Still Birth by Chiara Ernandes
Chiara Ernandes
Yogurt Magazine
2021
Italy
Rome
Francesco Rombaldi
Francesco Rombaldi
Bieffe
Fedrigoni Arena Natural Smooth
9788894634815
136
Fedrigoni Arena Natural Smooth
In a summer night of 1989, Chiara Ernandes was stillborn after childbirth. She was like that for five long minutes.
The most rhetoric, shocking narration would spend some words embellishing the grief of a mother, It would linger on the frantic father’s powerlessness, on the doctors’ frenzy and their search of a small rationalistic miracle as priests of a rationalistic cult. And on the relief of that first breath.
But it would neglect the fundamental protagonist, the newly born baby, as if her unripe emotional state could make her immune from the changes in a still unknown world, which let her keep waiting on the threshold for five interminable minutes.
Still Birth is not only a book, it’s the result of a visual imprinting, of a limbo that left a scar on a child’s subconscious mind. She decided to wait on the other side before staking her claim to exist.
