Non Parlo Italiano: Part 4
(May 27, 2008)Part 4 of a four part essay entitled, "Non Parlo Italiano."
Non Parlo Italiano: Part 4
by Mary Saracino
The language of my grandparents died in the second generation’s coming of age, but their Italian-ness remained vital and strong. Their persistent belief in their cultural heritage survived the ferocious fires that stoked the melting pot. They celebrated Italian holidays and infused American ones with an Italian accent, serving ravioli and Turkey at Thanksgiving, inviting La Befena to fill their children’s Christmas stockings alongside Santa Claus. In American Legion halls, they danced the tarantella at the weddings of their children and grandchildren. They grew grapes in their gardens, made wine in their cellars, cured prosciutto, played bocce in the parks. As their faces wrinkled and their eyes dimmed, their memories of their original homeland faded as well, but the sadness never fully waned.
Grandma Saracino repeatedly refused to answer when I’d ask her why she left Castellaneta and what her life was like in those southern hills. She’d shrug her shoulders, turn the corners of her mouth into a frown and say nothing. Instead she taught me to make meatballs and breadballs and season the red sauce, choosing to transmit her Italian ways by filling my mouth and stomach with something other than words. Two generations later her Apulian dialect is foreign to me, but I still dream in Italian. And it matters less and less that I don’t comprehend the words.
I am Italian. And I am American. I am an unexpected hybrid, the evolution of a long-held, ancient aspiration. Now, I search for the understanding that lies beyond the limits of vowels and consonants. I try to understand the losses and sacrifices experienced by my grandparents. I know the sound of their longing by heart; it is mine as well. I see the after-shocks of assimilation in the faces of my mother and father, my siblings, my aunts, uncles and cousins. My generation has risen out of its working class ashes to claim a thicker slice of the American pie. And I understand that this is not enough. Poverty is not pretty, but neither is cultural genocide. The price of rising to a more comfortable class of income and education has left scars. We can pass for white middle class Americans, but the truth lies deeper. My future is as olive-skinned and insistent as my past. I can’t go forward until and unless I reach back and bring my grandparents with me.
In visiting Italy, I reclaimed a personal fluency, something that my blood remembered even though my tongue did not. I saw the beauty of the country that forced my grandparents to leave. I came to understand that the motherland had abandoned her children, shoved them out the door, told them there were too many mouths to feed. They would have to fend for themselves. It made them stronger, fiercer in facing adversity. But it also made them orphans—vagabonds of the spirit, lost between two shores, homeless, displaced, betrayed. How could a mother do that to her children?
I have still not mastered the Italian language and so a rich vein of my cultural identity remains in need of excavation. If I’m to claim it home to me, complete and comprehensible, I must be able to articulate my longings, express them in what has become, to me, a foreign tongue. Alien to my ears, it somehow sings to me in spite of everything. I couldn’t speak Italian with the man at the bus stop in Siena, but a different conversation took place, nonetheless. In the caesura of sound, I understood the loss that had long raced through my blood. I ached for what my grandparents’ leaving had taken from me, ached, too, for the grief their leaving must have born in them. So much is left unsaid, buried beneath the soil in western New York, muted by the six feet of ground that covers their earthly bones. If I could, I would ask them, now, not why did you leave, but how did you find the strength to endure?
I’ve lost their language, but I’ve located the mother lode, the deep artery of memory that’s the enduring legacy I inherited from grandparents who had no monetary wealth to bequeath. In dreamtime and in waking I can still hear their voices, still recall their faces; still remember the lives they left behind, the futures they forged in an unfamiliar land, the gifts these strangers in a strange country held out to me.
And it is good.
Va bene!