Luigia (working title)
A novel by Stephanie Rebonati

Luigia is a collage-novel in three parts. Its genre is unfixed. It is (near) fiction, journalistic documentation, and magical realism. It deals with migration, assimilation, and historical amnesia within Italian American culture. The novel begins in 1981 with a Sicilian American mariologist in New York who 'reads' Leonardo Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre) in passionate, unorthodox terms. We then move into the mystical in-between world of an underground saloon in Manhattan's South Village at the end of the 19th century, and shortly thereafter into the textile mills of Paterson, New Jersey, where anarcha-feminist workers from the Mezzogiorno organize strikes, produce theater, and run radical libraries, in the early 20th century. We travel from western Sicily's impoverished grain-growing communities into the sugarcane fields of Southern Louisiana where the "Italian" peasantry is tasked with replacing enslaved labor. We dive into the history of the citrus fruit trade between New Orleans and Palermo which is historically linked with the Arab conquest of Sicily in 826. In the last section of Luigia, a contemporary Sicilian American figure aims to stretch across all these dimensions in order to reintegrate what has been lost with what has always lived within.

Luigia is a highly nuanced, heavily researched and carefully pieced together collage that speaks to the contradictory pieces that I personally consist of: Swiss, Northern Italian, Sicilian, American. My maternal great-grandparents migrated from Casteldaccia and Vizzini to Queens, New York, in 1901 and 1912. My paternal grandparents migrated from Bergamo and Milan to Zürich, Switzerland, in the 1950s.

I feel a strong sense of responsibility which is mirrored in this potent quote by Nzula Angelina Ciatu, the co-editor of Curaggia: Writing By Women of Italian Descent (1998): "The Italian women's reality within North America with all of our diverse tongues, ethnicity, class statuses, skin colours, divergent historical origins, and sociological placements that fall under the umbrella 'Italian' will only add depth to the ongoing and necessary discourses around racism and classism within feminist and mainstream communities."

Stephanie Marilyn Rebonati
Brooklyn, NY, September 2023

Image: my grandfather, John Peter Cannizzo, with family members in Jackson Heights, Queens, ca. 1940s, (photographer unknown).