Biancamaria Frabotta: Pushing Boundaries

by Shannon K. Winston

Biancamaria Frabotta is one of the most politically engaged poets in Italy today. She has been at the forefront of the woman’s movement in Italy and, as previously mentioned, she has written extensively about the polemics surrounding the category of an exclusively “women’s literature.” In the 1980s, she was the editor of a feminist review entitled “Orsa minore” and in the early 1990s she also edited a review called “Poesia.” In addition to her numerous poetry collections, she has also written a book and several plays. Frabotta teaches contemporary Italian literature at the University “La Sapienza.”

Frabotta’s creative and academic work reflects her commitment to gender studies and women’s rights. In “Frabotta’s Elegies: Theory and Practice,” Keala Jewell highlights the fact that questions of sexuality lie at the core of Frabotta’s work: “In Frabotta’s own verse we find a fascination with ambiguous creatures and doublings. A number of poems evoke the theme of twins (Frabotta’s astrological sign) or an “ambidextrous” self torn between two identities” (Jewell, “Frabotta’s Elegies: Theory and Practice,” 179). Jewell cities octopi and jellyfish as animals that inspire Frabotta precisely because they are not animals that typically inspire poetry. These animals serve as “new “others” against which the lyric self comes to the fore in a series of analogies and differentiations” (Ibid).

Much of Frabotta’s poetry grapples with many of the same themes that psychoanalysis attempts to understand, namely the complexity of the subject and his/her position of in the world. Themes of doubling, otherness, and difference are central to Frabotta’s writing. However, to reiterate Jewell’s point, Frabotta does so from unusual and new perspectives. For example, in the poem “The White Rumor,” the speaker begins: “The apple teaches me that it doubles it itself. / Life teaches me that it is apple seeds/ the half of a growing circumstance/ the mirror that doubles the head of a good hope” (1-4). Here, Frabotta finds quotidian objects—the conventional image of the mirror and the less commonly invoked apple—to explore issues of doubling and identity, which she uncovers in all facets of life. Frabotta’s poetry is demanding and, often times, hard to penetrate. The reader must be patient and use his/her analytical skills to uncover the meaning(s).

Frabotta’s poetry not only challenges conceptions of gender with her choice of subject matter, but also in the generic forms that she uses. In fact, Jewell’s principal argument in her article is that Frabotta uses the elegy—a traditionally male form—and reclaims it with her own feminist perspectives. Frabotta is, therefore, a writer who continually pushes the boundaries in her work in order to arrive at a greater sense of equality and to gain a deeper understanding of herself and others.

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