Alda Merini, the heroine of chaos

Annalisa Nicastro

Annarita Briganti writes "Heroine of chaos" (Cairo editore) 10 years after the death of Alda Merini, a book that deals with poet's public and private life through unpublished testimonies and interviews, enriched by a text by His Eminence Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who was her spiritual advisor, and one of the last letters written by Alda Merini.

The writer recounts Merini's life as if it were a novel, capturing the intense existence of a complex, rebellious woman who went against all forms of convention and hypocrisy. Alda Merini, in fact, is a bit tight inside the edges of a page because her powerful writing, her famous loves, her innumerable solitudes between her two marriages and four daughters, a World War and her hospitalizations in hospital and fifty electroshocks, flood like a raging river all the life she lived, full of pain but also of joy, as her daughter Barbara says in the book "my mother was also happy".

Annarita Briganti with an original style gives us, with passion, the story of a woman who has never given up on being free and who has paid a very high price for it. Her book gives back to the Milanese poet the freedom to be, to fly over our world, giving back what many of her have taken away over the years, isolating her and not giving her understanding.
The poet Merini used to say that “if you rub the powder off from the wings of butterflies then they fly anymore”. The author of this essay, necessary and indispensable, makes her fly high, making the poet known in all her entirety and complexity.

The book has also become a theatrical show and in 2019 was among the winners of the City of Como International Literature Prize for Non-fiction.

La Briganti, journalist of “La Repubblica” and “Donna Moderna” loves to tell the stories of great women, in fact she has recently published the new essay biography of her: Coco Chanel. A woman of our time (Cairo, 2021).

Annarita with the book Heroine of chaos was the first time you write an essay. Where did the idea for this book come from?
Nonfiction is a noble genre and I am proud to be one of the few female essayists in Italy. The Heroine of Chaos, dedicated to Alda Merini, was my first essay that renews the genre because it is also a biography and a reportage resulting from interviews, field research and unpublished content that reads like a real novel. My second essay, recently released, I dedicated it to another woman with a romantic life: Coco Chanel.

Let's start with the title: “Heroine of chaos”. How do you see Alda Merini?
Many know the dramatic life that the poet had, blessed by the talent and the gift of poetry and words but also marked by a very long internment. She is a heroine because in spite of everything and everyone she has always overcome her troubles. Merini had a rare ability to manage chaos and she was also very fond of creating it around herself, in the private and public sectors. Her famous home on her Navigli mirrored this aspect of her, reflecting her great creativity that was not controllable.

She spent 12 years of her life in an hospital, what idea did you get about Merini's "madness"?
"No one is normal if you see him so close", this is the sign that welcomes visitors at the entrance of the former Paolo Pini, the psychiatric hospital where the poet was interned. It is a sentence that makes everyone think about what "normality" is. I believe that each of us has a certain amount of discomfort, I like more to use this term instead of madness. An unease with which each of us tries to come to terms with personal and different strategies.
Alda Merini has never been put in a position to deal with her discomfort. They were different times that offered neither a psychoanalysis nor an advanced chemistry like the one we have available today. So at the time on her skin they experimented with practices that we all recognize were unacceptable, let's take the case of electroshock, which Merini has suffered over and over again.
What is the Merini's “madness” due to? I had an intuition that in the book I link to one of the most important contents it contains. Many do not know that the poet survived the Second World War and with her family she was forced to flee on a cattle wagon and find themselves living in Vercelli in a kind of stable, where she, when young, looked after her mother and her brother as soon as born.
What happened during the displacement? My intuition is that something may have happened at that time that represented her initial trauma that marked her later throughout her life.

Alda was a spokeswoman for pain, but also for joy of living?!
Spokeswoman for pain is a beautiful definition. Merini's poetic production is characterized by pain, this explains why many young people continue to love her, recognizing themselves in the disillusionment of their first love, in the sense of loneliness and alienation that she expressed in her verses about her. The poet suffered a lot from the sense of isolation, because many were jealous of her success and then it was not even easy to be next to a large and complex personality like hers. The phrase that best represents her strength than her is, in my opinion, “Life was hell, I paid a dear price but I enjoyed it”, it was an example of how she lived to the fullest until the end.
This aspect of happiness asked me to underline by Barbara Carniti, her daughter who perhaps resembles her the most. When I interviewed her she asked me to remember in the book how her mother was a person capable of being happy.

How do art and life coexist in the Milanese poet?
Art and Life in her existence have no distinction. She didn't have a boundary between her private life but also between people. There are two examples one is Giuliano Grittini, her official photographer who is also the author of the cover of my book, but also her great friend. Same goes for Alberto Casiraghi publisher who brought out the aphorist in the Milanese poet, an aspect that many do not know of Merini, author of aphorisms. She was very good at writing them I will cite one as an example: "I'm not beautiful I'm only erotic". Casiraghi published her aphorisms and was also a close friend of her, even fifty phone calls were made a day. Art and life were not separable for her also because her inspiration always came from reality.

She lived through years of great social changes, especially for women. How does Merini fit into that time?
Merini as a twentieth-century woman is not that intellectual who could be openly deployed, she could not have done it as we do today freely. She is on the de facto side of women, that is, how to be a woman with chipped enamel, with the signs of time and disease on the body, without filters and she teaches us in a "fake" era like today to be real people.

The Literary Parks pay homage to the writers who have been influenced by those places they lived by bringing them back and remembering them in their verses. How much was the place where Alda Merini lived inspiring for what you wrote?
Totally. Alda Merini is Milan, Milan is Alda Merini, to the point that for her tenth anniversary the bridge of poetry over the Navigli was inaugurated, the bridge she crossed every day in the area where she lived. And it's nice to think for future generations that there is such an eternal thing as a bridge that will remember it forever. Another sign of Milan's love for the poet is her presence in the monumental cemetery and, as the story tells in the book, Alda's tomb is always full of fresh flowers. The love between Merini and Milan is the one most reciprocated in her whole life.

What magic is there in Alda Merini's poetry?
There is that magic that only grown-ups have and that makes her poetry unique to her. Merini may or may not like it but her role is undoubted during the twentieth century, she is our most important poet, one of the few candidates for the Nobel Prize.

May I ask you if there is a poem of her that you are more fond of than the others?
The verses I put in the epigraph are very important to me. She was plagued by loneliness and she has always had a very strong need for presence and I am sure that she gives a voice to many of us. She was a very generous person, she was open to others, she believed in it but she often found herself punctually exploited and was left alone. 

Ho bisogno di sentimenti
Di parole, di parole scelte sapientemente,
di fiori, detti pensieri,
di rose, dette presenze,
di sogni, che abitino gli alberi,
di canzoni che faccian danzar le statue,
di stelle che mormorino all'orecchio degli amanti...
Ho bisogno di poesia,
questa magia che brucia le pesantezza delle parole,
che risveglia le emozioni e dà colori nuovi.

 (da Io non ho bisogno di denaro, Alda Merini)

Riproduzione riservata © Copyright I Parchi Letterari