Mafia

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.