A novel that looks to the past to explain the neuroses of the present, an idea born during a trip to an island that today is a celebrated tourist destination, but until a century ago it was a place from which men fled in search of luck and women broke their backs in the morning on the fishing boats and in the evening in the fields to avoid going hungry.
Not yet another story of female emancipation – even if the protagonists are predominantly women – nor a simple hymn to resilience, but a way to restore historical truth to a moment and a place in which being ‘female’ meant first and foremost be “aware of your role”.
“The inspiration came from a trip to Lipari in which I discovered the history of the fisherwomen and the testimonies collected by the anthropologist Macrina Marilena Maffei” says Francesca Maccani, author of ‘Agata del vento’ (Rizzoli, 304 pages, 17 euros) ” and from there a world opened up to me in which, against the background of events that actually happened, characters move that are equally real but full of suggestions, such as healers and fortune tellers, the so-called ‘majare’ considered by some to be like witches but still strong in a role that society itself recognized them“.
Women who “paradoxically compared to us women today were extremely free”, which one might say, it is necessary to tell in order to escape literary clichés. “I’m realizing that there is a lot of suffering in women subjected to very strong social and media pressure: they must be wonderwomen, but without complaining; they have to be ironic and cool and this load of social expectations causes them all to burn out a bit. There is a very contemporary suffering that derives from the loss of that idea that women once had of themselves and which was entirely focused on carrying forward their gift.”
Reading ‘Agata del vento’ one almost thinks that the women of the past could be a model for those of the present. “For the fact of being able to afford the luxury of being what they were while also enjoying the respect that went beyond aesthetic and social judgement, yes: they could be that model of strength and self-determination which today we are unable to carry forward” says Maccani, “We lack respect for the figures responsible for a basic social function – doctors and teachers – and the ability to broaden the spectrum of respect to social functions without limiting it to that of gender” .
Agata is not a character in line with the ‘Women of Acquasanta’, the workers of the Palermo tobacco factory who were the protagonists of the writer’s previous successful novel. “It’s a different way of telling a cross-section of women” says Maccani, “that one was more social and choral, this one instead contemplates another sensorial sphere compared to the male one, linked to magic, care, feeling and seeing things that others do not see or hear. Certain sensitivities that are part of a heritage that we are losing because we are moving away from it, too focused as we are on the judgment of others”.