Andiamo

This morning, I sat by the Tyrrhenian Sea, sipping a cappuccino and having a loud, impassioned, conversation with a group of other Italian-American women, all of us crowded around a too-small table. We spoke of identity and nostalgia and belonging, and I’ve never felt simultaneously farther and closer to home. 

That question of home is the heart of every conversation I’m having this week while attending a writing seminar specifically designed for writers from the Italian diaspora. The idea of including myself among such a group, my rejection of it and embrace of it, is in itself a diasporic experience. Intellectually, I do know that. But an Italian one, specifically? Is that even a thing? The short answer is yes, of course it is. My personal take as a third generation Italian-American involves a much longer answer. Potentially a book-length one. Being at a seminar titled Italian Diaspora Studies has shown me I’m far from alone in this liminal space. This is what we were all yelling* about this morning. 

(*Note: just how we speak, not anger.)

Replace the sea with a kitchen sink, replace the cappuccino with mildly burnt coffee that might be a few hours old, and I could have been crowded around my grandmother’s kitchen table in East Utica; a large difference being that each of us in conversation, our ages ranging from 40 to 70, have at least one post-graduate degree, if not two, and the reason we have them is because someone else, at some other time, decided to leave Calabria. 

Calabria is a place I heard about my entire life. The “mother land.” A place I had never been, my parents had never been, and most of my grandparents had never been. And yet, it’s also home. I don’t feel a connection to the place, not really, but I am connected to the people who still live here. The descendants of the ones who stayed.  

I feel too removed from the immigrant experience and Italy itself to consider myself part of a diaspora. And yet, I grew up as if I was first generation. Being Italian was ingrained as my identity since birth. White people were “other” but so were Black people. We were a third thing, a better thing, and that idea that being Italian was superior was also part of the mindset around me. I grew up in a neighborhood that was still known as the Italian ghetto at the time, no longer exclusively, but still predominantly, Italian through the ‘80s and early ’90s. I watched it evolve into the next immigration wave’s community by the time I entered middle school, when most Italian families, including my own, began to scatter to “better neighborhoods” or suburbs. Like their grandparents before them, who tried to recreate a Southern Italian experience in their new American neighborhoods, my parents’ generation slowly lost pieces of tradition too, not for lack of interest, but simply because things change.

Some time around my first year of college, I began to notice that Sunday dinner conversations would turn to “the old days” earlier and earlier, with someone inevitably lamenting how the old neighborhood had changed, despite their own upwardly mobile path to assimilation creating those vacancy signs that allowed new immigrants to become American, whatever that is, the way they did. This is the second generation experience.

One of the first sentences I wrote in my workshop here in Calabria was “I am not Italian.” An affront to the sentiment instilled in me growing up, but not untrue. Not necessarily true either though. This is the third generation experience.

My last newsletter was about not knowing how to write about this very topic, and then I took a month off to finish an entirely different project. Now I have a better idea about where to go next, though it’s still pretty murky. At some point I’m sure I’ll send another newsletter about where I’m at with this project, but we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled quips and quandaries next time! Thanks for indulging me, as ever.

FUN STUFF:

What I'm Reading: Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum

What I'm Watching: Widow’s Bay (Apple+)

What I'm Listening To: The Great Divide - Noah Kahan (album)

What I'm Eating: So much pasta