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WORKSHOP TWO

“the magical, wonderful accord (…) between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were
locked in a mystical, timeless cycle of death, burial and resurrection,” Maggio concludes
by saying “I found such a myth still alive on a small island in the middle of the Mediter-
ranean Sea” (xvi): Favignana. Similar passages can be found in many pages of the book.
For instance, Maggio writes that “the wheel of life, death, and rebirth still spins every
spring on that tiny island” adding, immediately afterwards, “for a few years I arrived with
the tuna in the spring” (12). She thus establishes a deep connection between the fish and
herself, both crossing the Atlantic and coming back to their roots to love, die and be born
again. In her dreams, Maggio becomes a tuna, swimming with the giant fish in the
“cottony silence” (218) of the Chamber of Death, then rising “slowly and unwillingly”
(218) towards the mystical chants of the fishermen, towards the daylight, towards her
destiny of death and resurrection.

What strikes the reader, however, is that Maggio neither lingers on her family his-
tory, nor on the description of her actual town of origin: Santa Margherita Belice, the
village where her father came from, mentioned briefly in the first and fourth chapters of
the book. Her efforts seem to be entirely concentrated on the recovery of roots which go
back even beyond her own, beyond the history of many first generation Italian Ameri-
cans, torn between their longing for a distant motherland and the urge to be assimilated
into the “melting pot.” She comes back to plunge deeply into the very core of mankind,
into pre-history, through a rite “essentially unchanged since the Stone Age” (12), thus
overcoming all the binary oppositions such as insider vs. outsider, assimilated vs. misfit,
domineering vs. dominated produced by Western history and uncovering, instead, uni-
versal ties which bind people beyond geographical, ethnic and religious differences.

The Mediterranean Sea, therefore, becomes a sort of amniotic fluid, a “briny vessel
of primordial juices” where “sex, death, and begetting mingle” (11). Maggio visits the
caves on the shores of Levanzo, an island three miles off the north coast of Favignana
and, in this “womb” of the earth, she stares at “four-thousand-year-old sepia-ink cave
paintings of humans and animals: dancing man and limbless, violin-shaped women;
equines, bovines, two boars, six fish, and, at the very bottom, the unmistakable diamond
shape of a giant bluefin tuna” (9). Actually, as we read in another passage, the name for
Canaan “the promised land” that the first Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic were trying to
reproduce on the American soil, “derives from the Hebrew word for tuna” (210). There-
fore, following Maggio’s hints, Canaan is not a land, a place to be “located” precisely on
a map; on the contrary it seems to be connected to the idea of “mobility” of “coming
back” and, for an immigrant, to feeling comfortable with “multiple roots” in the name of
the common origin of all mankind, generated from the same, liquid womb.

Throughout the book, the Mediterranean Sea seems to turn into a woman, into a
mother figure. Just to quote some of the most striking examples, “Mondello Bay is curled
in the arms of beach and mountains” (4); one of the fishermen touches with the back of
his hand “the smooth water and caress(es) it like a woman’s cheek” (25); the boat rocks

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