An editorial and publishing adventure that becomes an experiment of self-awareness
Simonetta Sciandivasci (ed.), I figli che non voglio (Mondadori, 2022)
The book, based on an idea of Simonetta Sciandivasci for a column in the daily newspaper LA STAMPA, collects the voices of mothers and non-mothers (but also fathers). An editorial and publishing adventure that becomes an experiment of self-awareness and that, going beyond the stale discussions on the purely economic causes of the Italian demographic winter, sheds light on the change of perspective of the Italians with respect to parenthood.
Review by Claudia Mazzilli
I figli che non voglio (Mondadori, 2022) is a choral text, born from an idea of Simonetta Sciandivasci, who thought of making a census of the feelings of the Italianə on the issue of motherhood for ‘Lo Specchio’, the cultural insert of ‘La Stampa’. The book has collected both unpublished texts and testimonies already published for the newspaper’s column and is one of the very few in which the topic of ‘having/not having children’ is not faced from a demographic, statistical and economic point of view, but from the point of view of that minority of women, 5%, who have neither problems of sterility or infertility nor work or affective precariousness, but simply do not want children because they do not want children and are ‘enough’ like that. The book also tackles so much else: women who have had children but do not recognise themselves as mothers (because they do not like labels and every motherhood is unique and unrepeatable, like every human being); loving fathers excluded from parenthood after a divorce (because the prevailing parent for the courts is always the mother); women who speak of procreative agnosticism (children exist when they exist and there is no point in talking about them in the abstract! ); single women fighting for the right of adoption; a trans person (F to M) who is proposed to freeze her eggs, as long as possible, to become a father in the future.
Back then, in 2022, the editorial office was overwhelmed by hundreds of letters on the matter of children, while the mainstream chatter discussed a possible female president of the Republic, followed by a prime minister who wanted to call herself ‘the (male) president’. The column, therefore, had the merit of restoring to a daily newspaper everyday life of women’s lives – allow me this pun -, a true cross-section of a piece of the country, ‘a thousand little truths that kept unnamed behind the incontrovertible force of statistics. Not to deconstruct them, nor to circumvent them, but to load them with that emotional force, that feeling that made them more kaleidoscopic, and somehow truer’ (p. 47). In this way, what is not even confessed in surveys emerges, out of modesty, hypocrisy, or because the questions are structured in such a way as to induce answers that are not very nuanced and highly predictable. On the other hand,” notes Simonetta Sciandivasci, “pollsters are not Pasolini in Love meetings.
“Would you die for an ideal?
Answer: I would only die for my son.
What was different in your life before you became a mother?
Answer: That I would die for an ideal.” (p. 19)
The favourite topic at Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and in September, that is, Italy’s birth rate, the final balance of births, presented in figures and comparisons with Sweden, with reportages filmed in villages where the last centenarian survives, amidst television reports full of warnings to women (have children even if you don’t want to!), is tackled in a completely new way: ‘to bring self-awareness to a daily newspaper’ (p. 94). The book includes witnesses from famous and lesser-known people (some, particularly sensitive to the motherhood/non-motherhood topic, have also gave their testimony for LUNADIGAS: Melissa Panarello, Veronica Pivetti…).
What emerges is a collective medley of experiences irreducible to a single figure, each with its own stamp and its own embodied experience. Because there is no such thing as motherhood, there are mothers, as Nadia Terranova writes, quoting Adrienne Rich’s Of woman born, for whom ‘motherhood is the most feminist condition there is, and at the same time the most patriarchal institution’.
The world is not ready to accept the plurality of the concept of motherhood because it cannot read it as an individual process. Rather, it understands it as a mission of the whole human race, and therefore that everything is heteronormative and bound by love relationships […] I know, however, that we could all start by making a collective reflection on the sense of diversity that unhinges prejudices… so that whoever wants a child, for whatever reason, can feel welcomed precisely into a maternal – and not hostile – world (Carlotta Vagnoli, pp. 108-09).
All the witnesses are held together by connecting excerpts edited by the brilliant pen of Simonetta Sciandivasci, who briefly presents the biographical profile of the testimonies, the occasions when they met and collaborated on the project, but also lightly and ironically rambles on about her own experience as a non-mother (when she says at job interviews that she does not have children, she wonders “whether not having children is not, for me too, deep down, a manifesto, a claim, a response to the overturning of a scheme, a reaction to oppression”), or she wonders (she too, like many of us) whether the category of symbolic mothers is right (Uh! again, being the mother of an idea, of a book, of a project, as if everything that is not a child is nothing but a cast, an imitation, a tributary, a surrogate…). Or Simonetta simply tells us about the books she reads because she feels like it. Or she reflects on her own work, on the criteria for selecting the texts to be published: ‘Whether it has helped I do not know; I know that it has shown that a newspaper becomes dear to readers when it identifies a change and recounts it through direct testimony… I know that it has shown that nowhere more than in a newspaper is the personal political… I know that it has given a measure of how intensely different are the colours that make up the word family, the word mother, the word child, the word father, the word parent. I know that it has provided very good reasons to stop thinking that the demographic winter is a moral or economic issue; instead, it is a question of perspective, which imposes new lenses’ .
Yes, this book helped, and it was enlightening as well as hilarious. Read it.
Simonetta Sciandivasci was born in Tricarico in 1985 and grew up in Matera. She works at the culture editorial office of ‘La Stampa’. She has written for ‘Il foglio’, ‘Linkiesta’, ‘Rolling Stone’, ‘La Verità’ and ‘la Repubblica’. She has collaborated with RAI, on radio and TV, as a consultant and author. She collaborates with the Holden school and the Molly Bloom Academy. She is editor of “Nuovi Argomenti.”
