Health Care in Italy is Not Free

 

Health Care in Italy is Not Free

 

 

 

I once read an anecdote about a young American woman who was doing one of those “Drive Across America” vacations. She stopped for lunch at a diner and when she was finished with her meal she decided to order the fresh fruit salad. When it arrived, it was obvious to the young woman that the fruit salad came out of a can. She said politely to the waitress, “I don’t understand. On the menu it says ‘Fresh Fruit Salad’ but this is from a can.” The waitress was one of those women, a little more than middle aged, who treat all young people as though they’re her children. Cheerful and courteous, she explained to the young woman, with a big smile, “Oh, Honey! That’s just what they call it.”

I’ve been living in Italy for about twenty years now. I’m not going to do research for this article. What I’m going to write will be mostly about my own personal experience and what I’ve seen happening to others. If the people in power can convince people who have no power, including people who live in Italy and people who do research, that the health care in Italy is free, it’s not worth my time to ask them questions.

They call it “Free Universal Health Care” but it’s not free, it’s not universal, and sometimes the quality of the care is so low that it’s not even health care.

I’ve seen a lot of internet sites about Italy, some of them the official sites made by the government. Each region, province, and most of the cities, have their own official sites. Smaller cities are included on the sites of larger cities. I’ve seen a lot of comments from people saying that the health care in Italy is free, including a few from Italians living in Italy. One American man said that he and his wife were approaching retirement age and wanted to live in Italy, one of the reasons being that the health care is free. I’ve seen videos from Robert Reich who, when he talks about how expensive health care is in the United States, arguing that Americans should have free health care as they do in other countries, often includes a list of countries that offer free universal health care and Italy is always on that list.

One of the problems is that Americans usually think that when you use a word, it means what it means. But in Italy there are times when a word doesn’t mean what it means.

Reality is irrelevant in Italy.

I saw a comment on the internet from an Italian man in the comment section of a Youtube video that said that the medico di base is absolutely free. That much is true. What the Italian man didn’t mention is that it’s also true that the medico di base does absolutely nothing. The medico di base is your family doctor. You tell him what hurts and he’ll give you a prescription for an appointment with a specialist based on what he thinks you might have according to what you told him. You take your prescription to the pharmacy and they look in their computer and make an appointment for you. When you get to the specialist, that’s when you start to pay for your free universal health care.

I added my own comment to that video saying that I saw a meme of a patient on a stretcher in front of a hospital in the United States, trying to get some money from an ATM to pay for his expensive health care. I said that, while that might be a meme in the United States, in Italy it’s reality. If you go to a hospital near where I live, you’ll find, in one of the side entrances, an ATM. An Italian responded: “Where are you in Italy? HaHaHaHa.” I responded with the name of the city I live in, the name of the hospital I was referring to, and ended with “HaHaHaHa” just to show him that I have a sense of humor, too.

The reason you need to have an ATM at the hospital is that fees for health care have to be paid in cash, upfront. Some procedures are so expensive that many people just don’t feel comfortable carrying around that much cash.

You can also pay before you get to the hospital. There’s an office in all the hospitals, and other medical facilities, called the CUP (pronounced COOP). CUP stands for Centro Unico di Prenotazione (Central Office for Appointments). From what I’ve seen, it should be called Centro Unico di Pagamento (Central Office for Payment). You can get various health services performed there, including blood tests which you’ll need to bring with you when you see your specialist, but the main purpose of the CUP is to accept payment for your free universal health care.

They’ve got something called the “ticket.” (They use the English word.) I have an exemption from the ticket because of my low income, but it doesn’t apply for everything and every year the list of non-exemptions gets longer and the tickets cost more. And the list of things that everyone has to pay full price for gets longer.

The ticket is the fee you have to pay in order to get your free universal health care. In my own experience I’ve seen that the ticket can be anywhere from €12 to €500. This was a while ago, so all the ticket prices will have gone up by now.

I went to my medico di base and told him that my back hurts all the time.

He said, without knowing what was causing the problem, that nothing could be done about it.

A couple of months later, when the pain was worse, I went to the doctor again. He wrote the name of an aspirin substitute on a slip of white paper from his note pad, and told me to take one pill that night and another the following night. These were simple pain killers that don’t claim to heal anything, much less stop pain that you’re not feeling yet. Because it was non-prescription, I had to pay €17 euros for a box of ten pills that I knew wouldn’t do anything.

I spoke to an Italian woman and she said to tell the doctor I needed an appointment with a certain specialist. I went to my  medico di base and asked for an appointment with the specialist.

He was angry but he gave me a prescription for an appointment.

The first time I went to a doctor about the rings I was seeing around lights, thinking I just needed stronger glasses (I’m near-sighted.), I accidently went to a private doctor. When he heard my accent he told me I have glaucoma. He said that I would need to take a test at least three times, maybe four, paying €70 each time, in cash, no receipt, which meant he wouldn’t be paying taxes on the money he received.

I went back to my medico di base and got an appointment with an ASL doctor. The ASL (Agenzia Sanitaria Locale, local health agency) employs doctors who get paid by the State and not by the patient, unless you have to pay the ticket or you need a procedure everyone has to pay full price for.

I told the ASL specialist I had glaucoma. He gave me the glaucoma test once and that was enough to tell him I don’t have glaucoma.

When I told him about the rings I was seeing around lights, he examined my eyes and said I was developing cataracts, saying that I should have an exam once a year, explaining that I needed to wait until the cataracts reached a certain point and then I would need to have an operation.

The last time I went to an ASL specialist for my cataracts, he gave me one of those simple eye tests that consist only in naming the letters you see on a chart. He told me that my vision was a little worse, but it was such a slight difference that, if I didn’t want to, I didn’t even have to bother getting new glasses. (You have to pay for glasses.)

I didn’t say anything to the specialist but I went back to my medico di base and told him what happened. He said that if I didn’t like what the ASL doctor told me, I should go to a private doctor.

So far I’ve had to find a new medico di base about seven or eight times.

There’s a building here called the Cittadella della Salute (citadel of health). There are various health services provided there, including dental care and a CUP. Every time I went to the Cittadella, they refused to help with my teeth.

Once I had an appointment with a dentist at the Cittadella della Salute and when I showed up, the dentist told me that he wasn’t available just then and I should come back in a week. When I got there the following week I was told that he wasn’t in and they told me to talk to another dentist. That dentist told me that he didn’t like to finish up other dentists’ work. I told him that the other dentist hadn’t done anything. I showed him the x-rays and he looked at them for a moment and then said that he didn’t like to finish up other dentists’ work.

Another time I had a cavity. I have a row of crowns replacing about six top teeth in the middle,  right in front. The dentist said that the pain in my tooth wasn’t a cavity, that the problem was that I hadn’t gotten used to the crowns. I said that the crowns had been put in about two years before and my tooth just started hurting. He said that sometimes it takes a while for the teeth to start hurting.

When I got home I felt around in my mouth and finally realized that there was a tooth between the crowns and the tooth that hurt and that tooth between them didn’t hurt.

I went to a hospital in another city to see a dentist. I was told there that I had to bring a copy of my latest ISEE (Indicatore della Situazione Economica Equivalente, equivalent economic situation indicator), a document provided by the State that gives information about your income so that doctors, and others, can determine how much you have to pay for your free universal health care or whatever else you’re asking for help with.

When I had to have a little operation on my foot, the ticket was €40, no exemption. Then I had to buy a weird booty that I had to wear until the foot was healed. That cost me another €40. Not only is that not free, but for some of us it’s not even cheap. I’ve been poor most of my life and I’ve spent a lot of that time practicing how not to spend money. One of the things I learned was how to buy enough edible substances (notice I didn’t say “food”) to ward off starvation for more than a month for €80.

I had gone to an ASL doctor for my foot. My next appointment, I don’t know why, was with him in his private office. I didn’t even know at the time that ASL doctors also have private practices. He took off the bandage, looked at my wound for a few seconds, said it was healing nicely, put more disinfectant on the wound, covered it with a new bandage, and asked me for €200 euros. When he realized I hadn’t understood and didn’t know I was in the wrong place, he told me I didn’t have to pay.

If you go to your medico di base and tell him there’s a bump growing on your thigh just where it attaches to your leg, and he thinks that you might have cancer, you can’t just go to a specialist and get treatment. You have to get a test to make sure you really do have cancer and, if so, you have to know what kind of cancer you have because each kind of cancer requires a different treatment.

There’s no ticket for that test because everyone has to pay full price for it. If you don’t have enough money to pay for the test, there might be an organization that will pay for it for you. But you have to find that organization in time to get the money in time to pay for the test. If you don’t find such an organization in time, or they decide not to give you the money in time, all you can do is go home and wait to die.

If you need a procedure done, you’ll be put on a waiting list. The list is long but if you have the money, you can go to a private clinic and pay full price for your free universal health care. If you don’t have the money, and you have no one to help you, you just have to content yourself with being on the waiting list. Sometimes, people die while they’re on the waiting list just because they don’t have the money to pay for their free universal health care.

I’ve seen Italian videos on Youtube about people who have such a problem, with actors playing the various roles. These characters include one who has a certain health problem but doesn’t have the money to pay for the operation he needs. It’s usually an older man who has the problem. He and his older wife are totally stressed out and don’t know what to do.

In one of these videos, an older man who needed an operation to save his life and didn’t have the money to pay for his free universal health care, was visited by his son who wanted to introduce his new girl friend to his parents. They’re upset because she’s a foreigner. That is, she speaks Italian very well but with a foreign accent. She might actually have Italian citizenship, but she’s considered a foreigner, and treated like one.

Many Italians don’t take kindly to foreigners.

But it turns out that the young Italian man’s girlfriend has the money for the operation the older man needs and is happy to pay for it. This saves his life and then the parents like her and everyone lives happily ever after.

The moral of the story is: Be nice to foreigners, but not because they’re human beings who shouldn’t be discriminated against and deserve to be treated with respect, but because they might be able to help you someday.

There are private doctors and insurance companies in Italy that sell health insurance. How do they stay in business? You pay them full price. There is no ticket when it comes to private doctors. I don’t know what the insurance rates are in Italy but I would have thought that free universal health care would make health insurance unnecessary.

That’s just the “free” part of the lie. Then there’s the “universal” part which is tangled up with the “quality of care” part.

The reason for the “universal” part being tangled up with the “quality of care” part is that the quality of care you receive is based on racism, on whether or not you’re Italian or one of those horrible foreigners who come to this country and cause all the problems Italy has.

Foreigners are limited in the “free” health care they can get in Italy. Sometimes they have to go back to their country of origin to get medical care. People who emigrate to other countries usually can’t afford such luxuries. So they just have to die in the land of free universal health care.

Once I was waiting to be seen in the emergency room at the hospital. They had a chart on the wall (red for big emergencies, orange for middle size emergencies, and I think it was white  for little emergencies), explaining that people would be seen in emergency-size order. But they didn’t explain what they meant by “people.” While I was sitting there waiting, a nurse came out to the waiting room and said, “I want the foreigners to sit on this side of the room and the Italians to sit on the other side of the room. We’ll be seeing the Italians first.”

Not only are immigrants limited in the free universal health care they can get in Italy, but so are their children who were born in Italy. There is no such thing as birth-right citizenship in Italy. If your parents were born outside Italy, and you were born in Italy, your father (because your mother is still in the hospital after having given birth to you) has to go to an office to apply for a visa for you. The visa has to be renewed until you’re eighteen years old when you can apply for citizenship, going to an immigration office where you’ll be treated as though you just arrived in Italy. Although you were born in Italy, you’re a native speaker of Italian, you’ve gone to all Italian schools, most of your friends are Italian, you eat mostly Italian food, and maybe you even found a job through an Italian employment agency that finds maids, delivery people, people who break their backs picking tomatoes for a salary that’s so low you have to wonder how they get away with calling it a salary (There’s no minimum wage in Italy.), in order to get Italian citizenship you have to be living, and working legally, in Italy for at least ten years. I think you have to take a test, too.

The likelihood of a foreigner born in Italy and getting Italian citizenship at the age of twenty-eight, with all the delays, lost papers, appointments missed by the real Italians who just don’t always show up for work, bureaucracy, prejudice against foreigners, resentment against foreigners who come to this country and take jobs away from real Italians who don’t want to do the jobs the foreigners are taking away, is pretty slim.

In the meantime, you can’t vote, you’re expected to pay all your taxes (Real Italians aren’t expected to pay all their taxes.), and you’re expected to obey all the laws (Real Italians aren’t expected to obey all the laws.). And, of course, you’re not getting free universal health care.

Once, at the hospital, I was sitting in a waiting room while one of the doctors was in his office filling out forms to determine how much money the State should pay for my free universal health care and how much should be paid by me. The doctor came out and, to avoid having the other people in the waiting room hear my personal business, politely whispered to me, “I’m sorry I have to ask you this, but do you have Italian citizenship?”

Another time at the hospital, when I was waiting my turn to be seen, a foreign woman was crying loudly, wailing in agony, because she had just watched her young child die. The child might have died of negligence on the part of the doctors. Of course I don’t know that for a fact, but from what I’ve seen I’d say it’s a pretty good guess.

The Italians who heard the foreign woman wailing didn’t respond with comments like: “Oh, the poor child! So young! Think of how the mother must be suffering! It’s such a terrible, terrible thing for a parent to have a child die.” Instead they said things like, “Will somebody shut that woman up? This is a hospital. She’s disturbing everyone. Some people give no thought to the feelings of others.”

But all that would come under the heading of “Bedside Manner” and that’s not the responsibility of the patients.

Once, when I was having a tachycardia, I called for an ambulance.

All I said to the man who answered the call was “Ho bisogno di un’ambulanza.” (I need an ambulance.) But that was enough to let him know that I’m a foreigner. (I have Italian citizenship because every gene in my body is Italian.)

He said, “Cosa?” (What?)

“Un’ambulanza.”

“Cosa?”

“Un’ambulanza.”

“Cosa?”

“Un’ambulanza.”

I would have thought that people whose only job is to receive calls from people who need an ambulance and send one out quickly, would have ears ready to hear and understand the word “ambulanza.”

When he got tired of the game, he took my name and address, which he had no difficulty understanding the first time I said it.

When I finally got to the  hospital, a doctor came out and talked to me for a couple of minutes in a room that looked like a cross between a waiting room and a supply room. It was late by then and I had no way to get home except to walk, which would take about forty-five minutes. I told the doctor that but she just ignored me.

There was no examination. I wasn’t hooked up to any kind of heart monitor. The doctor didn’t even press a stethoscope against my chest. She just walked out the door without a word and left me standing there.

It was about three o’clock in the morning. There are no street lights on one long stretch of the road back to my home. If there hadn’t been a full moon, I might have gotten hit by one of the rare cars that passed or I might have fallen off the little bridge I had to cross.

If you think that’s health care, you need to have someone explain to you what health care is.

Once, my medico di base sent me to the hospital to make an appointment for tests for a serious life threatening illness. I don’t know why I couldn’t just go to the pharmacy to get an appointment. But I had a one-day urgency which meant that I’d be lucky if my appointment was only for about three weeks away. When I got to the hospital I was told that someone would call me to tell me when my appointment was.

When the lady from the hospital called, a couple of weeks later, the first thing she did, after hearing my accent, was to ask me whether there was anyone else at home. I said no, I was alone. Well, she said, she couldn’t tell me when my appointment was because I wouldn’t know what she was saying. I told her to just tell me when my appointment was. She kept insisting that I wouldn’t understand her. We had a little conversation that lasted about two minutes and it was obvious to me, as it should have been obvious to her, that we were understanding each other.

What was I supposed to do? Should I have gone back to my medico di base and start the whole process over from the beginning, wasting more time just hoping that I’d be called by someone who’s not a racist?

Finally, I got so pissed that I said, in the nastiest voice I could, “Ma’am, tell me the day and time!”

This time, she said, in a meek little voice, “Thursday at 11 a.m.”

“Thank you,” I growled and hung up.

On another occasion, I was told to come into the hospital on a Friday afternoon for some tests. When I arrived, the woman who had the bed before me hadn’t checked out yet. I had to wait in the hall for a couple of hours. When I got into the bed, I asked the nurse whether I would have the test that afternoon. She said it was too late in the day for tests. I said, “So, I’ll have the test tomorrow?” She said, “No. We don’t do tests on Saturday or Sunday. You’ll have your test on Monday.”

So why did I have to go to the hospital on Friday afternoon?

The hospital gets paid by the State according to how many beds are occupied, how many tests they do, how many other procedures they perform, every bandage they change, all their office equipment, all the meals they serve, anything their staff has enough imagination to come up with, including tests you don’t need, repeating tests that only need to be done once, and letting student nurses do their homework on you.

Once, I was in the hospital because I had a life threatening illness. The young woman in the bed next to mine was a foreigner. I never asked but I would have guessed she was Romanian.

Although she had a foreign accent, she spoke Italian pretty well. When I arrived, she said she had been in the hospital for about three months. You could easily tell she had been there for a while because of all the half-finished bags of chips and snacks on the little table that was meant for any of us to use, and the piles of clothing, some of it from the season that had just finished.

She was there for tests. After three months, the doctors still didn’t know what she had and they didn’t even care enough about her to suggest another hospital that might be able to help. If her illness was so rare, the doctors should have figured out at least that much. But she was content where she was because she was fully confident in the doctors. She believed everything they told her and knew that, someday, they would cure her. But she was pretty young.

On the other side of the room was an Italian woman, that is, a real Italian woman, not like me. The day she arrived, two or three doctors came in to talk to her. They told her what they suspected she had, told her what tests she would have, when she would have them, and not just the day but the time. They did the tests when they said they would and she was out of the hospital in about a week.

Also, her husband was a doctor in that hospital. In Italy, even if your problem is that you might have a life-threatening illness, it always helps if you know someone.

I was diagnosed with lymphoma. When I asked them whether that was cancer, they were horrified.

“No, no!” They assured me. “It’s just a light form of lymphoma.”

When I got out of the hospital, I looked for lymphoma on the internet. I found out, reading a medical site written by doctors, that lymphoma is a type of cancer. There are about 1,000 kinds of lymphoma, divided into three main groups. One group will kill you pretty quickly, no matter what you do. Another group can be controlled; if you get the proper care, you can expect to live almost as long as you would have if you didn’t have lymphoma. The third group can be cured.

I wasn’t told by the doctor at the hospital what group I was in. I figured I was in the second group because I had to have blood tests every six months. Then, after about a couple of years, the doctor told me to get an appointment for the following year. I took that as a good sign.

But, after that, I was back to having blood tests every six months. Why? Although I’ve never been too good at arithmetic, my guess is that a blood test every six months gets the hospital twice as much money from the State as a blood test every year does.

I’ve now been in remission for more than eleven years. Wondering whether it’s possible to be in remission that long; wondering why first I was told have a blood test every six months, then given a new appointment for a year later, and then I was back to appointments every six months; wondering whether I was put into the wrong group and was actually in the group that can be cured, and I was cured, I got onto the internet site of the American Medical Association to ask. I typed a question into their special private question box and got an automatic message saying that they weren’t allowed to give information to people living outside the United States.

I found an Italian organization on the internet that does research on cancer. I couldn’t find any place to ask a private question. Half of the information on their site was about cancer but it only gave very general information which was useless to me. The rest of the site was about the important work their organization was doing, how great their organization was, and all the people their organization was helping, along with detailed information on how to give the organization money, either in donations or in your will.

Now there’s a new ddl (disegno di legge, a bill) that the Senate has already passed and now it’s going to be voted on in the Camera (House), called Autonomia Differenziata (autonomy differentiated), that Vincenzo De Luca, the president of the region of Campania where Naples is located, has been talking a lot about lately. According to the ddl, each region will decide what they do with the tax money they receive, how much of that money will be for health care, schools, environment, energy, and other things people need help with to make their lives better. Autonomous regions wouldn’t necessarily have to share that money with the rest of the country.

According to De Luca, and others, the tax money received in the rich north will enable the regions there to raise the salaries, by €2,000 a month, of doctors and nurses working there. He says that doctors and nurses, attracted by the raise in pay, will leave the south and go up north to work. That means that the people in the north will get health care and the people in the south will drop dead.

Remember Marie Antonette? Remember eating cake? Well, in Italy, it’s going to be “Let them take an aspirin.”

So why do they call it “Free Universal Health Care”?

Just taking a wild guess, I’d say that the health care in Italy, in the beginning, really was free universal health care.

But language doesn’t always keep up with the reality it’s supposed to represent. We still say “hang up the phone.” We still call it a “cold” even though scientists have known for many years that catching a cold has nothing to do with the weather.

And if an expression makes the people in power look good, there’s no reason for them to try to update it.

Free universal health care in Italy? Oh, Honey! That’s just what they call it.

 

© 2024 Rose Romano (malafemmina press)

 **************************************

 

If you’d like to take a look at other articles, you can find them on my blog malafemminapress.Blogspot.com or you can write to me at malafemmina.press@yahoo.com if you want to get in touch with me privately. Thanks.

Neither Seen nor Heard, a selection of poems by Rose Romano

Rose Romano's poems deserve a prominent place in the Italian American literary canon. These poems helped shift the focus of Italian American writing from cultural nostalgia and a sense of loss toward the examination of consciousness of those feelings.

The finest poems of this oeuvre respond with ferocious satire to the whitewashing and the distortion of Italian American life not only by other Americans but by Italian Americans themselves.

Rose Romano’s poetry has defined a post-modern approach to both Italian American poetry and Italian American consciousness.

--George Guida, The Return of Rose Romano, July 2019, Ygdrasil, Journal of the Poetic Arts, the first literary journal to be published on the internet

Neither Seen nor Heard, Rose Romano's third book of poetry, includes all the poems from Vendetta and The Wop Factor (both published by malafemmina press) plus many poems published in various literary journals and a few published here for the first time.

 

Neither Seen nor Heard is available from

iambooksboston.com

ISBN 9791220010610

 

Below is one of the poems included.

Look for other poems from the book on

malafemminapress.blogspot.com

Leave it to the Italians

She told me she had been wearing

a t-shirt with the words--

I'm terrific--

over her left breast.

An Italian asked--

What's wrong with the other one?

Leave it to the Italians--

she said.

Was I just called a sex maniac

again?

Not at all!

She loves Italians!

I love bright yellow canaries

that sing in the morning.

I love soft fat puppies

with cold wet noses

and little round kittens

tangled in yarn.

Essential Poets Series 281

Antonio D'Alfonso

The Two Headed Man

Collected Poems 1970-2020

Guernica Editions Inc.

ISBN 9781771835497 (softcover)

Available from: www.guernicaeditions.com

Poetry isn't always given the attention it deserves. Too many people think that reading poetry is hard work and not worth it, that poets aren't in touch with reality and have nothing relevant to say regarding an ordinary person's daily life.

They forget that nobody's ordinary. They forget that poets know reality far too well. They don't seem to be aware that reading poetry, the words of a poem, isn't hard work and that it's worth it to take the words in and see what was done with them.

This is a poem from the book:

To the Reader

Frightfully foolish having to be reminded

Not to step too quickly over those who

Cross your busy path, a crucifixion.

Taken by surprise, unforeseen.

Must we be deliberately overlooked

As though we were forgotten garbage bins,

Sticky, stinky? As if rotting

In the confinement of self-talk and

Evaluation down the addict's alley

Was our ultimate ideal.

We come alive with your listening.

We come alive with your reading.

We live for your heinous eyes,

For your montrous strictures.

Because of you we consider ourselves free.

Because of you, dear reader, are we totally free.

If you recognize us by the street-light

Of your readings, wave your hand,

Your fingers have a way

Of changing pain somehow

Somewhere into tenderness.

It just struck me, along with many of the other poems in different ways, because if readers allow the critics to tell them what a work is and what its value is, instead of reading the work themselves, the readers, and even those who don't read, will be cheated out of a good part of their lives.

In the title poem, the two-headed man reads night and day and multiplies himself. If  you want to be multiplied, read this book. You'll never be alone.

Come dici alla gente che non sai parlare?

 

 Sono entrata nel bar. Ho chiesto una birra, con il mio italiano zoppicante. Il barista, che mi ha visto tante volte e sa come parlo, mi guarda con sospetto.

Il giorno prima, avevo lasciato al bar una copia di Etrurialand con il mio primo articolo. Evidentemente, l’aveva letto.

Lo sapevo io. La gente crede che, se una persona sa scrivere una lingua, segua logicamente che questa persona sa parlare la lingua.

Ma, come tante idee logiche, non è sempre vero. Cioè, è abbastanza vero per la madrelingua, ma per le lingue che impari a scuola come lingua straniera, non è per niente vero.

Infatti, anche se riesco a scrivere un po’ l’italiano, lo parlo come una maniglia della porta che è stata lasciata cadere sulla testa quando è nata. Se qualcuno al bar mi dice qualcosa, e io rispondo a monosillabi inadatti, crederà, adesso che ha visto come scrivo, che non voglia parlare con lui perché sono una snob.

Il problema è almeno in parte il modo in cui insegnano le lingue straniere nelle scuole tradizionali. Ti insegnano soprattutto a leggere la lingua, poi un po’ a scriverla, raramente a capirla quando è parlata, quasi mai a parlarla.

Avevo studiato l’italiano in una scuola tradizionale per un anno e mezzo prima di arrivare in Sicilia tanti anni fa. Anche allora ero capace di scrivere delle cose in modo abbastanza comprensibile. Ma, per parlare, sapevo solo: Buon giorno. Come sta? Spaghetti and meatballs. E buona notte.

Poi, c’è anche il mio carattere. Sono sempre stata più a mio agio scrivendo che parlando, anche in inglese.

Ricordo sempre quando avevo imparato a leggere: il mondo, che prima era stato in bianco e nero, si apriva davanti a me in tutti i colori, e riuscivo finalmente a capire con più chiarezza. Ho una mentalità visiva.

Quando mi parli, per capire, devo vedere le tue parole, leggere le tue parole nella mia mente. Se non le vedo, non le capisco.

A questo punto, dopo cinque anni in Italia, se una persona mi parla, un po’ lentamente e molto chiaramente, riesco a capire quasi tutto perché ho abbastanza tempo di scrivere, vedere, e leggere quello che sta dicendo.

Invece, se tu mi metti in una stanza con un gruppo di persone che stanno parlando tutte insieme, ad una velocità normale, con tutti gli idiomi, il gergo, e il dialetto, che non ti insegnano a scuola, non capisco niente.

Vedo solo, volando sopra la mia testa, la scia, tante scie, di parole che appaionno come macchie grigie e informe.

Sono anche timida. Come oso parlare se non so nemmeno qual è l’argomento della conversazione?

Sono stata cresiuta dalla mia nonna napoletana a cui non piacevano gli americani. Per lei, i napoletani, non tutti gli italiani ma solo i napoletani, erano il capolavoro di Dio.

Mi ha lasciato con la sensazione, che non riesco a togliermi anche adesso, che, se questa non è Napoli, questa non è l’Italia, e che Brooklyn, dove sono nata e cresciuta, non è niente che un quartiere di Napoli, un quartiere rovinato dagli stranieri, cioè, gli americani, e poi i neri, i portoricani, i chinesi, i siciliani, i calabresi . . .

Per lei, il modo in cui si deve educare i bambini era di punirli quando sbagliavano, e il suo modo di punirmi era di dirmi che non ero abbastanza buona per essere italiana, cioè napoletana.

Ogni volta che facevo qualcosa che non le piaceva, mi chiamava americana, per lei l’offesa più brutta del mondo.

Le zie e gli zii, la prima generazione nata negli Stati Uniti, volevano solo essere americani e volevano che noi bambini fossero americani. Per questo, ogni volta che cercavo di parlare in napoletano, la lingua usata in casa, mi dicevano che eravamo in America e dovevamo parlare in inglese.

Qualche volta, mi si beffavano addirittura o mi ignoravano. Così, invece di crescere bilingua, come tanti newyorkesi, sono cresciuta con una sola lingua e una sensazione rafforzata che non sarei mai stata abbastanza buona per essere italiana, tanto meno napoletana.

Per questo, invece di avere un vantaggio nell’imparare l’italiano, ho dovuto superare problemi psicologici per fare uscire dalla bocca una sola parola di italiano.

Secondo la cultura newyorkese, almeno nelle classe più poveri e la classe operaia a cui io appartenevo, se non c’è bisogno di parlare con gli sconosciuti, non devi parlare.

Puoi andare in negozio a fare la spesa senza pronunciare una sola parola.

E’ normale, secondo la cultura newyorkese, e se cerchi di parlare inutilmente o perfino, che Dio ti aiuti, cortesemente, ti credono un pazzo.

Per questo, non sono abituata a tutta questa cortesia, e la lingua che richiede, che ho trovato qui a Viterbo.

Poi, quando leggiamo, leggiamo con la nostra voce, non con la voce dello scrittore. Quando vivevo a Roma, ascoltavo un programma alla radio che permetteva a tutti di chiamare la stazione per parlare oppure mandare un sms.

Una sera, ci ho mandato un sms. Per scrivere quel breve sms, mi ci volle una mezz’ora.

Dovetti consultare il dizionario, due libri di grammatica, un libro che presenta 501 verbi italiani coniugati in tutti i tempi. Scrissi, lessi, riscrissi il mio messaggio.

Ma quando l’uomo lo lesse alla radio, lo lesse fluentemente, facilmente, con l’accento perfetto, il ritmo e il tono italiano. Infatti, il mio messaggio suonava proprio come l’italiano di uno cresciuto in Italia.

E’ lo stesso quando tu leggi questo: lo leggi nell’italiano tuo, non nell’italiano mio.

Adesso, il mio italiano è un mucchio di parole e frasi che ho dovuto imparare sui libri. La mia mente è una soffitta piena di cianfrusaglia e ninnoli polverosi fra cui devo frugare per cercare una risposta, mentre, allo stesso tempo, sto cercando di visualizzare le parole a cui devo rispondere. Non è una cosa facile.

E’ una cosa che, quando parlo, la si vede, ma quando scrivo, no.

Per favore, se io, o qualsiasi persona che non parla bene l’italiano, cerca di dirti qualcosa, abbi un po’ di pazienza e anche comprensione.

La gente che non parla bene l’italiano non è per questo snob o stupida.

Ricordati che, se questa persona non parla bene l’italiano, ci sarà un’altra lingua che parla bene, una lingua che tu, probabilmente, non sai parlare per niente.

Dodici Azpadu: Using Omertà to Break Omertà

I wrote this paper a lifetime ago and presented it at a conference of what was then called The American Italian Historical Association.

Dodici Azpadu: Using Omertà to Break Omertà

  

 

 

Abstract

 

 

What some people might consider negative stereotypes of Italian-Americans, many politically correct progressive lesbian feminists consider to be forms of a patriarchal oppression of women peculiar to Italian-American culture, making it almost impossible to create an Italian-American lesbian literature both acceptable and true in the American lesbian community. This paper, through its discussion of one of Dodici Azpadu’s novels, Goat Song, attempts to describe how Azpadu succeeds in maintaining Omertà and why Omertà is necessary, while exploring realities too threatening to be recognized in the lesbian community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s almost impossible to create a Sicilian-American lesbian literature that’s both acceptable and true in the American lesbian community, yet Dodici Azpadu, by using Omertà as a way of speaking out, has succeeded.

Her novel, Goat Song, seems on the surface to be an effort to explain the motivations of Brandy, the central character, in the ostensibly unprovoked murder of a man she doesn’t know. But as a Italian-American lesbian, I read it as an extended metaphor intended to describe what it means to be a Sicilian-American lesbian.

In her introduction, which smells more like an apology, Joan Pinkvoss says that Goat Song is a book populated by stereotypes, that it’s “about the roles society assigns its lowly placed” (viii), and that it’s “a book about lack of awareness.” (ix) It’s certainly that, but in some ways that Pinkvoss, because of her own lack of awareness, has missed. The book is also about the roles lesbian society has assigned its own lowly and not-so-lowly placed and it’s about the lack of awareness of its readers and editors as well as its characters. And it’s not populated by stereotypes: it’s populated by metaphors.

Brandy was abandoned to an orphanage at birth. No one knows who or what she is and Brandy seems to care less about it than anyone else. Although the ethnicity of the other characters is definitely specified, we get only a few hints about Brandy’s ethnicity from Catherine, one of Brandy’s lovers, who guesses that Brandy might be “Middle Eastern, Eurasian, Latin or Creole.” (pg 33) The author describes Brandy as having a “gray brown face . . . dominated by large, chocolate hooded eyes—absolutely humorless—beneath an excessive growth of eye brows that parted only slightly to begin the sharp arc that formed her nose” (9), and later as having “swarthy skin, a large hooked nose, thick coarse black hair and brows, a trace of hair above her lip.” (33) Brandy might be everything Catherine thought—and more—and still be Sicilian.

But Brandy’s claim to Sicilian ethnicity is much more than a matter of appearance. Her attitudes and behavior together produce the most brilliantly sustained metaphor in the book: the Sicilian-American lesbian as an unclaimed orphan.

Azpadu describes Brandy’s feelings about material possessions: “She took the attitude—thinking it gave the most freedom—that nothing belonged to her that she had to protect.” (11)

Sicily has a long history of being exploited. Sicilian-Americans have their own history of exploitation.

Americans appropriate Italian-American culture at the same time that some Americans claim that ItalianAmerican culture isn’t worth preserving while others insist there’s no such thing as Italian-American culture.

Americans deplore crime yet never tire of Mafia movies. Americans are shocked by blatant displays of sexuality but love to read about those romantic Italians. Americans have always been impatient with candle-lighting peasants just off the boat, yet have always sought a more gut-level spirituality than what’s offered by organized religion. Americans call pizza a fattening junk food; then they put sprouts on it and claim it originated in the United States.

Italian-Americans often respond to the possible loss of their culture as Brandy does to the possible loss of material possessions. It’s less painful, and less embarrassing, to become American than it is to risk having your culture taken away and sold by a pack of idiots.

Brandy lives in a studio apartment in a slum. There's no door on her bathroom. Brandy doesn't consider that a real problem. She lives alone and her friends rarely visit so there's no urgent need for the privacy a bathroom door would provide. But, while cleaning the bathroom in preparation for a visit from Joyce, another one of her lovers, it does occur to Brandy that Joyce would consider the lack of a bathroom door to be "tacky." (109)

Brandy considers the possibility of asking the building manager to find a door in the storage room, although even this is presented as the author’s explanation of the situation and not as Brandy’s own thoughts. Azpadu says: “Of course, that would mean speaking [original emphasis] to the manager, asking for what was over and above what had been given to her. It meant calling attention to the fact that she had to ask for what others were routinely given and took for granted. It meant risking that a word or look would make it clear that he knew she was born to nothing.” (10)

This always seemed to me to be the kind of cluttered reasoning from which Sicilian-American Omertà emerged. If we, as Italian-Americans, ask for what we’re entitled to, all we could ever be sure of succeeding in doing would be to point out to strangers that we don’t have all we’re entitled to, that maybe we’re not capable of obtaining what we’re entitled to. That much alone is guaranteed; there’s no guarantee that we’d ever get what we’re asking for. On the contrary, it seems more likely that having to ask for what we’re entitled to would make it less likely that we’d ever get it because if we could get it just by asking for it we’d most likely have it already without having to ask for it and we don’t have it, do we?

But we know, as Italian-Americans, we have a proud and worthy history that goes back to the beginning of the world. Even if we don’t know exactly what that history is, what’s left of our ethnic consciousness tells us that there are more important things in life than shoveling through convoluted claptrap just to get a bathroom door or the respect of ignorant bigots. So we keep our mouths shut and the world thinks we know how to enjoy life.

While Brandy never appears to be lacking in confidence, she seems to have accepted as a simple fact of life that almost anyone is a better judge of quality than she is. Brandy has several lovers at any given time. Her life is spent wandering between one lover and another, most of them floating in and out of her life without much fuss. But there are two lovers who have special significance for her; her attraction to both these women is based mainly on her belief in their ability to teach her about quality.

As an Italian-American child, I learned Italian culture at home and American culture at school. During adolescence I learned American social customs by trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. It never occurred to me that I was living in two cultures at once. Instead, I concluded that my family was strange, that I was strange and that maybe I shouldn’t trust my own judgment, that I might be better off taking the advice of my friends who always seemed to know what to do. Joyce and Catherine, Brandy’s most important lovers, always seem to know what to do.

When Joyce is a guest in Brandy’s apartment, Brandy pours each of them a glass of chianti, which she’d chosen because Joyce had told her, while they were in a restaurant drinking the wine with their dinner, that “good chianti has a rooster on the label.” (159) Although Brandy isn’t enjoying the wine so much without food, she doesn’t see a problem until Joyce calls it vinegar. Even then, instead of admitting her own feelings, she reminds Joyce about the rooster.

As Italian-Americans, we’re told it’s up to us to fit into American culture. Sometimes we don’t realize that it’s up to us to create a culture that fits us, so instead of looking for heritage at home, where there often isn’t any anyway, we look for it in the media. Instead of asking ourselves whether something feels right, we ask others whether it made the best seller list.

Catherine is introduced with the flat statement that she’s beautiful. Then she’s described: “wavy, shoulderlength auburn hair . . . flawless cream-white complexion . . . . Blue eyes. . . . delicate nose.” (259) If I remember correctly what I learned in a schoolyard in Brooklyn, that’s beauty.

Many people of color, if they bother at all to make any distinction between Europeans, generally identify the wasp as the inventor of racism. Brandy’s Catherine is an Irish-American Catholic—the wasp of the ItalianAmericans. Catherine imagines her life as “a film about a successful, but misunderstood, unappreciated woman.” (84) Like a metaphorical wasp who’s appropriated the culture of others and has begun to feel the lack of her own, lately she feels “trapped by a tyrannical director who [keeps] her on set when she want[s] to escape” (84) and, like a guilt-ridden progressive, she has dreams of “a banker calling in an overdue note on unspecified securities.” (29)

Catherine buys a building in a “fog-free neighborhood of San Francisco” (25), so that she can live in its topfloor loft, “the stage on which she play[s] herself as enviably comfortable among the unique, the expensive, the handsome.” (25) She gives parties for her gallery’s artists, her business associates and her admirers, inviting Brandy so she can watch Brandy being ill at ease.

But Brandy feels less ill at ease with Catherine’s friends than Catherine feels with Brandy’s. Brandy doesn’t mind so much that she’s not part of Catherine’s world; she just wants to get close enough to understand it. As

Catherine soon realizes, Brandy doesn’t long for possession of fine things, but for familiarity with them. (33) So Catherine teaches Brandy about high culture—music, poetry, how to sit in front of a fireplace, and how to walk along the beach.

But Azpadu goes beyond the single-level metaphors, piling layers of meaning in every direction. The woman who teaches Brandy high culture is a breathtakingly beautiful white woman. Joyce, who teaches Brandy more mundane things such as the difference between real silverware and stainless steel flatware, is a fat Black woman with cornrows, who doesn’t measure up to Hollywood standards of beauty. Brandy needs both of these women to teach her about quality, yet, although she’s in awe of what Catherine can offer and she feels an affinity for Joyce’s experience, she knows she’ll never really belong to either—like a Sicilian-American.

But if Brandy is Sicilian-American, why doesn’t Azpadu just say so?

Politically correct lesbians define humanity according to a hierarchy of pain in which light skinned people are oppressors and cause pain while dark skinned people are oppressed and feel pain, the shade of one’s skin determining the degree of one’s guilt or pain. While some Sicilian-American lesbians aren’t quite light enough to be white, most of them aren’t nearly dark enough to be considered people of color—but there are no other choices. By calling us white, politically correct lesbians can not only persist in their belief in negative stereotypes—the wife beater, the dutiful daughter, even the leg-breaking criminal—they can call these beliefs radical lesbian feminism. Believing their anti-Italian bigotry to be radical lesbian feminism not only allows these lesbians to both ignore and perpetuate their bigotry, it also enables them to consistently misinterpret Azpadu’s work.

By not naming Brandy Sicilian-American, Azpadu uses Omertà to slip some very politically incorrect stuff past the censors and, in doing so, makes Brandy more realistically Sicilian—and more painfully alive—than she would have been had she actually been named Sicilian.*

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Goat Song was published in 1984 by Aunt Lute Book Company.

Italian American Bookshelf: "You'll never have me like you want me" by R...

 

Coming Out Olive in the Lesbian Community:

Big Sister is Watching You

Having little or no power, as lesbians, beyond their own community, lesbians with power within their community often abuse that power. Overwhelmed by straight society’s determined misinterpretations of what they are, many lesbians have developed their own self-definitions. In many ways, however, they’ve defined themselves as straight men have defined them, that is, many lesbians define themselves in relation to others. What a lesbian is depends to a great extent on where she fits in what is known as a “hierarchy of pain.”

Whoever has suffered the most is most deserving of respect; whoever hasn’t suffered deserves no respect. Black people, because of past slavery and present racism in this country and others, are considered to have suffered more than anyone else. As the skin color of members of other races and ethnicities becomes lighter and lighter, those races and ethnicities are considered to have suffered less and less. Therefore, the lighter one’s skin, the less respect one is entitled to.

I have been censored in the lesbian press and ostracized in the lesbian community because I call myself Olive. Politically correct lesbians have agreed with the division of people into two categories: white and “of color.”

There is no distinction made between different groups within the white community—if I am white, I am assigned wasp history and culture. In one essay, in a book meant to help its three authors and all its readers to unlearn racism and anti-Semitism, there’s this question: “When women differ from us by ethnicity, by ‘blood,’ but are white-skinned, how much does our desire to have them be like us have to do with our thinking racially in either-or categories: either you are white or you are not. . . .”¹ Although her words accurately reflect the situation in the lesbian community, they seem to be only words, and I don’t think she knows what they mean. This Presbyterian woman not only fails to overcome this problem in her own self, but, while she seems to acknowledge her problem, she completely denies it by nearly always referring to both Protestants and Catholics as one people—Christians. A few times she mentions that she or another individual belongs to a particular Protestant denomination. Other than that, Christians do this, she says, and Christians do that. This is the experience of Christians in this country, she says, completely ignoring the fact that the experience of Catholics in this country has been more similar to the experience of Jews in this country than to that of Protestants. She mentions the Ku Klux Klan and their attitude toward and treatment of Jews, but never mentions that Klansmen are Protestant and feel and behave the same way toward Catholics. She says: “. . . when we [her local chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW)] scheduled a discussion on religion, the two women who spoke were a professor of religion and a Methodist minister; no representation was requested from the women of the local Jewish congregation, since ‘religion’ meant denominations of Christianity.”² My advice to this woman would be that she guess again. According to my understanding of this sentence, she and her friends at NOW consider religion to be denominations of Protestantism. As a Southern Italian/Sicilian-American Pagan Catholic, I hardly consider myself to be represented by the Pope; I certainly don’t consider myself to be represented by a Methodist minister.

Throughout her essay she drops certain phrases, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bits of bread as their stepmother leads them into the forest: “Christian-raised,” “Christian culture,” “Christian beliefs,” “Christian civilization,” “Christian believers.” Only twice in her essay does she make a real distinction between Catholics and Protestants, once when she talks about a civil rights demonstration organized by Protestants and once when she complains about her Catholic ex-husband and his priest who were trying to force on her their ideas about birth control. Apparently, this woman thinks that Protestants and Catholics are pretty much the same except that Protestants do good things and Catholics do bad things. All in all, her essay not only mentions briefly the problem of re-assignment of culture according to superficial assessments of appearance, it also does a pretty good job of demonstrating it.

This re-assignment seems to show up most obviously in the area of religion, as in the above, maybe because there are other ethnicities, besides Italian, who are overwhelmingly Catholic and who have always made more noise than Italian-Americans. But Italian-Americans are beginning to make noise. The problem now is that some are making American noise, probably because there is no Italian noise, at least not at a pitch Americans are capable of perceiving.

In her book, No Pictures in My Grave,³ Susan Caperna Lloyd, half Sicilian-American, describes her trip to Trapani during Easter Week and her efforts to re-discover her spiritual heritage. Throughout the book, she reminds us that she’s American; the Sicilians think she’s odd; people in the street recognize immediately that she doesn’t belong; she doesn’t know whether she’ll ever be able to feel a part of things. As a photographer, Lloyd is determined to get pictures of what might be a painting of a Goddess in a cave at Levanzo. The use of the flash is not allowed because it would harm the painting. She says: “I felt irritated with this Italian penchant for obeying the rules. … It never seemed to occur to them to try to get around the rules or to buy off the powers-that-be.”⁴ Maybe the Sicily Lloyd’s family is from isn’t the one on this planet. Or maybe she just forgot that Sicilians and Italians don’t tell the same story to strangers that they tell to family.

Not only does she evaluate Sicilian culture according to wasp standards, she shows the same American disinclination to even recognize Sicilian behavior if it doesn’t fit into the stereotypes. She tells us about women who participate in the Easter Week procession at Trapani: her new friend, Clara, who’s been helping to carry one of the saints in the procession for the three years prior to Lloyd’s arrival; the old women dressed in black who walk behind the Madonna; and different groups of young girls dressed as the Madonna or as Veronica. Yet she still complains that women aren’t allowed to participate. When Lloyd is invited to carry one of the saints, her participation is called “unprecedented” in the promotional material I received from the publisher with a review copy of her book. But if Clara and many other women have been participating in the procession for years before Lloyd arrived in Sicily, Lloyd’s participation is obviously not “unprecedented.” So the message is pretty clear—if you’re Sicilian or Italian (Americans are unaware of any distinction) you either conform to the appropriate stereotypes or you’re invisible.

And she tells us about the Portatori, the men who carry the heavy statues through the streets all day and all night. I know it’s important that I show respect to my people and I know it would be an honor to be asked to help carry one of the saints in this procession. But I think of the sweat and the blisters; I think of the terrible ache in the shoulders and the sharp pain shooting through the legs and I know why the job of hauling heavy loads through the village is usually reserved for donkeys. But Lloyd seems to feel that the goal of a feminist is, not to attain for women equality with men, but to be allowed to do what men do; that is, it isn’t the behavior she wants for its own satisfactions, it’s the association with men. She reminds us throughout the book that men go outside and do while women stay inside and don’t and, like an American, considers outside and doing better than inside and not.

All the same, there’s no way to deny the value of Lloyd’s book; she goes a lot further than other Italian-American women, who don’t seem to go at all, and she provides us, in a readable and friendly style, very important and very necessary information. But her American (and straight) evaluation of that information—that it’s better to be outside with men than inside with women—doesn’t help us any. Instead, it only strengthens the politically correct lesbians’ case for assigning to Italian-Americans wasp history and culture—white history and culture.

But I look white; therefore, I am white. And if I’m white, I belong to white culture. And, as a member of white culture, I’ve been told I have suffered the least and caused the most suffering to others. If there is little I can do, as an individual, to stop the suffering, I am expected to do the next best thing—feel guilty.

I have been told that by calling myself Olive I am evading my “responsibility of guilt.” Because I am a light-skinned woman living in the United States, it is accepted that my grandparents, whether or not they owned slaves themselves, belonged to the group who did own slaves and were entitled to all the benefits. If they chose not to take advantage of those benefits, it’s their own fault. When I tell lesbians that Southern Italians and Sicilians didn’t even begin to arrive in this country until twenty years after the slave days were over I am told that this is a “wrong use of facts” and that today I am a member of an oppressor group and that I can choose to take advantage of my “white-skin privilege.”

“White-skin privilege” means I don’t suffer from racism. It means that whatever problems I have that might be caused by anti-Italian bigotry are of less significance than the problems of dark-skinned people because I can scrub the shine of olive oil from my forehead, pluck the hairs from my chin, change my name, and go right out and get myself a well-paying job and a luxury apartment anytime I like.

One lesbian, in a women’s newspaper, writes in opposition to racism, yet uses several racist techniques to defend her position. At one point, she says “... the more lesbians who look like the dominant culture claim that they are examples of oppressed cultures, the more invisible the members of truly oppressed cultures become.”⁵ To ignore the problems of truly oppressed people is racist but to ignore the problems of merely oppressed people is not racist. Any lesbian can suggest that we fight the racist act of ignoring the problems of oppressed people with the progressive act of ignoring the problems of oppressed people and other lesbians will not notice what she’s doing. If I write about the problems faced by Italian-Americans, I am taking attention away from other, more deserving, people. Therefore, if I write about the problems faced by Italian-Americans, I am a racist.

Far more important than literary merit to a lesbian editor is the extent to which a lesbian writer has suffered from oppression. While in straight literary journals contributor notes usually list a writer’s publications, readings, awards, jobs, etc., in women’s literary journals contributor notes often list race, sexuality, physical handicaps, chemical dependencies, experiences of child abuse, etc. The purpose of lesbian literary journals is not so much to present worthwhile literature as it is to preserve otherwise neglected stories.

If I am Olive, if Italian-Americans have suffered oppression, my story deserves space in a lesbian literary journal. There are very few lesbian journals. The space in any one of them is limited, the money is tight, and the staff is an unpaid, over-worked collective that’s constantly changing. It’s impossible for any little magazine to print everything considered worthwhile. It’s impossible for lesbian literary journals to print work representative of every different group of women. It’s racist to deny dark-skinned women the opportunity to be heard, as white men have always done in mainstream publishing. It’s racist for lesbian literary journals to give space to light-skinned women when they might have given space to dark-skinned women. Space given to one woman is space taken away from another; it’s impractical to live up to one’s ideals.

If I am white, if Italian-Americans have not suffered oppression, my story is wasp and has already been told. There is no way, and no need, to justify giving space to an unimportant variation of a too-often repeated theme that so few people can relate to, whether considered in terms of ideals or money. If I am white, lesbians can abuse, ridicule and, by doing so, neglect my culture without being charged with racism. Mentions of Italian-Americans in women’s literary journals are very rare, very brief, and always negative.

In one issue of Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, one story uses the name of Al Capone to remind the reader that criminals were as dangerous in the thirties as they are today.⁶ In another issue, a character in a story claims that a firefighter’s job is no more dangerous than the job of a bartender in a lesbian bar because the bartender has to put up with the Mafia.⁷ In both cases, there is the acceptance of the bigot’s association of Italian-Americans with crime and a willingness to reinforce that association. A further reinforcement is accomplished by the fact that Italian names are never used to bring up positive images—or even to identify real and active characters.⁸

In A Gathering of Spirit,⁹ an anthology of writings by American Indian women, one of the contributors is half Italian. All the writers identify their ethnicity in their contributor notes. Although they are over-whelmingly full Native American, several mention other races. One woman describes herself as Laguna/Sioux/Lebanese, another as Blood/Chicana. One woman says her mother is French-Canadian and Native American. One contributor’s name is Kateri Sardella; she identifies as Micmac.

Sardella’s narrative, apparently true, includes a brief conversation between two insensitive bigots who refer to her father as a “paizan.”¹⁰ Only Italians would use that word and only in reference to an Italian. Although she thus admits in a begrudging and negative way to being just as much Italian as she is Micmac, she never actually names herself Italian and doesn’t claim that part of her heritage.

Like many Italian-Americans, Italian-American lesbians don’t know which side of their pizza the sauce is on. When I told an Italian-American lesbian about this story, her immediate response was typical of those confronted by claims of oppression of Italian-Americans—she said, “So what? Everybody’s got problems.” She said that Sardella isn’t necessarily an Italian name and that “paizan” doesn’t mean Italian, it just means friend.

If Italian-American lesbians don’t even know how to read about themselves, it’s not surprising that they don’t know how to write about themselves. One cliche in lesbian literature is the use of a massage as seduction in a lesbian love scene. Lesbians like to use different kinds of oils, choosing oils with medicinal properties or magical powers, scented or non-scented. According to work I’ve read as editor of la bella figura,¹¹ an Italian-American lesbian chooses olive oil every time.

In an effort to bring a better awareness of Italian-American issues to non-Italian lesbians, and to Italian-American lesbians as well, I proposed, to the editor of a lesbian literary journal, a special issue of Italian-American women’s writing. This is fairly common in the lesbian literary community, in which there have been, besides the Native American issue mentioned above, special issues of various literary journals devoted to work by and about Black women, Asian-American women, and Hispanic women.

My proposal was not only accepted, I was asked to edit the issue. In preparation, I attended a meeting of this journal’s collective to learn how they work together and to understand what was expected of me. When I got to the meeting, I was given, by the editor, a previous special issue of their publication on Jewish women so that I could “get some ideas about what could be written about such a small group,” as though her ignorance of my culture and heritage is proof I have none and, therefore, I needed to copy another culture and heritage to make it look as though I do have my own. The impression I had from this woman, who was Jewish and who had contributed to this issue, was that she felt, as a Jew, Jews are real and Italian-Americans are not and that if I, as an Italian-American, want to be real, too, I’d have to learn from non-Italians.

Another member of the collective said she understood my right, as an Italian-American, to have such an issue, and she was very strongly in favor of the right of all women to define themselves, although she really couldn’t see how I could fill a whole magazine—this would be fewer than 150 pages—with nothing but writings by and about Italian-Americans. It reminded me of the time, when I was about ten years old, I announced to my father that I was going to write a book of short biographies of women who had accomplished great things in the arts and sciences. My father was pleased and said my ambition was commendable, but I’d never be able to find enough women to fill a whole book.

And I thought about The Dream Book, an anthology of about 400 pages of writings by Italian-American women. An editor of a fairly important women’s literary journal, and a feminist interested in all the concerns of all women, might be expected to have heard of such a book which, at that time, had been out for more than two years. But, when I told this editor about the book the first time, she said she’d never heard of it. Maybe it’s not entirely fair to expect someone to know everything in any given area, even if it is considered her area of expertise, although one book is not everything. But when I mentioned it to her again, not too long afterward on another occasion, she said again that she have never heard of it. And when I mentioned it to her a third time, not too long afterward on another occasion, she said again that she had never heard of it. How many times does a politically correct radical lesbian feminist separatist, who’s in a position in which one might expect her to know something about women’s literature, have to hear about a book of writings by Italian-American women before she’s heard of it … before she acknowledges that it exists … that we exist? But if it doesn’t fit the stereotypes they don’t see it. Italian-American women don’t write; we cook.

It wasn’t long before I understood what was expected of me. When I asked the editor what she thought an Italian-American women’s issue would be, she said, after some hesitation, that she thought it would be an examination of the difficulties of being a lesbian in an Italian-American family and a celebration of our culture. Considered from a non-Italian point of view, these topics can be seen as descriptive of negative stereotypes—the homophobic patriarch and the harmless buffoon. Even worse, if these topics are the only ones examined, the journal would ignore more important issues (more important because they’re ignored everywhere else)--the difficulties of being Italian-American in the lesbian community and how Americans and Northern Italians, including lesbians in both groups, have tried to rewrite the history of Southern Italian/Sicilian-American lesbians and straight women. What this editor wanted from me was a journal about Italian-Americans that wouldn’t disturb the popular notions of ignorant people, most of whom were bigots as well. And she hoped, by asking me to do the typesetting, something not asked of other guest editors, she would be able to free herself of a good deal of the work of putting this issue together, so that she could devote that time to writing her own novel.

When I told the editor that I was no longer interested in doing the issue, she gave the job to two of her friends—women who had been friends of mine until I dropped the issue.* One of them told me that the editor had required them to sign a contract giving the editor full and final editorial control of the issue—something else which isn’t asked of guest editors of other special women’s issues since it so obviously makes impossible the whole purpose of self-definition. As a result, the official Southern Italian/Sicilian-American lesbian self-definition, as given in a fairly important women’s literary journal, is a definition censored by a non-Italian who is ignorant of our culture and heritage and unwilling to learn. And there is censorship, along with a determined inability to recognize reality, working to limit the writing of Italian-American lesbians, in quantity as well as quality, in other segments of publishing as well.

There is only one Italian-American lesbian publishing novels about Italian-American lesbians. There is also Dodici Azpadu, who identifies as Sicilian-American. In her novel, Saturday Night in the Prime of Life,¹² Azpadu presents a Sicilian-American lesbian whose problems, according to the lesbian press that printed the book, seem to be caused mostly by her family’s Sicilian heritage. Their blurb on the book’s back cover says: “Though primarily Neddie and Lindy’s story, the context—the trap—is the male-dominated Sicilian culture that affects the women who exist inside and outside it.” This is acceptable in lesbian literature. Lesbians consider Italian-American culture to be patriarchal; Catholicism to be a woman-hating religion; Italian-American men to be wife-beating male chauvinist pigs; and straight Italian-American women to be glued to their stoves by the starch in their pasta. These are the forms of oppression suffered by Italian-American women because of their culture; these are not the negative stereotypes of bigots. Obviously, a Sicilian-American or Italian-American lesbian has a lot to complain about.

Yet, reading this book reveals very quickly and plainly that the story revolves around Concetta, the family matriarch, to the point that “the context—the trap” that oppresses all the other characters, female and male, lesbian and straight, Sicilian and American, far from being a “male-dominated” culture, is most definitely a “Concetta-dominated” culture.

The novel is mostly concerned with Neddie and Lindy’s working through their decision about what to do with Concetta, who, in her old age, is making conciliation noises at her estranged daughter, Neddie. The scenes describing how Concetta makes life difficult for everyone around her on the “straight side” of the family serve to indicate the special difficulties not found in a traditional, and legal, heterosexual relationship. As Lindy points out many times, Neddie’s brothers, in spite of the real problems they have in their own situations, aren’t considering leaving their wives to take care of their mother, as Neddie is considering leaving Lindy. But what’s also clear in the book is that, whether any particular character is actually afraid of Concetta or, at the other extreme, almost openly resentful of her, they are all willing to rearrange at least half their lives, if not all, to give the appearance of showing respect. Concetta’s power may not be the kind that’s honored, or even acknowledged, in mainstream or lesbian culture, but it’s power nonetheless—and it’s a power even her sons don’t want to mess with.

Goat Song,¹³ another novel by Azpadu, revolves around Brandy, a woman who was abandoned to an orphanage at birth. No one knows her ethnicity, including Brandy herself. Although Azpadu seems to make a special point of stating the ethnicity of every other character in the book, even we, the readers, are never told Brandy’s ethnicity, although Catherine, one of Brandy’s lovers, offers a few guesses: “Middle Eastern, Eurasian, Latin or Creole.” Azpadu describes Brandy as having “swarthy skin, a large hooked nose, thick coarse black hair and brows, a trace of hair above her lip.”¹⁴ Because of her appearance, she’s subjected to racism as a woman of color. And this is why it’s never stated in the novel that she’s Sicilian. From conversations and correspondence with Azpadu, I know that Azpadu identifies as a woman of color and that she knows her history well enough to produce such a brilliant metaphor—the Sicilian-American lesbian as an unclaimed orphan. While Brandy’s every thought, feeling, and behavior screams Sicilian, Azpadu understands her own culture well enough to realize that Brandy is made more thoroughly Sicilian by not being named Sicilian. Thus Azpadu succeeds in using omertà to break omertà—Azpadu would also understand that this novel would not have been published by a lesbian press if it openly named Sicilians as people of color who suffer from racism. It simply wouldn’t fit in with the politically correct lesbian’s “hierarchy of pain.” If lesbians make no distinction between different European groups, they certainly can’t be expected to distinguish between Northern Italians, Southern Italians, and Sicilians. In fact, they seem to have no notion of how young Italy actually is or of how the peninsula and the islands became one political entity. Instead, they seem to have accepted the kinds of historical accounts generally found in the most shallow of travel guide books and believe that the name Italy is really descriptive of a single ancient civilization created by a single ancient people. If they happen to know a blue-eyed blonde who has a grandparent from Milan, there’s no reason for them to upset their tidy categories by thinking that Brandy is subjected to racism because she’s Sicilian.

At the other extreme is Rachel Guido deVries’ novel, Tender Warriors.¹⁵ This book makes a point of labeling Italian-Americans as white and minimizing prejudice faced by Italian-Americans. One character, a Black man, obviously a token, serves no purpose in the plot other than to conclude that Sonny DeMarco isn’t so bad for a white guy. DeVries says: “Till Sonny, he never liked to talk to white people after that.”¹⁶ Lorraine DeMarco marries a Black man: “Once [her in-laws] got past an initial disappointment that Curtis was with a white girl … .”¹⁷

Although the novel represents Italian-Americans in a positive enough way, it never goes beyond what an anti-Italian bigot could tolerate; positive enough is not positive enough. There’s no really deep sense of Italian culture and heritage as there is a deep sense of Sicilian culture and heritage in Azpadu’s Goat Song. The several small evidences of Italian ethnicity given throughout deVries’ novel could have been acquired by a non-Italian in a movie theater. Most references are to food: lasagna, stuffed braciole, artichokes, meatballs, simple cue words. Other references are to “that macho Italian stuff;” to Dominic’s being a patriarch and to Dominic’s Cadillac.

DeVries uses three Italian words in the book. Two of them are spelled incorrectly. All three are translated on the bottom of the page on which they first appear. This is in contrast to Azpadu’s use of Sicilian* in Saturday Night in the Prime of Life. Azpadu offers no translations, just as many Hispanic feminist writers offer no translations of Spanish words, phrases, and whole paragraphs in otherwise English texts in English language publications. On the one hand, you could say it’s polite to translate. On the other hand, you could say a reader might have enough respect to look up a word in a dictionary, enough awareness of an “other” people, who have contributed a great deal to this country’s culture, to be familiar with a couple of simple words. It’s apparently because of this other hand that deVries doesn’t translate the Spanish word “machismo,” a popular word among speakers of English. But “capice,” (“capisce” or better, as it’s used by the grandmother to address the grandson, “capisci”) which she does translate, is also a popular word among speakers of English.

The novel describes an Italian-American family that tries to escape itself. The three children, Rose, Lorraine and Sonny, become, as Lorraine thinks of it, “a dyke, a junkie, and a weirdo.” Rose has a “need to carve out her life, separate from the family, as different from the way she grew up as she could imagine.”¹⁸ After distorting Italian-American family life to fit the stereotypes, deVries has her characters running away from that distortion as though anything’s better than being Italian. Rose, Lorraine and Sonny choose non-Italians, mostly Blacks, as friends, lovers, and spouses. Even the language of the book is more similar to Black English than to Italian English. With all the non-Italian motivations of the characters and the distortion of Italian ways, deVries could have written a very different novel exploring how an “other” culture, in an ungracious country, can become so distorted and unhealthy that its own children run from it, something that’s a very real and common problem among Italian-Americans. But this is never openly pointed out in the novel; that’s not what the novel is about. Instead, the author seems to have accepted this distorted and superficial view of Italian ways as simple Italian-American reality and thus seems, herself, to be running from the family.

These three are the only novels written by and about Sicilian-American and Italian-American lesbians published by the lesbian press.* Each falls into one of the only three categories allowed by lesbian censorship. Saturday Night in the Prime of Life, according to the lesbian press that printed it, blames all problems on “the male-dominated Sicilian culture.” Goat Song acknowledges problems of racism within the lesbian community but does not name Sicilian one of those who suffers from this racism. Tender Warriors names its characters Italian-American, but calls them white and middle class, and minimizes their problems.

None of these novels tells the whole story. Maybe it’s not fair to think three novels should tell the whole story of a culture. Or maybe it’s not fair that lesbian censorship has only allowed us these three novels.

And while lesbian censorship has made our prose difficult to write, the denial of our culture has made Italian-American lesbian poetry impossible. I’ve been told that poems that honor my family according to Italian-American values are “feeding into negative stereotypes;” that poems protesting against anti-Italian bigotry are racist; that offensive images, that is, Italian-American images, should be modified to be made acceptable to the “majority culture;” that benign poems are wonderful evocations of my culture but not universal or serious enough to publish.

When I didn’t receive a timely response to a poem I submitted to a women’s newspaper in New York, where I lived at the time, I attended an open meeting of the paper’s collective to see what was happening. The collective consisted of Blond, Hispanic, Black, and Jewish women who informed me, with politely controlled rage, that my poem was racist; therefore, it had been tossed in the trash and ignored. The poem openly discusses the lynching of Sicilian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891, even making the murder of these few Sicilians seem as horrible as the murder of so many more Blacks in other lynchings.* I was told that Blacks, because they’re Black, have been subjected to institutionalized racism, while Italian-Americans, because they’re “white,” have not. The implication was that, because Blacks cannot escape being Black, as Italian-Americans can escape being Italian-American, Blacks don’t have the luxury of escaping racism as Italian-Americans have. Therefore, Blacks have a serious problem that needs to be corrected while Italian-Americans have no problems. Although it would be considered racist to suggest that a light-skinned Black woman try to pass in order to get ahead in a racist society, it’s considered an advantage for an Italian-American to be able to abandon her culture and heritage and become something better: in this land of opportunity we can rise from lowly w0ps to real white middle-class Americans. Isn’t that why we came here in the first place? In fact, it’s not only racist, it’s pointless to talk about the lynching of Sicilians and Southern Italians when I can so easily pretend it never happened, get white, and it’ll never happen again.

I’ll always wonder what would have happened in that room if I had mentioned that some of the people who participated in that lynching of Sicilians were Blacks and that the NAACP considers this to be the worst single incident of lynching ever to have occurred in the United States. And I wonder how many Sicilians it takes to equal one human being.

I’ve also been told that the internment of the Japanese during World War II was motivated purely by racism, as is the resistance to reparation today. The proof I’m given is that Italians and Germans were not interned. But Italians and Germans were interned during World War II. Imagine trying to write a poem about the internment of Italians during World War II, about the real suffering of real people. Imagine trying to make that poem sound as proud and bold and full of human dignity and energizing rage as some poems about the oppression of Black people. If history books and newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, continue to pretend that Italians were never interned, and lesbians, both Italian-Americans and non-Italians, believe the lies they read about Italian-Americans and accept the omissions, as they claim not to believe or accept about anyone else, a poem about the internment of Italians during World War II is not only impossible to publish, it’s impossible to write.

There’s a motto printed on the bookmarks given out at many women’s bookstores across the country--“Freedom of the press belongs to she who owns the press.” I used to think that meant that in order for us to define ourselves by our own standards and to preserve our stories, we would not only have to do our own writing, but our own printing and distribution as well. Apparently, I was wrong. After several years of trying to publish poetry that defines Italian-Americans by our own standards and preserves our stories and values, I’ve concluded that this motto means no more than it says—that the small percentage of lesbians who have access to printing, control what is printed, and by doing so, determine what every lesbian should be.

The Italian-American lesbian, if she is neither white nor “of color,” does not have a place in the lesbian’s “hierarchy of pain.” If every human being must be either white or “of color,” and I claim to be neither, either the lesbian’s view of the world is false or I don’t exist. Therefore, although there are a few individuals who are white and middle-class Americans whose families just happen to have come from Italy, there is no Italian-American, as a people with a heritage and a culture, in lesbian literature.

notes

1 Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminists Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1988, page 49.

2 Ibid, page 31.

3 Susan Caperna Lloyd, No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily, San Francisco, California: Mercury House, 1992.

4 Ibid, page 38.

5 Bay Area Women’s News, January/February 1988, “Of Color: What’s in a Name” by Vivienne Louise, pages 5 and 7.

6 Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, no. 24, fall 1987, “Nancy Drew and the Serial Rapist” by zana, pages 4-19.

7 Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, no. 25, winter 1988, “Hanukah at a Bar” by Lee Lynch, pages 15-27.

8 A Gathering of Spirit, Sinister Wisdom Books, originally issue no. 22-23 of Sinister Wisdom.

9 Dodici Azpadu, Saturday Night in the Prime of Life, Iowa City, Iowa: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1983.

10 Dodici Azpadu, Goat Song, Iowa City, Iowa: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1984.

11 Ibid, page 33.

12 Rachel Guido deVries, Tender Warriors, Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1986.

13 Ibid, page 26.

14 Ibid, page 72.

15 Ibid, page 131.