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REVIEWS For Charles P. Greco,Goffredo Pallucchini, Lewis Turco and Patricia Catto, Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, Pasquale Verdicchio, Irene Musillo Mitchell, Maddalena Tirabassi, Marco Fraticelli, andCalogero Messina Charles
P. Greco. With God’s
Help, Memoirs of Bishop Charles P. Greco. New Haven, CT: Knights of
Columbus, 1989. 246 pages, illus. Often overlooked by
book reviewers, librarians, book store operators, and, therefore, by most
book readers who would enjoy them if they were aware of their existence, are
those worthy volumes published by smaller university presses, small
independent publishers or, as in this case, by a Catholic fraternal order,
the Knights of Columbus. The public at large is, of course, the looser.
Though these memoirs here being reviewed cannot really be considered
scholarly in the sense that the word is generally accepted, they,
nevertheless, tell the story of an Italian religious leader, who of all
unexpected places, was born on a cotton plantation in the small town of
Rodney, Mississippi, a short distance from Vicksburg. Rather unique to say
the least. Son of immigrant parents from Cefalu in northern Sicily, Bishop
Greco, who died in his early nineties in 1987, began keeping a journal in his
younger days and maintained the practice during much of his adult life. It is
essentially this journal which has now been published. I tend to lean
towards that school of scholarship which claims that biography has to be
presented and preserved in order to understand history better. Therefore,
this volume helps to add to that knowledge which shows us more of the
distinguished contributions which Italian/ Americans have made over the
decades. Though by no stretch of the imagination can the volume be considered
a study in ethnicity, it can be considered, as stated, a study of one of our
ethnic background who made a contribution as a priest, bishop and religious
leader. Here and there, almost serendipitously one could say, a glimpse that
only an Italian/ American could enjoy fully is found in the volume. Bishop Greco had a
varied career during his long life being sent to Europe to continue advance
studies in Louvain and Fribourg just at the time that World War I was
breaking out; becoming assistant pastor of a small rural parish in the Deep
South where he ministered to a mostly French-speaking people; actively
working with the Knights of Columbus from their earliest years to assuming
the post of the first bishop to become national chaplain; and working on special
parish projects work and more. Perhaps the culmination of his career came in
1946 when he was appointed bishop of Alexandria, Louisiana, the first native
born Mississippian to become a Catholic Bishop, indeed one of the very first
Italian/Americans from the South to achieve national attention. Again, as
stated, there are no footnotes, no deep reflections, and the style of writing
is often more in the nature of an amiable front porch conversation between
himself and the reader, and topics will range from his love of hunting to his
responsibility as chairman of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine which
had the task of educating the young; and his editorship of one of the few
Catholic diocesan newspapers in the South, the weekly “Catholic Action of the
South.” Along the way one gets good insight into some of the mores, life
styles and everyday happenings in the Louisiana (the area where he spent most
of his life) of the early- and mid-20th century. Perhaps the publishers might
have helped out in trying to provide some marginal notes in certain sections
to give the reader a little more background on what the Bishop was
discussing, but basically it was their intention to preserve and help
disseminate the journal, and after all, such an accomplishment is worthy
enough. A good reminder of the work which relatively early Italian/American
priests accomplished throughout this country. Nicholas
J. Falco Bronx, New York Goffredo
Pallucchini. Is
This A Political Discourse? Haydenville, MA: Aldebaran Press, 1978. Eyebrows almost
always rise at the news that an academic has published a volume of poetry.
Those trained in the way of interpreting literature are not expected to
create it. This dilemma is the theme of much of the poetry in Goffredo
Pallucchini’s collection. Of course, if we read
Foucault and Jameson, these poems can’t help but create political discourse.
But when we read Pallucchini, we find that there is more to politics than
ideologies and argument. In these poems we find a voice struggling to express
feelings that the formally trained mind has learned to suppress. This voice
is especially strong in “About a Woman” and “About the Power of Dialectical
Discourse,” both of which feature a woman as the object of critical scrutiny
by those whose reasoning overpowers any chance of empathy. “Fuga” questions
the goals of a “triumph of harmony” and “the order of reason” that result
from the academic use of language. The dream in response to this reality is
of silence of the desire to just “be quiet.” While few of these
poems are easily explicated, the effort is well worth the investment. “After
the Revolution” seems to take off from Whitman’s invitation to hit the “Open
Road.” The irony of this poem is that the inspired leaves the staid domestic
world only to become the victim of the wild, outside world. Many of these poems
question the place of imagination in the act of political interpretation.
This question is most clearly articulated in “Ballad: On the Political
Discourse,” one of the collection’s longer poems. Along with “The Radio,”
“Ballad” depicts a society that is numbed and controlled so that human
contact is replaced by interaction with mechanical devices. In both poems the
inability to imagine--to create images and to interpret those self-created
images--leaves us in an impregnable solitude. Setting off others
from the self is yet another story told by Pallucchini. In “Portrait of an
Interior” and “Exclusion” we realize that the worlds that others create often
don’t contain us. In “Dream” and “A Last Image” Pallucchini juxtaposes the
internal world of self, where knowledge is categorized and ordered into
meaning, with the external world which is composed of chaos and ignorance.
The writing of the poem, in effect, bridges the inside and the outside,
allowing both to exist simultaneously. And this, in the end, is the tale that
Pallucchini tells so well. We can study all the theories, join in all the
discourses, but in the end, we are left with our selves and the dilemma
between our human need to have it all make sense and our animal instincts to
sense it all without having to order it into meaning. While Pallucchini yet
to join the ranks of those poets who live off their poetry, his collection
forces us to challenge the way we live, the way we read, and the way we too
often artificially separate creation and interpretation. Fred
L. Gardaphe Columbia College, Chicago Lewis Turco. A Family Album.
Eugene, OR: Silverfish Review, 1990. Patricia Catto. Wife of Geronimo’s Virile Old Age:
Seventeen Poems from Cochise County. Oswego, NY: Mathom Press
Enterprises, 1991. Winner of the 1989
Silverfish Review Chapbook Competition, Lewis Turco’s A Family Album features a tight cast of twelve kindred members,
each of whom we come to know through the form of the dramatic monologue.
Living or dead, each speaks a distinct and arresting idiolect: each discloses
the pith of her life in frank and concise strokes. “They were familiars, /
once . . .,” we discover of these persons in the first poem,
“Albums”: “A jowl / sags here, beneath this rafter. An eye is
gray. . . .” And they are hardly less than family by the time
we leave the book. But first, as the poem
above promises, “the pictures come to life and walk the halls.” We hear
initially from Julia Pullen (every poem takes as its title the name of the
appropriate relative), the aunt who collects vials of sand. No sooner do we
learn of this avocation than we are coaxed inside one of her distant
memories: I remember standing beside the sea
on a day lambent with haze, the surf
moving in from Madagascar. I stooped to sample the
world. Later, in this house, in a room
faint with lavender and shadow, I labeled
the vial and laid it in the batting, interred
in my bureau drawer with the others. The tone here succeeds
in being modest, somewhat wistful. Contrast this with the non-romanticizing,
hard-as-a-banker’s-heart brand of remembering done in “Ruth Carr”: From the spring founting in the valley
there followed a hurliburl of foliage in thunder and in
sunlight. Summer spent itself at
last. It broke into bankruptcy with a
fine splurge—too late. We
fairweather folk fared well away. We’d know nothing of that bleak
grace . . . . Or, for a more striking
contrast still, compare Julia Pullen’s with the brash and blessedly
irreverent voice of Herbert Torrey: [T]he lawn tapped out
its cricket sounds. One girlchild rapped her doldrums out
upon the tabletop. Muzzy Aunt
Nat turned over turning
forty-one, gave the women the
once-over, thumbed down the
thought. Turco is nothing if not
a master of the means of looking back, of the varieties of tone and type of
voice. In A Family Album, we get the
best of all of the above; indeed, we get what is wished of the summer
described in the penultimate poem, “Jean Court”: Summer, if it should
come, would be an age of brass
and trumpets, swallows, and the flight
of swallows. Not a poem in this
collection disappoints. In the poems in her
chapbook, Wife of Geronimo’s Virile Old
Age: Seventeen Poems from Cochise County, Patricia Catto also explores
family, primarily by way of her maternal line. More often, though, she
reckons with issues having to do with region (Cochise County, Arizona) and,
more largely, with Southwestern American lore. To be sure, the chapbook is
written “For the Creatures, Gods, and People of Bisbee,
Arizona . . . .” The forms of these poems are as diverse
as the region’s flora and fauna: we find, in addition to the dramatic
monologue, a “Sort of Sestina,” haiku, and imagistic and narrative poems. Best among these varied
works are, I think, the imagistic poems and those dealing with matters
familial. Foremost among the latter is a poem appearing early in the book,
“The Hummingbird.” It relates the experiences of the speaker’s mother caring
for and trying to come to terms with her dying sister: One July morning my
mother gave up, Eighteen times the
previous day bits of aunt’s
intestines had left her to die had streaked the sheets with shit and blood til mother’s dreams were bleared with the
stain that for once her washer
could not make Eden . . . . In the next stanza the mother,
aghast and exasperated at her own seeming helplessness, throws up the sheets
and vows to give up her caretaking role. “[F]ully intending to stay gone
forever,” she notices how the “noon filtered in” the garage to which she had
fled. An “intimate ticking” makes her shift her gaze to face the glass, where
she finds flickering against it—a
translucent heartbeat a sapphire bee with a
ruby at its throat blurring and thrumming the silken light This sudden turn toward
the hummingbird—here, a lovely, cogent emblem of kin and persistence—is
masterfully wrought. So, too, is the
imagistic piece “Ocotillo,” taken as a whole. I quote it in full: Back east they know
nothing of the octopus standing
on its head in the sand waving its glad legs
madly in the air four dance-hall girls in
mid-cartwheel their green thorny
stockings on slender limbs kicking and kicking
their red flower shoes. Any poem that succeeds
in turning a cactuslike tree into something sexy is a prize. The chapbook abounds in
such whimsical leaps. In “Monsoon Morning, Bisbee Arizona”—where the book’s
title comes into play—we see a frolicsome and visionary mind: The monsoons arrive.
Thunder and lightning! I wake from a dream of
Geronimo, from being the wife of his virile old age. Now suddenly everything
goes streaming down the canyon, the waters herding stones and twigs to
town . . . Growing concerned, the
banker steps out gawking. This could be a morning when money floats away. When banking in a gulch seems unwise. One would do well to bet
on Catto. It is my hope we haven’t heard the last from her. Diane Raptosh Albertson College of Idaho Jerre
Mangione and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of Italian American
Experience. Harper Collins Publishers, 1992. This past year, 1992,
was an important and difficult year for Italian Americans. The Columbian
quincentennial was celebrated across the country in its usual way—at the
annual October parades, especially in the larger cities. A year-long
multifaceted cultural project featuring dramatic readings and scholarly
presentations were on ongoing part of the cultural package sponsored by
Columbus: Countdown 1992, based in New York City and spearheaded by its president,
Anne Paolucci. In the universities at large, however, Columbus’s adventures
have taken a more critical route; excoriated for exploiting and destroying
the land and its inhabitants, Columbus and his “discovery” are being
critiqued by the new historicism of academia. Despite their recalcitrance and
albeit understandable defensiveness, Italian Americans have had to reconsider
their roles in celebrating an event and a man who has increasingly come to
represent genocidal destruction in America. Responding to the losses that the
Native Americans suffered, Italian Americans in Chicago, for example, have
established an ongoing dialogue between the Joint Civic Committee of Italian
Americans and two Native American organizations in Chicago. It is in this light
that Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale produce their wide-ranging, scholarly,
and insightful history of five-hundred years of Italian American experience
in La Storia. Both writers themselves,
Mangione and Morreale trace the history of Italians in America, beginning
with the Colonial period and the adventurers of the late fifteenth century.
The authors place Columbus’s voyage in the context of early Italian
adventurers, who took part in the European expansion across the Atlantic.
Introducing their historical narrative with the anonymous canto, “The Song of
the Emigrants,” Mangione and Morreale offer an interpretive gloss on the
experience of large-scale emigration, one that surpasses the Columbian voyage
and gives voice to the nameless victims and survivors of the transatlantic
crossing and offers the reason for their coming: “Better to choke in the
ocean than to be strangled in misery.” Organizing their
chapters chronologically, the authors move from the description of Italian
emigrants before and after the American revolution to an analysis of living
conditions in the Mezzogiorno
before and after Italian unification. In Chapter 4, “Saints and Legends to
Live By,” the authors clarify that the dream of America was part of the
Italian mental climate in Southern Italy and Sicily well before the unification
of Italy and the end of Bourbon rule. Inspired by the travels of Columbus and
later on by the occasional repatriated immigrant, Italians’ conception of
America took on mythic proportions well before the “politics of miseria”
catapulted them out of their impoverished villages. Thus the peasantry,
reduced to escaping their misery by either joining the priesthood or the
brigands, found themselves instead succumbing to the fever of emigration and
leaving their homeland altogether. Although the authors’ sense of history is
too often defined solely in male terms, they make a very important point
regarding the Southern Italians’ decision to emigrate. The assumption
primarily fostered by Northern Italian officials that Southern Italians are
“irrevocably rooted to their native soil,” are an “apathetic lot, hopelessly
fatalistic,” is severely undercut by the massive evacuation of entire
villages. Despite the tendency of writers such as Carlo Levi to depict a
changeless and timeless world south of Eboli, in fact, the authors tell us, a
dying economy in the Mezzogiorno
soon impelled a mass exodus. Italians did and could change, if their
conditions proved insufferable enough. Mangione and Morreale
painstakingly detail the Italians’ departure and arrival in the new land,
their establishment of “tight little islands,” which, in fact, did achieve a
social structure, though investigators rarely knew how to read the culture
of little Italies that sprung up across eastern and midwestern cities in the
United States. Incorporating the autobiographies of well-known Italians such
as Fiorello La Guardia and Angelo Pellegrini, the authors skillfully
interweave commentary from Italian Americans who first hand recorded the
struggles and triumphs of their parents’ generation. Pellegrini’s mother, for
example, imbued with the spirit of individualism and a “frontiersman
mentality,” fought successfully to receive a state pension after her husband
was killed in an industrial accident in the state of Washington. Mangione and
Morreale make clear by this example that Italian Americans could overcome the
fatalistic notion that the individual was powerless to change her
circumstances, but much of that new-found ability was reinforced by the character
of life in the West, where Italians were not confined to the nation’s Little
Italies and where they were more directly influenced by other cultural
groups. Chapter 13, “New
Orleans—Wops, Crime, and Lynchings,” the authors describe the wave of anti-Italian
bigotry in the 1880s that eventually led to the lynching of eleven Italian
Americans in 1891. Recognizing that the lynchings “were a manifestation of
growing anti-immigrant feelings generally,” the authors nonetheless suggest
that during this period the repeated emphasis on the word “mafia” by the
press indelibly stigmatized Italian Americans and irrevocably linked them
with crime. Despite the widespread belief that organized crime was imported
from Sicily or Naples, the authors demonstrate in their chapter on “Identity
Character and Assimilation” that such crime was learned on the streets of
America, “where children did indeed catch the spirit of the new country.” The authors might
very well have strengthened their analysis of Italian/American identity in
general had they gone beyond Andrew Rolle’s limited concept of the Italian
family and its infantilizing mothers. For background on Italian women, Lucia
Chiavola Birnbaum’s liberazione della
donna would have provided solid scholarship on Italian feminism. The oral
histories of Italian/American women collected in Voices of the Daughters, edited by Connie A. Maglione and Carmen
Anthony Fiore, and Micaela di Leonardo’s anthropological study, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience,
would have liberated the authors from depending too readily on a Freudian
interpretation of the mothers’ unconscious desire to present themselves as
martyrs to their husbands. In contrast, these works place the mother in a
historical and social situation in Italy out of which such behavior was
borne, but not consistently sustained in America. If Mangione’s and
Morreale’s La Storia is an
important contribution to the wealth of material published to commemorate the
quincentennial, it is equally important as a corrective to the ongoing
belief that Italians in general don’t read and have not produced worthy
writers. The authors dedicate two chapters to detailing the efforts and
success of both male and female Italian/American writers. In contrast to Gay
Talese’s recent and infuriating article in The New York Times Book Review (“Where Are the Italian-American
Novelists?” March 14, 1993), the authors of La Storia give solid and satisfying evidence of a growing
literary tradition among Italian/American authors. In contrast to Talese’s
belief in the Italian’s inherent reticence, the authors of La Storia provide the future Italian
novelist “with the distinctive advan-tage of listening to tall stories
. . . The least educated immigrant was often naturally endowed with
a strong gift of narrative that planted the seeds for the offspring’s form of
storytelling.” Italian Americans have been absorbing the stories from their
ancestors and continue to share their memories with the larger reading public
in works of poetry, autobiography, and fiction. La Storia, too, should be shared with the public. It is a
full-bodied testimonial to the complexities of one of the largest
Euro-descended ethnic groups in America. Mary Jo
Bona Gonzaga
University Pasquale
Verdicchio. Nomadic
Trajectories. Montréal: Guernica, 1990. The
mystery of nomads translation
in motion All
wrong imprint
of the vanished A
voluntary disappearance every
identity Ephemeral
gifts Essentially
pure sacrifices an
unexplainable voyage The
first step tells the story: they
construct masks tribe
have no name (. . .) Pasquale Verdicchio, “Between the Desert” The first person in
modern lyrical poetry, both confessional or dramatic, serves to convey many different
gestures of different order along with the poet’s multiples selves. From this
come the personae that abound in
Symbolist and post-Symbolist verse. The mask of the nomad is the most
vanishing: it escapes any name and definition, and sets itself as the endless
destiny of a pure voyage within the language perceived as a desert, as
distance and absence. There is already a tradition of nomadism in modern
poetry. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Edmond Jabès among the others have laid the
milestones of this tradition in which should be inscribed also Pasquale
Verdicchio’s Nomadic trajectories. While Jabès and
Ungaretti knew the African desert, Verdicchio seems to refer to the North
American desert and to the nomadic way of life which many of the American
Indians followed. The nomadic type of culture offers valuable lessons to the
contemporary industrial human being who identifies with an endless series of
distracting ideologies and destructive instruments. The industrial human
being is in danger of being crushed by the weight of its civilization, and
blinded by the perspective of the material achievements in western society.
Modern psychoanalysis has discovered a real instinct to migrate as
counterpart to the instinct of belonging to a particular land or to a specific
people (Imre Hermann). The nomad is “Born under wandering stars” as
Verdicchio writes. In fact in mythology the instinct to migrate is often
associated with the moon, and the moon stands also for the opposite instict,
the need to belong. The tension between these opposite instincts points to an
endless search for the beloved. In German the word wandern (wander) is connected to wandeln (change, transform oneself). The nomadic style chooses an
“Exile constant/and no place” to preserve the lightness of the spiritual
values: the nomad has always “Hands to the heavens” and knows that “A mirage
resolves all.” Verdicchio’s style
follows the trail of nomadic trajectories reproduced by the free verse and
the shattered lines. On the other hand the intensity and the rythmn of his
reasoning is so pressing that it can be expressed simultaneously in small
pieces of prose-poetry. As he writes: “Heather labyrinth grows, higher than;
it does and obscures. Any trace, any way out. The labyrinth decides its own
weakness.” Massimo
Lollini University of Oregon Irene
Musillo Mitchell. Beatrice
Cenci. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Great literary
biographies rise above the documentary nature of their times to become works of
literature. One need not go all the way back to Vasari for an example. I
think of Maria Bellonci on Lucrezia
Borgia, and to a lesser degree Julia Cartwright on Beatrice d’Este or Troyat on Chekhov.
These books succeed partly by their imaginative prose and an almost
novelistic empathy with their subjects. By such a measure, Irene Musillo
Mitchell’s averred of Corrado Ricci’s two volumes on Beatrice Cenci falls flat. Like Ricci’s biography, it is honest,
workmanlike and subjective. The book has some good moments, but again like
Ricci, the language lapses too easily into the pedantic. It is perhaps fitting
in the Year of the Woman that Beatrice Cenci’s sixteenth-century life of
parental abuse reminds us of how modern her story really is. In her way, she
was emotionally prescient. It would take America, for example, four hundred
more years to bring into the open the ongoing occurrences of parental incest. In her biography of
Beatrice Cenci, Ms. Mitchell carefully documents the early abuses of a
wealthy Roman nobleman, Francesco Cenci. He is ruthless about money,
sodomizes young boys, is guilty of not taking care of the simple needs of his
family, and after the death of his first wife, of maltreating women. Today we
might think of him as having a borderline personality disorder, but at that
time he was known simply as a man of “violent disposition.” Trouble with Beatrice
begins when he holds his eighteen-year old daughter and his new wife virtual
prisoners in a castle in the remote Abruzzi mountains near the town of
Petrella del Salto. He continues to command Beatrice to rub or scrape his
corpulent nude body, which is frequently covered with mange due to long
periods of incarceration for “nefarious vice.” It is a pattern of sexual
abuse that the father set-up years before. As in many tragedies
of today, Beatrice’s letters and calls for help are not taken seriously
leading not to plot with the castellen (and others) in having her father
murdered. A plea of incest by
Beatrice’s lawyer is ignored by Clement VIII who is determined to use the
Cenci as an example of children who commit parricide. Beatrice, her older
brother, and stepmother confess under torture and are put to death. While Ricci accuses
Beatrice’s lawyer of not having enough faith in the incest charge, and too
much interest in the proceedings rather than “conviction” for his subject, he
falls too easily into the same trap. Whether or not the rape or attempted
rape actually took place, his comments frequently appear naive and dated:
“Nothing has ever indicated . . . he (Francesco) performed any
shameful actions on the person of his own children . . . the lack
was not due to any scruples in his character but to the natural and general
repugnance of the fusion of ones own blood which preserves brothers and sisters,
parents and offspring from incestuous contacts . . .” Unlike Ricci, who was
a male writing at the turn of the century, Mitchell has the sensitivity not
to rule out the possibility of incest. “Given . . . Francesco’s
indecent sleeping arrangement (in the same room near his daughter’s bed)
. . . Beatrice’s revolting . . . task of scraping her
father nightly; and most significantly, Francesco’s unconscionable character
. . . it is not unthinkable that the perverted Francesco attempted
to have relations with his beautiful daughter.” Observations like
this in Mitchell’s book make me wish there were more. Mitchell is good at
introducing new information taken from the Valentini/Bacchiani biography Beatrice Cenci, Un Intrigo Del Cinquecento,
published in Italian in 1981, such as Beatrice’s relationship with the poet
Margherita Sarrocchi Birago and her distant cousin Marion Guerra. Her book,
however, is mainly based on Ricci’s exhaustive work of 1923. The author is also
thorough in explaining the legend of Beatrice Cenci and literature written
about her through the centuries. Several residents today in Petrella,
unfamiliar with the history, speak of Cenci legend often confusing the facts.
Even the facts are changing. When the little church of Santa Maria (now called
Chiesa Parrocchiale) was being renovated in 1988 in Petrella, it was
discovered that Ricci had been wrong about the position of Francesco’s crypt. But despite these
details, Beatrice Cenci will be remembered less for her legend than for her
social and psychological significance in women’s experience. Surely she was
and is a phenomenon. Her courage in confronting an all male tribunal, her
determination to defend her body and her freedom as a sacred rite, her final
dignity in facing an unfair sentence, four hundred years later, make her
story a peculiarly modern one. I wish Mitchell’s book had been better at
showing us why. Novato,
California Maddalena
Tirabassi. Il
Faro di Beacon Street: Social workers e immigrate negli Stati Uniti
(1910-1939). Franco Angeli: 1990. Quest’opera
articolata e complessa si basa fondamentalmente su tre piani di ricostruzione
storica. Come scrive Rudolph J. Vecoli nella presentazione questo lavoro
“integra con grande perizia la storia dell’immigrazione, la storia delle
donne e la storia dei sistemi di welfare” (7). La scelta di parlare
delle donne immigrate e delle contraddizioni che esse incontrano nel loro
inserimento sociale e all’interno delle loro famiglie, dove non di rado sono
vittime delle violenze più brutali è doppiamente coraggiosa. Da un lato
infatti la studiosa occupandosi delle donne immigrate basa la sua ricerca, oltrechè
su un concetto di classe, anche su
quello di gender che l’ha aiutata a vedere “gli immigrati come soggetti
sociali attivi nel mutamento sociale: non più prigionieri di una cultura
fissa, impermeabile agli stimoli esterni, o vittime di un progetto di
americanizzatore loro estraneo” (12). In secondo luogo Tirabassi rilevando e
rivelando le contraddizioni e le brutalità pertinenti al nucleo familiare
degli immigrati italiani tende a distruggere certi stereotipi a proposito
della famiglia italiana e dimostra che il processo di americanizzazione è
stato, nella maggior parte dei casi, elemento di emancipazione per le donne
delle comunità italiane immigrate. In particolare il
libro si apre con un’analisi dei mutamenti che si verificano all’interno della
welfare history a proposito del concetto
di assistenzialismo: si verifica infatti il passaggio da una mentalità
filantropica ad una più professionale secondo cui la condizione
dell’assistito diviene oggetto di indagine su un piano “sociale.” I diversi aspetti
della vita dell’assistito mettevano in contatto gli operatori del settore con
istituzioni quali la scuola, l’ospedale la clinica, il tribunale ecc. Si
riusciva ad avere così un quadro individualizzato e complessivo di quello che
veniva chiamato il case work, la raccolta dei cui materiali
costituisce gran parte delle riflessioni di Tirabassi. Proprio l’analisi del
case work, permette da un lato di comprendere le modalità di intervento
dell’istituzione, dall’ altro di avere uno spaccato di un particolare settore
dell’immigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti” (15). Intimamente legato a
questo aspetto è quello della nascita del social
work che da puramente volontaristico diviene vera e propria professione
la cui nascita in tal senso può essere datata nel 1921 con la fondazione
dell’ American Association of Social Work. Le social workers sono soprattutto donne di cultura anglosassone che
si trovano ad essere escluse dal processo produttivo. Gli anni presi in esame
da Tirabassi sono quelli che vanno dal 1912 al 1939 con particolare interesse
per il periodo 1924-1939. Il 1924 è l’anno di fondazione degli International Institutes, elemento
centrale della ricerca. Il 1939 segna l’inizio della seconda guerra mondiale
e conseguentemente un nuovo ciclo dei problemi etnici e di emigrazione negli
Stati Uniti. Grazie soprattutto a
Terry Bremer che aveva maturato una lunga esperienza di lavoro come social worker si verifica il passaggio
dagli YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association), fondati nella seconda metà
dell’ottocento, agli International
Institutes. Il programma degli istituti, almeno inizialmente, è rivolto
soprattutto alle donne straniere e la sua “filosofia” è basata sulla
“creazione di donne” nel senso di uno sviluppo della loro personalità che
tenga conto delle radici etnico-culturali secondo la tradizione del social case work, ampiamente praticato
negli istituti. Proprio la valorizzazione delle culture etniche a svantaggio
della specificità di genere è quello che determinerà la definitiva separazione
tra YWCA e International Institutes
nel 1933. Lo scopo degli Istituti era quello “di aiutare gli immigrati
nell’adattamento finchè non si integravano in gruppi. L’utenza degli istituti
era ormai composta da una grossa percentuale di uomini, ragazzi e vecchi
oltre che da donne e ragazze. Inoltre l’unità a cui prestare servizio era la
famiglia o l’intera comunità nazionale, mentre per la YWCA continuava ad
essere la singola donna o ragazza” (66). È pertanto che l’interesse di
Tirabassi si rivolge agli istituti come elemento di analisi e scandaglio del
concetto di americanizzazione che ne sta alla base. Il programma di
americanizzazione infatti aveva come obiettivo il “felice inserimento degli
immigrati nella società americana” (95). Comune agli istituti era l’idea
dell’inserimento degli immigrati nella società americana mantenendo valori ed
istituzioni del paese di appartenenza quali famiglia, religione, tradizioni
ecc. La conoscenza dei valori culturali delle varie comunità e delle tecniche
del case work, di cui gli istituti
erano particolarmente esperti, consentivano di raggiungere risultati nuovi e
di grande interesse. Il caso dell’insegnante che racconta per scritto la sua
storia (127-29) mostra al di là del conflitto generazionale nel rapporto tra
madre e figlia, come il processo di americanizzazione abbia rappresentato in
alcuni casi un elemento di emancipazione per alcune categorie di donne.
Questo, come altri esempi di cui si tratta nel libro, mostra inoltre il tipo
di rapporto che si era venuto costruendo tra social worker e immigrate.
Tale rapporto come scrive Tirabassi costituisce “il principale oggetto di
questo studio” (213). Da ciò emerge la complessità delle dinamiche che
regolano il funzionamento degli istituti a seconda che prevalga l’elemento di
classe, di etnia o di gender. Se
sotto il profilo di classe questo evidenzia una caratteristica paternalistica
da cui emerge un tentativo di controllo sociale, sotto quello etnico il
discorso si fa più complesso. Spesso nel lavoro degli Istituti il tentativo
di sviluppare una crescita della personalità delle donne si scontra con il
tradizionalismo familiare delle comunità immigrate. Ed è proprio il terzo
elemento, quello di gender, che,
attivando dinamiche di solidarietà al femminile, costituisce un elemento di
emancipazione. Nonostante che, come rileva Tirabassi, sia “il meno
esplicitato a livello teorico, . . . perchè è possibile coglierlo
solo dalla prassi quotidiana del lavoro svolto negli istituti
. . .” (214) diviene elemento promotore di pluralismo culturale.
Tirabassi non esclude risultati contraddittori che vengono valutati di volta
in volta, ma certamente rifiuta una visione della filosofia degli istituti
come puramente strumentale. Piuttosto vede in queste istituzioni uno
strumento che ha facilitato l’inserimento degli immigrati nella società americana
rispettando le culture e le tradizioni delle comunità immigrate anche negli
anni del predominio dell’idea della “melting pot.” Un libro quello di
Tirabassi che unisce alla ricchezza della documentazione e all’apporto di
discipline e punti di vista diversi tra loro una passione ed un interesse per
le vicende femminili nel contesto americano degli anni ’20 e ’30 che
rappresentano non solo un tassello della storia degli Stati Uniti, ma fanno
anche riflettere sullo sviluppo successivo del pensiero femminista e delle
sue elaborazioni. Loyola
University—Chicago Marco
Fraticelli. Voyeur:
Selected and New Poems: 1972-1991. Montreal: Guernica, 1992. Marco Fraticelli’s Voyeur offers both short lyrics and
haiku. The haiku are richly embedded in the middle two sections of this
four-section gathering. In the Prologue to his collection Fraticelli vividly
presents a persona addressed as “you,” who boards the bus to Vancouver,
wishing to escape his past. All he has with him is a photo album. While he
picks over the album, “like a child picking at a scab,” he realizes he will
never escape his memories. Instants
is the first section of eighteen pieces, mostly short lyrics, dating from
1972-1978. It is interesting to note how the sharply minimalist insights
interact with the even more compressed haiku-like poem. I quote: In Your Bed I am the left hand of the Renoir nude and you are her
hair flowing through my fingers softly like a
stream. Waiting Crouched like a
black cat at the edge of my bed the telephone Note the contrast in
tone and picture: the soft fluency of the lyric, the ominous focus of the apparent
haiku. The double theme of love and separation interact like this throughout
the book as in a fugue, technique becomes obbligato. In Night Coach our dream-filled journey
continues, consisting of fifty-three haiku. There are neither titles nor frequency
of figures of speech, but the same Fraticelli voice is heard. See the
following (from Night Coach
1980-1990): spider web: my hand on your
bare leg your sleeping face
awakens rainy vacant lot a billboard
continues to peel tired poet After the Wake
is a sequence, thirty haiku not previously published. Fraticelli continues
“shedding his skin like a snake,” while he studies and discards photographed
scenes and memories. There are tensions between living and dying, lovemaking
and alienation. The tone is ironical, or self-mocking. For instance (from After the Wake 1991): morning of the
funeral I peel a
hard-boiled egg. Voyeur
is the fourth and last section. The eighteen poems are in the time honored tradition
of love poems. And the personae, male or female, are seen in their changing
occupations: painter, photographer, worker for the blind, burglar, etc. Note
the sharp edge of loneliness, affection, and surrender. For example (from Voyeur 1991): The Pet Shop He has just begun
to talk to the cages the way that new
parents babble to their
children Trapped behind the
cash register and slipping on
sawdust he tenderly
caresses and feeds his
prisoners before selling them
like slaves for Valentine
gifts. In closing, I would
like to quote the Epilogue in full, which gives the tone of the book and the
fine line Fraticelli walks between reality and dream: Epilogue Lately, I have been having a recurring
dream. I am sitting cross-legged in a field. The trees surrounding me are in
autumn colours. In slow motion, thousands of bits of paper
and pieces of photographs begin drifting down like snowflakes. I reach out to
touch them but they dissolve in my hand like ashes. I stick out my tongue to
catch one and its taste is not as bitter as I’d feared. I have written of
haiku. I have said nothing of senryu. Senryu is this ancient form with a
human focus rather than a nature focus. Several of Fraticelli’s haiku are really
stunning senryu, sometimes humorous, sometimes sad. The diary of the
heart of course, is about our old friends, the Japanese poem-and-prose diary
called the haibun. The haibun is
ostensibly the account of a journey, in which haiku is enmeshed in a prose
narrative. That Fraticelli handles all these concepts and techniques so
gracefully in this bright, sad book is a testament to his veteran talent as a
leading Canadian haikuist. Voyeur,
an experiment that works, speaks for all of us. This Guernica book is
number 40 in the lively publisher’s “Essential Poets Series.” The volume is a
model of book-workmanship: art work, photography, format design, generous
spacing, all functioning together to bring the intelligent reader the book as
a living experience. Marco Fraticelli’s trip, along the highways of his
heart, is first class. Selma
Stefanile West Lafayette, Indiana Calogero
Messina. Sicilians
Wanted the Inquisition. Trans. Alexendra and Peter Dawson. Brooklyn, NY:
Legas, 1993. From Thucydides to
Edward Freeman and Roman Roland who compared the ancient cities of Sicily to
the “cities of America where populations of the world were poured into a pot
never to truly melt,” many have written histories of Sicily. Now we have a
history seen through the eyes of three characters whose conversations bring
to life the history of the Holy Inquisition. It is all done in a good
Sicilian tradition much like Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily and in the manner of the late Leonardo
Sciascia who I suspect Mr. Messina has read and learned from. At the beginning we
are introduced to Master Giurlannu who could not believe that they wanted to
take “the Holy Inquisition away from us.” Giurlannu is eighty
years old. His life has gone by like the century he lived in, but he carried
his age well. He is a jolly man from Girgenti. His tailor shop in Palermo was
a school where great discipline reigned but you didn’t only learn the art of
tailoring you also learned how to behave, how to live with others, how to be
respected; in his workshop you became a man. Uncle Cola who has a
shop in the Vucciria—the Palermo street-market—is the second partner in the
conversion. Uncle Cola, ten years younger than Giurlannu, is a pure
Palermitan. He is a match maker with a good conscience because he has never
arranged a bad marriage. The third conversationalist is Turi. He is in his
fifties and has never been married. He is from Caltanisetta. He has come to see
Uncle Cola who is looking for a wife for him who, Uncle Cola exclaims, “you
are man who can afford more than one wife.” The three men are
horrified that the Holy Inquisition will soon be abolished. They reminisce
about the Spanish rule in Sicily which, they maintain, brought stability,
morality and law and order to Sicily. How dare they imagine a Sicily without
an Inquisition, without Spain and its Kings. They blame the horror of a
Sicily without an Inquisition on the French. Giurlannu bemoans, “that cursed
fellow Voltaire” who could not keep his atheism to himself, whose doctrines
have done more damage than Luther. “Filth filth. He spread filth and yet
there are people who look for his books and are crazy for anything coming
from France.” The three men go on
to describe with loving detail past heretics burned at the stake; Brother
Diego La mattina, of Racalmuto, who killed the inquisitor with the manacles
that held him to the wall. This prompted the narrator to mention that after
this all prisoners were not chained to the wall but sat chained to chairs
while being interrogated. They reminisce about
past auto da fes that were like
festivals in which everyone carried a morsel of wood to contribute to the
fire. Now (1780) there are plenty of people fit to be burned but they get
away with simple whiplashes, the three complain. Abolishing the
Inquisition, will be the loss of hundreds of jobs, Uncle Cola warns. Many
good families will be impoverished. And the women
Giurlannu adds, “They’ve become worst then men . . . Once they were
prudent, they were a check. Now they are once again the cause all evil.” “We need the gallows,
the Inquisition.” They conclude. But on March 16, the
Inquisition is done away with. Fortunately Giurlannu has died by then and two
others accept the fact the narrator concludes: The Palermatins
began to hold popular festivities at Villa Giulia; where the trees that fed
on the ashes of the fires of the Holy Inquisition offered seclusion to young
couples and lovers, overflowing with life. And in time nobody spoke any more of the
Holy Inquisition. After turning the
last page one is left with the feeling that the ghost of Giurlannu still
haunts the world. This fascinating
imagined conversation around the plea, “Sicilians want the Inquisition,” can
be seen as a distant semaphore sent to our own times. SUNY
Plattsburgh |