I finished Ardizzone’s Satutzzu a few days ago, and while I’ve already reflected on most of what it meant to me—to be honest, for much if it I was too distracted with the how of the reading that the distilled what of the story was a bit lost. What I gathered, though, is it is a celebration of family.
Family isn’t an easy concept or an easy entity in our society. It’s hard to get my fingers around what a family is, or even what a family is supposed to be. Like so many of my generation, I am the product of divorcees, who are themselves products of divorcees. In fact, I know of one couple in all of my extended family who has had an enduring marriage.
Which is okay, because that doesn’t make us any less family. The Santuzzu family had their problems—separated by thousands of miles, separated emotionally and physically for a big section of their lives, in the end what mattered was family and one another. And my family, too, is separated by hurt, by psychological reactions to what’s happened in our lives, and I think maybe most of all by our respective searches for identity and self. And just like, whether in grief or in jubilation, the Santuzzus were still bound by mutual love and belongingness, so are the Eckhardts, so am I. And wherever I go searching for who I am and what I am meant to be, I am still bound by what my family is—I am an Eckhardt, complete with our traditions, our mythologies, and the string of love that ties them together.
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