ITALY WRITES AT JOHN CABOT UNIVERSITY

WANTED IN ROME PUBLISHES THE WINNERS OF THE FICTION AND NON-FICTION AWARDS IN THE ANNUAL ITALY WRITES CONTEST

John Cabot University holds an annual Creative Writing contest to recognise excellence in Italian high school students whose primary language of instruction is not English. Italy Writes began in 2011 as the first “sister” of the 11-year Italy Reads program.

Seeded by an NEA grant for The Big Read Rome in 2009, JCU has since offered Italy Reads, an annual program of English language reading and cultural exchange that brings American university students together with Italian high school students. Each year, a work of American literature is the focus of discussions, student projects and meetings, public events, and theatrical performances by The English Theatre of Rome.

Here we publish the winners of the Fiction and Non-Fiction awards respectively. The first place prize in the Non-Fiction category went to Cecilia Federici, a fifth year student at Liceo Scientifico G. B. Morgagni in Rome, for ‘HER - Noticing the color purple in a field’. The first place prize in the category of Fiction, to Martina Cacchioni, a fourth year student at the Scuola Svizzera di Roma, for ‘So I flew'.

—HER— Noticing the color purple in a field: Celie’s journey to herself

By Cecilia Federici

In The Madwoman in the Attic the two feminist writers Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar said: “To be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that has no story … is really a life of death, a death-in-life”. A human being without personal identity and individuality is just a hollow shell that inevitably becomes inhuman. It is this lack of humanity that characterizes the protagonist of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie, who sets the perfect example of the hard yet necessary journey each one of us undertakes to self awareness and self acceptance. Our aim is to highlight the intensity of Walker’s novel following Celie’s journey to herself through Emersonian transcendentalism, unfolding her approach to this subject matter from a gender-related, spiritual and linguistic point of view.

Celie’s journey is to be seen as her transformation and not her conversion from a monotheistic approach to God and religion to a more pantheistic view of God while still being part of the Christian community: in the end she manages to remain herself despite the revolutionary changes that occurred in her mind. At the beginning of the novel Celie is just an embryonal person while, at the end, she can truly and utmostly be herself. Guiding her through this hard process is

Cecilia Federici

her spiritual cicerone, her moral guide, the unapologetically sex and femininity lover, the Emersonian philosopher of the streets, the catalyst for Celie’s transformation: Shug completely embraces the transcendentalist philosophy as she thinks of God and nature as the same thing, the latter being just a proof of the former’s existence, also embodying the ultimate expression of non-conformity1 in her sexual habits and her ideas about gender equality. Asserting that her first Emersonian experience was close to an orgasm, and seeing Celie’s shocked face, Shug replies “God love all them [sexual] feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys ’em a lot more”. To initiate Celie’s transcendence, Shug must first deconstruct the primordial, fundamental beliefs that society has inculcated into her mind: she has to unlearn in order to grow up as a human being. The first stitches to wash off are her convictions about sex and femininity. At first she has a reactionary attitude towards the changings occurring in her life, blaming Shug for blasphemy at the statement: “The white folks’ white bible”. “Shug! [Celie] say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it”. Also Shug’s frequent show-offs are to be read like a form of rebellion: she is aware she’s attracting the male gaze but the pride in her walking and the challenging look she wears is a symbol of freedom and rebellion: Shug de-objectifies herself because she becomes the protagonist of her own narration, wearing “a gold dress that show her titties near bout to the nipple”.

The next step to transcendence is less easy to fulfill but still crucial: Celie has to deal with the abstract entity of God, whom she pictures as a white bearded man. Here again Shug has to deconstruct everything Celie thought to have learned through her life. Shug knows that she, as a black woman, cannot possibly deify a male figure, white or black, that has been the symbol of her and her sisters’ oppression: “ain’t no way to read the bible and not think God white, [Shug] say. … When I found out God was white, and a man, I lost interest”.

She lost interest in traditional Christian religion per se, but not in the spirituality associated with the former, hence she neares herself to transcendentalism, still not totally repudiating Christianity: “Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us know don’t mean I ain’t got religion” and this is why we can talk about transformation and not conversion. After having accepted her body through dismantling the patriarchal and misogynist part of her education, Celie has now to come in contact with nature in order to fully accept herself. And here Emersonianism emerges with Shug as its prophetess: accepting the idea that God is the Universal Being, it is implied that God is within nature itself and all human beings are part of nature, so God is in each one of us unconditionally. Here it comes Celie’s surety and peacefulness: God won’t leave her by herself, no matter what because now she has accepted her nature, her inner self, her deep-black skin, her gender. Quoting Shug: “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook. … But I’m here. Amen, say Shug. Amen, amen”.

1 “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (Emerson, Self Reliance, p. 178)

Last but not least, we can experience Celie’s transformation through her discovery of the meaning of the word, and consequently the concept of God himself. At first, she perceives God as the sequential order of the three letters g-o-d, it is just an anchor that is given to her to support her miserable life and to make her stay quiet and mind-blinded: “I just say, Never mine, never mine, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along”. Along with her conversion, her ability to write begins to increase in syntax, structure and vocabulary, but also in the confidence and deepness she writes in2 —she manages to internalize and process the rape she was victim of:

Seem like it all come back to me, laying there in Shug arms. … How it stung while I finish trimming his hair. How the blood drip down my leg and mess up my stocking. How he don’t never look at me straight after that.

Patriarchy is even more manifest if we consider that Celie calls her husband “Mr __________” for so long that she can no longer remember his first name. When she finally addresses him by his name, she puts herself on his same level and discloses a veil of forgiveness for his actions, because to fully transcend she has to leave behind all the harsh feelings. But the greatest declaration of her real bildung relies on the changing interlocutor of her letters, that shifts from God to Nettie and then to Nature: first we have a plain and simple “Dear God,”, then, when she disowns traditional religion, she addresses directly to Nettie: “[Shug] talk and she talk, trying to budge me way from blasphemy. But I blaspheme much as I want to”. In the end, she interlaces with transcendentalism, understanding that God and nature are the same: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear everything. Dear God”.

In conclusion Celie’s transformation —the original deconstruction of herself and her ultimate reconstruction and humanization— engenders her realization of selfhood. In Shug’s words: “It pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and you don’t notice it”, and in the end, Celie noticed, she noticed indeed. As Emerson himself put in his greatest poem: “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit”, and the color of Celie’s soul is definitely purple.

So I flew By Martina Cacchioni

“That’s a shit idea. You’re a shit idea.” “How can I be a shit idea, I’m not an idea.” I looked at Tom’s face and shook my head. I sometimes worried he was going to get me killed, be it a painful death by the teeth of a wolf or a stupid one, like tripping and rolling off a cliff. Which would happen now, if he didn’t immediately stop dancing around on the edge of the precipice we were standing on. “You’re so full of shit ideas that you’ve managed to become one. Congrats.” It was hard keeping my voice steady when every move I made seemed to get me closer to the endless void mere centimeters from me. The sky was gray, a storm rippled the air with its cold

Martina Cacchioni

2 “I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn’t even talk about it to

God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was”. Walker, The Color Purple, p. 110)

laugh. Far away, a thunder echoed the howl. “Stop being such a crybaby, Dyl, enjoy me while you can. I might not be here forever.” He spread his arms like a pair of wings, as if he were begging the storm to come take him. Us. The wind whipped his hair around, bringing out the red shades of his golden hair. It often reminded me of fire. He reminded me of it. The wide grin, the savage spark in his brown eyes. I could barely look away from his face when he offered me that smile-that-was-not-a-smile. That laugh-that-was-not-a-laugh. “You most certainly will not, if you don’t stop that madness. I can already see your fall. I assure you, it won’t be pleasant. Not for me, because your mom would blame me for your death, but mainly not for you, because I see pointy rocks down there. “ To my surprise, Tom halted his steps and looked at me. His brows were furrowed, and his gaze burned on me like ice. With blazing rage he pointed a finger at me, and I took a step back, a little bit scared, yet mostly fascinated. I didn’t know what had made him react that way. I never knew; Tom was as unpredictable as life. Yet he must have seen something on my face, because the anger didn’t linger. Soon, he was grinning again, the expression much wilder and frightening than before. “I will teach you to live, Dylan, right here and now.” I didn’t have the time to move, to understand, before he grabbed my arms and swung me around like a dreidel. A ragged breath came out of me, its echo the only sound in my head as I looked at his face… and felt the emptiness behind me. My feet already half out in the open air, his hands were the only thing keeping me from falling. Gravity tucked at me with heavy fingers, pleading me to yield. “Tom..-”, I managed to whisper, nothing else. His name on my lips, my murderer’s name, my friend’s name. My last words. I hated the idea, I wanted to say something else, something as brutal as his eyes, as fierce as his heart, before parting from this world. But then again, I had never loved anyone nor anything as much as him. As cruel and dangerous as he may be, he held me in his hands, held my body and my soul. Had done so for much longer than these last seconds. So I closed my eyes and embraced it. Embraced the winds, the coldness, the death. But he held me. “Open your eyes, Dyl”, he said softly. I did. His stare had turned delicate, his smile no more a grin. “You must live now. You cannot let yourself die.” I didn’t understand what he meant. My life lay in his hands, if he let go of me, I would have no choice, no saying. I would fall, and I would die. “Dylan, tell me you understand.” His voice was strangely happy, even as my end slid closer and closer. I didn’t answer. “You’ll survive it, if you really want to. If you insist, if you tell death No. If you grow wings.” “I…” “Dylan, listen to me! You are a bird, and you fly free. You can command the wind, you can command destiny, and if you dare, you can make death bow.” His words got carried away by the wind, strands of his hair fell into his eyes. A hand so cold it burned my blood gripped me at his words, and then, just as he opened his mouth again, I felt it. The unearthly freedom he had spoken about. The freedom of birds, the freedom of stars. Luring me into the sky. Whispering into my ear “Fly away…”

So I flew.

Essential bibliography

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”;“Self-Reliance” in Selected Essays (NY: Penguin Books, 1982) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanist Prose (London: The Women’s Press, 1984) Alice Walker, The Color Purple (NY: Penguin Books, 2019)

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