1/23/01: Potswoli
Once I told you I was going to tell you the story of Potswoli. Now I shall tell you that story.
When I was working on a project for my Irish in America class -- namely, a project on how the Irish and the Italians interacted in New York, with a focus on Jimmy Walker vrs. Fiorella LaGuardia -- I came to ask my father about how my Italian side ended up here. I am, you see, half Irish and half Italian. Hence my interest in such things.
Anyhoo. Dad told me that my Italian family came from central Italy, kind of near Naples*. They left, he said, not so much because of the agricultural malaise, or the social revolts, or any of those things. No, they left the little town of Potswoli (what a name!) because it was threatened by the rumblings of a nearby volcano. The whole town was abandoned. Dad says it's still there, and still abandoned, because of the volcano danger which remains but never realizes itself.
Isn't that the saddest thing? It brings me to tears sometimes to think of it. Just this little lonely village, where a scant 150 years ago, some of my great-greats were living, making bread and working in the fields and falling in love and getting born and getting dead. It amazes me.
So I wonder if I should go "back" some time. I don't know what it would tell me. I know I felt oddly at home in Ireland. It was bizarre. I stepped off the plane and just looked around and said, "Well, yeah, duh. I've been here before. I can't remember when, though."
But on the other hand, we all come from somewhere, and before that, somewhere else. My dad has a theory that my Italian side was probably at some point Jewish and running out of Spain during the inquisition. He has a number of reasons to back them up, which are too involved to go into here. But then -- am I Spanish? There also seems to be some sort of North African influence. To look at our hair**, and my grandfather's skin tone -- it's not a stretch.
So... does Potswoli really have any claim on me, or me on it? Am I supposed to go there? My Irish side doesn't claim a hometown or a home county -- Clare seems to come up often enough, and we don't seem to be from the North at all (my great-grandmother is quoted as saying that "the northerners were a shifty folk"). Does that mean that I don't belong to anywhere in Ireland, or that I belong everywhere in Ireland, or that belonging is a strange thing to even be thinking of in this context?
Am I starting to lose you all? My head is sort of everywhere. I've been speaking Adspeak all day and my vocabulary is all full of words like "leverage" and "bidirectional" and I'm having trouble forming English sentances.
One more thought and then I'm going home for tonight. Back in the Irish in America class, we took a field trip to the Tenement Museum. It's an old tenement building that was never renevated, that was sort of "found" by the city and turned into a museum, complete with artifacts, and fixed up to look, and even smell (to some degree) like a real old tenement. One apartment "belonged to" an Italian family. And something about it made me feel very, very, very at home. It was completely and utterly bizarre. I walked in, looked around at it, and said, "oddly familiar" to myself, and then the tour guide said, "Italian." So. Make of that what you will. I'm going home to eat more of my corn bread. Yum.
*When Reneau and I were in Greece, and were in a hating-Greek mode because were sick of it, and she told me that she hated Naples too, and I told her that Naples used to be called Neo-polis and was founded by the Greeks, we found that to be very funny. Of course I don't hate the Greeks anymore. It was a suffusion of passion brought on by too much spanokopita and nounou and not enough water.
**Not my hair. I got it chemically straightened. Believe me, this was an act of kindness towards all humankind. Kerri Russell I am not.