“Grazia Deledda. What it is and what it represents for me and, I hope, for the sardinians” By Giuseppe Cabizzosu
Deledda, for us Sardinians, is not just any writer: she is the writer. The writer who has overcome the narrow confines of our island and has created eternal, universal, Sardinian stories and characters, of course, deeply, intimately, viscerally Sardinian but with a strength, a passion and a feeling that goes beyond and goes well beyond the distinctive social traits and cultural islanders. Her characters are certainly Sardinian, and her greatness certainly lies in this, but they can easily be Russians, Americans, Asians, Africans; they can and are, in a word, human, that is, they belong to humanity as such.
On the Deledda everything has been said and written. Careful studies and in-depth analyzes by leading critics and scholars of world literature have focused on her.
Talking about her therefore runs the risk of banality, of obviousness, of repeating things already analyzed and described better by others. But I will take this risk and focus my small contribution on the social and human value that the great realist and decadent writer has, in my opinion, for Sardinia and the Sardinians today; for the Sardinians who live in Sardinia and for those who, forced to live elsewhere, have left their hearts in this wonderful and bitter land. For me and, like me, I believe, many Sardinians who have decided to stay in their homeland, Deledda is not just a Nobel laureate, she is a symbol. A woman who, as a woman, in the male-dominated culture of the 1800s, was able to study self-taught, to rise from those ties and social constraints that somehow relegated women to the domestic environment to dedicate herself, against everyone’s will, to an occupation considered a rifle, superficial and, especially for a woman, almost unseemly from a moral point of view. A woman who had the strength and the courage to analyze the most hidden and recondite folds of human psychology now in decay of a world, the pastoral one, based on the immutability of its certainties, which clashed with its future, made up of an emerging bourgeoisie commercial and intellectual, and did not want to accept it.
Deledda, a woman, and moreover a Sardinian woman, was the heir of a millenary female tradition. A tradition made up of silences, open spaces but also narrow places, passions lived within, suffered and never expressed. Of strong feelings, hatched for years and screamed within but suffocated with difficulty in the enclosure of the home or in the shepherd’s enclosure, in conformity and in the tradition of eternal immutability from which she seemed impossible to get out. She was born exclusively for the care of the family, she used to see, for centuries, condense and reduce her own world and universe only within the home. In her I see the image of a young woman who, at the end of the nineteenth century, shivered and possessed within herself a fire which, especially in the early years, no matter how hard she tried, she was unable to hide, to disguise the appearance of circumstance that tradition imposed them. Perhaps she already felt within herself the solicitations that came from outside, the claims of equality of the English suffragettes but, within the provincial and closed reality of Nuoro of those years, she had no alternatives. She could not help but succumb or transfer her dreams, aspirations and drives into literature. Creating and elaborating within her fertile creativity the social and cultural redemption that women had been claiming for centuries and which, also through her voice, was manifesting itself in the new millennium. I believe it was a very hard personal struggle, a laboriously climbing the slope of centuries of submission, of silences, hard, long and suffered for the conquest of a new conscience and the awareness of one’s own autonomy. She also had to leave the island, abandon her Nuoro her.
Loved and hated, and with such dichotomous intensity she was always reciprocated by her fellow citizens. She could choose her hallway, close herself within the literary ivory turris, cultivate and transfer her conquered dignity by relegating it to beautiful Roman pages. Maybe she was writing love or digression novels like so many were writing about in those years. But she doesn’t! She decided to write and analyze the very world from which she had laboriously managed to emerge. She decided to write about her Sardinia about her. To expose the weaknesses, the inner dramas, the backwardness and misery, human and social, of her island. With the sensitivity of a woman she was able to grasp the passions, the faults, the conflicts of an era that were projected into the generational clash between fathers and children. The human and social anxieties of an entire culture and, having itself risen above those same tensions, she was able to clearly grasp the subtlest aspects, the most significant nuances, to immerse herself deeply in them without getting lost in them and being overwhelmed by them.
But, above all, she was able to find in them the justification and strength for a true, hard and ruthless analysis, if you like, but also full of love, passion and desire for redemption which represents the most beautiful gift that this little woman has. made to Sardinians of all times. Do not give in to despair, do not be overwhelmed by the desire to give up, to give up, to flee, to seek elsewhere more advanced realities where you can live and fit in while ignoring and denying your origins and history, but always knowing and living your own reality, maybe small, hard and cruel, sometimes backward, problematic, often difficult but that only those who live fully can fully grasp, appreciate, love and fight to improve it. La Deledda is this for me: the strength to look within and the courage to improve oneself and one’s land.
And this applies to Sardinians in their homeland but also, and perhaps above all, to Sardinian emigrants who have the strength and dignity not to forget, to feel Sardinians even outside Sardinia, even more so outside the island, because even more gorged is the temptation, on the outside, to sever those bonds that make us, now and again, a unique people who love their land and suffer deeply for it. And, however hard and bitter, she feels that it belongs to her and only he has the task, I believe the duty, to support, promote and improve her. I hope to be worthy of this gift. And this is the wish that, with all my heart, I feel I can give to Sardinians from all over the world.
