L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano LIFE PEOPLE MOVIES MUSIC BOOKS MARIELLA RADAELLI T en years ago, on November 1, Italian contemporary poetry lost one of its true and limpid poetic voices. It suffered the loss of Alda Merini, an original poet, writer and aphorist — sensitive, death-haunted, carnal yet mysti- cal and deeply Milanese. She was 78 years old. Thirteen years earlier, the Académie Française picked her name as a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. A few years ago, American novelist Joyce Carol Oates confessed to me that "Merini wrote some of the best and most moving poems I've ever read or ever hope to read." In Italy and abroad, Alda remains a cult figure, the kind of woman whose life is difficult to untangle from her work. And since her death, Alda Merini's fandom has continued to grow. Born in Milan on March 21 (the Spring Equinox), 1931, her life was soon affected by the miserable experience of being confined to a mental hospital. The madhouse changed her for- ever. "Institutionalization marks people. We are permanently marked as sick," she told me one day. I visited Alda several times in her old, small and messy two- room apartment at Ripa di Porta Ticinese 47, facing Milan's famed canal, the Naviglio Grande. Every time, I sat patiently, calmly and steadily in her living room, collecting infor- mation to write a story once back in the newsroom. With Alda, you couldn't immediately turn the conversation to the subject at hand. She piloted her way through anarchic passages and you sometimes had to endure her behavior without frustration. Usually, the photographer who accompanied me on the assign- ment didn't have the same patience. But when you were listening to her inner rhythms, her out- pouring of mixed emotions, you could experience her force. Her face was saturnine and gnostic. Her still, sensual lips lined with lipstick were twisted with bitter- ness, poignant irony and free- dom. Alda was a piece of work. She was intense, paradoxically lighthearted and enigmatic in a hundred ways. And even though her nerves were sometimes taut like the string of a bow, she recalled with such haunting vividness what took place in the past. She was only 16 years old in 1947 when they took her to a psychiatric clinic called Villa Turro, where she stayed a month after being diagnosed with bipo- lar disorder. Institutionalization became part of her life after October 31, 1965, when she was forced to check into the renowned Paolo Pini psychiatric hospital. That scary routine last- ed more than 14 years. In 1979, Merini began writing La Terra Santa, the most intense work on her traumatic experience of staying in a mental home. Italian philologist Maria Corti defined La Terra Santa as a masterpiece. It was published in 1984 by Scheiwiller and in 1993 won the Librex-Guggenheim Award Eugenio Montale for Poetry. In the '80s, she re-experi- enced the horrors of psychiatric wards, this time in Taranto, Puglia, where she was living with her second husband, the poet Michele Pierri. In Taranto, she wrote L'altra Verità. Diario di una Diversa. In 1986 she returned to Milan. "Electroshock therapy wiped out my memories," she told me one day. "But there is a positive thing: I survived. It is better being a donkey on earth than a scholar in heaven. I often think about my peers who couldn't make it. They were sacrificial lambs who paid the price for all." She was eternally grateful to Franco Basaglia, the reforming psychiatrist who opened locked wards and removed his patients from straitjackets. In Italy, the name of Basaglia is attached to National Law 180, or Basaglia's law, promulgated in 1978 while he was the director of the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital in Trieste. Basaglia called for the closure of all Italian asylums. "I have to thank him. Those were sort of concentration camps, human rat-traps," she said. Her sense of humor helped her cope with the pain. "I am a tragic Alda but I want to laugh," she told me. She was able to laugh at life's absurdities and tragedies. Elements of rough, raw humor and comic relief permeated her speech as an unconscious way to lighten the mood of the tragedy. "I suffer from a sort of cheerful neurosis," she said. Once I asked her what kind of child she had been: "I was a frangible and sickly child," she answered. "The pain of living took me in its grip. That is why I wrote. I was a precocious and very emotional child." "I always had a lot of ques- tions in my head. I kept asking myself: 'Does God exist?' I was a tragically tragic child." Then, as an adolescent, Alda became a buxom beauty. "And you had a great number of suit- ors," I told her: "Yes, I did," she confirmed. "I was so embar- rassed, and therein lies the prob- lem. I would clam up completely with anxiety. I recall that then I underwent a very strict diet until I developed full-blown anorex- ia." In her intellectual biography Sono Nata il Ventuno a Primavera. Diario e Nuove Poesie, released by Manni Publishing House, Merini also described her literary debut. She was a teenager when she gained the attention and the endorsement of very influential writers, poets, and critics such as Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo, the priest poet David Maria Turoldo and Maria Corti. They opened her up to a new world of ideas. "Manganelli was extremely shy," she told me. "He was an adult child with Cyrano de Bergerac's large nose. He always peeped his eyes into my breast!" Expressionist writer Giorgio The moon and the pen: remembering Alda Merini on the 10th anniversary of her death A black and white portrait of Alda Merini (Copyright: Giuliano Grittini) Continued to page 18

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