— Domenic Beneventi
In his study of Canadian immigrant fiction, Arnold Itwaru suggests that immigrants are constructed as “other” the moment they set foot on Canadian soil, effectively relegating them to the margins of Canadian society. Rather than dwell upon the ways in which minorities come to be defined by the centre, Itwaru explores how immigrant communities are themselves actively engaged in the construction and elaboration of ethnic identities. Not only must these new arrivals “invent” a sense of self and of community within a new social context, they must also construct Canada as a social and spatial totality:
The invention of meaning is . . . a reading and an experiencing in which versions of ourselves in the world . . . are simultaneously and constantly being invented, by ourselves as well as by others. It is here where present consciousness with its attendant ambiguities, anxieties, and disorientations, invents meaning in the need to reduce confusion. Such persons’ search for meaning within the country named Canada is also the search for Canada as a domain of experience integral to the development of a sense of self. (9–12)
As individuals, immigrants generate meanings about themselves in their efforts to cope with the rupture of emigration and in their desire for integration into Canadian society. As collectivities, ethnic communities also generate meanings about themselves in relation to the larger social and cultural milieu of the host society. Changes in education, class, and social ritual in succeeding generations have cultural implications for the community and, hence, for the manner in which these communities imagine themselves. These various “versions” of identity constitute ethnic performances which vacillate constantly between the desire for mainstream integration and the desire to maintain links to heritage cultures. Because the immigrant/ethnic subject negotiates and adapts to new circumstances, ethnic identity is invented or put into public discourse by themselves and by others. Ethnic constructions of self as “dual,” “hybrid,” or as “in-between” two cultural contexts, for instance, amount to technologies of identity from which subsequent meanings, symbols, and practices are created and elaborated.
I would suggest that one of the ways in which ethnic Canadian writers elaborate or invent versions of self is through textual experimentation with heritage languages in relation to the majority languages of Canada. It is often the case in minority writing, for instance, that the inclusion of the heritage language in a predominantly English or French text will signal a particularly ambiguous moment of self-labelling or an emotionally charged insight or cultural memory. Linguistic experimentation may also be a more overt strategy on the part of the writer to find a middle ground between their heritage culture and their Canadian experience.
This essay aims to explore some of the dynamics of language use in Italian-Canadian writing, taking as example the linguistic play in the poetry of Antonio D’Alfonso. I suggest that it is through experimentation with the Italian language and regional dialects that the quest for an “authentic” Italian self is elaborated, while the English language serves as the vehicle of communication and of ethnic alienation from the heritage culture.
Some of the questions addressed include the following: What role does language choice play in the individual’s affiliation to an ethnic group and/or to the majority culture? Does the shift between English, French, Italian, and Italian dialects in a text correspond to a change in the narrator’s sense of “locatedness” as a cultural insider or outsider? In what ways does language construct Italian-Canadian identity while at the same time undermining the very integrity and “authenticity” of that identity?
Various critics have discussed the “dual perspective” of minority narratives, the tensions which emerge from writers who straddle two cultural and linguistic systems. The ethnic subject comes to terms with a displaced Italian identity as he or she assumes the label of hyphenated Canadian through a symbolic or actual search for origins, often manifesting itself in the motif of the return journey. As Pivato has pointed out, the return journey bridges the gap between an Italian identity, situated in a distant past, and a Canadian one, situated in the present:
Immigrant writing demonstrates the close interweaving of history and literature. In the novels, stories, and poems that we consider here, the autobiographical element is always just below the surface of the text, the image, symbol, metaphor, dialogue, and characterizations. This is all the more evident in the structure of the return journey . . . [it] recurs so often that it can be described not just as a major theme but an obsession in the Italian-Canadian imagination. (Pivato “The Return Journey” 169)
In myriad ways language defines communities and shapes their cultural memory. It is not surprising, therefore, that for many writers language constitutes an intensely personal and troubling aspect of collective memory and identity. The writing process enables Italian-Canadians to explore various versions of themselves in relation to both their Italian heritage and their Canadian upbringing. The spaces between these cultures are inscribed as sites of linguistic and thematic experimentation and play, enabling the construction of identities that go beyond a simple Italian-Canadian binary.
Deleuze and Guattari have suggested that a minor literature is one in which the cultural dissonances and linguistic transfers between the mother tongue and the language of the text become significant. Language here is not simply a transparent vehicle of communication but rather a problematic in and of itself. Minority cultural expression displaces the cultural, linguistic, and historical assumptions of the centre with respect to its own traditions and narratives through their appropriation and re-interpretation. Italian-Canadian writers negotiate the sense of cultural loss and deterritorialization common to all immigrant groups through the “intensive” use of English or French described by Deleuze and Guattari. As Pasquale Verdicchio has pointed out: “By stressing Latinate vocabulary, by the insertion of Italian syntactical forms, and by the inclusion of linguistic elements that represent the utterances of immigrant culture, these writers have altered the semantic field of English, thereby denying expected meaning” (17).
Italian-Canadians are also “minoritaire” in that they are increasingly alienated from contemporary Italian cultural narratives. The culture of reference (Italian) becomes a trace which is constantly being reinterpreted and transformed. This is especially true for succeeding generations who are born and educated in Canada, and whose cultural attachments and affinities to Italy become increasingly tenuous. The spatial, temporal, and cultural distance from the homeland results in an articulation of Italianità which is itself contaminated by a variety of Canadian cultural and linguistic elements, one too often limited to the most stereotypical elements of the culture. Writing from this position of alterity and “cultural loss” becomes for the Italian-Canadian a way of reappropriating past tradition, and of creating hybrid cultural narratives.
Language functions in a variety of ways in the Italian-Canadian text, pointing to both the desire and the difficulty of maintaining a stable sense of ethnic identity. At its simplest level, the language used in these texts is an indicator of the socio-cultural reality of Italian-Canadians, for it is an English contaminated with Italian expressions and grammatical structures. As such, it faithfully reproduces the quotidian reality of all immigrants who negotiate the different spheres of their lives in different languages. Caccia argues that, in the case of Italian-Canadians, regional dialects (Sicilian, Neapolitan, Molisano, etc.) correspond to the vernacular language, the “language of remembrance and exile” (157) spoken in the intimacy of the home.
English and/or French are both vehicular and referential language, since they are the languages of education and social functioning in Canada. They represent the unavoidable break from the maternal language responsible for the primary deterritorialization in immigrant cultures. English and French are also the referential languages, the languages of written expression which initiate the process of re-territorialization. Within this scheme, normative Italian becomes the mythic language, the language of high culture, church, and religion (Caccia 159), which manifests not only the wealth of Italian tradition but also the assimilationist tensions of official (northern) Italian culture vis-à-vis regional cultural expression.
The intermingling of each of these linguistic levels in Italian-Canadian literature enables the display of a rich multitude of points of reference, positionalities, and identities for the narrator who is exploring his or her cultural heritage. The constant switching between language modes invokes not only the negotiation of different social spheres, but also a more subtle shift in subjectivity and cultural positioning. It signals the complex relationship between historical contingency, personal identity, and cultural memory which has characterized the immigrant experience. Language use (the choice of language as well as its application and symbolic functions in the text) occupies a central role in the construction of ethnic subjectivity, for language is the principal means by which cultural attachment to the homeland is maintained, yet also the means by which that attachment is undermined.
For the post-immigrant generations, the roles which the English and Italian languages play are reversed, as the vehicular language comes to symbolize integration and success while the heritage language, increasingly impoverished, comes to symbolize a tenuous connection to the past. As Caccia notes: “How do they react to this language fraught with the suffering of the past? They deny it, they repress it. The apprenticeship of the vehicular language and the frenetic adhesion to the values of a consumer-oriented society become the accepted means through which to make the break” (157). As succeeding generations are acculturated to the English and/or French languages, Italian weakens to the point where it may become a source of shame and a symbol of cultural poverty, a constant reminder of the unbridgeable distance between their own reality and that of their Italian heritage. The grasp of Italian deteriorates to the point where it is reduced to a sort of Italian “baby talk” (Canton 98).
Language use in the Italian-Canadian text is also characterized by indeterminacy and play, by the inability to properly translate one socio-cultural reality into another. This process of translation in the ethnic’s day-today functioning is soon transformed into a more symbolic translation and representation of reality in which the cultural codes and sensibilities of the homeland and that of Canada are intermingled. While something is always lost in the process of translation, what is gained is an understanding of one’s locatedness and subject position within Canadian culture, an awareness of the position of cultural difference from which one speaks. As Verdicchio points out:
Italian-Canadians are suspended between the English/ French Canadian reality and their own cultural background, the result of which one could imagine as a centre/margin relationship in which, every day, every single act or thought enacts a continual switching of positions from the centre to the margins, and back again. There is a play of multiple personalities and unstable subject positions where the languages of thought and expression do not necessarily match, where intellectual and social life conflict, and where the political opposition to a dominant culture often manifests itself as an internal, rather than external, experience. (15)
Through the adoption of the majority language, a sense of location with respect to an Italian homeland is expressed, as is a sense of difference from its native speakers. The difficult task of negotiating a hyphenated identity is achieved through the English language, the “agent of reterritorialization.” Paradoxically, English is also a marker of ethnic difference, for it is an English interspersed with Italian words and grammatical structures. This different way of speaking or of giving voice to the immigrant experience through the language of the majority becomes one of the ways in which ethnic identity is fashioned and performed.
Throughout his poetry and prose, Antonio D’Alfonso switches between Italian, English, and Molisano, each occupying different roles in a polycultural and polylingual identity. For instance, the narrator of Fabrizio’s Passion reflects upon his privileged position at the intersection between cultures: “Being a strange combination of cultures, I was able to converge my three views of this city (Montreal) and form a completely unique triangular (tripartite) worldview” (212). In The Other Shore, Antonio D’Alfonso’s narrator grapples with English and French, and especially with Italian, and is frustrated by his inability to contain language, to nail down its meanings or circumscribe its boundaries. Constantly shifting in both the meanings it generates and the experiences it describes, language, like identity itself, is tenuous and profoundly mysterious. Language contains (in the sense of enclosure or containment) cultural narratives and collective memory, but language also frees its user to improvise meanings, to invent new identities.
The languages in which D’Alfonso expresses himself are in constant interaction, and the complex relationships between syntax, emphasis, choice of words, and linguistic structures reflect the interactions of his various personae. This is expressed in the opening note to the collection: “This book of broken verses, broken thoughts, about broken feelings. This, a notebook without a beginning, without an end, only a flowing towards being, a growing; contradictions and explanations” (7). This collection of poems, in journal form, records the thoughts and impressions of an ethnic writer who crosses physical, linguistic, and cultural borders. Written both in Canada and Italy, the work seems to capture perfectly the tensions which emerge in this negotiation of linguistic, cultural and physical spaces.
D’Alfonso’s narrator meditates upon the physicality of language, upon the manner in which it is burdened with meanings, histories, and personal memory. Language is for him contingent upon sensual experience and oral narrative, and is often described in physical terms: “The fluidity of language. Language as liquid” (111); “The flakiness of words. What peels off or can be chipped. Words wear down. They lose their thickness and crumble, exhausted . . . A great tendency to excessive reduction to darken the gamut of possible meaning” (17).
Language also courses through the body and the breath, and is equated, as in the poetry of di Michele, to a corporeal and “pure” mode of expression: “I do not break the natural flow of language purposely. It is the way language comes out of my body. I breathe this way normally. When critics scorn my writing for being rigid, unnatural, I feel as if they are criticizing me for the way I breathe, for being the way I am” (110). Language is porous in its ability to contain memories yet duplicitous in its reversals and constant shifts of meaning. It functions both as mnemonic device that transports the narrator back to a mythic Italian childhood, and as a cipher of the narrator’s performative Italianità in the text. The linguistic tensions and unease present just below the surface of D’Alfonso’s poetry becomes a “natural” form of expression mirroring his pluricultural identity. We see a preoccupation with self-presentation, with the physical display of the ethnic body and the auditory display of the accented ethnic voice. Mary di Michele notes that: “D’Alfonso is not concerned with the purity or reality of language . . . words have no weight without experience; they are contingent on experience and on the personal voice” (146).
The narrator vacillates between the view of language as an “essential” aspect of his ethnic identity, and language as a slippery and arbitrary code which inevitably fails to express emotion, memory, and ethnic identity. Language is ripe with powerful emotional value and associations, but can just as easily be emptied of these: “Language, a thing that contains itself. Not all language contains a priori memory. It may contain nothing at all. Language is overburdened with itself. It is energy propelling the user of language” (106).
The process of writing involves the translation of one cultural and linguistic reality into another, and D’Alfonso highlights the degree to which the interpenetration of languages translates an Italic sensibility into an English one: “I write with the memory of one language in mind and express this memory in another language. It is the marriage of memories” (108). This literal translation of languages involves a transformation of self as well, a constant negotiation of identity between the domestic Molisano dialect of childhood and those languages acquired later in life: “Even Italian is a learned language for me. Language of the North, it is not the language my thoughts got formed in nor the music I hear in my head at night when I cannot get to sleep. Already a transformation occurs: from Guglionesano, I must translate into Italian. When I write, I translate” (The Other Shore 109).
The inability of D’Alfonso’s narrator to completely possess the normative Italian language, and therefore participate fully in Italian cultural life, becomes a source of anguish and frustration, a realization of his otherness with respect to an Italian cultural elite. While Guglionesano represents the emotive, corporeal response to his surroundings and his upbringing in an immigrant household, standardized Italian is a language of loss, representing dislocation and familial history disconnected from its source of cultural wealth. As Caccia points out: “At once desired and detested, Italian, the mythic language, is also the language of power. The ability to speak Italian well is a mark of class, of social mobility” (Contrasts 159). For D’Alfonso, each of these languages corresponds to a particular sphere of cultural identity, to an ethnic performance or “savoir-faire” that is put on display for others and for oneself. This reflects D’Alfonso’s adoption of the image of the “living and sly chameleon” (73) which changes its colours in relation to its shifting surroundings.
D’Alfonso seeks to find a proper language in which to write, one which will authentically mediate his experiences as an Italian, as a Guglionesano, and as a Montrealer: “Now that I have relearned the syntax of my breath. Now that the muscles of my mouth are relaxed, I want to study the languages of history . . . my own grammar, my struggle with grammarless homes” (129). The constant movement from one linguistic frame to another and the interpenetrability and contamination which this implies is used to illustrate the unease and ambiguity with which the hyphenated Canadian approaches questions of ethnic self-definition.
Verdicchio writes that “the major reason behind the use of Italian appeared to be one of assessing identity, reclaiming a language and a culture that has somehow become distant” (98). The inscription of Italian phrases, expressions, and dialogue in the text are part of the ethnic writer’s construction of personal and collective memory, an attempt at bridging the realities of the past and those of the present. The Italian word in the English text not only affirms a particular immigrant history, it enunciates the narrator’s ethnic specificity to a Canadian reading public: “The quoting of Italian words and phrases is then an attempt to duplicate one’s identity in language, a way of setting distance, of expressing difference” (Verdicchio 119).
Verdicchio suggests that, while the insertion of Italian words in the English text may be “rich in inclusive cultural resonance,” such words and expressions do not provide the full cultural contexts and implications of the immigrant/ethnic experience, and the ultimate effect is that of “empty gesture and device” (99). In the abandonment of one sign system for another, the Italian word loses its layers of meaning and depth and becomes an empty sign of cultural difference that floats upon the surface of English: “The locking of Italian words and phrases within a different linguistic environment duplicates one’s identity in language and restricts a free-movement toward cultural presence” (99).
The inclusion of the English word in the Italian-Canadian text thus serves as a sort of performance of ethnicity, an attempt at rendering more secure one’s weak link to the Italian cultural tradition and language. I would argue that this ambiguous relationship to language in the work of D’Alfonso and, indeed, in the work of many Italian-Canadian writers, reflects this ambiguity about their own sense of ethnic identity. In other words, there is in Italian-Canadian literature both the desire for an “essential” Italian identity, and the desire for a more open, fluid, and dynamic sense of hyphenated identity. This is shown in the writers’ recourse to the Italian language as an assurance of “authenticity,” and their subsequent flight from it manifested through linguistic unease and experimentation.
In his 1998 anthropological study, Nicholas Harney examines the myriad ways in which Italian-Canadians construct a sense of community and ethnic identity in Canada’s large urban centres. By closely examining such things as Italian-Canadian cultural centres and associations, heritage schools, religious festivals, and the transnational connections between Italian and Canadian business and cultural organizations, Harney outlines the manner in which this ethnic group maintains and redefines itself as a group vis-à-vis the urban environment:
Through these sites I interpret the constant refashioning of “Italianness” and examine the social construction of an ethnic community. These local foci of identity construction act as generative structures in the production of Italian-Canadian identity. Ethnic identity does not emerge from a monolithic, shared culture but through a complex, diverse social field that forms social space within which numerous interests compete and conflict for expression and distribution of meaning within the community, and articulation to the greater public culture. (4)
Harney argues that the transnational movement of Italian consumer products, Italian and locally produced media, and other forms of cultural exchange contributes significantly to the ways in which Italian-Canadians imagine and define themselves. Italian dialects and regionalism have affected the way in which Italian-Canadians construct identities and filiations within Canada. Furthermore, identities traditionally imposed upon the Italian immigrant (the festive labourer, the criminal, etc.) are not only surpassed but are sometimes used in an ironic manner. In this way, identities are juggled, constructed, “imagined,” and managed within Canada’s ethnic ghettos, but also outside of those ghettos in the ethnic face that is presented to the majority culture.
It is within this complex environment of constantly shifting meanings, practices, and performances that “Italian immigrants and their children make choices within the social, political, and economic structures that shape, deny, and offer opportunities for them to create meaningful worlds” (3). Language use (both oral and literary) is one of the many ways in which Italian-Canadian identities are being actively negotiated and constructed.
This performance of ethnicity enables Italian-Canadians to maintain attachments to the homeland as well as to their heritage cultures. With succeeding generations there is an erosion of linguistic and cultural affiliation to the Italian homeland, and these sorts of technologies of self counter cultural fragmentation through the maintenance and/or renewal and/or transformation of ethnic meanings. It is also clear from the poetry and prose in question that the ethnic writer is aware of and complicit in this performance of identity. As Marino Tuzi points out: “Overtaken by such indeterminacy, the ethnic subject participates in a continual process of resignification” (15).
For D’Alfonso, language is both troubled and troubling, for it is central to the ongoing strategy of constructing and elaborating an identity that is neither Italian nor Canadian, but somewhere in between. It is through the re-inscription of language codes that his poetry questions not only the homogeneity of the Canadian cultural landscape, but his relationship to his own ethnicity as well. Through historical artefacts, photographs, family narratives, through the thematic and linguistic experimentation afforded by the writing process, D’Alfonso seeks to redefine his relationship to the past and to the communities to which he belongs. His project, then, is to ground the disjunctive influences of immigrant and ethnic experience by validating this “in-between” as the basis for a hybrid cultural identity.
Caccia, Fulvio. “The Italian Writer and Language.” Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing. Ed. Joseph Pivato. Montreal: Guernica, 1985. 155–167.
Canton, Licia. “The Question of Identity in Italian-Canadian Fiction.” Diss. Université de Montréal, 1998
D’Alfonso, Antonio. In Italics: In Defense of Ethnicity. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 1996.
____. Fabrizio’s Passion. Toronto: Guernica, 1995.
____. The Other Shore. Montreal: Guernica, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1975.
Di Michele, Mary. “The Other Shore.” Rev. of The Other Shore, by Antonio D’Alfonso. Canadian Ethnic Studies 19.1 (1987): 144–145.
____. “Writers From Invisible Cities.” Canadian Woman Studies 8.2 (Summer 1987): 37–38.
Gobard, Henri. L’alienation linguistique. Paris: Flammarion, 1976.
Harney, Nicholas DeMaria. Eh, Paesan! Being Italian in Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Itwaru, Arnold Harrichand. The Invention of Canada: Literary Text and the Immigrant Imaginary. Toronto: Tsar, 1990.
Minni, Dino C. Ed. Writers in Transition: The Proceedings of the First National Conference of Italian-Canadian Writers. Montreal: Guernica, 1990.
Pivato, Joseph. Echo: Essays on Other Literatures. Toronto: Guernica, 1994.
____. “Constantly Translating: The Challenge for Italian-Canadian Writers.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (March 1987): 60–76.
____. Ed. Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing. Montreal: Guernica, 1985.
____. “The Return Journey in Italian-Canadian Literature.” Canadian Literature 106 Fall (1985): 169–176.
Sandhu, Nirmaljeet. “Québécité et polyphonie dans La Québécoite de Régine Robin et L’autre rivage d’Antonio D’Alfonso.” Frontières et manipulation générique dans la littérature canadienne francophone: Actes de colloque, Université d’Ottawa, 20–22 mai, 1992. Hearst, Ont.: Les Éditions du Nordir, 1992.
Verdicchio, Pasquale. Devils in Paradise: Writings on Post-Emigrant Cultures. Toronto: Guernica, 1997.