`We Were Working on an Erotic Song Cycle': Reading Carole Maso's AVA as the Poetics of Female Italian-American Cultural and Sexual Identity

Throughout my childhood, I was brought up to be Italian and I was brought up to be American: two distinct identities not to be merged but to exist somehow simultaneously not quite one and not exactly the other, in a kind of hybrid state. But what did I know of being a "real" Italian? The link to my own cultural heritage has always been a tenuous one. I was purposely not taught the Italian language at home so that my mother and her sister and the other relatives could discuss family business in privacy. As a teenager, I took Italian classes at my high school and then later in college. By then, my family had mostly stopped using the language of their birth, of their distant homeland. In America you speak American. But I wanted to learn the language of la famiglia which I had thought was my link to life. The Italian that I learned at school, however, bore no relation to how my family spoke. The only Italian I now know is what I heard growing up, snatches of phrases and words which still act as an entryway to keeping my foot in the door of a lost and dying culture. These words emerge from my mind like something I cannot stop but also as something I can never seem to summon at will. What I still know are pieces of the songs my mother would sing to me, and still sings to me when I come to visit: le cante d'Italia. As a child, I never found out what those songs meant, and I still haven't. What I have discovered is that the language, the lyric, the song, the poetry has helped to created my sense of Italian identity as part of an ongoing experience which seems to have no complete literal American English translation. What constitutes Italian-American culture for a third-generation daughter born of a second-generation parent? Like many of my generation, I searched for answers to that question by traveling to Italy to the place I thought of as my homeland. My mother had no interest in going because her grandmother, who had never come to the United States, was no longer alive. "What was the point of going now," my mother said, "Che via vecchia"! So I went, with a friend, and saw the sights. I did not visit my grandparents' places of birth, Lucca and Sestri Levanti, where I still have many family members. I went instead to Venice and Verona and Rome. I saw the Spanish Steps and had tea at Keats's house and spoke sporadic Italian. But I saw myself there somehow. I saw the food I like to eat, the laundry I like to hand wash and let dry in the sun, and heard the music I like to listen to when I can't fall asleep. I saw the women with their thick dark hair, so much like mine, riding scooters together around the piazzas. Surely, this is my culture, too, I thought. I fantasized about living along the Mediterranean coastline, listening to opera and writing postcards back home to say how sorry I was that I was never returning because I had found my place at last. Soon I awoke from my slumber when the young Italians with whom I had encounters let me know that it was in fact not my country; they had no interest in welcoming an American, especially la turista. They resented my presence and did not see any connection at all to who I was, and what I looked liked, to who they were and where they lived and what they wanted. When I returned to the United States, I didn't feel so Italian anymore. I've been wondering ever since how to assert a non-anglo American identity, a specifically Italian one, at the same time that I know that Italy is not my home. Italian-American writers and scholars have used the term italianita to describe the vestiges of Italian culture that still persist over time and across continents for the immigrant separated from her or his home country. Scholars Anthony Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gardaphe articulate the particular dilemma and strategy of the third-generation Italian-American writer whose work often begins and ends from a place of cultural and artistic distance. For this generation of writers, there has been a shift in the focus of their work, a tilt in their angle of reflection, so that their [writing] becomes less a vehicle for presenting what it means to be Italian in America and more of what it means to carry the cultural trappings of italianita into their everyday American lives. …