[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_60

Giving life, Michela Murgia, 2024

“If I get out of a bed where I've been with a woman, am I a lesbian? If I do it from a man's bed, does that make me a straight person? What are we if I go one evening with one and one evening with the other, or maybe together? Instead of bi-, they will perhaps call me confused or perverted, or in any case, someone who has to give explanations of her desire and reduce it into something normative even outside the sheets. These answers all seem stupid to me, but I continue to receive them as biased questions that, instead of opening horizons, close them: questions that aren't questions".

This is the beginning of “Giving Life,” Michela Murgia's last book, published posthumously in January 2024. It's a title that makes you think because Michela Murgia gave her life for what she believed in. Her coherence and courage attracted the hatred of that entire conservative and patriarchal part of Italy, which, unfortunately, still represents the majority of the country. This hatred, total and exaggerated in its blindness, just as she was total and exaggerated in saying what she thought, gradually took away her health: Michela Murgia passed away on 10 August 2023 at 51 years of age. With her, the only feminist voice that managed to establish itself in the mainstream television and cultural panorama of the Peninsula is buried. I say the only one not because, in Italy, there aren't many other voices denouncing sexism and patriarchy, but because she was definitively the only one to reach excellent visibility. She was the only one who spoke her mind freely in this position of fame, without fear of going against the interests of those who, for example, were hosting her on the show.

Michela Murgia was the only one who, in 2019, when accused by the leader of the far Right of being a radical-chic intellectual, detached from reality, responded by publishing a comparison between their two CVs, from which it appeared as if she had always had to do multiple jobs to pay for her studies while the Minister hadn't done much except orbit from one party to another. She was the only one who, in 2020, publicly, during a radio program, asked one of the most beloved presenters on Italian television to apologize to all women for having said that the value of a woman, in addition to beauty, is that of knowing how to stay one step behind the man. But she was also the only one to demonstrate with her own life how, quoting the words of Djarah Kan, "the body of the nation constantly tries to abort its most intelligent and disobedient women [...] It tries to expel them, isolate them, denigrate them, and condemn them."

The example of Michela Murgia makes us understand very well how misogyny is a choice and how it is more comfortable to listen to the voices of those who confirm our biases rather than those who question them. When Michela Murgia died, I felt profound despair. I felt alone and helpless: who would carry on the battle? Who would report what no one says?

I was reminded of Antonino Caponnetto, the former leader of the anti-mafia Justice Pool, on the day of the mafia attack on the life of Justice Paolo Borsellino when, in a state of shock, trembling, with his hands on his face, he whispered into a journalist's microphone: "It's over... it's all over". To everyone, it sounded like "we have lost".

Paolo Borsellino was killed shortly after his fellow anti-mafia Justice Giovanni Falcone, who was the only one to receive strong media visibility while still alive in his epochal battle against the Mafia. Like Michela Murgia in her equally epochal struggle against the patriarchy, once Falcone got visibility and media attention, he became the subject of protests, public humiliation, and hatred. They both were hindered and isolated rather than helped and supported by establishment recognition.

Many people who decide to fight such great battles in Italy seem to die. They do not die because the battles are impossible to win. As Giovanni Falcone himself said, "People die because they are left alone."