«La Punta della Lingua» is an international poetry festival, organized by the Marche Cultural Association Nie Wiem, which in almost twenty years of existence has broadened its scope of investigation from the lyric word in the strict sense to the different possible folds of language, including symbolic languages.
In the 2024 edition of the event, scheduled until July 2nd in various locations in the Marche region from Ancona to Fermo, a thematic section is dedicated to female poetry and languages over time; today, June 29th (at 7 pm, at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona) it proposes the presentation of the anthology Your voice manifests itself voices of twelve Iranian poets against censorship (in collaboration with Amnesty International Marche).
Also today and always at the Mole of Ancona, at 9.30 pm, the Frosini Timpano Company (Ubu Prize 2022) will perform the show Contempt for Women. The Futurism of the Species.
An American poet, at Harvard University, Amanda Gunn will bring her reading on July 2, at 7 pm, to the Church of Santa Maria di Portonovo in Ancona while a colleague of hers who lived in the nineteenth century, Annie Denton Cridge, has already been the protagonist in absentia of the national preview presentation of his book, A would you be okay? – Men’s Rights published by Argolibri, in the Rosa fresca Aulentissima series and translated for the first time into Italian by Stella Sacchini and Ilaria Mazzaferro.
We must be grateful to the publishing brand of Nie Wiem, an association that takes its name from the poetic refrain of a female author, Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish, very Socratic “I don’t know” that opens the doors to curiosity and therefore to philosophy, science, speculation; and indeed curiosity, but not in the cloying and gossipy sense of the vulgate, is a woman and Annie Cridge’s book, excellently introduced by Valeria Palumbo, fully demonstrates this.
The British author who emigrated to the States, very little known in Europe and not much investigated even overseas, an activist in the suffragette movement and a capable speaker, is considered a forerunner of feminist science fiction, precisely because of this book written in 1870; the novel consists of a supposed collection of dreams, the dreamlike travel diaries of the writer who tells of having visited extraterrestrial places (Mars in particular, the planet where fantasizing humans have always placed their imagination) where there is a matriarchal society mirroring that of the American one of the nineteenth century; a world where women hold the reins of society, hold top roles, legislate, study, decide. Men, on the other hand, are relegated to domestic and family care, do not vote, have atrophied brains and intellects like the body imprisoned in constrictive clothes.
Annie Denton Cridge manages at the same time to be very funny, polite, witty and, in the eyes of those who read her today, supremely disturbing as befits every correspondent on the edge of reality: the gaze on ridiculed, decorated, perhaps astute men is merciful but always unadorned because they lack any grace or glimmer of intelligence. She disdains the author and is moved by the first cries of male liberation struggle, promptly rebuffed and mocked by the gender hegemony in power. The description of women-only parliaments or what we would call female company boards, on which the pamphlet of political and socio-economic denunciation based on an absurd demonstration is centered, is effectively and dramatically science fiction even today.
Cridge’s work, and Palumbo’s analysis, open up to more than one gender reflection, not only sexual, but also literary; Would that be okay with you? (a clever title in its use of the human, rather than feminine, argument of empathy) falls within a trend that overflows the banks of what we consider science fiction and perhaps is more on the side of the Anglo-Saxon category of speculative fiction, characterized by plots that distance themselves from realism, regardless of the element of space or time, or the scientific and technological one. In any case, these are astonishing stories; Amazing stories it was also the title of the first American magazine of Science Fiction stories (created in 1926), then borrowed from two TV series: the first by Spielberg, in the 1980s, and a vague remake dating back to pandemic year 2020 broadcast by Apple TV+. Stories that are not always Martian but invariably disturbing, like those of the also successful, historic TV series The Twilight Zone, because the English amazing has in its etymology the maze, the labyrinth, the disorientating tangle.
And Annie Cridge disorients, because she shows reality through its reversal in a mirror, like Lewis Carrol in half Alicelike the wonderful classic and contemporary authors, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Angela Carter, of the book The Visionaries collection of twenty-nine stories chosen by the couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer: the best of fantasy fiction interpreted in a feminist key with a futuristic and/or surreal setting; short bildungsroman where sexual identity and power processes are constructed (published in Italy by Produzioni Nero in 2018, edited by Claudia Durastanti and Veronica Raimo).
If they also travel very well in the wake of speculative fiction Orlando by Virginia Woolf and all the stories of Daphne Du Maurier, and the narrative pretext of the dream is that of L.Frank Baum in Oz (as well as Martin Luther King), the phantasmagoric progenitor of these plots is Mary Shelley with her Frankenstein born in 1816; more than modern Prometheus or prequel to Pinocchioa futuristic dream of a different kind of motherhood, of the creative and generative power not necessarily of human beings, a theme on which the story of the Visionaries that in part Cridge’s reflection (which also touches in a non-trivial way on the current aspect of fashion and facial cosmetics) and where we forcefully return even today because the matter cannot be resolved; the demagogic outbursts of politicians, the serious and sometimes interrupted debates of intellectuals are periodically directed there (the case of Michela Murgia with Giving life), some new plots, such as that of Barbie by Greta Gerwig, others dredged up from the recent past: it happens with the Modest by Goliarda Sapienza who, in the revival of Valeria Golino and Viola Prestieri, in her voracious joy of living, is still capable of disturbing, not only men.
