Page 6 - Marino2005

2.3, September 2005
Nebula

with your Italian origin, with the importance we attach to story-telling in the
family?

T.M. I have to say, there wasn’t much storytelling in my family. Everything was a
secret, usually a discussion of some bitter vendetta or remembered slight. Whatever
stories were passed at the dinner table Sundays at my grandmother’s house were

passed in Sicilian, the older generation’s secret language, and kept from us kids.
But in the end, maybe you are right. I went to Sicily in the first place in spite of my

grandmother’s caustic admonishment that "there is nothing there", to find out what
WAS there, and what were all the secrets about.

Why am I so interested in oral tradition? Human behavior is the most interesting thing

on earth. For some reason, I am fascinated by human rituals and dying traditions. I’m
a journalist, trained to seek out my sources and write down what they say, simple as
that. I get people to tell their stories, when I am lucky, or when I do my job right, or

both. Then I write them down. It helps me and my readers to see the world from my
subject’s point of view. To recreate a foreign world, a distant culture.

Mattanza was full of oral tradition—the cialome (songs the fishermen sing), the
prayer of the rais, the shout of the tonnaroti the day before the first Mattanza (Sempre

sia laudato il nome di Gesu!), the soaring seabirds that signal the arrival of migrating
blue-fin tuna, the short ritual and prayer a fisherman learns to stop a sea tornado,

washing one’s face with water sprinkled with flowers on May First. The women had
their own traditions: my landlady’s mumbled invocation to relieve her son-in-law of

the curse of the Evil Eye, Rosa of the Cemetery’s semi-pagan prayers to Saint
Anthony to get one’s boyfriend back.

Stone Boudoir was full of oral tradition, too. For example, the methods nuns used to
name the infant orphans placed in their care, or the traditional family protocol for

naming legitimate children, or what the screaming devotees of Saint Agatha are
actually saying during her mind-boggling feast in Catania.

It was a pleasure to learn from a distant cousin that the women of Santa Margherita
Belice who cleaned the Leopard’s palace took "an hour-and-a-half just to open all the

Marino: …An Interview with Theresa Maggio 123