Saints and the Hereafter:

An Interview with Nino Ricci

 

by Michelle Alfano

October 25, 1994

 

Nino Ricci is arguably the best known young Canadian writer to have appeared in the last few years. He wrote the critically acclaimed and internationally successful Lives of the Saints (1990). It was to be the first book in a trilogy focusing on the life of a young Italian boy named Vittorio Innocente living in a small village in post-war Italy.

Ricci won the Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, as well as the Smith­books/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the G. F. Bres­sani Award for his first book.

The second book, In a Glass House, followed Vittorio as he em­igrated to an inhospitable new land and extended family in Canada’s Ontario farmland. The third book of the trilogy, as yet unfinished, will feature Vittorio, as an adult, returning to his village, Valle del Sole.

MA:    In a previous interview you had stated “. . . one of the rea­sons I wanted to start the trilogy in Italy was to give readers a sense of people within a community where they are not marginalized as ethnic . . . and I wanted my readers to be able to enter that community and see the strangeness of that label—eth­nic—for someone who is living it from the inside.” Why was this an important issue for you to tackle?

NR:     I think partly it was important for me as a writer to enter into the material in that way in order to de-ethnicize my own thinking about some of these issues. When I first came to writing I think I was reluctant to deal with Italian themes or with themes of my own background because they seemed somehow un­literary or not the right material for a writer. And, I think, also, I had a fear of being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer.

MA:    What are your concerns with that label? And a lot of writers have a concern about it.

NR:     The whole discussion of ethnicity has undergone a lot of transformation in the past ten years or so. But certainly when I was growing up and when I was studying, I guess, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I think the perception was still that ‘ethnic’ was more of a derogatory or a negative label . . .

MA:    That it’s a kind of ghetto for writers?

NR:     . . . That if you were writing out of an ethnic background, you were sort of a specialist writer. You were appealing only to the ethnic group that you wrote out of, that you couldn’t have a wider appeal. That, yes, that you would be ghettoized as a writer. But also that it was somehow substandard, that ethnic writing would be quaint. These were all . . . these were not neces­sarily conscious or stated stereotypes.

MA:    But why do you think that you felt this way as a writer and as a reader? Do you feel that was something that was incul­cated in you in our educational system, that somehow, unless you tackle the themes that were non-ethnic or more universal in per­spective, that you would be somehow operating on a level that was not on the highest literary level?

NR:     It’s a good question. I don’t know. I can’t point to a profes­sor who said something that lead me to believe that. Part of it, I think, was just in growing up, you would get these messages by osmosis. When I was a child, I had a sense that being Italian or to be ethnic was to be apart, to be different, to be outside of. I wouldn’t have used the word mainstream as a child and yet I had a sense, a vision that there was some mainstream that I was outside of. Some real culture or some place where people under­stood everything that was happening and did things in the right way, that we were on the outside of because we had funny clothes, we had funny food . . .

MA:    But that’s interesting, because I think both Lives of the Saints and In a Glass House are about marginalization and about people who are, to a certain extent, socially isolated. Would you agree with that description?

NR:     Yes, yes, definitely. Certainly that comes out of my own ethnic and immigrant background. But I think it’s also a tradi­tional theme for writers everywhere and in every situation. I think that typically the writer, or the person representing the writer, or the person who most closely has the writer’s point of view, is the outsider. They’re the people who see things that aren’t necessarily part of them. . . . There’s a sort of inevitabil­ity in that theme. But, a lot of it, in my own experience, came out of being ethnic, being outside.

MA:    And the third book, is that going to continue with the themes that were expressed of marginalization in the first two books? I understand the setting is going to be again Valle del Sole in the third book. Is that correct?

NR:     Yes. About half of it takes place in Canada, a little over half in Canada and the rest in Italy, in the same village, about twenty years after the first book.

MA:    Can you tell me a little about the third book?

NR:     Gee, I wish I could.

MA:    Are you very early in the process?

NR:     Well . . . no. Yes and no. I know what’s going to happen. I have it written out. I have a couple of drafts of it done and I’m working on what I hope is the, not necessarily the final draft, but a fairly finished draft. The story is quite . . .

MA:    We want to know what happens to Vittorio! [laughter]

NR:     The second was quite different from the first and this one is different again. It follows chronologically, with the narrator in his twenties and living in Toronto with his half sister. . . and it deals with the relationship he develops with his half sister Rita and that’s sort of the focus of the book. It ties into his return to his home town. So part of the book is, I mean I hate to put it in these terms, but the old ‘exploration of roots or attempt to return to roots.’ Part of it is that very simple story: you leave a place, you long for it, you go back and you find that it’s not what you thought it was.

MA:    Like many immigrants.

NR:     Yes, like many immigrant stories and like the whole mythic structure of Western civilization. [laughs] It’s basically that same story in [a] different form, the fall from Eden and the attempt to get back to it.

MA:    Is there a target date for when it’ll be published and who is going to be publishing it? Is that confirmed at this time?

NR:     No. Not at all.

MA:    Anthony Tamburri has written, and I think I have some idea what you think of this issue but I’d like to speak to you about it, that the hyphen in the term “Italian-American” repre­sents “the reluctance of the dominant culture to accept newcom­ers.” Would you agree and how do you feel about that term, Ital­ian-Canadian?

NR:     Well, it’s not a term that I use, in relation to myself, ex­cept . . . when I’m forced to. [laughs] I mean it’s not a term that I use in my mind. It’s not an internal category.

MA:    But do you feel that this is something that is thrust upon you? Because in a way, you’ve become this sort of cultural icon for the Italian-Canadian community whether you are comfortable with it or not. It’s sort of been forced on you.

NR:     Well, yes.

MA:    You’re a writer that’s ‘done good.’ He’s won all these awards. He’s become internationally known.

NR:     I mean the world does that to everybody. You’re always pegged in some way. That’s how ethnic groups tend to get pegged. I think there are a lot of things happening in that kind of peg­ging. Partly yes, it’s a setting aside. ‘They’re outside. They’re not quite us, they’re a little different. They don’t quite fit.’ Nowa­days, there’s also a sort of reversal of the hierarchy. ‘Oh, they have an ethnic background, isn’t that great? They’re more rich [culturally].’ So it also works in that way. It’s still a sort of posi­tioning of us and them, or of oneself and the other.

MA:    But I sense with you that you’re just not comfortable with it, with this categorization and I guess it’s because . . . I guess it’s second-generation Italian Canadians who, at some point, we try so hard to fit in, especially as children, to be comfortable within the mainstream. And it always feels like we’re sort of being shunted aside or having this label attached to us, whether we ask for it or not, whether we consciously want it or not. I sense that kind of ambivalence with you but I don’t know if that’s ac­curate.

NR:     Yeah, I mean I think that’s part of it. Although I would­n’t say that I even thought about the term much until I became a writer. [laughs] That’s when it started being applied to me most. But beyond that, I think the thing that I don’t like about it is that it’s inaccurate. It purports to be an explanation of a person. It’s always going to be partial. It’s always going to be. . . . In­evitably, it will carry along certain stereotypes or certain pre­conceptions that are not necessarily correct. Within that label Italian-Canadian, you’ll find a vast diversity of people. And yet from an outside perspective, it serves as an explaining label that sort of suggests that there’s some sort of homogeneity in that group, that isn’t necessarily there.

MA:    Well, how would you define yourself then? Or is it some­thing that you even think about?

NR:     I think about it but I would never find a single word to do it. [laughter] I hope not anyway.

MA:    Okay, I’ll let you off the hook then!

NR:     Well, no, I mean, just to explain a bit. I think that any person is the sum of so many different forces. I grew up in an Ital­ian family but I watched American TV. I went to a Canadian Catholic school which is much different than, say, an Italian Catholic school. I grew up in Canada but also in Southwestern Ontario. All those things went into forming who I am and for ev­ery person it’ll be the same. They’ll be so many different forces, so then to try and then summarize a person with that kind of a label. . . . There’s a certain usefulness in it, at least, okay, it gives you some sense of where they may have come out of. But as soon as it becomes some sort of defining [of a person] or a way of defining the essence of a person then it inevitably distorts.

MA:    But I think there’s a tendency with Italian Canadians that if you consciously avoid that designation,”Italian-Cana­dian,” that it, somehow, is an indication of a sense of shame about your Italian roots as opposed to the reason that you’ve given, which is a very valid reason and there are many writers and many Italian Canadians who feel the same way.

NR:     I can see how that comes about. Certainly, I went through a period of shame about my Italian background. Probably, that has made me, in some ways, more resistant to the label, not be­cause of residual shame, but because I went through a different kind of personality development as a result of that shame then. Where I may have become more something else in an attempt to distance myself from that background and for better or worse, that’s who I became. I don’t think now there’s any shame in not wanting to use that label.

MA:    Isn’t part of it too that . . . because you may be concerned that you don’t want to be locked into a stereotype that doesn’t represent you? For instance, I can see from your work that you def­initely have a consciousness about race and you seem to be politi­cally active. You’re very active in the literary and the cultural community and that’s sort of at odds with the stereotype of what an Italian Canadian is. ‘We’re ethnocentric. We stick to our own. We don’t really mix with other kinds.’ And I think, sometimes, there’s that concern as well that ‘I don’t want to be known as someone [having] all those negative attributes that are attached to the [label] . . . ’

NR:     Yes . . . well, I think that part of that is that, if you insist too strongly on that label, in essence, you’re still distorting your­self because you’re trumpeting that aspect of yourself perhaps more strongly than is a true reflection of who you are. If you are an Italian in Italy, you don’t have to go around saying you’re Italian to everybody.

MA:    Yes.

NR:     So you join a human rights organization. You may be a peasant or you may be an engineer. You may like your neighbors or not like them. You may hang out with other Italians or with foreigners. Your whole sense of self-definition would not be con­stricted by that cultural or ethnic label . . .

MA:    . . . the way it is in Canada.

NR:     Yes. When you’re ethnic here, there’s more of that dis­torting pressure, I think, to conform to your own group’s stereotype of itself, not only of the outside’s stereotype.

MA:    Well, one of the things that is customarily said about Southern Italians is that they have a tremendous sense of fatal­ism and melancholy which I think is true of your work. [laughs] They are very melancholic books, in a beautiful way, but they are very sad. When I think of the things that happen: Christina dies after giving birth; she’s had a fairly difficult life; she’s been pretty well persecuted by the villagers; Vittorio struggles in Italy, struggles in Canada. In the second book, his father dies. Would you agree that this is, first of all, this is part of our tem­perament and that there’s a streak of it in your work?

NR:     Well, there’s a streak of it in my work. I can’t deny that. In terms of it going back to Southern Italian ways . . .

MA:    Do you think it has a historical [basis]?

NR:     I think it does. Perhaps not reflected in every individual or on that level but, yes, in a broader sense. It’s been the history of that area, [it] has been one of toil and hardship and impotence until quite recently. So inevitably that will come out in the character of a people. So, I can only say . . . Yes! [laughter]

MA:    I think we had touched on this in an earlier question but . . . Vittorio, to me, obviously displays a great deal of shame. Even though Vittorio is born in Italy and comes here when he’s seven, that seems to me that that’s the kind of shame that a lot of second-generation Italian Canadians feel that come from sort of humble backgrounds. That’s a feeling that is familiar to me as well. Is this what Vittorio was experiencing, the sort of insecu­rity of the child of the immigrant? Does that represent what Vittorio was about in the second book when he moved to the farmland [in Canada]?

NR:     Sure . . . I think that’s certainly a part of it, a large part of it. The situation is exacerbated because he has the double shame of his mother’s crimes . . .

MA:    Am I overemphasizing that, the ambivalent feelings about being an immigrant or is it more a question of the fictional elements of the story [which account for Vittorio’s insecurity]? His mother had just died. He’s got this sister who was fathered by a man other than his father. Am I putting too much emphasis on that [immigrant experience]?

NR:     I don’t know how much I would weigh the two factors. But they’re all important in the psychology and the difficulty that he has. I think he probably has a harder time than most because the normal problems of adjustment are compounded by this legacy of shame that he already brought with him.

MA:    But there’s also, too, a tremendous amount of emotional ambivalence and rebelliousness in the characters. And, it seems to me, even in those situations where Vittorio is being assisted by someone, someone displays a kindness to him, he’s got these very conflicted feelings. He’s almost angry. [There’s] the kind teacher in Italy, the teacher in Canada who shows him a certain amount of kindness and favoritism. [There’s] his almost hostile relation­ship with Fabrizio who he pretty well abandons in a moment of crisis, allows him to be beaten up by his schoolmates. Where am I going with this? . . . [laughs]

NR:     Why is he such a creep? [laughter]

MA:    No, no it’s not that he’s a creep but it seems to me that that character doesn’t feel that he is worth the love and the kindness that is being extended to him.

NR:     Yes.

MA:    And there’s a lot of that, I think, in the book, or in both books actually.

NR:     Yes, it is in both. It’s sort of stronger or heavier in the sec­ond but I think that’s a good point that [here’s] someone who’s lacking in self-worth and therefore anyone who bestows any at­tention on him must also be flawed in some way or another, must not be anymore worthy than he is.

MA:    But it seems too that the men . . . are by turns inept, brutal, unkind, cruel. The women, at least you have Christina, she’s brave, she’s beautiful. You’ve got the teachers who are kind. You’ve got Rita, who’s a very strong, independent character but definitely, the men are very reprehensible in many instances. But I had read that you had consciously wanted to challenge the stereotype that Italian women in villages were not strong. Could you comment a little further on that? Do you remember that quote?

NR:     Yes. I think that anyone who has any experience with Italian culture, Southern Italian culture, would immediately see that that’s not true. Certainly, in my own experience, in terms of aunts and other relatives, my experience was of strong women. There were often parameters to that strength or to their power. There were lines, often, that they would not step beyond. But within those parameters, they exercised a lot of power, a lot of will.

MA:    Why do you think the stereotype exists? Because it’s very prevalent that Italian women are dominated by men, first of all by their partners and [by] their families. And yet we know that there are many, many instances where they are the center of power in that family.

NR:     Well, I think, partly because of the strong family struc­ture and as I said, I think that the women do tend to stay within those lines. Not so much now, but certainly in more traditional cultures. The woman will be powerful in that sphere but she won’t leave home and get a job. She won’t step completely out­side that system or not often and so from the outside it seems like a fairly traditional family structure. And also, often, I think, [in] one study that I saw, there was evidence of a fair amount of misogyny in Southern Italian culture and again from the outside that misogyny would seem to reinforce the idea of women as op­pressed. Although when you analyze it more closely, often the source of that misogyny was the impotence of men. It was the fact that often they had to leave home for months at a time to get work. They had no control of their women when they were away and the women tended to rule the household as the result, simply by virtue of the fact that the men were absent and the men were very afraid that the women would betray them, would sleep with someone else, or whatever. And that, you know, in some ways, was the source a lot of misogyny and yet from the outside, what you just see are the trappings of an oppressive, patriarchal order. You don’t necessarily see the power that the women have over men.

MA:    Well, to me, Christina and Rita represent feminist hero­ines because [for instance] Christina’s incredibly strong. She’s the one who defies the villagers; she’s the one who takes care of her father when he breaks his leg; she’s going to make sure that he gets medical attention; she arranges to go to America. And eventually when she passes away, in some ways, it might be per­ceived as retribution for her adultery. That’s not my take on it, but it might be perceived in the same way that Flaubert kills off Emma Bovary with the arsenic. But she and Rita seem to me to be part of a strong feminist subtext throughout the work. I don’t know if that’s your slant on things or how you feel about the rep­resentation of women.

NR:     No, I was fairly conscious of that when I was writing the book and when I was working on the trilogy but not in a program­matic, strictly ideological way. I mean I wanted Christina to be this incredible character. I didn’t want her to be a feminist avant lettre. She didn’t read any of the French theorists and if she had, she would have thought it was all bullshit. [laughter]

MA:    Right. That’s my take on it as well, that’s my take on Christina as well.

NR:     But, [she was] acting from a very individualistic stance. She looks around and thinks ‘Well, some of this is crap. Some of what goes on here I don’t like’ and acts from that very personal base. And that doesn’t make her someone who will have rea­soned out the equality of the sexes and the way which sexism is entrenched in society, but it makes her someone who has re­sponded to immediate examples of that sort of oppression.

MA:    But why is it important for you to have a character like that? I can’t really think of someone with an equal amount of passion and rebelliousness who exists in modern Canadian litera­ture who comes from such a restrictive background. For me she stands alone, now that might be my ignorance.

NR:     Well, Margaret Atwood points out that usually strong women get killed off in the end.

MA:    But it’s true. [laughter] It’s true.

NR:     It’s true.

MA:    It’s like society has no way of viewing them or reconciling them into the culture. So they’re . . . out!

NR:     They’re out. There’s just no place for them. I was aware of that when I wrote this book.

MA:    Was it conscious on your part? I guess that’s where I’m leading to with this question, that you wanted to develop a very strong female character. Did you know how it would end? That’s always something I’m curious about with the writer, does he know that Christina is going to die at the end of the book?

NR:     Yes. I did know that. That’s where I started from. In fact, I started from the third book and worked back through my own thinking. So I knew the whole story and I knew that she had to die [laughs] for the next two books to happen or that was what I wanted to happen, that was the ending that I saw.

MA:    But, I think, part of the thing that people missed in In A Glass House was Christina. Has that been expressed to you be­fore that they desperately wanted her presence, her rebellious­ness and her passions? I guess, because, what Vittorio goes through is so unrelentingly dismal for him. He has such a hard time in Canada. He is really struggling and he’s almost strug­gling completely alone. You’ve got Rita [his half-sister] who is dealing with her own battles and her own difficulties and the father is isolated and lonely and, perhaps, mentally disturbed and there’s no haven for [Vittorio] in a way. He seems so com­pletely lost and directionless. I think, in the first book . . . I loved the whole sort of magical perspective of the child. He was viewing things always in sort of a fantastic way because he has no sort of rational, logical way to explain the things [that happened]. In the second book, because he’s growing up, that’s lost. I was wondering if it was more difficult to write from the perspective of Vittorio in the second book because the magic is gone? The fantastic take on things has disappeared and he’s just stuck with reality.

NR:     Yes, it was more difficult. The point of the book is what happens when that magic is gone [laughs] so I had to deal with that issue and I was stuck with a certain world view. It was much harder for me to work it out than with the first book.

MA:    Wasn’t there also a certain amount of . . . it would seem to me, a tremendous amount of pressure after Lives of the Saints be­cause it seemed to come out of nowhere and it won a number of prizes, highly critically acclaimed. There must have been pres­sure in writing the second book that would be a follow up to the first book. Did you feel that kind of pressure or did you just sort of say ‘Oh!’. . . ? [shrugs]

NR:     Yes, I do.

MA:    You feel that pressure . . . and have you found it difficult in proceeding with the second and third book?

NR:     Yes and no. I was well into the second book when the first one came out so, in a sense, it was a moot point. I had already de­termined the course of it and I just continued in the vein that I’d been going so, in that sense, it didn’t really affect the writing of the book tremendously. The other thing was . . . I think that [with] anything . . . you only have one pure book. It’s your first book. [laughs] No matter what happens, that is it. After that your innocence is gone. If the book is well received and there’s the pressure etc. If the book is badly received and there’s the pres­sure etc. If the book is mediocrely received—Anyway it goes, it’s going to affect you. At least, if it goes well, you can say, ‘Well, I’ve been validated as a writer. People believe that I’m not wasting my time doing this.’ My parents don’t bother me anymore about my writing. [laughter]

MA:    Does the acclaim assist you or does it just get in the way? Does it make it easier to write or does it just create this sort of anxiety?. . . ‘Oh no, now I have to live up to tremendous praise.’

NR:     Again . . . The level of praise that you get in the public world is pretty superficial. [laughs]

MA:    So it doesn’t affect you.

NR:     Once you realize that . . . you get a great review and you say ‘Wow! This is great!’ then you read the review and it doesn’t even look like they even read the book. As you were saying be­fore, even a rave review often seems wide of the mark or is ninety percent plot summary and maybe a few comments and it all occurs on a pretty superficial level. Not that it’s not true, in whatever sense you want the word to mean, but it’s not . . .

MA:    It sounds like you approach it with a certain amount of skepticism.

NR:     There’s a fickleness to it.

MA:    That sounds like a healthy attitude for a writer.

NR:     There’s always an extent to which success breeds more suc­cess and then you get people regarding you as a wonderful writer who’ve never read a word that you’ve written. But you’re getting all that level of positive stroking that is not necessarily con­nected to your work. There are only a very few lines that lead di­rectly back to your work.

MA:    But you seem like a very private person and it seems to me that that would be very disruptive for you, having people prais­ing your work or being very positive towards you when you know they haven’t read your work. It must be . . .

NR:     Well, again, I spend most of my time at home alone. I don’t have a job. I don’t have that sort of regular contact with the world. My contacts with the world, apart from being with friends, are when I go out to do readings or when I’m out there as a writer and . . . I don’t mind having that connection with the world. It’s sort of a very distorted way of dealing with the world but at least it’s something. [laughs]

MA:    Do you have much contact with first-generation immi­grants that have read your work? I’m trying to get a fix of who exactly is reading the book. I think there are a lot of people my generation, second generation, but I’m just wondering . . .

NR:     Some. They tend to be people who came over when they were young. I’ve had a lot of people who came over when they were between five and fifteen or whatever who have read the book and commented on it.

MA:    How do they respond?

NR:     To both books, they respond quite favorably. [To] the first book, almost as a sort of exercise in nostalgia and the recreation of that past for them and [to] the second as a . . . ‘cause often it speaks to their own difficulties and own problems to adjusting when they came to Canada. But in terms of older, first-genera­tion people, I don’t think many of them read English. That’s my sense. Certainly in my own town [Villacanale, Molise] there have been some people who have read it. But even close rela­tives of mine haven’t read it because they can read some English but to actually sit down and read a book . . .

MA:    It would be difficult.

NR:     Yes.

MA:    I just wanted to ask you about a quote in Lives of the Saints where Vittorio says: “. . . as if my mother’s slap had not been a punishment at all but part of some sin or crime we’d committed together, and which had gone undetected.” And I perceived this to refer to the incestuousness of Southern Italian village life where all the members of a family are condemned when one is seen to err or to sin, as if it was a kind of disease that was being communicated. Would you agree that that’s an accurate interpre­tation of what happened to Vittorio and certainly, I think, [to] the father in the first book?

NR:     Yes, I think that’s a very accurate part of the family dy­namic of Southern Italians and it probably extends more broadly than that in the sense that the family has a single face. And that you need to keep . . . right . . . and that you have disputes within the family but you don’t let them show outside of the family. Once that wall is broken then you’re sort of perpetually shamed. . . . In In a Glass House it results in a strengthening of the siege mentality but at the same time, [there’s] always the sense of judgment of the outside.

MA:    What do you think is the source of that type of behavior? Is it just merely the nature of village life? Is it l’invidia? Is it the combination of a lack of education, sophistication? Is it just because when you live in a small town everyone knows your busi­ness and everybody feels called upon to interfere or have an opin­ion. Is it something that’s particular to our temperament as Ital­ians? To be judgmental, to be . . .

NR:     No, I really think it’s a quality that extends across the spectrum. I think it’s true, in greater or lesser degrees, in peasant families, in very rich families, in Canada, [in] Hungary. I don’t think it is particular to Italian culture or even to village culture. I think it tends to be [that] you see it in a purer form in village culture, in a more exaggerated form because they’re not other competing value systems that question that way of being. You build up this system over centuries and that’s just the way it is; whereas, in the wider world there are all sorts of other possible value systems to see yourself from. I don’t know, I think it’s partly . . . boredom. [laughter]

MA:    That’s very possible.

NR:     That drives a lot of it. You need some excitement in your life . . . and that excitement is ‘What’s the neighbor doing? What did the neighbor’s son do yesterday? What new scandal can we uncover that will give us some excitement?’

MA:    I think that has a great deal of validity actually.

NR:     And it’s a form of self protection also. If so-and-so has committed a scandal then that sort of exonerates me for, maybe, at some point having done something wrong.

MA:    I wanted to read you another quote where Vittorio speaks of his grandfather. He says, “My grandfather used to joke that he had taken an African bride, and that somewhere now I had a brood of creamy brown cousins who prayed in African but swore in Italian.” Now, this is a bit of a leap but . . . it seems to me that many Southern Italian-Canadians [are] attempting to create a cultural or emotional bridge with people of color. That we want to acknowledge what is obvious, but is not positively acknowl­edged. It’s a racial heritage that we share with African people both as colonizers and as a people which have been colonized many times. Is this one of your objectives, as a writer, to build a kind of bridge? I know I’m making a leap with that one little quote but it seemed to me to display a certain level of sensitivity.

NR:     Well, actually, in earlier versions of the trilogy, that whole motif was going to be developed much more extensively and in various ways. Partly sort of dealing with the stereotype of Africa both as the place of darkness and also the place of par­adise, the standard dichotomy about Africa but also yes, to try and force some of those connections that you’re talking about. In the second book, the character does actually go to Africa and teaches there and often when he’s there, at one point, he says that often he felt more like one of them than one of us. That [was] partly because of his own experience of marginalization and be­ing an immigrant and also of coming from a town that was not that different from the town he was now in, in Africa. The condi­tions in some way, the same sort of mentality, the traditions, the open market, some of the architecture, that he felt more of an affinity for those people than for the whites that he was part of.

MA:    But yet, we as a people, despite these obvious similari­ties. . . . Even if you look at Sicily, it’s almost a bridge towards Africa, a geographic bridge towards Africa. We, as a community, and I don’t want to lump everybody into the same category, but there is a tremendous amount of resistance to acknowledging that part of our racial history and a tremendous amount of racism in the community . . .

NR:     Yes.

MA:    . . . [There’s] a desire to set ourselves apart. On the one hand, we’re sort of stereotyped and denigrated by Northerners with phrases like “Africa starts at Naples” and [the idea] that we’re all basically one step away from being African ourselves and yet we don’t use that as a way of building ties with the [Black] community. We use it as a source of shame about being dark skinned or curly haired or having African features.

NR:     I think that just because someone is discriminated against does not mean that they’re going to be sensitive to discrimina­tion.

MA:    Yes, that’s true.

NR:     I think that often the reverse is true, that when you’re discriminated against, you learn discrimination and therefore you find the person ‘below’ who you’re going to discriminate against. I think that happens a lot in Canada. If you go into the Kensington Market here, for instance, a friend of mine once pointed out to me all the different tensions that she noticed, like how the Chinese treated the Blacks, and how the Blacks treated the Portuguese, and there are all these sort of internal rivalries and tensions between these groups that from the outside you say ‘Oh wonderful multicultural market!’ But on the inside, there’s a very clear sense of who they are and how different they are from everyone else.

MA:    Yes, very much so and even amongst Italians themselves.

NR:     Yes. yes. Northern Italians, Sicilians . . .

MA:    Urban versus rural, working class versus middle class . . .

NR:     Or here in this neighborhood, for instance, I found that, again from the outside, Italian and Portuguese are fairly similar cultures and yet . . .

MA:    . . . they hate each other! [laughter]

NR:     There are a number of instances where there are very strong antipathies.

MA:    It’s interesting because to a white racist, he would just lump us all together: Italians, Portuguese, what’s the difference? But there’s just so much animosity between the two groups that it’s unfortunate.

NR:     It makes me think sometimes of the “Life of Brian,” that Monty Python film, with the various sorts of Christian groups and there are all these little splinter groups and splinters of splinters and often it’s the groups that are most closely aligned that are the most vehement enemies.

MA:    Eastern Europe is a good example of that. It appeared to me that there was a lot of overt religious symbolism in Lives of the Saints. Christina’s life clearly mirrors the travails of her Christian namesake; she’s bitten by the snake after she commits adultery and obviously snakes have a certain symbolic connota­tion in Christianity; Fabrizio likens his father’s whipping of himself to that which Christ received; and, the virgin birth of Christ described by Father Nicola [is described] in ways that are somewhat similar to the hardships of Christina’s pregnancy. What is the value of Catholicism in your work or was it merely a construct from which you were working to develop Lives of the Saints?

NR:     Well, it was partly a construct but a very important one, in that, it partakes of many of the major narratives of Western cul­ture; therefore, [it] informs, in a very profound way, I think, the way we think about reality even if we are not overtly religious. Certainly, stories or certain myths that come out of the Catholic Christian tradition have formed the way we think about the world. One of the things I was trying to do was examine how be­ing immersed in that world, how that shapes the imagination in Vittorio for instance, and how it shapes the kinds of parallels and metaphors that people have experienced that you would use. So in a sense, Vittorio is looking for the right metaphor for his mother, that’s not to mean he’s doing it consciously but also kind of what the narrative is doing. Is it the Garden of Eden? The Fall from Eden? Is it Mother Mary? Is it Mary Magdelen? Is it Christ? Is it Santa Christina? And I think we all do this in our own lives as well. We’re always looking for what story we fit into. Where is our life going? What models are we living out? So it’s an examination of religion at that level, how does it inform the way we look at our own experiences?

MA:    And did that inform the names that you chose as well be­cause it seemed that the names very clearly represented, for me, religious symbols: Vittorio Innocente, Darcangelo, and [moving] away from the overt religious theme but [referring] to the overt symbolism: Rocca Secca, Valle de Sole which is anything but a Valley of Sun for the people there sometimes; Vincenzo and Maria Maiale, they sort of epitomized the characteristics that they displayed.

NR:     Yes, all the names were chosen fairly consciously to have some significance. One of the nice things about Italian is that you can do that because generally names do tend to have some mean­ing much more so than in English, say, like Rocca Secca really ex­ists as a town. Valle del Sole was actually the nickname of my mother’s village.

MA:    Villacanale?

NR:     Yes, and I think someone came to me at some point and said ‘Oh, I came from Valle del Sole’ so there actually was a vil­lage somewhere in Abruzzo that was named Valle del Sole. So even though the names were chosen for me to have those connota­tions they also reflect, in many cases, fairly accurately, the ac­tual sort of meaningfulness of Italian names.

MA:    What was your reception [like] in Villacanale? I know you’ve been back. How do they respond to you? Have they read your books?

NR:     They haven’t read it. There was nobody in the village that I was aware of that had actually read the book. They did receive me well. I still have relatives there. The village had a little reception for me which was quite interesting. They’ll have a reception at the drop of a hat! [laughter] I think it was one of three that they had that week. But nonetheless, it was quite nice. They set up a little stage and they had several speakers come in, none of whom had read the book at all, but all of whom commented on it at some length [laughter] in a quite interesting way. There was a local historian from a nearby town who, I guess, had heard a synopsis of the book and was commenting on snake symbolism and went into this long, obscure analysis of snake symbolism in Buddhist theology [laughter] and would keep looking at me, ‘Did I get it right?’ They understand that there’s been some sort of external success around this and they like to praise that. In terms of the actual content of the book, since they haven’t read it . . . I don’t know how they’d react. There were a lot of people in the region who had read it, not in the village, and on the whole, the reaction was fairly positive. Although I did hear that some people thought, ‘Oh no, that’s just a perpetuation of the stereotype of the superstitious. . . .’

MA:    The villagers themselves thought that . . . or Italians?

NR:     It was at a school in Campobasso, in a fairly large center, where some of the teachers were teaching the book, I guess, in an English class and some of the teachers felt that way. They didn’t say this to me, I just sort of gathered this through the grapevine.

MA:    From what I’ve heard, there’s been an overwhelmingly positive response. Have you had Italian people say to you these people are stereotypic and you’re showing the sort of brutality of this sort of life and it’s not fair. It doesn’t represent us or things have changed and it’s no longer like that. Or has it been gener­ally positive for you?

NR:     Well, it was only in this one instance that I got that sort of feedback. It’s hard to tell. But certainly Italians here won’t comment that way because they don’t live there anymore and so they don’t feel implicated in the same way. People from the re­gion itself are still sensitive about how they’re portrayed to out­siders so I think there was some of that then, but it’s hard for me to gauge because people won’t come up to my face and tell me that on the whole. . . .

MA:    They’re more likely to do things behind your back. [laughter] But your writing . . . is it a mystery for your family? I think sometimes they’re a little bit removed from what we do because they don’t usually read English for one thing. Is it a mys­terious process? I know you said one time that your father had read your book.

NR:     Yes, I think my mother read it first and I think she’s read the second one. I’m not sure if my father’s read the second one. I think it’s a bit of a mystery. Certainly, initially . . . before I published anything, it was a big mystery. ‘What’s Nino doing now?’ [laughter] ‘Isn’t he finished school yet?’

MA:    [mystified] ‘He’s still in school?’ [laughter]

NR:     And it’s something fairly removed from their experience. They have [a] grade five education. They don’t read. My mother actually does read occasionally now. She’ll read in Italian and English but certainly not my father so, I think, it was difficult for them to grasp what it was that I was about. And even now I think it’s more . . . they understand that it’s something the world values. If my first book had been a big failure, they might still be asking me those questions. ‘What are you doing? When are you going to get a job?’ [laughter]

MA:    What’s in store for you? You’re going to obviously continue with your third book.

NR:     You make it sound like I have a future. [laughter] I don’t know. I’m going to finish the third book. I’ve three other books, I have four other books, I have five other books. . . . Three of the them are sort of related, actually four of them are sort of related. They’re not linked in terms of stories . . .

MA:    These are fictional works as well?

NR:     Yes, so I have them, as one always does, I have them very clearly mapped out in my head so if only I could sit down to do them they would just write themselves.