[Author’s Note: This except is part of my dissertation “Race and ethnicity in the works of Kym Ragusa, Mary Bucci Bush and Louisa Calio” forthcoming in winter 2021.]
Part one: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (1970)
Louisa Calio is an eclectic artist – a poet, a teacher, a multimedia performer, a writer, a photographer, a painter and more. Her work is the very embodiments of a curious creolization of the Italian American society, it is a cultural mosaic that reflects her life and our times. Even a quick look at her biography demonstrates the spectrum of her heterogeneous background. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Calio has traveled extensively through the African continent and currently divides her time between U.S., Italy, and Jamaica. She has, therefore, in effect, lived all her life crossing boundaries, physically and culturally, as she herself recently asserted, “my soul seemed to come from many places, and many of them had both a rich history and a history of female”.[1] Calio’s life mirrors this ethnic collage.
Certainly, proud of her Italian American roots, Louisa Calio embraces a wider variety of cultural and literary background than is customary in the Italian American tradition. In verses of remarkable sensitivity, the poet looks at human connections and uproots various fixities assigned to the notion of italianità. As shifting and as various the huge cultural heritage of Sicily, United States and Jamaica – respectively, the land of her ancestors, the land where she was born, and the place where she has been living since the eighties – her body of work displays “a sensitivity to multi-culturalism and ethnic diversity that is sometimes lacking in Italian-American culture,” as Stanislao Pugliese put it (http://lideamagazine.com/poetry-is-a-way-of-knowing-exclusive-interview-with-author-louisa-calio/ visited on 5/15/2021). Her Italian American background interweaves with the multiple cultural landscapes she inhabits providing her reader with a “many-sided” reflection for world and society in her poems.
Too tight in the shoes of an Italian American, Louisa Calio has been always engaged in the effort to locate her Sicilian roots within a widervision. Ambitious, stylized, and meticulously researched, Calio’s poetic gravitates toward Mediterranean’s ancient cultures enshrined in classical, biblical, and pre-Christian tradition, offer an alternative viewpoint that unsettles the orthodox topography of the world – that over the centuries has come to impose its definitions of ethics, race, and space –and opens up new ways of seeing Italian American identity and suggests the idea of overlapping territories and intertwined histories where people share mutual origins and a similar destiny. It is precisely along this path this article wants to go, discussing two early poems by Louisa Calio, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman and Angie’s Hands Have Seasoning, which highlight her innovative and traditional aspects.
In his chronological survey of “Italian American Poets” (D’Acierno 1999, 266-88), Stephen Sartarelli evidences how, despite the stylistic diversity, Italian-American poets make use of certain themes that, whether for inspiration and tradition, are typically Italian American, such as family, religion and immigration. Similarly, Dana Gioia in his essay “What is Italian American Poetry?” (Ciongoli and Parini 1997) explains that the Italian-American poets of the first and second generations “have used the immigrant experience as their imaginative point of departure,” but, Gioia continues, the new generation of Italian Americans find their “cultural links with the old country more tenuous. As the Little Italies disappear and families move to the suburbs, the descendants of Italian immigrants gradually lose their original ethnic identity in mainstream America. Values change subtly but significantly” Gioia adds (167-68). Still Gioia also notices a persistent characteristic that distinguishes poets of Italian descent, namely an eternal struggle between tradition and revolution. A conflicting impulse that pushes on the one hand “to preserve the richness of the past, [on] the other to reject it in search of the new” (170).
This impulse to preserve and transform is evident in Louisa Calio’s poetry, which often reinvents tradition in contemporary form. But what kind of innovation does Louisa Calio bring to poetry? What are some of the defining characteristics of her work? What are the ongoing effects of Italian heritage in her poetry? Innovation in poetry means adding something new to it, such as a new subject, a new form, a new message. Shall we consider innovative a poet that uses traditional subject-matter in a non-traditional form? The answer to these questions shall follow. The first part of this essay frames the position of female writers in the Italian American community during Calio’s age era, then it considers Calio’s early work and her first book of poetry In The Eye of Balance.
All women writers affected by societal strictures and literary patriarchal dictatorship are, to varying degrees, mavericks and inventive, even when their works are conservative. For an Italian American woman like Louisa Calio, for example, just choosing a literary career was revolutionary. First, because in male-dominant society of her youth and, the Italian American household, women were confined to very precise roles which were hard to change; and second, women weren’t supposed to aspire to higher education or intellectual position, since they were often educated only for specific functions of becoming fine housewives. In this context, it was unlikely for a woman to pursue her writing vocation (Giunta 2002).
If on the one hand, in the Italian community, there was a high regard for women, and woman’s role was recognized as life-sustaining by being “the central pivot of family life was crucial because of the importance of the family over the institutions” (D’Acierno 1999, 211), on the other hand, women couldn’t escape their prescribed role. Since early age, they were taught to be good wives and good mothers (Gambino 1974), as Helen Barolini describes in Chiaro Scuro (1999) “the Italian American woman comes out of a family-oriented, patriarchal view of the world in which women stayed home or, at most, worked alongside their immediate male kin, but where always dependent upon a male – their father, brother, husband, and, eventually, if widowed, their sons” (158). This discriminating ideology was denounced by Italian American women writers. Authors like Helen Barolini, Josephine Gattuso Hendon, Dodici Azpadu, Octavia Waldo Locke or Louise De Salvo used literature as a megaphone to expose the narrow-mindedness of the society they were living in, inciting changes and asking for more visibility (Azpadu 1983, 2001; Barolini 1985; De Salvo 1996; Gattuso Hendin 1988; Waldo Locke 1961).
Like her colleagues, Louisa Calio explores the implications for young women being raised a female in an Italian American family such in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (1970). In this early poem Calio represents woman artist’s subjugation with the metaphor of the captive bird. Through this image, that remembers Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Calio emphasizes women’s resilience even in front of efforts destined for failure.
But more like the crazed caged bird
Trying fruitless to be free
I f-l-u-t-t-e-r, flu-ter, flutter
Flapping my wings
Until blood stains streak the bars that bind me;
And with that energy
Of one too long restrained
I begin again, and again and again
Though my wings be clipped from the start.
In few sentences, the poem captures much of the heartache of a young woman who fight for her (intellectual) freedom. The verses express the idea that freedom is a natural state, and the knowledge of this fact cannot be undone by any amount of oppression or limitation. Oppressed subjects suffer, the poem suggests, but they never lose sight of the inverse of that suffering. The bird with clipped wings has been placed in a cage that prevents it from flying away. Despite its captivity, the caged animal does not stop trying to fly, because if it stops, it will die.
The euphemism is clear, here: the bird on a cage eloquently reminds the struggle of the artist as a woman (as the title stresses) to become freed from the shackles of misogyny. Calio uses a variety of poetic devices that contribute to the development of this message. For example, the plosive sound of the “f” ”, which stops the air in the reader’s mouth, in the alliteration/onomatopoeia “f-l-u-t-t-e-r, flu-ter, flutter/ Flapping my wings”, perfectly represents the imagery of struggle; as well as, the repetition in “I begin again, and again and again” and the rhyme “free/me”, which accentuate the restless determination of the bird in the cage to overcome its battle for freedom. With the imagery of bird inside the cage, Louisa Calio also wants to draw attention on the dramatic solitude of the animal/women’s battle, implicitly stressing that united women fly, divided they fall.
In reading the poem title, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, one cannot overlook the reference to Joyce’s masterpiece A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The speaker of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman is not Stephen Dedalus, nor claims to be, – “No Icarus or Daedalus can I be”, the poem says in the first verse – however, one can make many significant associations with Joycean developing artist. The young woman in Calio’s poem symbolically connects to Joyce’s young man through the similarity of their quest and vocation, they both want to become artists and both are isolated and stuck in an uncongenial location which paralyzes their creativity.
In chronicling Dedalus’ evolution as an artist, Joyce presents him as trapped in the nets of a restrictive Dubliner environment; the city, in fact, is presented “as a place of confinement from which Stephen must escape in order for him to realize his potential of becoming an artist” (Grant, Stephen Dedalus and Classical Daedalus…, 419). The young woman in Calio’s poem is also trapped behind the bars of a restrictive environment – i.e., the cage – and she must disentangle herself to create literary art. But, as opposed to Stephen Dedalus, the artist in this case is a woman, thus, the possibility of her becoming as successful as Dedalus is scarce, if not impossible. The image of a bird on a cage underlines this impossibility.
Like in Joyce’s A Portrait, references to birds and flight abound in Calio’s poem, but Joyce associates them mostly with positive images such as freedom, beauty, and creative power (Grant, 422). In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman the image is of a wounded, imprisoned bird that unsuccessfully fights freedom. Calio’s use of such image serves to emphasize unequal gender achievements and to stress that socio-cultural barriers and discrimination have held women artists back.
This poem is profoundly shaped by Calio’s experiences as a female artist of Italian American descent. Indeed, despite that fact that many of even the most passionate Italian women writers have been relegated to the margins and disconnected from the intellectual world for a very long time. This phenomenon is more often attributable to the fact that writing was strongly discouraged in the Italian American household, as Donna Gabaccia asserts, since “writing doubly violated Italian American or familial demands for silence and omertà when the writer was a female.” (Gabaccia, Italian American Women: A Review Essay, 50). Nevertheless, many Italian American women dreamed of moving forward and, finally, break the silence.[2] Determined, like many her colleagues, Louisa Calio discloses the patriarchal nature of much of ItalianAmerican life and depicts the inner strengths of the women and call upon them to join her in her battle.
[1] Ibidem.
[2] This happened only in the ‘80s thanks to Helen Barolini, the first writer to denounce the void of women’s voices in Italian Americana. With her pioneering work, The Dream Book, (1984), an anthology of published and unpublished literary works of Italian American female writers, Barolini collected a wide variety of literary genres from poetry to memoirs, depicting the determination of many women to override their fathers’ dictates and becoming the genesis and the firelighter of the Italians’ gyno-literary tradition. After Barolini, many novelists, poets, and artists of all kinds in Italian Americana build up their confidence to reverse the status quo. Indeed, the emergence of Italian American authoresses as a literary phenomenon in the second half of last century, is perhaps unique to the history of the Italian Americana. Writers like Rose Romano, Dodici Azpadu, Daniela Gioseffi, Louise de Salvo, Gioia Timpanelli, etc. “steal the language” of their fathers, to use Alicia Ostriker’s words (1986), to question the sexist’s practices within the Italian American community; the kitchen becomes a site for fierce battles and literature becomes a mode for sharing their experiences and breaking the mold of passivity largely assigned to them.
(To be continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Cinzia Marongiu