California Italian Studies

Silvana Grasso and Fadhila Chebbi are two “Mediterranean” writers. The visions of these women of the Mediterranean, represented both experientially and vis a vis their own writing highlight points of view that are unique and that actively and forcefully confront their status in their respective cultures. They write with great conviction, free from the notion that they may still be prisoners to ancestral chains that would bind them to their ‘heritage’ or places of ‘origin’. Their writings tend to oscillate between the realms of the personal, political and social, revealing a complex and cosmopolitan commonality in their approach to thinking and writing about issues of identity as they pertain to their shared cultural status as representatives of the Mediterranean basin. By reading and representing these two writers together, this article brings to light and puts at a crossroads two representations of Mediterranean-ness and the Mediterranean woman, by women—one a Sicilian novelist (Grasso) whose semi-autobiographical text Disìo (2005) features a tormented protagonist, the other a Tunisian poet (Chebbi) and recluse who is often misunderstood.