The Neapolitan writer Erri De Luca tells us his view on fatherhood, connected to his own life experience and his knowledge of literary and biblical domains.
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ERRI DE LUCA: «I’m not a father. I wasn’t that lucky. I didn’t have this chance. I’m not even a husband. I proposed a couple of times but … I haven’t … They didn’t take me seriously, so that’s it. I am left in between, I use the term “dead end”. Those who don’t have children are like “dead ends”. They end there, the species won’t cross to the other side. But I have quite a common name and surname, so is not at risk of extinction.
I don’t feel it as something missing, but that’s a flaw of mine, not feeling what’s missing, I just feel what is present. If I had children, I would feel their presence, but without them, I don’t feel it as something missing. I don’t have enough imagination for that. In Naples, women say men are like strangers in a family. Paternity happens in a flash, it’s a casual chance, nothing compared to motherhood, which instead involves everything else. Women are the makers, when the semen meets he egg it gets a thousand times bigger and … it crosses the eras of the earth. It evolves from fish to bird and to mammal. And when it comes out the womb is only the last step of it getting bigger and bigger. Outside of it, it won’t grow as much as it did inside his or her mother’s womb. You can’t even compare fatherhood to motherhood. In ancient times they couldn’t be compared. Fatherhood had a role just for social purposes.
My father, he had a fatherly disposition towards me and his daughter, but especially towards me. He passed down to me his passion for books and mountains because they were there. Books were there, I grew up in a store room full of his books, that was my bedroom. And the mountains because in his stories, mountains where the only thing my dad wanted to mention.
He fought the war in those mountains. He was an Alpino during World War II, and those mountains save him from that wreckage. He could look at them with gratitude, he could stretch his gaze and could mentally detach from where he was. He passed down to me this affection, this gratitude towards mountains. And then I became a climber, I climb and touch the mountains with my own hands. Thanks to his books I started to write too, reading that…
My father had a fatherly personality towards me even if he didn’t agree with most of my choices. For example during the years I took part in a revolutionary movement in the ‘70s, he took it upon himself to buy every publication of that organization and now I have a collection of all the publications of that time, that maybe just me and a couple of other people have in Italy. It was a daily newspaper called “Lotta Continua”. My father collected the entire publication, kept it and had it bound, without sharing it just because he thought that that’s what fatherhood was about. My mother passed down to me the Neapolitan dialect, my mother tongue. She passed down to me the feelings of that place, of the postwar city where I was born. And there I learned about feelings, I had my emotional education in Naples, thanks to my mother and other women’s stories, I’ve learned about emotions such as compassion, anger, and shame. Those are basic feelings that shape a personality, the personality of a young kid. And therefore, the sense of justice. I’ve never thought about fatherhood without a woman, an abstract fatherhood never crossed my mind. With some of my relationships with women I thought we could have gone towards that direction, that something could have happened, but it didn’t. I’ve only experienced my dad’s sense of fatherhood. His education was like the one of porcupines: porcupines let their children try every kind of food, even the poisonous ones, so porcupines strengthen their immune system. They’re immune to poisons. During my childhood and adolescence my father exposed me to every book that was in my room, and that strengthened my immune system. Painful at times, but it did strengthen me. His is my only experience of fatherhood.
The Virgin Mary was a young mother. In that story, we are used to imagine the intrusion of an angel with all the characteristics related to divine visitation, like wings and religious symbols. But in the Jewish story, the malach is a simple messenger. He’s not a cherub or a seraph. These angels exist and they’re illustrated with wings on the Ark of the Covenant. The malach, instead, is just a God messenger but with human features, and you realise he’s a divine being only at the end. We need to imagine that in the actual Jewish story of that time, that the presence appearing in Miriam’s room is a man announcing her the news. The most surprising thing is how she welcomes him, instead of yelling or running away because a man bursts into her room, she admits his presence, she welcomes him and immediately embraces his message. And that message transforms her into “full of grace”. When she embraces that message, she is “full of grace”, and it’s not a superficial demonstration of beauty, but it triggers an internal energy that overwhelms her and those around her. An internal energy that allows her to face the whole world, in which she’s an adulterer as pregnant before marriage and the baby is not her husband’s. This strength and fullness of grace allow her to face and ignore the world, remaining unperturbed. A fullness of grace that only some prophets have. They go against the evil of the world. They’re sent by God to announce the hardest things to hear. They do that without any protection, without any reserve. They just do that because that’s their mandate. The strength that some prophets have to go against the evil of the world and confront, threaten and condemn it so it can change its habits, can also be found in the approval of that young girl, who in that moment becomes a mother but also a fighter. That strength will overwhelm her
and will shine upon her groom too, Joseph. No Gospel describes Joseph as an old man, so we can imagine him as a young boy, deeply in love and close to his bride, so much so that he believes in that improbable pregnancy. But the truth is often implausible, and it needs love, strength, and enthusiasm to be believed. And Joseph has this strength. The Jewish name Joseph means “he who will add”. He embraces that faith, he believes in that woman, and then becomes a second husband to that girl saving her from being punished with a stoning as she is an adulterer according to law. She is protected by the marriage that young Joseph confirms, renews, and reiterates. Joseph also becomes the second father of her forthcoming baby, not only because he teaches him to become a carpenter like him, but because he registers him under his name. He register his birth under his name in the Jewish registry, so Yehoshu’a, Jesus, is part of Davide’s lineage, that of the Messiah, because Joseph belongs to it, to that lineage. Without the registration under his name, that child would have had no father, he would not be in that lineage. So Joseph follows the meaning of his name, he adds his presence next that girl who guides him, she is his guide.
I think that’s what happens in every pregnancy, women look ahead, venturing into their pregnancy, exploring it, bringing their companion, their husband along as a partner in their union. The Jewish original name of Mary is Miriam. In Hebrew the “m” has two forms: one if it’s at the beginning or at the end of the word, and another one if it’s at the end of it. In Miriam these two forms that open and close her name, the first “m” is open, it’s clearly an opening, reminding of a womb opening up, whereas the last “m” is completely closed, clenched. A bit like her experience of motherhood, after opening her womb with that message, she had to accept that that same womb will be closed by the same message that opened it. Closed because within that message there was the mandate and the prophecy of that creature bound to be born, and who had to sacrifice himself at the end of his short experience. So there’s an open and a closure in Miriam’s name.
The Hebrew verb banah means “to build”, it also forms the word ben that means “son”. A woman without children, an infertile wife is not “built”. When Sarah, Abraham’s wife, decides to offer him her maidservant, so she could be a mother, even in a surrogate way, she says “I will be built up too”. Women are the “builders” of lives, they build this. We found a similar verb at the beginning of the Bereshit, that’s the Genesis, when God formed Adam, he makes this being, he forges this figure from dust and breath. The verb he uses is “to fashion”, the same verb of the potter who mixes clay. But when he took one of Adam’s ribs, the verb God uses is “to make”, and “he made”. So he took a part of Adam, a semifinished result of his Creation, to make a perfect and definitive female figure, which is also the final purpose of his Six Days of Creation. And the verb he uses is the verb “to build”, produced, created, and built by God. There are some women whose womb is shut, and they think is something to be ashamed of, like a mutilation. After all, for those people and for that time, fertility was a sign of blessing. That small community, who at first was enslaved in Egypt within a few centuries become such a large community, so prolific, that even the Pharaoh was alarmed by the consequences of such a demographic explosion. It was a people blessed by fertility, and when God wants to attract it to the Promised Land, that people was deeply rooted in Egypt, even if enslaved, He uses the word linked to feminine fertility, “a land with menses of milk and honey”. Translations don’t approve this word they refuse, censor, and renounce to this word. But it’s all about feminine fertility, the word of the women’s menses will have that Promised Land. And it’s this promise of fertility similar to the feminine one, that attracts, encourages, pushes, and leads that people out of Egypt. For women, and nuns in particular, it’s a deeper sacrifice, a deeper consecration compared to men’s sexual abstinence. They offer their own womb, deeper than just renouncing to temptations that men can have. Supposing they do. Sarah as well received the news from divine messengers. Sarah became pregnant at the age of 90 but only after Abraham took some visitors in, giving them food and a shelter because they were wayfarers, and only after this Sarah receives the announcement. And Sarah laughs at it, so her son will be Yitzhak, Isaac, that means “one who laughs”. A laugh that was needed to open up Sarah’s womb. A liberating laugh opens Sarah’s womb to that announcement and makes her fertile at 90.
I scanned all the publications of “Lotta Continua”, and I uploaded online. Actually, an association called “Fondazione Erri De Luca” did it, that I didn’t create. It’s available to everyone. It’s a privilege I wanted to share and now it’s a tool used by those who are curious of that time and of the point of view on that time. I’ll bequeath my belongings to this association. A woman suggested me to do so. I would have left everything to chance. Keeping things to pass them down is something I agreed to, but… I actually never believed in that.
I find the memory of me as a person useless even for myself, maybe what I wrote might remain for some time. But books are just like people, they’re not monuments as Horace said: “I have built a monument lasting more than bronze”. Good for him, but I don’t have this intention nor this imagination. Books get old, disappear and get damaged, they’re made of paper and nonresistant ink that fades away. They’re just like us. Books disappear, just like people do. I don’t use the verb “to work” when I talk about writing. I did manual jobs for about twenty years, I was a workman, so I relate that verb to a specific experience. At that time, writing was opposing the verb “working”, it was its negation. It was a pleasant moment, a setback during my day, which made me feel I was not completely worn out by that exploited work. For me, writing is like enjoying time off.»
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