The Impossible Return:

Women, Violence, and Exile

 

After all, I am a Sicilian too. Even if my Sicilian is like the dialect you hear in Little Italy, on the streets of New York: it is a language that has stalled and does not resound with internal echoes. But I certainly do not need any translation.—Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Canto al deserto

 

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli has been known to Italian readers for many years thanks to her novels La briganta (1990), the mystery Complice il dubbio (1992), Canto al deserto: Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia (1994), her autobiographical book Mama Africa (1993), her non-fiction writing in which she has focused on gender issues, and her recently published book on prostitution Il denaro in corpo (1996). Women are always at the center of her writing; more specifically, women warriors are the main protagonists of her novels. In La briganta, Cutrufelli explores the life of a woman who dramatically redefines her traditional identity as a wife by killing her husband and joining a group of brigands. In her latest novel, Canto al deserto, Cutrufelli shifts her attention to a more contemporary woman warrior whose rebellion can only have tragic consequences.

Canto al deserto is a book about writing a book that is partly autobiographical. Canto al deserto is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, whose name is never disclosed. She begins a journey of return from Rome to Gela, Sicily, in order to research the life of a young woman, whom she has chosen as protagonist of a novel she is determined to write. This act of self-effacement, of losing the public identity offered by “having a name,” allows the narrator a malleable identity that is constructed in frag­ments that originate from different geographical locations and cultural contexts. Her return to Gela is defined as a Dantesque journey, guided by a relative who was her friend in their youth. It is a descent into a “closed and suspicious world,” an “impene­trable” Sicilian community even for a woman of Sicilian origin (22).

The narrative hinges on the dissemination of the protagonist’s cultural and linguistic identity, which makes her simultaneously both an insider and outsider in Gela. The narrator tells of her birth in this city on the “African” side of Sicily, her education in another, more “northern” region of Italy, her return to Gela in her twenties, her political struggles as a young teacher, and, finally, her departure, followed by a twenty-year-long voluntary exile in Rome. By traveling back to Gela, the protagonist wants to tell a story, the life story of a woman who is as old as the narrator’s exile. Tina’s life story is a lost fragment in the teller’s life that can be narrated as complementary to, but at the same time very different from, Tina’s self-destructive rebellion.

Even with her cousin’s help, the narrator/protagonist finds gathering testimonies about Tina’s life to be an almost impossible endeavor: she is confronted with hostility and reticence, since she is labeled as a foreigner to Sicilian ways. She is a stranger who wants to talk about a Mafia story involving a woman who embodies those developments within the traditional criminal institution, which are an inevitable consequence of the changed roles of women in Sicily. Her decision to “tell” and “narrate” is challenged by the people she interviews because

 

to leave means to betray. And those who betray lose their right to speak. To abandon Sicily is tantamount to choosing an exile from which there is no return. The root of their suspicion and distance lies in my temporariness, in my ambiguous nomadism. What need did I have to leave?” (36)

 

The narrator refuses to be silenced and to be labeled as an out­sider: “I will not allow him [my cousin] or anybody else to treat me like a stranger” (37). She must face, however, the fact that she is a stranger to herself, and discovers how slippery any dis­course on origins can be and how challenging it is to construct a self-representation of her own hybrid identity.

By displacing her attention on Tina’s story, the narrator begins to explore both the “periphery of her memory” and the other woman’s story, which is not centered on loss, but rather on Tina’s defiance and her challenge to the overcodified roles and rules that Sicilian women are expected to embody and follow (29). Cettina, the daughter of a small Mafia-connected criminal, witnesses the murder of her father, who is shot in the face in the family’s apartment. Cettina reacts to her father’s murder by gathering his weapons and redefining herself as her father’s daughter. She drops out of school, declares the end of her life as a young girl, and begins her career in crime when she is just a young teenager. Cettina also renames herself: she becomes Tina, “’a masculidda,” a boyish girl who refuses to be gendered as a traditional Sicilian woman, discovers her attraction to other women. At the same time, Tina refuses to accept the changes in her adolescent body, a body that is betraying her chosen identity as “masculidda” (4). Tina is an elusive entity that the narrator attempts to construct in a story that other people supply in frag­ments about a woman who hates to be known as such.

Looking for Tina but never finding her becomes a recurring theme in Cutrufelli’s unusual narrative about the Sicilian Mafia. In that part of Sicily where “the law of gravity” always wins, where the frequent executions of people who “fall” in the streets are perceived almost as a natural phenomenon, Tina’s ambition is to be a part of the establishment, to prove that she can belong. In writing about the Sicilian Mafia, however, Cutrufelli does not portray the mythical entity that has been glamorized in Ameri­can film or the undefeatable, invisible, but always present phan­tasm that appears in Sciascia’s novels. In searching the periph­ery of her memory, Cutrufelli also explores the periphery of a female world trapped and powerless but struggling for change even in self-destructive and falsely emancipatory rebellions like Tina’s. Of course, her difference must be obliterated because it is a betrayal, and in the end, an unacceptable challenge.

Betrayal is what links the two very different lives chosen by Tina and the narrator/protagonist. Both deviated from what was expected from them, either through self-destructive vio­lence or through exile. They are both expelled as unacceptable. While Tina is dramatically obliterated and can only survive in a story told by another woman, the narrator must accept the impos­sibility of returning to what she had thought were her roots; instead, she goes back to Rome to write about Tina’s secular heresy.

Another plot is also inscribed within the story of Tina and the narrator/protagonist. It is an autobiographical plot in which fragments of Cutrufelli’s life are translated into the novel. Canto al deserto’s nameless protagonist is, like the author, a woman writer who chose to leave her native Sicily, and who returns there by writing the story of a community whose members are women in exile. In recent years, the South has been explored by Italian women writers as a methaphor for a journey to their elu­sive origins and cultural roots. Dacia Maraini’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa (1990) and Bagheria (1993), together with Cutrufelli’s Canto al deserto, have been among the most success­ful in portraying the distance that exile creates from the cultural geography of origins. Both Maraini and Cutrufelli can only return to these mythical origins by further distancing themselves in the construction of autobiographical fragments reflected in fic­tional characters and in other women’s stories, who in turn embody the impossibility of return to a unitary identity, origin, and cultural identity.

Diasporas are at the center of the work of many contemporary women writers in Italy. The Sicilian female diaspora discussed by Maraini and Cutrufelli is connected to the representations of migration and exile in many immigrant women’s autobiogra­phies. The south to north movement, which Cutrufelli attempts to retrace in her return to the motherland, is also at the center of texts by the Somalian Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, the Palestinian Salwa Salem, and the French Algerian Nassera Chohra.

Fazel’s Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994) narrates a double exile that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. After migrat­ing to Italy in the early seventies in order to escape the Somalian military regime, Fazel discovers that she is the subject in a dou­ble process of unbelonging: she is neither Italian nor Somalian. The description of her nomadic self hinges on the representation of an impossible return to Mogadishu, which she can only see, like any Italian, through the Western eyes of Italian television as it broadcasts her country’s violent self-annihilation: “The camera freezes images and we are grabbed by a passing feeling of indignation and pity. . . . Those are only images, images of phan­tasms that do not concern us” (48). Similarly, Salem’s Con il vento nei capelli: vita di una donna palestinese (1993) tells of a privileged migration to Europe and a new life in Italy. However, in her description of her struggle as an exiled Palestinian woman, Salem creates a representation of her people’s diaspora and of a future she sees marked by hopelessness. After fighting for years to move from a restricted private sphere into the public domain of university life, political struggle, and academic life as a teacher, she feels marginalized by the same men who had origi­nally supported her independence. Her loneliness and isolation only subside once she creates a female community in Italy that supports her and allows her to return to her political commit­ments:

 

In Italy, it is mainly women who give real support and sol­idarity to “intifada.” I believe that women express their support more because they do not have roles that are very official. They are not afraid of losing certain advantages, and have the courage to express their opinions with more clearness and strength. (168)

 

Betrayal seems, however, to mark her life, as it is her body that performs the greatest act of separation: Salem dies of cancer before finishing her autobiography, which is completed later by an Italian woman.

This brief intertextual reading of very different texts allows us to open a discussion of gendered exile that Cutrufelli creates as nomadism at the margins of a national context. Her investigation of female otherness already hints at those issues of race that sur­face in Fazel’s, Salem’s, and also in Nassera Chohra’s self-rep­resentations. In fact, Chohra’s Volevo diventare bianca (1993) braids two different migratory movements: from south to north—in her parents’ journey from Algeria to France—and within Europe, in Chohra’s migration to Italy. Just like Cutrufelli’s main character, Chohra’s representation of her self defines her double identity as both insider and outsider in the Western soci­eties in which she has lived. Her short trip to Algeria makes her realize her estrangement from the parental culture. Divided between the language, culture, and values that dominate the familial sphere and the education she acquires in French schools, Chohra chooses to add another facet to her already hybrid iden­tity by moving to Italy and writing her life in Italian:

 

Today, looking at my son, my mother is probably wondering what God he will worship, what kind of life he will have, what language he will speak. But my son is learning all the languages: Arabic, French, and Italian. I hope he can grow with serenity by borrowing here and there any­thing that will make him happy. But I also and above all wish that the future will show him that white and black are nothing but gradations. (133)

 

In Cutrufelli’s autobiographical novel, the past can coexist with the present only when distance is established. Exile becomes a privileged space in which a woman’s identity can be rewritten and another woman’s failed rebellion can be inscribed in the protagonist’s journey through an impossible return. Simi­larly, exile and the language of exile are at the center of immi­grant women’s narratives of unbelonging that, like Cutrufelli’s text, strive to investigate women’s diasporas and the arduous definition of their nomadic identities.

 

Graziella Parati

Dartmouth College

 

Works Cited

Chohra, Nassera. Volevo diventare bianca. Ed. Alessandra Atti di Sarro. Rome: E/O, 1993.

Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa. La briganta. Palermo: La Luna, 1990.

___. Complice il dubbio. Milan: Interno Giallo Editore, 1992.

___. Mama Africa: Storia di donne e di utopie. Milan: Feltri­nelli, 1993.

___. Canto al deserto. Milan: Longanesi, 1994.

___. Il denaro in corpo. Uomini e donne: La domanda di sesso commerciale. Milan: Marco Tropea, 1996.

Fazel, Shirin Ramzanali. Lontano da Mogadiscio. Rome: Data News, 1994.

Maraini, Dacia. La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa. Milan: Riz­zoli, 1990.

___. Bagheria. Milan: Rizzoli, 1993.

Salem, Salwa. Con il vento nei capelli: Vita di una donna palestinese. Ed. Laura Maritano. Florence: Giunti, 1993.