When I was next to her, my mother was alone. Even though I was close to her, on the bus, at the table, in the waiting room of a clinic, my mother was alone. She was like that in the dining room, in the kitchen, she was like that when we walked home from school and I knew that being next to me or my sister meant nothing to her. She was a woman in apnea, because she didn’t feel loved by the only person she wanted to be loved by. She often cried, more often she commented in a small and anxious voice violence sufferedmade not of the body but of absence, neglect, rude phrases, debasement of his person, forced isolation from his family of origin, estrangement from friends, exclusion from the job he had hoped to resume one day but which, with the birth of his daughters, she had been banned forever.
For years it felt like I was holding my mother’s hand, telling her “Mom, I’m here, even if he doesn’t love you, I’m here.” I remember when she threatened to leave and I, terrified, ran to the left side of that double bed which seemed to me like an enormous raft, at the mercy of a storm from which no one would escape alive, “Mom, if you leave, take me with you.” you. Really, don’t leave me alone.”
Violence against women, those words that hurt more than a punch
by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
I imagine my mother as the right height only as a girl: green eyes, blonde, one meter sixty two. Then, getting married to the first and only man in her life, I see her shrink. From year to year, from minimization to debasement, my mother has shrunk, a decimeter, a centimeter, a millimeter at a time, in exactly the same way as one grows or ages, with that irregular speed that ensures that nothing happens for months or for years and then, suddenly, you wake up grown up, with short sleeves, sagging cheeks. At eighteen she reached my ankle.
The story of my mother and her gender violence, as I understood it as a child – before experiencing a completely different one, first hand, made up of unknown hands between the private parts on the bus, of comments in high school about sex with a partner (directed only to me, nothing to him) , of pressure from a boss to grant me more than my skills, of allusions to the fact that having become a mother implied that I could do without fulfilling myself at work – it is a story of inherited violence. Over time I understood that legacies are not just houses, clothes or junk: involuntary gestures, automatic phrases, violent thoughts are also inherited.
Italian writers united against gender violence
edited by the Culture editorial team
Second Emil Cioran, revenge is «a need, the most intense and profound that exists, something that everyone must satisfy, even if only with words». If deferred, it becomes an illness. Why am I talking about revenge? Because the story of gender violence is not just the story of a man against a woman, it is also of a woman against another woman, in a battle between victims, forced to fight against each other like dogs trained for war. So it was my paternal grandmother against my mother, my mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law. I remember my mother crouching at the corner of the entrance of a house that has now disappeared, while she handed me and my sister the receiver of the rotary telephone, “Listen to her – she said – listen to what your grandmother tells me”. We didn’t want to listen but absolute loyalty was required of us, to be on the right side. Her only compensation was the shared hatred towards that other woman, the contempt for my father. Now I know that I wasn’t able to love him fully because loving him meant betraying her.
Rosella Postorino: “If man thinks he can dominate us”
by Rosella Postorino
Yet, we need to dig, just a little, to discover how my grandmother also suffered one in her turn violencea victim of simply being born a woman. The grandmother was married at the age of eighteen because she was made lame by polio, hastily sold as a poor product to a much older man. The husband was gentle but the hatred originating from violence suffered ends up everywhere. You throw stones at the ghosts and, inevitably, you end up hitting those present, even those who were there by chance, the living.
The gender violence she is treacherous and the more invisible she is, without bruises on her face or broken bones, the daughter not of a single person but of a social structure, the more insidious she is. It is there, and yet it is also possible to deny it, you can say that it is not true, that you invented it: and all this only because the eye is not used to seeing it. I discovered the Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes years ago, the astonishing photographic series Landscapes in which, through the juxtaposition of the body, decorated to the millimeter with the same patterns as the selected background, it creates an effect of mimesis: the woman’s silhouette disappears and re-emerges, depending on the angle of the gaze.
Gender violence, languages that hate women
by Michela Marzano
They are tapestries of extreme beauty and yet, in my mind, I cannot separate from them the image of all the women in my life who, beyond the color of their skin and the clothes they would have loved to wear, have spent a good part of their existence trying to be women in the only way they could, working to become part of the background against which they were born, some remaining in a sad marriage, some taking revenge on other women. Making that woman visible who also camouflages herself, with the violence she suffered clear, seems to me to be the goal today.
The series. The body of women
This article, like others that we will publish, is part of a campaign in which writers and journalists have joined to denounce gender violence and name it. The initiative starts from an appeal by Giulia Caminito and Annalisa Camilli.
#Gender #violence #mother #invisible #eyes
– 2024-04-17 18:29:49
