Who Am I to Speak to You of Italy?

Who am I to speak to you of Italy? Who, for more than 50 years have lived in silence, far beyond her shores.

Yet, such words do not belong to me alone. “Italian Americans are invisible people.” Fred Gardaphé writes, “Not because people refuse to see them, but because, for the most part, they refuse to be seen.” Even here, across an ocean, truth resonates in his words. And as he knows, being forgotten has a price. A price paid with the coins of self-forgetting.

“I am Italian.” “I am Australian,”, here statements irredeemably, eternally both true and false. Words which mock reason and defy solution. Yet in their mischievous unruliness, a distant promise gleams: if our gaze is steady.

From across an ocean, Italian-American voices shape us. Mario Puzo, wrote the Godfather. Yet, invisibly, his greatest hero, immigrant mother Lucia Santa, laments: “America, America, … My children do not understand me when I speak, and I do not understand them when they weep.” Nino Rota’s music, under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, sings of loss. For no ship will ever carry pilgrim back home through the bewildering currents of time.

Maria Famá’s Sicilian-American poetry recites: “I will not check the box for white on any form.” For the box on the form surely tells of slavery and racial division in her new land. It is not her story. She does not forget. She does not forget the Black Madonna of Tindari for whom “racism is a sin”.

In the margins of war, an English airman wandering the Tavoliere also saw the Black Madonna’s serene powerful face. “Father, why is she black?”, he asked. Here, hidden stories of ancient faith unforsaken; and cries for justice launched on the prayers of a million hearts.

At the Battle of Solferino, the final birth pangs of Italy, the women of Castiglione stood by. And in their tearful eyes, Henri Dunant saw their anguish as they bound the wounded and dying young men of many nations. When he listened, their hearts beat like his own: “Tutti Fratelli, Tutti fratelli”. “All honour”, Dunant exclaimed, “All honour to those compassionate women, to these girls of Castiglione!” From the seeds they nurtured in his heart were born the famed Geneva Conventions.

It was no accident that destiny should unfold on the plains of Italy, for as Italy lies on faults deep within the Earth, so has she long lain along the political fault lines of Europe. And the cultural and theological discord of Mare Nostrum washes her shore.

In lost centuries the children of Abraham proclaimed her glory. As in the days of the prophet Isaiah so it would be in Puglia: “From Bari shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Otranto“. Few remember now, but their ghosts walk in every uncounted Vico Ebrei which yet adorns Italy.

For Sicily’s Michele Amari, Italy could never be until her story was fully told. And from ancient manuscripts, inscribed in an eloquent poetic tongue, he drew forth a hidden Arab past and the forgotten glory of his island.

Denis Mack Smith writes in the “The Making of Italy” of “great men”: Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi (and beyond them still “greater” men in Europe’s great capitals). And who can deny that such men placed their mark upon the fabric of Italy? Yet that undivided fabric is woven of many threads. Threads that span oceans and unwind far into the past. Ever evolving customs of birth and death, faith and food, love and loss, all woven together in infinite joyous life: the Italy that the world sees and loves.

Dante Alighieri: Father of Italian and Citizen of the World, is the fitting patron saint of the Italian diaspora, for he himself knew well how hard it is to climb stairs which are made for others. He sought a language worthy to speak the greatest human thoughts and he knew it must be the language of mother and child. He gave birth to a community of writers, and in time, beyond his imagination, a nation.

Dante’s Beatrice, she who makes blessed, appears before me, when I say, “I wish to write of Italy, what has never been written of a nation before”.

Yet, the unexplored literature of Italy fills shelf after shelf: the whispered voices of a people.

Who am I to speak to you of Italy.

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Note

The above work was written to mark the occasion of the Giornata Della Ricerca Italiana Nel Mondo held at Mathematical Sciences Institute of the Australian National University on 17 April 2019 by the Embassy of Italy. Due to shortness of time I did not read final three paragraphs.

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Commentary

This work may be thought of as a “first preliminary synthesis” of the Italian Stories series. On 12 August 2019, I published an accompanying commentary, which explores some of the background to this work.