The Right Person at the Wrong Time – Michela Murgia (1971-2023)

Michela Murgia – a very fine writer, and probably the most widely known feminist public intellectual within the Italian cultural landscape of the last couple of decades – died at the beginning of last month. She wasn’t very well known abroad, not even simply as a writer (her most widely acclaimed and awarded novel, Accabadora, was translated into English, and got some appreciative reviews, but that was it). I think she deserved to be, but that’s another story, and it’s now a bit too late for a celebratory obituary anyway. What I would instead like to share with you are two thoughts about how much potential the role she decided to incarnate as a public intellectual had…and yet how little it seemed to make a dent beyond the usual suspects.

Murgia was not a typical member of the intellighentsia. She was born and raised in provincial, almost rural Sardinia, in a very modest if not even poor family. As a teenager, she was taken in by by another family as a filla de ànima (a ‘soul-child’), a traditional Sardinian practice of informal adoption (more on this below). She went to a technical school; held many precarious jobs including a position in a call-centre and as an estate-agent for timeshare properties; and ended up being a religion teacher in secondary schools for several years before starting her literary career. If you listened even barely carefully every time she spoke, you could never really overlook this. And not just because she denounced the poor conditions of some of those precarious jobs in a number of public interventions and books (one of which was turned into an excellent film): Murgia went back to her Sardinian roots even when, on the contrary, she wanted to make some of her positive and most radical points. The tradition of having fill@s de ànima was, to her, one of the very first forms of unconventional, indeed queer, family models – before that idea even existed within liberal discourse. Fill@s de ànima were taken in by families other than their natural ones, often as older children or teenagers, and typically with a keen attempt to maintain the bond with the natural family (like in a permanent foster relationship of sorts). It was an extremely sophisticated informal institution, which delicately balanced different values. This was primarily done because the natural family was extremely poor, but could also happen (if still primarily in a context of poverty) because the child didn’t “fit in.” and didn’t get along with the family of origin. Murgia hinted more than once at the fact that several queer children and teenagers probably found a a way to survive thanks to the practice. Murgia’s advocacy for LGBTQ rights often ended up making references to fill@s de ànima – as a way of reminding conservatives that we should be careful when we invoke traditions in general and the “traditional family” in particular, because we might be surprised. Her point was that there are incredibly surprising, respectful, refined and careful progressive practices to be found in the places we never even look at, because we take for granted how backward they must be. A similar thing is true about the figure of the accabadora (the “finisher” in Sardinian, which shares many words and roots with Spanish) – a woman who, again according to Sardinian traditions, would be called in by families when someone was terminally ill and in great pain, to help them die in the most pain-free and dignified way possible. Again, her interventions on euthanasia never failed to make reference to the existence of this practice in rural Sardinian communities. In fairness, the jury is out on whether accabadore ever really existed – but the very fact that a culture might invent such a figure would be meaningful in and of itself.

In a nutshell, then, Murgia was the incarnation of intersectionality, standpoint epistemology, and (God forbid!) Rawslian political liberalism at the same time (she would have of course hated the latter label, she didn’t see herself as a liberal in the least). She often tried to show – and out of personal experience at that – that we do not need to dismiss our traditions to advocate progressive ideas. On the contrary, radical thoughts can be found where you least expect them.

The second feature I would like to mention is the sheer joy that permeated nearly all her interventions and public appearances. Just do a quick image search on Google, and see that contagious, mischievous smile nearly always printed on her face. And this was not a mannerism – in a way, all that Murgia ever spoke about was love. There was some bitter denunciations of working conditions in the modern world and of the official Catholic hierarchy – for a feminist intellectual and advocate there are always plenty of opportunities to be angry; but most of her work was about advocating for acceptance (of women, LGBTQ people, etc.) whilst showing that most cultures might already contain the roots for such an acceptance within themselves. Indeed, Murgia was a firm Christian believer throughout her life, and always hoped that this kind of acceptance could one day occur within the Catholic Church, as well. Even the accabadora was always portrayed (read her beautiful novel!) as a figure of love.

And yet, beyond the usual suspects – who probably would have listened to what she had to say even she had been a typical member of the intellighentsia – these features of her personality, personal story, and advocacy seem to have gone unnoticed. The conservative media never stopped portraying her through the stereotypical lenses of the bitter, angry, radical feminist intellectual with no connection to the real world. After she died, many conservative intellectuals, journalists, and politicians pointed out how sorry they felt, not only about the fact that her life was cut short before her time, but also about how “filled with hate” it had sadly been. I cannot even begin to explain how much cognitive dissonance I experience when I hear the term hate in conjunction with Murgia. Yes, she made some angry, passionate interventions on some topics. But her style was one of joy and love through and through – if with some mischief. She spent the last months of her life (whilst terminally ill) opening up to the public, with a  couple of in-depth interviews, about the nature of her own, multi-faceted, queer family (including several fill@s de ànima) – to show that it can and does work. Hate and vitriol is what she herself received from certain milieus, more like.

I don’t really know what lesson to draw from this. Maybe nothing, I just wanted to share. After all, her legacy is just starting to be built, and things could still change a great deal. Certainly, though, it is painful to realise that even the most promising, joyful, bottom-up ideas can be completely misread when the cultural, social and political circumstances are not conducive.