92  writing the terrorist self:

the unspeakable alterity


 of Italy’s female

 perpetrators

Ruth Glynn

abstract
This paper examines texts written by, or in collaboration with, female ex-members of
the Italian left-wing armed organization, the Red Brigades. The corpus differs from
male-authored or male-centred texts in that issues relating to identity and selfhood
lie at the very heart of the project of narrating the terrorist past; the primary concern
of Italian women’s post-terrorist narration is not to narrate the experience of
belonging to an armed organization, but to construct a new identity distinct from a
pre-existing self identified exclusively with the transgressive experience of political
violence. I consider the corpus in the light of a number of critical problems posed both
by the specificity of female perpetration and by the dearth of theoretical writings on
perpetrator trauma more generally. I identify in each text an acute anxiety about the
very act of speech or narration and find that, in order to circumvent the perceived
prohibition on speech, the women of the Red Brigades subtly insinuate into their life
writing a discourse of alterity bordering on subalternity that obscures the boundary
between victim and perpetrator. The unacknowledged slippage between discourses of
perpetration and victimization is explored in relation to Ruth Leys’ critique of Cathy
Caruth’s formulation of trauma as the wound that cries out through the voice of the
victim. The paper concludes by questioning whether perpetrator trauma can ever be
articulated as such and by considering the implications of that question for
traumatized perpetrator and victimized society alike.

keywords
women; terrorism; perpetrator trauma; life-writing; Italy; Red Brigades

feminist review 92 2009 1

(1–18)
c 2009 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/09 www.feminist-review.com
 introduction
In Italy, the years between 1969 and 1983 witnessed such pervasive political
violence that they are now commonly referred to as the anni di piombo (‘years of
lead’). Economic crisis, rapid social change and increasing frustration with a
blocked political system led to violent tactics being employed by extremists on
both sides of the political divide. According to official Ministry for the Interior
figures, over 14,000 terrorist attacks were committed, resulting in 374 deaths and
in excess of 1,170 injuries.1 The earlier years of the period (1969–1974) saw the 1 The figures are
drawn from Alison
emergence of political violence predominantly as a practice of the far right. In Jamieson’s
addition to diffuse lower-grade activities, indiscriminate bombings of public reconfiguration of
the Italian Ministry
spaces, tactically designed to cause maximum injury and panic, formed part of a of the Interior table
right-wing ‘strategy of tension’ which sought to pass off acts of public violence for the period
1969–1987. The total
as the work of left-wing activists in order to pave the way for the imposition of number of attacks in
that wider period is
military rule. In this strategy of tension, the Italian State itself was implicated, in 14,491; the total
the guise of secret service involvement in right-wing atrocities. Although this number of deaths
is 419 and 1,182
activity appeared to wane after 1974, it would return and generate record injuries. Further
details regarding
casualties in the Bologna train station bombing of 1980. From the mid-1970s on, the breakdown of
the far-left responded to what they saw as state-sponsored violence with violent attacks and deaths
according to
tactics of their own, targeting for ‘proletarian trials’, beatings, kidnappings and provenance are also
shootings individual representatives of their capitalist adversaries: the large provided. See
Jamieson
industrial corporations, the security forces, the pro-capitalist mainstream media (1989: 19–21).
and the Italian State. The culminating episode of left-wing political violence was
the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat party President, Aldo Moro, by
the Red Brigades in 1978. During the 55 days of Moro’s captivity, the major
political parties in Italy articulated different positions regarding the validity of
negotiating with the terrorist organization in order to save Moro’s life. The very
duration of Moro’s captivity and the active role played by the media in making
the Italian public privy to the series of communications passing between the Red
Brigades and the State, compelled the population to burden themselves with the
question of whether or not Moro should be saved at the risk of weakening the
State. The subsequent death of the hostage thus implicated, alongside the Red
Brigades and Italy’s political leaders, the wider public and especially those
members who had tacitly condoned left-wing violence until that moment.
In the immediate aftermath of the anni di piombo, there was little appetite for
wide-scale discussion of the legacy of political violence in Italy. Moro’s death
signalled the beginning of the end for terrorism; internal tensions within the Red
Brigades and the loss of passive public support for their actions, combined with
the introduction of a series of new policing initiatives and legal innovations which
greatly enhanced the anti-terrorist campaign, resulted in mass arrests and the
containment of political violence in the early- to mid-1980s. This containment
enabled a weary Italian public to put the violence of the past behind them, and
to embrace the indulgent consumerism of the post-ideological 1980s. In more

2 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

 recent times, however, Italy’s experience of political violence and terrorism
has returned to the forefront of both political debate and cultural activity. In the
late 1990s, following the demise of the First Republic, the institutions of the
State began the process of working towards some form of legal ‘reconciliation’
with former terrorists. In July 1997, the Italian Parliament’s Judiciary Committee
opened the debate on a proposed law designed to reduce the sentences served by
those incarcerated for terrorism-related crimes committed before 1989. Although
that debate would be cut short by the emergence of the ‘new Red Brigades’ and
the murders of two government consultants, Massimo d’Antona in 1999 and Marco
Biagi in 2002, it was in this context that former terrorists began to narrate their
own stories to the Italian public. It is important to clarify, however, that in
the context of Italy’s recollection and discussion of the anni di piombo, it is
almost exclusively left-wing perpetrators who have contributed to the shaping of
the memory of political violence. Their right-wing counterparts, responsible for
the major bombings of the period, remain to a large extent unidentified; having
escaped the penal process, they are unable to speak openly about their
2 A further participation in the violence of those years.2
complication for the
potential of
neofascism to There now exists a significant body of autobiographical writings by, or extended
contribute to the interviews with, members of left-wing militant groups imprisoned for terrorism-
memory of the anni
di piombo is the fact related offences. The authors and protagonists of those texts include Prima
that although
successive judicial Linea’s Sergio Segio (2005) as well as ex-Red Brigade members Renato Curcio
investigations and (1993), Mario Moretti (1994), Alberto Franceschini (Franceschini et al., 1988),
trials have
attributed all major Valerio Morucci (1995, 2005), Adriana Faranda (Mazzocchi, 1994), Barbara
bombings of the anni Balzerani (1998), Anna Laura Braghetti (Braghetti and Tavella, 1998, 2003) and
di piombo to radical
neofascist groups, Prospero Gallinari (2006). This body of literature, augmented by a small number
prominent
neofascists continue of fictional works by Alberto Franceschini (Franceschini and Samueli, 1997),
to reject those Teresa Zoni Zanetti (1997, 2000) and Cesare Battisti (1998) appears to constitute
findings and insist
on a construction of a veritable micro-industry and a sub-genre of post-terrorist narration. As Silvia
neofascism as the
victim, rather than Dai Prà puts it, ‘the Seventies sell, their subversive side, in particular, is trendy
the perpetrator, of and has a certain appeal’ (Dai Prà, 2005).3 This should not surprise us; as Leigh
such bombings (see
Cento Bull, 2007). Payne suggests, ‘audiences find perpetrators’ power alluring. Perpetrators, after
3 All translations all, ‘‘do’’ violence; victims are ‘‘done to’’. [y] What makes the stories of
from the Italian are perpetrators so compelling is, in part, that they are agents: they act upon others’
my own, except
where stated (Payne, 2008: 15). Moreover, the mainstream publication of this body of work by
otherwise.
Italy’s major publishing houses suggests that post-terrorist narration may
perform an important role in shaping the memory of the anni di piombo and
in addressing and working through the traumatic imprint of the violence
synonymous with those years.
Conspicuous gender differences in the post-terrorist corpus, however, complicate
4 In comparative our understanding of what that role might be.4 Texts written by, or in collabo-
terms, women’s
participation in ration with, female ex-terrorists – the subject of this study – distinguish
terrorism in Italy is themselves from male-authored or male-centred texts in that their primary

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 3

 concern is to construct a post-terrorist identity distinct from a pre-existing self considered to be
particularly high.
identified exclusively with the experience of political violence. Where ex-terrorist The latest statistics
male authors and protagonists seek to distance themselves from the violence of reveal that women
comprised 20 per
the past, they do so on a purely political level and without any apparent damage cent of the
to their own self-identity. For female ex-terrorists, however, issues relating to membership of all
left-wing armed
identity and self-hood lie at the very heart of the project of narrating the organizations, and
13 per cent of the
terrorist past and the post-terrorist present. The acute anxiety associated with most notorious
the attempt to articulate a new identity distinct from that of the transgressive organization, the
Red Brigades
terrorist past develops, I will argue, a discourse of alterity bordering on (see De Cataldo
Neuburger and
subalternity, and an associated slippage between discourses of perpetration and Valentini, 1996:
victimization. 7–8).

theoretical considerations
A number of critical problems are posed by the field of female perpetrator
narratives. The first of these is the curious absence or void in contemporary
critical theory around the subject of the perpetrator and perpetrator narratives
tout court.5 I write ‘curious’ because the re-emergence of trauma studies in the 5 Rare exceptions
include Judith
last decade owes much to an enormously influential re-reading of the Freudian Herman’s Trauma
paradigm that places the perpetrator experience at centre-stage. I refer here and Recovery
(2001), which
to Freud’s reading of Tancredi’s unwitting and fatal wounding of his beloved provides some
Clorinda, disguised as a knight, in Tasso’s construction of the tale in the exploration of
perpetrator trauma
Gerusalemme liberata (Freud, 1955) and also to Cathy Caruth’s re-reading of this in Vietman war
veterans, Bernhard
episode in Unclaimed Experience (1996). Yet, as Dominick LaCapra points out in Giesen’s recent
Writing History, Writing Trauma, Caruth’s reading of ‘the ambiguous status of study of perpetrator
trauma in post-war
Tancred as perpetrator-victim [y] does not explicitly open itself to the Germany (2006), and
Leigh Payne’s
formulation of the specific problem of perpetrator trauma which her example Unsettling Accounts:
seems to foreground’ (LaCapra, 1994: 182). Ruth Leys goes further: in her The Politics and
Performance of
devastating and damning deconstruction of Caruth’s theoretical frame in Trauma: Confessions by
A Genealogy, she claims that ‘Tancred is a murderer and Clorinda is his victim Perpetrators of
Authoritarian State
twice over. Caruth knows and admits this [y] yet she is determined to identify Violence (2007).
None, however,
Tancred as a victim of trauma y’ (Leys, 2000: 294–5). In a very close reading of constitutes a
Caruth’s argument, Leys accuses her of bending Freud’s analysis of Tasso’s epic comprehensive study
of perpetrator
to fit her own theoretical model and warns that ‘if, according to Caruth’s trauma.
analysis, the murderer Tancred can become the victim of the trauma and the
voice of Clorinda testimony to his wound, then Caruth’s logic would turn other
perpetrators into victims too’ (Leys, 2000: 297).
What Leys’ pertinent critique alerts us to in the first instance is the displacement
of the very concept of the perpetrator in Caruth’s highly influential theory and in
contemporary trauma studies more widely. That displacement may be explained,
in the first instance, by the therapeutic practice associated with trauma studies,
a practice that upholds the restorative power of truth telling and stresses

4 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

the testimonial quality of the victim’s narration in its public aspect, which is
both political and judicial (see Herman, 2001: 221). Trauma therapy’s practice of
empowering of the victim through a public speaking, a public recognition, of the
wrong done is bound up with the cultural politics, or ‘memoro-politics’ (Hacking,
1994: 29), of our time, which forefronts the suffering and voices the pain of
oppressed, marginalized or subaltern social groups. Indeed, in the Humanities,
the field of trauma studies has developed primarily in relation to studies of the
Holocaust, slavery, colonialism, and within the field of women’s studies. While
not wishing to undermine the validity or question the value of that cultural
politics, it is important to recognize its implication in what has been termed a
culture of victimhood or a ‘wound culture’ (Seltzer, 1998) in Western societies;
a culture, that is, more fluent in the language of victimization than of
culpability.
But if Caruth may be accused of denying Tancredi’s status as perpetrator in order
to fit her own theoretical model, Leys may be charged with denying Clorinda that
same status for her own theoretical end of ensuring that trauma is assigned to
the victim alone. Although Primo Levi has demonstrated that it is possible to
recognize the existence of perpetrator trauma – the suffering caused by the act
of inflicting violence on another human being – without affording to the
traumatized perpetrator the status of victim (Levi, 1989), the fear of such a
change in status is precisely what lies at the heart of Leys’ critique. Her
insistence on recognizing Clorinda exclusively as the victim of the murdering
Tancredi disregards Clorinda’s standing and reputation as a skilful, merciless and
unconquered warrior in an opposing army – canto nine of Tasso’s poem witnessed
Clorinda leaving a battlefield strewn with body parts: a heart and face cut in two
(Tasso, 1970: 9.68); a twitching amputated hand (ibid: 9:69); and a head
triumphantly decapitated (ibid: 9:70). Leys’ determination to overlook such a
spectacle of mutilation and overwrite such a construction of Clorinda the warrior
in favour of a construction of Clorinda as victim reveals deep anxieties about
the relationship between theoretical or literary discussions of trauma
and perpetration (such as Caruth’s) and real-world contexts of violence and
suffering.
A second critical problem is that posed by the peculiarity of the female
perpetrator’s experience. The influence of feminism on recent developments in
trauma studies is recognisable not only in the attention paid to societal
mechanisms which victimize the women of the world in a number of ways, but
also in the critical language employed in the field. For instance, both Judith
Herman in Trauma and Recovery and Ruth Leys in Trauma: A Genealogy
consistently gender the perpetrator male and the victim female. While on the one
hand this works to expose the dominant pattern of violence in Western society
where perpetrators are indeed overwhelmingly male and their victims female, it
leaves intact and unchallenged the cultural perception of the emasculation of

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 5

 the victim, whatever her gender. In Tasso’s archetype, this emasculation may be
seen both in the re-inscription of the disguised Clorinda’s femininity in place of
her warrior persona when she is fatally pierced by Tancredi’s sword – attention is
drawn to her ‘lovely chest’, her ‘tender breasts’, as she falls to the ground a
‘pierced virgin’ (Tasso, 12.64–12.65). It may also be seen in the unmanning
of Tancredi when confronted by the spectre of Clorinda; petrified with fright, he
loses his rationality and drops his phallic sword (Tasso, 13.45). Yet the
implications of such gendered constructions of perpetration and victimization
have not as yet been subjected to systematic analysis. Leys acknowledges
that ‘the gender implications of [Caruth’s] analysis remain unexplored. It is as
if Caruth displaces Clorinda’s gender divisions – a warrior maiden who dresses
and fights like a man – onto Tancredi himself’ (Caruth, 1996: 296) but offers
no further gender analysis herself, leaving this aspect of trauma theory
unexamined.
The lack of a gender inflection to contemporary trauma theory has inhibited
discussion of the traumatic psychological impact of women’s active participation in
violence, be that as medieval or early-modern warrior, or as twentieth-century
terrorist. Such a failure to recognize and address the specific psychological impact
of the female perpetrator, in both Freudian and post-Freudian theory, may well be
a symptom of the fact that women’s participation in violence is, in itself, culturally
traumatic. As Hilary Neroni argues, ‘If there is one characteristic that defines
masculinity in the cultural imagination, it is violence. The depiction of a violent
woman upsets this association of violence with masculinity’ (2005: 19). Moreover,
since the cultural paradigm ordains that violent men and vulnerable women form a
relationship of complementarity, in which male violence may be channelled towards
protecting vulnerable women, ‘when woman is violent, she eliminates the need for
the male protector, thereby disrupting this complementarity relationship’ (2005:
86). For Neroni, then, the truly traumatic import of female violence is that it
undoes the ideological fantasy of male-female complementarity that underlies
social organization. It is for this reason that female perpetrators ‘provoke
exaggerated attempts to define femininity: their violence disrupts this sense of
complementarity and throws off (or unsettles) all the cultural nuances that define
[y] traditional ideas of femininity’ (2005: 93).
Following Neroni, I would contend that the involvement of women in political
violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo and beyond constitutes a
particularly deep, and still open, wound in the Italian collective unconscious. This
is evinced by the strikingly different treatment of male and female terrorists
in mass media representations of the 1970s as well as in more recent cultural
products addressing the period. Films like La meglio gioventù [The Best of Youth]
(Giordana, 2003), Buongiorno, notte [Goodmorning, Night] (Bellocchio, 2003)
and Romanzo criminale (Placido, 2005) all gender terrorism male by naturalizing
male violence and problematizing (i.e., psychopathologizing, undermining or

6 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

 exaggerating) female violence. Representations of female terrorists tend to
oscillate between polarized depictions of women militants as ‘token terrorists’
(Morgan, 1989) – incapable of violence and therefore subject and in thrall to the
violent men to whom they are attached – and as extremely ruthless and
unnatural killers whose thirst for violence far outstrips that of their male
counterparts (as discussed by Macdonald, 1991: 4–5). Such treatment serves to
remind us that cultural representations of female terrorists are intricately
embedded in a range of psychological, social and cultural discourses that tend to
replicate what Marie Orton has described as ‘the Woman-as-other construction
that exists in society in general’ (Orton, 1998: 283). Although such constructions
may not be directly acknowledged, they continue to play an important role in how
women see themselves and in how they are seen by others.

introducing the perpetrator

The central texts in the corpus of memoirs written by, or in collaboration with, the
women of the Red Brigades – Silvana Mazzocchi’s Nell’anno della Tigre: Storia di
Adriana Faranda (1994), Anna Laura Braghetti and Paola Tavella’s Il prigioniero
(1998 and 2003) and Barbara Balzerani’s Compagna luna (1998) – narrate the
experiences of the organization’s most prominent female members during the late
1970s: Adriana Faranda, Anna Laura Braghetti and Barbara Balzerani. All three
were involved in a number of fatal shootings and played a role in the kidnapping
and detainment of Aldo Moro. At the time of their writing, all three protagonists
were still serving time (they have since completed their sentences and been
released from prison), but while Faranda and Braghetti had officially
disassociated themselves from political violence and were collaborating with
state investigators, Balzerani has consisently refused to follow suit. All three
texts display a recognition, on the part of the former terrorists, of their status as
female perpetrators, sometimes validating that status in order to express regret,
at other times railing against it. The publication of the books before and during
the Judiciary Committee’s discussions on the possibility of a legal reconciliation
with former terrorists ensures that all three contribute to some extent to those
debates and to the contemporary reshaping of public responses to the anni di
piombo. The corpus is completed by Mara Nanni and Stefano Pierpaoli’s y E
allora? (2002), which narrates the story of Mara Nanni, a low-ranking member of
the Red Brigades uninvolved in crimes resulting in loss of life, but nonetheless
marked by the experience of being branded a terrorist. y E allora? was
published some years after Nanni’s release from prison, in the wake of the
D’Antona and Biagi murders; it is the most apolitical of the corpus.
In formal terms, Nell’anno della Tigre, Il prigioniero, Compagna luna, and y E
6 Excluded from this allora? might all be described as hybrid texts.6 Situated uncomfortably between
list is the epistolary
exchange between biography and autobiography, the corpus demonstrates a preference for
Braghetti and right- co-authorship, for oscillation between first and third person narration, and for

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 7

 fragmented narrative forms. In the genesis and production of the narrative, then, wing ex-terrorist
Francesca Mambro’s
these hybrid texts might be seen to run counter to the autobiographical Nel cerchio della
dominance in Italian women’s writing and the assumption that women should prigione (1995).
Although this text
write themselves. The earliest of these publications, Mazzocchi’s Nell’anno della does provide a
Tigre, offers a kind of prototype of the ex-terrorist ‘outlaw genre’, a designation certain amount of
autobiographical
Caren Kaplan has provided for texts resisting strict formal classification.7 reflection, it serves
less to narrate the
Although ostensibly sole-authored, Nell’anno della Tigre’s ‘quattro-mani’ [four- self than to
handed] formulation adheres to the model proposed by Kaplan, who observes represent the other,
each woman
that outlaw texts frequently require ‘collaborative procedures that are [y] narrating the story
of the other.
closely attuned to the power differences among the participants in the process of
7 Kaplan’s analysis
producing the text’ (Kaplan, 1992: 119) and portray, ‘instead of a discourse of of outlaw genre
individual authorship [y] a discourse of situation; a ‘‘politics of location’’ ’ focuses on texts
written in non-
(Kaplan, 1992: 119). The situational politics of Nell’anno della Tigre as outlaw Western societies,
genre is evident in Faranda’s reluctance to claim authorship despite having a and on the ways in
which such texts
significant autobiographical authorial contribution. This reluctance may be employ but re-
conceptualize the
explained by the fact that, as the first post-terrorist narration concerned both quintessentially
with the story of a female militant and with the emotional impact of her Western genre of
autobiography as a
involvement in the Red Brigades, the book risked arousing a very negative critical act of
resistance to
reaction on the part of the Italian public. Marie Orton has observed how Western culture.
Mazzocchi’s claim to sole ownership serves simultaneously to shield and distance Such analysis is not
appropriate to
Faranda from authorship of the text, while, her ‘textual presence of interviewer/ discussion of the
editor both facilitates and insulates Faranda’s narration’ (1998: 284). As author, texts under
consideration here;
Mazzocchi is at pains to situate her own subject position very carefully in relation my understanding of
the coincidence
to Faranda’s. This is most evident in the preface, where Mazzocchi clarifies that between ex-terrorist
her motivation for writing the book was the ‘challenge of giving voice [y] to the narratives and
Kaplan’s wider
protagonists of an environment and a scenario with which, at the start of the categorization of
‘outlaw genre’ is
1970s, I myself had flirted without being tempted even for a moment by its lure’ restricted to the
(1994: 6). Having established her status as witness to the events, and alluded to texts’ formal
construction and the
a shared political point of departure, Mazzocchi attests to her own spotless collaborative
credentials in relation to the violence of the 1970s in order to act as impartial procedures
deployed.
facilitator of this testimony, and as ultimate guarantor of its sincerity.

Mazzocchi’s role here – like Tavella’s and Pierpaoli’s in Il prigioniero and y E

allora?, respectively – is akin to that of a confessional mediator, understood in
the Foucauldian sense. According to Foucault, confession is:

a ritual of discourse [y] that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not
confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the
interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it,
and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which
the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order
to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its
external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it

8 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

 exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and
promises him salvation (Foucault, 1998: 61–2).

In brief, the confessional mode is one that offers an opportunity for a positive
regeneration and transformation of the self but that, in its requirement for a
responsive interlocutor and arbitrator, ‘conflates a functional boundary between
the public and the private’ (Gilmore, 2001: 2) and implicitly involves and appeals
to others for forgiveness and understanding.

The difficulties – or obstacles and resistances – inherent in the articulation of

confessional discourse are made manifest by the tentative, laboured and hybrid
constructions of post-terrorist narration. In the case of Nell’anno della Tigre,
every sentence of Faranda’s is filtered through the narration of Mazzocchi, who
repeats and reformulates Faranda’s words and phrases, thereby attenuating the
impact of her words while also conferring upon them greater credence, greater
authority. But it is not Mazzocchi’s textual presence alone that insulates
Faranda’s first person narration; rather, Faranda’s ‘autobiographical flashes’
(Mazzocchi, 1994: 7), visibly differentiated on the page from Mazzocchi’s
authoritative third person account by the use of italic script, are delimited by
numerous other textual presences – statements provided by fellow ex-terrorists,
childhood friends, family members, court prosecutors, prison governors and even
family members of the victims. The function of these contributions in the text is
not so much to elucidate ‘a part of the events that have so deeply marked our
country’ (1994: 6), as Mazzocchi has promised, but, rather, to attest to Faranda’s
personal conversion and rehabilitation.

With the exception of Il prigioniero, this model of textual insulation and

mediation is replicated elsewhere, in the employment of prefaces and
introductory notes attesting to the positive alteration, the contrition and
sincerity, of the ex-terrorist protagonist. The body of y E allora?, for instance,
is preceded by a ‘Preface’ by Pierpaoli; three ‘Testimonies’ (written by the former
director of Rebibbia prison, by Adriana Faranda, and by another of Nanni’s ex-
comrades, Annunziata Francola, who comments only on Nanni as a person as she
has not actually read the book); and a ‘Note’ penned by both authors. In
Compagna luna, Balzerani provides a prefatory address which presents the text as
‘the result of my most urgent questions and the request for help in trying to
answer them’ (1998: 9). At the same time, however, the preface circumscribes
the limits of that appeal for help by identifying several categories of readers to
whom the book is – and is not – addressed. The function of such introductory
contributions is to prepare the reader for the encounter with the transformed
ex-terrorist protagonist of the text, and to enable her to speak. For what
underlies the mediated structure of each one of these hybrid, confessional texts,
I would contend, is the unspeakable nature of the perpetrator.

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 9

 the unspeakable perpetrator
To some extent or another, all four texts written by the women of the Red
Brigades are concerned with addressing and overcoming an inability to speak
the self in order to construct a post-terrorist identity. This feature appears to be
peculiar to the female perpetrators of the anni di piombo. While texts written by
male militants display little concern for the impact of violence on the authors’
sense of self, a major impetus for the life-writing of the women of the Red
Brigades appears to be what Susette Henke has termed ‘the articulation of a
haunting and debilitating emotional crisis that, for the author, borders on the
unspeakable’ (Henke, 2000: xix). Faranda, for instance, suggests that her past
has left a visible sign of her alterity; like a scarlet letter, it signifies but it fails
to communicate. She describes it as: ‘almost a mark on my skin, which
distinguishes me and makes me different from everybody else. [y] Part of me
remains incommunicable to others’ (Mazzocchi, 1994: 208). Balzerani also writes
of having ‘an unnarratable past’ (1998: 130); and, although not so overtly
expressed, similar sentiments of the incommunicability of the experience of
violent perpetration and its impact on the self may be traced in the texts
treating Braghetti’s and Nanni’s experiences.
The incommunicability of the ex-terrorist self may originate, at least in part, in a
cultural construction of female perpetration as particularly transgressive.
Although the heightened gravity of women’s participation in terrorism in Italy is
never fully acknowledged in any of the texts under discussion, it may perhaps be
detected in the hyperawareness that each displays to the disjuncture between
the protagonist’s own sense of self and externally generated constructions of her
as terrorist and perpetrator in media images, courtroom documents, or third-
party discussions. In the case of Compagna luna, for instance, the first chapter
opens with a comparison of a photograph of Balzerani as a child with a later
photograph of herself as a wanted terrorist. She discerns in the earlier image a
distrust of photography and the ‘early signs of the suffering she would undergo
years later, on seeing her face printed on the pages of trashy newspapers: Look
at her, the icy-eyed assassin, foremost professional prototype of the soulless
monster’ (1998: 13). What emerges from such a disjuncture between multiple
past images of the self and the present identity of the writing woman is a
fractured and incoherent sense of self, encapsulated in the phrase: ‘I still have
so much to do before I can make my shattered image whole again, from the
fragments in the mirror’ (1998: 63). Similarly, in Il prigioniero, Braghetti’s dual
construction of herself as ‘Laura’ – the name she was called by family and friends
– and as ‘Camilla’, the name by which she was known to her comrades in the Red
Brigades, is replicated in the structural edifice of the narrative. The book is
divided into odd numbered chapters concerned with Braghetti’s experience of the
55 days in which Moro was held captive and even-numbered chapters providing
episodes of Braghetti’s life prior or subsequent to those 55 days. The dualistic

10 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

structure of the book intimates an ongoing inability to incorporate the experience
of terrorism into a coherent narrative of the self.

However it is in Balzerani’s Compagna luna that the terrorist’s inability to speak

is explored with greatest commitment. ‘How to narrate myself now?’, Balzerani
writes, wracked by the inability to give expression to ‘the not-yet narratable’
(1998: 63). Although her memoir is single-authored (the only one of its
kind to date), Balzerani’s narration is also mediated and insulated to a certain
extent. Like Nell’anno della Tigre, Compagna luna combines, on the one hand,
a third person narration which distances the narratorial voice of the present
from the past events and experiences narrated and, on the other, italicized
first person passages focusing more on the personal, on the emotions and
sensations, rather than the events of the episodes recalled. Moreover, each
individual chapter, as well as the book itself, opens with an epigraph, usually
from a literary text, a mechanism which engages the narration in a relational
dynamics with the discourses of power and victimhood that the chosen epigraphs
project.

The epigraph to the book as a whole comes from Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and
alludes to the incommunicability of the traumatized self which speaks a language
of its own: ‘I am probing my memory the way a doctor probes a limb to see
whether it has atrophied. Perhaps pain dies before we die. That information, if
true, must be passed on; but to whom? Of those here who speak my language,
there is none who will not die with me’ (Wolf, 1984: 6; Balzerani, 1998: 7).
Balzerani’s preface follows on in a similar vein, explaining, as already noted, that
the book is ‘the result of my most urgent questions and the request for help in
trying to answer them’ (1998: 9), and that its genesis lies in the ‘unbearableness
of a deafening silence in which memory and free speech are prohibited’ (1998: 9).
However, the fact that the very same preface identifies a total of seven
categories of potential listeners to whom the book is specifically not addressed
provides ambiguity about the stated desire to emerge from silence, and reveals a
very real anxiety about the status of the text.

This anxiety, which is an anxiety over the act of speech itself, is confronted
head-on in the closing stages of the book, in a highly articulate analysis of
Mimmo Calopresti’s film, La seconda volta [The Second Time] (1995). The film
presents the encounter between a female ex-terrorist, on day-release from
prison, and the man she had shot some years earlier, whom she fails to recognize.
Centred on unresolved trauma, Calopresti’s film builds towards the moment
of confrontation between two individuals whose lives have been forever
shattered and fixated by the same event. When finally called upon to explain the
reasons for her violent actions, the ex-terrorist seems unable to find a
justification that can satisfy either her victim or herself. Balzerani’s critique of
Calopresti’s film centres on this portrayal of the female terrorist’s inability to

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 11

 articulate the political convictions she had held and for which she had been
willing to risk all:

She cannot speak, not because she does not know how, perhaps, but because she must not.
She is not expected to have the faculty of speech, and even if she were to have it, she
would be denied it.
Why? Because the social vendetta for her guilt is a sentence of silence. [y] She must not
speak. She can only be spoken and provide an image that will ease the anxiety emanating
from a memory that is too damaged to generate the kind of conviction associated with any
reassurance of a more enduring kind (Balzerani, 1998: 128–9)8. 8 My thanks are due
to Judith Bryce for
her assistance and
expertise in
Balzerani’s very difficulty in articulating what is in effect a prohibition on speech translating this
passage.
– she reformulates the basic idea in several different ways (repeating ‘she must
not’ alongside ‘she cannot’, ‘she is not expected to’ and ‘she can only be
spoken’) – is testament to an awareness that it is not so much what the terrorist
has to say, but the very act of speech itself, that is intolerable. As Herman
reminds us, ‘certain violations of the social contract are too terrible to utter
aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable’ (2001: 1).
Such formulations of the ex-terrorist’s unspeakable subjectivity, coupled with the
many implicit comparisons of Balzerani’s experience with that of the world’s
oppressed social groups, would seem to invite a characterization of the
perpetrator as subaltern, in the terms formulated by Gayatri Spivak (1988). An
even stronger claim to unspeakable subalternity might be more forcefully
asserted in the case of any of the co-authored texts. Mazzocchi’s treatment of
Faranda, for instance, provides an extremely lucid illustration of the manner in
which an individual denoted as a perpetrator may be denied the status of
conscious speaking subject. On one occasion Faranda is quoted as saying that
she lost a sense of her self-identity in the experience of armed struggle: ‘The very
fact of belonging to an armed organization changes you. You lose your individual
identity in order to assume a totalizing collective identity that ends up deforming
your own way of being and thinking’ (Mazzocchi, 1994: 147). Elsewhere, in
extracts from her life-writing, Faranda presents herself as lacking in agency on
those occasions when she found herself at odds with collective Red Brigade
decisions, for example, ‘I’m at my wit’s end, but I have to bend to the decisions
of the Organization’ (Mazzocchi, 1994: 132); and ‘I felt my convictions crumbling,
but my respect for collective decisions won out’ (Mazzocchi, 1994: 136). However,
an alternative perspective is offered by a fellow ex-terrorist, Assunta Griso, whom
Mazzocchi quotes as saying that Faranda ‘had not become just a part of a
collective identity, she had not obliterated herself. This is what drew us to each
other. The fact that she had retained her individuality within the Red Brigades.
Despite the Red Brigades’ (Mazzocchi, 1994: 195). Mazzocchi makes no comment
on the inconsistency between the two versions but simply accepts the testimony

12 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

of Griso (for whom she does not have to vouch) over that of Faranda (for whom
she does), when she attests shortly afterwards that Adriana and her partner,
Valerio, ‘had been able to preserve that individual identity which so many others
had lost, obliterating themselves in the collective and totalizing viewpoint of
armed organizations’ (1994: 199). Mazzocchi’s dismissal of Faranda’s stated
position in favour of that offered by Griso provides a very clear illustration of the
idea that the unspeakable terrorist ‘must not speak. She must only be spoken’
(Balzerani, 1998: 129).

The ex-terrorist’s unspeakable subjectivity should perhaps be understood less in

terms of subalternity than in terms of trauma and taboo. Ultimately, the
prohibition on speech identified by Balzerani and demonstrated by Mazzocchi is
bound up with the ongoing post-traumatic conflict between traumatized
perpetrator and wider society, and between their competing but mutually
exclusive discourses of trauma. Yet the consequence of the social imperative that
renders the terrorist an unspeakable Other and prohibits her speech as taboo is
that the perpetrator may only speak by adopting the subject position of the
victim. Thus, in writing the self and attempting to carve out a post-terrorist
subjectivity, the women of the Red Brigades subtly insinuate a discourse of
victimization into their life-writing. That discourse is not limited – as it is in
male-authored texts – to a predictable narrative of political victimization
in which left-wing violence is explained and rationalized in relation to the
right-wing strategy of tension in the early 1970s. Instead, the narrative of
victimization most common among the women of the Red Brigades relates to the
way in which the violence they inflicted on others has impacted emotionally on
themselves. Balzerani, for instance, describes the act of shooting as a
diminishing of self (‘shot after shot, I leave a part of myself behind’, 1998: 71),
while for Braghetti the experience of killing another human being is recounted in
relation to the ongoing psychological punishment of recurrent involuntary
recollection of the event (‘My punishment is not prison, but that image. I am
condemned to have it forever before my eyes’, 1998: 131). Considerable attention
is also paid in post-terrorist narrations to the erasure of the self inherent in the
experience of living on the run, an experience Mara Nanni describes as ‘a non-life
[y] a sort of annihilation that alienated our consciousness’ (2002: 75), and to
the hardships and suffering endured by the perpetrators in their long years of
imprisonment, ‘when life is always lived elsewhere’ (Balzerani, 1998: 113).

A less subtle claim to victimization is made in Balzerani’s Compagna luna, when

the prohibition on speech is formulated as a ‘social vendetta’ which imposes on
the female terrorist a ‘sentence of silence’ (1998: 129). Balzerani is careful not
to claim for her post-terrorist reconstruction of herself an explicitly victimized
status – the point is mediated through discussion of Calopresti’s film –
nonetheless, she does go on to compare her imprisoned self with the film’s

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 13

 protagonist, suspended between life and death: ‘Like me [y] with a mandate
that makes her a semi-living being, with an unnarratable past, an impoverished
present and an non-existant future’ (1998: 130). This comparison of herself and
the cinematic terrorist condemned to a half life recalls her equation of life and
speech in the prefatory address to the book as a whole, where she writes that ‘in
addition to survival I have been granted life, that is, speech’ (1998: 9).
Balzerani’s implicit claim of victimization recalls and gives credence to that
aspect of Caruth’s theorization of trauma so heavily criticized by Leys. According
to Caruth’s formulation, trauma is the wound that cries out but that does so only
through the voice of the victim: ‘for while the story of Tancredi, the repeated
thrust of his unwitting sword and the suffering he recognizes through the voice he
hears, represents the experience of an individual traumatized by this own past –
the repetition of his own trauma as it shapes his life – the wound that speaks is
not Tancredi’s own but the wound, the trauma of another’ (Caruth, 1996: 8): his
victim, Clorinda. Which is not merely to say that trauma can only be articulated
through a discourse of victimization; rather, that trauma silences the perpetrator
as perpetrator so that the perpetrator’s trauma may be expressed only through
the voice of the victim.
So too for the women of the Red Brigades. The title and cover of Braghetti and
Tavella’s Il prigioniero, for instance, allude to Aldo Moro; but they do so in order
to speak, not of the victim’s experience, but of Braghetti’s. Similarly, Balzerani
cushions the impact of her narrative’s encounter with the reading public by
employing the names of Red Brigade victims as chapter titles and by including
literary epigraphs that voice the suffering of Holocaust survivors and victims of
child abuse and mental institutions. This device works to situate her own trauma
story in the same context as that of the world’s subaltern groups. But most
remarkable of all is the manner in which Mazzocchi’s text comes to a close, for it
places Faranda’s ongoing suffering on a par with that of Aldo Moro, the most
emblematic victim of the anni di piombo. The final words employed to speak
Faranda’s trauma at the close of Nell’anno della Tigre replicate two of the final
sentences of Moro’s last letter to his wife before being executed:

For Adriana that part of her life is over forever. But the wounds remain open: the deepest
and incurable ones for the relatives of her victims, still piercing her soul.

Aldo Moro, in his last letter to his wife, Noretta, wrote: ‘I would like to be able to see, with
my mortal eyes, how things will be afterwards. And if there were light, it would be very
beautiful’. (Mazzocchi, 1994: 221)

This closing passage, which directly aligns Faranda’s and Moro’s testimonies as
prisoners, is both a voicing of pain and a plea made through the voice of the
victim, a voice that demands to be heard, for a future in which Faranda is free
from her past and free to speak the self.

14 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

Such a plea might be read by Caruth as a positive encounter between victim and
perpetrator, in which the adoption of Moro’s words would serve ‘to represent the
other within the self that retains the memory of the ‘‘unwitting’’ traumatic events
of one’s past’; on that reading, it would also be evidence of ‘the way in which
trauma may lead [y] to the encounter with another, through the very
possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound’ (Caruth, 1996: 8). But
Mazzochi’s plea on Faranda’s behalf might equally be read (following Leys) as a
form of exploitation of the voice of the victim on the part of the perpetrator.
According to that reading, Mazzochi’s alignment of Faranda and Moro would
serve to position Faranda on the side of Aldo Moro and to remind the
Italian public that she had already sided with him and with Italy’s silent
majority in 1978, when she had opposed the Red Brigades decision to
murder Moro. Mazzocchi thereby endorses Faranda’s entitlement to speak
the self, and facilitates her rehabilitation and potential re-entry into civil
society.

conclusion
Perpetrator speech is never neutral. It is inevitably contextualized, received and
interpreted in relation to both the act of violence for which the perpetrator is
responsible, and an understanding of how that particular infringement of the
social contract be punished, made good or resolved. That the women of the Red
Brigades are intensely aware of this fact is substantiated by the intense anxiety
over speech displayed in their tortuous attempts to narrate the self and
construct a new post-terrorist identity, at a time in which the potential for legal
reconciliation was being debated at the highest levels of the State. The implicit
recognition of the alterity of the female terrorist and of the taboo surrounding
perpetrator speech provides a challenge to the limits of discourse, articulated as
a challenge to the narration of the traumatized self in the life-writings of the
women of the Red Brigades. The corpus of female post-terrorist narration thus
engages the most current debates in trauma theory and begs the thorny question
of whether perpetrator trauma can ever be expressed as such, or whether it
must inevitably be articulated through a discourse of victimization. Finally, the
ongoing struggle for social rehabilitation on the part of the former terrorists
and their appreciation of the post-conflict sensitivities of their audience
attests to the enduring cultural trauma of the anni di piombo in the Italy of
the 1990s.

acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for granting me a
Research Leave Award to complete this paper and others forming part of my
project on women, terror and trauma in Italian culture. My thanks are also due to

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 15

 the anonymous reviewers of Feminist Review for their extremely close reading and
insightful comments.

author biography
Ruth Glynn is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol. Her research
interests lie in late twentieth-century Italian culture and include representations
of the anni di piombo; postmodernism; the historical novel and philosophy
of history. Her current research project examines how Italy’s experience of
political violence and terrorism in the anni di piombo is articulated as trauma in
memoir, fiction and film. Publications include Contesting the Monument: The
Anti-Illusionist Italian Historical Novel (2005), and articles on literary works by
Consolo, Eco and Malerba. Forthcoming works include co-edited volumes on
cinematic representations of Italian terrorism, entitled Terrorism, Italian Style
(2008) and on the cultural legacy of the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro,
Remembering Moro; as well as two articles on the figure of the female terrorist in
contemporary Italian film.

references
Balzerani, B. (1998) Compagna luna, Milan: Feltrinelli.
Battisti, C. (1998) L’ultimo sparo: Un ‘delinquente comune’ nella guerriglia italiana, Rome:
DeriveApprodi.
Braghetti, A.L. and Tavella, P. (1998) Il prigioniero, Milan: Mondadori.
Braghetti, A.L. and Tavella, P. (2003) Il prigioniero, 2nd edition, Milan: Feltrinelli.
Braghetti, L. and Mambro, F. (1995) Nel cerchio della prigione, Milan: Sperling & Kupfer.
Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Cento Bull, A. (2007) Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of
Nonreconciliation, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Curcio, R. (1993) A viso aperto: Intervista di Mario Scialoja, Milan: Mondadori.
Dai Prà, S. (2005) ‘Lo sterminato romanzo degli anni Settanta’ Lo straniero, No. 60: June. Available,
http://www.lostraniero.net, (accessed 28 August 2008).
De Cataldo Neuburger, L. and Valentini, T. (1996) Women and Terrorism, trans. L M Hughes, London:
Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin.
Franceschini, A., Buffa, P.V. and Giustolisi, F. (1988) Mara, Renato e io, Milan: Mondadori.
Franceschini, A. and Samueli, A. (1997) La borsa del presidente: ritorno agli anni di piombo, Rome:
Ediesse.
Freud, S. (1955) ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ in Strachey, J. and Freud, A. (1955) editors,
Vol. XVIII, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London:
Hogarth.

16 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self

Gallinari, P. (2006) Un contadino nella metropoli. Ricordi di un militante nelle Brigate rosse, Milan:
Bompiani.
Giesen, B. (2004) ‘The trauma of perpetrators’ in Alexander, J., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser,
N.J., Sztompka, P. (2004) editors, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkley, Los Angles
and London: University of California Press, 112–154.
Gilmore, L. (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Hacking, I. (1994) ‘Memoro-politics, trauma and the soul’ History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 7,
No. 2: 29–52.
Henke, S. (2000) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing, London:
Macmillan.
Herman, J. (2001) Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, rev. edition,
London: Pandora.
Jamieson, A. (1989) The Heart Attacked: Terrorism and Conflict in the Italian State, London and
New York: Marion Boyers.
Kaplan, C. (1992) ‘Resisting autobiography: out-law genres and transnational feminist subjects’ in
Smith, S., and Watson, J. (1992) editors, De-Colonizing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 115–138.
LaCapra, D. (1994) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Levi, P. (1989) The Drowned and the Saved, Rosenthal, S. translator, New York: Vintage International.
Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
MacDonald, E. (1991) Shoot the Women First, London: Fourth Estate.
Mazzocchi, S. (1994) Nell’anno della Tigre: storia di Adriana Faranda, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi.
Moretti, M. (1994) Brigate rosse, una storia italiana: intervista di Carla Mosca e Rossana Rossanda,
Milan: Anabasi.
Morgan, R. (1989) The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism, London: Methuen.
Morucci, V. (1999) La peggio gioventù: una vita nella lotta armata, Milan: Rizzoli.
Morucci, V. (2005) Ritratto di un terrorista da giovane, Casale Monferrato: Piemme.
Neroni, H. (2005) The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American
Cinema, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Orton, M. (1998) ‘Demonsterizing the myth of the terrorist woman: Faranda, Braghetti, and
Mambro’ Annali d’italianistica, Vol. 16: 281–296.
Payne, L. (2008) Unsettling Accounts: The Politics and Performance of Confessions by Perpetrators
of Authoritarian State Violence, Durham: Duke University Press.
Pierpaoli, S. and Nanni, M. (2002) E allora? 2nd edition, Rome: Edizioni interculturali.
Segio, S. (2005) Miccia corta: una storia di Prima linea, Rome: DeriveApprodi.
Seltzer, M. (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, New York; London:
Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (1988) editors, Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 271–313.
Tasso, T. (1970) Jerusalem Delivered, trans. J Tusiani, Rutherford; Madison; Teaneck: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
Wolf, C. (1984) Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, London: Virago.
Zoni Zanetti, T. (1997) Rosso di Mària: L’educazione sentimentale di una bambina guerriglia,
Rome: DeriveApprodi.
Zoni Zanetti, T. (2000) Clandestina, Rome: DeriveApprodi.

Ruth Glynn feminist review 92 2009 17

 films
Buongiorno, notte [Goodmorning, Night] (2003) directed by M. Belloccio, 01 Distribuzione.
La meglio gioventù [The Best of Youth] (2003) directed by M. T. Giordana, 01 Distribuzione.
La Seconda Volta [The Second Time] (1995) directed by M. Calopresti, Banfilm Production.
Romanzo criminale (2005) directed by M. Placido, Cattleya Production.

doi:10.1057/fr.2009.6

18 feminist review 92 2009 writing the terrorist self