SCRUTINIZING MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN’S

   WHERE I COME FROM

 

 

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry in Where I Come From (Guernica Editions 1995) thematizes issues of culture, family, education, and multiculturalism. The mechanism of thematization is crucial in Gillan’s work because this tool parallels a dialectical mechanism that negotiates acculturation and stigmatization. Attention to ab­stract poetic mechanisms both underscores and contrasts with Gil­lan’s thematizing and makes these themes noticeable and power­ful. These poetic devices make Gillan’s work a source of extremely close reading and demonstrates the textual richness and literary potential and fulfillment of her most pervasive themes. Poetic re­flexivity creates a dynamic interplay among Gillan’s themes and opens a space for culturally pertinent allegorical readings. Gillan consistently supplies a roving focus and a descriptive excess that implies an open and constantly generative cultural perspective, which nonetheless relates with the makeshift touchstone of a common culture. Within this context, Gillan’s poetry skillfully weaves changes of address and addressee. Address implies both separation and relation. Clearly, neither cultural isolation nor complete assimilation are viable answers. Similarly, neither a po­etry separated from cultural issues nor a poetry that does not util­ize poetic tools of exploration are workable.

The poem “Public School, No. 18 Paterson, New Jersey” exem­plifies this cultural and poetic interplay and echoes throughout Where I Come From. “Public School, No. 18 Paterson, New Jersey” (12–13) begins with the image of an opaque eye. The poem’s speaker, who is a former student reminiscing, describes her teacher, “Miss Wilson’s eyes opaque / as blue glass.” The teacher is here an enforcer who is incapable of interacting with the stu­dent. There is no play of reflections. The student encounters the teacher as an educational and epistemological wall. In “Public School, No. 18 Paterson, New Jersey,” the student is oddly fixated by the vacuousness of the color blue. She is assailed by a prescrip­tive conception of culture rather than a performative model. Gil­lan’s speaker desires to say that she is American, and if she mixes her Italian with English this is ipso facto an American way to speak. She generates what it is to be, act, and speak “American.” How­ever, the teacher assumes a game that is already in place. Accord­ing to her, life in America equals the horizon of English being placed on all language. And yet the student obviously under­stands English because she can understand the teacher. This “evi­dence” nonetheless seems invalid because the student’s means of expression are rendered invalid. The evidence is, according to the student, “stacked,” as if the evidence were school chairs put on top of one another in order more easily to mop the floor. Gillan’s speaker is caught in the stratified and industrial environment of American public education. The source of the speaker’s economic and intellectual betterment is thus paradoxically the site of her belittlement and curtailment of intellectual interests.

The poem’s title tells us that the student is at Public School 18, a public school that is presumably interchangeable with Public School 35 or any other public school. It is of course not only “Eng­lish” that is imposed. The student’s mother literally goes to the roots to apply culture. She sculpts the young girl’s hair to achieve an image of nature and uniformity that counters the aims of the student’s education. However, the shine of the girl’s hair is rue­fully received by Miss Wilson, who surveys it suspecting the pres­ence of the demons of lice. The speaker wishes to detach her face from her hair as it is inspected. She wishes to leave the domain of imposed regularity and regulated surveillance, to hide her own eyes from regulation.

School is contrasted to the speaker’s domestic life. Home is “smooth,” spontaneous, and affirming. The home is equated with the internally corporal space of the mouth. However, in the public space of “school,” the domestic space of “home” is undercut. School is where the home is corrected, where the public sphere overrules the domestic and private spheres. “Home” is the given, the most common assumption, the site of the self. Home is associ­ated with the full comfort of Italian and school with the enforce­ment of English. Gillan must “grope for the right English,” al­though groping is at odds with ultimate correctness. In contrast, public education employs “the progression of teachers,” an as­sembly line of public surveillance mechanisms. The barren “sprig[s]” of official English words are contrasted with the Italian rose that is said to sprout from the child’s mouth. These sprigs are presented like the progression of assembly line teachers. They do not sprout but rather lead to a never ending design of regimented sprigs. Nevertheless, the sprigs and the rose unite within a site of the student’s fear. “Anglo Saxon” and Italian culture stand in rela­tion to one another. The speaker’s sense of “I am” comes from her denial of her Italian ethnicity. To be Italian, her teachers teach her, is to be marked as less than existing. Her “country” is hence “booted.” It is as hard for her to “touch,” being a part of her now “hate[d]” self, as her teachers. This plurality of teachers condenses in “time” into one “Psychology professor.” “The Psychology pro­fessor” takes a definite article and is capitalized as if to make offi­cial an internalized psychology. This psychology is situated in an all American “white house” in the country’s heartland, Kansas City. He sees the now grown speaker in an official American mir­ror — Time magazine — in the guise of an official deviant — a Ma­fia leader.

The speaker reacts against this association by letting out “the rose” that as a child she feared would sprout from her mouth and reveal her Italian heritage. However, now from her mouth “anger spits venomous.” The establishment of her identity requires a psy­chic violence because it is the restrictions based upon her psyche that must be overcome. However, this accomplishment requires an external addressee because the indoctrination came from the outside. Nonetheless, the realization is internal. The speaker val­ues the black apparel of her mother to the white house of the psy­chology professor. She values the “noise” in this house over her educated acculturation. The poem concludes with the speaker ad­dressing her elementary school teachers as an equal of sorts. She calls them “ladies” and herself, in opposition to the noise of fam­ily’s home, “the silent one.” The spell of her education is now bro­ken and her voice and rage can now blow the “house” of her edu­cation, P.S. 18, down.

Within the context of public education before World War II, “Public School No. 18, Paterson, New Jersey” polarizes the Anglo and Italian cultures and languages, clearing a path for under­standing American English as a language and culture in the mak­ing. The poem furthers previously unacceptable visions by mak­ng concrete the stigma implicit in them. In order to do this, an addresser/addressee relationship must be (re)established. Simi­larly, in Gillan’s poem “Arturo,” the speaker must take on the persona of her younger self to address her father and adjust past stigmatizations. The speaker must acknowledge the father of her youth by his Italian name so as to address what she had denied within her education as an “American.” She is making official the paternal knowledge that she had only halfheartedly accepted. She says that the “spears” of the ethnic slurs that are directed at her are “curved,” implying that the words implicate both addresser and addressee in a system of mutual incision. (Similarly, in “Image in a Curved Glass” [22–23], curvature suggests the en­trapment of women in a familial system of child-bearing.) Thus “the anguish of sandwiches,” sandwiches implying a dual external construction, which become a trinity with the contents of the sandwich. However, the speaker cannot fully enjoy the three piece structure of her “homemade” sandwich. Before the above passage, Gillan speaks of an imaginary father in a “three piece suit” who blocks her real family life, culture, and food. This anguish culminates in “the rice pies of Easter,” connoting the pain of a re­birth or resurrection that this poem enacts through a reconstruc­tion affected through the memory. Rice pies suggest a new fertility within the context of the certification of the marriage ceremony.

The speaker must renounce the false father and the false official knowledge that she has created. Arturo suggests both “artist” and “author.” Gillan’s father represents an official language that ac­knowledges unofficial language, “unEnglish” English, and “dark” and visual verbal language. Gillan portrays her father Arturo as “closed by” “growing deafness” yet now politically wise. He “still worship[s] Roosevelt and J.F.K.” He is able to “read closely” the paper and understand “the details of revolutions and dictators, / the cause and effect of all wars, / no matter how small,” and he dispenses the poetic and political wisdom of close reading. His daughter must access this detailed wisdom through the proper address: Details of address must be accessed properly. In a kind of open confession, Gillan addresses “America” and by adjusting her mode of address for her father she “reinvents” herself. In “Ar­turo,” the speaker tells her father’s Italian name, and her own name, to a mainstream American public. In this regard, Gillan’s “Growing Up Italian” (54–57) ends “I take back my name / and wave it in their faces / like a bright, red flag.” The speaker’s sense of a cultural identity parodies the nativism it derides in order to demonstrate the drawbacks of a limited sense of American iden­tity. These same limits apply to narratives of assimilation and co-existence with American society. If, as Whitman said, the United States is essentially a poem, every strong poem in relation to the United States uproots, performs, names, negotiates, and re-envi­sions American culture and identity. Hence, Gillan employs Whitman’s rhetorical celebration of self as a mechanism for ethnic pride.

In recent decades, Gillan’s father’s wisdom of working-class al­liances and politics dissipates, and Gillan’s poetry often distin­guishes her roots from contemporary reality. For instance, in “Connections” (62–63), Gillan finds herself accidentally driving toward her mother’s house where her mother’s criticisms and of­ferings of food anchor her “as though / the world were a quaking bog / and she, the only solid place / on which to stand.” Simi­larly, in “Uncertainties” (41), Gillan ruminates that the clouds as seen from “TWA’s Flight Number 171” appear like the snow she played in as a child. “I remember when the snow seemed so firm beneath my feet,” she says. However, the appearance of reality is now an illusion. “If I were to lift the heavy door that guards us / and step outside this window, / I would meet the cavern / of empty space / into which I’d fall.”

A positive version of this cavern can be found in the sense of place that Gillan’s poetic powers find in her perception of New Jersey. As Gillan’s frail mother is an emblem for the ground of all connections, so reality exists as a kind of glow beneath the surface. A false reality of total assimilation must be resisted so that this glow can be noticed. Note “Morning in New Jersey” (33).

“In New Jersey Once” (27) carries this romantic impulse to a description of a New Jersey that exited as virgin land where mari­golds grew wild. The poem’s clinching poetic statement maintains that this New Jersey still exists: “the old dark earth / is still there. Dig your hands into it, / feel it, deep, alive on your fingers.” Gil­lan, we may imply, links the roots of America’s New Jersey to her Italian heritage, which still exists, and indeed has thus shaped the construction of the United States and various American identities. The earth is still on our “fingers,” suggesting that the parts of a whole (the hand) are still relevant and connected. Descriptive de­tails are inevitably related by the imagination.

“In the Still Photograph, Paterson, New Jersey, Circa 1950” (60–61) also demonstrates the complicated relationship between description and poetry. Gillan employs the Greek rhetorical strat­egy of ekphrasis, that is, the verbal description of a visual repre­sentation — in this poem’s case, a family photograph. Gillan’s ek­phrastic use of the photograph emphasizes that both memories and descriptions are bound to a spine of coherence. And yet to meticulously describe this photo goes against the grain of mem­ory’s coherence. Gillan presents the photo as the incomplete evi­dence that was lacking in her teacher’s mind-set in “Public School, No. 18 Paterson, New Jersey.” The whole description occurs in the background of “a backyard,” perhaps the photographer’s back­yard. Gillan’s family is on the outside. The house is barely visible, as a trace of a lattice of roses that metonymically stands for the porch. These roses evoke an Italian heritage as it is expressed in “Public School, No. 18 Paterson, New Jersey.” However, behind these evocative roses stands a mysterious onlooker perhaps en­gaged in a kind of cultural surveillance.

The stare of this woman is then placed in apposition with the “stare” of the sun that the makes her young father squint. Gillan describes his gabardine pants, thick hair, and other Italian charac­teristics. As she describes her other family members the poem suddenly blurts: “Even in the standard family picture, / we do not look American.” The poem than expands inside her Italian neigh­borhood. The speaker dwells on her family’s juice, espresso, and her mother’s way of doing laundry as distinguishing characteris­tics. The speaker then imagines the family walking home from the photo, as if to leave it. The potential in the photo lies in the escape from the photo’s rigid poses into action, the “still photograph” of the poem’s title put into motion. Thus the poem concludes.

Similarly, “Home Movies” (89–90) presents a moving picture of memory. The home movie shows progress in that Gillan’s family now has its own home and is seemingly more American. How­ever, Gillan notes how remote everyone seems from an effective sense of self. The upward mobility reflected in photographic mo­tion merely enforces cultural alienation. They are eerily “un­touched.”

As in “In the Still Photograph, Paterson, New Jersey, Circa 1950” and “Home Movies,” Gillan’s use of expressionist shading comes into play “In Memory We Are Walking” (58–59). “In Mem­ory We Are Walking” relates a reflection of the speaker’s family on a picnic outing when she was ten years old. The title and first line, “In memory we are walking,” frames the poem’s rumination as an ongoing and changing presence. Indeed, it is through mem­ory that significant walking occurs. But it is not walking toward a destination but rather an impasse. The reminiscence ends with a suspicion verging on certainty that the people who live in “the houses neighboring the park” “hate / our dark skin, our immi­grant clothes,” and is followed by her father’s tale. The father “traces” the railroad tracks and undermines their definition as railroad tracks. He merely uses them to point out the direction for his walk. By a kind of tracing, or zero degree mimesis, he recreates or imitates the railroad, replacing it with his walk, an activity that is of his bodily scale, in contrast with the railway’s industrial use of moving bodies. His human scale makes him an object of deri­sion by industrial workers who are threatened by his work ethic. He feels their threats like “hands on his back.” And yet the poem implies that his family also assimilates this threat. The father feels compelled to reenact this arduous walk as a family outing. Indeed, reliving this hurt becomes a pastime in the speaker’s active “memory,” which informs the poem’s creation. “In Memory We Are Walking” negotiates with that which is stuck in time and un­negotiable. The poem, like most of Gillan’s work, simultaneously respects and problematizes the repressed and its place in her Ital­ian-American heritage. Gillan rearticulates her community as she addresses it and addresses it differently as it is reformulated. The disjunctive movements of poetry are crucial to Gillan’s construc­tion of Italian-American identity.

In conclusion, Gillan’s poetry exemplifies a reflexive realism wherein elements of writing and communication, such as address­ing or writing and reading or listening, play off one another and in a sense are the real action of her poetry. The “realism” of her po­etic narratives is only one aspect within the interplay of this ac­tion. This kind of understanding of Gillan’s work makes it easier for us to see the great intelligence and subtlety with which she approaches the “writing and reading” of psychological and social identity and constructs a framework for us to analyze Gillan’s po­ems with the close attention that these powerfully and beautifully realistic texts deserve.

 

Stephen Paul Miller

St. John’s University