To The Arrogant Dude Who Demands I Explain To Him Why I Relate To The Works Of Elena Ferrante,
When you cornered me in the staff room, I was a little taken aback, considering that I’d been reading for the past hour or so and I wasn’t expecting to be interrupted. The conversation started innocuously enough. I was then reading The Story of the Lost Child, the final book in the Neapolitan Quartet, a little too lost in swirly feelings that every Ferrante book brings, you had to repeat your question. You asked again, this time a little more impatiently, that why was it so that a pseudonymous lady author writing about working class Italy of the 50′s, was relevant to me, a middle-class Hindu woman in India born in the 90′s.
We’ve gone over this conversation many times, but we keep changing the tone and the terminology to pretend that each round is somehow different, when it really isn’t. What you actually want to know, but will carefully hide is, why did I turn to Ferrante (as did your girlfriend and your mother and your sister, going by your frustrated mutterings), when there are perfectly good Indian lady authors, and why aren’t the women around you raving about these Indian women, the way we seem to be talking about Ferrante. Of course, you’re much too fluent in academese to say this outright, you refashion this into a conversation about the politics of translation--”Is this book really as good as the ‘original’ if you have no scale to compare the ‘original’ to?” is tossed around a few times, before you concede that translation, and the problems thereof are separate and that we’d get to them at some later date--and then later, angle your question in such a way that it sounds like you’re accusing Ferrante fans of *enjoying* the stark violence in her books, because it gives us an “edge” to identify as victims, or something.
I don’t dismiss your entirely ludicrous demand, you know it hadn’t worked in the past either. You get louder and more insistent, and honestly, no one needs to live through that twice. I don’t talk about how dangerous such cultural relativism is, nor do I poke fun at your obvious unease at the Ferrante books (I mean, it is really no co-incidence that you, a literature professor, haven’t read any women since you read Jane Eyre in your undergraduate years, have a hard time believing in the literary merit of women), and how all the women in your life enjoy them so visibly, means it automatically says something about *you*. Don’t get me wrong, as awful Freud is, he is mighty useful when calling out rubbish like the question you still were waiting to have adequately answered. I don’t talk about how these books, while peopled with working class female protagonists, were in fact quite post-Marxist, post-feminist, post-whathaveyou, because they actually do try everything: they try leaving their men, their neighbourhoods, losing their Naples dialect, forgetting the impulses a lifetime of fear can cultivate, and they seem to not be able to “transcend” anywhere, least of all, themselves. I don’t tell you the point isn’t that these women, so far away, are so relatable when our lives are so obviously different, the point is *how* they’re relatable, *how* we find ourselves bridging this distance. But that was never your question now, was it? You are more keen to accuse me of ignoring Indian literary fiction, as if my reading Ferrante forecloses any possibility of me picking up a Chitra Devakurni Banerjee or a Eunice De Souza. You don’t want to really understand, if you did, you’d wouldn’t be so affronted that I don’t defend my reading choices.
It is now four months later, you’ve just seen me with yet another Ferrante--I am reading Troubling Love every time I get two minutes to myself--you admit that you’ve tried, but it feels too sensational, overhyped even. You tried reading My Brilliant Friend and give up after the page 25. We’re standing in the exact same place again, I am probably a little more angry and defensive, given that I’ve had a few months of thinking about the Neapolitan Quartet, having to answer and/or defend the “toxicity” of Lenù/Lila’s friendship—as if male friendships are somehow free of power play and codependency. I am mostly angry that your question kept rattling in my brain, that it’s no different than something I’ve been thinking about ever since the first letter Lila sends Lenù in Ischia in My Brilliant Friend, and held my heart in her hands. I wanted to tell you how easy it is to be drawn to Lila and all her violence and destructiveness, how I see so many girls and women I’ve loved in her. That she also very like me, in the hours I have the courage to admit that to myself. I wanted to tell you about how while our worlds are different, there’s something achingly familiar about global patriarchy and masculinity, that a quartet this selfishly devoted to women—selfishly, yes, because I bet you cannot help but side with women in this series—and their lives, bodies, and dreams is so rare in this world, that four measly books about two girls and their friendship has saved all of my last year. I wanted to tell you that despite the fact she’s talking about Italy post-WWII, and how her women engaged with the radical politics of the 60’s, their discontentment with their men—in and out of these progressive movements—is so contemporary, and almost universal, in this particular shade of betrayal.
The perfect answer came to me when I was more than halfway through Troubling Love. This book’s protagonist is contemplating how her father’s jealous, murderous rage towards her mother, and his constant suspicion arms her, a little child then, to distrust her mother. She writes,
“Whenever there was a stranger in the house (for example, the men who appeared on certain intervals to commission street urchins, the Gypsies, or classic Vesuvia with the pine trees), he warned her: “Don’t laugh”. That laugh seemed to him added on purpose to humiliate him. In reality Amalia [the protagonist’s mother] was only trying to give voices to the happy-looking women in the magazines of the forties: wide-painted mouth, lively gaze, sparkling teeth. She imagined herself like that, and found the appropriate laugh. It must have been difficult for her to choose the laugh, the voice, the gestures, that her husband could tolerate. You never knew what was alright, what wasn’t. Someone who passes on the street and looks at you. The joking remark. A careless nod. See, they rang the door. See, they were delivering the roses. See, she didn’t reject them. She laughed, instead and chose a glass of blue vase, and arranged them in a container that she filled with water. […] She let the black curl fall over her forehead, batted her eyelashes, gave tips to the delivery boys, she allowed things to remain in the house as if their remaining were permitted. Then my father would find out and destroy everything. He tried to destroy her, too, but he always managed to stop a step before stupidity. But the blood bore witness to the intention”.
She continues a few pages later,
“Probably in the course of her existence, Amalia [the protagonist’s mother] had given up doing many things, like every human being, she legitimately or not legitimately have done. But perhaps she only pretended to not have done them. Or perhaps she had given the appearance of someone who pretends, so that my father would constantly be thinking of her unreliability and suffer for it. Perhaps that was her way of reacting. But she hadn’t taken into account that we, her daughters, might think that too, and forever: I above all. I couldn’t remake her innocent. Not even now. It was possible that Caserta, looking for her companionship, had only been pursuing a fragment of his youth. But I was sure that Amalia was still playing the game with herself, opening the door with youthful mischief, pulling the curl over her eyebrows and batting her eyelashes. […] I realised I was summarising a woman without prudence and without the virtue of fear. I had memories of it. Even when my father raised his fists and struck her, to shape her like a stone or a log, she widened her eyes, not in fear but in astonishment. […] I, too, was astonished, as if watching a scene of violence: the scarecrow that doesn’t scare, the victim who isn’t annihilated."
In a quick moment, look how Ferrante put to words the very murky feelings in abusive relationships, things me and mine are intimately familiar with but didn’t know they had their own language. I wanted to show you how expertly she translated that gossamer line between agency-victim-responsibility, that yes, we are not responsible for abuse anyone throws at us, but living the lives that we do means sometimes we will go ahead and pick fights, and provoke volatile brothers, fathers, uncles, fists and legs because when we know what’s coming, might as well choose how we go out, yes? I didn’t know this secret dance could find expression in some fictional woman’s life, with such accuracy, that it’d knock the wind out of me. I want to tell you that you don’t have to have been a witness to such horrific assaults on a person to identify and empathise with this protagonist or this mother, that it’s enough, in this moment to understand that Ferrante has managed to do something for her female readers that many people haven’t, that she (violently) forces us to reconcile the violence of our lives, forces a catharsis on us, and then offers no closure. She opens up wounds, because she’s hurting, and we’ve been hurting in similar ways, but we didn’t know how or when to start talking about these wounds.
I want to tell you the women in your life who are reading Ferrante so passionately, it says something about *them* and not *you*, that allowing them to inhabit this emotional space Ferrante’s work builds is a hard earned comfort. Talk to them about what reading Ferrante does to them, what it brings out in them, and why do they keep returning to these beautiful, tender and angry books that leave them smarting every time.
But, as we both know, you stopped listening a long time ago.
Desolate,
B.
