As an “exiled” German who’s lived in the UK for 39 years, I can really empathise with Viola Di Grado (Sicilians are brought up to hate our island – but those of us who flee are seen as the enemy, 21 August). Most Germans I meet who have lived in the UK for a while appear to prefer speaking English – even when I address them in German. When I left in 1985 to do an MA, I felt a mixture of relief at not having to fully confront a German history that I was powerless to change – as well as the excitement of landing in a truly multicultural capital that was willing to give me a chance at a different life. I have spent the last 39 years trying to reframe my troubled relationship with the country of my birth and have, it seems, made peace with it while recognising that I’m not English either.
My two passports live happily in the same drawer along with my sense of being neither fish nor fowl, but appreciating the fins and the feathers that come with it. Possibly a chimera – but one at peace with itself.
Martin Klopstock
Letchworth, Hertfordshire
• I am a Sicilian in my late years. I spent 10 years in different places in Italy and abroad as a professional, and came back more than 30 years ago to live and work in Sicily. The family experiences of Viola Di Grado are not the same as mine, and as to the feelings she describes with her friends, these cannot be generalised either.
But Sicily has structural and social problems that go back centuries, and the multiple conquerors over a couple of millennia are part of the explanation. Today, the representatives we elect bear much of the responsibility. At the end of the day, when we vote we choose “friends”, wherever they might be politically placed and whatever their competence. We tend to choose people who we feel could give us something in return: a job, or a job for a relative, being the most valuable item. Accordingly, the administration staff are not the most qualified in the world, and paperwork tends to be impossibly slow. So shortcuts are handy, even if they are much costlier.
My grownup children are abroad and I don’t expect them to come to live here anytime soon. Anecdotally, I only know few families whose children stayed here and have a job; dozens of other families have children somewhere else in Italy or abroad.
Sicily is a great land to visit, The White Lotus or not, but is a much harder place to live in and thrive if you don’t happen to go along with the way its society works.
Vincenzo Guardabasso
Catania, Italy
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