by Patrick H. Moore
I do not know whether Amanda Knox played any part in the murder of Meredith Kercher but I certainly hope she did not. I also hope that she will receive a just verdict in the Italian court. We here at All Things Crime Blog have posted numerous articles about the case that have engendered a great deal of heated commentary from zealous anti-Knoxers and equally zealous pro-Knoxers. Frankly, I have been amazed by the fervor and – at times – ferocity displayed by both sides. And don’t think my sense of surprise stems from the fact that I am cold and uncaring. Anyone who has been following All Things Crime Blog for the past eight months is fully aware that I do give a damn although I may work hard sometimes to hide that discomfiting fact.
No, the reason I am amazed by the raw fervor and fury displayed by both the pro and anti-Knoxers is because I find it extraordinary that people can be so sure of their positions – almost as if they were there in the Perugia dwelling where Meredith Kercher was brutally slain on that fateful November night.
But what I am interested in here is the broader context that brought Amanda Knox to Italy in the first place and the rather unprecedented “growing pains” she experienced in the aftermath of Meredith Kercher’s murder:
Once upon a time there was something called the Grand Tour – a foreign sojourn that served as a kind of “finishing school” for well-born young American men and women after they graduated from their prep schools. Henry James’ classic novella, Daisy Miller (1878), falls into the category of “Grand Tour” fiction:
Daisy Miller was one of James’s earliest treatments of one of the themes for which he became best known: the expatriate or footloose American abroad. Americans abroad was a subject very much of the moment in the years after the Civil War. The postwar boom, the so-called Gilded Age, had given rise to a new class of American businessman, whose stylish families were eager to make “the grand tour” and expose themselves to the art and culture of the Old World. Americans were visiting Europe for the first time in record numbers, and the clash between the two cultures was a novel and widespread phenomenon.
Fast forward 130 years and we come to the Grand Tour revisited in the form of American exchange students studying abroad. In this case, our exchange student is Seattle-bred Amanda Knox. In a review of Knox’s memoir, Waiting to be Heard, that appeared in the Boston Review entitled “Bloody Abroad: Amanda Knox Finds Herself,” Yale graduate student and writer, Merve Emre, explains that prior to traveling to Italy, Knox was a neophyte writer who believed that her Italian experience would be broadening and would bring a depth of experience that would help her bridge the gap from a beginning writer to someone with more experience and the tools with which to express herself more artfully.
Emre explains in her essay:
Knox’s desire (is) that her semester at the School for Foreigners in Perugia (will) transform her from a 21st century American ingénue—a goofy pothead and aspiring creative writer clueless to her own sexual desirability—into an upper-middle class cosmopolite. This airbrushed projection of what Knox frequently refers to as her “grown-up self” awaits her somewhere on the Continent, imaginatively displaced from her hometown of Seattle by a semester’s worth of time and space. But Knox doesn’t yet know how to go about finding her future self. In August 2007 this is her biggest problem—a luxury unto itself. “As I got ready to leave for Perugia,” she worries, “I knew I hadn’t become my own person yet, and I didn’t know how to get myself there.”
Oddly enough, according to Emre, the Italian prosecutors saw Knox’s propensity for writing as a sure sign of her diabolical nature. Emre writes:
To the Italian prosecutors and criminal psychologists who put her behind bars, Knox was worse than the average Pilgrim daughter enjoying her junior year abroad. Her unfettered libido, her self-proclaimed urge to “do what every American girl does” in Italy and “get fucked up,” was all the more damning because she was a bonafide “graphomaniac.” Or, in plain speak, a compulsive writer who nursed a pathological sense of narrative entitlement. Knox chronicled her dangerous liaisons abroad in a handwritten journal, a Myspace blog, and letters to her family and friends.
In other words, the fact that Knox was a writer, albeit one at an early developmental stage, was a sure sign that she was dangerous and even diabolical, yet more evidence that she was one of the murderous crew who took Meredith Kercher’s life.
Absurd? Of course. Ridiculous? Utterly.
Emre believes that “Knox’s real Italian growth experiences and maturation as a writer…almost certainly did not begin until she found herself subjected to ‘the routine abuses of juridical power that took place while (she) was incarcerated at the Casa Circondariale Capanne di Perugia.’”
There Knox was subjected to sexual harassment on the part of Vice-Comandante Raffaele Argirò, the prison chief of the Capanne.
(“Would you have sex with me? No? I’m too old for you?” Argirò asks on a nightly basis.)
There’s the fake HIV-positive test result that sends Knox into an impotent rage, a self-immolating desire to “undo everything—to be out of my body, out of this prison, out of this life that had caved in on me.”
(To which Argirò gamely responds, “Don’t worry. I’d still have sex with you right now. Promise me you’ll have sex with me.”)
There’s the prison handyman who tries to sexually assault Knox while fixing a clogged drain in her cell bathroom.
And finally, there’s the confiscation of Knox’s letters, notes, and prison diary by the police, materials that are later peddled to the Italian press in an effort to shore up prosecutor Giuliano Mignini’s accusations of graphomania. “The physical chaos” of the raid on her cell, Knox writes, “was nothing compared to the chaos in my head. They’d penetrated my innermost space.”
According to Emre, Knox’s writing – which prior to her arrest was simply “the act of recording the exotic and unfamiliar—‘just like a tourist who writes a travelogue,’ soon becomes ‘psychologically essential,’ an act of willful self-preservation.”
Thus, Emre detects an essential difference between the first half of Waiting to Be Heard which still falls into the general category of “chick lit” and the “stronger, darker second half.”
In prison Knox prefers books with characters who are lost in the ‘surreal, existential way,’ fictional models of how life on the inside recalibrates one’s sense of self. She now claims to prefer hefty novels such as Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed and Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle over chick lit goddess Jackie Collins or other YA fare. (One is tempted to point out that desperation drove Knox to acquire a literary and linguistic education superior to anything Perugia’s School for Foreigners had to offer.)
Emre believes that prison transformed “Knox into a new person, and a literary subject to boot.”
In effect, Emre posits that the essential virtue of Waiting To Be Heard is that the second half of the book constitutes a genuine and powerful prison memoir in which she:
(O)ffers her readers brief yet jarring vignettes that panoramically reveal the population of the women’s prison as the disempowered dregs of Italian society. Without any explicit theorizing on Knox’s part, it becomes 
abundantly clear from the examples culled from her prison diary how virulently patterns of social oppression—sexual, racial, and class-based—are reproduced by the prison’s discourses of criminality: Cera, Knox’s bisexual roommate for some months, is in jail for allegedly murdering her boyfriend, a crime the wardens interpret as a symbolic rejection of heterosexuality; Pica and Falda are zingare outcasts (a derogatory term for Roma) and petty thieves who insist that the earth is flat; Laura, Knox’s closest friend and guardian, is a fellow American citizen turned accidental drug mule by a scheming Italian boyfriend. Most heartbreaking of all is the story of Gregora, an illiterate mother for whom Knox writes letters, and her toddler Mina. In one of Knox’s darkest days, Mina is placed in an orphanage when Gregora—who cannot “read, write, add, or subtract,” let alone defend herself in a courtroom—is unable to calculate her child’s birthday. What Mina’s fate will be, we can only imagine.
Emre does not fail to point out — lest this become an Amanda Knox cheering session – that the young American woman and her prison memoir do have their blind spots:
But like all prison memoirs, Knox’s has its blind spots. Most problematic is how she accounts for—or rather, fails to account for—her own biases as a privileged white exchange student in Perugia, the barely veiled racism that prompted her to finger her former boss, club owner Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, as the perpetrator of the Kercher’s murder. Unsurprisingly, Knox refuses to acknowledge it as such, choosing to attribute her false accusation to the coercive interrogation tactics of the police. It was their roughness, she claims, that led her to believe she was “deeply disturbed and very frightened of Patrick, the African owner of . . . Le Chic.
* * * * *
Thus, although clearly fascinated by Knox’s maturation and her perhaps remarkable growth while incarcerated, Emre hardly falls into the trap of failing to point out that sensitive though she is, Knox is disturbingly blind to her own entrenched white, middle-class sense of entitlement.
However, Emre finds that this shortcoming is to a large degree transfigured by Knox’s clear awareness that although she has been imprisoned, abused and – in a sense – left for dead with the rest of society’s outcasts, she never forgets that in comparison to Meredith Kercher, she is still “the lucky one.”
Emre writes:
Perhaps this is the saving grace of Waiting To Be Heard. While her ordeal is indeed excruciating, Knox never forgets, “With all I’m going through I’m the lucky one”—an empathetic sentiment, but also a self-renouncing one, implicitly taking to task the misguided impulses of trashy exposés and good investigative journalism alike. For Knox’s account is the only one that insists on remembering Kercher, as it revisits the senselessness of her death in myriad passages rooted in Knox’s anger, sadness, and desire for justice.
At its most mature moments, Waiting To Be Heard is a convoluted apology to Kercher’s family, a gesture of symbolic atonement that Knox never had a chance to convey personally and was dissuaded by her lawyers from delivering in writing. As her appeal approaches, she drafts a letter to the Kerchers that never makes its way into their hands, but it is reproduced in the book, with the same intention to communicate. “I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to say so. . . . In the relatively brief time that Meredith was part of my life, she was always kind to me. I think about her every day.” Reading Waiting To Be Heard, one comes to appreciate more fully the tragedy of Kercher’s death through this tragic interlude in Knox’s life—her terrible journey to her grown-up self.
* * * * *
It’s time to dispel once and for all the foolish and childish notion that Amanda Knox is simply a selfish, empty-headed “narcissist” who doesn’t give two damns about anyone other than herself. Rather, she is an “American girl” who has been unalterably transformed by her horrific ordeal, an ordeal that is still ongoing. While I cannot predict where it will lead, I can state with certainly that Knox – whether or not she took part in the murder (and I want desperately to believe she did not) – although flawed like the rest of us, is now a stronger, wiser and more humane person than she was before this all began. She has been, for all intents and purposes, transfigured by her remarkable journey.
It will be interesting to see — assuming she is acquitted – if Knox is able to contribute further to the body of literature as she moves forward in life. Writing so as not to die is a time-honored Continental tradition and Amanda Knox has apparently joined the ranks of its able practitioners.