She wanted them to be sermons, not essays. Oriana’s voice, twenty years on

If you type ‘Oriana’ into your computer, you won’t even have time to type ‘Fallaci’ before Google suggests a search: ‘was she right-wing or left-wing?’. That alone is enough to explain why, on the twentieth anniversary of her death (15 September 2006), Alessandro Gnocchi dedicated a book to her that is at once a pamphlet, a memoir and a tribute: Oriana ad alta voce. Why We Still Need Fallaci (Foglio Edizioni, 150 pages, 16 euros). The title is to be taken literally: the author knew ‘la Signora’ only by voice, over the Milan–New York telephone line, whilst working on the pieces she contributed to Vittorio Feltri’s *Libero*. Locked away in ‘a sort of glass cage’ set up in the newsroom, Gnocchi adapted to the time difference, the moods and the meticulousness of his interlocutor, who could dwell until exhaustion on a summary that didn’t sit right with her: most readers wouldn’t have noticed, but Oriana was concerned with “not leaving anything sloppy in the world”, commas included.

The articles, presented as extracts from the trilogy that began with La rabbia e l’orgoglio following the attack on the Twin Towers, “were in fact texts rewritten almost in their entirety”. She had not intended to write non-fiction but – “get this properly into your head, Gnocchi” – “a proper sermon, to be delivered aloud in front of an audience”, which “must stir and move people”. The future bestseller, as you will recall, first appeared in draft form in the Corriere della Sera on 29 September 2001: if the date holds some hidden significance, it is the feast day of Saint Michael the Archangel, the warrior. It was the terminus post quem when the revered mentor of the progressive milieu, the feminist icon, the paradigmatic correspondent, was turned into her opposite. It was the date that explains Google’s algorithm and the common narrative of the ‘two Fallacis’, as Gnocchi summarises: ‘A great journalist and writer up until 11 September 2001; then something snapped, and the books of the Trilogy were the product of a mind no longer lucid, of a bitter old age, of a rancour that had taken the place of judgement. Blame it on illness and loneliness’. Xenophobic. Racist. On trial for Islamophobia. September 2001 is the point at which to insert the ‘but’ when speaking of her again, the point at which the adversative phrase is triggered: it occurs ‘in Rai TV dramas, in theatre productions, even in the official biography, where the final years take up twenty pages out of three hundred’. She suffered a massive character assassination, just to re-legitimise the meaning of a phrase that now rolls off the tongues of television narcissists.

What justified such virulence? According to Gnocchi, ‘La Trilogia’ ‘has produced something unique in post-war Italian cultural history: the first (and last, for now) nationwide debate on mass immigration, political correctness and European identity’. She denounced the West for denying reality, one-sided pacifism and the erosion of values fostered by conformism, but she did not soften her words with the ‘fabric softener’ that governs the procedures of indignation within the Italian cultural system, which is subject to “social pressure that needs no laws to function because it operates through marginalisation and self-censorship. Fallaci had chosen to cross the line’. The well-worn tactic of ‘delegitimising the person rather than refuting their ideas’ was therefore applied to her: she was ‘a mind weakened by cancer’. This was untrue, as the journalist in the ‘glass cage’ observed; it was also untrue because, when illness struck Terzani and Murgia, they were portrayed as figures somewhere between the sage and the quasi-religious. A squint of ash (this is not a typo) that consumes in the bonfire only those who do not think comme il faut.

There is no ‘Oriana 1’ and ‘Oriana 2’ – the progressive and the reactionary. Fallaci the ‘writer’ (as she insisted should be inscribed on her gravestone) did not undergo a complete about-turn in 2001: as early as 1961, she had declared in Il sesso inutile that Muslim women were ‘the unhappiest in the world’; ten years later, she reported on the mass executions in Bangladesh; in 1979 she interviewed Khomeini and concluded that ‘political Islam is not a deviation from Islam, it is one of its intrinsic characteristics’; in *Insciallah* (1990) she argued that ‘it is impossible to resolve, using Western means, a conflict rooted in a belief system that does not recognise Western means as legitimate’; Shortly afterwards, during the Gulf War (when the ‘Black Cloud’ of burning oil seeped into her body), she noted that the sermons in the mosques were directed against the American allies rather than against Saddam. Even a certain Osama bin Laden listened to them attentively.

Gnocchi now imagines phoning the ‘Lady’ to comment on the newspapers: some of his hyperboles are no longer hyperboles; a certain section of the left still reveals itself to be ‘autocratic, totalitarian’; the anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism that she exposed in 2002 has gained ground; in the name of peace, “hatred and brutality are absolved on one side only”. Perhaps Oriana’s answers were not always correct, but her questions were: and “in a cultural system that prefers not to ask them, that is already extraordinary”. What remains relevant about her is “not the prophecy that came true, nor the posthumous triumph, but the demonstration that the refusal to listen to the difficult questions” has “a political, cultural and human cost. Paid by everyone. Even by those who had condemned her”. The Italian debate denied her the benefit of fact-checking: it took courage to agree with her, and even more to disagree.