Serving the cause of my beloved land
My dearest Eugenio and Franco,
I’ve read your article with my heart full of emotions while two long strings of tears were crossing my face
Oh brothers of mine, you are so right! It is true!
Perhaps the lawyer Livreri does not need these lines to take care of her own destiny, because she does and knows how to do it since long time.
But Giovanna, your Giovanna, needs to feel you close to always feel the strength expressed through the courage to affirm the truth and justice. Her fight as a woman, just like Sicily is woman, against the hostile destiny. And here i remember Sciascia and his lyric to Sicily: “Sicily….. herself a woman too, mysterious, implacable, revengeful, and beautiful”. A destiny that Sicily strongly wants it to be prediction of monsoon, of hurricane to wipe out the mean power and interests plot of the ones who do not allow our little country to break the chains e declare its freedom.
And I am just like her, like our land, and I feel part of its agony.
How I would like to be part of the resurrection of Sicilians and be part of the moral and economic revenge of the “uncomparable land”. I want it. Yes I do want it! As much as “L’altra Sicilia” wants it, as much as my friends Franco e Eugenio and their brothers from diaspora want it. And probably I had to go through this new great challenge and suffering and personal tenacity to rise up against common and wide spread injustice. Probably what’s happening to me these months and these days, in its unicity and excepionality, is telling me even more about cleaning up the false values, those expressed by the lobbies of power which make endless the immobility of our little country.
Palermo just like “Sodoma e Gomorra”, city closed to itself, politicians of bad behaviour and easy gossips, corrupted and servile businessmen, corrupted magistrates and easily available court ladies……many available court ladies willing to help the growth of them: statues of salt.
Palermo capital of a region/country made slave and princess/cindarella, covered with dust, not recognized by its sons and forced to grab the crumbs falling from tables full of its goods in Rome: the city of wolf.
Yes, it’s true, the opportunity is close, but only if with you and together for our land. I hope I have proven, with my personal battle, that there are no untouchables.
In Sicily, where mafia, as a dishonest mentality shows its arrogance through abused power, diverted and stolen, all can be mafia, and there is no palace, institution, confession where this one has no slaves, sons, members; but it can be reported, attacked and pushed to the corner. On the other hand, mafia is a life philosophy, it is a belief. Ever changing in its being able to survive against everybody and everything and able to walk along with the legs of whoever brings her where she wants.
She has been the epidemy which has affected our social life and made us crippled and stunted and not because it has taken the places left empty by the absence of the State in the island, but because mafia is itself, in the island, part of the expression of the highest powers of the state. You can read Leonardo Sciascia in “il giorno della civetta”: “Mafia was and is something else: a system that in Sicily moves power and economic interests of a class which can be approximately defined as “borghese”; and it is not born and developed in the emptiness of the state (when the state, with its laws and functions, is weak or absent) but within the state.
Mafia in other words is not other than a parassitic middel class, a middle class which only exploits”.
Yes it is true we might be like Cicerone defined Sicilians: “ difficult and suspicious people, born for controversies”.
Still today many authors have found a common denominator for the behaviour of Sicilians, clearly objective, but probably not completely false. But there are many other characteristics of sicilians: the highest sense of honour and family, the respect for women and for femininity, but also the link to their land, the theatricality of moves and acts, the sense of hospitality, suspicion and the intolerance towards justice.
And I intend to resume these last characteristics because I am Sicilian and will die Sicilian and like the “triscele” – mythological creature with three legs because wherever you throw him, he will always stand – together we must affirm the capacity of strength and firmness of the character of sicilian people, would this be incentive to be strong and work hard for the destiny of our island of light.
What else.
Here I am my dear friends, always thankful as you helped me discover the sense of belonging to the country. I am therefore willing to serve the cause of my beloved land and for Her and of Her I live.
Thankful for your friendship, I send you my regards with affection.
Giovanna Livreri
Read related post:
Traduzione dall’italiano di Masssimiliano Di Domenico