Reporting of BastaBugie editorial team
Fairy tales are where we keep monsters (ad es.: resentment because others seem to be loved more than us)
Of Silvana De Mari

Fairy tales arise by themselves, no one knows where, choral and anonymous; they evolve bit by bit, they travel through centuries and across places, undergoing all possible modifications, but always remaining the same. Fairy tales have fantastic and magical protagonists and must not exceed the space of an afternoon spent by the fire and, above all, that of one evening, because their main job is to fill the “before going to bed”, so that the child can drift off to sleep lulled by the adult's voice, without the monsters that live inside the darkness being able to disturb him. Monsters are the fear of not being loved, the resentment of not being loved, jealousy because others are or seem to be loved more than us. Fairy tales are where we keep monsters. As Kafka intuits, fairy tales are the gold and silver boxes where we keep monsters.
The monsters are unspeakable. Negative emotions are not always allowed for children, especially to those who would have the most reason to have it: therefore it is appropriate to hide them inside a fairy tale and try them out through a third party, identifying with the main character.
THE ORPHAN
In the omnipresent figure of the orphan, key character in all children's fiction, there is obviously the fear of becoming one, ma, above all, the eternal fear of not being loved enough is hidden. The stepmother on the one hand is the representation of a precise historical reality, of a real danger in other times constantly lurking: that of remaining orphans of a mother killed in childbirth, at the mercy of a stepmother who would have divided the little food unequally between the children of the first and second bed, the many beatings and the endless hours of backbreaking work. On the other hand the stepmother is, above all, the universally usable ghost of a mother who loves little or less than we would like. Inside half-brothers and half-sisters there is fear constantly present, even in the children of truly loving families, that the brothers (sisters) are more loved than us. Inside the witch and the ogre there are mother and father when they are angry and screaming: with distorted features, infinitely larger than the child they loom over, omnipotent, terrifying. Fairy tales, how everything also addresses the unconscious, they do not avoid contradiction. Being an orphan is not only a terror but also a childhood dream. The killing (possibly ritual, not with shovels) of parents is the necessary phase to achieve independence. It's difficult to face the dragons chased by mum who asks us if we've changed our wool sweaters. In a certain sense inside the dragon, eternally guarding something precious inside impenetrable caves or semi-ruined castles, there is also parental authority, that it is necessary to break to become adults and free.
FAIRY TALES
Fairy tales, fantastic narration without any pretense of verisimilitude, I am, absolutely, as a work born from below, the most faithful mirror of an era. Fairy tales contain the persecution of children. In fairy tales he has always been one of the protagonists, along with hunger, to fear, all'infanticide, to the idea that children could be chased away, walk away, sold, exchanged, abandoned in a dark forest where a hideous ogre will eat them for dinner, unless a row of pebbles shining under the moon brings them back to a home where no one wants them. Sexual abuse dares to appear in the fairy tale, pedophilia and incest (Donkey skin), criminal psychosis and uxoricide (Bluebeard). When they were going through the war, the lanzichenecchi, drought and locusts, when there were no more crops, it could happen that children were abandoned in the woods, killed (Snow White) massacred with work and discriminated against their brothers (Cinderella) or sold in exchange for food (Rapunzel) while they are still in their mother's womb, as still happens today in the horrendous practice of the rented womb, (nothing and no one will ever be able to force me to use other words than these, uterus for rent).
RAPUNZOL
In the original fairy tale the pregnant queen has a craving for turnips, owned by a witch that her husband goes to steal for her. The witch finds out and the king promises the life that the queen carries in her womb in order to be freed. To the king all my contempt. A good man dies, of hunger, of effort, he does not sell his woman's belly. My father would have died, he would never hand them over. The task of men is to die for their women and their children. We remove the gold and silver and what remains is a little girl sold with the complicity of the man who was supposed to protect her. The children were sold, for food, to infertile couples, where sometimes there was a need for a child for hereditary reasons, or to carpet or brick factories, or to the mines, four-year-old children went down the mine. The adoptive mother, Rapunzel's owner, the one who bought and paid for the child becomes her jailer: the purchased son, on special agencies that advertise “baby in arms”, equivalent “turnkey”, he has been bought and paid for and is unlikely to be given the freedom to be as he wants to be. Relationships between mother and child, or rather between the owner of the uterus and the fetus (I wouldn't want to be accused of psychological terrorism), they are huge, the risks a woman runs during pregnancy are enormous, they can remain scars of importance forever, such as stretch marks and wider feet, due to the greater weight and laxity of connective tissues, or serious pathologies such as diabetes, renal failure. A woman can die. A woman suffers: natural childbirth is suffering, Cesarean birth is suffering, postpartum is suffering, a happy and welcome suffering when one's own child is born, conceived with the man she loved, atrocious suffering in other cases. Womb rental is the new form of exploitation of the body, of slavery, of oppression, of violation of dignity. Buyers of the baby say they love him, and that love solves everything. The insistent use of the words love, this affectivity vomited continuously, flaunted at every moment, it is the stigmata of hysteria, the sign of an empty sentimentalism: give birth to a motherless child, after reducing her pregnancy to a uterus rental, it is not a gesture of love. The baby learns to recognize the mother's voice in the fifth month of intrauterine life, throughout his life he will produce oxytocin by hearing that voice. The mother-son bond is a sacred bond. Whoever interrupts him commits a crime.
Note from BastaBugie: Paolo Gulisano in the article below entitled “Bluestone, the ogre who rejected evil” talks about the values ​​that exude from Silvana De Mari's latest novel, Arduin the Renegade (Ares). And they are the values ​​of friendship, of tenderness, attention to the little things, of love for life, for every life and contain a call to remain human and reject evil and conformism.
Here is the complete article published on La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana on 18 December 2017:
One of the greatest contemporary Fantasy sagas reaches its final act. This is the Saga of the Last Elf, by Silvana De Mari, than with the masterpiece of the same name which opened the narrative cycle followed by L'Ultimo Orco, The Last Spells, The Last Prophecy of the World of Men, My name is Yorsh and finally The Last Prophecy of the World of Men. Epilogue, won the love of thousands of readers and the recognition of international critics, from France to the United States.
A saga that stands out for its gripping writing, original, enriched by an irresistibly biting sense of humor, which raises a smile even in the darkest pages. Already, because the literary cycle born from the fervent imagination of Silvana De Mari, a doctor who worked in hospitals in Ethiopia, who dedicated herself as a psychotherapist to abused and violated women, won letters, it is a world where a tough fight against violence is fought, against injustice, against abuse. Nothing new under the sun, some might say. Ultimately the great narrative of the Imaginary, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars tells us exactly this: this titanic struggle made by a few brave people to stop the advance of Evil, represented by Sauron or Emperor Palpatine.
However, Silvana De Mari's genius in recent years has unfolded in describing an atrocious world in her books, where evil finds expression through its most banal face, more everyday, without all this moral mud, this filth of souls, can undermine or extinguish the flame of hope. We could say that De Mari turned Hannah Arendt's famous judgment on the banality of evil into literature. Many of the evil figures in De Mari's works are not the usual villains of fiction or cinema, but they are simply imbeciles, of the obtuse executors of orders, of people who have abdicated the precious gift of intelligence and reason.
From this point of view, Arduin the Renegade (Ares) represents the quintessence of Silvana De Mari's thought, and on the one hand it is the highly anticipated prequel to the Saga of the Last Elf, which places the definitive piece in the history of the World of Men, revealing to us the events that happened three hundred years earlier, and revealing genealogical connections to us, political scenarios and above all the personal story of the great Sire Arduin, This novel can very well be read as a standalone. This is because it represents a beginning, because it introduces us to this imaginary world inhabited by Men, Orcs, Beautiful Elfi. A world that could very well be ours, in another era, with other protagonists, but where the same mistakes and atrocities present in ours are made. Where a sort of dramatic clash of civilizations between different and hostile races is underway, the Men, the Elves, the Orcs. And the story is told starting from the story of an Ogre, a small baby ogre who is sold by his father, beastly obtuse and cruel, to the military who train children to send them against the Elves, knowing that these, with their very high human values, they will be shocked by having to deal with children, and this will take away their powers. Little Arduink is therefore prepared together with his companions in misfortune for this fate, and is taught to hate, to lie, to deceive. He is taught the worst through a “pedagogy” of suffering, inflicted without sense, without purpose, if not for the entertainment of the torturers. Arduink, However, progressively learns to reject this role. He rebels against the so-called “Orchitudine”, opens his eyes to the cruelty of the chain of evil that begins from the soldier who must instruct him and reaches up to the Orc Emperor, and understands that he can choose, who must choose the good.
The book thus tells us the rise of a great warrior, the ogre child who rebels, who deserts from the Orca army, who becomes a solitary seeker, and then he meets creatures- orcs themselves, and then men and elves- who show him the path to honor, of respect, of compassion. Arduink chooses to renounce the ways and customs of the orcs, by whom he will be branded as a traitor, and puts himself at the service of Men. Among which there is no shortage of stupid people, the cruel, the deceivers, but there is good in this world, in the villages, like in the courts of castles, and this is worth fighting for.
We said that this compelling and exciting novel represents the quintessence of its author's vision of the world, that already manifests itself in the other volumes of the saga. In particular, Silvane De Mari tells us that Evil is very present in the world and in history; looms over us, corrupts our hearts, overthrow the thrones, erase dynasties; he particularly enjoys abusing small and innocent people. However, Evil does not have the last word. It must be stopped. We must fight courageously against it. No contemporary Fantasy saga is so clear and crisp. Every creature – and not just men or noble Elves – but even an orc can choose to reject evil, cruelty, hatred, and can choose the Good. The warrior Arduink loses the K and becomes the knight Arduin, who decides for the good, and is touched in his heart by love for Princess Giada, princess of men.
The values ​​that exude from this novel are therefore those of friendship, of tenderness, attention to the little things, of love for life, for every life.
Theoretically this should make Silvana De Mari an author admired for her intense humanitarianism. This book should be used in anti-bullying courses, because he lucidly describes its ruthless mechanisms. It could even be exalted as a warning against social discrimination; when Arduink settles among men, he has to suffer a sort of racism, as well as all the unfortunate half-orcs resulting from the rapes of human women that occurred during the orc raids. Unfortunately, we know that this is unlikely to be the case: Silvana De Mari has long been the target of harsh personal attacks due to her political ideas “incorrect”. In particular his firm stance on abortion, on euthanasia, on gender theories. Topics that he addresses not from a theoretical point of view, but based on many years of experience in the field. Everything comes from his journey among suffering humanity, which touched his sensitive soul, and which is transfigured into a story. His is the voice of a free conscience, tidy, who wants to remember truths that are perhaps too uncomfortable today.
Silvana's books contain a sort of heartfelt appeal: let's stay human, we reject evil, we reject dullness, imbecility, we refuse to silence our conscience under the dark cloak of conformism. Let's hope it doesn't go unheard.
Official trailer of Silvana De Mari's latest book: Arduin the Forsaken (term: 3 minutes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWuYFwd_aEA