Claudia Durastanti

Claudia Durastanti on Strangers I Know

L’Indiependente, 9 Aprile 2019

https://www.lindiependente.it/claudia-durastanti-la-straniera-intervista/

English translation by Francesco Chianese and Thomas Proudfoot

© Durastanti and Chianese 2019

CF: Identity. My first question addresses your divided and dislocated identity, but surprisingly, I would like to explore your Lucanian background, rather than your American and British sides, which have been over-investigated as of late. In fact, beyond the story of the people on the move, one should also consider the more original point of view of the abandoned village, especially in relation to the most mistreated and ignored regions of the peninsula. What do you think has remained of your Lucanian identity, and how have you experienced this moment of touristic prominence that Basilicata has been affected by? Considering writers such as Franco Arminio, who presents himself as a “paesologist,” how important has your anthropological training been in this regard?

CD: Before Strangers I Know I had never written about Basilicata, I did so with deep and unexpected joy. It kind of gushed out of me. There is a certain fury in those pages, which comes from a process of removal. The entire discussion on the oil extraction in the “Italian Texas” shook my imagination and made me dwell on the strange intersections of magic and modernity, on the ways my generation has been marked by the technology that brings both the future and the ghosts of the past. In my view, a misalignment such as the one perceived by those who came of age in Basilicata during the 1990s, before the arrival of the Internet, and who then had to deal with this new dialogue with the outside world, should have produced hallucinatory, punk, nihilistic, and wall-collapsing writings. By contrast, as I was growing up, I could still feel the weight of some rugged rhetoric, of a humble, post-peasant literature characterized by modest expectations and the sweetness of the losers, something I have tried to avoid all my life like the plague. I have also come to recapture Basilicata through books: it was as if I wanted to overwrite a canon by which I felt crushed. I wanted to free myself from that annoying intimacy with Carlo Levi, from De Martino’s Magic: A Theory from the South and from the outdated theory of amoral familism. Hence, as I started writing, I thought about the Agri Valley that I knew, which resided between Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Stephen King’s It and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I approached this in a dazed manner, which is kind of the attitude held by my mother who still lives there today. It implies a very strong sense of improbability: it’s all kind of, I shouldn't be here, so why am I here? What voice is coming out of this reluctant, dreamy permanence? Perhaps there I realized that I deeply resemble the region where I grew up, because of this “fantastic rage” that we share. It is a region that I had long removed myself from precisely because I felt unable to find new references which did not reduce the place to some kind of nativity scene, in which all roles were assigned: the madman, the mute’s daughter, the doctor’s son, and so on. When you grow up in such a small community, you think about Edgar Lee Masters every day, it’s inevitable. Once I came to study cultural anthropology in Rome, I felt violently thrust back to Basilicata, but everything had been adjusted to a postwar South that I felt didn’t apply to me, hence I somehow used the tools of the discipline to destroy it, reinvent it, and liberate myself from it. In recent years, I have come to understand the power held in growing up in such loneliness. It was a loneliness which contained both my own loneliness and my mother’s, as well as that of the village where we lived. For me that loneliness is still an itch that I have been unable to scratch. Despite what happens in the Matera area: there is a “ringworm,” an estrangement that is always left out of the adverts. It’s a force that is very much alive. When I think about those who stayed in Basilicata, or those who grew up there and then left, like me, with whom I kept deep ties, I remember a phrase from Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, addressing Italy: “It is a country where disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion reign. And yet, in the streets, you can feel intelligence circulating, like vivid blood.” I don’t love the absolute romanticization of the suburban, nor the rhetoric of abandonment, but during my visits, I keep feeling the presence of this vivid blood. I was always told that history came last in those areas, but I learned many things I know about migrations, about how power is fed through the waste of resources and climate disruption, in those streets, or I ask those who are still immersed in that perspective to tell me about those things. These villages seem perfect candidates for minor novels, but instead we should think of them as if they were maximalist novels, imagining that the avant-garde lives in them. “Paesology” only interests me insofar as it is not nostalgia, when the “visiting” does not aim to draw great prophecies from the territory, but it is still aware that past and future have always coexisted there.

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FC: Migration. In the next question, I will switch the focus from the country to the escape from the country, and address migrants, expats, Italians abroad, and the so-called brain drain. I believe your book captures an important aspect of contemporary Italy, which is rarely discussed in the mother country, apart from superficial comments alongside a series of meaningless statistics during the evening news. However, this phenomenon is discussed more thoroughly abroad. Your coming-of-age narrative reflects the different experiences of emigration encountered by different generations of your family, including your grandparents’ migration in the 1960, your own experience of migration, and even going back to your great-grandparents’ earlier migration to Argentina. Your book also reflects on the ways in which this aspect is translated in the terminology used by Italians to define themselves, when they cross the border. How do you define yourself when you are outside of Italy?

Some time ago I saw a survey on Twitter about belonging to the working class. In a few questions, it asked: are you part of the working class because you grew up in a working class family? Or because your job and salary determine the inclusion in that category? To what extent can you identify as roa member of that class, if you have emancipated yourself from your subaltern family? I admit I was confused, I felt a nominal emptiness, an inability to define myself. The same emptiness overcomes me when I am asked to give a coherent answer to the question “where are you from?” I am not any better at “where do you live?” either, because in the past eight years I have resided in a triangular space between Italy, England and partly the United States (a kind of Bermuda Triangle of fascism) and those countries have lost their tangible margins, a phenomenon clearly facilitated by the continuum of their respective political disasters. This loss of identity is still not clear to me, but neither is the acquisition of something different. I believe that each of us ends up living in an imagined homeland, an overlapping of the multiple places where we have been, and within which we continue to leave holograms of ourselves, and this is true even if you have never moved from your country. At some point they stop being cities and towns and become myths: I am thinking about Maria Wyeth in Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays, about the obsessive focus on her origins, about the construction of self that must pass through place, the place she left behind. As a young girl, Didion decided to be a frontier heiress and shaped her writing by following that trail. Furthermore, there is an entire strand of writers of whom I am fond, who come from diplomatic or military families in perpetual displacement: Joan Didion, Denis Johnson, recently Valeria Luiselli. It’s an imbalance that you can feel on the page; the best origins are the invented ones. Displacement happens within spaces too: we are used to thinking in terms of national affiliations, but how many local identities can one accumulate within a single nation? The transit of students travelling to their college cities, or of those who leave the suburbs for the center or vice versa. You lose those aspects when, abroad, you say, “I’m from Italy,” and for me they are fundamental nuances. It is no coincidence that, since I have emigrated, I have discovered that I am Southern, more than Italian, and that all those differences in class, political culture and, if you like, even linguistic sensibilities, which I felt between northern and southern Italy, are magnified within my community in London. And it is here that I feel an unexpected continuity with my grandparents’ migration to America, which was already a late migration, having occurred in the 1960s. The resurgence of their Italianness and Southernness has long been a mystery to me. Their inability to trade the place they came from for a new place frustrated me, instead they just accumulated, created excesses, proliferated. Managing our belonging is a brutal, concrete, minimal, everyday thing: everyone identifies their own strategies and activates and deactivates their feeling of something according to their circumstances. My problem arises in the moment when we believe that the freedom to discard one identity and create another is a privilege of educated and affluent cosmopolitanism, where we are all entitled to excesses of identity, and in the realization that nominal discomfort, this inability to define oneself, hides a form of contempt for the migrations of others. Brexit served an illuminating function in this regard: those who defined themselves as expats, foreigners, or ‘fleeing brains’, discovered themselves as immigrants in the moment when they saw the real possibility of being rejected and deported, thereby creating a connection between the self and others. But this awareness, instead of generating a broader reflection on the meaning of borders and the movement of people and how it is regulated by states, has been reduced to a network of European solidarity that, in my view, is not across-the-board, even cynical if you will. In those years, people would say “It’s their loss, I have a double passport.” I think it says a lot about the social conflict experienced in England in recent years. If we experience a fluid and multiple sense of belonging that is disconnected from the destinies of those who have not had the same migration paths, we are the first to establish a boundary between those who can call themselves expatriates and those who are defined as immigrants. Likewise, we find inoffensive and cute words like Brexodus to talk about those who leave England because they are disheartened. As long as we continue to perpetuate a rhetoric of migration only made up of great successes or catastrophic shipwrecks, I will continue to feel uncomfortable, and unsure of what to answer, I will refuse to give an unambiguous answer.

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FC: Italianness. Your narrative makes it clear that although you have moved from one Italian community to another—Brooklyn, Basilicata, Rome, London—your journey has remained fundamentally centered on Italy. How would you describe the relationship between Italy and its suburbs? Does one feel more, or less, Italian after living abroad almost half of their life experience?

CD: I have indeed lived half of my years abroad and half in Italy, at this point, but I spent my entire upbringing here in Italy, and that is the most stable part of me, the part that has given me a more defined sense of myself. It won’t sound original, but I believe that we are the language that we spoke from childhood to adolescence and the one we studied in school, the language of the first novels we read, of the first fairy tales.  As long as I continue to write in Italian, Italian will be the primary bond. What I learned is that even from afar the language seeks its revenge and tries everything not to be ignored. Since I started living in London, my Roman accent has become thicker. I often evoke some dialect from Lucania, which I cannot speak fluently but I often use in the domestic context to express a more comic tone. By contrast, I now only express anger in English (for me, it is the language of offense) and it is impossible for me to carry out an argument about the Italian language if it does not include a reflection on its dialects. My non-fiction is Anglo-American, my fiction is Italian. Just to complicate things, my first person is Italian and my third person is very direct and English. Italian betrays me, it surfaces when I don’t want to use it, hence, Italianness is, for me, that substance that comes out unchecked, when the self is soft, distorted and fragile. Even though my Italian is also becoming, in the spoken register, a dirty, smuggled language too, I still can’t put it on the page like that. At the moment, it is very polished and firm, but I would like to introduce more and more untranslated elements, especially when I find myself writing in English, for the same reasons explained by Elaine Castillo, the author of America is not the heart, or to explore different registers. In the end, all reflections on the new Italian communities abroad need to involve a discussion of how the language of a substantial segment of people changes, the poetic potential of which is yet to be explored. […] The Festival of Italian Literature in London, which I help to organize, was also founded around this question: what language do we speak? What substantial contribution do we make to Italian literature, having been elsewhere and having become walking calques?

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FC: Colors. Changing direction, I would like to focus on the way colors gain a great deal of importance in the book, seeing as you say that you picked them up from your mother, along with obsessions and a sense of inconsistency. Since I believe that books are also judged by their covers, I wonder how this is reflected in your choice of red (assuming it was your choice) for this book?

CD: While I was finishing writing Strangers I Know, I was translating Kassia St. Clair’s The Sentimental Atlas of Colors, and that activity helped me recover the idea of color as a cultural construction. There are colors that exist in some cultures and communities and not in others. Tyrian purple for some people belongs in the purple category, for others it is a shade of red. It sounds like something far removed, but, in rather profound way it has a lot to do with my approach to disability and “normality” in the book, which is aimed at bringing to light how deeply the way in which we view our bodies is construct of our society. In Territorio selvaggio, Laura Pugno writes: “In fact, nothing is potentially more dangerous, more reactionary, than the idea of the natural, of the simple, of the primitive. Or the idea of deeming something to be inevitable, because it is related to the body.” Well, I grew up in a world in which my parents’ lives seemed inevitable because of their bodies, something I had to accept as a given. But I also grew up with a grandmother who responded to the objectivity of red and blue with a circumstantial particularity of language, which had a profound effect on me, and helped me to break things down, to turn them upside down or explore them more deeply. When I think about my grandmother, she always reminds me of the character of Father Paulus in Underworld, when he tells Nick Shay that he must learn to name all the parts of a shoe. I also came to use the language so precisely alongside the knowledge that these choices concern a single moment and a single space. This language also came to me through the translation of St. Clair’s book, which brought me back to the use of color for the women in my family: my mother, who used to hand-paint paintings with bright, violent colors and sometimes cover them all in black, preventing me from revealing the part underneath. This is the demonic influence which I mentioned in the book, the lack of fear pushing us to ruin and destroy what is beautiful. It is an activity that I feel is opposite to my own: I always compare writing to those drawings we did in elementary school, when we were asked to cover the figures drawn with wax crayons in black, so that we could then scratch it off and bring back to light the part underneath. For me, writing is that scratch, it is a rescue. Furthermore, to dye and to die basically have the same sound but radically diverse meanings. This misunderstanding is inherent in my family history, in particular my grandmother, who lost a daughter because of the color. It is the proof that by now, if I was not a translator and I was not suspended between two languages, I would not even know what to write. It was, however, Elisabetta Sgarbi who made the decision regarding the choice of cover for the Italian edition of Strangers I know, and I am grateful to her. A good publisher sees things that the author does not immediately understand. I wanted something abstract, I feared the depiction of a female figure, but, above all, I feared this red. My mother, on the other hand, as soon as she saw the cover, she thought about Irène Jacob in the poster for Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red, and she felt that this was the right cover. Conversely, while working on the book, I thought about Prussian blue as its color, in terms of emotional temperature, the color of constellation. It is not by accident that the trilogy also includes Blue among the three colors. Perhaps it is a complementary cover.

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FC: Self-indulgence. Memoirs and autobiographic fiction usually involve the highest rate of self-indulgence. Often one feels as if the author wants to provide justifications about his or her life choices. Diving into your mother’s secluded world through American rather than Italian literary references made me think of DeLillo, who, through Nick Shay’s regrets, rediscovers the Bronx of his childhood in Underworld. By contrast, in your book I recognized a process of affirmation. Consequently, I thought about Didion and Ginzburg, rather than other sources, who, like you, try to provide explanations about the crucial events they lived, by telling their personal experiences. This is the reason I mentioned anthropology just before, or sociology. Furthermore, in an interview to Radiotre, I was struck by the way you described your attitude towards tragedies, as one who heads toward the apocalypse with a smile. Since this is a trait that you have in common with the protagonists of your former novels, is it fair to say that Durastanti’s approach to memoir is free from whining and melancholy? What kind of path did you have in mind when you wrote Strangers I Know?

CD: I have devoted several books to grief, focusing especially on the ability to free ourselves from grief through language or art. In this sense, A Chloe, per le ragione sbagliate is my real memoir, given what it says about the body, about a sentimental relationship, about what is confirmed to be an illness. In relation to that book, Strangers I Know is more of a novel combined with an essay. Consequently, it presents a happiness which inevitably springs from fiction, from the act of exiting the self and of working on archetypes which the reader can identify with, and pretending to tell closed stories that instead turn out to be open, suitable for anyone. You make people forget that it is a specific life so that it can become pure fiction. The other day, I was writing to a friend about how I got to this point, and I repeated to him that I had “dumped” my family in the previous fiction, as if only their bones were left here, like those of the horses in Dead Horse Bay. In front of these bones, I could even get a bit emotional, before going further. This book, which has circulated as a memoir and, like memory, is made up of so many things that are gone, not forgotten, but gone. It was important to include the sections on “Money” and “Love”, which are the most restless and fragile, still in the process of maturing and writing outside the book. Otherwise, it would have been an artificial book, almost a posthumous one, like my editor Chiara Spaziani said. I have never loved autofiction books in which the protagonist forgets to be a character, or at the very least, I expect their testimonial or documentary reflections to have a high profile in terms of language or philosophical clarity, otherwise the book does not work. When a friend who works in photography heard that perhaps I wanted to include family photos to the book, she very tactfully pointed out that it would require an external filter and opinion, because those photos would all look beautiful and important to me. The effect on page would have never lived up to my expectations though. My parents on film were no longer my parents, they were no longer the people in the book. A writer who wants to use the first person and start a memoir has to be the first curator of his memories, we have to do a careful work of selection. For me, it is only this activity that keeps the writing safe from melodrama, from the pathetic, or from tragedy. A good activity of self-editing (which is not censorship, rather the simple ability to know how to read oneself) demonstrates that even the most unspeakable traumas keep their consistency over time. They are reconfigured according to new pains or new joys. Trauma is not just removal and injury, it is also something that we rework, pacify, inhabit as if it was new ground. Otherwise, we would stand still forever, and I believe that every character in Strangers I know tries to do the opposite, they never stand still.

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FC: Heroes. As we read Strangers I Know, we retroactively discover that Cleopatra and Chloe, as well as the “American” characters of your earlier books, have numerous points of contact with your personal history, as, in fact, we had always thought, and as you just pointed out. They are extraordinary characters, as extraordinary are the characters you describe as part of your experience: they all belong to the same world of people who perceive themselves out of focus for some reason. Although the hero in the book is arguably your mother, who embarked on so many adventures without being discouraged by her disability, don’t you believe that your ability to find order in the disorder is equally heroic, or exemplary, as well as walking in her footsteps?

CD: Anyone who writes likes to think about their work as part of a continuum, of a personal poetry. With Strangers I Know, this desire became a game, something I wanted to test for myself, first of all. What would have happened if I had presented some episodes of my life, which I already used in previous novels, as true? What new light or nuance would they have assumed, if presented to the reader with a different intention? This applies to the dialogue with my cousin, when she states that only when we stop being addicted to a substance, do we acquire the typical appearance of the drug-addicted: when love ends, all our scabs and miseries appear. I used this in Cleopatra va in prigione, but I showed a man saying that. Likewise, with the kidnapping episode at the beginning of A Chloe, per le ragioni sbagliate: instead of the East Coast, my father drove me through the countryside in Abbruzzo. It became a game of cross-references that made me understand the degree of pleasure that I receive from manipulating reality. I also realized that for me, writing cannot be defined in terms of “it’s a true story” or “a false story.” I never thought about that, nor have I ever realized, even at this stage of my life, that I cannot see boundaries between people and characters. They are always corrupting each other. I have started thinking that the characters I have always used and I tend to use, even in short stories, resemble each other: they also are casts of the people I love. For me, the act of falling in love itself is a kind of mistranslation of ideals and dreams that we carry with us, and to love means to perfect the language that we have found, to work on its realization. A dear friend of mine pointed out that there is a scene in my first book, where Jane is standing on the street at a traffic light and her partner is looking at her, while in Strangers I know I describe my mother standing at the traffic lights. Perhaps every girl I describe in my work is a projection of my mother’s youth, a way of overwriting it and owning it. It is as if I have always worked on not living up to her, but no mother lives up to our expectations, nor she to ours. We need to find the right distance, to keep a constant conversation with a myth that is tired of being a myth, or no longer has the strength to be that. In generational terms, I am interested in this betrayed love which never turns into hatred: it just becomes a relationship in which sometimes they are the stronger ones and sometimes we are the stronger ones, constantly alternating between defeats and victories, which is what the relationship with a mother is all about. A mother who always wins or loses, she is done as a mother, she has no story to tell.

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FC: Professions. Claudia is a triple threat, or more: writer, translator, essayist, but also an organizer of literary events. My idea of a writer is deeply intertwined with that of the all-around intellectual, who writes, reads, and gets read, who, in short, holds together various parts of the literary system and does not just publish and promote what she writes, by showing up in bookstores along with the book on the shelves. How much does each part of your work influence the others? In the English editions of Cleopatra and Strangers I Know, which you have announced recently, will you be self-translating?

CD: At the moment I am helping with the selection of the English translator for Strangers I Know, but I will not self-translate my book. I don’t think I would be able to, even though translation is the best way of editing a text, and I believe that the American version of the book will be different in so many respects, as it will also include the reflections I made in the weeks following its release. Talking with the editors from Riverhead and Fitzcarraldo, the possibility immediately emerged of a work of rewriting and reinvention, alongside the transition into the other, which is one of the aspects that gave me the most satisfaction. I do not exclude exploring things that remained inactive in Italian (the entire chapter on London, for example, in an early version was set in the future, in the form of speculative nonfiction, but it did not turn out well and I decided to give up. I enjoyed the idea of introducing a time jump in a book that is conventionally about a life already lived). Besides the parts written directly in English, all the longform about San Remo and the translation in the book was written first in English before being translated into Italian. There are great writers, women and men—Rachel Cusk, among others—who work quietly on their writing without any need to promote their books, their translations or to always be assertive about the present. Sometimes I envy them, but I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way to participate to literature. I know that perennial interventionism does not work for me, nor any form of hermitage. I try to find a balance and, the more time passes, the more I feel I naturally slipped into the position of one who takes pleasure in popularizing the work of others, even as a trivial matter of getting the blood flowing again. In the past, the difficulty I found in leaving some of the magazines I used to work for was compensated by the joy of bringing in new voices from whom I could learn: they did the necessary work of discovery and research, which was no longer spontaneous for me. As such, sometimes the work of promotion and cultural mediation which I carry out originates from a deep selfishness, from the need to get a grip, to find references for the books to come.

[…] 

Strangers I know also reflects on class and emancipation from a prescribed fate. I asked myself many questions about the function of luck and realized how devastating the rhetoric about talent always coming to light sooner or later is. By contrast, so much talent remains unexplored. I believe it is obscene to say that so much of my career depends on luck and the generosity of those I have met in my years of formation, because this element forces me to come to terms with the reality that education is not enough if there is no outside connection helping those who come from certain social backgrounds, at the margins of an assumed center. This thought agitates me. Here, if there is one thing I believe to be right, it is the form I decided to use to tell this story, which could not be anything else than intersectional, born out of my own deep weariness with the rhetoric about disability, migration, and social class that is employed in the spheres of public debate. I tend to think that this intersectionality is right for the historical moment, so to speak. On the use of autobiography, […] conversely, I am more seraphic: we are inundated with ‘firsts’ on social media every day, the fact that all this spills over into literature is inevitable, but time will sort this. Time will tell what will remain.