A Sicilian in East Harlem By Salvatore Mondello

itself, a language that has no future tense. Since Sicilians have been conquered by many invaders who have controlled their political institutions and have acted for them, the Sicilian male believes he can only rely on himself; he is a man alone. Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, a sea that exists at the center of so much history, “cannot be anything else but a land of conquest and devastation.”²¹ Lawrence Durrell in his visit to the tiny island of Ortygia off Syracuse found the remains of a Greek temple cocooned within a Catholic Church; Sicilians do not destroy symbols of their past but rather accommodate these icons. Durrell found vestiges of the Greek way of life in the “food, the wine and the wild flowers of the land they had inhabited and treasured.” Andrea Camilleri, a contemporary Italian writer of “gialli,” Italian murder mysteries, writes in Sicilian-Italian and is one of the most popular writers in Italy today. Perhaps we are seeing an interest in the Sicilian language and culture among the general reading public in Italy. Perhaps a Sicilian writer was correct when he wrote many years ago:

I grew up in a family that spoke both the Sicilian language and a Sicilian dialect. I knew very little English. When I was enrolled in P.S.168, the elementary school on One Hundred and Fifth