Of Women, Writing, and Recognition

Abstract

Last year, my mailman delivered a package containing a book; on the cover, a color photo revealed the author, a woman, youthful despite her white hair, standing against a green and mountainous background. This unexpected gift came from a writer I had never heard of: Filoména Lo Curcio Stefanelli. She had read an article about my work on Italian American women writers that had just appeared in the New York Times and felt compelled to write to me.¹ Writer, historian, archivist, and photographer, Stefanelli self-published, in 1998, The Stromboli Legacy: My Voyage of Discovery, an evocative exploration of the authors cultural and geographical connection to the rocky island off the coast of Sicily where her parents were born. Stefanelli wanted me to know about her book—perhaps she knew I would let others know about it, too.

For publication means the breaking of a first seal, the end of a “no-admitted” status, the end of a soliloquy confined to the private sphere, and the start of a possible sharing with the unknown other—the reader, whose collaboration with the writer alone allows the work to come into full being. Without such a rite of passage, the woman-writer-to-be/woman-to-be-writer is condemned to wander about, begging for permission to join in and be a member.

—Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other

And it was then that my father’s Italy became a place imprinted on the platen of my soul.

—Flavia Alaya, Under the Rose: A Confession