Bound by Distance:

Italian-Canadian Writing as Decontextualized Subaltern.[1]

 

Il vero divorzio è l’emigrazione

 

If emigration could have helped

the working class to emancipate itself,

it would never have existed.[2]

 

In The Other Shore (1986), Antonio D’Alfonso closes the book with a section entitled “Il nuovo barocco,” in which he states:

 

I shall no longer write (in English). This notebook in which I move ahead. Alone. A step forward. A stop towards the ultimate horizon, the only path. To find myself. Ourselves. A step back­wards.

 

The “moment of change”: when one becomes another. The exact moment of transformation. The action fixed, the verb metamor­phosing into a noun. The action and the verb possess a morality of their own, which rises from within; whereas the Baroque freeze frame—the artistic noun—knows nothing of morality. It exists per se and appears before our eyes naked, without pessimism or optimism, as if it were created by a mathematical force beyond our control. (155-56)

 

D’Alfonso’s “I shall no longer write (in English)” marks the instate­ment of silence and antagonism toward English Canada. However, rather than choose one of the other languages at his disposal (Italian or French), he continues to write in English. What begins as a contesta­tion of English, bi-lingual Canada’s dominant language, takes on the appearance of an act of antagonism toward Quebec and Italy as well. Indeed, the contestation retains its multidirectionality and should rather be taken as the assertion of having acquired the language of expression of Canada’s “dominant” culture in order to unveil its silent dimension and thereby subvert its power positon. Those who believe that D’Alfonso “shall no longer write” and therefore stop reading, will not hear the emerging voice and will not notice the “moment of change” in which their language (English) “becomes another[’s].”

Silence is also the currency of Dôre Michelut’s poetics. In Loyalty to the Hunt (1986), silence is expressed neither through Italian nor English, but through the use of Friulano. This is a silent language in many respects, first because it is an oral language and, most impor­tantly, because it is ranked in a subordinate position (as a dialect) to Italian. The piece entitled “Ne storie” (36) reflects the paradox of orality, where reference is made to language but language is often superfluous to voice. There can be no answer to the (written) question “Dulà sêtu stade fin cumò?” (“Where have you been?”), for originally Friulano had no written language and therefore its written form can only be a fiction. What the reader receives is a voice that, since it affords no linguistic reference, may well be overlooked. Despite this, Michelut writes in Friulano, a language the use of which brings on feelings such as “bitterness that seeps into my mouth, that shocks my teeth like icy well water” (37). Rather than a sensation that would keep one from using the language though, the “bitterness” reveals itself to be a viable contestatory element in opposition to written language and the fixation of meaning. The memory of its orality is what enables one to “see,” in other words, to hear and to understand: “And we see each other only when the Stèle floods from the mouth of the storyteller who once upon a time would go from barn to barn and say: [. . .]” (37). While the author does provide English translations to her composi­tions, I would suggest that they represent nothing more than a silencing gesture to prevent any English reader from asserting authority over the text’s inherent absence. Michelut bypasses both Italian language and an English representation of herself, and gives center stage to the emerging Friulan voice.

While the preceding examples are of a silence imposed on the English reader, in the case of Marco Micone’s plays the silencing is a result of language interference, not unusual within immigrant family groups. Micone’s Voiceless People (1984) is one example of the problems due to generational difference in cultural adaptation. The attempts at acculturation that lead to conflict among family members are also the cause of internalized frustration and the cessation of communication. But his more recent “Babele”[3] is much more effective for its polyphonic structure, the white noise and silence that hinders communication, within a family whose members have adopted different languages of expression and can no longer find a common ground. In the following excerpt Pasquale, the father, proudly boasts about his son Tony’s abil­ity to speak “English like an Englishman and French better than the French.” This he reports in his own dialect to a Quebecois visitor who does not understand the language; nevertheless, while boasting about his son’s linguistic capabilities he complains that Tony has forgotten Italian:

 

Pasquale:

 

(a Jacques, rapidamente dimostrando fierezza)

Ha visc’te come parle ’nglese. Pare ca ’nce vo fa’. Però . . .

Parle ’nglese come nu ’Nglese e u francese meglie di Francese.

I’ u sacce, p’ cchè a isse u capische, mentre i francese d’ qua

manche na parole.

 

(poi, come se gli rivelasse un segreto)

Sule u taliane, nu parle tante boune.

 

(riprende il tono normale)

Quille, doppe, u pov’re uagliò, già ’nze ni tè da parlà. Doppe a

vute a sf’rtune da capità miezz’a nuie.

(più forte in ottimo italiano)

Abbiamo dimenticato finanche l’italiano.

 

(poi continua in dialetto)

A ch’ serv’ne i solde, i case, i mach’ne e tant’atra rrobbe, simme

perze a cosa cchiù bella ch’ c’ sta. N’n sapimme cchiù bella

ch’ c’ sta. N’n sapimme cchiù parlà.

 

(con rabbia contenuta)

Di vote, v’ nnesse tutte e m’ n’ iesse . . .

 

(dirigendosi verso gli spettatori)

Che v’fa, a vuie, quande u figlie vuosc’tre v’ parle ’nglese o francese sapenne ca vuie capite sule u mulisane o u bruzzese? (30)[4]

 

While these three examples go to show the great variety of work produced within the Italian-Canadian writing community, their salient feature is in their position of contradiction and antagonism. This places them, through language, at the center of the mechanisms of cultural production. Theirs is a response to the external forces that have constructed their subjectivity as immigrants, and an attempt to unveil those same forces. Micone’s and D’Alfonso’s opening epigrams demonstrate that the antagonism is not only addressed at Canada’s con­struction of their subjectivity but also at Italy’s. This declares their autonomy from both influences and clears a ground for further cultural activity that speaks of itself and is not merely the mirror of another’s image.

However, as Luigi Lombardi-Satriani explains, in his Il silenzio, la memoria, e lo sguardo (1979), and as the above writers illustrate, the language of antagonism is not necessarily direct in its expression:

 

La verità delle classi subalterne—che è la verità del dominio, del desiderio, della tensione alla liberazione—non può affiorare allo scoperto, in sè, non può costituirsi come linguaggio esplicito della eversione, nè può affiorare nei tribunali—che sono il luogo del soffocamento da parte del diritto statuale del diritto folk­lorico e, quindi, luogo della violenza e della menzogna istituzion­alizzate—ma va ricercata nel non detto, nell’allusività, nella parola camuffata, nella metafora, nel silenzio. (31)[5]

 

In current debates on subaltern cultures, it has been acceptable to con­sider the position of subaltern groups solely within the context of their present national situation. However, this designation is not universally applicable, given the fact that many such groups have definite ties to other official cultures and traditions external to that of their immedi­ate residency. Whatever the forces of their decontextualization, be they economic, political, or other, these groups maintain a historic link with their place of provenance.

The emigration of hundreds of thousands of Italians, mostly from the southern regions of Italy, evolved out of specific socio-political and economic parameters. For this reason, I find it most proper to consider the question of Italian-Canadian writing through the works of a writer equally concerned with the region known in Italy as “the South and the Islands.”[6] In his meditations on The Southern Question and The Role of Intellectuals, among other subjects, Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian founder of the Italian Communist Party, provides approaches to ques­tions of cultural determinacy that are valid in a contemporary context. How does the work of Gramsci help us today to understand the rela­tionship of a group, such as that formed by Italian-Canadian writers, to its official culture(s)? And, how will understanding such relation­ships help us to better identify the overwhelming “official” mecha­nisms at work in the maintenance of a system of dominance and subordi­nation? This is what I wish to explore in the following pages, by means of a Gramscian lens aimed at a fragment of that Southern Italian popu­lation so central to much of his writing.

 

* * * *

 

The makeup of a writers’ group such as the Italian-Canadian is quite varied, and in fact it is not solely represented by southerners, though they are in the majority. Some were born in Italy, others were not, and mostly, the writers are the offspring of parents who did not have the possibility or the occasion to pursue a formal education. Their back­ground is proletarian or subproletarian, of either urban or rural extrac­tion. Their languages also differ from each other and, needless to say, from the standardized Italian taught in schools. And, their participa­tion in the governing of their land of origin, and the structuring of its official culture was at best marginal. These women and men come from historically inactive or hidden groups whose potential to achieve the cohesiveness of a historical bloc, and therefore make their presence known, was further truncated by the imposition of emigration as a result of economic and/or socio-political oppression.[7]

In the attempt to present a coherent and recognizable force, these writers have come to organize as the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers. This group meets with some regularity and sponsors readings, talks, and the like, all of which provides a sense of community and communication for writers who had been working alone along the mar­gins of what may be termed “official” Canadian writing, in itself a problematic designation. It is fairly common to now describe this type of relationship to an “official” literature or culture as “minor,” a term borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s long essay, Kafka.[8] With respect to our concerns the breakdown of the elements of “minor” litera­ture are as follows: “The deterritorialization of language” involves an extended series of languages: dialect, standardized tongue, Canadian English vs. American English (and the relationship of both to British English), and of course the relationship of Quebecois French to Parisian French. The “political immediacy” of minority expression calls for and requires the achievement of a critical stance regarding the immigrant condition. And the minor’s “collective assemblage of enunciation” relates, in this case, to the existence of the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers itself.

In their self recognition and organization into the Association (1986), Italian-Canadian writers are in part representative of a “historical bloc.” Anne Showstack Sassoon, in her discussion of the concept of “historical bloc” in Gramsci’s Politics, (1980)[9] regards the historical bloc as being “specific to the national context,” and suggests that, while there is an “international conjuncture, a special emphasis is placed on the national dimension as the basic unit to be analysed” (121). It could be argued, however, that while the emergence of a historical bloc may be forever stalled within a particular national situation, within another it may indeed flourish. In aid of this, the self-representation of countries like Canada as “multicultural mosaics” provides for immi­grant populations, at least on the surface, the possibility of historical bloc formation.[10] The “international conjuncture” quoted by Sassoon is of course the end to which Marxism aspires, but it is an insufficient van­tage point for isolated, unrepresented groups whose international internal references may be overlooked. For example, the study of Italian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, or Haitian-Canadian writing purely as a Canadian phenomenon, identified only with the plight of either the Canadian working or immigrant class, would be both incom­plete and misleading, as would be a reading that merely reduced their relationships to a static dominant/subordinate dichotomy on the cul­tural level. To open up and give life to this relationship, terms such as “hegemony” must be reviewed in a renewed light.

 

* * * *

 

Again, the applicability of Gramsci in relation to the topic at hand and that his concepts, though communicated and applicable univer­sally, were primarily based in a very particular Italian context. And, of specific importance is their linguistic source/reality, the relation­ship of Italy’s South and Islands to the rest of the country.

Though at times, in his Prison Notebooks (1987), Antonio Gramsci makes use of the term hegemony to express the domination of one class or group over others, the complex of his discussion is much less defini­tive and simplifiable. As the Notebooks reveal, hegemony cannot in itself signify domination. In order for the concept of hegemony to take on a sense of domination it must be backed by a coercive political appa­ratus, at which time it ceases to be hegemony and becomes state. In fact, a plurality of hegemonies may coexist within what Gramsci termed an “expansive hegemony.” This designation is discussed by Chantall Mouffe in her “Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy,”[11] whose reconsideration of the influence of hegemonic theory is also part of her co-operative work with Ernesto Laclau.[12] The association of the term with what Mouffe defines as the achievement of “plural democracy,” reasserts Gramsci’s use of “expansive hegemony” to express an ever active interplay of cultural entities in the creation of culture, not necessarily culminating in the emergence of a dominant group.[13]

Cultural interplay is directly related to language and the under­taking of an historical critique through linguistic means. Such an exer­cise leads to the consciousness of the “moment of change” quoted by D’Alfonso in his discussion of the “New Baroque.” This designation that he would apply to expressions such as Italian-Canadian writing is actually taken from Marshall McLuhan’s discussion of the Baroque: “Baroque art and poetry sought to unify disparate facets and experi­ences by directing attention to the moment of change.”[14] The quotation’s source is of added significance, given McLuhan’s concept of “global vil­lage” and the cultural inter-relatedness it describes. The “moment of change,” placed in the context of minor literature,[15] is the moment of challenge. It is the point where cultures touch and mingle, and there­fore define their positions; the moment that both unifies and distances the populations of a land. Italian-Canadian writers must assess their value within the moments of “departure” and “arrival” which alter all involved, and as such represent a criticism both of the place left and of the place reached; yet these moments must find articulation in order to be of value. Such articulations are to be found in the work of D’Alfonso, Michelut, and Micone, through their use of language, and in particular in their use of metaphor, and the presence of silence and deferment of meaning. They, and other Italian-Canadian writers, use the inheritance of silence against itself in their cultural self-assertion, establishing its function not only through metaphor but as a metaphor in itself.

M. J. Michael Fisher, in “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,”[16] comments that “the search for a sense of ethnic identity is a (re-)invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical and future-ori­ented. Whereas the search for coherence is grounded in a connection to the past, the meaning abstracted from that past, an important criterion of coherence, is an ethic workable for the future” (196). Fisher further says that “ethnicity is a process of inter-references between two or more cultural traditions” (201). This assignation of ambivalence to the “moment” finds congruency with Gramsci, in his underlining the impor­tance of relationships within all of his concepts. Fisher’s conclusions, while not over-valuing either past or future, further make it clear that the processes of cultural expression and “ethnic” self-representation cannot be viewed as singular, unidirectional, and definitive.

Italian-Canadian writers are now expressing a period of conscienti­zation that achieves something that may have remained unattainable in the Italian national context.[17] As such, they represent a flourishing of “organic intellectuals” who are very specific in the expression of their immigrant position. Immigration also supposes emigration, and the problems associated with the former can in no way be disassociated from the latter. In order not to digress on a discussion of the “organic intellectual”, here it will suffice to provide a link to the “historical bloc” designation mentioned above. Briefly, Gramsci’s “organic intel­lectual” is to be distinguished from the “traditional intellectual” in that s/he is the product of a particular group and upholds that group’s cultural and political interests. The line between the two types of intel­lectuals is a fine one, given that the acquired language of communi­cation, in this case English, is also the “official” language. What dif­fers from one group to another is the application and the mode of dis­semination of that language. Of primary importance is the “organic intellectual’s” responsibility to his/her constituency rather than to any other external institution.[18]

 

* * * *

 

With the acquisition of a language of expression, with the opening provided by language as an antagonistic tool, Italian-Canadian writers have been able to turn the English language against those who call it their mother tongue. By stressing latinate vocabulary, by the insertion of Italian syntactical forms, and by the inclusion of linguistic elements that represent the utterances of immigrant culture, these writers have altered the semantic field of English, thereby denying expected meaning. The expression of Italian-Canadian “silence” becomes Anglo Canada’s interpretative silence;[19] at which point begins the formation of a genealogy that provides its own subject position in opposition to a given history.

The re-instatement of a subject in history necessitates a recognition of the subject’s historical situation, which must take place at the level of aggregate subject.[20] As such, it would also be reflective of the forces that act upon it; becoming conscious of the conditions that outline the subject, one also discovers its oppositional potential. I would like it to be clear that this is not a call for community. The heterogeneity of the Italian-Canadian group would negate any such attempt. Rather, it is a proposal for the exploration of a historical commonality that does not erase the group’s cultural diversity but in fact reinforces it.

In her essay “Contemporary Italo-Canadian Literature,”[21] Susan Iannucci states that “Italo-Canadian writing is circumbscribed by time. It is the product of a moment in a writer’s life, and that moment van­ishes. [. . .] Italy filters through in past tense; their present is Canadian” (225-26). Such a questionable conclusion is strongly based on the belief that “ethnicity” or cultural identity is something discernible in themes and subject matter, and that once explicit treatment of certain themes becomes invisible they have been surpassed or overcome. This attitude supports the formation of institutionalized multiculturalism agencies which require a specific set of themes from a writer in order to be qualified as “ethnic.” A failure to conform to prescribed ethnic for­mulas leaves some writers marginalized to an even greater degree due to their double exclusion from both the “official” and “ethnic” cate­gories.

What makes it possible to describe Italian-Canadian writing, and by extension any hyphenated writing, as “the product of a moment,” is buried deep in the blindness of the historical causes and effects of emi­gration. It is fair to say that while emigrants physically leave behind family, friends, and home they also leave behind a cultural past. What is more important is that such a cultural past may often have been deemed secondary to the official culture of their land, or have even remained unexpressed due to oppressive pressure of national com­promise. As such, immigrants, upon arrival in their new home, are faced with another choice which more often than not dictates that they must once again suppress their own culture in order to embrace that of their host country.

And so, while the writing of Italian-Canadians may be “the product of a moment in a writer’s life,” I would oppose Iannucci’s “moment” with McLuhan’s. Iannucci’s view fails the very group it is analysing by regarding that moment merely as a stage resulting from the meeting of Canadian culture and perceiving it, not as another culture but, as a lack within one’s self. The supposed resolution of the crisis is achieved through a realization that leads to a finding of one’s “Canadian” iden­tity, as ambiguous as that may be. This approach, even while making weak overtures to heterogeneity, blatantly valorizes one culture over another, and disregards the influences at work in a phenomenon such as e/im-migration. Further, it facilitates and propagates the image of an ethnic literature as nothing more than nostalgic portrayals of the pos­sibility or impossibility of a return to an illusionary rootedness. Often this work can be deeply reactionary, and may in fact further alienate the subject from not only its new situation but also the distant and changing one it has left behind. Alternative reactions to displace­ment may come to light either as rejuvenated hegemonic representa­tions, by which the writing subject engages the new culture in a critical dialogue that includes an awareness of his or her own historical situa­tion, or as an attempt at full integration into, and denial of difference from, the official culture of arrival. Whatever the expression, it results from a contradictory construction of the subject, and an attempt to answer that contradiction. I believe that the most interesting expres­sion of the Italian-Canadian as expatriates comes from the instigation of cultural dialogue, and from the antagonism that it represents for the official culture. Writers such as D’Alfonso, Micone, and Michelut seek to shake culture at its roots, language, an act which (in the spirit of the Vichian verum factum) opens the possibility of knowledge to those who undertake the challenge of making a language new to suit their expres­sion.

 

* * * *

 

Canada, with its complexity of a double (English/French), if unbal­anced, center toward which other cultural expressions must articulate themselves, actually hides a stalled hegemonic interplay under its varied surface. One would think that in Quebec, if only because of the Quebecois’ own struggle for cultural survival within an ineffectual dom­inant/subordinate system, “expansive hegemony” would be allowed to thrive. However, there too, is a constant reassertive strategy that man­ifests itself in relation to minority groups, a strategy of containment by which linguistic and educational laws designate a minority’s mode of expression. This failure to extend to others the rights of cultural pres­ence is a serious problem that maintains the system in a static tension that may eventually meet with forceful assertions of cultural identity (and the recent incidents concerning not only the Mohawk but other native groups is a result of this sort of blindness).

The seventies were an instance of this type of tension that the Quebecois themselves experienced and acted upon; future tensions may be a direct result of a set of circumstances which perpetuate a system similar to what the Quebecois fear in their relationship to so-called English Canada. The Quebecois struggle for recognition prepared the right set of circumstances for other groups to take up similar struggles. Yet, Quebec’s need to ensure its survival has resulted in a state coercive apparatus not dissimilar to English Canada’s; systems that only barely hold on to their “hegemonic principle” of culture and will in time have to resort to other (violent?) means to maintain their dominance if unre­solved.

 

* * * *

 

Here, and this could refer to Canada, the US, Germany, or to whichever place Italians may have migrated, our culture is known only in its singular, concentrated space: for example, the Italian community, or Italian culture as perceived by non-Italians. However, in Italy, maybe not surprisingly, cultural diversity is still a point of incredible conflict.[22] But, whether internal, to the industries of Milano or Torino, or external, to Germany or Canada, the disorientation these hegemonic fragments of immigrants experienced has come to stand as a mode of cul­tural opposition wherever they have settled. As with all emigrè or refugee groups, the nature of the distancing from the group to which they belong represents a deprivation of a sense of continuity in history. Their experience is largely undocumented or disregarded in their places of origin; and in their new land they are further discontinuous, since no history precedes them.

Italian-Canadians are suspended between the English/French Canadian reality and their own cultural background, the result of which one could imagine as a center/margin relationship in which every day, every single act and thought enacts a continual switching of positions from the center to the margins, and back again. There is a play of multiple personalities and unstable subject positions where the languages of thought and expression do not necessarily match, where intellectual and social life conflict, and where the political opposition to a dominant culture may manifest itself as an internal, rather than external, experience.

Italian-Canadian writing represents a site of reterritorialization tending toward the formation of a historical bloc, even if the writers share only a partial history and their linguistic histories are dissimi­lar in their initial deterritorialization. Within this context, Italy is an abstraction that cannot be given dominion, just as the English lan­guage cannot. Multiculturalism proposes a structure, a mystificatory role by which people become the creation of the cultural rather than viceversa. Multiculturalism, or institutionalized ethnicism, dictates the parameters for de/re-territorialization, and neutralizes the poten­tially antagonistic “political immediacy and (the) collective assem­blage of enunciation” of any cultural agent.

 

* * * *

 

More and more, the languages of colonialism are themselves being colonized by the very elements they once sought to subdue. The exam­ples are many, of the writers who have taken the colonialists’ lan­guage as a means of expressing their own culture: Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah of Somalia, and Shiva Naipaul are but a few. Nations that find themselves overwhelmed by the influx of diverse populations are hard pressed to define a national characteristic that in turn would represent their relationship with the rest of the world. To aspire to less would be equal to undoing all national borders, and admit to a heterogenous make-up that would diminish a nation’s interna­tional stance. Nation-hood is a matter of pride and power, the mainte­nance of which sooner or later depends on the use of force.

It has, however, become common that, having reached a certain point in their development, nations have had to give recognition (but always limited) to the voices that inhabit them. To quote Giovanni Arrighi: “Whenever the political claim (and/or definition by others) is less than that of state sovereignty, we tend to call this group an ’ethnic group,’ whatever the basis of the claim, be it common language, common religion, common skin color, or fictive common ancestry.”[23] “Ethnic,” it should be clear by now, is a subset of the minor condition named above, or a condition necessary to it, thereby also representing a potential threat to the dominant. In order to neutralize its expression, in other words to return it to the status described by Arrighi, it has been necessary for official culture to institutionalize the term, and “circumscribe it by time,” as another cultural “-ism,” ethnicism.

Canada has opted for the “Multicultural Mosaic,” a euphemism for institutionalized multiculturalism, which is in fact a “strategy of con­tainment” adopted out of necessity by the dominant culture in order to maintain its power identity. As it becomes obvious by what is published and what is not, whether and where it is anthologized, and whether any attention is paid to it in general, or whether it is funded by one agency or another, the “strategy of containment” involves a choice by which only a selected (non-representative) sample is allowed to speak for/from a particular ethnic group. The end result, of course, is one of ethnicism or culturalism, in other words an external imposition of iden­tity that denies past and present history in favour of abstractions such as nationhood and nationality. Such abstractions, among which we must include “ethnicism,” “multiculturalism” and, the “Italian” nationality we are involved with here, are ideological not only because they repre­sent strategies of containment in the definition of meaning, but because they suppress alternative meaning that is a basic requirement in the interplay or challenges of hegemony.

The work read, presented, critiqued, and discovered at AICW meetings is often relegated, by the official culture, to a sphere that, while inextricably connected to others such as the social, the political, the historical, is approached as if it were divorced from everything. When lip service is given to an “ethnic” culture it is done as if that cul­ture had developed tabula rasa and in isolation. Immigrant, ethnic, minor, marginal cultures are products of definite socio-historical condi­tions that, whether originating from abroad or within a single national setting, represent a suppressed element in the hegemonic dialectic.

What are the conclusions of this piece? There should be only ques­tions, one of which is: in what sort of hegemony does the AICW partic­ipate? Our culture, while a product of the cultures of those who form the immigrant groups, cannot claim to represent them. To present the AICW as the cultural representative of the “Italian community” in Canada would be nothing more than a variation upon the rule of state, and reveal the necessity to declare and identify one’s self with this society’s dominant dimension. And what recommendations can I make? Only one: that while we are indeed partaking in the construction of a new culture we cannot pretend to know what that culture may be. Any agent describing hegemonic circulation must remain distant from deter­minative temptation, lest s/he participate in the suffocation and atro­phy of its expression. Situated thought such as Gramsci’s was to a large extent denied the possibility of expression that is now being exercised by groups such as Italian-Canadians. And, if for Gramsci possibil­ity=freedom, then the literary production of Italian-Canadians has introduced a range of possibilities into English which is potentially freeing for all users of the language. This, and similar work by other cultural groups within the Canadian context, goes to facilitate the dialectic between determinism and freedom by which a truly multicul­tural society may emerge.

 

Pasquale Verdicchio

University of California, San Diego

 

 

 

 

 


[1]Subaltern is used here mostly in a Gramscian sense, in which the subaltern classes are prehegemonic and not unified (Prison Notebooks 52). Groups such as the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers are just such a non-unified group, whose activities are “intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States” (52). In addition their historical activity “can only be demonstrated when an historical cycle is completed [. . .]” (55). That their historical activity can only be recognized in hindsight, and their contestational activity may therefore not be readily explicit in nature, is of special import and is discussed herein.

Within this text, subaltern is used in conjunction with terms such as minor and ethnic. None of these terms are derogatory in character, but they may become negative in use, assigning a sense of secondary importance to groups defined, when appropriated by institutions such as “Multiculturalism Canada.” Minor, a term usually used in defining a writer or a group as “less important” than what is officially recognized, is used herein in its Deleuzian sense as defined in note 8. Ethnic, while making reference to the difference of one cultural group to another within a society, is also a potential term of exclusion and segregation. In the US, ethnic seems to have come to mean “non caucasian,” as current discussions regarding curriculum and the nature of “Ethnic Studies Departments” would indicate. I hope that the diverging characteristics of these terms have been made clear in my use of them in this piece.

[2]“Il vero divorzio è l’emigrazione” is a quotation from graffiti in Antonio D’Alfonso’s family’s home town of Guglionesi, now in his The Other Shore (Montreal: Guernica, 1986) 65. The other epigram opens Marco Micone’s play Gens du silence (Guernica, 1982) / Voiceless People translated by Maurizia Binda (Guernica, 1984). Dôre Michelut’s Loyalty to the Hunt is also a Guernica publication.

[3]Published in the “transcultural” journal VICEVERSA, No. 26. VICEVERSA is a multilingual publication out of Montreal, whose initial founders included Antonio D’Alfonso, Fulvio Caccia, and Lamberto Tassinari.

[4]Pasquale:

 

(to Jacques, quickly showing his pride)

See how he speaks English. He doesn’t let on. But . . . / He speaks English like the English and French better than the French. / I know, because I understand him, but not a word of the French in this place.

 

(then, as if revealing a secret)

Only Italian, he doesn’t speak it very well.

 

(in the normal tone again)

He, then, the poor boy, already has nothing to say. Then he had / the misfortune to end up with us.

 

(louder in excellent Italian)

We have even forgotten Italian.

 

(the continues in dialect)

What’s money, houses, cars and everything else, if we’ve / lost the most beautiful thing there is. There is nothing more beautiful. We don’t know how to talk anymore.

 

(with contained anger)

At times, I’d sell everything and leave . . .

 

(turning toward the audience)

How do you feel, when your children speak to you in English or French / knowing fully well that you only understand Molisian or Abrutian.

 

Molisian and Abrutian are dialect variations of the Abruzzi-Molise region.

[5]Luigi Lombardi-Satriani, Il silenzio, la memoria, e lo sguardo (Palermo: Sellerio, 1979). Lombardi-Satriani is a cultural anthropologist whose work in folk culture is one of the best representative of the application of Gramscian concepts in contemporary Italy. Of importance is his volume Antropologia culturale e analisi della cultura subalterna (Milano: Rizzoli, 1980).

“The truth of subaltern classes—which is the truth of dominion, of desire, of the tension toward liberation—cannot emerge unprotected, as itself. It cannot constitute itself as explicit language of subversion, nor can it reveal itself in the Courts—which are the place of suffocation, on the part of State, of folkloric rights, and, therefore, the place of institutionalized lies and violence. The truth of subaltern classes must be searched out in the un-said, in allusions, in the camouflaged word, in metaphor, in silence” (31).

[6]Antonio Gramsci, La questione meridionale (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1966) and Gli intellettuali (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1977) are collections of material collated from Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks).

The geographic designation of “the South and the Islands” defines the empoverished areas of Italy. This large region encompasses approximately half of the Italian landmass. The effects of the “economic boom” of the postwar era have largely left it behind, industrialization has almost consistently failed, and the stereotypic imaging of southerners as a primitive and uncultured sector of Italy still subsists in the racist expression that states that “Africa begins at Naples.”

[7]Historical inactivity does not mean cultural inactivity; however, cultural activity itself may in fact produce historically active factors that may go unnoticed or unrecognized until a later period.

[8]Gillez Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). Further, “the second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. Minor literature’s [. . .] cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it” (17). “The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value” (17).

[9] Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980) 119-25.

[10]Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith, ninth printing (New York: International Publishers, 1987) 360. In Gramscian terms possibility=freedom. As such, even a superficially open environment like the Canadian “multicultural mosaic” provides enough of a possibility for groups to take up a struggle for self representation.

[11]Chantall Mouffe, “Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, C. Nelson and L. Grossberg eds., (U of Illinois P, 1988).

[12]Ernesto Laclau and Chantall Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).

[13]Within the Gramscian differentiation of the concept of hegemony, “hegemonic principle” is that by which the official culture takes into account the demands of a certain group only to neutralize it and prevent its extention. Whereas, “expansive hegemony” is the process by which equivalences between groups are found that support the demands of equality of a number of groups.

[14]Marchall McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968) 17-18.

[15] Gillez Deleuze and Felix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). Further, “the second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. Minor literature’s [. . .] cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it” (17). “The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value” (17).

[16]Michael M. J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George E. Marcus eds. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) 194-233.

[17]Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, Harvard Educational Review, Monograph Series No. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard Educational Review, 1988).

Conscientization is a term used by the Brazilian intellectual Paulo Freire to refer to a population’s “critical self-insertion into reality,” or as expressed by the editor of the English translation: “the process in which men, not as recipients, but as knowing subjects, achieve a deepening awareness both of the socio-cultural reality which shapes their lives and of their capacity to transform that reality.”

[18]Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” refers to the intellectual that emerges out of a group and maintains his/her cultural ties with that group. The difference between the organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual resides in the fact that the organic intellectual acts as an agent for its constituency of origin, while the traditional intellectual abandons that constituency in order to join and represent the interests of the official culture.

[19]The reference here is to English as the target language. This relationship is also evident in many Italian-Canadian writers from Quebec who write in (or also in) French. Of particular importance here are Fulvio Caccia’s Irpinia (Montreal: Triptyque/Guernica, 1983) and Scirocco (Montreal: Triptyque, 1985), and Antonio D’Alfonso recent roman Avril ou l’anti-passion (Montreal: vlb éditeur, 1990). I also wish to point out that The Other Shore was also published in French as L’autre rivage.

[20]I use aggregate because it maintains a sense of individuality within the grouping, rather than propose an individual vs. group paradigm.

[21]Susan Iannucci, “Contemporary Italo-Canadian Literature,” in Arrangiarsi: The Italian Immigration Experience in Canada. Roberto Perin and Franc Sturino eds. (Montreal: Guernica, 1989) 209-27.

[22]A notable recent example of the vast divisions that still hinder a full expression of Italian cultural diversity is Giorgio Bocca’s La disunità d’Italia: per venti milioni di italiani la democrazia è in coma e l’Europa s’allontana (Milano: Garzanti, 1990). See my “L’Italia in Bocca” in Viceversa 36, March 1992.

[23]Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkings, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (New York: Verso, 1989) 25.