Things My Mother Told Me
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Guernica, 1999.

In Things My Mother Told Me, Gillan takes risks. She is not afraid to write about those commonplace experiences and relationships that have touched her life and that have shaped her identity as an Italian American woman. Gillan locates her poems and her identity in that familiar landscape of family that we all recognize. With simple and direct language, she explores her relationships with her immigrant parents, husband of more than thirty years, children, grandchildren, and former teachers.

She takes even greater risks in the form of her poetry. Many of her poems are prose poems that look more like paragraphs on the page than conventional verse forms. Such risk taking in both content and form mirror the strong voice that speaks to us in these poems about those experiences, positive as well as negative, that have shaped Gillan’s identity as an Italian American writer. Her voice does not feel compelled to hide behind literary artifice and device.

The subtext to these plain-spoken poems is that Gillan, as she did in her previous book, Where I Come From, has broken the silence that has traditionally been imposed on working-class, Italian American women of her generation. In the first poem of the volume, “Learning Grace,” Gillan recounts one of the “things” her mother taught her. She locates the roots of her creativity and poetry in her mother’s ritual practice of making bread and serving it to her family.

In “I Dream of My Grandmother” and “My Great Grandmother,” she imagines those two “strong Italian women returning / at dusk from fields where they worked all day / . . . graceful women carrying water / in terra cotta jugs on their heads.” Out of these narratives, she learns the origins of her own mother that fashion ultimately her own identity and identity of her own daughter.

Gillan turns these domestic episodes and relationships in her life that might otherwise be seen as insignificant moments into universal experiences that tell us something about love and relationships. In “Brushing My Mother’s Hair,” “Singing to My Mother,” Papa Where Were You,” This Is No Way To Live,” “My Father Always Smelled of Old Spice,” and “No One Speaks His Language Anymore,” she writes of caring for her aging parents and the pain of watching them decline physically and lose their old friends and connection to their community.

In his 91st year, her father “longs for days when he danced at the Societa dinners and played briscole and bocce with his friends, the days when everyone spoke in his language.” In these poems Gillan is unafraid to explore these common yet painful episodes in her life. Out of the accidental incidents in her life she fashions poems that reflect universal experiences of aging, loss, and separation. The human spirit manifests itself in a phrase, a gesture, or a word.

Her aging father says, “I worry about money. About where I’ll go if I get worse and I get worse everyday. I worry, you know, even that there won’t be room in heaven for me.” In another poem, Gillan tells her mother, “Ma, We’re Americans Now and Look At All We’ve Lost.”

Gillan writes of other struggles she faced while growing up Italian American in Paterson and attending its public schools. In “Learning Silence,” she writes that “in the grimy, shopworn classrooms of PS18,” to please Miss Barton, her teacher, she would have been willing to be the light-complexioned Jane from the first grade reader. Instead, she was the Italian American girl in the back row with her “sausage curls,” “olive skin,” and “cheap cotton” dress.

She writes that when she was young, like so many of the Italian American girls around her, she wanted desperately to assimilate. “Marilyn Monroe, and My Sister,” “First Dance and the CYO,” “Glittering as We Fall,” and “When We Were Girls” are all about Italian American girls’ efforts to fashion an acceptable American identity that would conceal their immigrant heritage.

She writes in “Training Bra” that during her adolescent years she learned about “all the snaps and hooks / designed to train us to accept the boundaries / of the women we would become.” In Zia Concetta and her “Whalebone Corset,” Concetta had learned well during her long life all those things women had “to learn to hold in.”

These are poems of linkage and lineage. But the path that leads from one generation to the next is not always untroubled. In “My Son Tells Me Not to Wear My Poet’s Clothes,” Gillan writes that as a teenager her son was ashamed of his mother in her flowing, unconventional dresses and scarves. She was never the image of the traditional mother.

Now that her son has grown into an adult and father, the “landscape that separates” them is matched emotionally by the “language that fails” them when they try to communicate over the phone. As an Italian American woman, Gillan pays a price for her independence, for breaking the silence. But Gillan is not alone. She is part of a long tradition of Italian American women writers. Her sacrifice is not radically different from the alienation that Italian American poet Diane Di Prima experienced for her unconventional views in the 1950s and 60s.

Like Di Prima, Gillan fractures the boundaries that were imposed on Italian American women of the previous generation. She writes intimate love poems to her husband. She is well aware that her poems are an inversion of the male-dominated love poetry tradition that we find in Petrarch’s and Dante’s poems to their idealized Laura and Beatrice.

In “The Moment I Knew My Life Had Changed,” she attended a Broadway play and from that point on her mind and her heart were turned “away from the constricted world / of the 19th Street tenement” where she grew up. In that moment she writes that she ‘breathed in the new air / racing toward a world filled with poems / and music and books that freed me from everything / that could have chained me to the ground.”

Her journey led her to that “extravagant kingdom of words” that broke the silence she learned as a young girl in PS18. It is in that self-defined “kingdom of words” she has located her life as a poet and from which she has become the voice for Italian American women of her generation.

Prof. Ken Scambray, a correspondent for I’Italo-Americano for over twenty years, teaches North American Italian literature at the University of La Verne. He is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (Univ. Pittsburgh Press) and The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica Editions), Surface Roots, (Guernica), and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press). He is co-founder of Italian American Writers of Southern California.

 

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