t have
the strength to read dozens of books about the mafia or Sicilian
culture in general, this is the book you want.
