The Oyster and the Rope: Leaving and Returning in I Malavoglia and Songs of Dust and Water
- Written as
- An imagined student aged 18, quinto anno, a state liceo linguistico in Catania
- Format
- Esame di Stato (Maturità), Liceo Linguistico; Lingua e cultura inglese, argumentative literary essay prepared for the written work and the colloquio pluridisciplinare
- Task
- Compare the way leaving and returning are presented in Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881) and M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water. To what extent does Hydara’s novel answer Verga’s “ideale dell’ostrica”?
- Length
- 2,610 words, not counting headings and references
Twenty minutes up the coast from my school, the Faraglioni stand in the sea at Aci Trezza. Every Sicilian student meets them twice: once in the Odyssey, as the rocks the blinded Cyclops threw at Ulysses, and once in the first pages of I Malavoglia, where the Toscano family and their boat live in their shadow. I did not expect to think of Aci Trezza while reading a novel set in two fictional countries of West Africa. But Songs of Dust and Water opens in a village where the well’s rope “came up slower every month” (p. 4), and with a young man who would rather be anywhere than at his father’s loom. That young man could be ’Ntoni Malavoglia, and the question the novel asks about him is Verga’s question too: what happens to the poor when they let go of the place that holds them?
Verga gave his answer before he wrote the novel. In “Fantasticheria”, the story that opens Vita dei campi (1880) and was first published in 1879, the narrator describes the fishermen of Aci Trezza to a rich lady who once spent two days there and was bored. He calls their way of surviving the “ideale dell’ostrica”: the poor can resist the storms of life only if they stay attached to their rock, like oysters, and whoever detaches himself, out of curiosity or the wish for something better, is swallowed by the world. In the preface to I Malavoglia he speaks of the “fiumana del progresso”, the flood of progress that carries everybody forward and leaves the “vinti”, the defeated, along its banks. The novel tests the theory on one family. Padron ’Ntoni, the grandfather, buys a cargo of lupini on credit from zio Crocifisso and loads it on the family boat, the Provvidenza. The boat is wrecked in a storm, his son Bastianazzo drowns, the lupini are lost, and the debt remains. To pay it the family loses the casa del nespolo, the house with the medlar tree. Young ’Ntoni leaves to find his fortune, comes back poorer, falls into smuggling and goes to prison after stabbing a customs officer. At the end he returns one night to the house his brother Alessi has bought back, understands that he cannot stay, and leaves before dawn.
My argument is that Hydara keeps Verga’s fear and rejects his conclusion. Songs of Dust and Water agrees that leaving is dangerous and that the people who leave often cannot come back whole. But in Verga there are only two choices, the rock or the sea, and both end badly for the Malavoglia. Hydara adds a third, which depends on what the people who stay do with the rope while the others are away. In Hydara’s novel, return becomes possible when the place itself has been changed.
The first part of the novel is closest to Verga. Talib, the weaver’s son, does not leave his village, but he leaves his craft, which in Madina amounts to the same thing. His father’s warning in the opening scene could come from one of padron ’Ntoni’s proverbs: “A weaver’s craft is in his hands” (p. 3). Talib’s hands are elsewhere, in a notebook of circuit diagrams, and when the foreign engineer arrives with his solar plant he joins the crew as quickly as ’Ntoni jumps at the life he has seen in Naples during his military service. It is important, though, that Hydara gives him a reason Verga never gives ’Ntoni. Talib’s sister Hawa is “the first of their family to go past the village school, and everyone had sold something to send her” (p. 5), and her fee is due: “Hawa did not have time for fifty birds” (p. 5). The vague longing for the unknown that Verga blames in “Fantasticheria” has little to do with it. Talib leaves because the rock is not feeding anybody.
The plant burns, as the Provvidenza sinks, and the scene that follows is the one I found most Verghian in the whole book. Talib says to Adam, “I believed you. All of it” (p. 68), and then: “I left my father’s loom for” (p. 68), and his hand points at the ruin before he says the last word. Some months later he goes home, sits at the small loom where the “broken warp thread” (p. 20) has been hanging since the first chapter, and ties it. The novel repeats his father’s words from the opening scene: “Then you must re-tie it” and “That is the work” (p. 76). “The old rhythm came back into his arms” (p. 76). If the book ended here, Verga’s oyster would be completely vindicated: the boy who let go of the rock has been punished and has crawled back to it.
But the book does not end here, and this is where I think Hydara begins to argue with Verga. When ’Ntoni comes back at the end of I Malavoglia, he has nothing to bring. He has learned only that the world outside is cruel, and the house cannot take him in because he no longer belongs to its rules. Talib comes back with the notebook. Aisha tells him, “Your mind was never on the loom, Talib. It’s in that notebook of yours” (p. 74), and years later we learn that he “weaves in the mornings and mends radios and pumps for half the district in the afternoons” (p. 231). He has returned to the rock carrying the sea’s knowledge, which in Verga is impossible. When in the last chapter he travels south to Nafawol with the visitors from Madina, he gives his name only as the word that “meant student” (p. 231), the same meaning he had given Adam years before: “It means student” (p. 30). He has left again, and this time he can.
The second point of comparison is debt, because in both novels debt is the thing that pushes people out. In I Malavoglia the lupini debt is private. Zio Crocifisso, whom the village calls Campana di legno because he pretends not to hear, passes the credit to Piedipapera so that he will not seem to be the one squeezing the family, and the whole of Aci Trezza comments on it like a chorus without doing anything. Padron ’Ntoni pays because for him a debt is a question of honour, and the honour costs him the house.
Hydara’s villages know this kind of debt well. When the trader Fatou proposes borrowing from a consortium to build a mill, the elder Mamadou answers: “And while the mill pays, the debt has calves” (p. 141), and adds that “The imam has a word for that” (p. 141). Zio Crocifisso would recognise the calves. Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper, warns against the foreign company’s offer with an image that could describe the casa del nespolo: “A family compound built with borrowed money” and “the gate key in another man’s hand” (p. 189). Even the names of the projects remind me of Verga. The Malavoglia’s boat is called Providence, a gift from heaven that turns out to be a trap. The fund in Hydara is called Proxima, “The nearest star to our own sun” (p. 91), and Fatou’s answer could be a comment on the Provvidenza too: “Then it’s a long way off” (p. 91).
The difference is that in Nafawol the debt is written on a wall. The village’s Coffer Fund lends without interest, posts every figure in the square, and adds a “suspension clause” for a village whose mill has been sealed by an inspector: “This village did not fail. It was stopped” (p. 163). Hydara does not pretend this saves everyone. When crop prices fall because of a glut and a subsidy on another continent, the clause does not cover old Teranu, and his family leaves for the coast. His words at the gate are some of the saddest in the novel, and they are spoken “without anger” (p. 204): “My sons have waited ten years” and “They are young once” (p. 204). But his eldest son asks Fatou, “Write on the wall that we paid what we could” (p. 204), and she does. Padron ’Ntoni would have understood that request perfectly. In Aci Trezza the chorus remembers who failed; in Nafawol the wall records who paid. For me this is the clearest sign that Hydara is answering Verga: leaving is still a defeat for the Teranu, but they are allowed to leave with their honour on the record, which means that in theory they could come back.
The novel is full of people who go to the coast, and each of them is a version of ’Ntoni with a different ending. Kadiatou’s son went “to work the docks at Port Walada” (p. 86); “He sent money when there was money” (p. 86). My great-uncle went to Wolfsburg in 1962 and the upper floor of my grandmother’s house in Acireale was built with what he sent, so this sentence felt familiar to me. When the builder Edrisa brings back an envelope from him, Kadiatou “held the envelope in her lap and did not open it” (p. 167). She gives it to the school, and on the public wall it is recorded with the words “From the docks” (p. 167). We never see the son come home, but what he sends becomes part of the village’s building. Verga’s emigrants are swallowed by the world like small fish; Hydara’s are swallowed too, but something of them keeps arriving.
Edrisa is the most interesting case because his temptation is exactly ’Ntoni’s. He goes to build hotels on the coast when the Fund cannot pay him, and before he goes he tells Kadiatou, “Leave the string” (p. 164), the string that marks out the walls of the new school, and warns her that if the goats pull it out the corners will go wrong. “The string was still on the pegs when he came back” (p. 164). When he returns he tells Demba that on the coast “a man who could set a corner true was paid at the end of every day, into his hand, and nobody asked him what he thought of anything” (p. 166), and “He said he had liked that more than he had expected to” (p. 166). This is the attraction of the world for ’Ntoni: a life without the weight of the family and the village watching. Edrisa feels it and comes back anyway, and he begins laying blocks before anyone has decided there is money to pay him. The string waiting on the pegs is the opposite of the casa del nespolo. Somebody at home kept his place.
Ousman’s son is the gentlest version. He went to secondary school on a scholarship and became an accountant, and “each time he came he stood a little further from the fire” (p. 148). Ousman had warned the committee that the schools of the capital send back “a man who is ashamed of his father’s fingernails” (p. 147). Verga would have turned this into tragedy. Hydara gives us a quiet scene at the bus where Ousman holds his granddaughter with one arm and keeps his other hand flat under the cloth, “so that his fingers did not touch her” (p. 149), because “There was earth in the cracks of them from the morning” (p. 149). Nothing is resolved. Years later, at the feast that closes Proxima’s ten years, the son leaves early, and “Ousman did not watch him go” (p. 214). Here Hydara accepts the oyster’s warning without exaggerating it. The son has not been swallowed. He is only a little further from the fire, and the novel leaves that distance as it is.
The deepest answer to Verga, I think, comes through Kadiatou and her granddaughter Mariam. The title of Water-Keeper passes through the women of her line, and the rule that protects it is an oyster’s rule: “They married within Nafawol, so that the well would never be kept by a stranger” (p. 85). Kadiatou’s whole identity is the rope. When Mariam says she wants to study beyond the village, Kadiatou could answer as padron ’Ntoni would. Instead she covers the girl’s hand and says, “Then go further,” and “And come back and tell me what you found” (p. 174). The narrator then gives us her private thought: “Then the rope is not for you, she thought” (p. 174). This is the moment I would choose to read aloud at the oral exam, because it contains the whole difference between the two novels. Padron ’Ntoni can only imagine leaving as the end of the family. Kadiatou imagines it as going away with a report to bring home, and she pays for it by giving up the person she would have chosen to inherit the rope.
Hydara does not make this easy. The refusal Kadiatou campaigned for costs Mariam a year, because in the bad season that follows the academy sends nobody south, and Kadiatou admits it: “It cost you a year” (p. 204). When Mariam finally leaves and asks again whether it was wrong, her grandmother only hands her the bag, and Mariam says, “That isn’t an answer either” (p. 209), climbs up “and did not look down” (p. 209). But in the last chapter Mariam is back, in a university jacket and holding a clipboard, standing beside Hassan on the station platform to receive the visitors from Madina. She has gone further and come back, as she was asked. And the rope passes to her niece Halima, who helps draw the first clear bucket from the recovered well and who is described as “a girl who did not yet know it was hers” (p. 232). The rock is still there, but it is held differently.
Finally, I think the two novels disagree because they have different histories behind them. For Verga, history comes to Aci Trezza from outside, like weather: conscription, new taxes, the battle of Lissa where Luca dies, the cholera that kills Maruzza. The village can only endure it. Hydara’s grandmothers tell a different story about their own past. When Wagadu fell, its people “followed the water, well by well, carrying what they could not bear to leave” (p. 81), and the grandmothers call it “a road that had not yet run out” (p. 81). The Fula grandmothers go further: to them “a road had never been an ending at all” (p. 81). When an elder calls Wagadu “Gone a thousand years”, Dr Arramata answers, “Everyone in this room is what Wagadu turned into” (p. 148). In this tradition leaving is how the people survived in the first place. The oyster is one way of living, and the herd on the move is another.
I do not want to say that Hydara is right and Verga wrong. I Malavoglia is honest about a Sicily where a family had nothing except its rock, and where nobody wrote the debts on a public wall. Many people from my region left and were swallowed, and many who stayed were swallowed too. But reading the two books together made me notice that Verga’s oyster has no choice about the rock, while the people of Nafawol spend fifteen years rebuilding theirs: the stone lines in the dead channels, the ledger, the road. Because they change the place, the ones who leave have something to come back to, and the ones who stay can let a girl go without losing the well. Several friends in my class will leave Catania next year for Bologna or Milan. I would like someone to say to each of them what Kadiatou says to Mariam, and I would like there to be a string on the pegs when they come back.
Bibliography
Hydara, M.J. Songs of Dust and Water. 2026. Paperback, ISBN 9798162251088.
Verga, Giovanni. I Malavoglia. Milano: Treves, 1881.
Verga, Giovanni. “Fantasticheria”. In Vita dei campi. Milano: Treves, 1880 (first published in Fanfulla della Domenica, 1879).
Homer. Odyssey, Book IX.
