By Mike Fiorito
MY WET BEAK
In this short essay, I’m going to survey a few notable Sicilian writers and discuss their contributions to modern literature. I’m very curious as to why Sicilian writers aren’t more widely read, other than the fact that few of them are translated into English and other languages. The tongue-in-cheek title “Wet My Beak” is a Sicilian phrase meaning “give me a little something.” And that’s what I’m asking for: a little bit more of a place for Sicilian writers in world literature. A seat at the table.
It’s important to mention that Sicilian writers have long had a unique relationship with America. Ironically, Garibaldi’s unification of Italy led to its fracturing. From the 1880s and into the turn of the century, many Sicilians, along with other Southern Italians, fled to the United States, desperately seeking asylum from an Italy that relegated them to the bottom of the barrel. It was not uncommon for Sicilians to migrate their families incrementally to America, maintaining relatives in both countries. Many Sicilians worked in the United States in factories or as dock workers, then moved back to Sicily. Sicilians who learned English while in America were even instrumental in supporting the Allies landing in Sicily during WWII. As a note of interest, my mother’s uncles found each other in Sicily as soldiers during World War II. Imagine the embrace of two brothers finally locating each other, in the country of their ancestral origin, at a moment when the world looked like it was breaking in half.
The emotional connection between Sicily and America can make the two countries feel as if blood flows between them. Sometimes that blood has given life and sometimes that blood has poured from open wounds.
This relationship has impacted both Sicilian and American literature and continues even today.
What follows is not a comprehensive overview. It represents my limited observations. This survey hopes to serve as a rough guide and perhaps provide a primer for other interested readers. This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other writers that are too numerous to mention here.
I’ll start with Giovanni Verga (Catania, 1840-1922), since he’s arguably the best-known Italian writer of the 19th Century. Years ago, I read some mediocre translations of Verga, but I think those translations sent me down the wrong path. I was impatient. And I was probably lazy. Also, sometimes you need the right context or introduction to appreciate a given writer or period. I have since found a few translations of Verga’s works that are vibrant and authentic. One such collection is Under the Shadow of Etna, translated by Nathan Cole.
Despite the fact that it looks self-published due to its low production quality, the writing sparkles in this short collection. The stories are often very narrow in scope, yet Verga’s prose reads like epic poetry. A man selling a donkey appears center stage in the concerns of the cosmos. In Verga’s writing we know that we’re reading something new, something that hasn’t been written before. I don’t detect any literary gimmicks or techniques. Verga is simply an amazing storyteller. Written in the verismo style that Verga (along with Luigi Capuana) innovated, the protagonists, shepherds and laborers, are placed in hopeless situations. Differing from the French realists like Guy De Maupassant, Verga doesn’t set out to teach us; there is no lesson, no moral to offer. He shows us how wretched life can be for a poor villager. And yet, Verga manages to convey irony and even comedy in his stories. We may not be shepherds or laborers, but we can’t help but find ourselves in Verga’s works. And while the stories are mythical and mysterious, they are, yet, common and believable.
It’s also worth reading the Penguin Classics collection Cavelleria Rusticana and Other Stories. There are many excellent short pieces in this collection. Some are only two to three pages long and read like they’re being rapidly fired at you.
One such story is “The She-Wolf” in which Verga describes an impossible but believable triangle of lovers. In this case, the triangle is a man, his wife and her mother. Despite its “hot potato” content, it’s the writing that ensnares us, not the salaciousness of the story itself. The mother has a “pair of huge eyes and fresh red lips that looked as though they would eat you.” The narrative goes on to say that the village people called her the She-Wolf because she could never be satisfied. She consumed sons and husbands in the twinkle of an eye. The She-Wolf is so savage, so all-consuming that she won’t even stop at her daughter’s husband.
Other stories like the “Wolf-hunt” describe an unfaithful wife and her lover trapped like a wolf in a makeshift hole dug in the ground. We can’t help but note the misogyny in Verga. Like most men of his generation, Verga isn’t a champion of the female point of view. That said, the writing is urgent, and we must turn the page before the pages turn to flames and singe our complicitous dirty fingers.
Interestingly, Verga’s Cavalleria Rusticana for which he is best known, was adapted by Mascagni for his opera score. Verga wasn’t pleased with the result and, as I understand, entered into a legal battle with Mascagni for years afterwards. Also, his other notable work, Malavoglio, so profoundly affected Luchino Visconti that it became the basis for his film Terra Trema. You can see the origins of Italian Film Neorealism in Verga, its unrelenting examination of the harsh realities of life in Italy, particularly Southern Italy. Italy needed the power of Verga’s writing in the wake of its own downfall after World War II to redeem its national identity.
One of the points of this writing is that there aren’t many translated Sicilian writers and even fewer women in that subset. One of the gems of Sicilian writers that have been translated into English is Maria Messina (Palmero, 1887-1944). Her groundbreaking collection Behind Closed Doors is like nothing ever written before. I’ve had Behind Closed Doors sitting on my shelf for at least ten years. Like the Verga (Penguin) book I’ve had for a while, I started to read it, then became distracted by life and put it down for a while. I didn’t know enough about the verismo tradition or the context of the period in which she wrote. But I was inspired to pick it up again after reading John Keahy’s excellent and highly recommended books on Sicily. For a non-Italian, his work is sympathetic to Italian, and particularly, Southern Italian history.
Every one of Messina’s stories in the collection explodes off the page. I could only rub my hands on my face and shake my head in amazement as I leafed through the book. The stories are so original, so compelling, I wanted to run out into the street demanding that everyone read them. Instead, I wrote this essay.
Extending the verismo tradition of Verga, Messina explores female characters in despairing and hopelessly ensnared predicaments. As is often the case with Sicilian writers, Messina’s stories are concerned with the flood of Sicilians that left the island to go to America. We read of the hardships that prompted thousands of Sicilians to migrate to North America, Argentina, Brazil and Australia. The old and the new worlds are not romanticized in any way; there is the heartbreak and misery of those who go and those who stay. Around the turn of the century, nearly one third of the Sicilian population fled to America for a new life. Messina deals with the broken lives this diaspora created. Often it was the woman left back in Sicily, lonely and alone, while her husband went off to America. Would he return? Would he be faithful? Would his wife wait for him? Reading Sicilian literature, one can’t get away from American history. Messina often uses la Merica’, the Sicilian dialect version of L’America, in her stories.
Messina had a lifelong correspondence with Verga. Despite his genius, Verga was reputed to be dismissive towards women, no less women writers. And yet he recognized Messina’s massive talent. Messina writes of the predicaments of villagers, exploring their hidden lives, but from a woman’s perspective. What would life be like for a woman who never married? What happened to the woman who was left behind by a husband that went to America? Like Verga, Messina possessed tremendous powers of storytelling. We’re never sure where she’s going. There’s no gotcha moment. Her writing is the result of her native creativity. She spent much of her life on the Italian mainland, but her writing focused on the lives of Sicilians. As Elise Magistro mentions in her ‘Afterword’ to Behind Closed Doors, Messina felt her sicilianità very deeply all her life and it showed in her writing.
I hope to see more translations of Messina in the coming years. In addition to Behind Closed Doors, Messina’s novel House in the Shadows has also been translated into English.
Next in my survey is Elio Vittorini (Syracuse, 1908-1966). Why have we not all read Vittorini before? Vittorini doesn’t write in the verismo style of Verga and Messina. He’s often associated with “new realism,” but I would say that Vittorini writes in his own vernacular. As Hemingway says in the introduction to Conversations In Sicily, taking a stab at New York academic critics, Vittorini’s work is like rain. It’s filled with life: experience, wine, bread, oil, early mornings, men, women, dogs, love, honor and more. Vittorini creates magic in his writing. We are transported. We are face to face with his characters. We hear their conversations and feel their breath. There is no daylight between his words and our experience of them. Even Hemingway doesn’t achieve this verisimilitude in his writing. In Hemingway I see the craft, the polish and I stand in awe of it. But I’m never so taken in by the emotion. I always know I’m reading. Not so with Vittorini. Reading Vittorini is like stepping into life itself.
The emotional honesty and vulnerability in Conversations in Sicily, particularly given that it was written during the fascist period in Italy, is staggering. Vittorini hides his critique of authoritarianism in the portrayals of intimate relationships. The main character, Ferrauto, has not visited Sicily since leaving at the age of 15. He then takes a train ride to Sicily, having numerous conversations with several Sicilians on the way to, and in, Sicily. It’s the story of a journey but it’s also a story of his journey into himself and into his life through these conversations. Upon finally arriving at his mother’s home, in conversation with his mother, Ferrauto has many revelations about his mother’s and father’s relationship. The novel ends with his mother scrubbing his feet, recalling Christ washing the feet of the disciples.
There are two other short novels, La Garibaldina and In the Twilight of the Elephant, in the excellent New Directions Conversations in Sicily edition that I have.
Now I want to turn to Leonardo Sciascia (Racalmuto, Agrigento, 1921-1989). Sciascia is another mind-blowingly unique writer. His works sometimes read like crime novels. But I don’t like crime novels. I don’t care who did it. Sciascia’s writing uses the form of the crime novel to investigate reality and experience itself. Directly confronting the Mafia in some of his works, Sciascia explores the notion of how a village can collectively tuck away the truth – in the interest of staying alive. How to keep secrets. This was a reality of his experience, not an intellectual fabrication. But there’s something for all of us to learn here. Namely, that the truth is elusive. It slips from our fingertips. And just as we propound on our discovery of truth, we are caught with our pants down. There is more than heaven and earth in our philosophy, Sciascia suggests. Keep in mind that he even wrote about the disappearance of Italy’s president. Can you imagine that? The president of a major country taken hostage by his political enemies. His body was never found.
Of course, there is also Luigi Pirandello (Agrigento, 1867-1936). His best known work is Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello received the 1934 Nobel Prize in literature. I place Pirandello alongside Jorges Borges. Like Borges, Pirandello could take a village knife fight and transform it into a fantastic magical journey of what is real and what is imagined. I’ll even go so far as to say that I can see a line from Pirandello to Calvino, which then connects to Stanislaus Len and even Philip K. Dick. But that’s another story.
Before writing plays, Pirandello wrote poetry and short stories. Pirandello’s terrific short stories are explorations in loneliness, jealousy, misunderstanding and death. His stories are often comic, sometimes gruesome and sometimes tragic.
Pirandello’s father belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulfur industry, and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. As such, his writing isn’t exactly sympathetic to the underprivileged.
However, Pirandello’s short story collections should be in every civilized person’s library.
Born in Palermo, 1896-1957, Giuseppe Tomasi Lampedusa was among Italy’s best-known authors. After being rejected by Italy’s major publishing houses, Lampedusa’s The Leopard became the top selling novel in Italian history. In 1959, The Leopard won the Strega Prize, Italy’s highest award for fiction. Unlike most of the other Sicilian writers I’ve mentioned, Lampedusa writes of the collapse of the Sicilian nobility. While it’s hard to lament the fall of the wealthy, it’s nevertheless a significant part of Italian and even American history. Garibaldi’s unification of Italy restructured the concentration of wealth in Italy. The fallout of this, among other things, is the Italian diaspora which would send Southern Italians to continents all over the world. Of course, during the reshuffling of the deck of the Italian unification, some of the losers were also wealthy. The novel was also made into an award-winning 1963 film directed by Luchino Visconti. Ironically, this film couldn’t be more different from Terra Trema in style and form, showing the breath of Visconti’s range.
The next author I want to introduce to you is Maria Rosa Cutrufelli. Born in Messina in 1946, Cutrufelli now lives in Rome. Her novel, The Outlaw, written in 1990, is set in the aftermath of Italian unification. The main character, Margherita, is a young woman of Sicilian nobility. As was the tradition of her time, Margherita was married off to a man she didn’t know or chose. While she was being carted off to marriage, her brother Cosimo is sent off to study. We know that Cutrufelli is asking: Why shouldn’t have Margherita been sent off to study, too? Not untypical of his time, but perhaps more so, her husband was dismissive and felt his wife should be subservient to him. In an act of hostility towards her and the education she had received, he gives away her vast library of rare books and documents that was accumulated by her mother’s family. This library would have been prized by anyone who valued learning and knowledge. But instead, the entire library is used for fireworks and destroyed: letters, missives, out of print books and rare books ravaged by flames.
Her husband’s abuse and intention to keep Margherita in the prison cell of his home drives her insane. But she won’t have it. Margherita is too alive to endure this entombment. In a sudden violent act of rebellion, she stabs her husband in the throat with a hairpin. The hairpin is a wonderful symbol of Margherita’s womanhood piercing and conquering the bloated masculinity of her husband. She then escapes to the mountains and, finding herself in the company of brigands, becomes one. In the mountains she undergoes a metamorphosis, blurring the boundaries of her female identity. She begins wearing men’s clothing and ties her hair up in a bun. If Messina provided a microscope to view the hidden realms of women’s experiences, Cutrufelli lobbed a grenade into our notions of gender and identity.
It’s important to mention that the brigand has special meaning in post-unification Italy. The brigand was a Southern Italian who refused to accept the oppressive economic and social structure that the Northern Italians had thrust upon them. With the unification, the nation invested in the north, building infrastructure, hospitals and schools. In addition, if life had been difficult for the laborers before unification, in its aftermath, they were virtually choked to death economically. Some people became brigands taking up arms against this oppression. The brigands were branded criminals, thieves and rapists in their own country. And many of those who didn’t stay and fight, left the island after unification, fleeing for their lives. The origins of prejudice against Southern Italians as criminals and less than human, begins in Northern Italy. Naturally, this label followed the Southern Italians’ migration to L’America.
The Outlaw is written in the first person and reads like a memoir or a letter. As she tells us, Margherita’s story was written in a prison cell. But the prison cell that Margherita refers to is symbolic of the prison that women have been kept in. A prison of limitations often set by men. She even says that she’s writing this letter and only expecting that men will read it because women in her time were taught to read religious books only. That women weren’t educated, like she was, to think for themselves. The Outlaw is clearly a call to revolution.
Although brigandage is usually associated with men only, it often includes women. The illiterate brigands, particularly the women, left no written testimony of their lives, apart from what can be gleaned from court documents pertaining to their trials. Drawing from these documents, Cutrufelli conjures the lives of women outlaws and the hardships they endured in their efforts to define their own identities in male dominated subcultures.
Cutrufelli has been writing on women’s issues related to equality in work and women’s emancipation since the seventies. She’s also investigated the phenomenon of prostitution and pornography in Sicily. Cutrufelli has said that women “even in their own land, even in their own home, can feel exiled, foreign and enemy, experiencing in this way directly—and sometimes harshly—the need for change, for a cultural fracture, of a dialogue with the others.” Cutrufelli has written many novels, travel books, essays and short stories. Though her books are translated into twenty-five languages, I am hoping that there will be more English translations of Cutrufelli’s important work. I want to read them. You should want to read them.
As I mentioned, I’m not a fan of crime novels, but I am a fan of crime novels that use the form for other purposes, such as those written by Andrea Camilleri (Porte Empedocle, 1925), whose family was purportedly distant friends with Pirandello. Early on, Camilleri wrote Biography of a Changed Son, based on the life of Pirandello. And even his famous works, the Montalbano series, have Pirandellian elements. In 1994 Camilleri published The Shape of Water, the first work in a long series of books, featuring the character of Inspector Montalbano, an awkward Sicilian detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town. Camilleri’s hometown of Porto Empedocle became a model for Vigata. For a time in the last decade, the town changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigata, hoping to capitalize on tourism inspired by the Montalbano books.
Camilleri’s writing is comical and yet compelling. Even though the Montalbano books are popular and entertaining, there is an anti-establishment thread throughout all of them. In his seventies, when he wrote the Montalbano books, Camilleri seems never to have forgotten the lessons learned from Mussolini’s fascism. Always question power and authority. “I’ve always tried to make Montalbano critical about the behavior and orders of his bosses, the imbecility of power,” he said. Camilleri has said that Italy’s Salvani reminded him of the followers of Italy’s 20th-century dictator, Mussolini, displaying “the same fascist arrogance, the same smug representation of power.” Readers quickly developed a fondness for Montalbano because of his values: a policeman with a high sense of respect for people, with impeccable honesty and a strong dislike for bureaucracy. They grew to admire his relatable humility, his stubbornness, his grouchiness and his solitary spirit. He loved to eat alone, in silence.
The series is written in Italian but with a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases and grammar. In fact, his books provided Italian readers with the opportunity to rediscover the importance of Sicilian dialect. Sadly, the English translations do not capture the richness of the Sicilian dialect.
Camilleri wrote other works outside of the Montalbano series as well. The Sacco Gang and The Revolution of the Moon are historical novels. The Sacco Gang portrays a family from a small village entangled with the Mafia. Based on a true story, The Sacco Gang recalls elements of Verga and Sciascia. The Revolution of the Moon is about a powerful and resourceful woman viceroy who cleverly navigates a council of greedy men to win the justice that is due her deceased husband. In these works, Camilleri shows he can also write historical novels and still use his gifts of storytelling and narrative.
Sadly, during the writing of this essay, Camilleri died at the age of 93. And While Camilleri may not be the equal of Sciascia or Verga, he is currently Italy’s most well-read author. Ironically, in showcasing his Sicilian heritage Camilleri thrust himself into the forefront of Italian literature.
And today, Sicilian born writers that now live in the United States have taken the mantle of proclaiming the Italian American story. Born in Gela, 1959, Edvige Guinta currently lives and teaches in New Jersey. A citizen of both the United States and Italy, Guinta has helped revive the works of other Italian American women writers, like Helen Barolini and Tina DeRosa. Collaborating with writers Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Louise Desalvo, Guinta has written extensively on Italian American women’s literature. Her articles, memoir, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. In her workshops Guinta teaches people from all cultures and walks of life to tell their story in their own voice.
Also born in Sicily, Geatano Cipolla, retired professor of Italian and Chairman of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, has been living and teaching in America a number of decades. Cipolla wrote What Makes a Sicilian and other books and has translated many works from Sicilian into English. President of Arba Sicula, Cipolla runs Legas Publishing (which published Cutrufelli’s The Woman Outlaw) in the United States.
As mentioned, this brief survey was intended to entice the readers to explore Sicilian writers. These and other Sicilian writers should be read. As we see in this survey, there is an important and unique relationship between Sicily and America, as if the two countries bordered each other. The shadow of America, its hopes and dreams, looms over Sicilian literature. The many Sicilians that migrated to the United States and around the world transformed their host countries, making significant contributions, too many to mention.
In some respects, the lines have been blurred now between Sicilian and American literature. There are many American writers of Sicilian heritage that continue to write stories of the diaspora. Writers like Michelle Messina Reale, Louisa Calio, Jennifer Martelli, Michael Ventura, and many others have written extensively on their experience of sicilianità. This is a living history.
There is more to be written.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 