The Tamesis
“No one who has ever known this land can completely shake off the nostalgia for it,” DH Lawrence said of Sicily. This statement has a double meaning for the Aeolian Islands and a triple meaning for the island of Alicudi, a jewel of the Mediterranean that has been my family’s refuge for 34 years. The island is too steep for cars or roads; instead, hundreds of steps were built on top of the now-abandoned crater.
My mother and I half-jokingly refer to the Alikudi house that belongs to our family as “our room.” Whenever my mother wrote a book, usually one that took place on the island or dealt with its history in some way, she would come here. The same thing happened to me when I visited her. But sometimes, having a room of your own requires a little extra effort. Getting there involves flying to Palermo, taking a boat to the island, transferring your belongings to a donkey, and climbing 450 steps. (Everything had to be carried on donkeys: groceries, suitcases, water, sometimes even furniture, slowly ascending along the same old lines.) My parents were both writers, but this was my mother’s space. This is where she can be alone with her thoughts and work. By the time you reach the top, you’ve shed or sweated months of city life. The creative reward after so much hard work is always incredible.
The house came into our family by my mother’s adventurous brother, who restored a ruin on the island in the late 1980s and we have been going there since 1992. I distinctly remember lying on the limestone listening to Rhythm Is the Dancer on my Walkman Bisolo Overlooking the sea, it was very boring as there were no activities or social gatherings. Yet, even as a young girl, I knew I could thank boredom and silence for forcing me to create worlds out of rock, sun, and sea—worlds that have persisted in much of my work and consciousness.
Later in life, when my family moved to the United States and summer visits became more difficult, a longing for this primal silence connected me to my mother. My brother and I both had complicated adolescences—influenced by the proximity of gangs and drugs and all the wrong paths—but it was a comfort to know that the island would be there waiting for us. Even later, when I began sharing my life with the screenwriter, the father of my children, and having to constantly negotiate silence and solitude, Alikudi’s house became the answer. A bedroom warmed by the sun, the scent of jasmine rising at night, a salty breeze blowing through the open blinds – this is a place where marital compromise does not exist.
