Muchachas sicilianas

Regrets that last for years, dark cloaks to cover and hide, windows ready to close, eyes that remain perpetually downcast, mouths that remain silent, existences that are relentlessly extinguished. The feminine humanity that María Messina fixes in the eight stories that make up this volume repeats the same gestures, multiplies the same pains. Her writing is linked to the losers and the humiliated, who, in her time and according to her experience, are none other than women. Messina portrays the female figures with a heartbreaking melancholy, in which autobiographical resonances are appreciated and an implicit desire to denounce the social conventions of the early 20th century. A woman who writes and tells the silence of other women, perhaps precisely because she is aware that no one else would be willing to do it.