This weekend, as I read an accessible text from Morley, I continually found myself questioning my own national identity, my own sense of home and my own perceptions of the twice-removed country my family is from.
I am Italian by heritage, but after three generations in Los Angeles, it would be untrue to claim to be an Italian-American. I don’t speak Italian. I don’t follow Italian politics or news. And I still have yet to visit the motherland, though we have some cousins there that would be more than willing to host. So what is it that makes me feel like I am Italian? As superficial as it sounds, it’s the bocci ball we play at family reunions, the vats of linguini and clams my great uncle cooks up every Christmas and the loud, overlapping conversations that are inevitable if you get more than three of my relatives in the same room.
Morley would see these as conceptions of home (or Italian-ness) cycled through generations of rootlessness and exile. In quoting Papastergiadis, Morley writes that “modernity is haunted by the image of its lost home,” (42) and that “exiles often develop a fixed and backward-looking image of their homeland.” (49).
Because the two sides of my Italian family are from opposite sides of the country (Palermo, Sicily and Genoa in the north), I have combined traditions and perceptions of both to create a whole that is (I’m sure) wholly inaccurate from the actuality of growing up Italian. Morley says that “the diaspora tends to emphasize only the classical components”—in my case food and recreation—by fetishizing images of the lost homeland.
Though both my mother and grandmother’s generation grew up in insular Italian communities—first on one street in Boyle Heights and then in an entire neighborhood in Alhambra—my generation is the first to break this streak with cousins living everywhere from South Carolina to Tucson, Arizona. This is another sense of rootlessness as we become even further removed from the Italian traditions that the previous generations tried to keep. Morley addresses this by saying that “traditions have to engage in a continuous process of modification and adaptation to new circumstances” (42) and that is certainly true for us.
Traditions, both social and religious in origin from both sides of our family have been combined, reappropriated and modified to adapt to their new modern place so that the conception of “mi famiglia” has gone from weekly Sunday dinners to an annual picnic in the park in Arcadia. We “focus on an idealized, static and dehistoricised image of the ‘authentic’” (50) Italy to replace what we feel we have lost. I will, for example, root for the country’s soccer team during the World Cup, but of course remain oblivious to the fact that the team has two American-born Italians who have chosen to return to their parent’s country of origin to play soccer.
These ideas of rootlessnes and migrancy are of course petty in comparison to those in immediate distress as a result of recent exile. However, many of the same issues that Moley describes continue to trickle down and remain salient two even three generations away from the original migrants. And the idea of home and identity is still in post-modern flux among those who would by all accounts have a home (America), but still suffer from this feeling of rootlessness left by the removal of their ancestors from their territorial home.
No comments:
Post a Comment