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.