Maria Laurino

Were You Always an Italian?

An excerpt

The elusive search for the past, the journey to understand the self not just in relation to a particular moment in time but to the many moments that preceded our consciousness, seems an impossible task when history is vague and conflicted, and shifts between two different lands. How do you recapture the past when knowledge is limited and molded by others? I cannot say that my life has been shaped only by my nuclear family and American education, or that the hundreds of years prior to my birth, years my relatives spent on southern Italian soil, have shed no influence on the person I now am. Don't we all, to borrow Virginia Woolf's words, "encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past"? But I have few guideposts to understanding life in southern Italy.

I have come to hate the books and documentaries about the "Italian-American experience," full of treacly discussions of food and family, describing "the beautiful song" of our heritage, those snapshots of golden days forever gone. Celebrities and politicians are the usual interview subjects; the former reminisce, and the latter repeat maxims and banalities like "We learned about self-sacrifice and respect for the family," and "We have a unique heritage." Are others taught selfishness? Don't all ethnic groups possess singular histories? These pasta/pizza/paesano tales embroider the myth of the "italiano," reshaping disparate character traits into a singular folkloric image, rendering us indistinguishable from each other, playing the Muzak of ethnicity.

Although I lament the dungers of selective nostalgia, I, too, willfully indulge in my family's tales of yesteryear. My mother, who has assumed the role of family storyteller, will describe a scene again and again, the repetition affirming the truth of the snapshot she presents: for instance, my maternal grandfather trying to teach his wife English, which he learned by reading the newspaper. "Veg-ah-TABLE, Maria, Veg-ah-TABLE," he said, emphatically slapping his hand on the kitchen table as he mispronounced the last syllable. My mother's mockery of the hopelessness of her father's English is tender, accompanied by admiration for a man who, I am told, defied the Depression through hard work, and whose warmth and good humor infused their apartment, along with the laughter of friends, the rhythms of swing music, and the comforting strum of his son's guitar. How different from the austere place I knew and hated to visit, my grandmother's mausoleum to him and their son; both were dead before I was three. In my memory of her dark apartment, I am alone in the pantry fingering a small tin baking sheet, the closest thing to a toy.

I will imagine my grandfather Natale and Uncle Mickey (Miguel, as my grandmother called him) as the gentlemen my mother has described; I feel obliged to preserve a memory that excludes me, to see the reels of the past through her voice, clear and strong, fluctuating with each detail and crescendoing to an excited high pitch by the end of the narrative. The portrait is contained, ensuring no conflict. When I choose to partake in this past, I am accepting a particular version of events -- that her life was good (on wistful days she means better) before she was married, and that her father and brother, who both died too young, provided a warmth and humor that have never been replaced. These stories are usually told in the kitchen, fulfilling an Italian-American clich, because that is the gathering place where we all sit closest together, five of us in assorted colored leather swivel chairs chosen when I was ten and, despite several deep tears in the red, gold, and avocado fabrics, never replaced.

At times when I am with my family and hear these stories, a hundred years can slip away, generations overlap like the tight fold of pleats: a word of dialect captures an emotion in its purest form; life is told with bread and wine; nothing has changed. Yet I cannot imagine a life more different from the one I live now than that of my ancestors. Consumed by this desire to connect to a lost time and place, I've been quick to romanticize my family's history, eagerly gathering scattered tidbits, patching together facts and weaving stories to form the ornate quilt of imagination. In the early eighties, I met a Roman journalist, Daniela Palladini, who would become a good friend, on a trip she made to New York with an Italian psychologist. During our lunch together, the psychologist seemed to offer a piece of my past. Speaking simply with a very thick accent, he remarked, "The name Laurino -- you must be from the Naples area."

"Yes, yes," I enthusiastically replied. "How did you know?" "Oh, because there was a very famous man named Lauro from Naples. He owned all these sheeps "

"Sheep, how interesting," I said. He and Daniela, who spoke less English than the psychologist, smiled and nodded.

Sheep, I repeated to myself. I knew I had an agrarian past, but his declaration gave it a biblical aura. My grandfather the shepherd, descended from shepherds. I imagined small men wrapped in broad white sheets roaming dry land, their moist hands cupped over brow to shield their eyes from the blinding rays of the Mediterranean sun. I shared this nomadic yarn with my parents, who showed some interest, and anybody else who cared to listen. Years later, at a party that included several Italians, I began a conversation with a man who spoke much better English than the psychologist. Cornering him by a fireplace, I proudly repeated the story of my grandfathers the graziers: "I think I am somehow related to a man named Lauro who owned many sheep."

"Ships," he said, smiling wryly as he swirled his glass of white wine before taking the next sip.

"What?"

"Lauro was a shipping magnate."

My pastoral image plundered, I meekly continued the conversation until I could slink to the opposite end of the room, unable to hide a flushed pink face. Not only did I misunderstand the original story, but I should have recognized the name: the Achille Lauro had become famous because of the ruthless terrorist killing of an American aboard the cruise ship. The psychologist was suggesting that peasants from the Naples area were given the surname of the wealthy Lauro; I'm not sure if my father's family would have been one of these Laurinos, "little Lauros," since they lived hours away, in the region of Basilicata. And the psychologist's vowel confusion should have been apparent after he mentioned that he was at the "Hotel Peek-week," the Pickwick Hotel. Without a fuller understanding of history, nostalgia fills the void and we become appendages to someone else's past, daylight somnambulists seeking peace with the spirits; or we create dangerous fictions, clutching a lost time that at all costs must be preserved undisturbed. In an impoverished American landscape of consumerism and technological hype, nostalgia has become a form of faith in a secular age, a palliative to replace the glare of the future with hazy yesterdays. In private we use nostalgia to find connections to help make sense of our lives; in public life nostalgia, if cleverly employed, offers a collective feel-good version of the past.