Abstract
Reviewed by: Brian Tholl, Rutgers University, USA
Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s The Mafia in Italia Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and their Geographies examines the role of the mafia in Italian culture and society through the analysis of and comparison to a wide range of sources, including novels, diaries, films, testimonies, and online media, all of which are read through the lens of spatiality. Foregrounded by the theory of writers such as Iain Chambers, Donatella Mazzoleni, and Edward W. Soja, Pickering-Iazzi seeks to illustrate and explore the urban mafia geographies, both concrete and imagined or desired, that pervade these texts. The book furthermore focuses on women writers, whose voices have been marginalized or outright ignored in volumes on the mafia and organized crime, thus contributing to a gendered discussion on the mafia, which at times is explicit in the volume and other times not.
In the first chapter, Pickering-Iazzi considers Gabriella Badalamenti’s Come l’oleandro, a contemporary mafia legend – inspired by the life of Faro Badalamenti – that she suggests is “a reconstruction of social conflicts between mafia and antimafia camps generating the macrogeography of Italy in the 1990s” (p. 24). She convincingly analyzes female agency within the mafia, demonstrating how mafia women, as well as Badalamenti, perpetuate the myth of an archaic mafia that represents honor, family, and loyalty. Although Badalamenti constructs a mafia legend, which is furthermore tied to local geography and identity through the relationship between don Faro and Mount Pecoraro, Pickering-Iazzi argues that she also succeeds in deconstructing the legend, allowing us to better imagine and understand mafia criminality.
In the second chapter, Pickering-Iazzi analyzes Amelia Crisantino’s Cercando Palermo and its “(non)sense of place.” She illustrates how the characters’ heterogeneous and dissonant ways in which they imagine Palermo, as well as the sociospatial relations that make it up, are critical in shaping the way in which the city – and the South, by extension – is viewed, especially with regard to criminality. We may consider Palermo, then, through its “geographies of (in)justice” (p. 87), mapping it as a site in which to consider questions of ethics, trauma, and memory.
The third chapter is dedicated to Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia, which Pickering-Iazzi reads as a form of postmodern impegno. Through the analysis of the desert-like spaces of the novel, she underlines how abandonment, violence, and the destruction of human agents have literally blighted the landscape of Gela. For Pickering-Iazzi, however, Cutrufelli’s novel is not solely an indictment of the forces that created this desert landscape. Instead, she proposes that the novel shows how individual and collective resistance to criminal desertification can pave the way for change.
In the fourth chapter, Pickering-Iazzi considers mafia geographies of voicelessness. By voicelessness, she intends the absence of the physical voice of those who opposed and were killed by the mafia. Silvana La Spina’s L’ultimo treno da Catania “makes present” the absence of the voice of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who was murdered on 3 September 1982. Pickering-Iazzi focuses on the significance ascribed to the silent presence of “the general,” as he is referred to in the novel, ultimately arguing that La Spina’s novel represents not a counternarrative of justice, but rather, a narrative of injustice, implicating the state in the murder of Dalla Chiesa “in the ethical, if not juridical sense” (p. 151).
The fifth and final chapter stands apart from the previous four given that Pickering-Iazzi moves to the realm of online testimony. The author first considers the diaries of Rita Atria, a protected state witness in a mafia investigation, who took her own life a week after the murder of antimafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, with whom she was working. Pickering-Iazzi argues that Rita Atria’s diary marks the site of psychic trauma, acting as her own personal witness, and also a crucial document in her (re)formation of identity. Pickering-Iazzi also examines Gabriella De Fina’s No al pizzo, a collection of testimonies from thirteen witnesses who perform antimafia geographies in the narration of their life stories. In the final section of the chapter, Pickering-Iazzi delves into the online spaces of antimafia communities. The shift may seem a bit unnatural, or out of place, but Pickering-Iazzi convincingly shows how the virtual presence of antimafia organizations and activity can translate into offline civic engagement.
The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature: Life Sentences and their Geographies is a valuable and original contribution to mafia studies, and promises to force scholars and readers to think about (anti)mafia culture in previously underdiscussed contexts. One hopes that Pickering-Iazzi continues her exploration of the expanding cartographies of microgeographies, mapping the various challenges of mafia texts and the resistance to criminality in Italy and throughout the world.