|
How I Became Italian: A Performance Piece When I moved to
Minneapolis, I became Italian. Not suddenly or explosively but gradually,
like a good sauce that has to simmer all day, its flavors slowly building,
garlic, onion, olive, tomato, into some orgiastic crescendo by the time it’s
dusk. When I moved to
Minneapolis, I became Italian. Walking into a room where almost everyone was
white and that whiteness was blond without bleach or brown that comes after
the blondeness gets older, with skin that carried pink as the only back hue.
I became Italian as I started to hear about lutefisk and cross-country
skiing, when ice fishing was something that people did instead of wrote
postcards about. I became Italian when
I came out as a lesbian at 27. I became Italian when I started to get my
bachelor’s degree at 29. I became Italian when I got involved with a Jew. I
became Italian again when I fell madly in love with a Brazilian butch. I became Italian when
I moved to Minneapolis. I had been Italian before but with a small “i”,
something that came up when people asked me where my name was from or,
checking out my body language, my hair or my eyes, where I was from. You know
the question I mean, the puzzled look on the face, eyebrow furrowed, and
then, sometimes subtly sometimes directly, “you’re not from here, are you?”
Followed by, “So where are you from?” Being white being light I don’t have to
deal with the “no, where are you FROM?” when I say Cleveland. My right to be
American is never questioned. But there is a pause and then, “Where are your
folks from, what’s your ancestry?” It never occurs to me or to anyone in my
family to refer to my mother’s blood line when answering that question. Her
maternal German line, the pork chops at the table and the many generations of
factory workers in Cleveland, they just were. Her paternal line, my grandpa,
well he was an Indian who told everyone he was French Canadian. By grandpa’s
choice and the metís of his skin, he defied race into something called
passing. Tattoos and muscle, my mother’s father was a good white Catholic man
who tanned well even in winter with an alias that had eluded the FBI for
years. No, when anyone asked, I was Italian, an Italian that was my father
and the name he left me and my brother. When people asked us what we were, my
brother and I kept my father alive, his memory explaining the olive, darker
on my brother, lighter on me, of our skin. ¦ I am about
four-years-old. We are sitting in our apartment, my father and me. He is
huge, 6’ 4” tall and big bones, I can still feel the size of his arms around
me. We are sitting on the floor in front of the TV. The moment is solemn.
Music is playing faintly in the background. Arranged in front of us are a jar
of hot peppers, a plate of bread, a glass of water, and some kind of white
cheese. “You are Italian,” explains my father. And he pulls a pepper out of
the jar, the juice dripping into his cupped palm as he moves it toward my
mouth. I know this will be hot, it will have spice and maybe make my eyes
water and my face turn red like it does for my father when he eats them,
loudly and with gusto, tears pouring down his face and his belly bouncing
with his laugh. This first time, this early ritual, all I do is lick with the
tip of my tongue, sneak out and get a drop of juice before my father pulls
the pepper away, gives me bread and cheese and some water to drink. This
ritual will be repeated, I don’t remember how many times, until, just before
his death, I could eat a bite of pepper without a quick bite of bread to ease
the heat in my mouth. My father died when I
was young, before he could teach me much about being Italian. The taste of
hot peppers, lemon ice in the summer, and knowing with pride that Italians
make good jazz musicians. I looked like parts of his family, had ways in the
world that he gave before he left, but his culture, his being Italian as easy
as he breathed? He took that with him when he died. I moved to
Minneapolis and became Italian. I became something that was more than my
father’s memory. For the first time, I started to take my own memories and
weave them along with what I knew of him, Peter, Pietro Raffo, growing up in
Queens, New York, summers as a child spent at Villa Raffo, the house in the Catskills
where the mafioso went when the heat was on in the city. My father with the
darker skin, the man who went south in the early 1960s to register Black
voters because he knew it was right, because in the summer in rural New York
with his hair shaved close to his head and his skin at its darkest he had
been called nigger and he knew that it was only his Italian parents, their
parents before them and his last name that stopped the racism directed at him
from sinking past the summer color of his skin and settling into his bones
and his dreams for the future. I moved to Minneapolis and became Italian. My
memories entwined with my memory of my father and in my dreams, he rocked me
in his arms. ¦ “What’s your name
from?” he asked me when we were both in the sixth grade. “It’s Italian. My dad
was Italian.” “Oh yeah?” Even
though we were both in the sixth grade and supposedly pre-sexual, I knew what
was coming next. It had happened before. “I know all about Italian girls.” And
he grabbed my arm and tried to pull me behind the white barn where the fast
kids made out, each one taking turns to watch out for the teachers. It made sense to me
that this should happen. I knew that being Italian meant being watched and
wanted. No matter what I did. This happened again and again and it wasn’t
until I was much older that I learned this happened to many girls many women
who walk willingly on public streets. I took it more personally, thinking
there was something about me, something I couldn’t hide like the swell of my
breasts or the fact of my legs. My uncles. Men on the streets. Boys at
school. Ghost memories that hid behind my eyelids, not to materialize for
many years, memories of men grabbing me, a man taking me, his whispers
telling me I was different, I had dangerous blood. Poisonous. Toxic. The
first time my mother’s father whispered this to me, dangerous blood you gotta
watch it, he said, dangerous blood’s gonna show, I knew he was talking about
something Italian, the taint of my father riddling its way through the blood
of my heart. He didn’t have to tell me, his eyes on mine and his hands
lingering, that dangerous blood had something to do with sex, the musty
places where sex like blood long dried hid away from the melt of the sun. Did
grandpa ever pull the words together for me — Italian dangerous blood sex poison
— I don’t know but I began to tie this belief to the whispers that men aimed
at my girl and then my woman, their whispers generally focusing on pussy
pussy girl pussy girl come sit on my face but I heard Italian slut. This
being-Italian meant that others, that men, saw something under my skin,
something invisible to me but desired by them. This I believed, they could
see something dangerous. ¦ My father’s mother,
my proverbial Italian grandmother, didn’t visit us much after my father died.
She came once a year when we, her grandchildren, were still young. I remember
missing her, even when she was there. Distant and watchful, she started to
cry at the mere mention of my father’s name. In the course of eighteen
months, my grandmother lost her mother, her husband, her first-born son and
her first-born grandson. Her tethers to a past and a future were cut and let
loose. Those of us still remaining held the frayed ends and tried to weave
together some kind of history. When I asked my
grandmother for stories, she cried. Sometimes she was angry. She once told
me in a rage that other people looked down on her family because they were
Neopolitan, Napolitano. “Someday I am going to go back to Naples,” she would
tell me. “Naples is a beautiful city of old squares with fountains in the
center.” It is one of the few memories I have to trot out as a calling card
when folks ask me to talk about “being Italian,” something that sounds
legitimate, that has nouns and cultural placing. Once I tried to tell my
grandmother that Naples had become a polluted industrial city with a port
hanging over a coast line of sewage. She wasn’t interested. It has been 27 years
since my father and brother died in that car accident, 28 years since my
grandfather, my father’s father, died. My grandmother lost the line of her
history, something that she had been holding in her fingers, olive skin
crocheting her way between Italian and American. She will not be sorrowed
and when I told her on her eightieth birthday that it would have been good
for me to hold her, to share with her the feeling of that loss, she told me I
was pazza, that what was past is past and what is now is now. ¦ I close my eyes and I
can feel my father’s arms around me, I am so small, so much smaller than this
grown up body can be. I was my grandfather’s favorite, Eugenio Raffo, I was
first born and he wanted me to have a good Italian name but my mother liked
Susan. I was his favorite and I have pictures and the ghost of a memory, we
are in Miami, the city of sun he has moved to, and he holds me up to feel the
fronds of a palm tree, his bald brown head glistening with sweat, he makes me
laugh. I moved to
Minneapolis and became Italian because the first seven years of my life began
to assert themselves through the second seven. It is not coincidence that
when at age 29 and 30, I began to remember being raped four times, twice by
family twice by friends, it was my father’s arms who held me, big and strong,
held me and rocked rocked rocked me as I cried. Memory seeping out of liver
and bile and moving from the shadows that had collected around my heart, my
father held me and let me be small, when I moved to Minneapolis, I became
Italian. I am 34 years old. My
father died when he was 31. When I turned 31, I was living in Minneapolis and
I became Italian. In my dreams he is bigger than I am but when I put one foot
after another, forward into a string of tomorrows, he recedes gently into staying
younger. A few months ago, in the midst of tears and feelings of bone deep
loss, I turned to my lover and started laughing. “Oh my god, Raquel,” I said,
“I have conflated my father and God!” She responded with a loving, “Duh.” When I feel small and
frightened, my father holds me in his arms and he rocks me. I begin to
understand why Catholicism, the Southern Italian flavor of Catholicism I grew
up with, saints in rich robes and sobbing aloud in church, something in which
Mary is everywhere present, strong woman mother to us all, Jesus is her son,
the one the priests talk about but the people remember only in Church, and
God Lord Father of us all God is someone you rarely see, with all of this I
stop and rest, my fingers aching for the touch of communion, my knees
remembering the hard leather, kneeling bowed head. I can not let go of
traditions that long ago stopped including me. Mary watches and her image is
kept by my bed and on the walls of my apartment but God, my father, I can’t
see him and when I am sad and feeling small, he rocks me in his arms, gently
gently, rocking me to sleep. When I moved to
Minneapolis I became Italian because my father reached out and claimed me.
His arms took my body that was melting into something invisible and made me
solid. My father, breath of memory, I can not smell the salt of his skin, but
when I moved to Minneapolis and no longer knew who I was, my father took my
hand. He walked with me as I turned 29 and 30, I can feel the calluses on his
palm, and at 31 stopped and stood still, side by side, my body slowly pulling
away into a place where his cells had long ago stuttered into something more
holy. I am Italian. I live
in Minneapolis. My father has died and his family, they live in New York and
Arizona, in San Francisco and they write me sometimes but they are people who
keep their ghosts shut outside the doors of their American dreams. I came to
Minneapolis to become Italian and things have changed: I am not afraid of sex
and I am Italian. My father took my hand and brought me here. I am not afraid
if you desire me and, truthfully, I hope that you do and if you do, I will
work it. This body with its dangerous blood hungers for your touch, the light
of your eyes on my body, I want you to look at me and I will not be afraid,
memories long rested into settled dust. I am Italian and I have Italian
family here, family not connected by blood but by something that doesn’t wash
away. This family loves me and when I tell them I am afraid, their arms pull
me against them and claim me as their own. I am Italian. I live
in Minneapolis. In the apartment that Raquel and I share, Mary watches from
every corner, her eyes are visible and they know how I love my lover. In the
apartment that Raquel and I share, my father sits at the table even as I
can’t see him. His forearms rest on the solid wood, its color warm and light,
we picked this out with my mother the last time she visited us. In the
evenings, I sometimes put out bowls of peppers, platters of bread, and blocks
of white cheese. I drink water and wine. He brought me here, my father, my
God, my cells, and the lilt of my soul. I am Italian. I live in Minneapolis.
When we are tired or on the edge of afraid, my lover and I, our bodies
sometimes melting fire sometimes worried stone, when we are tired or when we
rise, urgent hands, smooth skin insistent touch, hands that take and come, in
our bed as Mary watches, my lover and I, we rock rock, we rock ourselves to
sleep. Minneapolis,
Minnesota |