“Michela was an intellectual,” he says Marcello Fois, writer and close friend of Michela Murgia. «She knew how to see the present for what it was and explain the conditions that determined it, and in the contemporary world she perceived a latent fascist mentality, the tendency to limit freedoms and she continued to denounce it despite the attacks she received. She was against the military commissioner during the pandemic and – as we read from her second posthumous book “Remember me as you like” released on April 30th by Mondadori Edizioni – he feared the conditions existed for the consolidation of fascist power».
In the same text that he has his editor write, Beppe Contafavi, he writes: “At twenty years old they asked us if we would die as Christian Democrats. I don’t care if I don’t have much time (he said these words a few months after his death, ed.): now I just wish fate didn’t have the nerve to make me die a fascist.” With irony he gets to the point. As on other occasions he saw the mechanisms with which the present is “activated” by those in power arriving, with careful analysis, at the threshold of the future; even going so far as to predict it. Starting from life experiences and his chronicles, he showed how those in power oriented a line of thought in a more or less subtle way, discrediting the others. He put himself on the front line. She did this by writing books and commentary articles, exposing herself to the risk of being attacked. When asked what Michela Murgia would have done when faced with the news that the second season of Insider, Roberto Saviano’s program on the mafia, would not be broadcast or that Antonio Scurati, on 25 April, would not be able to read his speech on Rai Tre on liberation from Nazi-fascism, Fois replies: «He would certainly have denounced these limitations on freedom of expression». And he adds «It is especially in these moments that we miss him…»
Michela Murgia’s new book written by her editor Beppe Contafavi was released at the end of April
Daughter, daughter of the soul, Catholic, student, reader, worker, politician, activist and mother in the broad sense, narrator first, writer then and intellectual. Michela Murgia describes herself like this in her latest book “Remember me as you like. In memory of me.” And Marcello Fois, a friend of hers for twenty years, confirms. But on the label of “narrator” she intervenes: «The narrator has a detached look, while she was always involved. I think she was more of a writer than a storyteller.” From her chapter dedicated to her experience as a daughter and soul daughter, to her chapter dedicated to her choice to form a family queer, up to the paragraphs in which she recounted the struggles she carried out with her books and her articles against the powerful with a single mind, an observer emerges who is as acute in analyzing the present as she is participatory, never indifferent. «She was unbeatable in this», continues Fois. «You read the facts and based on the contingent conditions you understood how they would develop. A capacity that characterizes intellectuals. She was and she expressed her ideas with courage.”
Ideas reiterated in the chapters of the new book from which his fight for freedom emerges. «She was for freedom and probably the fact that she didn’t have any until the end of her adolescence moved her to intervene when she saw other people’s skills reduced or suppressed. She probably would have wanted others to do it for her in her time.” She believed it was fundamental to choose who to have close to her in her life, she gave substance to her, with her example, to the family of choice, or queer, to which I belong. «The personal experience – that of having left her biological family, within which she was not allowed to self-determine, going to live with her uncles who gave her the opportunity to get involved, to study and to choose who to be – has marked”. AND led back to the freedom to choose themes such as motherhood (which in “Dare la vita”, his first posthumous book, he distinguishes from pregnancy) and the end of life. This framework also includes “freedom of thought and expression which for Michela were threatened”. In the thirteenth chapter, “Fascism and short memory”Murgia, supports what fascist thought remains in people’s minds, even though fascism officially no longer exists, and how it re-emerges in the form of discrediting attacks on divergent thinking and those who express it. Fois specifies: «Michela was harshly criticized for her book “Instructions for becoming fascists” (2018), for the questionnaire it contains, the “Fascistometer”. Public opinion was unleashed and a harsh comment also arrived from Matteo Salvini – who wrote: “I present to you the brilliant creator of the “Fascistometer”! If certain “intellectuals” didn’t exist, we would have to invent them…! At the time Salvini was Minister of the Interior and as such the weight of his comment directed the debate. The judgments came in cascades.”
With the author from Nuoro we start from this first episode of the past, which dates back to 2018, to talk about current events and recent episodes of limitation of freedom of expression. That of Roberto Savianowhich was not given the opportunity, in November 2023, to broadcast the second season of “Insider”, a television program on mafias, and the Antonio Scurati case when on 25 April this year Rai did not allow him to read his monologue on the liberation of the country from Nazi-fascism on television. «She, like other intellectuals who were not passive and not subservient to power, reiterated it. I agreed with her. In some ways it is a sign of a depressed democracy. Surely she would have intervened to help them and would have reported what happened.” To the question what were the difficulties he experienced as an intellectual Fois states, without hesitation: «Loneliness. When she was attacked, few supported her.”
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW WITH MARCELLO FOIS:
