Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Hor always thought tenderly of Dacia Maraini little girl – what a wonderful little girl she must have been locked up in the Japanese prison camp because her father and mother had refused to swear loyalty to the Republic of Salòand therefore for the Tokyo regime they were traitors.
Nothing would have changed for the fate of Italy if Fosco Maraini and Topazia Alliata had given in, if they had given in to a generic adherence to a criminal regime but thousands of kilometers away; but everything would have changed for their conscience.
Dacia’s father, one of Europe’s leading orientalists, was in Japan for studies; the real traitors were the Japanese, who imprisoned a scholar for the sole “guilt” of having remained faithful to the legitimate government of his country.
The episode of Fosco Maraini is well known who, to protest against the inhumane prison conditions, he cuts his fingerwith an act of self-harm that earned him, if nothing else, the respect of his jailers.
It is less known that Fosco wrote poetry, hidden in the belly of the black and white bear from which Dacia’s little sister, Yuki, never separated. They are stories that resurface in My life (Rizzoli), the new, very sweet book in which Maraini recounts her war childhood.
“My Life” by Dacia Maraini (Rizzoli)
With her other little sister, Toni, Dacia played with stones, transformed with her imagination into fish with which to soothe her hunger: «The long stone was a small river fish that I imagined I could smell of roast…». A childhood of prisoners, but also a school of character, de rigueur, even imaginative. It is a story of little girls, but in its own way it is a story of resistance, of literature, of education, of life.
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