article from the Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 1999

The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, May 15, 1999 BOOKS A finger on history Between villa and concentration camp, Dacia Maraini is still finding much to tackle in the wartime stories of her own family. Desmond O'Grady writes. "WHEN I arrived in Palermo in 1947, I knew more Japanese than Italian," said Dacia Maraini. Japan seems infinitely far from her top-floor flat looking directly at St Peter's dome. An aged English setter sleeps on a cushion. There are statuettes won as prizes, indoor plants, flowers, a portrait of her and still lifes, and books, books, books. But for Maraini, Japan is very close; she is writing a book on her time in four concentration camps. Born in Florence in 1936, she went to Japan two years later when her father, Fosco, won a scholarship there. When Mussolini's last-ditch Republic of Salo was established in 1943, Italians in Japan were asked to swear allegiance to it. Dacia's parents refused and, with their three daughters and eight other Italians, were sent to a concentration camp reserved for them. "The guards didn't beat us but were harsh, even sadistic. We were so famished that some scavenged for leftovers in the rubbish at night. When the guards discovered this, they dumped night soil over the rubbish. "My parents pleaded for food for me and my two younger sisters but were told we were all traitors. My father found the right gesture - not hara-kari but kubi-kari. He chopped off his little finger with an axe and threw it at a guard. He was confined to a cell but had proved his pride and, as a result, they gave us a goat to milk. "We shifted three times. In Sapporo there was so much snow that we couldn't open our hut door but there was no heating. We were transferred to a Buddhist temple and worked in a rice field infested with snakes and bloodsuckers. Another camp, at Nagoya, was in the zone of frequent Allied air raids." Maraini's fear of bombs dropped by those fighting her oppressors links her experience with that of Kosovo's refugees, as she noted in a recent newspaper article. She recalled herself as an inadequately dressed child, sleeping hunched up against the cold on the stinking floor outside a lavatory on a Japanese train overcrowded with concentration camp inmates. Eight years after her arrival in Palermo, she began her first novel, which took five years to finish. She tried to interest publishers in it. "One said, 'You're good-looking, why write?' which made me boil. The outlook and organisation of the literary world was masculine. It was presumed women couldn't do anything serious." A publisher told her he would accept the novel if it had a foreword from Alberto Moravia, whom she did not know. She obtained the foreword and also Moravia: they lived together for 15 years until 1979. Given that Moravia used to say he had learnt everything from women, I asked what she had taught him. "The concerns of women of my age. Elsa [Morante, one of Italy's finest postwar novelists, who separated from Moravia but did not grant a divorce] was strong and autonomous but not part of the feminist movement. Alberto was open to it." Did you learn from him? "He never posed as a teacher but was a lesson in discipline, in being a literary craftsman. Daily, he rose at five and worked for four or five hours. It reinforced the discipline I'd already imbibed from my father." She has written of her childhood fascination with her father, a Japanologist, author and mountaineer who led an Italian expedition to the Hindu Kush and describes himself as a "citizen of the moon on a visit of instruction to the earth". He is now emeritus professor at Florence University, where he founded the Oriental Institute. At 86, he has just attended a New York exhibition of photographs he took in Tibet and Japan in 1940. He left the family a few years after their return from Japan. Did she feel it was her first betrayal? "Not a betrayal." She closed up. "But the break-up of a family is always painful." There were writers on both sides of her family: her paternal grandmother, Yoi Pavlovska Crosse, wrote a book called A Child Went On, and her paternal great-grandmother, Cornelia Berkley, wrote children's books. Both were English (there is also Chilean, Irish and Polish blood in the family). On her mother's side, an aunt wrote the family history while her grandfather's brother, Enrico, wrote books of theosophy (as well as creating one of the best-known Sicilian wines, Corvo di Salaparuta). Maraini's mother is from a Sicilian aristocratic family, Gravina di Valguarnera Alliata, which created a splendid baroque villa at Bagheria, near Palermo. On their return from Japan, Dacia's family lived in the villa's converted stables and found that they were up to their necks in debt. Maraini made her reputation as a leftist, feminist novelist and playwright before discovering, in the 1990s, just how interesting the Sicilian background she had previously rejected was. Her most successful novel, La Lunga Vita Di Marianna Ucria (The Smiling Duchess) published by Peter Owen, London, and the Feminist Press, New York), is the story of a 17th-century deaf-mute forebear whose handicap is seen as a symbol of the feminine condition. It has sold more than a million copies in Italian and has been made into a film and translated into 15 languages. She followed it with a successful non-fiction book, Bagheria, about the family and their villa. In all, Maraini has written 10 books of fiction, three of non-fiction and three of poetry, and has had five plays published as well as many more performed worldwide. She has scripted films for Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Ferreri and Margherita von Trotta. She does not write for television but launched the first Italian television program on how to write. She has given many lectures, including at Harvard and Berkeley universities in the United States last year. She spends months at a time, especially in summer, in a house 1,200 metres high in the Abruzzo national park where she has solid writing time. This year she has published a book of stories mainly about sexual violence against children, based on real cases in which the perpetrator was not found. She created the perpetrators and also a female police commissar who first appeared in another recent collection of her stories. Critical reaction was tepid. What is the book she must write? "The Japanese concentration camps story, even though I'm working on it with a certain reluctance. Although the guards were rough, the peasants were kind. For a period I managed to sneak out of the camp and work for them. They would pay me with, say, two or three tomatoes. And my Japanese wet nurse was the only person who visited us - Italians were too scared of being accused as traitors." Has she returned to the sites? "Yes. Everything has changed. I recognised one only because of a tennis court nearby. But my parents help me." Fosco's missing finger must be a vivid prompt. Dacia Maraini will take part in the panel discussion Herstory on Friday at 10.30am-noon at the Bangarra Performance Theatre, and will be in conversation with Suzanne Kiernan from 1.30 to 2.30pm at the Sydney Philharmonia Choir studio. She will also take part in the Literary Afternoon Tea and Readings at the James Cook Ballroom, Hotel Inter-Continental from 2.30pm-4.30pm, Sunday, May 23 (bookings required).