Michelle Murgia she’s dead. The feminist writer and cultural agitator originally from goats (Oristano) was 51 years old. A few months ago he gave an interview where he claimed to suffer from renal cell carcinoma to the fourth stage and that from there “there was no turning back”. Many today remember her as the champion of a radical feminist battle – “a path to fight against gender discrimination” – then recently transformed into the broad concept of “queer family” celebrated with a “not marriage”, but it is only since 2019 that the Sardinian writer begins to devote herself completely to this identity re-construction of content and language.
Thanks to a couple of essays written with Chiara Tagliaferri – Morgana: Stories of girls your mother wouldn’t approve of e Morgana: The rich man is me (both published by Mondadori) – and in another essay from 2018 – Hell is a good memory (Marsilio) – Murgia denounces the never questioned existential and identifying condition of the masculine that has characterized the literary imagination and the language of everyday life, relegating the woman to the role of random supporting character. “We are feminists if we rebel against the feminist condition as destiny, but we are equally feminists if we claim that generativity as foundational and live it as a specific way of being in the world, regardless of whether we have children or not. less,” he wrote in 2018.
See also
Michela Murgia, images of queer marriage: no gender dresses and ring on the finger for the whole family – VIDEO
In fact, 2019 is the time for a grammatical intuition that attempts to revolutionize the Italian language: the schwa. In the books written with Tagliaferri he explains: “Where it was possible we therefore chose to do not use the overextended masculinewhich traditionally claims to also represent the female gender, and we replaced it with the fonema schwa, which gives rise to a neuter plural”. In a famous video clicked millions of times Murgia tells how the neo-phoneme should be pronounced: “If you want to pronounce it you don’t have to learn any extraneous sounds: you have already done it singing the songs of Pino Daniele (I know crazy, it’s Naples) or correctly saying English words like about, sister, other”. Even before the 2013 essay on feminicide – I killed her because I loved her: false! – is from 2011 the key book to understand the cultural and ideological transformation of the Sardinian author. It is with Ave Mary – and the church invented the woman (Einaudi) that Murgia, a former activist of Catholic Action and former teacher of religion (in 2007 he even supported the candidacy of Mario Adinolfi for the secretariat of the Democratic Party), radically criticizes the role of women in the narration imposed by Catholic church. And he does it in an overwhelming way even if tinged with irony (often in his books he deforms or quotes pieces of Italian pop music in the manner of Lella Costa) starting, for example, from the representation of death in sacred stories, as in books and films: always a death in the masculine, but where is that of the woman?
Curious, however, that the Murgia reaches one anti-patriarchal battle e anti masculine after an important albeit rapid career as a novelist but above all after having made her debut as a perfect stranger denouncing, always with an amused and irreverent attitude, the criminal follies of the neoliberal world of work. At the age of 35 she had in fact risen to the honors of the national news in 2006 when she published for ISBN (today reprinted by Einaudi which has published almost all of its subsequent titles) The world must know – Tragi-comic novel of a precarious telephonist. A sort of acrobatic and somewhat crazy denunciation of the exasperated and frenzied pace of work in the precariousness of a call center of a US multinational. A story in the form of auto fiction with her period of work as a telemarketer for Kirby at the center, which will later become the plot for the film by Paolo Virzì, Whole life ahead.
See also
Michela Murgia shaves her hair and publishes the video on social media: “It looks like a party, but with friends, my son and the sun, what else could it be?”
To tell the truth, Murgia would have liked to become a novelist tout-court. And to tell the truth, she had even succeeded with an important first film such as Accabadora (2009, Einaudi). Award-winning novel Campiello, as well as translated into numerous languages, Accabadora is set in a small Sardinian town in the fifties where a little girl is taken care of and hosted in the house by the old seamstress of the town, a woman who hides an ancient and profound mystery concerning the ridge between life and the death. There is something creepy about this dark novelsomething between the charm of the esoteric and the roughness of the anthropological which already seems to silhouette against the light in the literary horizon two female figures in the round, with almost no men, able to forge an imaginary of readers declined to the feminine, above all with the brutal reference to the topic/taboo of euthanasia.
Strong there too anti-fascist component in the post 2011 Murgian corpus complete with collaborations and duets with Roberto Saviano and numerous public interventions in newspapers, radio, web and TV to underline their linguistic, cultural and ideological intuitions. Murgia had also run several times in politics: in 2010, still far from the feminist revolution, she said she was close to Sardinian independentism and in the 2014 regional elections she was a candidate at the head of three formations that today many would define as “populist”, collecting 10% of votes; while in 2019 her candidacy for the Europeans for The left it got 1.75%. Murgia was married from 2010 to 2014 with Manuel Persico from Bergamo, and she then remarried with a “not marriage” in 2023 with 35-year-old Lorenzo Terenzi. THE traditional weddings “are the most fascist thing that exists”, explained the Sardinian writer – “and they deny the will, the wonderful specialty of loving someone in an absolutely free way, without depending on any genetic destiny”. At the ceremony all in white with the logo “god save the queer” printed in red on the clothes of the participants – a reference, among other things, to his last book of the same name – there were not only the most loyal Clare Valerio e Clare Tagliaferrimembers of the Murgian queer family, but also Saviano, Nicola Lagioia e Teresa Ciabatti.