Italian-American literature of the second half of the 20th century described a world divided between generations, often very different from one another. Between two Fatherlands, between opposite perceptions and views of what Italy and America were. It described the American Dream, the eldorado and the fight against prejudice, a desire for integration and freedom, a frantic need to find a balance between identities, and independence from every kind of ethnic classification. It described, finally, also the New World’s adventure, and the journeys back to the land of origins.
The point is that emigration to America was and still is a mass experience, which, nevertheless, each individual lived and lives very personally, on the basis of one’s own experiences, of how much one’s family was or is connected with Italian traditions and language, of subjective feelings, and of the need and wish to identify with something.
Literature narrated the complexity, the suggestion, the drama, the comedy, the parody of it all, keeping alive the memory of one of the most voluminous, yet least discussed and represented, collective event of Italian history: migration. Italy’s migration, that of her people, not the one we read about in newspapers today, so deeply connected with the idea of welcoming and integration, or to the refusal of those who land desperate on her coasts. The migration of her children, who left the country and keep on doing it, who mingle with other cultures and societies. A density of events to be filtered through the lenses on one’s personal experience and to “correct” with one’s contribution to it.
Francesco Durante, author of Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943, and one of the most authoritative voices in the field, depicts a heterogeneous galaxy of figures at the heart of the Italian-American tale: Don De Lillo, Richard Russo, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, Mario Puzo, John Fante. With theirs, a plethora of other names, perhaps less known, but not less important if we want to know and understand the real narrative of the Italian migration to the US. It’s useful therefore, to look into the work of Alessandro Sisca, AKA Riccardo Cordiferro, the first generation migrant — Durante writes — who had a “textbook Italianness,” filled with all the virtues and defects of the stereotypical Italian, as imagined back then in the US. Or to discover Carlo Tresca, “public enemy number one” according to a New Yorker cover, because considered the most dangerous radical in America. People and literature are instruments for the reader to gain a full understanding of reality. Dots to join and get the complete image.
“I am like Homer. I mean my dog Homer: constantly looking for his own roots.” That’s how the brilliant biography of Lawrence Ferlinghetti compiled by Giada Diano begins. Diano worked in close contact with the poet, revealing to the public his life with a subjective and emotion-driven approach.
This is the point of our reflection. What can we say today, after his death, about the legacy Ferlinghetti, immense protagonist of the world’s artistic, literary, social and civic panorama, left us? What did we learn from this man, who lived the great season of the Beat Generation, but who’s been so much more? Part of his legacy is found, without a doubt, in this quest for one’s origins, for one’s Italian roots, but there is more. Our roots are a starting point for us, a trampoline for that convoluted mix of varied experiences that life is. Then we have the turning points, the markers and highlights, the sliding doors — all things we define, even in Italian, using English — the moments of passage that set the pace and make the difference, the crossroads where our life is made, never mind how we’ll eventually interpret and judge those decisions later.
Ferlinghetti sought his root tenaciously. But he was also a free man and a polyhedric artist, difficult to label. And that’s where part of his beauty lies. This man — a poet, artist, editor, bookseller, political hell raiser, activist, pacifist and tireless traveler — finds out to be Italian only when he asks for his birth certificate to enroll in the US Navy, a choice that was to determine his presence on D-Day and was to bring him all the way to Japan, to witness the aftermath of the atomic bomb. It was in that occasion that he discovered his father Carlo Leopoldo, who died before the poet was born, had the family surname anglicized to Ferling. From then on, Ferlinghetti walked a long, strenuous path in search his Italian origins, that was to bring him, eventually, to find the place where his father was born, Brescia, and later, in 2005, even to identify his childhood home. But it’s in 1955, when he decided to change back his surname to Ferlinghetti and to sign all his literary work with it, that he turned the page. He gained back a piece of his own identity.
Roots as a necessary and integrant part of the individual.
To walk through the 20th century, meeting all its protagonists and contributing with inexhaustible courage and creativity to the renovation of the American cultural panorama as he did, one needs strong roots to set his feet on, but also wings to fly with.
Being a child of two world is an experience made of duality and ubiquity, it’s a being and a not-being. It shows two planets by crossing their orbits, by turning back time to the big bang and by diving into the black hole of the future, all at once. It means recovering something and evolving at the same time. It’s probably the inner path each of us should follow to understand the events of our lives.
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