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Why
I Took Back My Name When I was a young
woman, my friends and I were in love with love. We loved movies starring Rock
Hudson and Doris Day, their romances that always ended in marriage, though
they never showed anything except the marriage itself or the proposal after
numerous misunderstandings between the lovers. The plot was always the same.
When the honeymoon was portrayed, the female lead would be wearing a filmy
white peignoir and having breakfast in bed on a tray with a vase on it with
one rose and a silver teapot and a china cup. When I was a young
woman my name was a long Italian name awkward with Z’s and T’s, a name that
no one could say even when we tried to make it sound American. Every time
someone would ask me my name, I’d cringe and say it in a whisper and spell it
out carefully though they never would get it right so I would have to spell
it out four or five times. When I was of grammar school age, I was Maria at
home when my mother spoke to me, Mary to my sister and friends. To my pen
pals I called myself Rie or Ria and in high school I decided I could be
Marie until I realized that Marie sounded vulgar and cheap and I reluctantly
went back to Maria but that wasn’t until I was in my 20s and everyone still
called me by whatever name they had known first. I tried to rub out my
foreignness, had my mass of curly, wiry hair thinned constantly, tried to
have it shaped into order, made up stories to tell friends about my family
and where we lived and seldom invited anyone home. The truth is I could have
called myself anything I wanted, I still looked dark and foreign, but I
tried. I bought preppy clothes, plain wool skirts and soft lambskin sweaters
and oxford cloth skirts in pastel colors and crew necked sweaters and penny
loafers. I bought make-up to lighten my skin, erase to remove the dark
circles under my eyes, and finally went to a plastic surgeon to have my big
Italian nose altered to look smaller, less obtrusive, but could not stop
being shy around anyone who was not Italian, could not make myself forget the
high school teacher who looked at me and said “Anyone who speaks another
language at home and thinks in that language will score 100 points lower on
SAT tests than people who do not.” I practiced thinking in English, practiced
erasing those Italian words that filled my mind. When I married, I
chose a man with blond hair and blue eyes, a handsome man who lived in a
white colonial house in an upper-middle class town. His parents went to
college and his father was an executive with a shipping company; he had an
Irish last name. To me, these people, four generations removed from Ireland,
were American, and I thought I was being transformed, lifted up and away from
my own Italian self. In my writing I was
always Italian, wrote poems about my father and even won contests with these
poems in 1969 and 1972, but I was conventional. I thought that a wife took
her husband’s name and kept it. It was years before I realized that I just
wanted to erase that long difficult Italian name and take on this new one
that everyone could say. In 1985 when an
anthology of Italian-American women writers, The Dream Book, edited by Helen Barolini, was published, and I
saw my name—Maria Mazziotti Gillan—spelled out and saw it in a review in the New York Times where they used my name
and quoted 14 lines of my poem, I was proud. Then a man with whom I had gone
to college called me up and asked me if I was the same Maria Mazziotti who
went to Seton Hall University and I said yes. In that moment the idea of taking
back my name surfaced. At first I started using it tentatively, fearing that
people would forget who I was, that changing my name would cause people to be
confused by the introduction of that middle name, but gradually, I used it
more and more, and with the encouragement of my publisher Stanley Barkan, I
put that name on everything that I published including my third book, The Weather of Old Seasons. Later I
even wrote a chapbook published by malafemmina
press called Taking Back My Name
which placed together the poems I had written over the last twenty-five years
about my ethnicity. It included the poem “Betrayals” that was published first
in 1972 but which was written originally in 1969 and worked on between 1969
and 1972. It also included new poems from 1990 and 1991, and many poems from
the early to the end of the eighties. My consciousness of
the necessity to take back my name, however, grew as I began to be ashamed
of my own attempt at erasing myself, my own attempt to deny what I was, and
to try to be “white.” If I had looked American—that to me meant being blonde
and blue-eyed and middle class, even if I had an Italian name, I would not
have felt the need to deny what I am, to cover up my Italianness under a name
I thought was American. Since my married name was Irish, I had only made a
small step up the ladder to American-ness, my blond, blue-eyed husband
producing light-haired children and grandchildren, children who could pass.
In yearning for this ability to pass, I see that I am similar to people from
many ethnic and racial groups where individuals yearn to take on the
trappings of a “typical American” and to be received by others as such, to
blend into the mainstream of a society where all differences are erased. Of
course, in passing, in allowing the erasure, we lose ourselves but I wanted
so desperately to be accepted that I was willing to endure erasure. Being
considered “ethnic” also has a lot to do with class. Because my father was a
janitor and not a lawyer, because we lived in the ghetto and not the suburbs,
my outsiderness was doubly insured. I did not have the “class training” to
cover over my ethnicity. Besides, even if I tried, my frizzy hair and olive
skin would always give me away. Only gradually did I realize that no matter
what my name, I still looked too Italian, too foreign, to pass. I learned
that it didn’t matter if I changed my name or not. I didn’t ever have the
luxury of “passing” because other people always picked me out as foreign, as
un-American. “What are you?” people ask me, and when asked I always said
“Italian.” When I went to Italy in June 1977, I discovered I was not Italian
but American and back in the United States I found I was not American either
but some hybrid creature, neither fully American nor fully Italian, but
something else. In recognizing the truth, I had to try to embrace, what I had
always denied, and I did so with a vengeance. If you look like an Italian and
sound like one and think like one, you are one, and no amount of pretending
was going to change that and suddenly I was glad. Passaic
County Community College |