Us and feminicides: Murgia’s battle over language

It begins with a list of numbers, a terrible and sad list, I killed her because I loved her.” False!the pamphlet on feminicide (it was a new word then, we’ll come back to it) which Michela Murgia e Loredana Lipperini published for the first time ten years ago, and which is now back as the latest issue (at 8.90 euros in addition to the price of the newspaper) of the series that Republic dedicated to Michela Murgia’s books after her death last August.

It begins with a list of numbers which are those of the women killed in 2012 and the times in which the media spoke about them: a count that begins on January 1st with two young prostitutes killed “with blows of a bottle and a knife” and continues until count over a hundred victims. It starts with the data but does not stop with the data, on the contrary, it moves on to language: to the way in which these murders – in cold blood, because killing someone is not a sudden act but a planned action carried out to the end – are told: a collective story, of individuals and the media, which has enormous social consequences and which has its roots – a chapter is dedicated to this – in a cultural heritage that inextricably links love and death (of women), from literature to ‘opera.

Exemplifying the way in which killing a woman is declassified as a consequence of a fit (and thus justified) is precisely the phrase with which the book opens, which we have heard repeated – with small variations – by the culprits, by their relatives, by their lawyers: «I was jealous. I didn’t want him to leave. I loved her more than my life. He was in a fit.”

Murgia, who worked until the end on changing the language with which we build society, together with Lipperini starts right from here: from the need to dismantle the equivalence between jealousy and love and between murder and love, to bring to the surface violence and oppression, and propose a new collective education. The two authors start from a lemma, explaining how, as they write, «the word feminicidefinally, it has become commonly used, albeit with infinite distinctions, and has emerged from the restricted circles of scholars and activists”.

While for the first time in Italy we have a government led by a woman (who asked at the beginning of the mandate to be called il Prime Minister) in these pages which date back a decade we read far-sighted words: «If you stand in the elections without a program regarding women’s rights, I will not vote for you just because you belong to the female gender», demonstrating how much road is missing because the rights have political representation. And while the echo of the mobilization created by Giulia Cecchettin’s crime does not die down, here we read: «Feminicide is called this precisely because it defines a type of crime that takes place within relationships impregnated with an archaic cultural structure, which is not yet it dissolves (…) we also have to deal with this, we also have to learn this: not to say “it doesn’t happen to me nor to those I know””.

So, let’s read this I killed her because I loved her” False! following the entire argumentative thread starting from the central point. Despite the denials, and the accusation of wanting to foment war between the sexes, an undeniable fact remains ten years ago and today. Women continue to die for the same reason: «I leave you, I will leave you, I would like to leave you, I left you but I agree to see you again. And he, that meek and desperate man – because, for him, there are adjectives – arrives at the appointment with a knife or a gun or a can of petrol, or with just his hands. Either mine or no one’s.” And he kills.