Studies in Scottish Literature

Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 43 | Issue 2 Article 25 12-15-2017 Immigrant Communities, Cultural Conflicts, and Intermarriage in Ann Marie Di Mambro's Tally's Blood Ian Brown Kingston University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, and the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Ian (2017) "Immigrant Communities, Cultural Conflicts, and Intermarriage in Ann Marie Di Mambro's Tally's Blood," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 43: Iss. 2, 283–298. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol43/iss2/25 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES, CULTURAL CONFLICTS, AND INTERMARRIAGE IN ANN MARIE DI MAMBRO’S TALLY’S BLOOD Ian Brown Anne Marie Di Mambro’s play Tally’s Blood was first performed in 1990 at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, directed by my namesake (then the theatre’s Artistic Director). The action of the play moves from 1936 through to 1955, and its title comes from a common twentieth-century slang term for the raspberry syrup squirted onto ice-cream cones by ice- cream salespeople in Scotland, drawing on the demeaning, and arguably racist, Scots term for an Italian person, “Tally.” The adjective is used for this ice-cream supplement because many of the progenitors of today’s Italo-Scots communities came to Scotland to work in the food industry, especially to set up, or work in, cafés, or to tour towns in vans or on specially designed delivery bicycles, selling ice-cream and related products. Di Mambro (born 1950) is herself a member of the Italo-Scottish community, and her play deals principally and centrally with issues of assimilation (and non-assimilation) over time of Italian immigrants— specifically what would now be called economic migrants—into a Scottish host culture, chiefly from perspectives within that migrant community. While the play undoubtedly centres on the historic mid-twentieth- century experience of this Italo-Scottish community, its continuing relevance today derives from its pioneering exploration of the relationships of new Scots to one another in their new community, and to the host community itself, so casting light also on the experience of other newer immigrant communities. Indeed, in this century other key works by the children of new Scots have emerged. These include, from the South Asian community, Suhayl Saadi’s first major novel Psychoraag (2004), where Scots, English and Urdu languages meld into new-Scots hybridity, and Matthew Zajac’s play The Tailor of Inverness (2008), dramatising his Polish father’s experience of European war and post-war immigration into Scotland, employing not only Scots and English, but other languages including Polish, Ukrainian and German in a multilingual blend. Tally’s Blood, however, was one of the first of such works about the immigrant 284 Ian Brown experience. Meanwhile, Di Mambro herself has moved away somewhat from theatre in her dramatic writing. After several successes in the late 1980s, and despite the success of Brothers of Thunder (1994), exploring issued around the AIDS epidemic and attitudes to gay men, and two more recent one-act contributions to the programme of Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime programmes, Di Mambro has successfully concentrated since 1990 on writing popular drama for Scottish and UK television, including many episodes for such leading series as High Road, Casualty, River City and EastEnders. In Tally’s Blood, Di Mambro, coming from a new-Scottish community, offers particular dramatic and character insights to a migration process often seen in twentieth-century Scottish literature in terms of host- community reactions. An example of this is the treatment of the looting of what was perceived as a German optician’s in Bill Bryden’s Willie Rough (1972), set in World War One. There, such looting is represented as jolly, rather than deeply disturbing. Di Mambro’s play was important at the time of its première, and remains so, for offering lively insights into the viewpoints of those making their lives in a sometimes-hostile host community. It reflects often-prejudiced pre-war responses of members of the host community to Italian immigrants, and particularly their outright hostility, including the smashing of shop windows and looting of premises early in World War Two on Italy’s first declaring war on the Allies. Then, even well-assimilated members of the Italo-Scottish community were declared enemy aliens, their menfolk subject to internment. The play does this, however, without glossing over or sanitising the fact that members of the new migrant community might feel antipathy to the host community which might precede rather than be a reaction to host community prejudice. Indeed, part of the play’s power arises from its clear representation of the fact that prejudice against newly arrived communities is not a one-way process: those new communities may well, as with characters in Di Mambro’s play, feel prejudice against the attitudes and values of the host community. The play’s readiness to address such issues of intercultural prejudice and intercommunal misunderstanding, not to say hostility, is still relevant today when both economic and refugee migration continue to be important issues in Western host societies. This may explain the continued popularity of Tally’s Blood, not only in productions in Scotland since its première, but in its current inclusion, through which it has become, in effect, canonical, as a key study-text in contemporary Scottish secondary-school certificate curricula. The way Di Mambro deals, with a clear eye, with the ambivalences and ambiguities of being an Italian- Scot and the painful collisions and confusions that cultural heritages can generate becomes representative of such collisions and confusions, current INTERCULTURAL CONFLICT IN TALLY’S BLOOD 285 and past, within other new-Scots communities and between such communities and the host community. Gioia Angeletti has drawn attention to another aspect of this concern, a complementary feminist insight, not only in the work of Di Mambro, but that of another Italo-Scottish dramatist, Marcella Evaristi. Angeletti argues that both add an enriching strand to the thematic preoccupation of “many contemporary Scottish women playwrights [with how discrimination, marginality and displacement impinge upon individual identity]”.1 She observes: “For both Marcella Evaristi and Ann Marie Di Mambro, this concern must be added to their personal experience as second-generation immigrants from Catholic Italo-Scottish families who must learn how to come to terms with their hyphenated identities.”2 As Tom Maguire has argued, Di Mambro’s “Italian roots add a further dimension of hybridity to an already hyphenated subaltern identity.”3 As a leading Scottish female playwright, then, while writing out of her own “hybridised” Italo-Scottish identity, Di Mambro, though now focussed on television writing, sits alongside such key “hyphenated” theatre-writers of her generation as Liz Lochhead, Sue Glover, Linda McLean, Anne Downie, Rona Munro, Nicola McCartney and Zinnie Harris. Both Di Mambro’s parallels with such writers and her specific treatment of gender, feminism and sexuality would form quite another article, but it should be noted here that Tally’s Blood represents a significant contribution to a new wave of playwriting in Scottish theatre that celebrated the power of women writers and diversity of identity. The play is further significant in the way that it addresses issues of new-Scots citizens. While it is not the first to do so—Unity Theatre’s production of Robert Mitchell’s The Gorbals Story (1946), for example, includes an immigrant travelling salesman—by and large such earlier plays tend to represent such characters, if not as exotic, as certainly, even in Unity’s humane treatment, outsiders in Scottish society. What Tally’s Blood achieves, as it explores events in the lives of the ice-cream-parlour- owning Pedreschis, is to take for granted, as it should, their new- Scottishness—almost before we used the term—as Italians by descent and 1 Gioia Angeletti, “Performing Cross-Cultural Relations, Identity and Conflict in Contemporary Scottish Theatre: Expatriate Italian Communities in Marcella Evaristi’s Commedia and Ann Marie di Mambro’s Tally’s Blood,” International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, Volume 8.2 (2015), p. 1 at https://ijosts.ubiquitypress.com/articles/abstract/202/ (accessed 7 September 2017). 2 Ibid. 3 Tom Maguire, “Women playwrights from the 1970s and 1980s,” in Ian Brown, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 155. 286 Ian Brown Italo-Scottish by assimilation, whose older generations made their lives in Scotland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To do this, the play examines the experience of Italian-Scots over a twenty-year period spanning World War Two. This timescale is important because the play is not focused simply on the effects of war, nor the despicable treatment of Italian-Scots during the war years. Large as these issues are, the play seeks to address other, arguably even larger, issues of relations between immigrant and host communities and the attitudinal changes that can develop over a longer period and between generations. The play does so, as Anne Marie Di Mambro herself explains in her Introduction to the published text, in a way that recognises that whatever pressure of prejudice there may be found in the host community against the new communities, there is also prejudice to be found among new Scots against the host community.4 What is more, and importantly, the play problematises the concept of what it is to be a Scot and so what it means to talk, if one can, in simple terms of a host community.

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