by Dacia Maraini

Dacia Maraini (b. 1936) has helped spearhead a multifaceted quest for a new female literature that has characterized Italian culture since the early 1960s. The eldest daughter of Tuscan ethnologist Fosco Maraini and Sicilian painter Topazia Alliata, Dacia was born in Florence, Italy, but spent nine years of her childhood (1938-47) in Japan. Her anti- Fascist parents relocated there for her father’s anthropological research and to escape Fascist oppression. When Japan sided with Germany and Italy in World War II, Maraini’s parents refused to pledge allegiance to the Fascist government in Italy, as requested by the Japanese authorities, so from 1943 to 1946 the whole family was interned in a Japanese concentration camp. In interviews, in her poetry collection Devour Me, Too (Mangiami pure, 1978) and, most recently, in the memoir The Ship to Kobe (La nave per Kobe, 2001), Maraini depicts the trauma...