Sweet Lemons 2: Discovery and Memory¹

Delia De Santis & Venera Fazio

AFTER CO-EDITOR VENERA FAZIO AND I assembled all the manuscripts for the multi-genre anthology Sweet Lemons 2, we realized that our goals for the content of the book had shifted. We were not the ones who had brought about the change, but it was the writing of our contributors that had changed. Their main focus was no longer the same as for Sweet Lemons, volume one, the purpose of which had been to celebrate Sicilian immigrants and to explore the diverse way in which Sicilian heritage manifests itself after generations of immigration. The contributors had now moved on from stories of immigration to stories of mainly discovery and memory: recalling, remembering, and trying to hang on to a heritage that now seemed more and more distant. They were searching and trying to recapture how it used to be, simultaneously conceding that a great part of their legacy had vanished in the years that passed after the migration of their ancestors to their new world.

For example, in the short story “The Sleeping Stranger” by Sicilian Australian writer Venero Armanno, the widow Grace goes back to calling herself Graziella now that she is old; a small gesture with significant symbolism, as if she is trying to recapture all that she has lost. Armanno explains: “In those young days they called her Grace because Graziella came off their tongues like ash and iron filings, so now when she found the stranger curled up and sleeping with her dogs, the first thing she wondered was what his name was, and how it might sound in his new country” (227). In this poignant story, as Graziella is dying and lo straniero is about to be caught, with the certainty that he will be shot by those who are hunting him, Graziella finally sees clearly “what had led to it; to come to the stranger carrying a shotgun. To let suspicion take root and grow. Her father, [...] he wouldn’t have done it this way. His hand would have come out first, in friendship” (237).

She doesn’t feel a strong pull for the country of her ancestors, but she is mourning the loss of the values of her Sicilian father as well as her failure to pass some of these same values on to her son, Joe, and his brothers. “For a moment Graziella even contemplated the impossible –talking Joe into actively helping – but the timbre of his voice and the quality of his hostility stayed with her (233)” so she remained silent. “The bastards know they got no chance,” Joe said to her. “You make sure you keep the bloody shotgun handy, all right? I checked it for you” (233).

From North America, New York writer and poet Nick Matros contributed a poem titled “Sicily, Am I Still Sicilian to You?” In the poem he asks:

But am I still Sicilian if I don’t

Tattoo on a tightly wound tricep

The tri-colore in the shape of the sacred island

If I don’t wear my gold cross

And hang a dying Christ over my bed

And be sure to get racist

And stubborn anytime anyone mentions

Moorish roots? (345)

Are there answers to Matros’ questions? This, in itself, is another question. In any case, these questions inspire a certain longing to discover more about one’s heritage and a need to retrieve images from one’s past – which, at times, can be a frenzied search, a chase for something elusive, something that is quickly slipping away.

Jim Pignetti, a writer from the US, strongly feels the loss of that “other” language or culture. He expresses this loss in a poem in which the form itself makes the words rebound on the page, much like the sound of the Sicilian words still trapped in his head. But that’s all that remains. Nevertheless, those sounds are still with him, strong, sharp, and perhaps not as much a lost world as he believes it to be:

Lost World

watching lassa mi stari hearing

the words bounce maronna

along the ceiling brutta, figliu they gather

picciuteddru, beddra, mortu

miserabili

swirling

bathing the boy iddru, dura, friddu in a language

he’ll never have. ( 343)

Frank Polizzi, editor of the literary journal Feile-Festa, in his memorable poem “Zampogna,” talks about first losing his family’s language, “then its culture / and even the extended clan / somewhere in the center of America” (353). Despite the fact that not all of his losses can be regained, he makes a strong, spirited attempt to recapture sounds that were familiar to his ancestors after finding a zampogna in a dark cellar. The name Zampogna is stitched on the dusty cover of the instrument. He carries it upstairs, in his arms, protectively – to the light, where he can better examine it. He then loses little time researching the strange instrument, and discovers it is “some distant Celtic cousin to the bagpipe!” (354), and that it is actually called cornamusa in Sicilian. His research prompts him to experience digitally the “mystifying melodies” from Bagpipes of the World from an old PC.

Of the cornamusa, Polizzi poeticizes:

I imagined that its notes must have cascaded

down those island-mountain slopes,

melancholy music for i poveri,

filling in the cracks of homes,

scored in surrounding stone

and lost in tempo over generations. (354)

Melancholy is the term that best describes the state of once belonging to another culture: the blood of one’s ancestors in one’s veins, but possessing only faint or fleeting memories of their faces, if any at all. Yet so much lingers, as seen in the above stanza of Polizzi’s poem, where through ancient music, the poet, although mystified, reconnects with the soul of his antenati:

To be honest, I had trouble fathoming the music,

yet the sound coyly echoed in my thoughts

that swept all the way

to the island of sun and winds. (355)

The poem ends with: “This was a time to listen, / a time to reflect, / chi sacciu, maybe a time to travel / to the deepest pitches of its call / in the heat of summer.” (355)

Cristina Trapani-Scott, a Sicilian-American, born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, wrote a poem entitled “A Photo on the Cellar Wall.” This touching poem takes us from the new world back to the old world:

Sicily must be another world to my

father who grew up in Detroit.

I’ve seen the all-American photo

of him as a boy [...]

[...] where he’s posed

in a white baseball uniform

ready to take a swing.

Another picture, maybe a similar one,

hung once on a cellar wall in Trapani. [...]

My mother told me [...]

that my father’s grandfather kept the picture

on the cellar wall to kiss when he went to retrieve wine

for dinner. I pictured him descending

into the dark cellar, one hand fishing

for the pull switch, the other

brushing the wall searching for the photo,

pausing to feel something beyond

the smooth finish,

to see color in black and white memory. (341-342)

[...]

Trapani-Scott has recreated her own tender memory, from something her mother had told her from the past. In her imagined world she tries “to feel something beyond / the smooth finish” by reaching back in time, peeling away layers of lost memory.

In a prose poem titled “Sita ’mmaculata – Immaculate Silk” by Canadian writer Bruna Di Giuseppe-Bertoni, the widow Nicolina, a member of Bertoni’s seniors’ group, tells of when she was a young girl back in Sicily. Eyes watering, Nicolina recalls of the courage it took to escape the fate of an arranged marriage. She wistfully mourns having to leave her beautiful wedding dress behind. “Pearls adorned the neckline,” she says, “di sita ’mmaculata era” (332). Nicolina was only fifteen and her mother wanted her to marry a cousin twelve years her senior. However, her destiny changed when she met a young man from America who had come home to find a bride. They fell for each other, and her aunt helped her to escape, avoiding bloodshed:

‘He’d be killed if word got out about our plan.

I left home like a ghost in the middle of the night

and met the stranger by a roadside.

Nu mi scantaiu,’ Nicolina said with certainty.

‘I knew he would be a good husband

My wedding dress was left hanging in the closet.

The journey to America was my honeymoon.’ (333)

Even though Nicolina has had a good life in the new country, her story is one of loss. “Her eyes water,” as she speaks of the beautiful wedding dress she never got to wear, and has never forgotten. All the dreams of a young girl had to be left behind forever, like her dress, “hanging in a closet.” Even without regrets, having to leave home and country, “like a ghost in the middle of the night,” was not an easy price for Nicolina to pay.

Louisa Calio, poet, writer, and performer, speaks to the Sicilian’s sense of belonging, in her poem “Cells Remember the Dark Mother”:

Sicily my dark mother

and other island of light

mighty land of contradictions, complications

multiplicities and many crossroads.

At last I’ve come to comprehend

my sense of belonging to all those other peoples. (364)

We hope that the writing of this new anthology will be fruitful in rekindling a desire for a greater depth in the search of one’s roots. A search that would take us back to the sounds of cornamusa over the hills of that triangular island in the Mediterranean, to stepping carefully back into the dark cellars of our ancestors, searching for “the faces on the walls.” This endeavour would undoubtedly give rise to a world of torn bits and pieces of remembrances, little threads that can be pulled to open up small vistas into the chambers of the forgotten, creating a greater yearning for what could soon be lost forever.

Following the publishing of Sweet Lemons 2, where will the writing for the third volume take us? For a moment, I will take us back to Louisa Calio, who may provide the answer in the poem “Signifying Woman – An Italian American Jazz Poem” when she says:

Sicilian queen,

a dew’s drop on mint green

Pure, liquid, mercury,

a grain of sand in the Sahara

& between cracks of concrete.

She is the wave length Green

fish-bellied, crab-crawling, moon-child,

secret reptile, Virgin &

Mean ...

the final curtain

called

before the Great Silencing. (362-363)

Yet, it is hard to imagine a “great silencing,” a closed book on Sicilian culture for people of Sicilian origin, whose forefathers and foremothers migrated away from their homeland in search of a better life for themselves and their children.