While a women’s issue is stirring everywhere, there is a woman in the shadows whose voice grows in intensity. And while many compete to be seen, there is an almost invisible woman who increases her brilliance. There’s now an Emily factor. Emily Dickinson, the poet of Amherst, USA 1813-1886. It is also present in Italian culture. She appears everywhere. She will not experience the fate of Frida Kahlo, reduced to a shopper’s image. Democracy of art? No, reduction to entertainment, commerce. With Dickinson it’s more difficult, she’s elusive, even if Netflix has already made a series to reduce her to fashionable stereotypes. But she escapes. And it reappears where you don’t expect it. For example in a debut novel by a girl who, apparently, doesn’t look like her at all.
There are river books, air books, iron books. And burning books. One is this, by Flaminia Colella, published by La Lepre, Figlie dell’oro. Who I am ? And what is the gold we are talking about? And why does she, Emily Dickinson, appear in these pages as a guest guide? The book, very current, tells of a risky maturation until death, in a context of relationships – the wonderful and strange grandmother, a genius and terrible psychiatrist grandfather, a poignant love, figures of women on different levels of time – and of typical difficulties of our era: neurosis, difficult acceptance of death, of the body, of love. The writer, novelist and poet, leads the narrative and epistolary game with a strong and light style. She moves between clinics, lighthouses, oceans, the streets of Rome and Sicilian visions with a somewhat deadly effectiveness.
Who are the daughters of gold? In one of her poems, Dickinson says: “It was given to me by the Gods / when I was a child / they give us more gifts – you know / as soon as they arrive – and small.” The girl in Colella’s novel grows up with this “difference” but she must focus on its meaning, and what the gold is in all the suffering that she encounters and experiences, sometimes terrible. Is there gold in our life? In the confusions and despite the abysses? What makes existence precious, its success according to certain models, or a gift?
The most mystical and secret of the American voices of poetry (which not surprisingly fascinated Margherita Guidacci, Silvio Raffo, Giovanna Sica, Silvia Bre, Giuseppe Ierolli, to name some recent translators and admirers) continues to run with that gold between her fingers, enigma in time of the loss of all value and all splendor that is not artificial. “I held it in my hand / I never put it down / I didn’t dare eat or sleep / for fear that it would disappear / I heard words like “rich” / when I ran to school / from lips on street corners / and I held back a smile.(…) / I was rich / to take the name of gold / and to own the Gold in solid bars / The difference made me strong”. In the novel, the portrait of the protagonist and the other “daughters of gold” is striking on every page. Women capable of immense and daily suffering and grace, offered with levity. Then male gazes that come out of the fog and know how to see, and powerful and stunning places – like the author’s native Roman hills, neighbor, so to speak, of other strong narrators such as Picca and Mencarelli and yet completely different. There Dickinson found another sister.
