#family ancestors identity immigrants Italy USA America

[krazyclue]

Italian in Name Only

I am a mixtape of European influences, but the two biggest are Italian and Irish, so it's maybe ironic that I've never been much for family. Not hostile toward it, more like disinterested.

 Italians and the Irish have the reputation of being devoted to their families. If there's nothing quite like a good Catholic upbringing mixed with poverty to convince people to have loads of children, then being middle-class and an only child is the antidote. Never wanted children, never wanted to be part of a family, didn't even really have a notion of them. I just never thought about it.

 Not until lately anyway, and I do not mean in the sense of having children myself. I mean of being suddenly conscious of a growing need to know what my origins are, to see how I somehow fit into the larger concept of a family. When my ancestors arrived in America, what they did once they got here, and how that differs from or mirrors what other families have found. This desire might have something to do with the pandemic and all that time spent alone when the world was shut down—the isolation making me want to reconnect and do so on a deeper level.  

Most of my knowledge of Italy is from the movies, design, and fashion. My understanding of Ireland is even more limited since I spent my only visit there wandering between pubs listening to white guys with 'dreads spinning drum'n'bass. I don't speak any Italian beyond a stray "Ciao, Bella" or "Vaffanculo." I know the second one because English soccer fans used it in a taunting chant whenever they played Italian teams ("Where were you in World War 2? VA-FFAN-CULO!!"). My father spoke fluent Italian when he was a child but forgot most of it in adulthood.  My immediate family is small and spread by time, distance, and some animosity; I know very little about most of the members of my extended one. If I have cultural heritage, it's hard to know what it is.

 I am not at all sure what made me start to think this way. It could have been watching the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante's novels. The show is a portrait of two women growing up in 50's Naples. We see their lives against a backdrop of a country coming fitfully to life after the devastation following the Second World War, its progress held back by repressive patriarchy. Grim moments often give way to more ecstatic ones before doubling back again the other way, leading to emotionally vivid set pieces that capture the personal and historical in the same scene. The score by Max Richter alone can induce yearning and seeing the young, very inexperienced cast gradually develop into compelling actors makes the whole experience unforgettable, like the best work of the Italian neorealist cinema.

 But My Brilliant Friend is set in Naples, and my family is from Tuscany. Italy, like the States, is a country of regions that do not always like each other, the north versus the south, and my ancestors would have been culturally different from the show's characters. Still, carried by the show, I find myself more and more drawn to thinking about Italy—I have roots in Germany and France as well, but for some reason, Italy is the country for which I feel the strongest connection. 

 Possibly I am entirely led by my stomach. Early in the pandemic, I started getting into Italian cooking, going carefully through a copy of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hasan, who you might call the Julia Child of that countries' cuisine. I have a copy of Silver Spoon too, a compendium of real recipes from Italian families, from which I've made a few dishes, and I have my grandmother's pasta maker, and somewhere on an index card her hand-written ravioli recipe. It took all day for her and my grandfather to make that recipe; she stirred the slow simmering meat and prepared the ingredients, and my grandfather painstakingly sealed each ravioli with a fork.

 My German grandfather may have loved his pig's feet and pickled herring, but that obsession thankfully was not passed onto me, nor, as far as I know, to anyone else in my family. I might like a good stout too, even some Irish stew on occasion, but it's Italian food that captures my imagination. I am only beginning to know how each region has shaped that cuisine and the influences that created so many varied dishes. 

 I have not kept up with my family. I hardly know most of them, and outside of my parents and my uncle, I am not in touch with any other relatives. I forget the birthdays of even the closest friends and family; I must mark them on a calendar, or I'll miss the day altogether. My uncle has become something of the family historian and has been sending emails to nearly a dozen family relations. While I do recognize many of the names, there are far more that I do not remember and at least two I only know of by reputation. There are also people I met on that list, only once or twice, and those I saw most often were back when my grandparents were making their famous ravioli to go along with the Thanksgiving turkey, and that was a long time ago now.

 Those emails coincide with my awakening interest in my origins. I know a few more names now: my great grandparents Enea and Italia Lorenzetti emigrated here in 1916 and had two sons; my grandmother's dislike for Enea, a man with old-world beliefs who thought women shouldn't drive, my grandfather's brother, who threatened to walk out if Enea told them how to run their business; a rift with the Catholic Church because a priest wouldn't baptize Enea's and Italia's daughter unless they paid him an indulgence, and that the girl died soon after.

I've seen family photos, the people captured in those images ghost-like in those black and white pictures, and since I am such a mongrel, I do not look at all like them. Of course, I'd like to know more, but really, what I want is a better sense of what Italy is and why I feel so drawn toward it, not only the particulars of my one family's experience. I will start getting to know my family, but that is only the beginning of reconnecting, not its conclusion.

As I read and study (and hopefully get to make that first trip to Italy after the pandemic canceled my trip scheduled for last October), I want to know Italy without romanticizing it. You can convince yourself that life is better "over there" when it's probably the same or worse. Okay, maybe better too, possibly much better. But I don't want to become an obsessive Italy fan. Or fall for obvious cliches—about how Italy is a place where people know how to live. Italians are all passionate and stylish, speaking with their hands, operatic and over the top, and all the other hot-blooded Italian tropes. I'm sure there's some truth there as well.

But Italy also had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks and still struggles with a government, often in disarray, that cannot impede the dominance of the Camorra clans in Naples. And Italy still hasn't quite overcome the legacy of Mussolini: a far-right movement led by Matteo Salvini remains threateningly close to taking power, a rise aided by racism and xenophobia. I do not want to idealize or unfairly condemn the place, but rather know Italy and its' people for whatever they are, so I can see how it shaped myself and my family. I want to take pictures in the streets, wander without a plan until I got lost and needed one. Maybe discover my operatic personality.

 Coming out of this lockdown, old age not quite here but getting closer, as in just around the corner smoking a cigarette close, with the world isolated from itself, without any family of my own; maybe that is what sparked this need to connect with a sense of place, a sense of family. That's what being "white" can mean—it's when you've become so absorbed into American culture that your ancestry seems like it started around about 1980 (in my case anyway). I used to joke that my cultural heritage was shopping malls and Back to the Future movies at the multiplex.

 I think that has some advantages to being part of a well-defined community or coming from a large extended family. If you have no family, you won't be assigned an identity by what they think you should be. You won't have as many expectations about your choices before you get to choose for yourself.

 The problem is that you also have no sense of history or your heritage or how your small part fits into it the larger story. You are isolated. You can claim America, the nation of immigrants, but you make a claim not knowing where your people came from, and that might be the worst side effect of assimilation: forgetting the past. I've never known much about mine. I regret letting so much time slip before realizing family and heritage are so important. Now I am going to do my best to embrace my past, whatever it may be. 

[musicallisto]

I think Americans claim their descent in the way that is clearly annoying to you because there’s the judgement if we don’t. For example, I always say “I’m American” because my family emigrated to America when it was still a colony so my descent is so far back that I don’t feel a connection to that culture. And yet, every single time, I’m asked to clarify: “no but like, what country did you come from?”

And I’m confused by your comment on being from the culture you identify with, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I would love some clarification:

I am not of French descent. At all. But if I learn French, and about French culture and submerse myself in said culture from where I live in America, I can consider myself French? I’m not arguing about how you feel about your Spanish descent, I absolutely understand you reasoning. But the “it’s really all about how big an impact said country has had on your life and identity construction” makes it seem as though as long as I am interested enough in and study the culture enough, I can claim to be a part of it. Is that what you were trying to convey?

Thank you so much for your clarification and patience with me.

✧˖°࿐ sorry for the time I took to answer!

I think, in some way, it boils down to an intrinsically different definition of nationality/origin between the USA and Europe, which I've noticed maaany times before and that just has to do with how our countries and societies are different and were built differently. I think if you told any European you were American, they would have left it at that and never would've inquired to know where your ancestry is from (if it was Europeans asking you 'but where are you from really?', then color me surprised!). I'm not knowledgeable at all about the subject to know why this difference exists in the first place (probably in the nature of our populations and how they came to life - because the USA was born from immigration so there's this idea that you must be from somewhere else, even if that was 300 years ago, but idrk and only studied the migratory history of the US in 12th grade, so don't quote me on that). If anyone knows more about the subject, feel free to intervene!

(Personally I don't mind Americans identifying with a very distant heritage - and by that I don't mean 'I'm X American' or 'I'm of X descent / I have X origins / My ancestors were X' at all! I really do mean "I am X" -, I just think it's a bit weird, but from what I know people from the involved cultures tend to find it disrespectful because it's inserting yourself in a community that is, in fact, completely divorced from your experience. I know Italians have beef with Italian Americans saying they're Italians because they have such wildly different conceptions of culture and race, with the whole “are Italians POC” thing but that’s not my place to discuss at all.)

And as for your question: no, I don't think you can claim to be from a culture if you're just partaking in it out of love, no matter how long you've been loving it. I mean, taking your example: if you learn French, immerse yourself in French culture, move to France, and eventually request French citizenship... then you are legally French, and no one can argue with that, so you get every right to say 'I am French'. However, you wouldn't be from France. Take my mother: she's been living in France for 20 years and is perfectly fluent. She doesn't have the French nationality because she doesn't want to get it, but she would have no problem in getting it. If she did, she'd be French... but never from France, because that's not where the majority of her identity was constructed (ie. in childhood and adolescence). Though you could argue identity is always being constructed, at every stage of life, and the last 20 years she spent in France are just as valid as the first 30 she's spent in Spain, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong; it's difficult to set rigid rules about who claims affiliations to a community or culture, and even more so when our approaches to origin are different (between the US and Europe). Like most things in life, culture is super fluid, contrary to nationality. At the end of the day, I think it's mostly up to the individual to reflect on what they genuinely feel close to, and not an illusory/idealized version of said culture.

When I said "it's about how big an impact a country has had on your life" I meant to juxtapose my Spanish and Italian heritage; if we look at my "blood count" (lmfao that sounds so ominous), like strictly speaking where were my ancestors from, I'm much more Italian than I am French. However I have zero cultural ties to Italy; I don't know the language, don't know my family there, have never been other than as a tourist... so even if "ethnically" I'm super Italian, I can't possibly claim to be Italian because that would be dishonest to actual Italian people who really do have an Italian experience I know nothing about. However because of my close proximity to my Spanish family, and growing up Spanish, I feel like I have a genuine Spanish experience. To which you could answer, "but how do you know your experience is truthful if you've never lived in Spain and don't know any better?", well that's true, I don't really know. All I can do is feel it, as stupid as it sounds.

Hope that wasn't too confusing, I feel like the more I talk the less sense I make oops. and thank you for being open to discussion! it's a very interesting topic to talk about :)