"I leave shreds of my soul on every experience" Oriana Fallaci

Letter to a Child Never Born

Letter to a Child Never Born (original title: Lettera a un bambino mai nato) is the title of a 1975 novel written by Italian author and journalist Oriana Fallaci. The book is a written dialogue between a young professional woman and the fetus she carries in utero; it details the woman's struggle to choose between a career she loves and an unexpected pregnancy. The English translation was first published in 1976.

Oriana Fallaci (June 29, 1929 – September 15, 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. An antifascist partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. She died in her native Florence, Italy, at age 77.

She was called "our most celebrated female writer" by Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Decades ago, the Los Angeles Times described her as "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no."^[1]

As a young journalist, she interviewed many internationally known leaders and celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Lech Wałęsa, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Federico Fellini, Sammy Davis Jr, Deng Xiaoping, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Alexandros Panagoulis, Wernher von Braun, Archbishop Makarios, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu, Haile Selassie and Sean Connery.

Following an interview with Ayatollah Khomeini she authored a book, titled "Ayatollah," which is forbidden to be published inside Iran.

After retirement, she authored a series of articles and books that roused controversy amongst certain Islamic and Arab factions.She spent the last years of her life in New York, where she lived for several years with lung and breast cancer, which she referred to as "the Other One" in her most recent books. She returned to Italy before dying of cancer in a hospital in her native Florence on the night between the 14th and the 15th of September 2006.^[2][3]

Fallaci was born in Florence. During World War II she joined the resistance despite her youth, in the democratic armed group "Giustizia e Libertà".Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It was during this period that Fallaci was first exposed to the atrocities of war.

Fallaci began her journalistic career in her teens, becoming a special correspondent for the paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1950. Starting in 1967 she worked as a war correspondent, in Vietnam, during the Indo-Pakistani War, in the Middle East, and in South America. For many years, Fallaci was a special correspondent for the political magazine L'Europeo, and wrote for a number of leading newspapers and Epoca magazine.

During the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Fallaci was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican armed forces. Later, her recollection of the events would shift. According to The New Yorker, her former support of the student activists "devolved into a dislike of Mexicans."^[4]

In the 1970s, she had an affair with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship. He had been captured, violently tortured, and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt against dictator and ex-Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos. Panagoulis died in 1976, under controversial circumstances, in a road accident. Fallaci maintained that Panagoulis was assassinated by remnants of the Greek military junta, and her book Un Uomo (A Man) (ISBN 0-671-25241-0) was inspired by the life of Panagoulis.

During her infamous 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, Kissinger agreed that the Vietnam War was a "useless war" and compared himself to "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse." Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."Fallaci twice received the St. Vincent Prize for journalism, as well as the Bancarella Prize, 1971 for Nothing, and So Be It; Viareggio Prize, 1979, for Un uomo: Romanzo; and Prix Antibes, 1993, for Inshallah.. She received a D.Litt. from Columbia College (Chicago).In previous years, she lectured at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.Fallaci’s early writings have been translated into 21 languages including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Serbian, Swedish, Polish, Croatian and Slovenian.Fallaci donated most of her books and private papers to the Lateran University, according to Bishop Rino Fisichella because of her great respect for Pope Benedict himself.^[5]

Controversy

A journalist from Florence, Tiziano Terzani, expressed disagreements with her approach in an open letter to her in Corriere della Sera while David Holcberg at the Ayn Rand Institute supported her cause with a letter to The Washington Times.^[6]Fallaci received support from rightist political parties and movements such as the Lega Nord in Italy, where her books have sold over 1 million copies alone, but also from individuals and organisations in the rest of the world.^[7][8]At the first European Social Forum, which was held in Florence in November 2002, Fallaci invited the people of Florence to cease commercial operations and stay home. Furthermore, she compared the ESF to the Nazi occupation of Florence. Protest organizers declared "We have done it for Oriana, because she hasn't spoken in public for the last 12 years, and hasn't been laughing in the last 50".^[9]In 2002 in Switzerland the Islamic Center and the Somal Association of Geneva, SOS Racisme of Lausanne, along with a private citizen, sued her for the supposedly racist content of The Rage and The Pride.^[10][11] In November 2002 a Swiss judge issued an arrest warrant for violations of article 261 and 261 bis of the Swiss criminal code and requested the Italian government to either trial or extradite her. Roberto Castelli, Italian minister of Justice mentioned this fact in an interview broadcast by Radio Padania affirming that the Constitution of Italy protects freedom of speech and thus the extradition request had to be rejected; the episode is mentioned in her book The Force of Reason.^[12]In May 2005, Adel Smith, president of the Union of Italian Muslims, launched a lawsuit against Fallaci charging that "some of the things she said in her book The Force of Reason are offensive to Islam." Smith's attorney, Matteo Nicoli, cited a phrase from the book that refers to Islam as "a pool that never purifies." Consequently an Italian judge ordered her to stand trial set for June 2006 in Bergamo on charges of "defaming Islam." A previous prosecutor had sought dismissal of the charges. The preliminary trial began on 12 June in Bergamo and on 25 June Judge Beatrice Siccardi decided that Oriana Fallaci should indeed stand trial beginning on 18 December.^[13] Fallaci accused the judge of having disregarded the fact that Smith called for her murder and defamed Christianity. [1]On June 3, 2005, Fallaci published on the front page of the Italian daily newspaper a highly controversial article entitled "Noi Cannibali e i figli di Medea" ("We cannibals and Medea's offspring") inviting women not to vote for a public referendum about artificial insemination that was held on June 12 and 13, 2006.^[14]On August 27, 2005, Fallaci had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo. Although an Christian atheist [2],Fallaci had great respect for Pope Benedict XVI and expressed admiration for his 2004 essay titled "If Europe Hates Itse"

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