Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what remains of them? In his monthly series Should we reread…?, The Duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. Today, Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), the idol of several generations of journalists dreaming of having the courage and the pen of the one whose point of view passed through the filter of her revolts.
Kamikaze? Pyromaniac? Oriana Fallaci’s detractors called her the worst, but she didn’t care. Her existence was a boxing ring, a field of ruins or a minefield. Nothing surprising for this passionaria of journalism who claimed “that the fight is more beautiful than the victory”. Which didn’t stop her from receiving blows. And giving them, a lot, to make her way in a professional environment with institutionalized misogyny.
Not only was Oriana Fallaci Italy’s best-known journalist, but from the 1960s onwards she would become a jewel of the profession – even if she loved to defy the rules of the trade. Her determination to obtain interviews and her blind courage (including in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon and Mexico, where she nearly died in 1968) would help to forge her legend. Some of her greatest books, including A man And Interviews with Historycould have made her eternal, but others, at the end of her life, will dig her grave.
Where does this need to question everything and shake up the established order come from? It has been said that she was deprived of childhood, and the main person concerned acknowledges it. Her father, engaged in the Italian resistance during the Second World War in Florence, will make her a fighter. At 14, she hid secret messages in her braids, would go and carry food and weapons to the underground rebels. Oriana Fallaci affirmed that her father had raised her like a man: no question of crying, even, and especially, in the face of heinous crimes.
Born into a poor family, but with “the vice of reading” – her first name is inspired by the character of the Duchess Oriane de Guermantes, taken from the universe of Marcel Proust – she devours everything that falls into her hands. A gifted student, she could become a doctor, but she is already hired by a newspaper to pay for her university studies, and exhaustion forces her to choose journalism, and a salary, she who also aspires to be a writer.
Those who admire Oriana Fallaci often ignore that she began her career covering the world of Italian and Hollywood cinema in the post-war period. However, the stars did not impress her, even if she became friends with a few of them (Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani), not holding back from saying all the bad things she thought about these sacred monsters. With her approximate English, she arrived in Los Angeles or New York as a conqueror. In 1955, while Marilyn Monroe was hiding somewhere in Manhattan, she went looking for her, determined to interview her. Weary of the war, Oriana Fallaci wrote the story of her non-interview published in 1956 in the magazine Europecontributing to the journalist’s notoriety. Because her reports are increasingly translated, including into English.
Fortunately, in the early 1960s, Oriana Fallaci had the good idea of traveling the world, taking an interest in the condition of women in the East (Useless sex) than in the preparation of NASA astronauts (If the sun dies). But it is his arrival in a Vietnam in fire and blood (Life, war and then nothing) which will transform her into a formidable war correspondent, ready to go to the battlefields, “this terrible laboratory for understanding men”.
With her reputation, she would have access to the greatest political figures, not holding back from mistreating them, violently removing her chador in front of Ayatollah Khomeini, ridiculing Muammar Gaddafi, embarrassing the arrogant Henry Kissinger and, later, openly scorning the lack of intellectual stature of Lech Walesa.
The idol of a generation
“We all wanted to be like Oriana Fallaci,” says Nathalie Petrowski, a journalist long associated with Duty then to The Pressevoking the memory of “this icon, this model, the one who sent the great and the good of this world packing… but who nevertheless sabotaged her own myth”.
Like many female journalists of her generation, Nathalie Petrowski admired her courage, but felt cheated by the woman who claimed that motherhood and a career could not go hand in hand in Letter to a child who was never born. She replied to him, also by letter, in her story Mom Last Callblaming Oriana Fallaci for having slowed down her momentum to become a mother, “by adhering to this idea that having children was necessarily slavery”. “I was brainwashed by a certain feminist discourse,” affirms with her usual frankness the one who recently published My mother’s life.
Michèle Ouimet, also a journalist at The Press until her retirement in 2018, author (Leave to tell, The Cat Man) and known for her many major reports abroad, remembers with emotion her reading ofA man. Oriana Fallaci draws a fictionalized portrait of Alexandros Panagoulis, a politician and, above all, a resistance fighter against the dictatorship of the colonels in Greece, imprisoned, tortured, and whom the famous Italian woman would love passionately. “It was a revelation,” says Michèle Ouimet. “This book touched me enormously, and that is why my disappointment with it was even greater.”
The horror under his windows
Little by little, she abandoned journalism for novel writing, but always drawn from reality, as in Inshallahon devastated Lebanon seen through the eyes of Italian peacekeepers in 1983. Then, in the 1990s, between Florence, the Tuscan countryside and New York, she disappeared from public life to devote herself to a book about her family. On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center towers collapsed a stone’s throw from her home and shook the polemicist. Suffering from cancer, an excessive misanthrope, Oriana Fallaci violently attacks the Muslim religion in vitriolic essays (Rage and pride, The power of reason), castigating both Islamist terrorists and imams, or even Europe, which she describes as “Eurabia”. This “atheist Christian” then attracted the wrath of the left, a few lawsuits, including in France, and became a great icon of the extreme right.
Michèle Ouimet still cannot explain this turnaround. “We explored the same terrain, in Iran, in Pakistan, we saw the condition of women. So why does this great feminist claim that it is the fault of women if they wear the chador or suffer without flinching the polygamy of their husband? From my point of view, it is unacceptable, and her analysis, very basic for someone who has traveled so much in the Middle East.”
This last chapter in the life of Oriana Fallaci also surprises Giovanni Princigalli, filmmaker (Aida’s Song, The bride) and historian of Italian origin, established in Montreal since 2003. According to him, Oriana’s last two books were a godsend for “the Italian right always lacking intellectual and cultural figures, because they are most often on the left”. He says he respects “the woman open to the world, who has experienced all the important issues of the 20th centurye century”. Especially since in her own family, one of her aunts, also a journalist, knew her, and her father, Giacomo Princigalli, former leader of the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, had protected resistance fighters from the dictatorship of the colonels in Greece who had taken refuge on the peninsula. But does Italy consider her a legend?
Over the years, several biographies have been devoted to him, including Oriana. A free womanby Cristina De Stefano (Albin Michel), and a biopic by Marco Turco in 2014. Even the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda makes him a key character in The man of the people (2013), portrait of Lech Walesa where the journalist questions, and provokes, the leader of Solidarnosc. However, in Italy, Giovanni Princigalli is categorical: “Her memory has disappeared, she has become marginal.”
“She was a great journalist,” recalls Michèle Ouimet. “She had the gift of captivating her readers, of evoking the details that matter. We should not judge all of her work by focusing solely on the last part of her life.” However, the one that the magazine The New Yorker had described as an “agitator” would have been so until the end.