Book review: Non è da tutti. L’indicibile fortuna di nascere donna

What I’m doing may seem to be just telling a story and in a way it is. . . . I am pursuing something which moves with time, in one direction or another and even sideways . . . and I follow it through words vividly coloured with meaning, like the colour of those fabrics which changes depending on the folds; even the personal pronouns mutate as in a dream so that now I am me, then I am them and then become us to later become me looking for you. (Non è da tutti, p. 71)

‘If you ask me what I think I’m doing by writing this book, I’ll tell you: I’m turning on a light’ (p. 34). This is precisely what Luisa Muraro intends to do in her book: she wants to show us the meaning of what is going on before our very eyes, to shed light on everything that remains confined in a dark ravine, to restore the correct features and dimensions to what has been altered or even distorted. By using a diligent and insidious metaphorical appropriation of femininity, man, a neutral universal subject of philosophical, scientific and theological papers, has somehow gained in substance and depth while woman has lost some of her symbolic substance, her recognizable countenance and often the capacity to reason. She remains in the dark.

‘Being a woman is a difficult human condition in itself’ (p. 13), and so it was for Marilyn Monroe, for the Nobel prize winner for literature Wislawa Szymborska, for our grandmothers, and still is for Women2drive (Saudi women who have started driving in protest at the law against women drivers), for Luisa Muraro herself and for those of us reading her book. More so for some and less for others.

Women, ever present everywhere, have long been inadequately represented by concepts that are too precise and categories that are too tidy to give real meaning to what they experience.

Let us beware of assuming the embarrassing stance of victims, the author advises us, as the female sex is not a victim of male wrongs, at all. Let us put it this way: throughout human history it is true to say that men have been, for much of the time and for too long, the absolute dazzling protagonists. Women have remained to one side, involved ‘elsewhere and otherwise, scarcely conspicuous’ (p. 21), much more discreet, much more modest. Opaque, just like everyday things. An elsewhere and an otherwise, which, at this point, must be taken into consideration and observed in the right light in order for us to understand human history better. Because if, after having meticulously counted various discoveries or masterpieces, someone should make the point that men have done more, we can object by saying ‘women had other things to do, such as working with the living or finding their reward in love’ (p. 72). We can, in fact, take a stance and say, as Luisa Muraro suggests, that ‘women had better things to do’ (p. 72).

Men are always on the hunt for tasks and adventures to show how great they are, and that would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that they leave behind them a trail of cans, barbed wire and carcasses. Greatness which is exquisitely feminine is another thing altogether, set between the ordinary things of life and very close to those most extraordinary things. It has nothing to do with success or prestige, nor those titles which stuff our mouths: indeed these are the very things one should adroitly avoid. Wherein then lies the greatness of women? It lies in the secret adventure of belonging to the female gender, suggests Luisa Muraro.

This is therefore the reason why the author has written a philosophical book reflecting the inflections of a daily, easy, energetic, happy language which we all learn from our mothers. The main issue is, in fact, simple. Just start from the beginning, from the starting point. Not so much from the logical foundation proposed by innumerable philosophers, but from a real, very concrete origin.

Being a woman is a fortuitous physiological situation, something accidental, it could even not have happened. But it happened and what a privilege! It is like being born into the nobility in ancient aristocratic societies: ‘you may not be born up to it, but just as you don’t deserve that rank in the same way you don’t lose it either’ (p. 14). A question of lineage, of genealogy, of birth. Greatness has been the prerogative of every woman right from the beginning and even more so from that very beginning because woman, who holds the glaringly obvious but ineffable key of life, is the generating force, the truth of being. Like ‘an everyday dress but designed by Valentino’ (p. 16). It is a privilege which you enjoy intimately, in your relationships with other women, in the great test of life. And when it becomes visible, wow, you see it. ‘It illuminates’ (p. 15) assures Luisa Muraro.

Brighter than any concept, more electrifying than any idea.

Victimism is out of place as ‘there is, within women themselves, something that exceeds comparison with men, something incomparable’ (p. 92). Luisa Muraro calls it excellence: something indomitable, incomparable, exorbitant, linked to the mystery of genealogy which is ‘the privilege which means that for a woman, the woman who is her mother blends with her own identity’ (p. 76). The excellence of a woman lies in ‘knowing how to stand up for herself in the presence of the world’ (p. 22). It cannot be demonstrated but can be recognized because, with simplicity, it allows itself to be seen. This happens when reality, even for an instant ‘becomes transparent to its invisible meaning, it is the invisible which appears and gives word to the indescribable’ (p. 42).

For this reason we must abandon concepts which are too precise and categories that are too tidy, free ourselves from speeches which blur the perception of truth, and put pressure on the meeting point between the planes of being, subjective–objective–singular–plural–real, etc., which that unilateral, somewhat tedious thought had separated. We must really live and feel the actual presence of things and people. We must know how to recognize this excellence which gives justice to women.

‘We are women and it isn’t for everyone’ (p. 12), the title declares resolutely. The same was said by Irina Petrescu, a factory worker who was made redundant because of the credit crunch, as she encouraged listeners in the square of a city in northern Italy. As the cold arrives, Irina doesn’t stay at home feeling sorry for herself but prepares cakes and pizza for her colleagues using recipes from her home country. This is the way, writes Luisa Muraro, that ‘those who find that meeting point between things that are so far apart, such as the deep intimacy of oneself and the global economy, win a leading role for themselves which is very different from the one of just being at the top of everything. It is at this point that we come to feel we really live’ (pp. 24–25).

A revelation, a grace. The discovery of being among the ordinary things and the extraordinary things of life but also in the elsewhere and the otherwise far from predictable places and rules. And being there with other women. And this is just how it happened. The quiet exchange between women has risen in volume and claimed its own normativity as being there with part of what happens close to the start of life and the world.

In the 1960s during a student political meeting ‘the subtraction of symbolic substance becomes tangible’ (p. 64). Some women separated off from the group to talk about things in a different way thereby releasing this sense of the difference of being female into the world. This simple gesture, consisting of powerful meaning, started off a bigger movement. Big enough to go right round the world. ‘A strong wind was blowing but those waves were also moved by deeper energy. I was there too’ (p. 65). It is the experience of a woman, who, only together with other women, can discover expressions, in among the tight-knit mesh of a language which does not fit with her needs, which can reflect her own meaning of herself and formulate her own desires. Luisa Muraro describes that experience in no strong terms and with great joy. ‘Just knowing that if I talk about myself, if I tell the story of my life, it will shift the axis of the world . . . and history books will tell their story in a different way’ (p. 33) because ‘if you are a woman you are wrong to think that you can be independent without it having repercussions on the world’ (p. 124). A personal story becomes a historical event. The world will not be the same. Real women, with desires who can speak, really exist.

I have turned on the light and the world has suddenly started to be populated with women, not only in my lifetime but, to my surprise also in history . . . women who have never given up on happiness, women to whom little mattered if they were seen as delusional, and they are right. (p. 69)

No longer opaque material but rather a sense of light, body and invention that twirl together. Because this, after all, is the heart of the question. Female excellence is not a hypothesis to test, or a postulate to demonstrate, or, even less, an enjoinment to be followed. It is being daily, electrifyingly incomparable.

To conclude, this book brings us an exalting promise: written in a sharp, yet ironic, and at the same time light hearted yet meticulous style, the author outlines the unexpected path opened up by women. This is a substantial decisive question which concerns the human dimension and the non-dimension of woman, which is exorbitant. In fact it is beyond both measure and the symbolic order which decrees the relationship between things and words, bodies and signs, desires and laws.

The illuminating and electrifying excellence of woman can be found elsewhere. In that place where a different order comes into being.