L’isola della poesia

Abstract

The essay focuses on a minor character in literature, generally snubbed by critics, Sycorax, the witch, alleged lover of the devil himself and mother of Caliban. Her identikit, unanimously, portrays her as the representation of an unspeakable absence, the embodiment of all those silenced women, of those who experience double patriarchy (male and colonial) or a double "otherization" to quote Spivak. In the rewriting work of the Indian writer and poet Suniti Namjoshi, Sycorax, relegated to the margins, as a barbaric Other in European culture, decolonizes the male-dominated world of Prospero: from absence it transforms into presence, while building its own history and storytelling.