Emiliana and Disability traces a journey that Cosimo Fornaro undertakes with extraordinary tenderness and poetry, moving through two mysterious worlds held in tension: ancient Sicily—symbolic, enigmatic, rich with meaning—and his daughter Emiliana, his silent traveling companion, fragile in mind and body. She moves through these pages with an almost touching fidelity, always at her father's side, speaking little. The words she does speak are simple, innocent, and they touch on truth.
We travel with them through these two realms that captivate Fornaro simultaneously: Sicily, with its generous natural beauty and the cultural wealth of a civilization whose charm he knows intimately (he holds the chair of Italian and Latin at the classical lycée Archita in Taranto); and his daughter's world, heavy with a father's love, marked by the milestones that every family with a handicapped child must pass—and by countless unanswered questions.
Fornaro writes of this twenty-year-old daughter with exquisite tenderness. He describes her character, her habits, her gifts with remarkable delicacy. Yet his poetry does not prevent him from seeing her with clear eyes, from confronting the harsh and painful reality she embodies. He does not hide her limitations. He paints all her wounds. One can only imagine the cost of confessing his daughter's imperfections, the disappointments they bring, the hopes that fade one by one, the burning frustrations. This is a book in which pain is ever-present, even in the description of a placid sea and an ancient temple bathed in sunlight.
It must have taken courage—and that very struggle against the temptation to idealize his daughter gives this book its weight. It is not a virtuosic exercise in empty poetry, but an honest and passionate look at the difficult condition faced by all people like Emiliana in Italy; at moments it becomes an anguished indictment. Yet there is also a glimmer of hope, more than a solution: Emiliana lives at the Oasis in Troina, a center that welcomes her as family, where selfless people dedicate themselves to her, befriend her, and help her satisfy the most basic needs for independence and the desire to feel useful, productive, genuinely adult.
In his pain, this father has perhaps discovered, after the difficult search that all such parents undertake, the hidden treasures in his mysterious daughter. Emiliana herself offers a silent answer to her father and to all who, like him, search for meaning in such innocent suffering. Fornaro arrives at that answer when he says: "I believe that if God wanted you to be here, you are as useful as anyone else, useful to someone at least. And when you ask me, 'What would I be without you?' I answer: With you, I am never alone."
by Anna Cece, 1986
===END===