From ALWAYS ELSEWHERE
LIVING IN MANY LANGUAGES
I don’t know
who-I-am-any-more
This fact strikes out
like a flash burning deep in the flesh
I want to know
how-others-see-me
this gathered crowd
scattered around the platform
in the
broken
pattern
of a flock
of birds
‘cause I don’t know
who-I-am-again
I’ve come from across the sea
I’ve come from across the miles
(which are still kilometres in my mind)
and I’ve come from a boot-shaped land
of sea-melting-with-sky-sinking-down-into-sea
(all that blue and I wasn’t a bit sad — just mad)
I’ve come through a land
of silent blond skiers
to this Emerald Island.
And now, my feet on this English ground,
I don’t know who-I-am-again
My words freeze now on the page
(too much snow I’ve seen)
turn and twist into this language
with too many breaths and not so sweet. A word, for instance:
BAM-BI-NA
(girl-child)
How can I give the softness of this word, its crumbly texture and its flavour
up
to these people who run and
down
between a Circle and a Central line
trapped inside this cage of
multicoloured tracks?
And so I hold onto
my book-my Travelcard-my Barclaycard my lipstick is an act of self-defense
I can appear as just-one-in-the-crowd but
I am the one who
does-not-know-who-she-is
I must again lead the plough of my pen into new grooves of unknown foreign land, just like a pioneer countryman
but my harvest/conquest
is humble
is nothing
but
my
own
Self
IF BREAD IS THE WORD…
I wrote this poem soon after moving to England, at the end of November 1984. I’d been in love with the English language since I first encountered it in the first year of middle school in my native Italy, when I was about 11: it had been love at first sight, with me quickly becoming the pet student of our very anglophile teacher, il professor Capaldo, who showed up for class in pinstripe suits and bowler hats and an ever-present umbrella under his arm even when the weather did not warrant it. After a while of taking classes, to avoid my crazy and overbearing mother nosying in my affairs, I began to write my journals in English; and from fourteen onwards, I hankered after every tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon boy with a rucksack I spotted wandering the streets of Naples, my hometown, wanting to strike up a conversation with these alluring strangers. I loved English, it was in my mind and my heart, but it wasn’t where I lived yet: the language of my daily life was still Italian, and I had not anticipated the linguistic, not only cultural, shock I was to feel when I finally moved to England.
When one moves to another country, to another culture, displacement takes on not only a socio-cultural aspect—the difficulty of communicating in a new language, the new society’s acceptance or rejection of the immigrant, for instance—but also a tangible one: we encounter new typologies of dwellings, different landscapes, unfamiliar urban topographies. Yet language is as much of a concrete locus of displacement as the concrete in the walls that replaces the bricks, stones, or mud we were accustomed to, or the asphalt under our feet that replaces the pebbles, or loose earth we may have been walking on before. “Lost in translation” is a common phrase used when addressing the discomfort experienced by non-native speakers; but in reality, things are not so much lost in translation when we emigrate as become displaced, just like our physical beings.
Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Task Of the Translator” addresses this displacement,
calling it the “intention” of the language; his example that the word Brot does not mean to a German the same thing as the word pain means to a Frenchman, even though both allude to the same thing —bread—is particularly salient for me, as an Italian who has been transplanting herself to a succession of five countries since the age of 25. Pane in Italy meant loaves of many different shapes and tastes—from the round one of pane casereccio, the wood-oven rustic bread with a crunchy crust and a very spongy sourdough interior, usually made with whole-wheat flour; or the sfilatino, a sort of fatter and shorter French baguette; or the rosetta, a roundish roll with petal-like grooves and a round top resembling a rose bud… And, of course, I was from Naples, so if I’d gone to Milan, or Florence, or Palermo, pane would have meant yet different things in those places: a more Germanic rye bread in Trentino-Alto Adige, a salt-less white bread in Tuscany, or a yellowish bread made with the addition of durum wheat semolina and covered with sesame seeds in Sicily…
But once I moved to Munich, Germany, my first port of emigration after leaving Italy, bread took on a completely different connotation: I discovered a universe of flavors and shapes that was unfamiliar to me, yet my palate took wholly to these dark and dense rye breads studded with caraway seeds: I loved the cake-like pumpernickel, or the vollkornbrot to which a variety of seeds and grains were added. I got so fat in my six months of living in Munich, between daily portions of these dense breads and slices of delicious cheesecakes with various forest berries!
And then, six months later I moved to England: a country that was never a culinary paradise to start with, and where, thanks to the industrial revolution whatever traditional cuisines had existed more or less disappeared, to be replaced by fast food filled with chemicals and preservatives. Fast food, convenience food, all these were unspeakable horrors to me, and the supermarkets in Birmingham, where I lived at first, offered little respite from these: the frozen food aisles were longer than the vegetable and fresh dairy ones. And so began my weekly bus trek to Wolverhampton, a nearby town where a wholesale shop for imported Italian foods was located: here
I bought good quality canned tomatoes, real pasta made with durum wheat—not the Greek stuff sold in supermarkets back then that practically dissolved in the cooking water—and aged Parmigiano Reggiano instead of the abhorrent powder that came out of a sprinkle can and would have been better used for some high school science project.
All these things had names that were either translatable into English or, as in the case of pasta, remained the same in the Italian language: but the Brits’ idea of pasta was certainly not the same as mine, and even less so their idea of bread had any resemblance with my pane: not the crusty, moist thing that Italians break off chunks of by hand to dip in their sauces and to clean their plates after eating a dish, so as not to waste even the slightest taste. There’s even a Neapolitan expression for this act, fare la scarpetta, literally “to make the little shoe”—a sort of visual onomatopoeia for shuffling your piece of bread all over the plate… Instead, English bread was produced in a factory according to chemical formulations, not in a bakery redolent of warm, homely fragrances; it was strangely rectangular, or came already sliced, because the only use for this pane at the English table was as buttered toast to accompany either breakfast or a meal; and it looked like, and tasted of, plastic or cardboard. This idea of a square bread loaf is in fact so foreign to Italians that they use a French word to describe what is only occasionally used to make a toasted cheese sandwich: pan carré.
Fast forward to 2013, when after 29 years of living my life in English—first in the UK, then the USA, then Canada, then back to the USA—I moved to Mexico, and Spanish was suddenly injected into my life: I became trilingual. I had thought I’d feel more at home in Mexico, since I was born in a Catholic country where the family is at the center of culture and people’s lives, where people venerate saints in a way that Protestants would call pagan or blasphemous, and there are so many religious holidays in the calendar. The language, too, was quite similar, especially considering that I am Neapolitan, and no other dialect in Italy contains as many Spanish-borrowed words as ours. But I’d been using English for 30 years and I adored it, I owned it and considered it my language even more than Italian. So for me getting used to using Spanish was a strange detour through two different locations in my past: translating from Spanish into English was not a very good idea, I quickly realized, for they have a very different structure: translating from Spanish into Italian was rather more advantageous; and yet, because English was so rooted within my psyche, I ended up often re-translating in my mind the Italian-into-Spanish words or sentences into English. Talk about displacement!
Living in Mérida, Yucatán, also meant another kind of displacement, that of my eating habits. After my first three years in Birmingham, I had moved to cosmopolitan London; in those years—the late 1980s—authentic regional Italian food was becoming all the rage in the UK, so I was able to procure the authentic imported ingredients to prepare my beloved recipes. And later, moving to the United States and Canada where consumerism means wide choice, finding Italian ingredients was also easy. But in Mérida it became a feat again: only a few shapes of imported Italian pasta were available; there was a paucity of good cheeses; due to the harshness of the tropical climate and the Yucatán soil being mostly limestone, few vegetables were grown. And besides, to Mexicans reared on tortillas, bread was a nearly foreign concept: what passed for bread was the industrially-produced, plastic-wrapped rectangle I had first encountered in England; or some soft and tasteless rolls used for making sandwiches. Interestingly, to render the culinary and linguistic displacement even more salient, these savoury sandwiches in Mexico are called tortas, which in Italian is a cake; while pan most often refers to sweet dough stuffed with jam, cream, or chocolate, rather than the loaves accompanying any meal in Italy. Indeed, so central is pane to Italian language and culture, that there is an expression, pane e companatico, literally “bread and that which goes with bread,” to signify any meal. Lack of good bread in Mexico was probably my main cause of displacement, and I really disliked the too sugary, not very tasty pan dulces—but did I perhaps dislike them even more because the word was too similar to pane?
If food is a repository of memory and culture, so is language: in my Anthropology studies I had come across that old nutshell as to whether language creates culture or culture creates language. Personally, I don’t stand by this “either/or,” believing the answer to be more nuanced; yet as a perpetually displaced person, I feel that for emigrants language most definitely creates culture, as the language we left behind becomes entwined in our memory and hearts with the entirety of the culture we left behind. Those proponents of colonialist assimilation tactics knew this well: the primary step in the cruel severing of Native Americans from their cultures was to deprive them of their languages; just as the European immigrants to America were made to feel ashamed—and sadly transmitted this shame to their children—if they insisted on using their native languages, or dialects, instead of English.
FROM CUMMARE TO “GOOMAH” C’E’ DI MEZZO IL MARE
Dialect: yet another locus of linguistic displacement, one deeply entwined with power and colonialism. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”—allegedly remarked Yiddish scholar Max Weinrich half a century ago. And of course Yiddish itself is not only a widely-spoken dialect, an integral part of a millenary diaspora, but also one that has penetrated the American language with many of its expressions. As, too, have some words from Italian dialects like Neapolitan and Sicilian, however corrupted and altered through time and mispronunciation.
For it’s not really true that the Italian-English bifurcation was the only aspect of my displaced life until I started using Spanish: there has always been this other language inside of me, my Neapolitan dialect. In my country, the “dialect with an army” that was Tuscan triumphed over the other dialects because of the mighty economic influence exerted by the city state of Florence in the Renaissance. It could have been Neapolitan, as Naples had been the capital of the Kingdom of Naples first, and then of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for four centuries—but Naples was neither ruled by illustrious Italian families, nor was it a fledgling banking system (double entry book-keeping was invented by Italians). No, my birthplace has been throughout its history the reluctant whore of the Mediterranean—the city that everybody wanted to conquer, only to vilify her later. She can boast scores of celebrated writers, musicians, painters, philosophers and scientists who influenced the course of Western culture among its offspring, but hardly any shrewd, rich bankers and patrons like the Medici. And so it is that all Italians today must speak Florentine if they want to understand each other; yet, in their hometowns, with their families, in moments of affectionate and erotic tenderness or violent anger, they often resort to their real mother tongue—the regional dialect.
And yet in my case this was not my mother’s (or father’s) tongue: my parents were capable of understanding and speaking Neapolitan, yet they always forbade it in the house, in fear of being “contaminated” by the “lower” classes they so desperately wanted to distinguish themselves from, in typical petit-bourgeois fashion (while in Naples many members of the old aristocracy, secure in their innate heritage and privilege, have no qualms about utilizing the dialect). Yet most of Naples is not, like so many American cities, topographically segregated by social class: a million people live in a 45-square-mile urban area, literally on top of each other because only apartment buildings exist in Naples, no “houses” in the English sense. Within such a small surface, you cannot really keep people penned into their specific socio-economic coops. And so it is that in the centro storico, the historical downtown area, a well-renovated palazzo signorile (mansion) that has been divided into spacious, twenty-foot-ceilinged apartments, may be sitting next door to a decaying building housing low-rent apartments and even bassi—the traditional street-level, one-room dwellings for an entire family of scant means. Even in the more middle-class neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, Vomero, most of which came into existence through the rampant, often unregulated overdevelopment of the 1960s, you’d have to use the dialect to buy from one of the small farmers who would come into town from their nearby orchards with small carts full of produce, just-laid eggs, ricotta made with milk from their one or two sheep. Hardly anyone in Naples lives in US-style gated communities, only ever getting out of their car at work, at the shopping mall parking lot and when they arrive home: instead, people of all social classes mingle in the same streets to shop at open-air markets for the same fish or cheese; go to the same movie theaters; and take the same, crowded buses or metro trains to go to work.
And so as I was growing up I picked up little bits of the dialect here and there, despite my parents’ injunction, and later used it with friends and boyfriends. And still today, il napoletano is the other language rooted inside me, close to my heart. My family was middle-to-upper class and none of my relatives ever had any economic need to emigrate—to America, Canada, Australia, and later Germany or England. Yet more than four million Italians made their ship-bound version of the mythical westward trek of manifest destiny, homesteading in rat-infested tenements on the Lower East Side of New York or other unsavory ‘hoods in the cities where they settled down.
In my first ever trip to the US in 1996, when I was still living in London, I spent a week in Philadelphia and one in New York. In Manhattan, I visited that little-known gem of a museum, the Tenement Museum, where actors working as guides recreate for visitors the lives of one of three sample immigrant families—Irish, Jewish, or Southern Italian.
And then, hungry for real American culture more than any celebrated paintings I’d already seen scores of in Europe, I went to the Ellis Island museum: where even the saccharine-based over arching narrative of “they came to find freedom and opportunity” could not displace the sadness and horror of the concentration camp quality of the barracks, especially when confronted with the pictures of what they used to be like before their renovation into a museum. Here, people from my country had had their names misspelled and changed forever, had been branded on the forehead like cattle with various markings by medical examiners, and the ones who were deemed healthy and sane enough to partake of the Great American Dream were shipped off to various back-breaking jobs that would enrich the already wealthy WASPs. Not an enormous difference, for some, from the back-breaking agricultural labor they had performed in Italy to enrich the already wealthy landowners…
Back in the “old country”, allegiance to a network of family and friends had traditionally superseded any other concept of “civil society” and “citizenship”, and this cultural trait (developed over centuries of an Italy fragmented into microcosms of city-states and foreign monarchies) in time has engendered both one of the most friendly and hospitable people in the world—once you get to know them, as Southern Italians can appear quite rude to strangers!—and various brands of organized crime such as Cosa Nostra, camorra, ‘ndrangheta, Sacra Corona. It’s not a coincidence that even these organizations are regional—perhaps with the exception of the Sicilian mafia that was successfully exported to the United States—and based on concepts of honor and faithfulness to one’s “family”.
During that first trip to America, everybody I talked to had been welcoming of my Italianness, everybody had an Italian story to tell me: about the distant relatives who still lived in Italy; about a friendly Italian neighbor’s scrumptious dinners; a wonderful vacation to Italy; a favorite local Italian restaurant. Of course it did help that I was visiting Philadelphia and New York, the two cities with the most Italian immigrants in America.
When I later moved to the States for graduate studies, in 2001, I ended up in Buffalo, NY, a city steeped in Catholic culture, with its European immigrants mainly coming from Ireland, Poland and Italy. In particular it was Sicilian territory, and I should have felt kind of at home there, since Neapolitans and Sicilians are not exactly breeds apart. Instead, I found myself still very much a
stranger, and quickly realized that Italian-American culture was mostly foreign to an Italian born and bred in the “old country”.
Going to Guercio’s for supplies—the largest Italian food deli in Buffalo—only made me feel more displaced: the customers’ accents were a caricature straight out of The Sopranos; at the deli counter, the requests for a sample of provolone, which to my ears sounded as “praavaloon,” or “baloney” instead of mortadella, made me cringe; the mounds of meatballs and—overcooked! An unforgivable sin in Italy—spaghetti, or lasagna swamped in red sauce made me feel almost sick. This was not the food I had grown up with, but a more unhealthy, less tasty caricature of it; these were not the people I had grown up with. Shelf upon shelf of imported products could not satisfy my yearning for my roots, because they were exactly that—imported. Like me.
When I moved to Buffalo, the HBO series The Sopranos was in its third season, and naturally everybody was talking about it; but I have never been fond of what’s hot and current, feeling that it’s often just a fad pumped beyond its actual interest or depth by carefully conceived advertising campaigns. Call me old-fashioned (and if you do, I’ll take it as a compliment, for being old-fashioned has never for me been synonymous with reactionary or narrow-minded), but I prefer to watch or read things after the heat has cooled down and I can gauge their real cultural and personal value. Besides, despite being a Scorsese fan, I was always in two minds about his mafia movies: yes, I appreciated their operatic, quasi-Greek tragedy quality, but not always their relying on stereotypes, even when transmogrified into archetypes; and, in Buffalo, I found myself surrounded by non-criminal Soprano types.
And so it was that I landed at The Sopranos shore six years after the broadcast of its final episode. Of course the added reward was not having to wait a week, or months, to know “what happened next”; I could indulge in nightly marathons of episode after episode, season after season. And I discovered that the writers had done such an amazing job constructing this fictional universe that it seemed entirely plausible to me and I could even sympathize with a character as contemptible as Tony Soprano.
I have an intellectual nature, so I also became curious about The Sopranos as a cultural phenomenon and took a book out of the library that seemed interesting, but turned out to be a flaccid rehash of pseudo-feminist, vaguely post-colonial theories, whose essays left me cold and even irritated, save for one by Fred Gardaphé (another immigrant whose family name suffered misspelling at the hands of the Ellis Island officers!): “Fresh Garbage – the Gangster as Suburban Trickster”. I could relate to this, after my anthropological studies, as his references were clearly Mary Douglas and Paul Radin: the gangster as cypher for all that’s sick in contemporary American society, at once an object of fascination and contempt; like the mythical trickster of traditional cultures, he is a creature of excess—excess in all its darkness (murder, torture, death) and lightness (sex, gluttony, laughter). He is also the scapegoat onto which all the sickness we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves becomes comfortably displaced. In this reading, The Sopranos is as much about the subculture of Italian-Americans as it is about American culture at large, just as the series itself, beyond its play-for-laughs attitude and caricatures of Italianness, is ultimately about the at-once ridiculous and tragic characters comprising all of human nature.
But only to a point. Because there was one thing that kept bothering me about The Sopranos, and it wasn’t even the racism, or the homophobia, or the double standards about women and sexual freedom—I know all of these to be sadly true, if not overall representative, of many Italian-Americans and Italians. No, what irked me episode after episode, was the distortion of my Neapolitan dialect.
From an anthropological point of view, I know that languages become creolized—that is, they change, adapt and corrupt, if you will, when their speakers migrate and come into contact with other cultures and languages. What became creolized and corrupted, in the case of Italians, was not the once-Tuscan-dialect-turned-national-language, the language that had been imposed upon them in the unification of Italy. After all, during the years when Italy was turning into a republic and a unified nation—1861 to 1870—there was a terrifying average of 78-91% illiterate people in the country. However, this doesn’t mean that these people didn’t possess a rich vocabulary in which to express themselves—it just meant that their expression was not in writing and not in the official language of the country, but in their regional dialects. These were exported to America on those ships, and, as in time their traditional foods became americanized so did their dialects, and the people became Italian-Americans; which is why I cringed more watching the gangsters in The Sopranos butcher my Neapolitan dialect than them butchering their rivals.
It also didn’t help that the people who typed the close-captions seemed to have no idea what these people were saying, and therefore ended up butchering even further the spelling of an already mispronounced word. And so each night I threw my hands up in horror seeing words such as “stugots” instead of ‘stu cazz’—literally, “this dick”, meaning a range of reactions from “yeah, right” to “no fucking way”; or “vafungool” instead of vaffancul’—”go fuck yourself in the ass”, to express defiance; or “gagootz” instead of cucozza—a pumpkin, to mean someone hard-headed or stupid.
But the worst one of all for me was the usage of the word “goomah,” which should be written and pronounced cummare—not only its phonetics, but also its intrinsic meaning had been corrupted. Where I come from, cummare is a nuanced word that can indicate many things: sometimes, the female friend of another woman; other times, it is used as a respectful heading to a proper name, a bit like “madam” in English; or it can indicate a woman who is your godmother; other times still, it can designate a woman who is the town gossip. And it can also mean a woman who’s the squeeze of a married guy, yet only this latter meaning was used in The Sopranos.
For there it is, the crux of it all: that displacement again; that feeling of being at once estranged and strangely familiar when I hear these words, words taken out of what, for me, is their
proper cultural context. I relish what they bring to me, a taste of my past, but at the same time recoil when that madeleinette that looked and smelled so appealing turns out to be stale and sour. To reduce a beautifully nuanced word like cummare (and all the other beautifully nuanced words of the Neapolitan dialect) to just one fixed—and deeply sexist—meaning seems to exemplify what all these Italians lost when they crossed the Atlantic: a variegated, not so easily definable yet specifically regional identity became crystallized into a series of ready-made stereotypes that would fit them like an iron glove; and these stereotypes were conflated into a hyphenated identity that is largely constructed and invented. And yet, even contemporary Italian-Americans have by and large retained their regionally-based diffidence against each other just as these, sadly, continue to exist in Italy today. But as it concerns Italian-Americans, this is a curious fact, because these prejudices are as displaced as the people who continue to enact them, as there are no more regions and dialects and different dishes and customs—only this umbrella term, Italian-American, just one more lump in the not-so-homogenous melting pot that is America.
ALWAYS ELSEWHERE, THE PLACE OF NOSTALGIA AND MEMORY
And so…. In The Sopranos the men will continue to have their “goomahs” just as I will continue to be my own cummare solitaria in… (insert name of the country where I happen to be dis/ placed at any given time); to live in several different linguistic universes at once, making comparisons and shifting from one to the other restlessly. A wonderful but tiring exercise for the mind, and sometimes you can get stuck, become confused, caught in the limbo between languages; and then you don’t quite know where you are anymore.
Which language am I speaking now? Which language am I supposed to use here?
Sometimes, a little short-circuit in the brain, some crossing of wires, and an Italian word, even a whole sentence may slip into my English or Spanish conversation, and suddenly the gap opens over a deep and almost threatening abyss—because the mother tongue also brings with it the taste of my mother’s mental illness that I have tried to keep at bay all my life.
Her madness had nothing to do with language, her madness had everything to do with language.
In a different cultural context, my mother’s frequent ranting and raving, her jumbled-up speech patterns, apparently without sense or order, could have been those of glossolalia, the “speaking in tongues” praised and encouraged within certain Christian practices. And, in yet other cultural or historical places, her delusions could have been seen, praised or feared but never ridiculed, as manifestations of the power of witchcraft or shamanism…
I come from a culture that still believes in the power of the evil eye, and the evil eye is not really much to do with a gaze but rather with an incantation that needs to be verbalized, that requires an utterance to come alive, to become effective, powerful and dangerous. But I have come to see that there is another form of the evil eye: it is that question I have learned to recognize as not always the sign of an innocent curiosity about others:
“Where are you from?”
Language, then, as the marker of identity and otherness; and once you open your mouth, even if your facial traits, your body language, your clothing style, had not already given you away as a foreigner, as anOther, your accent does. And the question as to where you are from—which after having moved so many times in your life, and shifted from language to language, and culture to culture, you are ill-at-ease to answer anyway—always threatens to degenerate into that other evil curse: “Go back to where you came from!”
But where am I from?
From another language, one far away, eons removed from this one.
I live always elsewhere, always a stranger and strangely at home everywhere; exotic even to myself; I inhabit an Atlantis of the memory. For the longing in be/longing is always deeper than the be/ing…
Bio:
Amalia Pistilli-Conrad writes memoir and is also a collage artist. Amalia believes in situating artistic work in a wider social and cultural context without forsaking an intimate account of personal life/lives.Amalia’s first book, Stella Maris – A Memoir of Mother, Madness, Mirrors was recently a finalist in the Uplift Voices Contest in Non Fiction by Jaded Ibis Press.Amalia is at work on Always Elsewhere, a memoir about her life in several countries, cultures and languages.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 