cIt’s Rosa, the fierce and tenacious matriarch. And then her daughter Selma and her nieces Patrizia, Lavinia and Marinella. I am the women of the Maraviglia family, but no, they are not called by surname, because the surname does not belong to women and the possibility of keeping it after a marriage will have the flavor of a conquest. Like the freedoms that are earned, in a time that goes from the 1920s to the 1980s, first collected, «like cats in a basket», in a small town in the Sicilian hinterland and then in a big city.
Aurora Tamigio was born in Palermo in 1988 and raised in Milan. You are a copywriter and write for companies in the world of technology and design. You have written short films and short stories. The surname of women is her first novel. (Photo: Giulia Ferrando)
The narrative slips from one female figure to another, along the minimal lives of women also tested by male insipience: Aurora Tamigio tells with the pleasure of telling, lets the strength of an unassailable bond between mothers and daughters flow through the pages, made up of ambitions and renunciations, between the new that is advancing and ancestral rites that have echoes of magical realism. A choral, convincing novel, a family saga full of stories that can be read in a breath and squeezed together tell the long journey of women.
We know Rosa in the 1920s: her abusive father imposes the unwritten law that women must be beaten to learn how to behave.
Rosa manages to get rid of this horrible man, chooses a completely different husband and creates a legacy of teachings for all the others. You always hear her voice, as if she had never left.
The surname of the women
Perhaps unconsciously, he teaches his descendants to keep their backs straight.
Yes sure. And to take the honor and burden of being the pivot of the family. Rosa opens a tavern, she makes a very heavy renunciation because she needs to support her children, she carries the weight of having to decide what is important and what is not. The refusal to stay in the place that the world has given her and the stubbornness of wanting to choose a different location support her. It is a teaching of dignity, the same that unites all these women, even those who apparently do not have her strong character.
The surname of the women of Aurora Thames, Feltrinelli416 pages, €19
“A man incapable of being bad is a good thing,” Rosa says to her daughter Selma. “But for a woman it is a black disaster.”
Apparently Selma is more fragile, she seems to have taken little from her mother, but her light presence is what holds the family together, her daughters, her brothers… Her story hinges on the absence of a man, her husband Santi , unable to build himself as a father or husband, attentive only to his sloppy male prerogatives.
Does Selma represent another femininity?
I imagined it as the reconstruction of that invisible role that women often have in the family, the ability to bring people together and make them sit at the same table, mitigating impetuous characters. She acts as a peacemaker, recomposes quarrels, small and large, with her very silent presence. She almost doesn’t even rest her weight on the chairs, but a word from her is enough for everyone to remember that they are part of something more important.
Even the meek Selma, at a certain point, is the victim of a “curtigghio”. What is it about?
The curtigghio is a gossip, literally a courtyard chat. In an ancient society, even more violent towards women than today, there was no leniency: everyone has little, you are led to resent others when they apparently have something that you don’t have. You think something has been taken from you and you want to take it back. Even with the violence of words.
Selma, still a girl, accompanies her mother Rosa to her first vow, in 1946. Rosa dresses elegantly for the occasion, puts on a lipstick that, years later, her daughter will also use…
Rosa has to choose between the King or the Public King, I liked writing it like this, as if it were a form of women’s politics. At her seat they ask her to remove her lipstick; Selma, years later, will not be asked. A historical trait, real, but one that creates a link between generations. Lipstick belongs to a woman’s characteristic, to her recognizability in public, in that case the electricians were asked to cancel this trait of themselves. As if it were said: you have to cancel femininity if you want to be part of society, you have to be as similar as possible to the demands of male power, to the role they assign you and which does not include female exposure. But Rosa takes her space for her, in her small way she is an entrepreneur and therefore she thinks it is right to go and express her vote as a citizen.
Among the granddaughters, Patrizia seems to have taken the most from her grandmother. How do her sisters live it?
In fact Patrizia is almost educated, more or less voluntarily, to become the head of this community of women. On the one hand, she finds herself wanting to meet all the expectations of those who have invested in her, who made her study and gave her the tools, on the other she has the role of whoever has to keep the family together and take the sisters where they should go. She doesn’t want to depend on males, but she often has to.
The new fashions proposed by the magazines, the arrival of television, the Susanna doll, the sofa packed in plastic, up to the 1982 World Cup: there is a micro-history of our country’s customs.
It helped me to mark time, of course. But then, fashion magazines, pop programs, songs always appear inferior, a second-class culture. Instead, I believe that everyone forms their own culture on all things, equally important because they are inputs that come from society.
Each of its protagonists claims rights, like the many unknowns who fought before us: we grow up on the shoulders of those who preceded us…
It is true. I would add that carrying on a woman’s singular, family but also public legacy, generally she is always another female. Usually a successful man’s thanks go to a wife who stepped out of her and enabled him to become famous. In a woman’s path to success, by success I mean even just the fact that Marinella, the youngest of the sisters, was able to get her diploma and then go to Manchester to study English, there is always the sacrifice that another woman he made of himself, that he wanted to leave to someone else.
Embroidering nuns, doctors who heal with herbs: in the outline there is a bit of magical realism…
I’m a big reader of magical realism and so yes, I was also inspired by Garcia Marquez. And then to Rosetta Loy: I recently discovered her, but I think she should have the place that Isabel Allende has in Chilean literature.
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