From Ibn Ḥamdīs to Giufà: Leonardo Sciascia and the Writing of a Siculo-Arab Literary History

Abstract

In this paper I argue that Leonardo Sciascia inscribes himself into a Siculo-Arab literary history, an inscription articulated through the historiographic metafiction of the novel Il Consiglio d’Egitto, the reception of the Sicilian poet of Arabic tongue Ibn Ḥamdīs, and the rewriting of a Giufà folktale. Influenced by the nineteenth-century Orientalist Michele Amari, Sciascia fashions Sicily’s Muslim past into a precursor of a Mediterranean modernity. Sciascia’s paradoxical vision of Arab Sicily is suspended between a fundamental historicism and an Orientalist essentialism, positing a Sicilian character that is both unchanging and the product of the island’s history of foreign invasions. The fictional investigations of Sicily’s Arab history provide Sciascia with an answer to the question of how one can be Sicilian, an answer that entails the responsibility of the historian, and the need to uncover a past that can guide us into an uncertain future.