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Can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian?
"My ancestral Italian village in America was in Waterbury Connecticut." In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian part of her identity-her Italianità-feels so aboriginal as to be inchoate, inexpressible. Sometimes it finds its expression in the rhythms of daily life. Sometimes it is embraced and enhanced; at others, it feels attenuated. "If, like me," Herman writes, "you are from one of Italy's overseas colonies, at least some of this Italianità will be in your skin, bones, and heart: other pieces have to be understood, considered, called to ourselves through study, travel, reading. Some of it is just longing. How do we know which pieces are which?"
"In When I Am Italian, Joanna Clapps Herman asks, 'Can a person born outside of Italy be Italian?' In this collection of wonderfully evocative essays, Herman illuminates the complexities of identity as she takes the reader on her life's journey starting with her girlhood 'up the farm' in rural Connecticut with her extended Italian family. Stops in her ancestral home in Basilicata, and Turin—'the opposite of Southern Italy'—reveal that being an American of Italian descent in Italy poses its own challenges." — Nancy Carnevale, author of A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945
"A beautiful book. It takes us through the decades of the last century and into this one to ask what it means to be Italian long after one generation's arrival, and to consider how deep and elemental the facts of that are. This is a subtle, moving, and original piece of work—to read it is to see the world around us differently." — Joan Silber, author of Improvement: A Novel
"When I Am Italian, Joanna Clapps Herman's exquisite new memoir, begins with her rich, cocoonlike childhood inside an extended Italian American family in Waterbury, Connecticut. With its all-encompassing rituals of food, talk, and work, her family has transposed the rhythms of southern Italy to the new world. It's only when Herman leaves home—to escape the restrictions and claim her own life—that she realizes that this part of her identity does not necessarily reflect how the rest of America sees itself. With beauty and insight, When I Am Italian gives us Herman's fully lived understanding of the complex interweaving of culture and finding self." — Lisa Wilde, author of Yo, Miss: A Graphic Look at High School
"A vital voice in Italian American literature, Joanna Clapps Herman sings the subterranean stories and voices of her community. Steeped in archaic rituals, The Anarchist Bastard resonated with the echoes of ancient bards and cantastorie. When I Am Italian continues her exploration into the heart of cultural identity as it has survived and mutated in the country to which her ancestors migrated, yet with a difference: here the narrator visits more private, intimate selves. Traversing the genres of memoir and essay, Herman brings to the page a woman whose gestures, language, and memories are filtered through the sieve of being Italian, an identity she understands as inherited and chosen, fixed and fluid. Anyone who has inhabited the 'liminal space' of an ethnic community—not only readers of Italian descent and persuasion—will be seduced by the exquisite writing and will relish the tenderness and vulnerability with which this splendid book pulls us into a world where everyone can be Italian." — Edvige Giunta, coeditor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Many Missing Stones What Does It Mean to Be Italian?
Quando sono italiana: When I Am Italian Waterbury, Connecticut, My Ancestral Village
Up the Farm
What Crawls around Inside Us
Housing Memory
Blue
What We Remember
Go Fish Food, Food, Food, and Hard Work
Creature Life
My Mother's Letter to Her Sister
Hard Work and Good Food
Sunday on the Farm
My Only Irish Aunt
Minestra Means Soup Move to America
Chiesta ca, or This One Here
After Eden
My First New York Story, 1965
200 Square Feet in the Village, or My Soluble Fortunes
My Friend Elizabeth
On Not Writing My Thesis
Italia, sempre italia
Part I. Southern Italy
The Stones of Dialect
Siamo arrivati
"That Winter Evening"
My Neapolitan Wedding
Part II. The Opposite of Southern Italy
After the Manner of Women The Grief Estate
Visiting Our Dead
My Father's Bones
Voglio bene
Somewhere My Bill
Notes