«Handicapped isn't an easy word to help take root. But tend it every day—keep it moist, keep it covered—and see what grows». It was 2014 when Valeria Parrella published the remarkable novel Time to Learn, a story of a crooked but warm and wonder-filled journey into the discovery and meeting with disability. Disability not as a legal statute number, a dispute among doctors, a war between life and choice, a clash between too much and too little. Arturo must learn to hold a pen and climb the school stairs. His mother—backpack on her own shoulders—must learn what disability is; learn to carry it, make it part of her daily life.
Arturo is a child who does not fit the standard mold as he grows, but it is his nameless mother who must truly find her footing—he is who he is; she must learn to reach him on his island. "It wasn't I who handed you over to an inside: it was you who pushed me out, into the outside". Elsa Morante would smile. Time to Learn contains everything: the pain, the rage, the helplessness, the knowledge that it will never be easy. But above all, it holds that tilted idea of normalcy; the disability of bureaucratic language and a gaze that does not listen; hope, wonder, and the joy of stepping into Arturo's rhythm, of discovering that his little friends got there long before; the sense (beneath what seems like nonsense) of school inclusion, the certainty that even when everything pushes back, the island is reachable. And that to live there is to be lit from within.
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