Introduction

Elena Lamberti

I REMEMBER WELL MY JOURNEY FROM Bologna, the city where I live and work, to Atri, in Abruzzo. That’s where, in June 2010, the thirteenth biennial conference of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers was held. I travelled on a slow train along the Adriatic Coast. The train stops in Pineto and, from there, someone can pick you up by car or you have to wait for the right bus. It was a typical hot, Italian summer day. On that train, I couldn’t help but think that even in 2010 Italy was still a country travelling at different speeds, metaphorically and literally. Travelling North to South and vice versa, Italy moves much faster along its western corridor than along the eastern one. Never mind how long it takes and how slow it is to travel from coast to coast: the railway lines that connect the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic have been the same for ages. There, through time, it is the railway that stands still, while the surrounding territory moves. A typical Italian paradox.

I was thinking of the peculiar mapping of Italian railways while going to a conference whose theme was connected to the idea of travelling: “Writing Our Way Home” or, in Italian, “Il viaggio di ritorno.”

That title would immediately render the idea of both a real and an imaginary journey, combining different landscapes and suggesting an open idea of ‘Home,’ to be questioned and assessed at the symposium. I would be listening to stories of Italians who arrived in the ‘Nuovo Mondo’ long ago. If truth be told, I was afraid of those stories or, rather, I was afraid I would have to listen to stories told too many times: redundant stories of Italian immigrants abroad, grown into a self-referential myth blurring the intensity of the historical archetype which had originated them. Stories that felt more and more distant from my changing self and from my modern, changing world – Italy in 2010. Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep respect for the stories and history of all those who, for different reasons, were forced to leave their Motherland. (When you are forced to leave, you never leave a country; you leave a Motherland; a Patria not a nation). My respect is born out of my historical sense and my cultural memory. It is rooted in my personal knowledge of many Italian immigrants abroad whose lasting trauma and pain are also well known to me. However, I must confess that, on my way to Atri, I also couldn’t help but think of the many times I had felt subtle impatience and a pervasive frustration in seeing that intense trauma imploding in a series of narrative clichés. These narrative clichés have shaped the two main characters of the early immigrant’s commedia (or perhaps ‘tragedia’) dell’arte: the victim (the Italian immigrant) and the persecutor (the new country). A Motherland, the old country cannot be a stepmother, even if it can no longer hold us close as a mother does.

Having said this, I recognize the important role of Italian-Canadian literature. Through time, determination and talent, Italian-Canadian writers have established a cultural and artistic heritage which matters to both Canada and Italy.¹ I remember the work of Raffaele Cocchi, a colleague at the University of Bologna, who was one of the first to bring new and emerging Italian-Canadian voices to our attention as early as the 1980s. Although he passed away unexpectedly in 2004, his lessons remain. His contributions to the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli “Altreitalie,” and to CISEI – Centro Internazionale Studi Emigrazione Italiana – are still landmarks in the study of the culture and history of Italians abroad. He also taught us how to appreciate those new works – not simply to acquire sociological knowledge about Italian emigration, but more importantly to value their intrinsic aesthetic and literary merits. Raffaele Cocchi taught us to be passionate about Italian-Canadian voices while not exempting us from a critical response and appreciation. Of course the immigrants’ stories and nostalgia are traditional tenets of Italian-Canadian literature, but they can no longer be narrated in the same ways. The impatience and frustration alluded to above did not originate from a lack of appreciation for traditional themes in Italian-Canadian literature, but rather from my desire to see that literature grow and bloom. I want to see it change and face new contingent challenges because we change through time and history is always in the making.

In other words, as an Italian reading Italian-Canadian literature in Italy (the motherland), I maintain that today’s Italian-Canadian writers could contribute much more to the literary community – which includes Italians, Canadians and all those who think that literature plays a fundamental role in our global and globalised brave new world. History has changed rather quickly: Italy is now the promised land for newcomers forced to leave their own motherland. Italy is to these new immigrants what Canada was to Italian immigrants not too long ago. It does not matter that, in fact, Italy IS NOT Canada. Yes, it’s an old story: history repeats itself. What if my own old immigrants, as well as their literary children, those Italians who have been so successful, who have made it, help us (old and new Italians) to find ways of better understanding each other, our stories and our histories? After all, our Italian immigrants have been able to overcome, through literature too, all those material, cultural and social obstacles that Italian-Canadian writers and artists have so well described in their novels, poems, paintings, songs and movies. The time has come to speak in the present and for the present. It is time to listen to second and third generation children who were born in Canada and who have a different understanding of home and Motherland. That does not mean to deny history. On the contrary, it means using history wisely and speaking to Italy from Canada as Italian immigrants who suffered the same experiences not too long ago, but who were successful nonetheless. Who better than the sons and daughters who have experienced the trauma of forced immigration can talk to a mother, a nation, Italy, which is now playing the role of the persecutor in the literary works written by new X-Italian writers? Yes! There are new writers in Italy. They were not born in Italy, but they have a sense of belonging there. In their stories, too, there are homes, mothers and stepmothers, countries and nations. History repeats itself, but sometimes – well, often – in reverse.

Travelling on slow trains gives one time to think. Italian immigrants in the world, journeys from and to the motherland, Raffaele Cocchi and his lessons, newcomers to Italy: that’s what I reflected on as I travelled from Bologna to Pineto. Once in Atri, I met the old and new voices of Italian-Canadian literature. I was comforted. My worries disappeared. I thought of Raffaelle Cocchi even more. He would have been very happy in Atri and not just because of the superb location and memorable meals. He would have been happy to witness the literature he loved so much reaching a new prime and moving on. Looking back, I dare say that the gathering in Atri was a turning point in the history of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers. As a consequence, it was a turning point in the history of the reception of Italian-Canadian literature outside of Canada, and especially in Italy. Yes, we want the best for what we love most! Atri was a good moment for the AICW: it revealed a mature literary group which is still blooming – not only in numbers (members), but mostly in themes, content, ideas. Certainly, the immigrants’ stories are still being told (it goes without saying!), but nostalgia now has a different flavour. Italian-Canadian writers and scholars have assaulted, so to speak, the cliché, bringing new registers and innovating the intergenerational dialogue. It is now possible to laugh about old grievances: not to diminish them, but to turn pain into energy. It’s no longer survival: it’s a new, full, happy and tragic life.

Thus, going to Atri was important for me. This brief introduction is my way of writing my own way home, my way of returning to Atri – a place and a moment in time which brought something new to someone like me, who engages mostly with Canadian literature, including Italian-Canadian writing. As a matter of fact, since today’s literary critics are, once again, discussing the (old) idea of world literature,² I would argue that Italian-Canadian writers are not just Canadian writers, but world writers. They write from Canada with an original point of view on multiple (hybrid) identities and have something to tell the whole world itself (which, after all, is but a cultural hybrid).

Looking back, 2010 was an important year for Italian-Canadian artists and writers at large, because of the events in Atri and other literary gatherings. For instance, in 2010 an Italian-Canadian artist, Dominic Mancuso, won the Juno Award for “World Music” for his capability to “transcend cultures and borders making old world new.” Once acclaimed as a “folk” or “ethnic” artist, Mancuso is now appreciated in Canada as a “world” artist; his Sicilian rooted music has bloomed into universal heritage, crossing and embedding diversities. Following a similar path, from Juno to June 2010, the Atri conference beautifully framed three main evolving aspects of the growing AICW community: a new idea of trans-generational Italian-Canadian literature which transcends the ethnic elements and reaches universal themes; a growing presence of Italian-Canadian voices within the university “establishment,” that is the growing presence of thinkers who are being established as sound mainstream critics outside the original community; the blooming of a new generation of writers and scholars, in constant critical dialogue with the previous one, who are also introducing different aesthetic experiences (for instance, the choice of writing in a language which is no longer a “hybrid,” nor is it a crossroad of different sounds, but which, instead, wants to return “pure.” Be it English, French or Italian, new Italian-Canadian writers often choose to write in a sole language to be different, to provoke, or simply because they do not feel that the italiese of the previous generations is their own language anymore).

Like my original journey by train, the journey that brings us this book was a long and slow one; just like the former, the latter too gave us all time to think, talk, and move on. The contributing writers were good travelling companions as they engaged in long and lasting conversations on the contents and form of their pieces. Their collaboration helped the editors to design a home for all ideas, feelings, and questions discussed in Atri. From a physical place (Atri), to a metaphysical place (the process which led to this volume) to another physical place (this book): this collection takes us all metaphorically back home, to Atri. We move back to move on, knowing that Atri further proved that travelling is but our existential condition: the identity of the AICW family is at home only when moving, that is only if we constantly question the making of our shifting identities because this association is made up of women and men who march with and in the world. This volume bears witness to that.

The three sections shaping the collection face an almost impossible challenge: to give order to the “creative and engaging” disorder of a conference. A creative disorder generated by the challenging questions nourished by the various presentations, readings, casual conversations (we know too well that many original thoughts are born out of what we discuss at coffee break or at dinner). The compromise between order and disorder is provided by the book form, which, in this case, cannot be introduced as mere conference proceedings. The three sections – “Understanding Identity: Theoretical Frameworks,” “Creative Visitations: Voicing Old and New Homes,” “Past, Present, and the Hybrid Self: Critical Considerations” – aim to create a narrative arc to contain the thousands of rivers of words shaping the many ideas on how to write our way home discussed at and after the conference. They take us from the journey questioning one’s own identity approached through old and new theoretical frameworks read through the Italian-Canadian case, to the creative journeys of writers mapping geo-cultural dimensions across space, time and languages, to considerations cross-reading history and stories, events and memories to interpret and reinterpret literary canons and genres.

In the first section, Oriana Palusci, Ernesto Livorni and Jim Zucchero develop a theoretical framework which spans from semantic and terminological investigations of key terms to define and understand our sense of being and belonging, to a more specific mapping of the morphology of the new Italian-Canadian literature, to the investigation of the role played by various mediators of memory (i.e. memoirs, novels, poems and films) in establishing universal patterns within individual or ethnic diasporas. Language, register, tone are also investigated as rhetorical devices forming a set of formidable tools that Italian-Canadian writers have been exploring and employing to “constantly negotiat[e] the relationship between their Italian cultural heritage and their Canadian cultural experience” (Zucchero). Their contributions fit the spirit of a conference and make good use of lightness (in the sense indicated by Calvino in his American Lessons) to convey complex and thorny issues. Why should it be otherwise? Theoretical discourses are much more effective if conceived first of all as “conversations,” that is, as genuine attempts to share ideas and advance thoughts. Too often, academic discourses are too far from the actual need of “common readers”; the clarity of diction and earnestness of purpose adopted by these critics here cannot but become shared tenets of all scholars joining the AICW.

In the third section, Maria Tognan, Darlene Madott & Gianna Patriarca, Maria Giuseppina Cesari, Delia De Santis & Venera Fazio, Annalisa Bonomo and Michele Campanini discuss more specific case studies, therefore proving that there are many ways to write our way home. The “creative nonfiction” of Janice Kulyk Keefer and Caterina Edwards are juxtaposed to work out shared narrative patterns bringing together the quests of different ethnic groups; similarly, the work of a canonical writer like Nino Ricci is challenged through an investigation of mythical (i.e. universal) elements in turn (re)shaping the writer’s own identity quest. In dialogue with Darlene Madott, Gianna Patriarca, too, reveals how her “classic” collection of poems, Italian Women and Other Tragedies, is in fact an “open work”: those “poems,” self-translated into her native language, stay now as a neverending journey because “poems are about language in transition,” just like the human beings who read and feel them. Similarly, De Santis and Fazio share some feedback and considerations on their Sicilian collections; their “backstage” stories are testimony to the shift of themes within the specific community of Sicilian immigrants, therefore presenting new identity needs and new forms to express them. Sicily returns also in the contribution by Annalisa Bonomo but in an unexpected way: Sicily becomes here the home in the writings of a Scottish writer, William Sharp, to prove that, through time and space, exile and home are constant leitmotivs across literary traditions and cultures. That foreign writer, so far from us today both in time and in space, sees “the Sicilian Highlands with the beauty of Scotland”: how not to think, then, that home is but within us or it is not; it depends on us to constantly find or rediscover it, bridging old and new landscapes through our imagination. Literature can make all those landscapes available through time and cultures to a multitude of different audiences engaged in their new real and metaphorical journeys. Travelling back (or forth) home is therefore an existential and suspended moment which is particularly intriguing for old and new literary explorations; it does not surprise us if, as Campanini recalls, the real journey, too, remains one of the favourite memories of immigrants abroad. No matter how painful it was, the journey is the way between, both a necessity and a choice, the act which will change forever our way of being and of belonging.

In between, the second section presents a selection of creative responses to the idea of writing our way home. Different in gender, age, education, life experience, John Calabro, Pietro Corsi, Domenic Cusmano, Mike Dell’Aquila, Alberto Mario DeLogu, Delia De Santis, Nino Famà, Venera Fazio, Maria Lisella, Darlene Madott, Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni, Linda Morra, Osvaldo Zappa, Gil Fagiani, Licia Canton and Michael Mirolla create a broad network of renderings proving that the community is alive and kicking. They engage with different genres to share their own cultural and biographical journeys and to prove that form itself is part of their own creative visitations and identities: from their lives to fiction, to poetry, to memoirs, to short stories, their works are a kaleidoscope of images, feelings, ideas which cannot but enrich (and complicate) our own lives as readers.

To an Italian like me, read as a whole these contributions seem to tell a much bigger story which both contains and transcends them all; a story which, in fact, relates to the vantage point history has granted to the AICW family. AICW writers (and scholars) have lived, rendered, studied and investigated processes of im/migration through time and from an original setting: they experienced or inherited a not too distant past of im/migration living in a country, Canada, which has chosen to transform its multiethnic dimension into a multicultural reality, as we now know with complex and evolving results. Inevitably, both their history and their Canadian location charge Italian-Canadian writers with an enormous artistic and civic responsibility. Today, they are in fact called to help old and new Italians to better understand each other. They can help us to understand the importance of acknowledging, respecting and learning from all differences. To do that, these writers and scholars can rely upon a literature that they helped grow through many differences, many experiences, languages, dialects, regionalisms; a literature that has been able to bring all those differences together and to grow through them. That literature played a role in shaping a broader group identity which was not visible before because too fragmented; that literature was able to speak to all Italians in Canada and to all Canadians alike. It is now time to make that literature speak with renewed strength to old and new Italians alike. These writers can teach the old ones how to welcome as their own children those who are now forced to leave their motherland in search of a new home; to the new ones, they can teach how to no longer portray themselves as victims, but as would be protagonists of other exciting stories. To both, they can teach that nothing is to be taken for granted, that home itself is continuous negotiations among different sensibilities. Through their works, AICW writers and scholars who met and renewed their dialogue in Atri, as well as those who added their voices after, can and must help us to shape a future full of challenges; they can and must help us to make sure that it will always be possible, for each of us, to write our way home in spite of the different speeds our trains will run at. In fact, they can and must help us to discover that we often go home and leave again without even boarding a train. A typical paradox of life.