Daria Bignardi: the new book tells the drama of prisons

In 2016 the manga was published in a Japanese weekly Beastars: a world populated by civilized animals, who seem to be live together in peace despite a marked distance between carnivores and herbivores. The former are prohibited from consuming animal meat but the latter this is not enough to feel safe. The protagonist is a lupoLegoshi, who tries to fight his instincts from carnivorous. In the manga there are two elements that deserve attention and which, as we will see, surprisingly intertwine the latest book Daria Bignardi, Every prison is an island (Mondadori, 2024).

The first is uselessness and, then, the cruelty of the repression it becomes segregation: in the manga, the black meat market was the place where excellent carnivores in society, poor beggars and exploited workers, met to give life to their instincts, expressing all the pain that they were forced to hide. The second is the fascinating and insidious illusion of a world divided in a geometrically perfect way between good and bad.

In Bignardi’s volume these two elements, the uselessness of repression that becomes segregation and the illusion of good contrasting with evil, dialogue with each other in a stimulating way, ranging between personal experience and collective experience.

The book, the result of years of Volunteering inside Italian prisons, especially at Saint Victor of Milan, is a skein of storieswhere even the smallest existence (like that of the pitches on the island of Linosa) offers a key to understanding the reality in which we find ourselves living. Just as insects end up becoming friendly presences in the silence of a cell, so the shots force visitors to Linosa to live with their mocking rubbing.

In the islands of Bignardi there is the power of nature that imposes itself on the passage of man, but there is also the exact opposite: later built on pristine lands to force residents of yesterday and prisoners of today to sense the horizon without being able to see it, locked inside their that humid.

Pain confined to an island has two possibilities: it can give way to oblivion or it can be intercepted in time. If you read the statistics on the prison world (61 deaths since the beginning of the year, of which 25 or 26 suicides) you can imagine which of the two hypotheses has the upper hand. Yet, to the question of Doctor C. on what prison represents for her, Bignardi replies: «It’s not that I like prisons, on the contrary. But inside there is the essence of life: love, pain, friendship, illness, poverty, injustice…”.

Bignardi will write that he corrected the order of the words, anticipating love over pain, almost as if he had to control himself in front of those who ask him to account for so much participation. Full sincerity, moreover, seems to be a distinctive feature of these beautiful pages, where we question ourselves about that adolescent obsession towards Count of Monte Cristo or towards Scotty, the American death row inmate to whom he writes long letters. The author, today, clarifies “I no longer have any fascination for prisons”.

And you have to believe it, especially if you have visited prison at least once in your life. The fascination is understandable, but it barely lasts as long as a TV series. Then, when you pass the assistants’ booth, provide your personal details and leave your cell phone, the seduction of what is obscure is engulfed by anguish for those confined in such violent places. We cannot ignore the brutality of the prison system, otherwise we risk accepting as fatal a punitive mechanism that endlessly reproduces mortification and death. But as long as it exists, as long as the prison continues to persist on our islands and on our continents, then it is good that a breach is opened in the anonymous fog in which it is immersed and it becomes a story, a poem and why not, a novel. Like that of Bignardi, in fact.

The stories found there add pieces to the collective history of an Italy that has often told its different seasons in an approximate way. Think of the very unfortunate definition of years of lead for a decade, moreover, very rich in vitality, creativity and very important reforms. But from the stories of those who participated in the “armed struggle”, Bignardi moves on to a reflection on those who crowd prisons today: drug addicts, migrants and poor souls of all ages. They are the inhabitants of these islands of bars, the victims of abuse who, for example during the pandemic, found their death where there should have been protection and assistance.

At the same time Bignardi cannot help but recognize the non-hell (Italo Calvino) of prison and rightly dedicates space to it. To the events of former prisonersthe stories alternate with the laboratories in the Bollate institute, the open cells, the possibilities found inside a section of San Vittore called Nave, born more than twenty years ago, from the idea of psychologist Graziella Bertelli and the former director Luigi Paganoanother important entry in this book.

Prison is an island because it is often considered to be distant and, in a certain sense, self-sufficient. But no matter how much we try to push it further and further away, it, if only from a geographical and morphological point of view, belongs like every island to a continent.

Perhaps for this reason, Legoshi, the wolf of that Japanese manga, at a certain point in the story he understands that it cannot be the border that determines peace on that land: even before being carnivores or herbivores, he will tell his companions, we are living beings. And from that mutual recognition something new, perhaps, will finally be born.