Gaia Giovagnoli
- Italy -
Gaia Giovagnoli (Rimini, 1992) holds degrees in Modern Literature and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Bologna. She has published two poetry collections: Teratophobia (‘Round Midnight Ed., 2018) and Babajaga (Industria & Letteratura, 2023). Some of her unpublished poems have appeared in the magazine Poesia (Crocetti), introduced by Milo de Angelis. In 2022, the publishing house nottetempo released her debut novel, Cos'hai nel sangue (finalist for the Fahrenheit Radio3 Prize, the POP Prize, and the Berto Prize; winner of the Dante Arfelli Prize), followed in 2023 by Chiedi se vive o se muore.
A Penelope weaver of absences. ‘Babajaga’ by Gaia Giovagnoli
by Alberto Paolo Palumbo
https://www.magmamag.it/baba-jaga-gaia-giovagnoli-recensione/
In folk traditions around the world, a major role is played by witches and, more generally, by old women. One thinks, for instance, of Frau Holle with her fluffy pillows whose feathers make it snow on Earth, but also of Baba Jaga, a character from Slavic folklore often compared to a witch with magical powers and enchanted objects who often helps the protagonists of fairy tales in their initiatory journeys.
Babajaga is also the new poetic collection by the poet Gaia Giovagnoli, who after Teratophobia and the recent narrative incursions of Cos'hai nel sangue and Chiedi se vive o se muore (both for nottetempo) returns to poetry, inaugurating the new series for poets under 35 Obtortocollo by Industria & Letteratura directed by Riccardo Frolloni, already author for the Massa-based publishing house with his anthology Corpo striato.
The poems of ‘Babajaga’
Babajaga lives in a kingdom of living shells
these few things of hers obey and sustain her.
In some tales, however, they become unfaithful to her and
revolt. In tales like this one
These are some of the opening lines of Babajaga. The story is that of the witch from Slavic folklore, reinterpreted in a contemporary key by Gaia Giovagnoli. Babajaga lives with a talking cat in a house that stands on two chicken legs in a forest where the birch tree has a crown of bones. All around her are eggshells who come alive sometimes disobeying and becoming unfaithful to their mistress.
Babajaga's story is a tale set in a suspended time where fairy tale and contemporaneity meet. Her story is also that of a woman abandoned by her beloved, a hero who, having finished his initiatory journey in love with the witch and the woman, abandons her without showing any sign of gratitude, but rather leaving traces of an absence that is difficult to fill.
The mythical method in ‘Babajaga’
Gaia Giovagnoli blends myth and contemporaneity to confront a very important theme such as that of relationships and absence, already addressed in her fiction, especially in her latest novel Chiedi se vive o se muore. In the exergue of this new anthology, in fact, Giovagnoli quotes Dialogues with Leucò by Cesare Pavese, for whom “myth is a language, a means of expression”. Myth, therefore, is to be understood not only as mythology, but also as a means of expressing the acceptance of destiny and the end.
This overlap between myth and contemporaneity is the same one we have already seen in poetic or prose works by authors such as T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land) and Anne Carson (Autobiography of the Red) and which takes the name of mythical method. Giovagnoli, in fact, tells through Babajaga's story that of a woman living in a present in which she has been abandoned by her loved one.
The story told here, however, is unprecedented with respect to the myth, very intimate and personal, most likely linked to Giulia to whom the sylloge is dedicated, and this is clear, for example, from the name, which instead of being written detached - Baba Jaga or Baba Yaga - is written all attached, as explained in the postscript: ‘I called you Baba Jaga,’ Giovagnoli writes, "because you had no name. You said: “better united”. Babajaga. You liked witches. You had short, electric hair'.
The comparison with Giovagnoli's fiction
As far as the comparison with folklore is concerned, Babajaga is influenced by Gaia Giovagnoli's fiction. If in Cos'hai nel sangue, for instance, the story of Caterina Foschi, the witch of Coragrotta, is inspired by the story of St. Catherine of Siena, Chiedi se vive o se muore is inspired, on the other hand, by tarot cards. On a content level, Giovagnoli draws, as for her fiction, on the folk tradition to create an imaginary world suspended between dream and reality, past and present.
Thematically, however, it is easier to make a comparison with the second novel. The stories of Babajaga and India, the latter the protagonist of Chiedi se vive o se muore, focus on toxic love relationships, in which love becomes a strong addiction that is difficult to manage, especially when confronted with absence or abandonment. Both women, however, resort to magic - enchanted objects or tarot cards - to exorcise their pain and absence and become able to control their love. This happens when, as India states in this excerpt, one is able to take control of one's memories: “to construct the mistakes of adults in retrospect gives a lot of satisfaction: it makes one hypothesise the origin of what we are, for better and, above all, for worse”.
In the witch's hut
Babajaga is, therefore, presented to us in a different way than in Slavic folkloric tradition. She is not a witch whom everyone fears and whose initiation trials lead the heroes to grow up, but a woman subjected to love, who once abandoned must confront her own pain. The fearsome house of Babajaga is, in fact, a house that rather than having the traces of fear in it has those of sadness and abandonment.
This house, moreover, “feels like gashes”, its street “is a carpet/of broken bones”, the dogs do not take their hands off the man's wrists, while the lock of teeth “only to him who does not come home/unlocks a grin” and the children she eats are actually “a lump of skin” that has fallen into her bathroom, a sign of a love that has ended and that cannot be perpetuated even by a birth. Around her there is nothing but an accumulation of debris dictated by absence:
The inventory of shards
counts two broken glasses;
a knife with the handle unglued;
the bathroom comb
that spat out another tooth;
the usual tablecloth
got some tears in it
The house belongs to the man
Babajaga is no longer the witch who bites, but is the one who is bitten by a woollen coat hanging in the house, who is stung by brambles in the forest and wounded by shards left lying around the house. Shards that she has to pick up in order to move on, to mend a broken life, and to do so she tries in every way to hold on to her beloved, just as the real person Giovagnoli is inspired by did. In the postscript, in fact, we read the following:
You told me about him leaving you as if you were telling me a fairy tale. You tried to hold on to him by all means - desperate attempts to block him with lakes and walls. You realised, however, that it was not possible. Something had not worked. It was you he was running from. From the witch you were.
Babajaga is no longer the witch who makes people flee of her own accord, but she is now a woman who does not want to be abandoned, and does everything to keep her loved ones with her. She fills the house with objects that no longer have magical powers to distress others, but contain spectres that haunt it and fill it with pain.
These spectres are those of the absence of the beloved:
But after the escape the objects have open eyes
and a breath. She remembers.
The man has inhabited them ever since: his spectre is in the
things, lives in those husks, makes them tremble and restless
Weaving Absence
The house belongs to the man, who has left the witch a lake to drown in, difficult to drain to prevent the man from escaping, and a wall of gangrene resonating with guilt that echoes in the objects, but also in the unanswered phone calls, in the voices of women at the supermarket blaming her, and in the mattress “[that] sinks into the middle/Because it has learned the weight of two/And does not withdraw”.
The woman understands that “you don't exorcise him who lives in objects/You don't exorcise him who, always, has not yet/left”. Absence cannot be erased, for it is evident in the objects worn by time, the scars it leaves us. Babajaga can do no more than weave a web from the remains of the beloved, from the hair left in the comb, the swelling in the pillow. Babajaga is a Penelope weaving the web not to take time, but to retrieve it: to make the beloved return, if not physically, at least in memory.
Dear spectre:
I look for you in the things
of our house
and wait
- but come back
I take it easy
they all do
but come back soon
Of living shells full of ghosts
Gaia Giovagnoli succeeds in Babajaga in giving her own version of the myth in the Pavesian sense of the term. Babajaga becomes a witch who is confronted with the increasingly painful acceptance of her destiny: a destiny of absence and abandonment. She does this through memory, weaving a web of worn-out objects, shards and rubble that make it possible to live with pain and absence, because after all, if one cannot physically recover what has been lost, one can do so through memory.
Many
say that the dead get
inside the cloth
that the dead get stuck
in knots of wool
- that they lie in the sheets
of undone beds
that they snug into clothes
and make them cold
They say that certain witches
weave them into rag
Poetry
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THE LOCK MADE OF TEETH / La serratura di denti
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THE BIRCH / L’albero
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THE HEN HOUSE / La casa gallina
