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REVIEWS For Kim Addonizio and Grace Cavalieri, Maria Corti, Joseph Tusiani, and Justin Vitiello Kim
Addonizio. The Philosopher’s Club. Boa Editions, Ltd. 70 pages; cloth $20,
paper $10. Grace
Cavalieri. Poems New & Selected.
Vision Library Publications, 120 pages; paper $10. Grace Cavalieri’s
tone in Poems New & Selected is
often similar to Kim Addonizio’s The
Philosopher’s Club in its reasoned acceptance of losses created by the
passage of time and death. Her imagery, too, is often of house, garden,
kitchen, family gatherings, and relationships. Her subject matter, like
Addonizio’s, also involves profound feelings for children, in this case
daughters, the expressions of a protective mother’s yearning. These two
collections contain some of the finest poems to or about daughters to be
found in contemporary American poetry of late. Yet, Cavalieri has her
moments of high strung bliss, which add variety of tone to her seventh
collection. An example occurs in “Upon Dreaming A Proposition That All Truth
Is A Conversion From Negative To Positive”: As if touched by
God, I, At night Saw that all Which exists comes
through a Transmutation From
dark. . . . And I am right at
this moment Crying With the thought of
it and how Happy I was Burning with it
waking up on that most Ordinary Summer
morning of my life. And, Addonizio
portrays moments of candid sensual pleasure which transcend the merely
philosophical, as in “First Poem to You.” Gerald Stern—in his introduction to
Addonizio’s poems, which appear in “The New Poets of American Series,” from
Boa—customarily introduced by an established poet—aptly states: “There are
some poets who write with a kind of fore-knowledge—I’ll call it that—and it
is what gives these poets their strange power. It’s as if all life has
already happened—as it happens—and they give in knowingly, even as they still
struggle with desire and hope. Kim Addonizio is one of these. She is someone
who knows, somehow, and this knowledge itself gives strength and pity and
tenderness, sometimes even terror, to her poems.” But, The Philosopher’s Club is aptly titled
as reasoned discourse. Passionate wonderment or anguish does not characterize
Kim Addonizio’s first collection of poems. Neither she nor Grace Cavalieri
are the sort of artists who would paint a wild and swirling “Starry Night” of
mad obsession or tear off an ear. Addonizio’s voice can be relied upon to
sail reasonably along, never shrill, never crying out in sorrow, making quiet
observations with intense accuracy. She captures nuanced moments with a style
that leaves them suspended quietly in the reader’s imagination. Both of these
poets belie the stereotype of their ethnic names as neither is overly
emotional or hysterical as Italians are often portrayed by the media. Their
poems do not talk with their hands, gesticulating wildly, but rather contain
emotions which are controlled and yet deeply felt, as in the Baroque
Classical music of a Vivaldi or Monteverdi. If such a metaphor is allowed,
their poems are not symphonic rhapsodies or Verdi arias, but mellow concerti
for harpsichord, flute, and violin. Kim Addonizio is wise
and crafty in her observations and her portrayal of sensual love, filial
feeling, death or loss, yet there is, perhaps, a sameness of tone to the
book which may dissatisfy some readers looking for those bursts of elation
or explosive feelings which can add variety to a mature acceptance,
resignation or quiet sensuality. Says Addonizio, in “Conversations in
Woodside”: Joe insisted that
life is extreme, but Nadja and I
argued for dailiness: The stove’s small
flame under the kettle, The lover who,
turning over in bed reaches for an
absence. . . . Grace Cavalieri, the
more seasoned of the two poets, is the author of six other books of poetry,
the most recent being Trenton about
which Reed Whittemore said: “Bliss is strong but relaxed and easy-strong.”
Daniel Berrigan called her, “Truly a seer—and a sayer of words that pierce
and heal at once.” And, he is right about that. Cavalieri is known nationwide
for the longest running poetry show on the radio airwaves. For twenty-five
years, she’s hosted and interviewed nearly all of the contemporary American
poets of our time on “The Poet and the Poem,” syndicated from Pacifica Radio,
WPFM in Washington, DC. She has, through her radio show, amassed the
country’s largest audience for poetry and she has, no doubt, learned a great
deal about the art by listening and asking questions as she does concerning
craft. She interviews each poet about their work which is broadcast on many
affiliates throughout the country. Cavalieri is at her
best when she writes from the heart about lost children, or aspiring love,
human relationships, and emotions with clarity and lucidity. When she drifts
toward an abstract expressionist tone, and her subject matter becomes
nebulous in the mode of the French symbolists, the reader is less engaged,
less moved or captivated. Some of her most satisfying poems are her most
concretely felt. “Death of a Cat,” “The Lost Children,” “Father,” “The
Orphanage,” “The Offer of Friendship,” and “Requiem Mass” are just a few examples
of Cavalieri at her best. Addonizio is most
profound when she’s philosophizing about the transient quality of life and
its central realization of mortality. There is a wistful pain of loss in our
most tranquil and beautiful moments, she seems to say, as they must pass
into oblivion, and we are “tethered to each other / by the slenderest and
brightest of ropes.” And, “The Last Poem About the Dead”: Sounds like this: a
long sweet silence the next soul
breaks as it drops, the way a fish
flops back slapping the quiet
water, . . . Both of these
skillful poets possess a mature voice deserving of our attention as there is
much to learn from their poetic musings, their ability to pierce through the
surface of daily life to its subtle meanings. Both exude a knowing air which
stimulates the reader to accept all that life offers in its profound but
simple domestic, social and familial dailiness—even its final ending. As
Cavalieri writes, in “How to Obtain”: You will show them
what you need And tell them what
you want And of dying you
will say “Is this all there
is to it” You’ll have known
it all the time. Andover,
NJ Maria
Corti. Otranto,
translated from the Italian with a Preface by Jessie Bright. New York:
Italica Press, 1993. This review is dedicated to Ugo Lopes Ruggieri “Wars happen because
the ones who start them/think they can win.” Maria Corti’s prize-winning
novel Otranto enlarges on this
theme, showing how in 1480 the Turks attacked a fortified Adriatic fishing
port on the Salento peninsula, the heel of the Italian “boot.” Alien in
language, customs, and religion, the invaders were determined, fierce, and
mostly merciless when they won. Military victory doesn’t always last, though.
It doesn’t always end the war—or the story. Therefore: resist! This is the
import of Otranto, which honors
defenders of the patria while
recreating life as it was and as it endures on the beautiful Salento
peninsula. While the novel is
based on fact, with some characters who were actual historic personages,
Maria Corti is less concerned with documenting or mythmaking than with
showing, from overlapping multiple viewpoints and in homely detail, how war
arrives and how people resist—or succumb without surrendering, faithful to
their own attachments, values, way of life. This is a novel about love and
resistance. Italian readers know
in advance, as American readers are instructed in the translator’s Preface,
that the Turks who captured Otranto massacred the people but their victory
was short-lived. Knowing this doesn’t detract from suspense, since each
narrating character must confront the challenge in personal terms. This is
the meaning of the original title, L’Ora
di tutti. This test comes for each one, the fatal hour. Our choices tell
us who we are. Collective identity and values outlast individual lives. The novel’s first
voice is Colangelo’s. He was prompt to spot the galleys with the dreaded
crescent on their hulls. He heard the turbaned Saracen heralds, after
requisite flourishes, deliver their ultimatum: Resisters will die; but if
the populace surrenders the men have two choices, to depart with their women
and children, or to convert and remain loyal subjects. When the main gate
closes behind the herald, drawbridges go up and armed fishermen guard the
walls. Outnumbered, the
Viceroy’s Spanish soldiers have fled in the night. The Turks have moved
artillery into place and landed hundreds of horses further up the coast. A
militia should arrive; but no one knows when. Meanwhile, the Otrantini have
help only from their guardian angels. Colangelo, warm from his Assunta’s bed,
their son’s even breathing still in his ears, takes his assigned place. The
enemy scale the walls, armed with scimitars; short pikes and hatchets hang
from their belts. These aggressors are sent tumbling down. The breach is
healed. Later, though, Colangelo has a vision of total destruction such as
has befallen other towns. He sees what remains, only “a few scattered blocks
of stone and one lone black crow hopping from one to another”—the blackened
hood of a fireplace, a pot on the ground. Running from the
walls, he meets “the beautiful delicate Idrusa, the loveliest woman ever born
in Otranto,” who offers him a glass of wine, noting how badly he needs it.
Women and children have been ordered to take shelter in the cathedral; but
she does not take orders. Their communion, candid and tranquil, is climaxed
by his brusque lunge, her yielding “without desire, without
pleasure”—desperate lust as the foil to spousal reassurance. Self-reproach
restores Colangelo’s sense of proportion and he recalls his mother, and his
wife when he was courting her. Arranging a marriage, planning to raise a
child, they incarnate the threatened culture, the achievement that is manhood
and womanhood. When Assunta cries because Cola must fight and may die, “This
is how two people suddenly sense they’re man and wife,” he thinks—and he
makes for the door knowing he may never see them again. Summertime weather,
direction and intensity of wind, every factor is noted that might affect the
outcome when arrows rain down and the struggle is hand-to-hand. In a respite,
Colangelo eats a frisella with
sardines in oil. Life: so simple, so simply terminated. “How little we get
to do when we’re alive” thinks expiring Colangelo. The novel’s second
part is narrated by a captain connected with but not belonging to the upper
ranks of nobility, the class distinguished by elegant manners and confusion
over practicalities. Elevated by the King of Naples, Zurlo is really a
homebody, perplexed by his children who “grow up with an intolerable
rapidity.” He lets his son accompany him on condition, he says, that “If the
Turks appear in the domain of Otranto, you depart immediately for Naples.”
“The Turks!” repeats Giovanello, ecstatic. . . . It is and is
not the same war for father as for son. Idrusa narrates the
third part. She, the woman all men desire, wonders about them: “Looking at
the olives sloping down toward the sea on either side of the rocks, with
parts of their roots exposed to the sun, I’d wonder why men didn’t go mad
with the urge to live among the trees.” More passionate and imaginative than
other women, more grieving and more proud, orphaned early, widowed at
twenty-two, in discourse a match for the clergy, she is (as the translator
notes) either a twentieth-century voice or an invitation to believe that
there have always been such women. Her fate, and the voices of the brief last
sections, fade out in a sunset with the question “And has anything really
changed?” From the start we are
shown that much has not changed. Defenders of Otranto are honored at every
summer’s anniversary of the battle, in the town whose heart is its cathedral
and whose people still work hard since “the sun is all the riches they’ve
got—but for whom the sun makes good figs, good wine.” The author spent the
first nine years of childhood on this peninsula, and her Introduction traces
“a path made by countless bare feet among the reeds and grasses of the Idro
Valley” along which women at dawn still proudly carry baskets of chicory and caciotte cheeses to the base of the
tower near the harbor, to sell them to inhabitants of the fortress-like town
above. At twilight fishermen still sit crosslegged by the pier, watching the
sea that is their livelihood. This emphasis on what
endures is neither sentimental nor nostalgic. We are not asked to celebrate
or take up going barefoot. Rather, Corti clarifies what is worth preserving:
knowledge of the terrain and waters that sustain life; manly and womanly
virtue; a sense of community; self-reliance and capability for self-defense;
institutional continuity. She deals with the town as collectivity, where
people are known to each other and class structure is understood and
accepted. The townsfolk fight defensively for what is most personal, most
dear. Presented
realistically, the Battle of Otranto is also a metaphor for Maria Corti’s
experiences of war. Born in 1915, she grew up with the generation that had to
deal with Fascism, World War II, civil war, postwar boom, and terrorism.
Unending struggle is her view of history: struggle to wrest a livelihood in
cooperation with land and sea, struggle to remain honest, loving and wise,
struggle to protect what one holds dear. In success, there is private and
communal celebration. Victory does not last, though, it is never once and
for all. Peace does not last and is certainly not to be taken for granted.
Readiness is what counts, when the summons comes. A ciascun uomo nella vita capita almeno un’ora in cui dare prova di
se. This prova di se—to show
one’s stuff, show what one is made of—is the inspirational element
reinforcing patriotism, love of the native land, and in combination they are
sufficient reason for the book’s adoption as a school text in Italy. As a metaphor for
resistance to Nazi occupation, events of 1480 are valid to the extent that
invading forces are to be repelled, occupation resisted. The implication that
World War II was a religious war, the Nazi enemy anti-Christian and not only
claiming Christian territory but also intent to extirpate the inhabitants’
faith and church: this is worth elucidating. The Swastika opposed the Cross,
in World War II, as irreconcilably as did the Crescent in the Otranto of
1480. Totalizing and requiring fanatic devotion, Nazism was out to eradicate
all faiths of the Abrahamic Accord. Hostile to life itself, it bureaucratized
the administration of death as it unleashed pathological rage and
uncontrollable fury, defilement humiliation and ingenious cruelty, in a
frenzy of annihilation. Mass murder was not enough; the goal was soul-murder
too. Maria Corti is not the only Italian writer to use the Turks as metaphor
for the Nazis. Pier Paolo Pasolini, for instance, as translator Dino Fabris
of Wellfleet informs me, did it too in his posthumously published play The Turks in Friuli. Yet the Turks in Otranto were not genocidal, and that
distinction too needs to be explicit. Taken for granted, in
Corti’s novel, is the historical background. Though reinforcements come from
elsewhere and the town is under Spanish domination, there is no analysis of
an expansionist Christian empire represented by the cathedral that dominates
the town. Nor do the invading Turks have any history. Imperial interests are
simply assumed, as fierce aliens inspired by messianic hatred impose their
religion on conquered territory. Italian writers may well assume on the part
of Italian readers some acquaintance with the historical background. Italian
legends and romances since the Middle Ages have celebrated Charlemagne—Carlomagno—and
his paladins, and the centuries of competition between two proselytizing,
militaristic (“Onward, Christian Soldiers”), monotheistic faiths. Surely
every Italian high-school student knows, as hardly any American one does,
about the Battle of Roncesvalles. American schools more typically require Ivanhoe, which admires Saladin but
never questions that the Crusaders fought in a just cause—or that a Knight
Templar might want Rebecca (but not Rowena) to become his mistress (and not
wife). Neither Otranto nor Ivanhoe demonstrates that a Christian
empire which blessed the bloody Crusades and the “liberation” of the “Holy
Land” was inherently superior to that of the Seljuk Turks who destroyed
Byzantine power or the Ottoman Turks whose empire extended over Bulgaria,
Serbia, parts of Hungary, most of the Balkan peninsula, and into Asia and
Africa. Though Suleiman the Magnificent was defeated by Spanish and Venetian
fleets at Lepanto in 1571, Spain itself enjoyed greater tolerance under
centuries of Moorish rule than during the Catholic Inquisition, and yet Otranto takes for granted that the
Church deserves its monopoly. This is not to
intercede for the Turks. In a later century too they slaughtered away, and
with impunity. Hitler could dismiss world conscience by saying “Who, after
all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Who indeed. Nor is
that story over: the business section of the Providence Journal
reported on May 29, 1994, beneath a four-column headline “Cyberspace a
battleground,” as follows: “Turks and Armenians have brought their
decades-old hatreds onto the digital stage, accusing one another of using
electronic mail forgeries and software that seeks and destroys an enemy’s
messages to the broader community.” Anniversaries refresh memories, just as
celebration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages meant also, both
in Italy and here, remembering the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews
from Catholic Spain; and in the wake of that recent historical review, the
excessive zeal of Europe’s Christian churches in persecuting Jews has been
understood as laying a foundation for the Holocaust. (Only in May 1994 did
the Vatican acknowledge insufficient resistance to Nazi might and, hence,
passive complicity.) We live with
consequences of these and more recent wars. In Bosnia the conquering Ottomans
brought some Serbs into Islam, and now slaughter is again determining
dominance. The protractedly wartorn Middle East is trying for a choice of
territorial negotiation over “holy war.” As states simultaneously break up
and confederate, populations shift; Jews who survived the Holocaust and Turks
who have been guest workers in Germany now hear the present Pope call for a
unified Christian Europe, while in Turkey the Christian population that was
32% at the beginning of this century is now less than 1%—and descendants of
the Jewish refugees from the Inquisition welcomed by the Sultan 500 years ago
may have new cause for nervousness. Historical novels that interpret the past
also impact on the history that continues to unfold. If Otranto’s major strength is lyric love
for homeland and family, its severest limitation is glorifying ancient
enmity. This is no time to revive epithets against “cursed Turks,” with
Turkey now in NATO and tourism to Turkey being actively promoted. Even as
Corti emphasizes how the town of Otranto retains its old identity, and the
sun shines on Otranto now as it did in 1480—in fact the world’s ozone layer
has changed; Adriatic waters have been rather depleted of fish; tourism has
affected real-estate prices. And perhaps Italian parents will have to leave
off threatening young children with the Turks, given recent economic changes
and population shifts. The Christian/heathen antithesis needs a roomier
framework for today’s more heterogeneous Italy, and certainly for our
pluralistic culture. Rarely, too rarely, does one read about the Abrahamic
Accord. Perhaps a second edition will mention it. That Otranto does seem to accept the inevitability of warfare should
occasion a note distinguishing defensive preparedness from glorification of
fighting. Towards the end of Otranto a congregation “drunk with
faith” hears the archbishop extol “those eight-hundred men marched off in
groups of fifty with their hands tied, . . . to be decapitated one
by one by their heathen captors”—and yet it is not clear why exclaiming “Long
live the Holy Christian Faith!” and dying is preferable to deception,
accommodation, and staying alive—as so many Native Americans did when
overpowered by conquering European Christians who continued their sectarian
wars on this continent. Moreover, Otranto
presents nothing from a Turkish viewpoint. By contrast, the Turkish poet
Nazim Hikmet, who received the World Peace Prize in 1950, has a long poem
written in 1935 after Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in which the
Ethiopian speaker, trapped in Rome, imagines devastation personally but knows
that the enemy soldiers are also victims—of ignorance, fear, and official
lying. (This observation I owe to Terence Des Pres.) Americans who know
little about Turkey or the Turks will not be charmed by their appearance in
this excellent novel. One must hope for a Turkish novel as ably translated as
this one to balance the case—or for more attention to Hikmet’s poem. The Ottoman Empire
that declined through the nineteenth century was supported by Austria,
France, Great Britain, and Prussia against—Russia. Because Otranto reduces conflict to
self-defense without the historical context, and there is no debate about
principles of Christianity or Islam, the novel hedges ideologically. On the
one hand it is Christian propaganda, though not doctrinaire. When prisoners
and captors finally come together with a renegade Christian mediating, the
author avoids implications of the quip “One faith’s as good as another.”
Really? Like the fishermen of Otranto in 1480, present-day Italians and
Americans need better understanding of the Christian West—and at least
passing mention in the Preface that in Italian “un cristiano” means not exactly “a Christian”—but rather, “fully
a decent human being.” The recrudescent enemy is fascist. Nazism is the real
threat. L’ora di tutti’s
stylistic elegance has been retained in English, with admirable economy. An
earlier century comes alive in clear, plain, colloquial diction. Some
sentences long in the original have been split to expedite the flow; the only
error noted is a line missing on page 221. Conversations delight whether
wives without husbands are “taking life easy, relaxed and good-humored, often
telling each other stories about their girlhood in a wistful melancholy tone”
or Captain Zurlo and Don Felice discuss love across the chessboard, or
resisters in the wine cellar resent privileges of those who can pay ransom
and go free. The author is very lucky in her translator. The reader is lucky
too, for the novel gives much pleasure. And for me, at least, it was also the
occasion for much thought. Brown
University Joseph
Tusiani, trans. Dante’s
Lyric Poems. Introduction and notes by Joseph Di Scipio. Legas, 1992. It is unfortunate
that the major corpus of great writers becomes so ensconced in the canon that
their other works are relegated to the rank of opere minore. Shakespeare’s comedies and dramas are so familiar
to us we often forget he also wrote exquisite sonnets; Cervantes’s Don Quijote, much read and admired,
casts into shadow his very vibrant dramatic pieces; and, after the density of
the epic Faerie Queene, Spenser’s
elegant love poetry recedes into the background. We remember the masters for
their masterpieces, but we give short shrift to their achievements in
different genres. Denying these writings their due, we deny ourselves a rich
literary experience. For had these “minor works” been written by others, we
would give them our full attention. Such is the case with
Dante’s lyric poems. Translated here by another “poet in exile,” Joseph
Tusiani, this collection and translation of Dante’s other writings reminds us
of their beauty and importance. While the brilliance of the Divine Comedy tends to eclipse Dante’s
lyrical contributions to the development of Italian poetry, the lyric poems
remain a milestone in Italian literary history. Dante’s poetic production
began during his adolescence. As Giuseppe Di Scipio writes in the
introduction to this anthology, “a comprehensive view of Dante’s lyric
poetry, as presented in this volume of Joseph Tusiani’s translation,
provides a concrete understanding of Dante’s poetic growth and constant
experimentation with forms, techniques, and themes.” Tusiani, who writes
poetry in Italian, English, and Latin, has won international acclaim as poet
and translator. This side-by-side English/Italian volume contains
translations to the Vita Nuova, in
which Dante’s own stil novo is
developed, the Convivio, with its
canzoni to Lady Philosophy, the mature love poetry of the Canzoniere, and Dante’s Latin
eclogues to Giovanni del Virgilio. This collection is a gem, with faithful,
clear, and elegant rhymed translations. The translator never misses a rhyme
or a nuance, producing a felicitous transformation of the Italian original.
The volume includes helpful biographical references, a brief introduction
which explains Dante’s poetic development, an an index of first lines, and
notes to the poems. Di Scipio is justified in suggesting, “With this
translation of Dante’s lyric poems Joseph Tusiani pays homage to one of the
greatest poets while giving us a precious gift.” Through this volume we are
offered the gift of Dante’s poetry, his message, his salute, with its connotation of greeting and wish at the same
time. To every loving,
gentle-hearted friend, to whom the present
rhyme is soon to go so that I may their
written answer know, greetings in Love’s
own name, their Lord, I send. (Vita Nuova 1.1–4) Columbia
College Chicago Justin
Vitiello. Poetics
and Literature of the Sicilian Diaspora. Studies in Oral History and
Story-Telling. San Francisco: Mellen Research UP, l993. 5ll pages.
$49.00. In this significant
volume of ethnohistory, Justin Vitiello offers the wisdom that may help us to
live through the tramonto (sunset)
of dominant western civilization and to glimpse the first morning light of a
just world. A returning emigrant like his story tellers, in an era when
emigration and otherness have become the flash-points of history, Justin
Vitiello reversed the journey of his Neapolitan and Jewish grandparents, who
came to America at the turn of the twentieth century. Professor of Italian
Studies in the United States, Vitiello returned to Italy and went to
Trappetto on Castellamare Bay fifteen miles from Palermo to gather the
stories of returning emigrants who had, like his grandparents, left to make a
living in North Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Holland, England,
South Africa, the Persian Gulf, Venezuela, Brazil, and the United States. Listening to the
stories, Vitiello discovers a major Sicilian belief, one now being
rediscovered by postmodernists—the colors of truth are many. “As the sun
turns yellow to warn of a turbulent tomorrow or red to herald a day favorable
to fishermen and worshippers of Mediterranean warmth and clarity, you can
bask in the chiaroscuri of the Sicilian
tragic sense of life and in harmony with one of the most beautiful natural
spectacles on earth. Pain and joy fuse and attenuate . . . in the
peace of the interlapping of Mediterranean waters and land.” Vitiello sees the
southern Italians who have returned to their native land as the wretched of
the earth. “In the shadows, their faces loomed, furrowed, worn, toothless,
indolent, inscrutable, sneaky, oily, pagan, backward, hopeless. Grim with the
industrial ashes and dust of northern Europe and their own stubble, these men
and women embodied for me the Mezzogiorno’s miseria, its ageless submission to bosses both sacred and profane
in that sink of bloods, La Bass’Idalia.” Wresting himself free
from the cords of western education that had taught him that only the history
of the colonizers is worthy of study, Vitiello found himself in a culture
that dates back to the cave paintings of Levanzo, l0,000 years before the
Common Era. He set upon the task of recording the stories of these colonized
people, stories that constitute their authentic history, stories full of the
particulars that, for Unamuno, disclose the universal. It is a history of
“passive resistance and accommodation to invaders and rulers punctuated by
violent popular uprisings . . .” and resistance to outsiders who
bring their western dichotomy of appearance vs. reality. Sicilians, islanders
in the Mediterranean that connects Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, see
“a multiplicity of equally valid images by juxtaposing so-called logical
contradictions as if they coexisted in counterpoint, or even in harmony.”
Listening, Vitiello realizes that a genuine Mediterranean point of view is
not concerned with distinctions between literal and symbolic truth, but
intent on “the conscious creation of an alternative, more liveable truth.” He
describes the “pulverizing sun, as it refracted through splinters of glass in
the hills, generated blazes you could watch all night as your body tried to
cool down and let your brains mull on the winds that had scattered Sicilians
in their diasporas.” Like other
subordinated peoples of the earth, for Sicilians there comes a point when
historically they have not, and in today’s Italy, they may not, tolerate any
more injustice, or mystification. This last has meant disregarding papal
pronouncements about what they should believe; they continue to consider
Christopher a saint and to believe that the madonna and her son are very like
themselves. Popes and invaders have tried to instill other beliefs, but
Sicilians know that the just person living in human society “must appreciate
one’s gifts from nature and make them bear fruit by doing good.” From their
own history of oppression, they know that life is a “journey that embraces
living death, redemptive suffering,” and in their bones they know they are
kin to all who suffer. The ground of these
beliefs, as it may be for all earth-bonded cultures of the Third World, is terra, mare, and madre. The stories that emerge from these ground beliefs, for
Vitiello (and for Robert Graves), are natural poetry. “All Sicilians are not
natural poets. But many of them in this book, deeply rooted . . .
and eminently capable of improvising on their oral heritage and of inventing
their own truth and beauty, are.” Justice, as
archeologists and historians are learning, is the central belief of peasant
cultures who have kept the memory, and the promise, of the prehistoric
harmonious and egalitarian past. Political implications of this “remembrance
of the future” of justice and equality are suggested in a Sicilian emigrant’s
awareness that “Us Southerners are the Blacks of Italy. . . . here we’re in
the Third World, a colony of northern Italy.” Once, states the
author, one discovers that there are no formulas for understanding Sicily but
“the telling and playing out of enigmas, the island, resistant and resilient,
calm and eruptive as Etna, emerges as a stage” where, for the Norwegian
scholar of Sicilian history, Johan Galtung, “the greatest human drama of our
time may be reaching its climax.” Returning Sicilians know, from their own
experience, that emigration and otherness are the flashpoints of contemporary
history. “Look,” one declares,
“I’m not criticizing Germany alone. I say Germany simply because I emigrated
there. . . . I could talk . . . about every European
country. . . . They’re all the same, exploiting unskilled
workers. There, on foreign soil, the guest worker does all the dirty work.
The native is reserved the nice clean jobs. . . . The worst
off, in Germany at least, are the Turks. They have to do the heaviest,
filthiest and least paid work.” “People treat you
with more civility in Italy than in America,” states Leonardo La Fata who has
returned from the United States. “Sicilians are more polite to foreigners
. . . the way Blacks and Whites treat each other in America
. . . [is] really hostile. Not like here. We look you over, maybe
too much. There, you’re invisible—or in somebody’s gun sight.” Not sanguine
about Italy, Mimi pointed out there is racism in northern Italy; a sign for
rent in Milan warned, “Sicilian, Calabrian and Southern emigrants and People
with Children Need Not Apply.” Offering comparative
cultural history, Vincenzo Palazzolo said of Trappetese who return from
Germany: “As soon as they come home, they dig into the pasta with fresh
sardines and wild fennel, fried eggplant, sweet and sour sardines, fresh
tomato salad. On the other hand . . . Trappetese who’ve emigrated
to America tend to lose their culture. They come back here and, right away,
they say something offensive. They have to tell us it’s no good here, that
America is much better.” In a statement that
suggests why the l994 swing to the right in Italy may be the temporal down
curve of the spiral of history, Orazio De Guilmi said, “Of course, my
ideology is rooted in Marx. But as an Italian communist I reject Stalinism
and depart from radical criticism of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. For me
communism means openness, dynamism, intelligent confrontation, constant
renewal, truth with regard to reality, one’s party, one’s self. It’s the
diametric opposite of the Christian Democracy’s approach: convenience,
embezzlement, hypocrisy, politicking for private interest, the rich and the
strong, the Mafia, and mafiosity forever.” “Say this in your
book,” said Vito Lo Grande, who has returned to Sicily from the United
States, “Socialism, the real kind for the peasants, is the only way. That’s
my philosophy; real socialism to defend poor people against all the mafias,
especially the ones in the government.” Vitiello’s storytellers point to a
socialism grounded in the earth, rejecting hierarchies, and finding hope in
the south of the world. Battista La Fata, a young woman who earlier decided
to fare la carriera in the north,
has returned to Sicily; today she speaks Sicilian dialect and sees herself
“as a southern Italian in resistance against all those racist stereotypes of
the Mezzogiorno.” Micheldimetrio Vinci, born in Germany of Sicilian parents,
has returned to his ancestral homeland to work for a better world. “Even if
our dreams don’t come true, I’ll always think of the Earth as a place where
people living so many diverse kinds of lives can unite and imagine how to
struggle together.” Berkeley,
California |