(Photo courtesy of Eurochannel) “Dacia Maraini has had a long and successful career writing about her experiences and more.”
Aaron Preziosi
Connector Editor
Renowned Italian writer Dacia Maraini visited UMass Lowell to discuss her most recent book, Vita Mia. Released in 2023, Maraini’s Vita Mia is a deeply personal memoir that explores her childhood experiences within a Japanese prison camp during World War II following her family’s refusal to swear allegiance to the fascist Republic of Salò. In the book, she details the atrocities she and her family experienced such as hunger, cold, disease, and cruelty, and spoke about those experiences at Allen House last Wednesday in her illuminating conversation.
In her conversation, Maraini expressed that she decided to write Vita Mia because of the rising tensions of war. While doing so opened old wounds, it helped her grow as a person, having found some closure for what she went through and having remembered some things she had previously forgotten. Maraini pointed out that food was a particular thing she gained a new perspective on because of her time in the prison camp, saying “Food became mythology. Mythology comes from necessity.” Having to live on roughly 20 grams of rice per day, she recalled having hidden food in the camp so she could go back to it and remarked that she continued to do so for many years after the war, only for it to be discovered by her mother, rotten and teeming with flies. She also remarked that she is not a great eater, but loves to look at food, expressing the sentiment of nourishing oneself with the “image” of food, tying into her idea of food becoming mythology in a situation where one has truly little of it.
The idea of anti-fascism and political exploration pervade Maraini’s entire portfolio, with her work exploring themes of “social and political (in)justice, feminism and women’s rights, oppression, and identity”, no doubt influenced by the childhood experiences she writes about in Vita Mia. When asked for comment, Maraini said to young activists: “If you want to change something, you have to believe in the future. You have to do something. We construct the future; you must make it.” Her powerful statement is a sentiment many people are sure to appreciate and is something to keep in mind as we move forward as a community, a country, and as a people. People can only read so much about the things Maraini has experienced firsthand, and through the wisdom of people like her, readers can understand history and ensure they are not doomed to repeat it. She adds, “What I learned there was to resist. Never to surrender.”
Dacia Maraini is undeniably one of the most influential figures in modern literature, not just in Italy, but worldwide. Readers can see the world through her well-traveled perspective and come out of the other side with a deepened understanding of the world because of the way she can capture her experiences and turn those into masterful expressions of the nature of humanity, and what people can do to make it better.
