Shiva Akhavan Rad is an Iranian freelance journalist. She worked as a psychologist before starting to write about film and culture in local Iranian newspapers and magazines.
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonymous author of many books, including the four-volume Neapolitan Novels, which tell the story of two girls, Lila and Lenù, born in Naples in 1944, who try to create lives for themselves within a violent and repressive culture.
Here the two discuss protest, patriarchy and the power of women.
Rad Iranian women are living in a terrible condition. They take off their headscarves in protest against the mandatory hijab and walk the streets without covering their hair and without fear of arrest. Some of them go further and burn their headscarves and this is a sign of a big change in Iran.
In my opinion, being a woman in Iran is a political act. That’s why some people believe that the movement that has formed in Iran today is the first feminist revolution in the world, which introduced itself with the slogan “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (woman, life, freedom). We live in a patriarchal environment and after reading your Neapolitan Novels and seeing the TV series I felt many similarities between the atmosphere of Iran and the atmosphere of Italy at that time, and I strongly psychologically identified with the characters of Lila and Lenù.
I’m wondering what Lila and Lenù would do if they lived in Iran in these turbulent days? Or what would you do if you lived in Iran?
Ferrante What can I tell you? Lila would certainly be in the frontlines, and Lenù, in order to keep up, in order not to miss anything , would follow her, even to prison, and to death.
As for me, I would be ashamed to make any claims: I’m far away and in a safe place. But for weeks I’ve been following what is happening.
The repressiveness is terrible, but it’s wonderful that people so diverse in age and in social class and culture are standing side by side, resisting.
I find the centrality of women especially exciting. The motivations of Iranian women are the just and pressing motivations of all those who today, in Iran and in the world, fight for dignity and autonomy, for the freedom to decide how to dispose of their own bodies, their own lives. I am moved in particular by women who expose themselves to danger wholeheartedly, with absolute determination. To demonstrate at the risk of one’s life takes great courage, extreme desperation, a glimmer of hope.
I’ve always admired those who openly confront the violence of power, and I always wonder if I would be capable of it. I think of myself as timid, but I can’t tolerate anyone who instils fear in me. Citizens should strike fear into their repressive rulers: the opposite enrages me. And rage, in general, makes me forget fear.
Thus – I imagine – if I were there, I would be in the streets, like Lila, with passion and rage; but also like Lenù, out of duty, the need to see, to understand and try to describe.
Rad In the first volume of the quartet, My Brilliant Friend, Lila tells Lenù about her conversation with Pasquale: “He explains about the things that happened before us… We don’t know anything, neither when we were children nor now. Therefore, we are not in a position to understand anything.”
I think one of the main themes of the novel is that we don’t learn from what happened in the past, therefore we repeat the historical mistakes of the previous generations. Lila understands that her parents know nothing about the past and the history of Italy, neither about fascism, nor about justice, oppression and exploitation. Lila is looking for historical awareness, but she is a victim of a traditional family system, patriarchal society, and the criminal gangs like Camorra. I think history is important in the lives of these characters.
In Iran, the freedom movement and the struggle against tyranny have been always there since the constitutional revolution. Progressive and national forces, as well as the leftists, have always been suppressed by different governments, however the people’s struggle for freedom has continued in various forms throughout history. And now the young generation is moving again on another path to reach freedom.
In your opinion, how can this historical awareness help the women’s movement in Iran and their emancipation? Is it possible for them to skip the historical mistakes and not fall into the pit again?
Ferrante Education is fundamental. Studying, remembering and self-analysis are indispensable for making a conscious choice about the form we wish to give our life. Put like that, though, it’s too linear. We mustn’t forget that every human being is a tangled knot. Different eras, incompatible beliefs, contradictory feelings are all mixed up in us.
Here in Europe we tend to simplify the complexity of our pathway to freedom. When we think we’ve won we set aside the pain, the inconsistencies, the unresolved problems.
Yet the history that is truly useful to us women is not the history that seems like a triumphal march but, rather, the history that reminds us of the sufferings and injustices endured by past generations: the history ensuring that we render justice to them, that we not delude ourselves on our victories, that we start again after our defeats, and that we remain aware that every generation, even though it learns from the preceding generations, ends up making its own mistakes. We have to be vigilant. No triumphalism.
In the west we believe we’ve won certain rights definitively, forgetting that no right – especially for us women – is ever truly won.
Rad Italy has a strong tradition of socio-political literature. In Italy, many novels with socio-political and antifascist contexts were written by influential writers such as Ignazio Silone, Cesare Pavese and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Your novels are also created in the same context. Have any of these Italian writers inspired you?
In your opinion, what is the difference between your works and their works and why they are so popular in Italy and around the world?
Ferrante I learned from women writers more than from men: Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Alba de Céspedes, just to mention a few names from the generation before mine.
As for my books, I don’t know: I tried to describe the effort made by the women of my generation to invent for themselves – I would insist on “invent for themselves” – a life not subordinate to the culture and power of the patriarchy.
Rad Is there a particular reason you write under a pseudonym? Maybe you feel the same way as Lila, who after going through her tragic experiences, writing and fame become a trivial and humble preoccupation for her?
I mean, you came to this mentality that fame is not important and that writing anonymously is a kind of rare growth in overcoming fame. Maybe Lila, who is missing and no one knows about her, is now a famous writer who writes under a pseudonym.
Ferrante The answer today, as I’m writing to you, seems simple: I did it because avoiding success and fame is one of the many ways of feeling totally free. But I also have a slightly more complicated answer.
One is not an author full time. For example, in daily life I do many other small things that are important to me. The urge to write is my moment of greatest truth. I call that moment Elena Ferrante, which for me, and for readers, is my true and only name.
Rad It seems that the character of Lila is a woman whose perception of life goes beyond her time and always sees distant horizons, although this does not prevent her from making mistakes, suffering and being a victim – on the contrary, she seems to suffer the most. Is it because you have breathed your soul into this character and that you have had difficult and painful experiences in your life like her?
Ferrante My life story is unimportant. For the most part, Lila resembles some complicated women I’ve known and loved, but who are also, at times, hard to take.
What can I tell you about them? They are extraordinary and difficult people, seductive and terrible. Their lives are filled with prolonged sufferings and sudden joys; they’re too sensitive. They move quickly and unpredictably, even though they seem motionless. And you can’t really hold on to them even when you try to contain them in writing.
Of course, to describe Lila I also drew on myself, on the part of me that I know least and which frightens me. But if I hadn’t settled inside the more controllable Lenù, I wouldn’t have been able to write about Lila.
Rad One of the interesting characters in your novel is Antonio, who eventually saves himself from the brink of lunacy and moves to Germany. Now that I look at it, I see that your novel is full of sub-narratives that are deeply explored in the heart of the main narrative and full of melancholic and bitter characters whose lives are literally tragic, and it is your genius in story writing that astounds me.
You are the master of creating introverted characters with many complexities such as Antonio, Enzo and Lenù. Did you take these characters from real life or are they coming from your imagination?
Ferrante I’ve known them all quite well, for ever. They’ve had chaotic lives, with a lot of inconsistencies and dark corners, as happens in reality. But real human beings are not in themselves a guarantee of solid literary strength. You can bring them into a story only if you find a way of treating them with imagination. Without imagination they struggle to find meaning.
Rad You have said once in an interview that violence is a male thing, but the violence that is taking place in Iran today is not only against women, but men are also the victims of state violence and domestic violence. For example, women who cheat on men are actually committing some kind of violence. May I have your opinion on this?
Ferrante We women, wherever we are in the world, are immersed in male culture from birth. Language is male, the family is male, religion is male, laws are male, government institutions are male, literature is male, the arts are male, the sciences are male, education – both male and female – is male.
What do I mean? I mean that, in all of our manifestations – even the perception of our body, even maternity – we assume the form of a woman through the forms that patriarchal domination has invented for us over millennia. Everything that I, a woman, seek to express moves necessarily from within the male tradition, and violence is no exception.
Let’s admit even that female adultery is a form of violence against one’s partner. Well, it’s a violent act that the woman carries out from within a completely male concept of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, a concept based essentially on obsessive surveillance of the female body.
It’s this basic violence that makes us feel female betrayal as a violent act and a sin, in this case punishable by death. (Male betrayal is generally regarded sympathetically, considered a manifestation of excessive manly vitality: it’s legitimatised.)
Even today, in Italy, a woman who betrays or abandons her partner for another man puts her life in danger. No, no, we have to train ourselves not to take the male for the universal. The human race doesn’t exist: the female race exists, sealed for millennia within the rules of the male race, within the patriarchal culture, which is slow to die even among the most sensitive men, those who stand beside us, with our aims.
Even when we women do violence – and now I’m talking not about adultery but about violence in general – we do it according to forms that were designed by men and based on male anxieties and fears. Our forms of violence – if they exist, and I hope not – have still to be invented.
Rad Slavoj Žižek, the political thinker, recently in reaction to women’s protests in Iran said: “What goes on now in Iran has a world historical significance: it combines different struggles (against women’s oppression, against religious fundamentalism, for political freedom against state terror) into an organic unity.
“Iran is not part of the developed west, so the slogan ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ is very different from MeToo in western countries: it mobilises millions of ordinary women, and it is directly linked to the struggle of all, men included – there is no anti-masculine tendency in it, as is often the case with the western feminism. Women and men are together in it, the enemy is religious fundamentalism supported by state terror.”
What is your comment on this?
Ferrante On the whole I agree with Žižek: the adversary is religious fundamentalism, the struggle crosses all boundaries, includes different classes, men and women, etc. But be careful not to forget, in putting together these alliances, that it’s Iranian women who are the engine of the protest.
Every women’s fight today has an inevitable core that in my view is the following: we will never be truly free as long as we have to express ourselves, in every field, from within forms of life that are essentially male. What is the gender of those who oppress us, who build despotic theocracies, who deny us our rights?
Even when we rebel at the cost of our lives, even when we are the absolute protagonists of our rebellion, we have to beware of the male categories we’re in danger of using to account for ourselves and our rebellion. We have to criticise those categories and search for new ways, our own.
Rad Italian society has experienced the terrible era of Mussolini’s fascism and dictatorship, and we have been experiencing similar dictatorship in Iran for years. So I would like to ask you how much you sympathise with the rebellious young Iranians who are fighting against this dictatorship. And are you willing to support them? Do you have a message for them?
Ferrante Every struggle that calls for the right to live our own life, assuming total responsibility for our choices and not giving anyone the authority to choose for us, is just and should be fully supported.
For what it’s worth, I am on the side of your struggle, especially on the side of women’s right to design in complete freedom their own way of being in the world, whatever it is.
Your battle has gone beyond national borders, and is carrying its specific nature into the struggle of all the women in the world. You remind us yet again that no right is for ever, and that the primary objective of power, behind the mask of cruelty, as well as that of benevolence, is always to impose on us new forms of servitude.
Rad Lila and Lenù are struggling to have a normal life. They don’t want to go through the same route as their mothers and the other women of Naples. In this sense there is a similarity between them and Iranian young women who fight for a normal life. We Iranian women have longed for a normal life for many years.
I lived with the Neapolitan Novels and many times I imagined that there must be a hope for Lila. I wish her life was not so bitter and sad. There seems to be no source of tranquillity for Lila’s super tragic life. If there is, what is it?
Ferrante In Lila there is all the need for and all the anxiety about change. It’s as if she were saying: my situation is intolerable, I have to change it, but I grew up in it and if I disrupt it I leave behind not only sorrows but also affections and routines; rebelling is not only good for me but also harmful.
Lila, in other words, demonstrates that it’s not easy to go beyond the margins in which we’re confined, and how painful it is – not only joyful – to force open, amid innumerable contradictions, the cages we’ve been shut up in.
Will she find peace? No, peace is for those who can settle for partial freedoms. It’s her nature always to seek new limits to overcome, and no matter how hard Lenù tries to stay with her, she’ll lose sight of her in the end.
Rad Did you have a teacher or mentor like Pasquale in your life that introduced Lila to fascism, Nazism, and communism?
Ferrante Yes, a woman friend of mine. But late, when I was around 20.
Rad Did you have a real-life figure like Lila or Lenù that inspired you? Lenù who thinks nothing really important would ever happen to her without Lila.
Ferrante Yes, especially in regard to the capacity to persuade yourself to act in a way that on your own would frighten you. Women like Lenù are much more numerous than those like Lila, and that’s good.
Lila is a permanent goad. In her everything originates but nothing is settled. She always lives, painfully, within the metamorphosis, and precisely while it’s taking place.
Lenù, on the other hand, is the new form that is established after the change. In her the metamorphosis becomes stable, gradually revealing the progress that has been made and, at the same time, its inadequacy.
Rad Thank you so much for your time and hope to see you somewhere in the world.
This interview first appeared in Cine-Eye online film journal
Translation from the Italian to English by Ann Goldstein
To order a copy of The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante’s most recent novel, go to guardianbookshop.com