Transforming travelogue into high art

The Ship for Kobe
by Dacia Maraini, translated by Genni Gunn

Hamilton: Guernica Editions, 2025
$22.95  /  9781778490019

Reviewed by Linda Rogers

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One definition of memoir includes the essential fifth element that transforms memory into spiritual experience and that is the essence of Dacia Maraini’s journal of desire, a return to innocence that never was, as we are all informed by the past and inspired by her spirit.

The beauty of Maraini’s poetic journey to her past, an almost forgotten early childhood in the Orient where her ethnologist father was employed as a university lecturer deconstructing Ainu culture, is the dream that transported her, by ship, to a reality of which the only phenomenal evidence is her mother’s diary, abruptly aborted by Japanese internment.

Ships have remained for me a place of narrative pleasure. It’s no coincidence that my first great literary loves have been novels set at sea: Stevenson and his ships that defy the mysterious underground movements of salt water, Conrad with his boats that hold inexpressible extraordinary secrets, Melville with his superhuman effort to dominate the evils of the seabed, Verne with his marvelous underwater machines.

It is especially gratifying to read a feminist grabbing hold of a male dominated genre and giving it the greater humanity of a soul’s longing for definition of our common journey through water, from the womb to burial at sea. “Remember that for women, the word ‘freedom’ means libertinism,” a friend advises her. She recalls a childhood idol, the actress Esther Williams swimming freely through water, the erotic pleasure of water on skin.

From the nocturnal waters of memory, dream, come reveries of childhood happiness and nightmares like the female circumcision she witnessed in Africa, obstacles in the journey to peace, the ultimate stop.

As she grapples with the larger issues that dominate every quest, longing and belonging, we understand that we are the source, wherever it may be located. Her sea travel begins and ends with feminine creativity, her own. When she cradles a chimpanzee in Hong Kong, she puts her grief over the loss of a child in context. “Was I miming, perhaps, the tenderness of a brutally interrupted maternity?” Is motherhood the impetus of women who write? Is every pregnancy a ghost, even before conception?

The dead tend to run away from us. They always become younger while we become older. Little by little, we transform ourselves into their mothers and then into their grandmothers. But why don’t they ever turn around.

The answer is, because their faces are blank, waiting to be filled in.

Her own mother, an aristocratic rebel, was distracted by love for her unfaithful husband and the translated reality of life in an exotic location. Like the self-propelling hand in The Addams Family television series, the author a “Thing” longing for definition, moves through water to the source. That is her quest and ours as we long to understand our places in the family and civilisation and she turns every philosophical observation into poetry with the feet leading, always the footsteps. This book is about small feet touching, then translating, the water.

Maraini’s companions on her journey to her past are well qualified to inform and enhance the texture of her observations. Her partner Alberto Moravia, an eminent Italian writer and filmmaker, and Pier Poalo Pasolini, the tragic ambassador for change and brightest light in the firmament of world filmmaking, are the complementing voices that help transform her travelogue into high art.

If they are a choir, Genni Gunn, an Italo-Canadian poet and musician, translator of this volume, lifts it out of sea narrative to angel choir. Her sensibilities, like Maraini’s, bring harmony to the deliverance of a poetically nuanced story to universality.

The fifth element is spirit, so much of which is under threat in the techno driven universe of literary communication. Into a world of Chat, The Ship for Kobe brings soul, the universal glue that adheres to one principle, we are one.

This book is film, cut and edited, not the whole story of a lost and almost forgotten childhood, but a stream of photographs that stop and surprise as recognition of details creates new narratives. Selection is an essential part of understanding the past, and the writer is fortunate in the presence of two great filmmakers, whose observations added to her own, make her story, as she wants it, complete and to their own oeuvre as they lifted one another’s lyrics. Gunn, also a poet, contributes her own notes to this score since translation, the invisible art, is also an element. In the nuances, sisterhood is felt.

Film is dream, always there to wake and haunt us. “The nomadism of the family is mitigated by the certainty of the return. One departs in order to return. One dreams in order to awaken. One craves night in order to dream.”

“And yet that feeling of suspension between one place and another, beside cluttered suitcases, is so familiar that I have never freed myself from it.”

Maraini compares her journey to myth, the cosmic travels of free women and explorers, and it is myth explained in fairy tale, their function to reveal the little monster inside each of us. “How do we free ourselves of those monsters,” we are asked. Part of that quest is to explore our origins, the ghosts that haunt us, that come and go in waves. “A girl who has aged prematurely by making waves, and is called in a derogatory tone, the feminist, they are to be kept under control.” How to control water?

She recalls Lady Murasaki, the first and greatest Japanese novelist, who inadvertently gave back their language to her countrymen who had adopted Chinese as the language of literary discourse. It is through her book, The Tales of Genji, that she best understands Japan, and herself because she too is a storyteller, grateful to the father who treated her like his son, throwing her into the water until she swam.

Recently an Indigenous leader excoriated a journalist who described his community as based on myth. Myths are lies, he wrote, we are storytellers. Maraini blurs the distinction, her past, a gathering of mad and inspired ancestors, all of them, it would appear, restless and romantic, interpreted in the present, embodied in her character and physiognomy, this film not stopping with the childless writer, but enduring in art, the ongoing journey toward the self.

She describes walking with her father in Moroyama:

“Papa, when will we arrive?”

“In five minutes.”

“But those five minutes, I know from experience, could become twenty and then twenty and then another twenty, entire days walking, waiting to arrive.”

Arrival, we already know, is not the point.

The point is walking through snow, falling and melting, water unto water: “The sound of God is the silence in snow.” Whether it is the god in us or in nature the committed Marxist knows it is everywhere. Ice melts. That is the journey.

For the loving mother who recorded the lives of her children in the diary found in a drawer belonging to her estranged husband, the record ends when her anti-fascist Italian family is taken to a Japanese concentration camp. For the eldest daughter, it begins again, the second wave, when she boards the ship that takes her home.

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Linda Rogers became familiar with the poetic writing of Dacia Maraini when she worked on a translation of one of her books for Guernica Editions in the 1980s. The Ship for Kobe is a key to her life of rediscovery. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, Edward H. K. Ho, Evelyn Thompson-George & Art Thompson, Bruce McIvor, Cheryl Troupe & Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.), and Adrienne Gruber for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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