My participation in Sicilian life and civilization has taught me to mock all authority but my own. My participation in American life has tempered that and has taught me to mock my own authority. For this reason I hesitate using the first person singular, then too the I has distorted most writings on emigration, making them akin in sentimentality to Country Music or bad poetry, which might be another way of saying that it speaks about a personal wound rather than the subject at hand. Yet the first person seems the most direct way of remembering a feeling as intimate as identity change, which after all, is the nature of immigration.
—Ben Morreale, Sicily: The Hallowed Land
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