Chapter 3

Translating Our Lives

My mother spoke an Italian dialect mixed with her own version of English; she could not read English. In Italy, she went to school through the third grade; after that, she worked in the fields and cooked for her entire family. When she came to America she was already 24 years old and pregnant with my sister. It was the middle of the Depression, and they settled into the life of many new immigrants, my father working in a factory when he could get a job. He even worked with the WPA on street repair for a while. My mother worked hand-sewing the sleeves in coats. The factory would drop the coats off at the house in the morning and pick them up again the next morning, leaving behind other coats for her to sew. Even later, when we were in school, and she was able to work in Ferraro’s coat factory, she worked with other Italian immigrants from her area of Italy and they chattered in their dialect while they sewed.

My mother had an intense desire to learn everything; she was quick and practical and efficient. She wanted to learn English and in order to do that she knew she had to go to night school. My father refused to allow it. Though she ranted and cried, he would not give in. “Women don’t need to go to school,” he insisted. Now, when I see how immigrants make a beeline for Passaic County Community College where they can get ESL classes and master Basic English, I think of how my mother would have given anything for such an opportunity. Although the opportunity was denied, she was well aware that language was power.

My mother had a padded rocker in which she would sit at night. We’d sit in her lap or the arm of the chair, and she would tell us Italian fairy tales or stories of her life in Italy before she came to America. I loved her rich laugh, her ability to spin a scary story or a hope-filled one, the music of that Italian dialect she spoke, and the English words she created when she didn’t really know the English word for something.

But my mother was always ashamed of her illiteracy. There were so many things she could not do when confronted with Americans, who did not understand what she was saying, and she, my super- competent mother, became helpless as a child when faced with their rudeness and sense of superiority.

I remember once going to a department store with my mother when I was 14 or 15, and the sales clerk was rude to her, because she asked a question about some nylons. I saw that my mother was ready to slink away from that woman, to duck her head in shame, and I yelled at that clerk so everyone in the store turned to look at me. “Don’t ever, ever talk to a customer that way again. I want to speak to your manager right now,” I said. She got that manager for me and, in my perfect English, I told him what had happened. Because I was articulate and furious and suddenly more powerful than I had ever been in my shy, 15-year-old self, I realized the power of language to present my side of an argument and to make people listen. I realized, too, though my mother was very intelligent and quick-witted in Italian and in the realm of her domestic life, outside of the confines of that Italian neighborhood and house, she was dismissed as stupid and unimportant.

My mother could tell me her stories in Italian, but she could not tell them to America, and maybe that was part of the reason why I decided that I had to be a writer. I remember the Sunday I announced my ambition and my cousin, the accountant, said: That’s the most impractical ambition I’ve ever heard. While part of me knew it was impractical for a working class girl, whose first language was Italian, another stubborn part of me knew I’d have to write in order to save the stories of my mother’s and father’s lives, to tell those stories to an America that would have to listen, whether it wanted to or not. Language gave me power, and I wasn’t giving it up for anything.

Whenever my students whisper, I shout: Speak up. Claim your voice. Seize your power. I force them to raise their voices so everyone can hear. In a way, that’s what happens when you write; you are seizing your power. Your words need to crackle. Sometimes, I get frightened that people will criticize me for what I’m writing. Then, I think of my mother in that department store who could not find the words to defend herself and I stiffen my spine and forge ahead.

In the same way Italian can be translated into English, we need to translate our inner lives, the place that we never talk to anyone about, into poems and stories and memoir in order to make the past come alive. Here is an example of such a poem about my grandmother, called “Donna Laura,” which appears in my book, What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009.

Donna Laura

Donna Laura, they called my grandmother

when they saw her sitting in the doorway, sewing

delicate tablecloths and linens, hours of sewing

bent over the cloth, an occupation for a lady.

Donna Laura, with her big house falling

to ruins around her head,

Donna Laura, whose husband

left for Argentina when she was twenty-four,

left her with seven children and no money

and her life in that southern Italian village

where the old ladies watched her

from their windows. She could not have

taken a breath without everyone knowing

Donna Laura who each day sucked

on the bitter seed

of her husband’s failure

to send money and to remember

her long auburn hair,

Donna Laura who relied on the kindness

of the priest’s “housekeeper”

to provide food for her family.

Everyone in the village knew

my grandmother’s fine needlework

could not support seven children,

but everyone pretended not to see.

When she was ninety, Donna Laura

still lived in that mountain house.

Was her heart a bitter raisin,

her anger so deep it could have cut

a road through the mountain?

I touch the tablecloth she made,

the delicate scrollwork,

try to reach back to Donna Laura,

feel her life shaping itself into laced patterns

and scalloped edges from all those years between

her young womanhood and old age.

Only this cloth remains,

old and perfect still, turning her bitterness into art

to teach her granddaughters and great granddaughters

to spin sorrow into gold.