I woke up this morning with a vehemency boiling and rumbling down inside me, like a dragon had taken up residency in my soul. Why this morning, I don't know, but I've suddenly realized:
America doesn't know who I am, who any of us are.
We have been trivialized, turned into caricatures of our real Selves. I'm no guidette, no Carmela Soprano. We're not all Sophia Lorens, nor are we the lady in the Ragu commercial. Maybe we're a bit like Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny. OK, we're definitely like her, at least sometimes (and right now we're all saying it in our heads: "Oh, yeah, you blend.").
But I think of the women I know, the women I love: my mother's cousins; my father's sister, and their cousins; my neighbor's sister-in-law; my little sister; my best friend from high school. And no matter how adorable Marisa Tomei is on screen, you, America, still have no clue who we are.
We are irreverent.
Nothing - besides food - is too sacred for a joke, not even Mother Mary. (Damn did she pull a fast one: "I swear, Joseph, it was the Holy Spirit!"). We make fun of each other, of our families, of ourselves. It toughens us up to the world outside, the world that would make guidettes of us all.
We are Catholics to the core.
Even those of us in Catholic "recovery" who, finding ourselves in a church for a funeral or wedding, feel a bit awkward at first, appreciate the ritual of it: we genuflect at the alter, know every word to the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and make the triple sign of the cross with our thumb before the reading of the Gospel, reverently saying, "Glory to You O Lord." We save mass cards, have some memory of a particular nun, can tell you the reason we picked our Confirmation names (and tell you the story of that saint), and still remember what it was like walking around with ashes on our forehead all day on Ash Wednesday.
We are intensely proud.
Those of us who are still 100% Italian by blood carry it as an honor. We shake our heads internally when we hear a laundry list of ethnicities that some people can claim, and nod in comfort (and a bit in disapproval) when an Italian tells the story of maybe being 1/8th or 1/16th something else. There's something in the purity of it, the purity of our Selves, that makes us feel safe.
Yes: We are great cooks.
Cook for 70 people in two hours? No problem! Even if there's no time to go to the store? No problem!
We learned somewhere, from someone, before we even left middle school, how to make a feast out of a limp vegetable, a box of pasta, a cup of flour, 3 soft tomatoes, a bag of dried beans, and two frozen chicken legs. Oh - and it'll be, hands-down, one of the best meals you've ever eaten.
Maybe it's a cultural inheritance of kitchen creativity but I think it's more a cultural obsession with having certain things at all times in the pantry: garlic, dried basil, olive oil, at least 2 kinds of vinegar, bread crumbs, dried pasta, canned tomatoes, onions.
Further: We're obsessed with food.
We know what we're making for dinner at least by morning if not several days or a week before. Even in the most rushed of evenings, making dinner is comforting, and everyone knows not to bother us with sibling squabbles, loud voices, or irrelevant bull while we're cooking.
Food shopping is a special event all its own; for those of us who don't go to church, food shopping is church. We touch things, taste things, ask at the deli counter for "a pick, a taste," talk to ourselves with either delight or disgust about freshness or price, and have taught our children how to properly choose produce before they turn 4.
At every holiday meal, every birthday gathering, every football game or chorus concert, our conversations with the rest of the family revolve around what we're cooking for the next holiday meal, birthday gathering, or get-together after the next football game or chorus concert.
We judge your pronunciation of our foods.
That soft cheese stored in water? "Moo-tza-deh-la" or, if you're short on time, "Mootz." That other soft cheese, the one that hasn't been pressed and is in a container? "R(ROLL IT!)-ee-goh-ta" or, if you're feeling extra fancy, "R(ROLL IT!)-ee-goh-t." That bread you see in big boxes at Christmas-time, with raisins and citrus peels? "Pah-nah-tone-ay."
Just get it right, okay?
We are deeply attracted to quality.
It doesn't matter how much money we have (or don't have) or how much money we grew up with (or didn't grow up with): we know and love quality, especially when it's subdued, classy.
The only bag we love at Marshall's, the one we can't stop touching, is 100% Italian leather and costs $625. Even if we can't buy it, we'll carry it around the store for awhile, stroking it and even smelling it.
The gold hoops we admire, with delicately hammered filigree that you'd never see behind our hair but that we'd love just in knowing such high levels of craft went into them, cost more than we make in a month. Even if we don't buy them, we'll judge every pair of earrings we ever look at again against them.
For many of us, this knack for immediately spotting quality is immensely frustrating, because we'll likely never own any of it.
We are loud.
Not all of us are loud all the time, though many of us are. But even those of us who lean toward the quiet end in public are easily riled up and out of that by any of the following: other Italian women; irreverent jokes (particularly about each other or Catholicism); food; or any mention of Italian ancestry.
Get us in a group, and good luck. I've had the inordinate fortune and blessing of knowing non-Italian women who can keep up with us, and they're quickly "adopted" as sisters, because it's no easy task. It's like Darwinian competition: only the loudest are heard, and being heard confers Alpha status - and if you didn't already know it, we are all born with an innate Alpha status. If we don't use it, we lose it!
And finally: We are the keepers of stories.
Within families, Italian women (and girls) are given the stories of generations. Sometimes the stories grow fewer and weaker as the immigrant generations move further into the past, but all of us carry some secrets that have never been doled out to men or those outside our bloodline.
Some of those stories and secrets are about family recipes, or maiden names, or what life was like in the old country, and they give us a sense of belonging, or twinges of nostalgia for places we'll never go, people we'll never know.
Some of those stories, though, truly are secret, and are meant to share the burden of pain. They go back farther than any one of us can remember and move forward in time, stretched taut like strands from one web to another. Eventually we notice that the webs of our lives are constructed from innumerable strands, over the span of centuries, seas and continents, and things like chronology, ownership, and external or social verifiability no longer matter. Those stories of loneliness and poverty, rape and beatings, abortion and estrangement, murder and intellectual oppression may as well be our own; we carry them for one another.
Because of this a sadness settles within us while we are very young, growing all the time, a sadness we never assume will be eased by any means other than the continual stretching of the gathered strands of the webs that are our ancestral lives to each generation of girls as they come to us. We are proud to be entrusted with the keeping of these stories, as if it denotes a trustworthiness of character; we are proud to be burdened by generations of sadness. Sometimes it seems that trading these stories is the only way we won't dissolve into oblivion, be forgotten, become nameless.
We are the keepers of stories, unique only because we are bound by silence.
Perhaps it is the silence inside the sadness that birthed my anger this morning; it's this silence that keeps us from being truly known. As for me, I am not only a keeper of stories: I am a storyteller, a writer all my life, and in loosening the bindings of silence I ease not only my own burden but the burden of us all. It is not about blabbing the specific secrets that we guard, not about divulging our Truths to the world...
It is about breaking the stereotypes that cast us as the shallow creatures that the media and its pop culture would have you believe we all fit into, breaking it by speaking to the depths within us that we might finally be known as something more.
I encourage you, Italian women in America, to do the same. Say it publicly if you like, right here or elsewhere; say it privately if you need, to me or someone else or even on a scrap of paper that you burn. Say something other than what's being said for you. The fear will pass in time - the guilt and the sadness and the anger too.
Share this with everyone, with anyone, that we might become more of who we really are.
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