 |
Category: Writing and Poetry
"Il Manifesto" del 03 Gennaio 2002
The Snake Woman coming from Cilento
The crossing between native culture and Mediterranean culture in the novel "The Long Return" by Tiziana Rinaldi Castro.
A tribal identity. A successful representation of the American Indian in the story of Pietra and her search of herself.
GIORGIO MARIANI Il Manifesto, January 3rd 2002
In her novel Il lungo ritorno (Edizioni e/o, pp.250, L. 25.000), Tiziana Rinaldi Castro an Italian transplanted in the United States where, after studying Anthropology, teaches now at the University of Colorado- shows a noteworthy courage. The author is, in fact, perfectly aware of the risks she is inevitably taking when deciding to set a large part of the story in an ambient so traditionally mythologized and idealized, and therefore misunderstood, as the American Indian world: in her case, the Apache reservation of San Carlos, in the State of Arizona Sure, however, of her autobiographical experience, and conscious that the only alternative to the consummation of a culture as well as to the ingenuous pretense of a mystical fusion with it, is the search of moments of partial juxtaposition of her own symbolic-cultural universe with the other's, Rinaldi Castro succeeds in giving us a multiform and complex representation of the Indian world, protected by the 'pro' and 'anti' Indian stereotypes. The novel first scene is set in the reservation, from which it surely proceeds towards places and moments that follow and precede that moment: among the many returns in the book-as the title suggests-, we need to include the narration's spiral movement, drawing up in this manner a path homologous to that 'long return' towards herself that the protagonist has to make in order to find herself. Pietra (Stone)- this is the name of the narrating protagonist- is therefore both a subject in transit, moving between the native Mediterranean (Cilento and Greece), New York and the reservation, as well as a figure gifted with a rocky solidity- as the name suggests- a stillness with an awareness, however, of her own roots and never mere immobility. Pietra lives, fights and suffers to understand herself and the others, moving along the narrow road that runs between the nomadic and schizophrenic post modernism and the immobility of traditions- whether Mediterranean or American Indian. Stealing herself away from the rigidity of her original family and then from her New York based relationship with her first husband Lou, Pietra proceeds her initiation path among the Apache people of her new partner Carlos Kaytennae, getting to a full maturity only after losing both Carlos and Lou. Only when, thus, overwhelmed by an "unspeakable pain" that seems to annihilate her and forces her "to look at all things without grasping the sense", she finds the strength to reconcile with a self that isn't any longer simply individual, and deserves to be celebrated in her plurality. Only then she can toast to herself: "Pietra Irene Snake Woman Mattia Martinson Kaytennae is saved". The novel, both in its structure as in the language, avoids any simplistic contraposition between the white world and the Indian world. Of course it is among the Apache that Pietra becomes, after a 'magical' rite of passage- the bite of a snake-, a "Snake Woman", a medicine woman, but the psychic powers and her visionary abilities are part of Pietra's life since she was a little child. The Indian world, therefore, more than a dimension of alterity to penetrate, or a spiritual sphere in which to lose her identity, is the context in which she is able to express that part of herself never allowed to emerge and never fully accepted in the social and imaginary worlds in which Pietra has lived before. Not only for the Indian ambiance, but especially due to the circular manner of the narration, for the great value given to the visionary reality, and above all for the ways in which this visionary dimension conjugates with the material experiences of the protagonist, The Long Return is maybe closer to many American Indian novels than to the models of Italian narration of today. The title itself has something 'Indian' about it. As Sara Antonelli writes in her recent and brilliant report of "The Contemporary USA culture" (Carocci, 2001) we need not to forget how "on the very large background of the American novel, the American Indian novel constitutes an autonomous canon. Differently from what happens in novels such as Huckleberry Finn e Moby Dick, in fact, the Americna Indian novels develop around protagonists for whom the search of the self proceeds not from the going away from home, but, on the contrary, from returning home, in other words not from the rejection, but the recuperation of a tribal identity to which one belongs or has belonged". Naturally, at the end of her path, Pietra does not find a 'tribal' identity, but it is certainly relevant that the novel ends with her return home, almost suggesting that it is any way with the Mediterranean "tribe" that she must reconcile, and that, as after all happens also in many American Indian novels, such reconciliation is never total and never without contradictions.
The complex and troubled relationships Pietra has with her family, in particular with her father and mother, are, in this sense, revealing signs of how not even a "medicine woman" like Pietra can aspire to a complete 'healing'. It is maybe for this reason that the author, in an interview with Cinzia Fiori on Il Corriere della Sera, the author states her uncertainty about assigning to her novel the status of 'medicine tale'. "Medicine tale is that tale that heals, the tale that becomes medicine for those who need it. It is the narration that returns the listener on the right path. For the American Indians it's also, of course, the tale that gives them back their origins by remembering the ancestors, their land with their beloved buried underneath, who are part of them in an only circle. I did not set to write a medicine tale intentionally. Maybe it can become one, though, for those who struggle to return to themselves". Or maybe, more radically, while the tribal tale evokes a transcendental dimension, a mythical home, to which one goes back, in the universe of the novel- even a medicine novel- the only corner stone on which to rebuild one's own house cannot be but an immanent Stone (Pietra) of flesh and blood.
7:02 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|