The author of a nomadic family who denounces the violent government re-education disappeared at the age of 74
On 5 September she died in Zurich, where she was born in 1947, but Mariella More he hadn’t lived a single life. As a child, daughter of a mother Yenisch (the third European nomadic population after Roma and Sinti), she was a victim of the eugenics program children of the highway (children of the street) organized by Pro Juventute from 1926 to 1973: it was a Swiss relief work that planned to eradicate the gypsy phenomenon by stealing children from mothers (who were sterilized). The children were locked up in institutions where their names were changed because their parents could not trace them, they ended up in foster care with peasant families. In her autobiographical books of her Mehr she told of the rapes and electric shocks she suffered, of the forced sterilization she was subjected to at the age of 24, after giving birth to a son, who had been taken away from her. Shut up, like her mother, in a psychiatric center, Mariella had spent most of her childhood without speaking, then entrusted to a Ticino family and taken back to another asylum. She at 19 she married her with the hope of having the child back, she got it but after the divorce she ended up losing him again.
Grow anger, baby, I’ll warm you up, let you survive this frozen hell, he wrote in stone agehis first book, released in German (his language) in 1981 (with the title Silviasilviosilvana released in 1995 by Guaraldi). Anger is the driving force of Mariella Mehr woman and writer: alcoholic, drug addict due to depression and anguish, rebel. His frozen hell lasted 31 years, until she underwent therapy to exorcise madness, as Anna Ruchat, her translator into Italian and friend wrote: desire for revenge, the emotional chill – and will then become the backbone of the trilogy of violence.
After nearly two years in prison, the slow rise begins when Mariella introduces herself to the foster family of her little one, begging to be able to keep him with her for a couple of weeks. She told with a smile in a 2006 interview: When the police came to ask for him to return him to Pro Juventute, I said: wait here, I’ll be right … I went back to the door with the longest knife I had in the kitchen and threatened. : either I will kill you or you will kill me. They left and it all ended like this. In ’72 he began the long battle of public denunciation against that ethnic cleansing in Swiss sauce. The following year the relief work was closed and it took years for Pro Juventute to do the MEA culpa official acknowledging that boys and girls had often been sexually abused.
This, in short, is the story of Mariella Mehr’s many lives (and battles). Then there is, but together with the fighter, the writer and the poet. The narrative trilogy of violence includes novels They worked (released by Effigie in 2006), The brand (Tufani, 2005), Accused (Effigy, 2008). Books written in Tuscany, where he had decided to move for a long stretch of years (until 2014), reduced almost to blindness due to a disease not treated in childhood: in the three novels, Mehr’s wounded memory stages several alter egos, who suffer frustrations, abuse, unhappiness, silences in a climate of growing hallucination rendered with pressing and strongly expressionist prose.
Agota Kristof comes to mind, the Hungarian author exiled to Switzerland, author of Trilogy of the city of K. There is a similar cruelty, but in horror there is also a greater visionary and at times fairytale openness. Writing doesn’t drive away ghosts, I don’t write to get rid of pain, he said. News from exile (always Effigy) a collection of poems that, with San Colombano and waiting and with the anthological choice of Each chained to his hour (Einaudi, 2014, also translated by Ruchat) renders the delirium of pain, but also the lucidity of the vision, between enchanted and cruel: persecuted in the black / infinite landscape / like a wild beast / in the belly / of the night / laughter / to shreds / on the scaffold / of time / pain begs / compassion.
September 6, 2022 (change September 6, 2022 | 9:04 pm)
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