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Learning to Speak
Doubly: New Poems by Gianna Patriarca and
Rose Romano[1] Like racial epithets,
ethnic slurs function to diminish and degrade. Reappropriating the negative
word, giving substance to insult is a gesture of refusal to be named
hurtfully, a powerful tool of minority cultures in their attempt to maintain
their integrity. In her title poem, “The Wop Factor,” Rose Romano takes the
joke made against her—“when you slap / the magazine on the table—
. . . / it goes WOP!”—and revises the meaning to suit her purposes
as a poet: “and when you slap us down / we make noise.” Both Gianna
Patriarca’s first book of poetry, Italian
Women and Other Tragedies, and Rose Romano’s second book of poetry, Wop Factor, refuse to be silent about
what hurts, sounding an alarm that both celebrates and critiques the noisy
world of Italian-descended ethnic poets. Common ground shared between
Patriarca and Romano includes: la
famiglia and its code of omertà;
the tender if not anguishing relationship to the old country; the ongoing
negotiation with one’s ethnicity and the assimilationist pressures of the
dominant culture. Both Patriarca and Romano insist that succumbing to silence
not only kills the individual, but the culture of heritage as well. In their
need to remember and embrace their italianità,
both poets recognize the undeniable strength of their familial culture and
the ceaseless relationship to the booted country. Gianna Patriarca’s
first book of poetry is written through the lens of a first-generation
immigrant woman. Patriarca was born in Ceprano, Frosinone, in the region of
Lazio. As a young girl, she and her mother and sister emigrated to Canada,
where they joined the father, who had emigrated four years earlier, in 1956. Italian Women and Other Tragedies is
Patriarca’s account of the transatlantic crossing, a harrowing journey as it
is for all immigrants who leave familiar terrain. Patriarca emphasizes the
particular feelings of loss and sorrow from the child’s perspective, a point
of view that seeps into the poet’s soul for good: though the poet’s mother
protects her daughter, her “young heart wrapped around me,” something is
irretrievably lost and yearning for return, encapsulated by Patriarca’s
chilling self-reflexive reference to the lost doll: “the arms and legs / of
my doll fell apart into the sea / finding their way back over the waves”
(“Returning”). The topics of abiding
concern to Patriarca further attest to her status as a first-generation
Italian/Canadian writer, a status that in no way limits this poet, but rather
offers her the freedom to explore the ongoing relationship between Canada and
Italy. Patriarca examines the intersection between the two countries in
significant ways: in her recurring image of the mater dolorosa, and her refusal to wear the mantle of
self-nullification herself; in her describing the troubled and sometimes
violent relationship with her immigrant father, which leads the poet into detailing
abusive relationships between men and women, children and parents; in the
recognition of the importance of telling stories and passing them down
generationally; and finally, in Patriarca’s poetry, written in English and
Italian, cementing her relationship with the two countries through language
itself. In the titular poem
“Italian Women,” the poet describes all-too painfully the life of women
harnessed by a familial culture that demands that they be ideal: “these are
the women / who were born to give birth / they breathe only / leftover air /
. . . I have seen them wrap their souls / around their children /
and serve their own hearts / in a meal they never / share.” Central to the
role of the suffering mother is her sacrifice for the onore of la famiglia.
It’s no wonder that Patriarca returns to the image of the mater dolorosa in the poem “Marisa,”
appropriately written in Italian, suggesting the ineluctable connection
between the Italian mother and the primary figure of motherhood, the
Madonna: “Marisa / si piega / verso i figli / si piega / verso il marito / si
piega / verso tutto / . . . Marisa / ride dolcemente / mentre
scanza / i suoi / sogni / nascondendo nei cassetti / pezzetti del suo /
cuore.” [Marisa / bends over / her children / bends over / her husband /
bends over / everything / . . . Marisa / chuckles softly / as / she
dodges / her / dreams / hiding in drawers / little snippets of her / heart.[2]] The role of self-abrogation, Patriarca
suggests, requires sacrifice in the form of mutilation, the mother
hopelessly trying to save the pieces of a battered heart. As if to clarify her
role as a woman distinct from past models, Patriarca monologizes in “Getting
Things Right,” reinforcing her role as a woman unwilling solely to define
herself against the needs of men: “i am / therefore / i make no apologies /
woman / italian / overweight, underweight / tall, loud / romantic bore / i
take no responsibility / for his broken heart / his buried body / the
vacancies in his life.” The allusive connection to Christ’s passion and
Mary’s role of weeping and keening the crucifixion of her son further
emphasizes the ways in which the mater
dolorosa image has been creatively interrogated by poets of Italian
descent. Patriarca is no exception. Patriarca explores
the equally oppressive circumstances of her father, a young, “dark-haired”
man, whose dreams of a better life ended early, “when his knees were crushed
/ by the weight of steel / along some railroad line / he was thirty-one
. . .” (“Dolce-Amaro”). In her elegiac poem, “Novembre 16, 1983,”
Patriarca recognizes the incomplete and unreconciled nature of their
relationship, her father dying at sixty-one and the poet having “nowhere / to
put this anger.” The father’s early sense of disappointment in the new world
is prognosticated by the birth of his daughter, forgiving her everything,
Patriarca wryly commenting, “even my female birth” (“My Birth”). What is not
forgotten, however, is the daughter’s later deviance from la bella figura, her father ramming
his fist down his daughter’s mouth when she stays out past midnight, a mala femmina by virtue of her status
as hyphenated Italian, an Italian-Canadian, who no longer solely abides by
the traditions and rules of la via
vecchia (“Daughters”). What’s increasingly and of necessity disturbing in
Patriarca’s first book is her repeated references to men abusing women and
children as in the poems “For the Children,” “Bambini,” and “Nina, la matta.”
Each poem serves as a kind of prayer for their recovery and a promise of
understanding by the poet. All is not dark and
tragical in Patriarca’s poetry; in fact, even the title of her book conveys
the wry humor underlying the difficult conditions of women’s lives. Perhaps
the most essential activity in which the poet engages is her recognition of
the healing nature of stories and passing stories on from grandmother to
granddaughter, mother to daughter. In both “Mother Tells Me Stories” and “For
Grandma in Bed, Waiting,” the poet implicitly makes a connection between
storytelling and healing, especially in the way that telling stories bridges
the gaps between the generations: in the lines to the grandmother in bed,
dying, Patriarca writes: “I am in awe, I listen / you take me to your
century.” The poet’s awareness of story’s soothing and curative function
connects well with what writer Trinh T. Minh-ha explains as the principle of
healing, which rests on reconciliation: “hence the necessity for the family
and/or the community to cooperate, partake in, and witness the recovery,
de-possession, regeneration of the sick” (Woman,
Native, Other [1989] 140). Although the poet
cannot literally save her grandmother or “the old man” (in the poem with that
title) from death, her poetry reinvests their life stories with the gravity
and reverence due to them. In this way, the poet herself becomes the chanter
of stories, reconciling families from both countries. Patriarca’s employment
of the Italian language in several of her poems is equally an important
testimonial to her role as mediator between two worlds, putting pieces of
fragmented lives together and placing her words in a context that gives them
location (Toronto, Ceprano, Via Alfieri, Crawford Street), in an effort to
restore balance after dislocation occurs. With a style spare and graceful,
reminiscent of the African/American poet, Lucille Clifton, Gianna Patriarca
offers us the genuine honesty that comes with poems deeply felt across the
pulse. Rose Romano’s The Wop Factor extends the themes
raised in her first book, Vendetta
(1990). In that earlier work, Romano accomplished several goals: she voiced
anger at the dominant culture, especially the media, which perniciously
misinterprets and reduces the complexity of ethnicity in America; she
reclaimed Italian/American familial culture in a life-denying world; she
often celebrated the legacy of food, love, and strength given to her by her
grandmother; and, finally, Romano made a creative and life-sustaining
connection between the heritage of the Italian grandmother, sitting at the
“head of the table,” her “own boss,” and lesbian identity, both Italian
American, heads of households, their own bosses (“To Show Respect”). In The Wop Factor, Romano deepens her
concern for Italian/American identity by historicizing in poetry the painful
episodes of prejudice, violence against and misunderstanding of Italian
Americans in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular,
“Dago Street” recalls the mass lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans
in 1891 (also captured by Richard Gambino, in his historical study, Vendetta). Romano recalls in
necessarily graphic diction, the bloody event: “One was / shot in the head,
his right hand / blown away when he raised it / to defend himself, the top of
his / head gone; he waited nine hours / to die.” What makes this poem
so vital is not only Romano’s insistence on incorporating the names of the
accusers and the victims—David Hennessy, Mayor Shakspeare, Antonio Bagnetto,
Antonio Scaffidi, for example—but also the way that the poet structures the
poem itself, which moves back and forth from the 1891 event to the present.
Doing this allows Romano to reinforce the insidious persistence of ethnic
prejudice in America; what the speaker of the poem hears from her landlady,
who falsely presumes that she is Anglo/American, on account of her blonde
hair, is the same charge whispered by the New Orleans police chief, Hennessy:
“Dagoes.” The landlady continues: “And you know what Dagoes bring— / Mafia.” Closely tied to the
speaker’s response to the overt racism of the nineteenth-century police chief
and the twentieth-century landlady is the issue of silence: both nineteenth
and twentieth-century Italian/American personae say nothing and leave the situation. Before criticizing such passivity,
Romano reminds the reader that in the 1891 New Orleans lynching, “eight
Italians escaped by hiding,” but as the poet who talks back, she concomitantly
compels the reader to recognize the potential cultural genocide inherent in
another form of hiding, that is, passing: “Most Italians escape by hiding, /
don’t teach the children Italian, / use Italian to tell the old stories, /
and never complain. Now most Italians pass / and don’t know it
. . .” Alongside Romano’s efforts to record the brutal deeds of
the past is her commitment to embracing the pain of other oppressed groups,
enraged and horrified by the suffering of their people. Empathizing with the
horrified Jewish woman, who has been told to forget the Holocaust, Romano as
poet functions much like an earlier American poet of the people, Walt
Whitman. Both in her love of refrain and in her embracing the pain of those
suffering loss—as in the line, “I know that pain”— Romano forces the reader
to recognize the genuine connections between different ethnicities. Other
poems, such as “Canary in a Coal Mine” and “Like an Echo,” reinforce the
idea that ethnicity functions as a resilient and mutable concept; as Romano
puts it in “Ethnic Woman,” “once you’re born, you define it, / it doesn’t
define you.” Aware of the fact
that assimilationist pressures have encouraged white ethnics to hide
themselves from their own heritage, Romano issues an ironic warning to
Italian Americans, who have almost gotten “rid of the hyphen.” In her
characteristic style, using anaphora,
the literary scheme highly conducive to polemical speechifying, Romano
writes, “I don’t think it’s fair / to expect people to / understand. I don’t
think / it’s fair to expect people / to know there’s an Italian- / American
culture without / anybody telling them. / I don’t think it’s fair to / expect
people to wonder / how it came to be / that Italian-Americans are / the first
people in the / history of mankind not to / have a culture” (“Wop Talk”). The
importance, then, of “wop talk,” is to make it clear that Italian Americans
do, indeed, have a culture, one that must and will be talked about, whether
or not “she’s beginning / to bore people with all this / wop talk,” whether
or not she’s perceived as “limiting herself / by always writing about / this
Italian-American stuff” (“Wop Talk”). To reinforce the
necessity of talking about Italian/American culture, Romano recalls the
highly controversial Columbus Day conflict in “The Family Dialect,” tracing
the changing, but always negative, responses to Columbus Day in America.
Recognizing the vital need to teach those who deem themselves politically
correct in proclaiming that Columbus was an oppressor, Romano tries to
clarify the “tortured logic” that compelled Southern Italian/Sicilian
Americans to heroize Columbus. Though she is compelled, once again, to
reiterate the distinctions between Northern and Southern Italy, and to remind
readers that Columbus “was a Northerner at / a time when there was no
Italy,” Romano concludes with a kind of extreme panic in her realization
that, in fact, it may not matter to
“anyone here / that I come from a culture / as old as the beginning of the /
world? . . . / Does it matter / to anyone here that my best chance
/ of ethnic pride is to rip off my / skin and roll in salt?” Such
self-flagellation seems to be necessary, according to the poet, for people to
see the pain of a culture beset by
denial and excoriation. Willing to join her namesake, Santa Rosalia, “at
least until the end of the month,” Romano expresses the “tortured logic”
from which she herself suffers, willing to be literally flayed in order to
maintain her deep association to italianità.
Romano knows the
difference between strident polemics and poetry, and she creatively converts
“every insult” into a poem, recognizing the genre’s value to her as it
redeems and helps her survive. Like poet Audre Lorde, Rose Romano believes
that poetry is not a luxury, thus
putting in question those poems with a “high degree of technical /
proficiency” that don’t seem “to be about anything” (“Wop Talk”). However, in
Romano’s The Wop Factor, all of the
poems are not responses to insults. For example, in the final stages of AIDS,
Romano’s ex-husband, Donald, asks forgiveness for having left the poet and
their daughter. What remains essential about their relationship is not their
separation (because of abandonment, race difference, and illness), but their
shared connections: both are gay, both feel awkward with “whites,” and both
are family oriented. To drive home their unbreakable connection, Romano
concludes the poem on the theme of family, merging the dying man’s and the
poet’s identity: “It all comes back to family, / starts with family, / lives
with family, / goes on and on and on with family. / I’m not going to call you
/ my ex-husband anymore. From / now on, I’m going to call you / my daughter’s
father. / But I have to stop and think / before I say it because if I just /
let it come out of my mouth, / smooth and natural, / I get confused and I
call you / my father’s daughter” (“Final Stages”). Identification is
likewise of concern in Romano’s celebratory poem, “There is Nothing in this
World as Wonderful as an Italian-American Lesbian.” Recalling the themes in
her first book, Vendetta, Romano
accounts for the wonder and beauty of Italian/American lesbians—butch and
femme—by their undeniable connection to their grandparents, the poet
exposing the similarities between the generations, between males and
females, and between heterosexuality and homosexuality. As necessary as the
elements, food becomes the Italian American lesbian woman’s key to ethnic
survival: “Look at her eyes as she thinks— / . . . the mother’s
milk taste of ricotta oozing / from stuffed shells; / . . . She
carries to the head of the table / not only the endurance of the Grandmother
/ but also the will of the Grandfather, / waiting intensely for the
inescapable climax / of that merciless, necessary feast.” Perhaps an area newly
charted by Romano is her final section of the book, Trying to get Home. This group of poems coincides nicely with
Patriarca’s ongoing relationship with Italy, though Romano’s poems recognize
the lack of familiarity at first with the old country. The poet courageously
moves from Naples to Palermo to Alcamo, “trying to get home,” aware of her
national designation as “American,” not as Italian American, a distinction of
little concern to her relatives. Nonetheless, the poet imagines what it might
have been like to have been born in Sicily: “looking for the woman I was supposed
to be,” Romano conjures an image of a comare,
who will show her who she is (“Signs”). The conclusion of The Wop Factor is, indeed, the
beginning of another journey for Romano, as she realizes, both spiritually
and physically, that she could take up permanent residence in Sicily,
knowing that she “got my faces, my / hands, my moves from / these people.”
Just as the street market gets “folded up and put away” for the day, so
Romano closes her second book of poetry, aware of another vista awaiting her pen.
(“Trying to get Home”). Both Patriarca and Romano have creatively rendered in
poetry the vital negotiations involved in possessing a double heritage. They
show us how such duality can be managed with grace and power. Gonzaga
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