Gods of Culture

There were evenings spent around cylinders and cigarettes, telling each other stories, and as when a little girl I listened, half asleep, to my dad's stories of hunting and travelling; so I watched and listened, half bored now, to storytelling of bending, and streets, and oil, and tyres and women in glossy magazines. There was he, then: not just a published writer and a photographer, but a bit of “a literary snob.” Still, he represented a gate.

Older. Cute. Educated. Culturally coded. Belonging to a certain specific aesthetic tribe: the smoky-voiced, ironic, intellectual masculinity of a certain Italian milieu. I know that type intimately because I grew up around it. Those men, with their Guzzi bikes, the cigarettes, the guitars, the cultivated melancholy, the Kafka paperback in the back pocket: that was an aesthetic. A posture. A performance of depth. Younger and surrounded by that, it felt like a gate to seriousness. Like: this is what writers look like. This is what intellectuals must sound like.

This is who I need to become.

I emailed him once and asked for advice, something about the practice of submission. In a way, I wasn't just asking for technical advice: I was knocking on a symbolic door. Unfortunately, his response wasn’t neutral information. It was hierarchy enforcement: “If you have to ask, you are not a writer.”

This morning, some 16 years later, I opened *The Right to Write*, sitting at my desk, and I encountered his long-forgotten name, among a very curated list of "creative monsters" as people who once made me feel small in my craft. I felt flooded again by his paternalistic voice, very dismissive. Shaming. Today, on the anniversary of my mother's death, I checked online, and I discovered he has sadly passed away.

There is no mystical coincidence; this is simply psychological timing. He represents an internalised critic which I carried with me for so many years. A specific one. Not abstract, but embodied in a real person who once spoke to me in a way that shrank me. When someone like that dies in real life, something symbolic happens internally: the external source of that voice is gone.

The man died; but does the imprint still echo?

I can feel sorrow for a human death, of course, and still hold the truth of how he treated me. Compassion does not erase impact.

And what’s striking is the sequence of my writing and the publishing of these postcards, for example, affirming me as a writer regardless of external approval, while at the same time, I confront the memory of someone who tried to belittle my craft. And now I discover he is no longer alive. Then, it wasn’t about process; it was just about belonging.

[Am I able, now, to write this "clean" and not accusatory?]

I sensed then that I needed to “belong first” before speaking with my own voice. That’s the trap, but many artists from intellectual families internalise that rule: first earn legitimacy through the tribe, and only then may you speak. In his statement, he reinforced that rule: he made the initiation conditional. And he did it in a way that shamed curiosity.

But here is the deeper truth: asking how submission works is not evidence of not being a writer. It’s evidence of being at the beginning of professional navigation. And every writer has asked someone how it works. His response revealed insecurity, not superiority. Secure writers demystify. Insecure ones guard. And the pain I felt wasn’t about him. It was about the fear that he might be right, that I didn’t belong to that circle.

Now I left the circle. I left the country. I built practice in isolation. I have been submitting without asking permission from anyone for the past 16 years. And I write daily. I am building authorship without the tribe's permission.

And here’s something strong: I no longer want to belong to any group in order to speak. I am speaking from outside. He doesn’t get to be my internal editor anymore. I am now writing not because a literary tribe anointed me but simply because I write. Some of the men that I looked up to then in admiration were not gods of culture. They were young men performing gravitas, and what hurt me then was not their actual stature, but the hierarchy they projected. The insinuation that I was outside the circle.

In the end, some four or five years later, I left, and I wrote. At times, I am interrogating my psyche at 3 am instead of smoking under a streetlamp, talking about authenticity, and if there is anything I learned from this is the difference between aesthetic and discipline.

This morning, the spell broke; and when it did, there was a flash of anger because I realised I once took it seriously. I measured myself against it. I wanted entry. Now I don’t.

I no longer need to belong to the smoky-guitar-Italian-literary-male club, De Andrè wannabes, in order to validate my voice. I have outgrown the mythology. The obituary made the mythology mortal. My practice made it irrelevant.

In the meantime, I am just writing.

Quietly.
Relentlessly.
And without the motorcycle.