Interview with the italian writer Ilaria Palomba

German translation of the book Fatti male

Rome [ENA] Ilaria Palomba was born in Bari in 1987 where she graduated in Philosophy and then specialized at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne in 2011-2012. She has to her credit as well as numerous collections of short stories and poems: the novels Fatti Male (Gaffi 2012 translated and published in German for the Aufbau-Verlag with the title Tu dir weh)“Homo homini virus”, “Deserto”, “Mancanza”, “Brama”, “Una volta l’estate”.

Ilaria Palomba tells her amazement of the world through a kind of literature that makes very careful use of the word, through a strong semantic experimentation and the use of a dense and reflective language. In an exclusive interview with Ilaria Palomba I tried to understand her way of describing the world. Carlo Marino: Homo homini virus, Deserto (Desert) , Mancanza (Privation ), Brama (Burning), Fatti male (Get hurt), Una volta l’estate (Once in the summer): the titles of some of your volumes. Reading them, it seems that in our world a game is constantly being played in which it is impossible to judge winners and losers, because victims and executioners always perform a sort of tightrope walk,

that is good and evil seem in balance. What do you think about it? Ilaria Palomba: I think that's exactly the case, in my books there are often victims who become executioners, a bit like the controversial movie character Joker... It is paradoxical, far-fetched and too bourgeois to think that we can seriously harm someone without without expecting a sort of revenge. This mechanism is valid in interpersonal relationships as in social dynamics: nobody loves having masters and nobody loves his masters. If considered inferior, abused, mistreated, exploited, underpaid, swindled, deceived, abandoned, human beings react, sometimes the outcome of this reaction exceeds the offense suffered. After all, it is the mechanism underlying all conflicts.

The writer Ilaria Palomba

Carlo Marino: In your book "Disturbance of brightness" the story takes place in the mind of a woman who has no name. The protagonist suffers from a borderline personality disorder. Violence and addiction are two characteristics that grip human beings today more than ever. Was it always like this? Ilaria Palomba: To answer this question it would be necessary to have lived elsewhere and in another time. I don't know if it has always been like this, I can hypothesize that religion in the past also had the task of curbing man's most violent instincts. After the Nietzschean death of God, everything is allowed. When man was able to choose, he elected evil.

Personal good often coincides with someone else's evil, when the concept of good is relativized and the impossibility of the highest good is decreed, man becomes the God of himself and will choose only for himself without taking care of the harm it causes to the other. But I also think that the death of God is an outdated phase and that the mourning that we must elaborate today is another: the death of man, that is, the end of the concept of human as a rational animal. Probably not only are we no longer animals, we increasingly become accessories of machines, but we are no longer even rational.

After God, reason had to disappear too, what will await us I cannot know but I think that the crisis in relations with others and the spread of behavioral disturbances are to be read in this sense. Carlo Marino: - I often encountered the evil of living – I am citing the Nobel Prize poet Eugenio Montale, to define that narrating voice you often use. The character moves in an opaque reality that stands out icastically in the mind of the reader. Will there ever be a way to redeem ourselves from the evil received and sometimes tolerated in this world? Ilaria Palomba: Montale, Pavese, Pascoli, poetry for me is all the more live as it approaches death (as far as Pascoli is concerned I think about the verses of Myricae).

It is very rare that you succeed but the only way to redeem yourself from the evil suffered is by not perpetrating the chain of pain, breaking it. As long as one is executioner, one continues to be victimized. But how can we live in the world without being devoured and without devouring in turn? Maybe we need to take a step back from everything we believe we are: the rulers of the world, of nature, the only intelligent life forms in the universe, the center of the food chain. We are none of this, we are only crumbs. Carlo Marino: Let’s talk about your relationship with the written word. Is your word a word found in yourself, or a word of which you go in search until you make it yours forever?

Ilaria Palomba: I have a great difficulty in communicating, I always had it, so much so that as a teenager I didn't speak for a while. Writing is finding the words that I had forbidden myself to say so my relationship with the word is cathartic, it is a constant search for the unspeakable. Carlo Marino : Can poetry be considered a gamble to try to decipher the world? Ilaria Palomba: Poetry for me is a demon, in a Socratic sense. Through poetry I see the invisible and I try to show it to the reader. Carlo Marino: Does literature have to impassively describe, I’d say objectively, even the misery of the world and then must commit itself to attempting some rescue?

Otherwise the process or act of describing is bluntly a commitment, a denunciation ? Ilaria Palomba: Literature must not be a photocopy of reality, it is not enough to describe, it is not enough to have ideas about the world, it is not enough to communicate. Literature must transcend the writer's will and capture the reader. Carlo Marino: Societies that destroy their poets by ignoring them, what kind of societies are, in your opinion, and what future can they have?

Ilaria Palomba: A society that no longer has a meter of artistic judgment and is based only on sales figures or on the advice of those who make audience is a society already well beyond the decline, is nothing but debris, in these ruins the only poets saved are those who lobby. The question I often ask myself without being answered is: Which Is More Important? Talent or warm-heartedness. If the answer concerns the second term then there are no more poets, only scholars and merchants.