Every morning I allow myself a quarter of an hour to have breakfast, between croissant and cappuccino I leaf through the newspaper. a kind of ritual with which I take a moment to immerse myself in the stories of the world before facing my little day. Often it is not a “light” reading because the narrative brings me back to images of violence, war, pain, anaffetiveness that seem so stupidly far from human reality … Every day.
Images of the Israelite hostages freed, of the man who returns home to find that his wife and daughters have been killed, Gaza razed to the ground, the filthy building proposals of the President of the United States, the insult to the shrine for the victims of the Basovizza foiba… already the foibe. I stop for a moment, memories of the years as a teacher resurface in which dealing with the history of the Second World War with the fifth grades was like starting an obstacle course, slippery and complex in which the risk of “getting lost” in ideological rigidity or in matters of goat’s wool was around the corner (“fascism was less worse than Nazism”; “even the partisans committed violent acts”; “The foibe were like the extermination camps”… were the traps to avoid at every lesson)
I remember that at that time I was trying to shift the axis towards research… research on violence: how it was born, why, how can it become fascism, Nazism, yesterday’s foibe, today’s Gaza, research as a possibility of rejecting the inhuman, of building a critical memory of the past to help us see the present and defend the future.
I then told my students the story of Norma Crossetto, the story of the death, after atrocious sexual violence and torture, of this young Istrian Italian, killed by Istrian partisans in October ’43. Norma was raped for days and infoibed because, coming from a family of Istrian fascists, she had refused to join the partisan struggle.
It is an uncomfortable story but it has always struck me because her ordeal is similar to that of all other women, of all wars, who have paid and pay on their bodies for male violence. Norma is the female body that should not simply be destroyed but violated, offended, humiliated, annulled. Norma is every woman in Gaza, Norma is the sad bulletin of femicides…
I close the newspaper… I go back to my daily life in Lucca and now I understand why, in the last few days, while I was reading the presidency’s mail, I felt a certain annoyance to see as many as 13 more or less institutional emails in which schools were urged to promote initiatives on the “Day of Remembrance”. All shareable of course … but… there is something not working
Sara Lazzaro
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