The Silence of Bees. Giuseppe Dessi’s Female Universe

Abstract

Women’s time in Dessi’s works is always a long wait, which since pregnancy - that kind of motherhood  either actual or  potential, often peculiar to his female characters -  covers the whole span of their lives. A wait made of stone like Sardinia/ the Island. Similarly, men’s job is the return from all the fights of life, either real or metaphorical, attempted or accomplished, useless or worthwhile. The return to the woman,  to the mother and consequently to Sardinia which is both the womb and the tomb of their lives. In Dessì’s narrative, such waits are told through silence rather than by words. From Mariangela Eca’s stubborn and awkward silence in the novel “The Deserter” which is a prayer and a speechless attitidu (“epicedium”), to the contrast between the aphasic understanding of the young girl, main character in the short story “La mano della bambina” (she utters only one word throughout the whole story) and her mother’s verbose dullness, (she seems to suggest that words are not necessary to understand  but empathy can be enough) and finally, to the servant girl’s social background in the story “La serva degli asini”, who begins to live again as a person only when the silence of her family’s women sets her free. That is a mightier weapon than the sword or the tongue