Aspects of Migration and Trans-Culturalism in Nino Ricci's Trilogy Lives of the Saints (LOTS), in a Glass House (IAGH ) and Where She Has Gone ( WSHG )

Aspects of Migration and Trans-Culturalism in Nino Ricci’s Trilogy: Lives Of The Saints , In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Ulrike DEU ČMANN

am Institut für Anglistik

Begutachter: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Martin Löschnigg

Graz, 2009

To the people who have always believed in me and my strengths:

My family, and, above all, my close friends.

To Martin Löschnigg, who inspired in me the love for Canadian literature.

And, last, but not least, to Nino Ricci and his wonderful novels.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... 3 1 Introduction...... 4 2 Different Concepts of Culture...... 5 2.1 Traditional Concept of Single Cultures ...... 5 2.2 Trans-culturalism vs. Inter-culturalism and Multi-culturalism ...... 6 3 Canada – A Mosaic of People(s)...... 11 3.1 The Canadian Mosaic vs. The US - Melting Pot...... 11 3.2 The 1988 Multiculturalism Act ...... 13 3.3 Italian Canadian Voices...... 15 4 The Author in the Sign of Trans-Culturalism and His Works ...... 18 4.1 Nino Ricci’s Life ...... 18 4.2 Lives Of The Saints , In A Glass House , Where She Has Gone ...... 20 5 Aspects of Migration and Trans-Culturalism in the Novels ...... 23 5.1 In Search of Identity and Belonging...... 23 5.2 Difference and Rejection of "The Other" ...... 34 5.3 Space and Boundaries...... 44 5.4 Alienation and Displacement...... 49 5.5 Memory and Fixation on the Past...... 57 5.6 Silence, Passiveness and Invisibility ...... 64 5.7 The Feeling of Loss and Loneliness ...... 69 5.8 Tradition, Superstition and The Roman Catholic Upbringing ...... 72 5.9 The Language Debate and "Double Consciousness"...... 78 5.10 Migration and Movement ...... 85 5.11 Trans-Culturalism and Being "In-Between"...... 90 6 Conclusion ...... 99 7 Bibliography ...... 100

1 Introduction

We are living in a globalized world. This is not just imaginary thinking, but a fact that we are facing increasingly in our everyday lives. Boundaries are blurring. Nothing can be made out as purely white or black. No matter if we look at world politics today – thinking of the recently elected first African American president Barack Obama – or if we, taking another example, look back on the Academy Awards Ceremony 2009 where we could notice a movement towards more and more cross-cultural film productions and film stars who would probably not consider only one nation as their frame in which they act and move. Thinking of my own cultural background and family history, I see myself living a transcultural way of life, being born and placed between national borders, languages I speak and languages I don’t speak but would love to acquire one day, because they somehow belong to me and are part of my roots, and, in consequence, a part of myself. So, no matter if we are aware of trans-culturalism as a significant feature of today's modern societies or not, it is there and it is also to be found in literary works, especially in Contemporary Anglo-Canadian Fiction. In this thesis, the main focus will be on the aspects of migration and trans-culturalism in Nino Ricci's trilogy Lives Of The Saints (LOTS), In A Glass House (IAGH ) and Where She Has Gone ( WSHG ). Apart from that, an insight into the different concepts of cultures will be given at the beginning of the discussion, followed by a brief description of Canada's leading role as an official multicultural society which was enacted by law in 1988 but which has also met its point of critique . Furthermore, Canada's mosaic metaphor vs. the US melting pot metaphor will be referred to, and then rounded up by a description of the Italian Canadian community, since the analyzed novels, as well as the author of these, have to be considered in this context. As for the categories in my analysis, it should be said that, at times, it has been difficult to decide where to draw the line. Since I am dealing with trans-culturalism, that is, lifestyles and cultures which "interpenetrate or emerge from one another" (Welsch 1999: 197) and boundaries that are blurring, it is not surprising that the chapters of my analysis cannot always be clearly defined. So, the different aspects of migration and trans-culturalism have been arranged into the following chapters in order to make it easier to deal with them.

2 Different Concepts of Culture

2.1 Traditional Concept of Single Cultures

Looking at the world and the world of literature today, it is not up to date any more to speak of single cultures or only one dominant culture. The traditional concept of single cultures is based upon various elements, among these is the one of uniformity which ends at national borders. Wolfgang Welsch (1999) states in his article "Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today" that the "three elements of this traditional concept have become untenable". (195) Instead he thinks: Modern societies are differentiated within themselves to such a high degree that uniformity is no longer constitutive to, or achievable for, them (and there are reasonable doubts as to whether it ever has been historically). […] Modern societies are multicultural in themselves, encompassing a multitude of varying ways of life and lifestyles. (1999:195)

Because there exists a variety of cultures, no matter how similar to or different from each other they might be, there is not just one single definition. Welsch speaks about vertical and horizontal differences. Speaking of vertical differences, he means the culture of where one works or lives, and by horizontal differences, Welsch explains that there are gender divisions, that is differences between male and female, or between straight and gay/lesbian. (cf. Welsch 1999: 195) So, as Welsch goes on, "the traditional concept of culture proves to be factually inadequate: it cannot cope with the inner complexity of modern cultures." (1999: 195)

Considering this concept of single cultures to be outdated the main focus then will be on what kind of relationship one establishes between different cultures. To define these terms more clearly (although absoluteness should not be claimed in this respect), different prefixes are used. This way it can be roughly differentiated between Interculturality , Multiculturality and Transculturality . Welsch uses these terms, but one can equate these terms with the suffix –ism

without change of meaning. So, one could also refer to the concepts as Interculturalism , Multiculturalism and Trans-culturalism .1

2.2 Trans-culturalism vs. Inter-culturalism and Multi-culturalism

Since we are talking about cultures and not one single culture the question arises which term tries to convey what kind of concept. Compared to the single concept of cultures, the terms interculturalism and multiculturalism try to establish an understanding of different cultures, but I agree with Wolfgang Welsch when he says: "They [The concepts of interculturality and multiculturality ] try to overcome some flaws of the traditional concept by advocating a mutual understanding of [my emphasis] different cultures. Yet they are […] almost as inappropriate as the traditional concept itself, because they still conceptually presuppose it." (1999: 196)

Interculturality proceeds from the conception of cultures as islands or spheres. (cf. Welsch 1999: 195) "According to the logic of this conception" they "do nothing other than collide with one another". (Welsch 1999: 196) That is to say, these islands or spheres can only be different from each other, they can fight each other, but they cannot understand or exchange views / experiences with or between each other. So, it is a negative view that is transported through this concept.

Multiculturality is very similar to the concept of interculturality : It takes up the problems which different cultures have living together within one society . [...] It proceeds from the existence of clearly distinguished, in themselves homogenous cultures – the only difference now being that these differences exist within one and the same state community. (Welsch 1999: 196) The multicultural idea aims at being tolerant towards other cultures and avoiding conflicts but it turns out to be as ineffective as the principle of interculturality since there is no mutual understanding between the cultures nor a transgression of barriers can be achieved. (cf. Welsch 1999: 196f.)

1 I will use the term trans-culturalism hyphenated throughout this thesis in order to emphasize the concept behind it. In other cases it will be used without a hyphen as it appears in the original text I refer to.

In comparison to interculturality and multiculturality the term transculturality not only is timely but it also seems to be the most appropriate name for present cultures. Welsch defines Transculturality as follows: Transculturality is a consequence of the inner differentiation and complexity of modern cultures. These encompass [...] a number of ways of life and cultures, which also interpenetrate or emerge from one another. [...] Lifestyles no longer end at the borders of national cultures, but go beyond these, are found in the same way in other cultures. [...] The new forms of entanglement are a consequence of migratory processes, as well as of worldwide material and immaterial communications systems and economic interdependencies and dependencies. [...] (1999: 197f.)

The term trans-culturalism or transculturality is not new, nor did Welsch invent it. Fernando Ortiz is regarded as the founder of trans-culturalism or, in Spanish, transculturación or transculturalidadad . (cf. Mertz-Baumgartner 2005: 12; Gross 2005: 393) He uses the term "transculturación" for the first time in the second chapter of his book Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar in 1963: El término "transculturación" fue utilizado por primera vez por el antropólogo cubano Fernando Ortiz en el segundo capítulo de su libro Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar , capítulo titulado "Del fenómeno social de la 'transculturación' y de su importancia en Cuba" 2 (Mertz-Baumgartner 2005: 12) Ortiz created this neologism to denominate the last phase of a migratory process which follows the process of "desculturación o exculturación" and the process of "aculturación o inculturación". (cf. Mertz-Baumgartner 2005: 12). He writes then in his book: Entendemos que el vocablo transculturación expresa mejor las diferentes fases del proceso transitivo de una cultura a otra, porque éste no consiste solamente en adquirir una distinta cultura, que es lo que en rigor indica la voz anglo-americana aculturación, sino que el proceso implica también necesariamente la pérdida o desarraigo de una cultura precedente, lo que pudiera decirse una parcial desculturación , y, además, significa la consiguiente creación de nuevos fenómenos que pudieran denominarse de neoculturación . (Mertz-Baumgartner 2005: 12)

2 Mertz-Baumgartner refers to Fernando Ortiz (1940/1963). Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar . La Habana: Consejo nacional de cultura.

So, what Ortiz says is that the term transculturación best describes the different phases of a transitive process from one culture into another because this not only means to acquire a new culture [here he alludes to the US melting pot metaphor] but it also entails the loss or the uprooting of the precedent culture, which could be called a partial deculturation . At the same time, it implies the creation of a new kind of culture. (my own translation, see above)

A significant feature of trans-culturalism is hybridization. Through global networking it is getting more and more complicated to make out single cultures and to consider something as absolutely foreign or absolutely one's own. I agree with Welsch when he continues about transculturality saying: Cultures today are in general characterized by hybridization. [...] This applies on the levels of population, merchandise and information. [...] the global networking of communications technology makes all kinds of information identically available from every point in space. Henceforward there is no longer anything absolutely foreign. Everything is within reach. Accordingly, there is no longer anything exclusively 'own' either. Authenticity has become folklore, it is ownness simulated for others – to whom the indigene himself or herself belongs. [...] in substance everything is transculturally determined. Today, in a culture's internal relations [...] there exists as much foreignness as in its external relations with other cultures. (1999: 198) These hybrid formations and images that are established when discussing trans-culturalism will be found in illustrative ways in the three novels by Nino Ricci that are going to be analyzed in the chapters to come. There one can see the cultural elements that are intertwining and merging, e.g. the English with the Italian language or the memories of the past with dreams or with the actual present reality.

Wolfgang Welsch not only treats the topic of transculturality on the macro-level, as it has been mentioned above, but he determines trans-cultural formation of individuals, i.e. transculturality on the micro-level, as well. Here he speaks about transculturality in connection with today's writers: We are cultural hybrids. Today's writers, for example, emphasize that they're shaped not by a single homeland, but by differing reference countries, by Russian, German, South and North American or Japanese literature. Their cultural formation is

transcultural (think, for example, of Naipaul or Rushdie) – that of subsequent generations will be even more so. (1999: 198)

Hence, trans-culturalism , is playing and is going to play a decisive role in our everyday lives. One has to be careful, though, with the assumption that cultural identity is to be equated with national identity. Somebody has got, for example, an Austrian passport, still, this person feels attached to another nation. To assume otherwise would not only be a disconnection from reality but also foolish and dangerous. Welsch states similarly: The detachment of civic from personal or cultural identity is to be insisted upon [...]. Wherever an individual is cast by differing cultural interests, the linking of such transcultural components with one another becomes a specific task in identity-forming. (1999: 199) The connection between trans-culturalism and identity-forming can be clearly seen in the examples of the novels that are given in the first chapter (see: "In Search of Identity and Belonging") of the analysis part called Aspects of Migration and Trans-Culturalism in the Novels .

In "Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today" Welsch tries to clarify the question whether transculturality means uniformization. (cf. Welsch 1999: 203f.) He repudiates fiercely: "Not at all. It is, rather, intrinsically linked with the production of diversity." (1999: 203) He continues saying: [...] a new type of diversity takes shape: the diversity of different cultures and life- forms, each arising from transcultural permeations. Consider how these transcultural formations come about. Different groups or individuals which give shape to new transcultural patterns draw upon different sources for this purpose. Hence the transcultural networks will vary already in their inventory, and even more so in their structure (because even the same elements, when put together differently, result in different structures). [...] It's just that now the differences no longer come about through a juxtaposition of clearly delineated cultures (like in a mosaic [here the mosaic metaphor is very appropriate when talking about Canada which claims to be a mosaic of cultures] ), but result between transcultural networks, which have some things in common while differing in others, showing overlaps and distinctions at the same time. (1999: 203) 9

Welsch then relates transculturality to globalization and particularization and shows that there are flaws in the latter concepts (cf. Welsch 1999: 204). At the same time he is emphasizing once more the advantage of transculturality over other cultural concepts: The concept of transculturality goes beyond these seemingly hard alternatives [namely the concepts of globalization and particularization]. It is able to cover both global and local, universalistic and particularistic aspects, and it does so quite naturally, from the logic of transcultural processes themselves. The globalizing tendencies as well as the desire for specificity and particularity can be fulfilled within transculturality. Transcultural identities comprehend a cosmopolitan side, but also a side of local affiliation 3. Transcultural people combine both. (1999: 205)

Summing it up, transculturality or trans-culturalism conveys a new, up-to-date and more appropriate picture of the relation between today's cultures, no matter if we are dealing with trans-culturalism in our everyday lives, in our literary lives or in any other form of lives, for example, when talking about virtual reality on the internet or in other media. This picture that is sketched is "not one of isolation and of conflict, but one of entanglement, intermixing and commonness. It promotes not separation, but exchange and interaction." (Welsch 1999: 205)

3 Here Welsch refers to Ulf Hannerz (1990) and his article 'Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture', in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity . London: Sage. 237-51.

3 Canada – A Mosaic of People(s)

3.1 The Canadian Mosaic vs. The US - Melting Pot

Canada in his recent history has tried to set itself apart from the USA. So, when talking about migration or immigration the USA have claimed to be a "melting pot", whereas Canada has been proud to see itself as a "mosaic" of people(s). The melting pot metaphor implies that people from other countries, their "own" cultures carrying at their backs, give up their "old" way of living and immediately adopt a new, mixed and dominant form of culture, labelled "US-American". In contrast to this, the image of the Canadian mosaic permits a stronger permeability. It describes the various cultural identities co-existing and living peacefully next to each other (cf. Gross 2005: 392) within a national frame. This way it comes closer to the concept of trans-culturalism. Although the metaphor of the mosaic seems to be a more positive one it still has met its point of criticism. Löschnigg (2001) writes in Kurze Geschichte der kanadischen Literatur that the image of Canada as a mosaic evokes an ideal state but this state has not been reached yet. (cf. Löschnigg 2001: 66) Instead, John Porter suggested the metaphor of a "vertical mosaic" 4: Der Soziologe JOHN PORTER hält dem Idealbild kultureller Pluralität die berühmt gewordene Metapher eines vertikalen Mosaiks entgegen. PORTER weist darauf hin, dass sich Multikulturalität oft auf eine kulturell-folkloristische Ebene beschränkt, während Diskriminierungen in sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Bereichen nach wie vor bestehen. (Löschnigg 2001: 66f.)

Peter Dickinson (2007) writes in his article "Subtitling CanLit Keywords" about the differing images of the USA and Canada: As Coleman has stated, we [Canadians] like to congratulate ourselves here in Canada that we are more civil than our neighbours south of the border (especially where our famous multicultural tolerance is trumpeted as the necessary antidote to the simmering racial tensions of the US melting pot, a pot where, as Tony Kushner's Rabbi Chelmelwitz would put it, nothing melts). (Dickinson 2007: 47)

4 Löschnigg refers to John Porter (1965). The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and power in Canada.

Summing it up, one can say that Canada seems to air a more positive, but not a perfect, image through the mosaic metaphor, whereas the US-melting pot principle suggests a quite aggressive or negative view of immigrants adjusting to their new lives in the country of their choice. Although the mosaic metaphor seems to "work", another, perhaps more appropriate image for Canada and its people has been suggested by Janice Kulyk Keefer, namely that of a kaleidoscope. (cf. Ricci 1992/2003 "Questioning Ethnicity" [online]; Löschnigg 2001: 67) Ricci writes in the following passage of his article "Questioning ethnicity" about the mosaic, then comes to talk about the kaleidoscope and, in consequence, he suggests the new concept of culture called transculturalism : That mosaic has perhaps long been merely a palliative, a convenient myth, if only because of the increasing assimilation of second and third generation descendants of immigrants. [...] Yet we may be at a point now where immigrant and other minority cultures can assert a decisive influence as to what form some future more inclusive notion of Canadian culture might take. The policy of multiculturalism [...] has in many respects fallen short; but in providing at least a level of official sanction to groups previously almost wholly disenfranchised, it has allowed us to pass through what was perhaps a necessary transitional phase, has provided a reference point from which dissension and debate have been able to take shape. The next phase might move us toward what writer Janice Kulyk Keefer has called a kaleidoscope rather than a mosaic culture or what Lamberto Tassinari, editor of the trilingual journal Vice Versa , has called transculturalism [my emphasis], the breaking down of ethnic barriers through cultural evolution and exchange to arrive at a new concept of culture that includes rather than ghettoizes. Perhaps that would bring us to a sort of de-ethnicization, a situation in which 'ethnicity' was understood not as a defining essence but as a social construct, a certain organization of power relationships for managing cultural diversity. (1992/2003 [online] 5)

5 See: Nino Ricci (1992/2003). "Questioning Ethnicity" [Online] http://www.ninoricci.com [2009, March 30]

3.2 The 1988 Multiculturalism Act

Smaro Kamboureli (1996) says in the introduction of her anthology Making a Difference. Canadian Multicultural Literature that "according to K. Victor Ujimoto 6, 'Canada was the first and only nation in the world to establish a Multiculturalism Act.' " (1996: 10) This act did not come suddenly into being but a lot of factors led to the act that Canada was officially declared a multicultural society in 1988. Kamboureli says in this respect: Beginning with the 1971 policy of multiculturalism, introduced by Pierre Trudeau, and later with Bill C-93, the 'Act for the preservation and enhancement of multiculturalism in Canada' legislated in 1988, we have entered a new and formative period in Canadian history, what we can call the multicultural stage of Canadian cultural politics. (1996:10)

What seems to be essential in the discussion about multiculturalism is the fact that Canada has always been – contrary to many beliefs – a multicultural society. It is apparent that the history of Canadian multiculturalism is not a simple, linear narrative. It is a narrative that has many beginnings, a narrative that unravels in many directions. No matter what narrative thread we resolve to follow, some of the inherited perceptions about Canada have been decidedly altered. The land we now call Canada was already [my emphasis] multicultural, and multilingual, before [my emphasis] the arrival of the first Europeans. (Kamboureli 1996: 11) But not all Canadians have embraced this official multiculturalism with enthusiasm. There are some critics who regard it as forced upon them and are of the opinion that it leads to even more divisions within the society. Eva-Marie Kröller (2004) also points out in her introduction of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature that there have been critics of the Multiculturalism Act, among these, the writer of Caribbean origin, Neil Bissoondath (see also Löschnigg 2001: 67):

6 Kamboureli refers here to 'Multiculturalism and the Global Information Society' in Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in '90s Canada , ed. Vic Satzewich (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, and Social Research Unit, Department of Sociology, University of Saskatchewan, 1992), p. 351.

Some commentators, however, dismissed this policy as an ill-considered ploy in domestic and international politics which would only serve to add further divisions to existing ones. One of the most vocal critics was Trinidad-born Neil Bissoondath whose highly controversial Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada , originally published in 1994, generated enough debate to require a revised and updated version in 2002. (Kröller 2004: 9)

Kamboureli writes that "multiculturalism signifies different things to different people" (1996: 11) and continues, citing Vic Satzewich 7: if multiculturalism is under attack from some for being too successful in promoting enough pluralism, it is ironic that it has also come under attack by others for not promoting enough pluralism. That is, the traditional critique of multiculturalism has been that it promoted only symbolic ethnicity, or those aspects of non-anglo ethnic cultures which did not threaten the anglo-saxon dominated status quo. (Kamboureli 1996: 11)

One recurring point of criticism is that "it is the very notion of tolerance to which they [the critics] object, for tolerance alone does not promise that those who have traditionally been constructed as 'others' will be able fully to practise who they are as individual subjects." (Kamboureli 1996: 11). Another one is that "multiculturalism has been attacked for offering a policy of containment, a policy which, by legislating 'otherness', attempts to control its diverse representations , to preserve the long-standing racial and ethnic hierarchies in Canada." (Kamboureli 1996: 11f.) So, what Kamboureli suggests is to no longer think of Canadian identity in singular terms. Instead, one should "attempt to understand how distinct identities can converge and dialogue with each other within Canada", and "how boundaries of difference must be repositioned – not in relation to the signs of 'centre' and 'margins' but in relation to new and productive alignments." (1996: 12)

7 Kamboureli refers to 'Introduction', Deconstructing a Nation , p. 15

3.3 Italian Canadian Voices

Italians have had a long history of migrating to other countries. Especially after World War II a lot of Italians left their home country to start a better life abroad. Although for many of those who were left behind, America was all one, no matter if people left for the USA or Canada, still, a considerable number of Italians migrated to Canada and chose the country with the harsh climate to be their future home. Udo Sautter (2007) notes in Geschichte Kanadas that in the 1950s there was an immigration boom to Canada. One third of the immigrants at that time came from Great Britain and not much less from Italy. Apart from that there were many Americans, Germans and Poles who intended to lead a better life in Canada. In diesen Jahren des Booms wuchs auch die Einwohnerzahl. Im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt strömten eine Million Zuwanderer nach Kanada und in den nächsten fünf Jahren nochmals eine Million. Einige kamen aus politischen Gründen, wie etwa viele Ungarn nach der Revolte von 1956. Die meisten jedoch erhofften sich materielle Besserstellung. Ein Drittel stammte aus Großbritannien, nicht viel weniger aus Italien. Amerikaner, Deutsche und Polen stellten ebenfalls größere Kontingente. (Sautter 2007: 93)

Caroline DiGiovanni (2006), who edited a literary anthology (1946-2004) under the name Italian Canadian Voices , mentions in her introduction the "sojourners", explaining them as "workers from Italy who came to Canada to work in the forests and on railroad construction", and that "these early migrants generally maintained the pattern of moving back to Italy after earning enough in the New World to assist their families in their hometown". (2006: i) DiGiovanni also speaks about Prof. Robert Harney's studies on Italian migration to Canada who demonstrated the importance of the immigrants' arrival in Canada throughout its history: Prof. Robert Harney's studies of migration history contributed this picture of the Italians in Canada in the first part of the 20 th Century. In fact, Prof. Harney's academic work on immigration influenced a generation of Canadian historians. He set out to record the impact of this change in people's lives, and demonstrated how significantly the arrival of new populations affected the social development of North America. Kings and Generals make their mark, but the movement of thousands of newcomers

into cities and towns provides the opportunity for an energetic new culture to develop. (DiGiovanni 2006: i)

According to the 2006 consensus, 1,445,335 Canadians, that is 4.6% of the total population, consider themselves to be of Italian origin. It is regarded as the 5th largest ethnic group in Canada after people of British, Irish, French and German descent. In the early twentieth century a hundred thousand Italians moved to Canada. They mainly settled down in Toronto and Montreal, both of which were to become soon large Italian communities. Smaller communities arose, for example, in Vancouver, Windsor, Niagara Falls, Ottawa or Quebec City. A lot of Italian immigrants started a new life in mining communities in British Columbia, Alberta or Northern Ontario. After World War I, new immigration laws in the 1920s limited Italian immigration. During the Second World War, Italian-Canadians, as well as German-Canadians had to face a great deal of discrimination because of having been suspected as Nazis or pro-Fascists. Some who were falsely accused, were interned at Camp Petawawa during the war. Along with the internment of Japanese-Canadians this is a historical fact and one side of Canadian history that is not well-known. As has already been mentioned, a great immigration wave started in the 1950s and 1960s. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Canadians 8)

The Italian immigrants that came to Canada after the Second World War have to be regarded differently from the early "sojourners", for the latter marked a new generation of migrants who wanted to enable the best life possible for their children in Canada. Their children were able to attend the Canadian universities the way their parents were not, so the second generation of these immigrants were looking for a better life in Canada via getting the best education, whereas the parents were looking for a better life by "simply" crossing the ocean. (cf. DiGiovanni 2006 i, ii) Nowadays, there are almost 100,000 Italian residents who live in Toronto and its surroundings, which accounts for about 40% of the total population. This area has the largest concentration of Italians in Canada. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Canadians ) So, it is not surprising that the author of the trilogy that is going to be analyzed lives in this area. In addition to that, the story of the trilogy, when in Canada, is also set in Toronto and its area.

8 Accessed on April 18, 2009

As far as the arts, especially literature, is concerned, quite a lot of Canadian writers with an Italian background have made a name for themselves. Among these are novelists like Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, but also Matilde Torres, Caterina Edwards or, for instance, Antonino Mazza, to name just a few. Paci and Ricci write in their trilogies about the situation of Italian immigrants in Canada, how they cope with the new situation in the foreign country, how they are torn between adjusting to the new culture but at the same time trying not to lose their own or what they consider their own culture. Both treat in their works the question of and the search for identity and the conflicts between the different generations.

4 The Author in the Sign of Trans-Culturalism and His Works

4.1 Nino Ricci’s Life

Nino Ricci is a Canadian writer, above all a novelist who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in 1959 in Leamington, Ontario, into a family of Italian immigrants from the province of Isernia, Molise. In 1981 Ricci graduated in English literature, in 1987 he earned a second degree in creative writing and Canadian literature, both from York University. Ricci has travelled in Europe and Africa. In Nigeria, he taught English literature and language in a high school for two years. Ricci's first novel Lives Of The Saints was a great critical and commercial success. It won the Books in Canada First Novel Award , the 1990 Governor General's Award for Fiction and a Betty Trask Award . Ricci served as one of the directors and as president of the Canadian Centre of International PEN, a writers' human rights organization that works for freedom of expression. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nino_Ricci 9)

His most famous works are his novels, which can be listed as follows (cf. Nino Ricci's homepage: http://www.ninoricci.com 10 ): Lives Of The Saints (1990), his first novel, was immediately successful. It won the Governor General's Award for Fiction and was also adapted as a TV miniseries in 2004, an Italian Canadian co-production. The first book of the trilogy was also published with the assistance of the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism. Nino Ricci himself says about his first novel that one of the reasons for its success was the right timing: As it happened, I was lucky: my first novel came out just around the time that the tide had started to turn for us ethnics, and indeed it wasn't long before it seemed that to be recognized at all as a writer it was a virtual necessity to be ethnic. No doubt all countries experience trends of that sort, where what was invisible only a short time before suddenly takes centre stage, and it is not always easy to analyze the forces that

9 Accessed on March 04, 2008

10 Accessed on March 06, 2008

account for these sudden shifts. In Canada it was probably a confluence of the slow acceptance of the value of cultural diversity along with the coming to maturity of a number of immigrant communities and the appearance within them of writers of real talent. Nonetheless a striking feature of much of the literature produced in this period [...] is that it is not set in Canada but in the writers' countries of origin, something that was true even of my own first novel, which was set in Italy. (Ricci 2005 in "The Writer and Canadian Multiculturalism. A talk for the National University of Mexico in Mexico City" [online] 80f. 11 )

The sequel of his first novel was In A Glass House (1993), followed by Where She Has Gone (1997) which completed the trilogy. Testament (2002) was another successful work which was winner of the 2002 Trillium Book Award . And his latest novel, called The Origin of Species (2008) brought him again the Governor General's Award for Fiction .

Nino Ricci has been asked what role his Italian background played in him becoming a writer. He answered this question on his homepage, in the following way: I am not sure what role my Italian heritage played in my formation as a writer. On the one hand, it was not a profession encouraged by my parents, nor was our household one in which books abounded, given that both my parents received a very limited education – to grade five – as children in Italy. Thus my literary education took place almost entirely outside my Italian heritage, and had much more to do with English (i.e. from England) literature, with a bit of Russian, French, American, and Canadian thrown in there and perhaps a few books from Italy as well. When I came to be a writer, it was more with the thought of writing in this world tradition of literature than out of my Italian-Canadian background. That said, the experience of being an immigrant probably gave me the necessary sense of marginality and outsidedness that I think is important to one's formation as a writer, since it is often that sort of distancing that gives writers their clearer perspective on the

11 See: http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/739/73901012.pdf , accessed on February 16, 2009

society around them. Also, my Italian-Canadian background bequeathed me a wealth of rich material which subsequently proved very important to my writing. (http://www.ninoricci.com )

Reading Lives Of The Saints ( LOTS ), In A Glass House ( IAGH ) and Where She Has Gone (WSHG ) one comes immediately to the assumption that this is autobiographical writing. An indicator for this assumption is, for example, the fact that the author shares the Italian background with the main character – Vittorio Innocente – of the novel, although Nino Ricci was already born in Canada, while Vittorio is born in Italy and moves to Canada as a child. Another similarity between Ricci and the fictional Vittorio is that they both in their lives do similar things, i.e. study at a Canadian university, or then teach abroad, even in the same country, Nigeria. However that may be, Nino Ricci, understandably, contradicts his writing to be autobiographical. Interviewed by Paula E. Kirman on January 21, 2000 [online] and asked to what extent his writing is autobiographical, Ricci answers: No more so or less so than most fiction is; none of the storyline is based on fact or anything that happened to me or even anyone that I know. But, a lot of the details are drawn from a world that was familiar to me – the villages in the first book are based on villages that I've known. The town in In A Glass House where the narrator grows up is based on the town that I was born and raised in, in Ontario. So there are those kinds of connections between my life and work, but I just take that as a starting point. I think it's dangerous to be limited by your own experiences because then it becomes difficult to get perspective on your material. (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/canadian_literature/31651/2 12 )

4.2 Lives Of The Saints , In A Glass House , Where She Has Gone

When Nino Ricci started to write Lives Of The Saints "the whole discourse of multiculturalism had actually penetrated into the general consciousness, so people were probably a little more open to writing from outside of the mainstream than they might have

12 Accessed on May 13, 2008

been ten or fifteen years earlier." (Ricci, interviewed by Paula E. Kirman on December 20, 1999: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/canadian_literature/31651/1 13 )

Nino Ricci created a trilogy of novels covering more than 30 years in the life of his protagonist Vittorio Innocente. The first book, Lives Of The Saints (LOTS ), is set in an Italian village called Valle del Sole in 1960, when Vittorio is seven years old and living with his mother and grandfather. At the beginning of the story we get to know that Vittorio's father Mario, has immigrated to Canada (as many other Italians from his region), though originally believed to be America, to pave the way for the rest of the family to come. The child Vittorio does not understand why the neighbours disapprove of his mother, but suspects it has something to do with the man he saw his mother with in the stable on the morning she was bitten by a snake. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that it is Cristina's independence of mind and rejection of superstition that offend the villagers in Valle del Sole. While Cristina becomes visibly pregnant during the absence of her husband, a teacher helps Vittorio understand life through stories in a book called "Lives of the Saints". At the end of the first book Cristina breaks with the village people in a self-confident and powerful way and departs with Vittorio to Canada. But the mother dies on the ship after giving birth to Vittorio's blue-eyed sister Rita. Lives Of The Saints , as well as the other two sequels, is a first person narrative from the perspective of Vittorio Innocente and can be categorized as a bildungsroman or coming-of- age novel. In this first book, though, the perspective of the narrator moves between a mature voice (that of Vittorio as a grown-up in retrospective) and one of youthful innocence, as it richly recalls the village and its customs.

The second book of the trilogy, In A Glass House (IAGH ) spans about 20 years. It is set in an Ontario farming community called Mersea on the shore of Lake Erie after Vittorio has arrived in Canada with his father. Vittorio and his half-sister Rita have joined Vittorio's moody father, who is a greenhouse keeper and who makes it clear from the beginning that Rita is not his child. Mario even hates the infant because she reminds him of his faithless wife. Vittorio desperately seeks to establish a connection with his father, but Mario only withdraws further, lives his familiar life at the farm and rarely speaks to his children. Vittorio's attempts to

13 Accessed on May 13, 2008

connect either in Mersea's Italian community or with other Canadians meet with rejection or misunderstanding. Yet, he slowly manages to live his life, growing as a person, attending university and traveling to Nigeria to work there as a teacher. Rita, who has felt all her childhood not being accepted in the Innocente family, finally escapes and is adopted by another family called the Amhersts. So, the second book mainly deals with the estranged relationship between Vittorio and his father, and between Vittorio and his half-sister Rita. It further explores the Italian immigrant experience and the problems the characters have to face while being torn between two cultures. Compared to LOTS , which gives a hopeful and optimistic insight into the characters and their lifestyles, intensified by the perspective of a child, the narrative tone of IAGH is more realistic, i.e. more negative, and brings out the inner conflicts and fears of the characters.

In Where She Has Gone (WSHG ) Vittorio, having been a teacher in Nigeria, meets with his half-sister in Toronto shortly after his father's death. They are getting closer to each other. Too close, in fact. Uneasy with their new proximity in each other's lives, they are at first restrained. But gradually what is unspoken between them comes closer to the surface, setting in motion a course of events that will take Victor back to Valle del Sole in Italy, the place of his birth, and to some other places. It is in his home town in Valle del Sole where the story had its strange beginning twenty years earlier, where he confronts his past, some secrets and its revelations. Where She Has Gone is a vivid portrayal of character and place. Vittorio's encounter with the past and his coping with the present is very moving and not easy to digest.

5 Aspects of Migration and Trans-Culturalism in the Novels

Finding appropriate categories for an analysis is always a difficult task, for there are no perfect categories. So, the ones that can be found here in the analysis part have been classified that way in order to make an analysis possible. Since the overall topic is about trans- culturalism, it is not surprising that the categories that have been established in the single chapters are similar to other chapters. In this respect, the chapters of this thesis are also merging, and boundaries cannot really and absolutely be established.

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding . That is why the concept is that of Horismos , that is, the horizon, the boundary. 14 (Chambers 1994: 64)

The word horizon seems to be more appropriate here, for one thinks of a boundary as something with a clear-cut line that stops abruptly, whereas a horizon suggests that there is something else beyond it which is not visible or tangible yet.

5.1 In Search of Identity and Belonging

"In Search of Identity and Belonging" should give an insight into the aspects of the trilogy that centre on the question of where one's home is, where one belongs, on the sometimes desperate attempt to fit in, on the struggle for meaning. It deals with homesickness and homelessness, and with the search for an (or more than one form of) identity.

"Coming home" plays an important part in the trilogy. In LOTS homecoming is important to those who have left Valle del Sole, no matter if they once lived there, if they are day labourers on distant farms or if they are migrants somewhere in Europe or even across the Atlantic. La festa della Madonna is an event that is worth coming back for: La festa della Madonna on the last weekend of September transformed Valle del Sole

14 Chambers cites Martin Heidegger, 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking', in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings , New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 332.

every year from a sleepy peasant village into a carnival town. [...] People from neighbouring villages, from Rocca Secca, old residents from Rome and Naples, flocked into the village; day labourers working on distant farms took leaves of absence; migrants in the north, in Switzerland, in France, boarded crowded trains for the long journey home. Sometimes even a few Americani appeared, planning their return to their native village to coincide with la festa . ( LOTS : 72)

Vittorio's grandfather, even though he says that Cristina and her son are lucky to leave Italy, still hopes that Vittorio will come back one day after his death to his roots and to the place that has left its mark on him. So, before their departure he gives his medals to Vittorio and tells him that he is going to inherit his house: 'Here,' he said, closing the case with an air of finality and handing it towards me, 'take them [the medals he had had since the first war]. Maybe they'll mean something to you some day, when you're older. I have no one else to leave them to. When I die I'll leave the house to you, if you ever come back for it. But now you're lucky to leave this country, because it's a place of Judases and cowards. ( LOTS : 175)

According to Chambers (1994), identity is formed on the move. He states: [...] identity is formed on the move. 'Identity is formed at the unstable point where the "unspeakable" stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.' 15 In that passage, and the sense of place and belonging that we construct there, our individual stories, our unconscious drives and desires, acquire a form that is always contingent, in transit, without a goal, without an end. Such a journey is open and incomplete, it involves a continual fabulation, an invention, a construction, in which there is no fixed identity or final destination. (1994: 25) Applying this thought of identity as something incomplete, unstable, as a continuous journey to one's self, one can see this forming of identity in the following passage. Vittorio is on the ship and on the way to Canada. The ship can be seen as a kind of "in-between state" or as being constantly moving. In this respect, Vittorio' identity is formed "on the move", so to speak. For an instance, he has got the feeling of tremendous power. He feels god-like, secure,

15 Chambers refers to Identity, The Real Me. Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity , ICA Documents 6, London, ICA, 1987, p.44.

knows no fear. Somehow one has got the impression that he feels quite at home there, in transit, being on the way. This scene also reflects the changes he is undergoing, the development from a child to someone who still is a child but whose days of carefree childhood soon will be over "when the wave finally closes over him". There is a kind of foreshadowing that his mother is about to die, that he needs to behave like a grown-up now and will have to take care of his sister: But in a brief instant before the wave fell, all my fear suddenly drained away and I felt a tremendous power surge in me, as if a I had grown god-like and could command the movement of the world at will; and for a moment it seemed the world had obeyed me, had become suddenly silent and still and calm again, frozen in an instant that might stretch on endlessly, give me time to crawl into the sea's belly and find whatever spoils of storms and tempests lay half-digested there. Then as if in a dream the wave finally closed over me, and the world went black. ( LOTS : 219)

"Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world." 16 (Chambers 1994: 1) If homelessness is to be seen then as everybody's destiny and not as something miserable, it is very appropriate for Cristina's dead body to be covered with an Italian flag and thrown into the sea. This scene, which Vittorio only vaguely recalls while being in a delirium, shows that Cristina, who has always tried to break free from the narrow minds of the villagers, finally gets the whole world, even though, ironically, only after her death. My mother's body, enclosed in a canvas sack and covered with an Italian flag, lay on a small platform that rose up above the rails and pointed out to sea. ( LOTS : 235)

After Cristina's death there are two souls who are looking for a place to belong. Not only Vittorio has lost his mother, but there is now the baby, too, that needs somebody to hold on to: The baby was staring up at its plastic ceiling, waving its wrinkled limbs as if reaching for something above her. [...] I made a face to make it laugh, but its small grey eyes – they were not yet the vivid blue they would become – seemed to stare right through me. ( LOTS : 236)

16 Chambers cites Martin Heidegger in James Clifford, 'Travelling cultures', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies , London & New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 101.)

Although Vittorio does not know what to do with Rita and admits even hating her at times, he then comes to understand that they belong together, that they are home for each other: She'd cry and cry inconsolable sometimes, make me hate her, make me wish for her death [...]. But then when they [the cries] had died into sleep I would see her curled in her crib and feel solemn with responsibility for her, understanding that she was mine in some way, that that had been decided now [...] (IAGH : 44)

Chambers (1994) is talking about "another sense of 'home', of being in the world": It means to conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging. There is no one [my emphasis] place, language or tradition that can claim this role. (Chambers 1994: 4) If home and identity is not fixed and if there is not just one place, language or tradition that can claim this role, what is to be assumed, then Vittorio's assumption that Rita is the only thing that is truly his (cf. IAGH : 87), is all wrong. He will discover in the course of the events that he will be torn by his fixation on his sister.

Another "place" that takes the function of a home, in the case of the siblings, is the TV. It brings them together and serves at the same time as a home and as a window to the world. [...] and in the new window it [the television] provided on the world we seemed at once brought out of ourselves and yet made more intimate, gathering around it every night as around a fire, sealed off in the living room's sheltered space as if nothing existed beyond us, or was real. ( IAGH : 88f.) Furthermore, it brings in the dimension of another, a "third space": I took a guilty pleasure in these afternoons, some wariness between me and Rita seeming briefly to fall away then, the television a sort of point of neutral contact that brought us together exactly by freeing us of each other, Rita beside me neither affectionate nor not, simply there in her small unmindfulness. ( IAGH : 89f.) The TV, at the same time, fills Vittorio's time on his father's farm and the hollowness he feels growing in him: "I had only this awareness of home now, the long hours of television that 26

filled my time there, the small hollowness that took shape in me every day and then its guilty relief in the living room's darkness." ( IAGH : 119)

Vittorio desperately tries to fit in somewhere. He is looking for a place to belong, somewhere he can feel home, that is why he starts to attend religious meetings. He is first drawn to these meetings because he "sees something in this", but soon realizes that this is not where he belongs. He looks for something quite simple: Within a few weeks I'd begun to attend these meetings regularly. It was never clear to me what had drawn me into them, perhaps the uncertain allure of those first stories I'd heard, the hope of crossing over into their strange, familiar territory, perhaps simply the petty fear of not going along with Terry and Mark, of losing them, of having nothing else to fill the blank space my life seemed then. But even when the meetings had become predictable, suspect, the testimonials and their inevitable conclusion, the acceptance of Christ, even when the rebellion at this bright, forced certainty had grown large in me, still something brought me back to them. [...] I felt something truthful in this, defiant, the group of us seeming hidden away in our upstairs classroom like early Christians in the catacombs. ( IAGH : 133) [...] Afterwards I felt hollowed out by my lie, had the sense there was nothing constant in me that held me together. For a few weeks I continued attending my meetings and classes but then began to make excuses [...] (IAGH : 136) In the end what I feared was not the religion, the testimonials and the prayers, familiar rituals by now, safe in their illusion of unanimity, but the empty moments between when I had only myself to fall back on, waiting silent in line to receive a hot dog off the grill from one of the grown-ups, sitting alone in darkening light on some stranger's lawn with a paper plate in my lap to catch the relish that spilled from the end of my bun. It was these most usual things that seemed furthest from me, that people had barbecues at all, conversations, back yards, that they took so much for granted; and perhaps what I most wished for finally was not the transcendence of belief but simply to feel at home in this strangeness, this ordinariness. ( IAGH : 137)

As already mentioned, "there is no fixed identity or final destination". (Chambers 1994: 25) Vittorio, though, is constantly looking for an arrival, not realizing that there is no arrival point, no final destination. The way is the destination. Still, he has got a feeling of having arrived, 27

when he gets to Nigeria, another "third space": In darkness we crossed the Niger, a stretch of inky black hemmed in by shores of shrouded bush like wading phantoms. It seemed shabby somehow, unimpressive, not the vista I'd expected but merely a trickle lost in the heart of a continent; and yet I had a sense of having crossed over, of having arrived. ( IAGH : 297) The country, Nigeria, is growing familiar to him and brings back memories in him from Valle del Sole. He has got a feeling of contentment and belonging, of having finally arrived: Yet even as I stood outside it the country seeped into me, grew familiar as if I'd remembered it from my own past. [...] with students sometimes a gesture or tone of voice, the contour of a face, would bring back suddenly some classmate from Valle del Sole [...] And I was happy there finally, unreasonably so, felt a contentment at the core of me that seemed to have little to do with the daily texture of my life, its frustrations and tensions, its occasional satisfactions, was more the sense of the smallness of these things, tiny blips in an energy too large to take the measure of. Being there made the world seem suddenly without horizon, without centre, like the surprise of discovering life on another planet [...] or perhaps the wonder was simply in feeling fall away from me all the foreign world I had never quite entered into at home, to be in this place without expectation that I should ever have to find the way to fit in. ( IAGH : 307f.)

After his father's death Vittorio leaves "home", i.e. the farm, behind him to start a new beginning in the city, in Toronto: I left home for Toronto [...], anxious now simply to be alone again, to be away. I was to take my father's car [...]. I felt the ghost of him still there when I got into it in the position of mirrors, of the seat, the place arranged to hold him, felt a strange sensation as I altered things as if erasing him. Then I had loaded my few belongings and was gone. Home, the farm, fell away in the anonymity of the road, its first pleasant moments of suspension when it seemed possible never to have to arrive. ( IAGH : 338f.) Iain Chambers writes in Migrancy. Culture. Identity that "the migrant's sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern condition" (1994: 27) So, speaking in Chambers' words, Vittorio is to be seen in this (post)modern condition, as such a migrant, rootless, living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present. 28

For Vittorio, as well as for Rita, Valle del Sole is home, a returning point, a place to go back to, not just a place to visit: The country would hold her [Rita]; it was half hers, after all, the hills were in her blood and the sky, the crumbled ruins, the cooked earth. Even for her it wasn't a place to visit but to go back to, like somewhere a road led after years of wandering; and slowly she'd drift down into the dream of it and the village would call to her like home, and she would go. ( WSHG : 157)

Vittorio is leaving for Italy. He has gathered all his belongings and has realized that there are just a few things that really matter to him. He has not told his family about his plans to go to Italy. Meanwhile he is thinking about himself and other Italians returning home, back to Italy: I hadn't told my family yet about my going. When I was a child, a return was always a matter of a certain ritualized formality like a funeral: those returning would sit in wait in their kitchens or rec rooms the night before their departure and all evening long people would come to them like petitioners with their envelopes or little packages to be carried back to their relations. It had always struck me how little joy there had seemed to be in these events, as if a return were a matter of grave risk or threat or as if it were a sort of judgement against those who remained behind, a source of quiet humiliation. ( WSHG : 162)

Being finally in Italy, Vittorio questions himself how his life would have been if his father had never set out for Canada, if he would have led a life like his cousin, being satisfied with this simpler life and knowing where you belong: My uncle's son; he'd been just an infant when I'd left. [...] and then all the trappings of this different destiny I might have had if a single decision had never been made, if my father had never packed his bags, and set out. I might have worked in a restaurant such as this, attended the university perhaps and lived in some cool, dingy, marble-floored flat in one of the old mustard-coloured palazzo in the student ghetto. I would have had friends who came by on motor scooters, would have dressed well; in the summers I would have gone back to the village and perhaps met a girl there who would be my wife. All the slow disintegration that that first departure had set in motion would never have happened: I would simply have been at home, in my element, would have looked 29

up into the street from time to time as I waited tables on weekends for my father and thought, This is my kingdom, where I belong. ( WSHG : 173)

Coming close to Valle del Sole, his home town, Vittorio discovers that the place still exists, but he has got the feeling that everything seems to be wrong, i.e. not the way he remembers it from his childhood: A weathered sign pointed the way: VALLE DEL SOLE 7. So the place still existed; I had this proof now. There was still time to turn back, to forget everything, and yet everything, in a way, was already forgotten, this road I had travelled a hundred times, this valley I had stared into. [...] I got out of the car. From where I stood the village lay spread before me [...] Everything about it was wrong: the road had never come in this way, the houses had not been cramped into so paltry a space, the church above the square had not looked so forgettable. And then the simple feel of the place, the unlikeliness that anything memorable or of import could ever have happened here, that all the history I'd carried crammed in my head could have had its seat in this half- ruined assortment of mountain-strung homes. ( WSHG : 178)

Twenty years after his departure Vittorio senses that he is like a soldier who has eventually returned home after years of fighting in a war: Time was different here [in Italy], people had patience, twenty years wasn't so long to wait for a story to reach its conclusion. In the village's eyes, I might be like some soldier who had returned after years of war – everything that had happened to me during my absence was irrelevant, wasn't part of the tale, didn't take on any meaning until the moment I stepped back into the village, and was home. ( WSHG : 193f.)

When Vittorio comes with his cousin Luisa to the ruins of a deserted house, Luisa sees a broken bowl and immediately sets out to fix it. The broken clay bowl is a strong symbol of something that has been waiting all those years for somebody to come and fix it: Luisa wandered in among the house's ruins. [...] Inside [the kitchen], sitting alone there on a shelf like a religious icon, was a plain clay bowl with a shard broken away, the missing shard still lying at the bottom of it as if all these years the bowl had set there awaiting the hands that would come to mend it. Luisa set the bowl on top of the side- board and fixed the shard in its place. It held. She picked a sprig of wildflower from 30

nearby and set it in the bowl. "Like home," she said. ( WSHG : 223)

With the days passing Vittorio feels more and more at home in his village. He senses that this is where he belongs and there is nothing wrong in his being here: Only a matter of days had passed but already I felt like a fixture in the village, taking my meals at Aunt Lucia's, setting up my little household. It occurred to me that there was no place in the world now that was any more home than here: this was all I had left, my kitchen table, my stiff-linened bed, my balcony over the valley. Even the villagers seemed ready quietly to accommodate me, growing daily more friendly and more inscrutable, showing me a flawless country hospitality as if to say there was nothing out of the ordinary in my being here. Their kindnesses were like a forestalling: with each day that passed, each kitchen I sat in nibbling pastries or sipping liqueurs, it seemed more unlikely that I would do anything untoward, that I would ask any awkward questions or in any way disturb the quiet surface of things. ( WSHG : 230)

Rita finally joins Vittorio in Valle del Sole. She puts on a dress and with her black hair and in the dress she looks less foreign, almost like her mother: The women's attention seemed to have changed her in some: she looked suddenly less foreign here. In her long-sleeved dress and black hair, seemed to have taken into herself some of the stone and shadow of this place. "They said it was the eyes that gave her away. Because they were blue." ( WSHG : 248f.)

Rita tries to make sense of this place and her past. She thought it would be easier for her to come here and find the answers to all her questions, to come to terms with the past. Still, her journey to Italy has been a freeing one because now that she knows there is not this other identity of hers here, she can stop looking for it: "This whole place," Rita said. "That's how it feels to me. Like it would make sense except for some little thing I can't put my finger on. It's almost as if I thought I'd come here and the past would just be here, that I'd pick it up and then I'd understand, I'd be someone else, maybe that little girl who knew how to speak Italian or whoever I would have been if things had been different. But I guess it doesn't work that way." "You sound disappointed." "It's not that. I suppose it's freeing, in a way. To know there isn't this other identity out 31

there I have to keep looking for as if there were some kind of curse over me." (WSHG : 255)

Although for a long time Rita and Vittorio have been fixed on each other, because they thought they were each other's only sense of home, they finally come to the point where they can accept that they are just brother and sister and that that is the way it is supposed to be: As we entered the outskirts of the village, Rita took my arm in hers as if something had been settled between us. We would walk this last stretch together, she seemed to say, brother and sister, and we nodded to the villagers we passed as we walked on arm in arm toward home. ( WSHG : 259)

After Rita is gone, Vittorio stays a little longer in Valle del Sole with his relatives, but senses then that the time for his departure has come. He leaves with the train without a certain destination in mind. During the train ride Vittorio is asked by another passenger if he is Italian: "È italiano? " he said. "No. Canadese ." ( WSHG : 308) Here the question arises whether Vittorio considers one of the two his home or if it is somewhere in between. He says he is Canadian, but he answers in Italian. This would suggest that he is somehow torn between the Canadian and the Italian culture.

At the end of the third novel we learn that Vittorio is in Kenya thinking about Rita and how they have gone separate ways, each of them trying to find where they belong and the right direction in their lives. He has come to understand that he needs to take one step after the other without a final destination in mind, to find his way back into life: […] I have had two other letters from Rita since the first, in reply to my own. There is still an intimacy in them but it is clear now that we are moving apart, as if we are growing our own skins again, extricating ourselves from each other; and soon it will be difficult to imagine the point of closeness we once reached, perhaps even to bear the thought of it. I have told her nothing about London; and she, for her part, has not asked me why I am here [in Kenya] or how long I will stay, even if there is always the unspoken question between us of what follows, of what we will be to each other when I return. In the meantime I set things down, placing them one after another like links in 32

a chain that might finally pull me back to the world, though there remain always those things, perhaps the most important ones, that are not quite captured or that are held back, where ability fails or where every fibre rebels at the betrayal of putting a thing into words. Language seems sometimes such a crude tool to have devised, obscuring as much as it reveals, as if we are not much further along than those half-humans of a million years ago with their fires and their bits of chipped stone; though maybe like them all we strive for in the end is simply to find our own way to hold back for a time the encroaching dark. ( WSHG : 320)

5.2 Difference and Rejection of "The Other"

We are all different. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not willing to see these differences and regard them as disadvantages, as something that has to be rejected. To talk about uniformity would not be realistic, since a homogenous culture can never be reached. What an individual perceives as being different depends on his/her perspective and, above all, it depends on the cultural frame someone moves in. In labelling something that is different from one's own point of view as "the other" one simultaneously establishes binary classifications or dichotomies. One could find numerous examples of dichotomies. Edward Said (1979), for instance, positioning himself somewhere between the cultures, since he was born and grew up in the East and lives in the West now, writes in his work Orientalism about representations of the Orient. There he talks about oppositions, such as "the East vs. the West", "the self vs. the other" or a "we vs. they"-mentality, the West/we being the stronger and the more educated ones, and the East/they being "the other", the weaker culture, the uneducated people, the ones who need to be dominated because it seems to be their fate. (cf. Said 1979 and Deu čmann's seminar paper (2008) on "A discussion of 'Orientalism' ") In postcolonial terms, coming back to the above mentioned Orientalism , "the other" is usually equated with "the East". Peter Barry (2002), in this respect, discusses the binary opposition East vs. West. He writes in Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory about Said’s Orientalism and focuses attention upon an interesting point, namely that the East serves as a projection of those aspects of the West which Westerners tend to ignore about themselves: [Edward Said's Orientalism ] is a specific exposé of the Eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both the superiority of what is European or Western, and the inferiority of what is not. Said identifies a European cultural tradition of 'Orientalism', which is a particular and long-standing way of identifying the East as 'Other' and inferior to the West. The Orient, he says, features in the Western mind 'as a sort of surrogate and even underground self' [...]. This means, in effect, that the East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge (cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness, and so on). At the same time, and paradoxically, the East is seen as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive. (Barry 2002: 193)

Summarizing what Barry states here, one can say, in more general terms, that "the other" is always something or somebody that is different to us, i.e. those aspects of ourselves that we do not choose to acknowledge or tend to forget, while, at the same time, "the other" represents also something exotic, mythical and seductive, i.e. something that we admire. Likewise, Lois Tyson (2006) takes up the subject of othering which was practiced in colonial societies and explains what is understood by it: The colonizers saw themselves at the center of the world; the colonized were at the margins. The colonizers saw themselves as the embodiment of what a human being should be, the proper "self"; native peoples were considered "other", different, and therefore inferior to the point of being less than fully human. This practice of judging all who are different as less than fully human is called othering , and it divides the world between "us" (the "civilized") and "them" (the "others" or "savages"). (419f)

To apply these thoughts to Nino Ricci's trilogy, one can see that "the other" and the rejection of "the other" is a subject that Vittorio Innocente and other characters in the novels are constantly dealing with. In this context, the topoi of "foreignness", "strangeness", "marginality" or "edge" are of interest, as well.

Vittorio not only feels like a stranger in Canada, in the "foreign" country, but already in the first novel, while still being with his mother in his "home town" in Italy, they both are outsiders and different from the other villagers. Especially his mother is rejected because she is not willing to adjust herself to the village's – she calls them "stupid" – traditions and religious beliefs: 'It's her father I feel sorry for,' she [Vincenzo's mother] said [about Cristina], after a pause. 'And Vittorio. Growing up like a weed. Do you ever see him getting up at four to help with the harvest, like my Vincenzo? Never. He and his mother play like schoolchildren all day. Someone should write to the boy's father – I have a mind to do it myself.' ( LOTS : 51) So, Cristina and Vittorio are seen as different, "other" than the rest of the people in Valle del Sole. Chambers (1994) writes about the construction of "the other": [...] the construction of the 'other' has been fundamental to the historical, cultural and moral reproduction of our 'selves' and our particular sense of the world, of the centre, of knowledge, of power. To name is to possess, to domesticate is to extend a 35

patronage. We are usually only willing to recognise differences so long as they remain within the domain of our language, our knowledge, our control. (Chambers 1994: 30) So, keeping this words in mind, one can argue that the village people turn away from Cristina and Vittorio in order to come to terms with their "selves" and to keep the power and the patronage over the "others". These people who are different from the rest do not necessarily have to be far away from the center, they are within reach, within "the internal territories of our own culture", as Chambers puts it: This idea of facing the other, of acknowledging differences, and with them the diverse inscriptions that inhabit and constitute our world, is not merely a geographical encounter typical of the metropolitan intellectual. It is also a rendezvous to be found within the internal territories of our own cultures – on the 'other' side of the city, culture and languages we inhabit. (1994: 100)

Vittorio and his mother Cristina feel like outsiders within their community. The villagers avoid Vittorio's grandfather, too, although he was the former mayor of Valle del Sole: At our house now, no one stopped by anymore to speak to my grandfather, to ask his help in settling some dispute or have a word with him about village politics; and if the villagers passed my mother sitting in front of the house they did not look at her when they mumbled their greetings, and quickly moved towards the centre of the street. (LOTS : 55) People usually tend to avoid other people or circumstances if they are afraid of them. This is also the case here with Cristina. Vittorio soon understands that, especially, the women avoid Cristina because they are afraid of her. They think she might even curse them: But the women only stared on silently; and I realized with a shock that they were frightened, as if they believed my mother was as good as her threat, or that she could cast some curse against them if they crossed her. (LOTS : 109) And it was the women who were hardest on Cristina: Yet it was the women of the village who had been harshest towards my mother, and who watched hawk-eyed from their stoops for the slow progress of her disease, as if they had taken it upon themselves to keep the disease from spreading; and even at mass now, and afterwards as we filed back into the village, the men seemed merely awkward and put out by my mother's presence, passing by us stoop-shouldered, their eyes averted almost guiltily, as if they had been forced into a posture that did not sit 36

well with them, while the women avoided my mother still with a cold-eyed rectitude, hurrying their children around us with their backs straight and their eyes forward. (LOTS : 140)

The villagers are not the only ones who reject Cristina. Her own father feels disgraced by the fact that she has had an affair with a foreigner and is now expecting the child of this stranger. Vittorio's grandfather blames Cristina for everything that has gone wrong in their lives. He actually accuses her of having killed her own mother, his wife, and of killing him now by this disgrace of hers. Cristina, although being the outsider, has got saint-like qualities, because when her father falls and injures his leg, she still helps him. 'For my sake! Was it for my sake you behaved like a common whore? Do you think you're better than those people? They are my people, not you, not someone who could do what you've done. I've suffered every day of my life, per l'amore di Cristo , but I've never had to walk through this town and hang my head in shame. Now people come to my house like they go to the circus, to laugh at the clowns! You've killed me Cristina, you killed your mother when you were born and now you've killed me, as surely as if you'd pulled a knife across my throat. In all my days I've never raised a hand against you but now I wish to God I'd locked you in the stable and raised you with the pigs, that you'd died and rotted in the womb, that you hadn't lived long enough to bring this disgrace on my name!' ( LOTS : 144f.)

Rita, yet unborn, is already treated as an outsider, because she is talked of as being a "bastard", for her mother has had an affair with the blue-eyed foreigner, i.e. a German soldier: 'You'll do as he [Mario] tells you,' my grandfather said. 'The orphanage is full of babies just like yours, don't think yours will be special. I'll not have that bastard child living under my roof.' ( LOTS : 155) Rita is referred to as 'that bastard child' by those who reject Cristina. When Vittorio's classmates and Alfredo tell him that his sister will be born snake-headed, he in his childlike and naive way, does not know what to think of it. He believes it and tries to find a solution to the problem: Whatever my mother was carrying in her belly – 'that bastard child,' as my grandfather called it, which I thought might be a reference to the snake-headed baby Alfredo had warned of – could be got rid of at the orphanage in Rocca Secca, so that for the time 37

being we would be troubled by neither arrivals nor departures. ( LOTS : 155)

Cristina is not only rejected because of her reputation of being a princess, but, mainly because she is so different from the other women, being independent and a free thinker: 'Fools!' she shouted now. 'You tried to kill me but you see I'm still alive. And now you came to watch me hang, but I won't be hanged, not by your stupid rules and superstitions. You are the ones who are dead, not me, because not one of you knows what it means to be free and to make a choice, and I pray to god that he wipes this town and all its stupidities off the face of the earth!' When she had finished an eerie silence fell over the street, even the rain seeming suddenly hushed. The villagers stood still as stone, seemed to have merged with the rock of the houses and pavement, become finally themselves simply crags and swells in the hard mountain face of the village. ( LOTS : 184)

When Vittorio is lying in the hospital with a high fever that he caught on the ship after his mother's death, "a stranger", that is his father, comes to visit him. The term stranger can be found in great numbers in the novels, whenever he refers to his father. Mario remains this foreigner to Vittorio for the rest of his life. It was the second visitor, who came after the first, that I had not expected to see: a stranger who was my father, and after all not the black-haired ogre I had imagined but a tired-eyed man whose hair had begun to grey and whose burly shoulders and limbs seemed to fit him awkwardly, like the Sunday clothes the peasants in Valle del Sole wore to mass. ( LOTS : 234)

Not only perceives Vittorio his father as a stranger, no wonder, since he has been absent in all his life, but Mario himself feels estranged in Canada. Chambers defines a stranger this way: Cut off from the homelands of tradition, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, the stranger is perpetually required to make herself [sic] at home in an interminable discussion between a scattered historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present. (Chambers 1994: 6)

People are not the only ones who feel estranged or are regarded as strange, foreign or different. Vittorio describes their house in Canada and the objects in it as being so different 38

from home. To him there is no feeling of welcome. The objects in the house are compared to human beings, being "mute and stubborn": There [speaking of their house in Canada] was a modernness to it that I thought of as what was foreign, not Italian, the preternatural gleam of the kitchen with its chrome table and chequer-board tiles, its porcelained fridge and stove, then the living room with its picture-book decorum, the sofa and armchair there, faded and worn but imposing, a different order of things than what I'd known in Valle del Sole; a hundred mysteries seemed to shelter there, the radio above the fridge whose insides slowly warmed to a glow as it came on, the telephone with its distant buzz like insects mindlessly churring. But if the house had any informing spirit it didn't seem to reside in its objects, which despite their novelty gave no feeling of welcome to the rooms that held them, refusing to give up their histories, sitting stubborn and mute in their separate spaces like things that had turned their backs to you. The only thing that betrayed them in this was a smell, a faint odour of mothballs and sweet rot and something else, not as simple as sweat or the smell of a breath but definitely human, lingering on the furniture, in the cupboards in the kitchen and pantry, in the chintz curtains left at the windows, and stealing over me sometimes to leave an odd hollowness in me like a gloom, the creeping intimation of whatever unknown lives had gone on there before us. ( IAGH : 6f)

Iain Chambers writes about what it means to live 'elsewhere'. He points out that to live 'elsewhere' means to continually find yourself involved in a conversation in which different identities are recognised, exchanged and mixed, but do not vanish. Here differences function not necessarily as barriers but rather as signals of complexity. To be a stranger in a strange land, to be lost (in Italian spaesato - 'without a country'), is perhaps a condition typical of contemporary life. (1994: 18) Vittorio finds himself in this condition of being a stranger in a strange land and to be lost. When the other schoolboys pick on him, he wishes to be different, to be somebody else. He does not yet see that his being different does not necessarily mean something negative. He "lets" the boys pick on him because he already feels humiliated: The boys who picked on me had found the right way to act – they were perfectly detached, indifferent, didn't pick on me because they hated me or were angry but only

because they could see the humiliation already inside me, as if I were made of glass, and if I'd been different they'd have left me alone or been friendly. ( IAGH : 50) And Sister Bertram, one of Vittorio's teachers, does the rest in making him additionally aware of how different the other children were from him: [While singing] suddenly Sister Bertram's voice would ring out with the strange name she had for me. "Vic-tur !" And her anger would seem to focus in on me like a light beam, as if she were inviting the other children to see how different they were from me. ( IAGH : 54)

One might think that Vittorio while having troubles adjusting to his new surroundings would feel comfortable with other "foreigners", meaning children from other countries. Instead Vittorio observes how much the foreigners hate each other and the feeling of being outsiders because the strangeness multiplies and reflects back at them: I began to nurse a small resentment toward Sister Mary then, angry that I'd been grouped with people like George and the Belgian girl, that Sister Mary didn't see how we all hated each other, hated having our strangeness multiplied and reflected back at us. ( IAGH : 57)

As already mentioned, Vittorio is not the only one who feels like a stranger. Strange or estranged is also the right term for the relationship that Mario and Rita have. In fact, Mario does not really have a relationship with Rita. He not only ignores her as a baby, but he also refuses to call her by her name. Instead, he always refers to her as "it": [...] my father continued simply to blot the baby from his mind, never referring to her in any way, as if he saw in her place only an irrelevant shadow or blur. ( IAGH : 35)

As time passes Vittorio grows different from his family and the farm. He feels that he has got a different destiny from "them", that his place is to be somewhere else: I emerged from these days, the isolation of them, as from a soundless dark, dazed somehow by the return of the others [the members of his family], the complex mundane world they brought back with them. Day by day they grew more alien, seemed to share the same strange features that made them different from me, that set us apart as surely as if we'd come from different countries or spoke a different 40

language ( IAGH : 67) So, he sets himself apart from his family consciously: I wanted to sit inside my difference and shelter myself there as if to protect it, wanted them to feel some punishment in it that would show up their own hideousness, this crippled family we formed. ( IAGH : 68)

His "other" life in Italy seems to be so long ago that he cannot really remember it any more. One can see that he is torn between two cultures, he is in this "trans-cultural" and being "in- between" state in the truest sense of the word. He cannot really connect to his new life in Canada nor can he return to his old life: Now and then some boy I'd known back in Italy would catch my eye with a newcomer's furtive hopefulness, whatever divisions there'd been between us back then seeming levelled in the diminishment of being together here in someone else's country; yet finally nothing would come of these past connections, always the lingering shame in me of what my mother had done and then some larger disjunction I couldn't account for, the not remembering somehow who I'd been in that other life. ( IAGH : 69) So, he looks for a kind of way out in going abroad. Vittorio decides to go to Nigeria to work there as a teacher. Going abroad, in this case to a "third" country, Nigeria functions as a "third space", so to speak. Homi K. Bhabha (1990) defines in an interview by Jonathan Rutherford the term hybridity and "the third space": [...] if, as I was saying, the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the third space which enables other positions to emerge. (Bhabha 1990: 211) "The third space" that Bhabha talks about is to be understood as a third moment, perhaps something more abstract, a mental state, but one could also apply the "third space" on the excerpt above, meaning Vittorio's trans-lation to a third, i.e. another country. In this sense, a "third space", apart from Italy being the first and Canada being the second, emerges, which enables Vittorio to come to terms with his life, to re-think and re-consider certain aspects of his life, to get the right distance to certain people and circumstances. So, this way Nigeria as a third space enables new positions to emerge. 41

In Nigeria he discovers, on the one hand, the differences between him – as being white – and the local people, which he describes as a chasm that cannot be bridged. On the other hand, he understands that, even abroad, Americans, meaning people from the USA, and Canadians, although both are united by the sameness of being Westerners and white, are different from each other: There appeared an assumption in most of my dealings with people there [in Nigeria] that beneath the surface gestures of fellowship there was a chasm that couldn't be bridged, so taken for granted that every exchange seemed a kind of evasion, a circling around some truer version of things that was never named; [...] Inevitably I fell in more and more with the Americans – we were united, at least in our whiteness, our newness, had less work to do to understand one another; though even then there remained always the shadow of difference between us, if only in the quicker, more expectant intimacy others assumed with them because they were Americans, known quantities, emissaries from the centre of the world. ( IAGH : 304)

Summing up, one can state that Vittorio, no matter where he is geographically, almost always feels like a stranger. Furthermore, he cannot really say where he feels more like a stranger, in Italy or Canada. Vittorio in the third part of the trilogy travels back to Italy. His cousin Luisa assumes that he must feel like a stranger now and here, meaning in Italy, that he has been away from his home country for so many years: [Luisa:] "You must feel, I don't know, like a stranger here after all those years in America. It must be so different there." "I suppose. Except now that I'm here, I'm not sure any more where I feel more like a stranger." ( WSHG : 224)

Being back in Italy, while Vittorio still feels like a stranger, Rita and John are clearly treated as "new strangers". They are regarded as being exotic and therefore interesting to the villagers: We passed a couple of villagers, but they seemed shy at the sight of these new strangers [Rita and John], nodding and mumbling some neutral greeting and moving on. But then one of the women I'd met at Marta's my first morning – Maria, the large one – spotted us from her stoop. "Oh, Americano ! Who are these foreigners you've brought?" 42

Before I could think of a way to refuse her she had got us into her kitchen, with an almost predatory aggression, settling us at her table and keeping an assessing eye on us as she went about preparing coffee and setting out sweets. [...] It wasn't long before other women had begun to appear at Maria's door, passing the same appraising eye over Rita and John as if Maria had set them on display here. In the end there were more than half a dozen of them crowded into Maria's kitchen, large and small, ancient and middle-aged. "They're just friends," Maria explained, to each new arrival. "From Canada. Though the man, he looks like a German to me." "Tedesco ?" one of the women said to John. "Deutschmann ?" John reddened. "Sì, sì, Deutschmann ," he said. "There's nothing wrong with the Germans," one of the others threw in. "People said, because of the war, but I'll tell you the Germans always respected us. You know who were the worst, the Canadians! It's true, they were the worst!" (WSHG : 246f.)

In the course of the novel, since we are dealing with a coming-of-age novel, Vittorio needs to develop, he needs to go through a lot of changes and negative feelings until he is able to realize that his being different, no matter where he is, is a natural phenomenon which he needs to accept and embrace.

5.3 Space and Boundaries

As has been mentioned before, nowadays, clear-cut lines and boundaries cannot be made out any more. Spaces are opening up, new spaces emerge and situations shift with simply one changing element. This chapter is supposed to present different kinds of spaces and borders, that means mental or physical borders, within Nino Ricci's novels. Homi K. Bhabha (1994/2004) writes in the introduction of Locations of culture : It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond . [...] The 'beyond' is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past. ...Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle , we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the 'beyond': an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da , hither and thither, back and forth. (1994/2004: 1f.) What he means then is that the beyond has grown to be more important than beginnings and endings. The beyond encompasses what border lines cannot. It is this kind of grey zone that we as humans move in most of the time.

In LOTS the Sun Parlour in Canada is described as being the destination of so many Italian migrants. This area is pictured as being a vast, cold place, a piece of land with great expanses and flat green fields that stretch for miles: The Sun Parlour was in a new part of America called Canada, which some said was a vast cold place with rickety wooden houses and great expanses of bush and snow, others a land of flat green fields that stretched for miles and of lakes as wide as the sea, an unfallen world without mountains or rocky earth. ( LOTS : 162) Equally, when Vittorio thinks of America images of limitless space, as wide as the sea, come to his mind: But though my mind was filled with images of America, of tall buildings and wide green fields, of the dark-haired man I remembered as my father, I could not believe in the truth of them, even my father now seeming merely like someone I had imagined in

a dream; and all I could see clearly of the future was a kind of limitless space that took shape in my head as the sea, and a journey into this space that took direction not from its destination but from its point of departure, Valle del Sole, which somehow could not help but remain always visible on the receding shore. ( LOTS : 165) Already on the ship, on his way to Canada, Vittorio senses the space of the engine room as being larger than life, as if made for giants: "We looked down from a high railing into a dim cavern that stank of steam and coal; everything seemed larger than life, as if made for giants, the huge pipes that ran overhead and along the walls, the great outsize boilers that rose up like vast oxen." ( LOTS : 203) The sea, stretching away in every direction, yet foreshadows the vast spaces of the Canadian territory: "[...] around us the sea lay bright blue and placid, stretching away in every direction, it seemed, to the very ends of the earth." ( LOTS : 204) Vittorio, already in Canada, notices the flat landscape and the endless openness pressing down on him: [...] and in that flat landscape with no point from which you could hold the world in a glance, you got no sense of where things stood in relation to one another, only of endless, random repetition, the openness pressing down on you, holding the world back. ( IAGH : 3)

Another image of physical, but at the same time of mental border lines, becomes visible in the following passage: "My father slept in the first [bedroom], in a bed with a headboard of slim metal tubes like the bars of a cage;" ( IAGH : 8) This clearly shows that Mario might not only feel encaged when sleeping in his bed, but it also suggests that he somehow feels caged in, or, better: locked out from, the Canadian society, as a whole.

Mario is someone who is moving between clear-cut lines. He totally avoids Rita as a baby, as well as the rest of her life. Vittorio mentions a dividing line in the house: "A line seemed to divide the house in two at the living-room door, Gelsomina seldom bringing the baby into the kitchen and my father, for his part, seldom crossing beyond it." (IAGH : 10)

Vittorio starts studying at the university and therefore moves to Toronto. In the city, he even feels more estranged than in Mersea at the farm. He talks of an empty space that surrounds him: 45

But in my first months there [in Toronto] I felt as if I had stepped out suddenly into empty space: I had nothing, finally, that defined me, not even the dull routines that had made up my life in Mersea, what I'd thought of then as encumbrances, obstacles in the way of some freer, better self, but that seemed now all that had kept me from the brink of this emptiness I felt impelled into. ( IAGH : 200) Chambers writes about migrant landscapes of contemporary metropolitan cultures: In the migrant landscapes of contemporary metropolitan cultures, de-territorialized and de-colonized, re-situating, re-citing and re-presenting common signs in the circuits between speech, image and oblivion, a constant struggling into sense and history is pieced together. It is a history that is continually being decomposed and recomposed in the interlacing between what we have inherited and where we are. (1994: 14f.) Therefore, one could argue that Vittorio, being a part of this contemporary metropolitan culture, also has to undergo a constant struggling in order to piece his own history together. And this sort of history that encompasses him needs to be continually de-composed and recomposed.

Instead of growing in a positive way as a person while collecting all sorts of impressions of his studying years in Toronto, Vittorio withdraws more and more into himself. Compared to LOTS , Vittorio in IAGH is a much more complex character, more serious and more depressed, and everything is getting worse for him. It seems he has picked up much more of his father's qualities, while his half-sister follows in her mother's footsteps. When Vittorio then thinks of committing suicide for the first time, it is described as the empty space that surrounds him: The world began to take on the strangeness of a place that I would soon be leaving. Every quality of it seemed a mystery suddenly, the shapes of things, the colours, the odd liveliness of people, continuing in their ways as if some secret energy propelled them, as tireless and as certain as machines. But already a dozen times when I felt close to the thing [i.e. killing himself], went so far once as to remove the screen from the window in my room, stood for a moment, my heart pounding, against the window's square of empty space, it was the thought of my family that seemed to keep me from it, of the monstrousness of it for them, so far from anything that would make sense to them – they were what I'd wanted so much to escape and yet all that seemed to connect me now to the world, resurfacing out of the murk into which I'd tried to consign them 46

to hold over me this final tyranny, the slender grip of home. ( IAGH : 202f.) There is a deadness in him, and the line between present and future seems to dissolve. The urge to kill himself gets stronger in him, so that he feels there is nothing between the thought and the act any more but empty space: But I couldn't bear the deadness in me when I spoke. The line between present and future, who I was and who I imagined I'd be, seemed dissolved; I saw only the endless perpetuation of things as they were, my small illusory rallies, my steep descents. I thought: I will do it. There seemed nothing between the thought and the act now but empty space; I would come to the point where I'd crossed it. ( IAGH : 217f.)

In WSHG Vittorio thinks about going back to Italy. He wants to show Rita her roots since they both are part of the Italian soil. Vittorio feels as if he were a place on the map: I'd left no question that I would go [back to Italy], that I would wait for her [Rita]. That had been how I had wanted to put things, as if there were no option involved, as if I were a place on a map that would be there whether she came or not. I had tried to show her once in an atlas where the village was. But even in the big reference atlas in the university library it hadn't been listed by name, so that it had seemed she had had to take it on faith that the place existed at all, wasn't a figment of my imagination, that somewhere in the criss-crossing of tiny highways and relief lines the map showed was this unnamed cluster of real houses you could go to, with real people walking the streets. ( WSHG : 157)

Vittorio finally returns to his home country and, among other people and relatives, meets up with his old friend Fabrizio. He feels he can enter a space with Fabrizio, one that is as innocent as the ones of his childhood: I spent the afternoon with Fabrizio at his farm, where he retreated every day after he'd finished his rounds. With him I seemed to enter a space like the innocent one of childhood, where everything that was pressing and large, that could hurt, was held back. ( WSHG : 233)

When Rita and John leave Valle del Sole Vittorio stays there a little longer. He senses that the village changes with the arrival of the former villagers who come there for their summer vacations. For a short time it seemed possible to step back into the past, but this moment has 47

passed by: Shortly after Rita and John's departure Valle del Sole began to fill with former villagers returning from the city for their August vacation. [...] The arrival of this group seemed to take the village away from me in some way. It was as if an era had passed, as if the village had briefly resided in a sort of timelessness, a space where it might have been possible to go back, to step through a doorway to the past, and now had suddenly been brought into the mundane present, just a quaint back-country village which people returned to for their summer vacations. ( WSHG : 296f.)

So, space can be regarded in the sense of place and time. Sometimes it can be found somewhere in-between. Most of the time it is not a clear line that can be made out. As far as Vittorio is concerned, it is empty space, a kind of hollowness, that encompasses him and makes him think of suicide.

5.4 Alienation and Displacement

A common feature when talking or writing about migration in literature is alienation or displacement . "Displacement is a key term in post-colonial theory which applies to all migrant situations. It refers both to physical displacement and a sense of being socially or culturally 'out of place'." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_literature 17 ) Bill Ashcroft (et al.) (1989/2002), similarly, writes in The Empire Writes Back : A major feature of post-colonial literatures is the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. [...] A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or 'voluntary' removal for indentured labour. [...] The dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature of post-colonial societies whether these have been created by a process of settlement, intervention, or a mixture of the two. Beyond their historical and cultural differences, place, displacement, and a pervasive concern with the myths of identity and authenticity are a feature common to all post-colonial literatures in english [sic]. The alienation of vision and the crisis of self-image which this displacement produces is as frequently found in the accounts of Canadian 'free settlers' as of Australian convicts, Fijian-Indian or Trinidadian-Indian indentured labourers, West Indian slaves, or forcibly colonized Nigerians or Bengalis. (1989/2002: 8f.)

So, terms such as alienation , displacement , dislocation , disorientation and estrangement appropriately describe Vittorio Innocente's inner conflicts and crisis of self-image. He often feels 'out of place', alienated, like an empty shell, cut off from his home country, his family, etc. In most cases this feeling of disorientation, i.e. his inner life, is mirrored through outer surroundings.

Being still back in Valle del Sole, Vittorio and his mother feel like "being ripped untimely from their womb, without gestation". He compares their histories to an empty shell:

17 Accessed on May 20, 2009

But my mother and I, it seemed, were being ripped untimely from our womb, without gestation: our own trunk was built in a day, and packed in a matter of hours; and our house, which had once seemed, even through the months of silence and anger, like a solid constant, unchangeable, infested as it was with our lives and smells, our histories, became almost overnight an empty shell [...] ( LOTS : 164)

In IAGH , Vittorio describes their house as being far from the other houses of the Italian community, forgotten and cut off from the world: The first Italians in Mersea, from before the war, had bought up farms on the lake [...]. Other Italians had settled around them as around a nucleus [...]. But my father had bought a farm further north and east, on the 3 rd Concession. We were the only Italians then who lived east of Highway 76 [...]; and though by road we were only four or five miles out of town, could see from our back field the weathered wall of the Sun Parlour Canning Factory, with its ad for Corporal cigarettes, the pink brick and white clapboard gables of the house on the town's outskirts, the stucco tower of St. Michael's church, still the farm seemed remote and forgotten, like a place cut off from the world. (IAGH : 2)

During his first weeks on the farm in Mersea he senses a feeling of disorientation. He dreams of being dead, but he is more frightened to be awake in this strange life of his than being asleep and having these nightmares: Sometimes, during those first weeks, I would wake suddenly in the middle of the night and for a moment, in the darkness, feel a disorientation so complete that I might never have known what a world was, or a bed or a chair. My mind in that instant seemed to mirror exactly the darkness of the room around me, seemed to contain no thoughts, no past, only a sudden panic and terror; [...] I thought then that the blackness I fell into on those nights must be like death, that I had dreamed of being dead, because sometimes, afterwards, I could remember an image of myself closing my eyes and sinking into a sleep as dark as the sea; though it was never the moment I closed my eyes that frightened me but the moment I opened them, when I emerged again into everything strange and new and forgotten, as into the sudden horror of being born, or born again. (IAGH : 3f.)

When Vittorio starts school in fall he still feels alienated. He talks of this alien winter in Canada and having the impression of not belonging to anyone. He feels himself not fitting in, being 'out of place', "like an aberration in a picture". He tries to escape into his memories, into his past, like going into another country: It was not until the first frost, into October, that the tomato season ended and I began school. Tsia Teresa set out clothes for me, packed sandwiches in my father's lunchbox, sent me out to the end of the drive to wait for the bus. The trees had begun to lose their leaves by then, all around the landscape preparing for its alien winter; and always there were the few moments then as I waited in the October cold when I seemed to belong to no one, the life going on in the house, my aunt in her morning clothes, the sleeping baby, seeming tiny and strange as through the wrong end of the telescope, and I myself, alone there at the roadside, like an aberration in a picture, the thing when all else was accounted for that didn't fit. There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house. ( IAGH : 45)

Entering school, Vittorio feels like being in a limbo. He sees himself as somebody who has fallen into darkness and cannot get out of it. The school resembles a labyrinth or a maze with its dizzying symmetry: I entered into high school as into a limbo, no sudden making over there as I'd hoped, no stepping out of the darkness I'd fallen into, merely a sort of perpetual furtive waiting without promise or purpose. The school [...] seemed a labyrinth after St. Michael's, with its wings and outbuildings, its dizzying symmetry, its unfixed world, the thousand nameless faces that moved unconnected through its dozen halls. I had dreams of wandering lost in it, of being late for some crucial test and then discovering it was in a language I couldn't decipher, all senseless hieroglyphs and scrawls. What friendships I'd had at St. Michael's seemed to fall away. It was the disconnectedness I couldn't bear, being with people yet having nothing to say to them, not finding the simplest word that was true, exposed to them then in their uncertain threat. ( IAGH : 130) 51

After leaving "home", i. e. Mersea, and going to Toronto to study there, he is not discovering the world as one might think he would, instead he withdraws into himself, spends hours and afternoons in a kind of daze, watching television. Again he feels a disorientation: I spent long hours in the common room watching TV in a kind of daze, its flow of images mesmerizing after my isolation. [...] I felt a strange disorientation, surfacing to them as from the mind-emptied clarity after a fever. The previous months seemed a dream I'd been through now: I'd come out to discover the world and yet still it eluded me, remote as these flickerings I watched in the common room's late-night dark. (IAGH : 206f.)

Vittorio is surrounded by familiar displacement. Displacements as far as his uncle and his behaviour towards his own family is concerned, but, above all, he alludes to his father and his being constantly silent: All the familiar patterns, the familiar displacements, Tsi' Umberto's sharp condescension toward his wife and sons, my father's silences, the sense when they were near each other of two shadows, two glooms, silently hovering. ( IAGH : 224)

In addition to that, Vittorio and his half-sister Rita feel estranged, each of them withdrawing into their own selves: Our correspondence began to falter. The gaps between letters lengthened; the letters themselves grew slowly more falsely amiable, more superficial. There was no clear point at which I could have said things had changed definitely, irrevocably, just this slow estrangement, this gradual turning away [...] The whole course of our correspondence seemed to skew: what we had shared, it seemed now, had not so much been our lives as each other's absence from them, the careful stripping away of any implication they intersected, she with her instinctive discretion and I with the distance she appeared always ready to let me fall back to, the worldly older brother, the mentor, recreating myself in the written word in the persona I lacked in life. But by the time I'd seen these things, admitted to myself the change between us, the small perversity in me that had taken a kind of relief in it, we seemed already to have drifted back into separateness, forever more cautious and controlled. (IAGH : 314f.)

Although Vittorio and his father have never had something that could be called a relationship, after Mario's death, though, Vittorio feels disoriented: I had the strangest feelings afterwards, not of relief or inevitability as I'd expected but a kind of disorientation, a nausea as at the thought of something unnatural or evil. (IAGH : 325) Vittorio, therefore, is very surprised to hear that he has inherited most of the farm, "unreasonable sums, this excess", for he has been removed from the farm all his life: This was my father's legacy to me then, these unreasonable sums, this excess. Somehow I hadn't expected it, had always imagined the farm heavily mortgaged, its profits slim, had hardly even considered I could have much of a stake in it when I'd been so removed from it all my life. ( IAGH : 333)

Rita, already as a child, and then in her adult life, at times seems to live in another world: Beside me Rita sat eyes forward, in another world but also stilled somehow, as if she had moved into a new territory where anger, shame, were irrelevant, where there was only the brute fact of what had happened. ( WSHG : 105) She seemed hardly aware of me and John now, withdrawn into the far remoteness she would go into sometimes as a child. ( WSHG : 107)

Trying to escape his surrounding real world, as already mentioned above (see IAGH : 107), and his duties to write his final papers, he watches TV reruns which take him back to this kind of innocence that he and Rita had as children: My classes had ended by now but I still had final papers to write. I kept to my apartment, trying to work though my mind was like an alien substance no longer matched to the world, that no new thought could take shape in. I'd picked up a small black-and-white TV at a yard sale down the street, and for days sat watching reruns on UHF of shows I'd seen as a child. There was an innocence in them that was like a balm, the television world they presented of hopeful suburban domesticity as if they'd preceded some global loss of faith, a great falling away that had somehow broken us. (WSHG : 117) Victor, as he is called more often now, constantly goes back to his days of television and sleep. One can see how his life is dissolving and how this sort of blankness makes him think more and more of suicide: 53

I went back to my days of television and sleep. They were growing almost comfortable now, like time taken out from the ordained order of things that was only for me, that didn't connect to any future or past. It occurred to me, in this state, that there could be a dissolution point in a life where the logic of cause and effect suddenly ceased to apply, where there was not enough sense in things for any forward line to present itself. Perhaps that was how people came to kill themselves: they simply reached this blankness they disappeared in, this moment when the story of their lives no longer cohered. ( WSHG : 136)

In the third novel, when he is back in Valle del Sole, one might think that he will find piece with himself now, but even there he has got a feeling of dislocation: Being in the house [the one he has inherited from his grandfather] I felt a strange sense of dislocation, as if just beneath the surface of things something deeper was trying to urge itself on me: my body would suddenly remember the turn of a stair, the feel of a doorknob beneath my hand, with a rightness the mind could never get back to; and then the feeling would be gone. That was the hard thing, this not-quite-presence of all my history here, what was everywhere hinted at but nowhere delivered up. And yet it was odd that what seemed to make the past most palpable, in the end, most real, was exactly this mute unreachability, the way it beckoned, and beckoned, and beckoned, and could not be touched. ( WSHG : 202f.)

After having stayed in Italy a little longer than Rita and John, Vittorio decides to take the train. At first he does not even know where to go, then he decides to go to Paris and from there to London. On the train ride, though, which could also be seen as this in-between state, he notices that one place is as senseless as the other. He still feels disoriented and this kind of feeling will linger on until the end of the story: I had claimed my own bit of floor, nodding off from time to time before some jolt of the train awoke me again, each time the same sense of panic rising up in me, the disorientation of not knowing for an instant where I was, where I was headed; though once I'd got my bearings the feeling was worse, the sick hollowness in the pit of my stomach as if it could not matter, after all, where I was, one place was as senseless as any other. (WSHG : 306)

Towards the end of the story, reaching London, Vittorio feels like he has arrived nowhere. To him it feels like the end of the world. He could go any place and all would be the same. To him there is nowhere further to go: It was the following night before I reached London: there had been rain and rough sea across the Channel, and then a haze that slowly thickened to fog as the train entered London's outskirts. It seemed days, weeks, since I'd slept, bathed, had a proper meal, since I hadn't been living my life on trains and station benches, moving toward a destination that seemed now, as I passed by the blocks of soot-blackened row houses that flanked the rail line, like an arrival at nowhere, as much the end of the world as any place could be. I stood outside the station thinking I might simply collapse there on the pavement: this was the end, there was nowhere further to go. I could hardly remember now what instinct had brought me here, if I'd imagined that Rita might somehow appear to me out of the whole anonymous world or if I'd simply needed to reach this point where there was no going on, where I was sure of that. ( WSHG : 310f.)

Vittorio has a blurred vision, he feels he needs to make a proper end to things now, that is to kill himself. At the same time, he has a strange perception of his body, he feels the strangeness of it for the first time: I sat down at the edge of the bed. I could hear the drip from the faucet; it seemed more insistent now, had sped up slightly or taken on a kind of asymmetry. I sat listening, my eyes following the floral pattern of the room's wallpaper as if somehow to use it to force the drip back to its regular rhythm. But no, the wallpaper too had quirks and irregularities, roses giving way to flowers I couldn't name, these to small, bent figures in frocks and kerchiefs, my vision beginning to blur with the dim, tiny detail of them. Almost as an afterthought I took a packet of razor-blades out from my toiletries bag, the double-edged kind that were not much in use any more – I had had them since Africa, had packed them against some special need and then they'd remained there in my bag for years, till I took them out now. I had noticed them in passing while packing my things to leave the village; though perhaps the thought had already begun to form then at the back of my mind, required only that I should have come to the proper end of things, that all possibilities be exhausted. [...] This was my body: for a moment I understood with perfect clarity what it meant to have a body, the wonder and the tyranny of it, the strangeness. For a long time I sat 55

exploring the textured surface of my skin, the lines of my knuckles and palms, the hairs and moles on my chest and arms. I had carried a body for so many years and yet wasn't on familiar terms with it – it might have been some strange thing washed up by the sea, sprouting limbs whose purposes, lost in the recess of time, would never be known. ( WSHG : 312f.)

We as readers are then in the middle of the act of him trying to commit suicide. Vittorio feels himself ebbing away, slipping toward sleep, falling into the unconscious. To him it feels like he is finally reaching home, a place where he belongs: I lost heart then, at the blood – there was an instant when I seemed to black out, when there was only the panic, the animal pounding of my heart. I closed my eyes and a kind of calm returned, but I couldn't face that instant's panic again, to see the blood's first pulsing out; and so I sat there with my single cut wrist thinking, it would do, the cut had been clean and deep, I had not made such a mess of it. [...] Something was ebbing away from me, I had the sensation of that, though it was not my very self, not the essence of me, merely the waking part. Or so it seemed, merely what I could after all do without. [...] I felt myself slipping toward sleep, felt it beckoning before like a country to reach, like home. Young maidens in kerchiefs and frocks were waiting for me there, had made me a bed of roses and daisies and angels' tears, if only I could get to it, could hold on. ( WSHG : 315)

5.5 Memory and Fixation on the Past

Memories play an important part in migrant literature, for the traveller or the person migrating always has a past and a history somewhere else he constantly refers to. Memory and fixation on the past are equally of importance in LOTS , IAGH and WSHG .

A definition of what memories are can be found in Löschnigg's (2004) article "Historical Perspectives on Migrant Communities in the Contemporary Canadian Novel: The Case of Rudy Wiebe’s ‘Sweeter than All the World’ (2001)". He writes that memories, it is generally agreed now, are not objective representations of past experience in the sense of retrieved storage, but are subjective and highly selective reconstructions of the past. [...] all personal remembrance is located within a social framework which Halbwachs 18 called the collective memory (" mémoire collective "). So, memories must not be mixed up with actual history, although one could discuss in how far history can really be called "truths" that have actually happened, and in how far they are just fictional constructions. However, memory is not an objective representation of the past, but liable to subjective reconstructions of re-constructions of the past. In the case of Vittorio, memories often mingle with dreams, visions or other forms of images.

While still being a child in Italy, images and memories of his father would emerge in Vittorio: Sometimes, though, an image of my father would surface from my memory, dredged up like the fragment of a dream […] I had an image of them too, sitting sullen and stoop-shouldered before a fire that was dying out, the room growing dark around them. […] The memory was so dim and insubstantial that I could not say if it had actually happened, or if the man I saw in it was really my father or merely a man I had imagined as him; ( LOTS: 37)

After his mother's death Vittorio falls into a world of dreams: The next few weeks I passed in a delirium. I had contracted pneumonia, and spent the

18 Löschnigg refers to the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1925) and his work Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire .

rest of the voyage, and some time after it, in a high fever. It seemed I had fallen into the world of dreams, where no object or image had the meaning normally assigned to it, hid some secret about itself that I must discover; and all day and night my mind raced, working out complicated schemes and theories that might account for all the disparate facts, that might piece them together at last into a final magical solution. But just when the solution seemed near, an odd image would intrude: the face of Dr. Cosabene peering over me, distorted like an object in a curved mirror; ( LOTS : 233) Before these events happen, namely his mother dying, he has a few moments of clarity witnessing his mother's funeral. Then he catches a high fever: But all these later events happened in a mist. Before the mist set in, though, I was granted a few final moments of clarity – time enough to witness my mother's funeral, which took place the morning after her death, and which I was allowed to attend because no one, not even myself, had noticed that I was burning with fever. (LOTS : 234)

Memories of Italy come to the surface accidentally and spontaneously: The words of a song were floating into my head, surfacing like sunken relics from a place that was no longer visible on the horizon, that had been swallowed into the sea: Vorrei far ritornare un' ora sola Il tempo bello della contentezza Quando che noi giocando a vola vola Di baci i' ti coprivo e di carezze. (LOTS : 237) In other cases, Vittorio is reminded of a past situation by certain objects, movements or smells: The porch had windows all around, pleasant and warm when the sun was shining, with an air of dreamy indolence that made me think of summer days out tending the sheep in Valle del Sole; ( IAGH : 10)

I nodded off for a moment, imagined that I was back at the ship that had brought me to Canada, reliving the dreamy roll and swell of the storm we'd passed through. (IAGH : 26)

Another catalyst for his recalling of Italy is the architecture of Canadian houses when he is 58

interviewing the Italian community around Mersea: One of my final interviews was with an old man from Castilucci who lived with his son along the lakeshore. The house was set back from the road like a Roman villa, and seemed to aspire, with its pillared entrance and arching balustrade, to the pretensions of one; I had seen a hundred variations of it over the summer, this confusion of flourishes, intended somehow to recall Italy though they had nothing to do with the plain stone dwellings people had lived in there. Behind the house long rows of greenhouses stretched toward the lake, blocking a view of it though it seemed held in the sky's hollowness like a reflection, a breeze wafting in from it laced with subtleties of texture and smell like forgotten words. ( IAGH : 279)

The weather is also something that reminds him of his past, either it reminds him of his childhood in Valle del Sole or in Mersea: I drove home. It was warm out, almost balmy, the air laden with smells that the winter had held in check. In the damp warmth, the lingering piles of dirty snow in parking lots and at the edges of driveways looked alien, anachronistic. As a child in Italy, at this time of year, I would wonder sometimes above our village with my friend Fabrizio to search out the snowfields still nestled among the higher slopes, playing with him there as if in full winter while below us the valley lay stretched out already coloured over by the wheat- and olive- greens of spring. ( WSHG : 64) Memories of his first month in Canada are evoked through the cold and wet weather: The weather continued cold and wet. April weather, not quite free of the shackles of winter. It put me in mind of my first month in Canada, closed off in the house with Rita, just a baby then, and the cousin who'd come to look after her. ( WSHG : 117)

The past perceived like another country you could walk to is a common metaphor when talking about memories and the past. Through a particular smell Vittorio is taken back to his past. There are some memories almost forgotten, that is why he feels his "body would burst with the pressure of remembering": There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the 59

present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house. ( IAGH : 45) When Vittorio's grandfather dies he has trouble calling up his image. He only remembers what his room and his withered limbs were like: My grandfather. I tried to call up an image of him, to feel now the news of his death, could remember only his narrow room, his pale withered limbs. His death seemed an anachronism, unduly delayed, the abstraction of an absence already long complete. (IAGH : 126) What he does remember, though, when thinking of his deceased grandfather are the funerals he used to witness as a child in Valle del Sole: I thought of the funerals in Valle del Sole, the keening processions to the grave, the desolation of them, and felt chilled somehow to think of the life still going on there without me. ( IAGH : 126)

In the second book Vittorio is interviewing Italians who have migrated to Canada. He does this work during the summer. While doing the interviews he comes across a lot of memories of his own past and he realizes that a lot that is said by the people is not the "real past", but something that is constructed for the machine that records them: [...] these interviews awakened memory in me like a prod, through the bone-familiar inflections of people's speech, the lingering Samnite stolidity of their features. The small unease I'd felt since the start of the project grew more insistent: there was always now the moment of recognition, when people drew me like a witness into their pasts. "But you were born there, you remember what it was like." But I wasn't part of their pasts, I wanted to say, not the official ones they constructed for the machine, that left out somewhere the essentials, the flies, the heat, the colour of evening light, some texture of things that could hold what wasn't spoken between us. (IAGH : 276f.)

Towards the end of the second book Vittorio is teaching in Nigeria. One day he finds a snake in the kitchen which immediately brings back his past, that is, the morning when his mother was bitten by a snake and he stared at the blue eyes of the man Cristina was with in the stable: I drew back, my heart pounding, the snake outlined now, a long, slim green, in the window's light, a mamba perhaps, deadly. I seemed to process a thousand thoughts in an instant, seemed to need to kill it and yet take away from it some uncertain 60

advantage or blessing, as if it had come like a messenger out of my own past; but the snake remained where it was, placid but alert, its tapered head flexed in calm tensed awareness of me. For a moment an absolute stillness seemed to settle over the room, I at my end and the snake at his, staring; and then finally the snake seemed to reach a decision, slithered and instant, and was gone. ( IAGH : 316)

Another situation that makes him think of his childhood in Italy is the church and the rituals that go with it. Vittorio is sitting in a Catholic church in Toronto when all the memories from his childhood and his growing up come to his mind: This had always been the moment for me, because of that first communion of voices, that rising up, when faith had felt truly possible, when it had seemed to hover before me almost graspable, almost mine. I was singing now, the words came: I was a child again in a small village church in Italy; I was a child at St. Michael's in Mersea. What had I wanted then, what would the boy that I was have seen in the man I' become? All that longing and hope, what had it come to? My head was filled with a rush of images, my whole past seeming to tumble through me like something being taken away, that there was no going back to; and then I was crying. ( WSHG : 84f.)

Vittorio sees a chestnut vendor in Toronto, who reminds him of another chestnut vendor he once saw in Italy. This image has lain for many years in his memory like a photograph growing yellow and has suddenly come to surface: Across the street, a vendor was selling roasted chestnuts from a trolley, a grizzled man in an apron and cap with a disconcerted look as if he'd been tricked by a sudden cold into appearing here out of season. I had an image of a chestnut vendor I'd seen in Italy once, of his own grizzled face and crooked teeth. It might have been at the harbour in Naples, when my mother and I had caught the boat for Canada. All the years since then that image had lain in my memory like a photograph growing yellow in a drawer. What could it mean to have called it up now, what use could I have for it? Long ago the instant it referred to had vanished utterly from the earth, and yet this record of it had stuck in my mind as if at some moment it might be of worth to me. ( WSHG : 123)

At one point Vittorio compares his half-phrases of memory to lists of contents written out on boxes that could never be opened. He refers to the memories of his childhood in Italy, 61

especially the pair of blue eyes that he saw. He wants to say something to Rita about his suspicion that John is her father, but is not sure of it and therefore afraid that his bringing up the subject might destroy the relationship between them: I was on the verge of saying something to her now but was afraid that even the small bit of certainty I had would slip from me then – it had all been so long ago, from another life, set out in the approximations and half-phrases of memory like lists of contents written out on boxes that could never be opened. [...] But still across the years, an impression had persisted: I remembered the flies, the heat, the rustle of leaves, two eyes staring out from a stable door. I had a relationship to the eyes like one might have to some crucial, irretrievably lost object - I'd never expected to see them again, had long ago consigned them to the unexplainable, the out-of-reach, and yet in some under-narrative of the mind there had always been the point where they recurred, like in some final meeting place, the denouement of a story or life, where every loose end was tied and every lost thing restored. ( WSHG : 153)

Vittorio at one point has a hard time differentiating between dreams and memories. He compares it to mirrors mirroring back the mirrored reflection: Sometimes I dreamt I was redreaming the dreams I had as a child. That was the worst, because in daylight then I couldn't piece together what was the dream and what the dream's dreaming, back and back like the infinite regression of mirrors mirroring back your mirrored reflection. The dreams churned up memories, associations, that floated in the grey of almost-possibility like sea things briefly darkening the sea's rippled surface: this might have happened, or this might have been what the dream's dream had made me dream might have happened. ( WSHG : 154)

While Vittorio is still struggling to come to terms with the past, Rita has got over it and can totally live in the present now. Vittorio describes her as being only a visitor in the past: The village looked like an enchanted place cut off in the mist like that, a pocket of the past only some magic spell could get you away from, where I was being left to languish now while Rita returned to the present, to what was real, what had to be got on with. She had only been a visitor here in the past. (WSHG : 283f.)

At the end of WSHG , Vittorio, after his suicidal attempt, is at the beach of a Kenyan island 62

looking back on the past, coming to the conclusion that in memories – compared to dreams – "there is no final awakening to the actual truth of things": Sometimes I awake in the middle of the night and there is an instant when a dream or just the residue of all the images my memory has churned up during the day makes me imagine that I'm back in some moment of the past, a child again in my mother's bed or rising up on a summer dawn on the farm or in my corner apartment in Toronto, listening for the clack of the streetcar or the drifting late-night voices of passersby. [...] In its way, the time I have spent here now writing these words has seemed this same hovering between waking and dream, this effort to hold intact an illusion; except in memory there is no final awakening to the actual truth of things, only the dream, only the little room the mind makes for itself with no doorway to the outside. ( WSHG: 317f.) Sitting here on the island now, he tries to describe his childhood departure from Valle del Sole. He remembers the rain on the day he left. With these memories a photograph comes to his mind, one that shows his mother, being pregnant with Rita, and him. He is asking himself what "the real story" to this memory is, which seems to be forever lost to him: Once, I was sitting here trying to describe my childhood departure from Valle del Sole when I suddenly remembered the rain, how I'd heard it building at dawn, how every aspect of that day had been suffused with it though I'd almost forgotten it; [...] But thinking the scene over again afterwards, I realized there was something else I'd forgotten: the photograph of my mother and me that Marta had preserved, taken that very day, or so Marta said, though there is no sign in it of the rain. There is some simple explanation, surely – maybe there was no rain, after all, or maybe the photo was taken at some other time. But the fact remains that the real story is forever lost to me, that I cannot now, or ever, account for the rainless instant that the photo represents. Perhaps there are always these moments that can' t be accounted for, that can' t be made to fit, as if the story of a life, to verge toward the truth, should always imply at every instant the dozens of other versions of things that must be suppressed to make way for a single one. ( WSHG : 318f.)

As Vittorio puts it, life offers many versions of one and the same story, but these are suppressed, so that there is a single one in the end that is kept alive and passed on from one person or generation to the other. 63

5.6 Silence, Passiveness and Invisibility

Silence is defined as the absence of speech. A silent person is someone who is not speaking. Silence is interpreted differently, positive or negative, depending on the cultural frame someone moves in. Still, there are different forms of silence. One could be silent for a short time because he/she is reflecting on something. But if this kind of silence persists for a long time, for years or a life time, then this must be regarded as the consequence of something that has been repressed. Then this person is unable to speak because there might be memories or circumstances that prevent him from showing his feelings. Taking the novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa as an example, one can find silence as a pattern there, a symbol of having been victimized, the inability to talk about the past because it burdens one so much.

In the novels by Nino Ricci silence is a significant feature too. Especially Mario is the one who remains silent for almost all his life. He is not able to connect to his son and, what is even worse, he totally ignores Rita. Even Vittorio takes up some of Mario's character traits. In IAGH Vittorio gets more and more depressed, he withdraws into himself and hardly lets anyone get near him.

This chapter has been called "Silence, Passiveness and Invisibility", since these terms belong somehow together. Someone who is silent is usually passive and invisible to others. So, this chapter is supposed to show how the characters in the novels cope with silence, with being voiceless or mute, with inarticulateness, "shadows", passiveness, inertia and invisibility.

Mario has always been a phantom or a ghost to Vittorio, even in his mind back in Valle del Sole. It did not surprise me that he [my father] had that power, because in my mind my father was like a phantom, some dim ghost or presence who could sometimes harden into the mute solid substance of a human form and then suddenly disperse again, spread out magically until he was invisible and omnipresent. […] and because my mother told me little else about him, and we had no pictures of him in the house, I sometimes imagined that he had no face at all, merely a shadowy blank that hid him from the world like a veil. ( LOTS: 36)

Since the villagers avoid Cristina because of her being and acting so different from the others, she is avoided by the women and indifferent to the men, as if she were invisible: [...] but the men, when my mother came round to serve them, made way for her with a casual indifference, as if she were invisible, and wrapped up in their own conversations they did not bother so much as to glance up at her as they took a drink or pastry from her proffered tray. ( LOTS : 143)

After the journey on the ship and after his mother's death Vittorio finds himself in a hospital where a thousand wild voices were babbling incoherently, which alludes to the biblical story of "The Tower of Babel". Here, for a change, Vittorio is hearing too many voices, whereas, most of the time he would just need that one voice that is not speaking to him: "Later, in a hospital ward where a thousand wild voices babbled incoherently around me, I had two visitors." ( LOTS : 233)

The silent train ride with his father when Vittorio is let out of hospital is characteristic of their relationship from now on. This silence between them can be compared to the desolate, bleak and snow-covered Canadian landscape around them: [...] everyday afterwards, until my fever had finally broken, he came to sit beside me, though he never spoke a word, only peered at me through his watery eyes, his cap clutched in his hands like a talisman. When I was let out of the hospital we rode together on a coal-dust-filled train, my father holding the baby in his awkward arms while we rolled across a desolate landscape, bleak and snow-covered for as far as the eye could see. ( LOTS : 234)

The first weeks in Mersea are to Vittorio like a journey through fog. People and objects appear and disappear. His father is like a stranger to him, surrounded by his shadow which seems to take him in too: Those first weeks in Mersea were like a journey through fog – objects seemed to emerge like phantoms, shimmer briefly into focus, fade away. People too: the strange half-familiar faces of the paesani who came to visit us, sullen and restrained as at a funeral; my father. When he'd come for me in Halifax after the crossing, the two of us face to face then on the long train ride in, while the baby sat apart in its hamper like some parcel to be delivered, he had seemed after his five year's absence from my life 65

like someone who had nothing to do with me, who was outside of me like a stranger, who I had to think about, be awkward with, only because I was sitting beside him. But more and more it began to seem that some shadow surrounding him took me in too, that he was not just outside but inside me somehow, so I could not see how things were now except through his shadow. ( IAGH : 3) Objects in their house seem to be as mute and stubborn as the people who live there, i.e. Vittorio's father: But if the house had any informing spirit it didn't seem to reside in its objects, which despite their novelty gave no feeling of welcome to the rooms that held them, refusing to give up their histories, sitting stubborn and mute in their separate spaces like things that had turned their backs to you. ( IAGH : 6f)

Mario's presence to Vittorio is merely a kind of gloom that surrounds him, no matter how often they spend time together. : But though we were together more often now, my father's presence seemed still merely a kind of gloom that surrounded me, my body tensing against him like a single hard muscle when he was near, taking in only his animal scent and then the shape he cut like black space in a landscape. [...] But usually he was silent [...] ( IAGH : 29f.)

Vittorio comes to the conclusion that Mario's "ghostly familiarity then [was] like a mirror [he] looked into" ( IAGH : 31), but everything seems to change for the better with the arrival of Aunt Teresa: "[…] With my aunt's arrival things began to change, the mood of the house, the careful eggshell order that had established itself." ( IAGH : 39)

The silence between Vittorio and Mario is an oppressive one, one that divides them deeply, making them unable to really communicate with each other: [...] what divided us wasn't our anger or our hate but merely this silence, my being unable to make the simplest offhand comment or begin the simplest conversation. There seemed some common ground between us I couldn't break through to though I could sense every subtle motion of his mind as if he were a thing I myself had created, some need in him I couldn't give myself over to though I couldn't bear the pressure of it on those Sunday drives, his dark, hunched silences beside me. ( IAGH : 142)

At times, Vittorio feels the pale inertness of his body like glass: "At home I lay on my bed in a kind of stupor, tried to read, decided to take a bath. For a long time I lay perfectly still in the water, letting it smooth out till it held the pale inertness of my body like glass." ( IAGH : 214)

In Nigeria Vittorio senses this trans-cultural state he finds himself in. Distancing himself from his Italian and Canadian life, he realizes his being invisible that bars him from establishing a relationship to other people: That invisibility seemed in the end what most defined my stay in the country. If I'd fought against it, refused to obscure myself behind my difference, I might have broken through to some truer level of exchange with people, become real, an individual; but there seemed always a risk in the transition, a challenge to the accepted order, always the line to be walked between this innocuous thing I was seen as and the darker history I might cross back into. ( IAGH : 306)

Even after Mario's suicide the oppressive silence still lingers on: My father had drowned in our irrigation pond. No one mentioned suicide and yet it seemed the word behind every other one, every condolence, every silence. The silence was the oppressive thing, at our house, at the funeral home, the long procession of solemn mourners before the closed coffin, reduced to a mute, awkward restraint in the face of our humiliation. I learned only the barest facts of what had happened, that he'd gone missing one day, that Rocco had found him several days later in the pond. (IAGH : 327)

In WSHG Vittorio has a dream while still being in Kenya. In this dream memories of his childhood come to the surface, but at the same time, there is an optimistic and hopeful prospect of his future and his new life that is awaiting him, a life that is defined by voice, action and visibility: But that night I had a dream: I was walking along a mountain path, and behind me the shepherds had gathered in their flocks and pitched their tents and started their music because the night was coming on, but still I continued to walk, with that peculiar feeling of lightness the mountains give, the sense that just ahead some new vista will be revealed or some new freedom hitherto unimaginable be offered out. The path I was on was neither gentle nor steep, the darkness that was gathering was not the black of 67

blackest night nor yet quite without threat; [...] Then, as I walked, small flickers began to appear in the valley beneath me: bonfires like the ones we would light on Christmas Eve when I was a child, the little messages we'd send out to join ourselves with the scattered villages and farms throughout the valley. There was just a handful at first but then more, spreading across the valley like code, a slow wordless coming-together, and I stood watching from the slopes as the valley lit up with them, ten thousand of them burning away, sending their sparks up into the night that floated an instant, then died, as if bidding goodbye. ( WSHG : 321f.)

5.7 The Feeling of Loss and Loneliness

When analyzing LOTS , IAGH and WSHG one needs to include the issues of loss and loneliness. In this context, words like isolation , solitude , remoteness , hollowness or emptiness will also be considered. Speaking of the terms of isolation and solitude , according to Brian Hatton 19 , there are significant differences between the two: "By solitude I do not mean isolation. Isolation is a state of nature; solitude is the work of culture. Isolation is an imposition, solitude a choice." (Chambers 1994: 49)

Vittorio often recalls the agony of the afternoons alone with his baby sister when he was watching her while the rest of his family was working outside in the fields: "[...] finally I was being left alone in the house the entire afternoon to tend to her while my aunt was out in the fields [...] What I never told my aunt was the agony for me of these afternoons alone." ( IAGH : 44)

Aloneness not always feels like a burden to Vittorio. Sometimes he regards it as a familiar and pleasant feeling, for example, when he is sitting in church remembering the rituals in Valle del Sole: [...] I didn't mind those morning services [...] the church seemed the one place where my language wasn't held against me, and I could relax into the familiar sounds of the Latin responses like a fist slowly opening. [...] and then in the hush afterwards a pleasant aloneness would settle around me, make me feel for an instant as if everything inside the church existed only for me [...] ( IAGH : 53)

With the time passing, Vittorio grows different from his family and the farm. He feels that he has got a different destiny from the members of his family, that his place is to be somewhere else, not on the farm with "the isolation of them": I emerged from these days, the isolation of them, as from a soundless dark, dazed

19 Iain Chambers quotes here Brian Hatton, 'From Neurosis to Narrative', in Linda Brown and Deyan Sudjic (eds), Metropolis. New British Architecture and the City , London, ICA, 1988.

somehow by the return of the others, the complex mundane world they brought back with them. Day by day they grew more alien, seemed to share the same strange features that made them different from me, that set us apart as surely as if we'd come from different countries or spoke a different language ( IAGH : 67)

Not only Vittorio feels isolated and alone, but Rita, above all, is practically on her own all the time: "In the mornings I'd wake her when I got up for school; but beyond that she was on her own, seeming to have fashioned for herself a small, quiet life with its own child's logic and order. ( IAGH : 83)

Rita leaves the Innocente family after being adopted by the Amhersts. Her absence does not seem to attract much attention in the family, but Vittorio senses the loss of her, like a hole in the room: "I'd somehow imagined Rita's absence would go unremarked but when we sat down to supper Friday evening her empty place was like a hole in the room." ( IAGH : 103)

Crystal is a character that appears for a short time in IAGH . Vittorio and Crystal resemble an island together, sharing a joined aloneness: "For a few moments there [...] we seemed to form an island, held safe in our aloneness" (IAGH : 175).

Vittorio starts to feel at home in his aloneness because he realizes it as part of him that he cannot get rid of. He even tries to carry it with some dignity: [In my next three years at Centennial] I began to feel more at home in my aloneness. It was the thing I'd most fought against, most hated, yet also what made me most clearly myself, what I'd always clung to as the last refuge of what I was, and it seemed enough now merely to learn how to carry it with some dignity. ( IAGH : 234)

Alone, old and forlorn like a forgotten patriarch – these are the words that describe Mario quite appropriately: I caught sight of my father at one point sitting alone at the end of a table looking suddenly old and forlorn like some forgotten patriarch; and in the gloom that flickered through me then I felt my continuing connection to him, the sameness, after all, that had always joined us but also my wish to have him approve now, an impossibility, of my need to escape him. ( IAGH : 253) 70

Leaving Canada and saying good bye to his father is not an easy task for Vittorio. He feels that there is a connection between them, but both of them seem unable to approach the other. To Vittorio, his father continues to be this "lonely figure" he never really got to know: And then I was already on the bus, without so much as a handshake, a touch. As the bus pulled away I had a last glimpse of him lingering there on the sidewalk, a lonely figure I'd never known, seeming still the sad stranger I'd sat beside years before on a Halifax train. ( IAGH : 291)

Vittorio and Rita, although only being half-siblings, are in many respects, both the same, namely, frightened and lonely: "We stood not looking at each other. What the matter came down to was this: we were the same, were both frightened and ashamed, were both alone." (WSHG : 102)

Being back in Italy, after Rita and John have left, Vittorio feels drawn to the old homestead, perhaps, because he is still expecting to find some answers there. He has got a feeling of desolation and realizes how lost to time certain things are: The days passed. As if by agreement Luisa began to come by less often; nothing was said, but it was clear that we were taking our leave of each other. I went by Aunt Caterina's once and walked down to the old homestead again, drawn to the place as if there was something I'd missed, some answer I might still stumble upon. But its ruins seemed as remote now, as unfathomable, as the bits of scattered rubble at Pietrabbondante. I felt a sense of desolation go through me at how lost to time things were, at the irreducible foreignness of this place though I had come from it. (WSHG : 301)

Vittorio's second departure from Valle del Sole is imminent now. This one feels more final and more fatal. He feels lost with no place left now to go home: My second departure from Valle del Sole, twenty years after the first, felt more final and more fatal: there had been the future, at least, to drive off into then, all the unknown, limitless world. It took only a few minutes of driving now for Valle del Sole to disappear from view; and then I was on my own again without destination or hopes, with no place left now to go home. ( WSHG : 302)

5.8 Tradition, Superstition and The Roman Catholic Upbringing

What is "tradition"? Friedrich Nietzsche 20 answers the question as following: "A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands . (Chambers 1994: 115) The same definition could be applied for superstition and the Roman Catholic faith.

A lot that has to do with tradition , superstition and the Roman Catholic faith appears in the first part of the trilogy. A common symbol of having committed a sin, according to the Roman catholic belief, is the snake. The morning Vittorio finds his mother in the stable with the blue eyes looking at him, she is bitten by a snake. The villagers think that has been part of God's plan to punish her: 'You know what they're saying about her [Vittorio’s mother] in Rocca Secca,' Maria said. 'As if everyone was blind. Walking around like a princess.' 'God will make his judgments,' said Giuseppina. 'It's not for nothing she was bitten by a snake.' ( LOTS : 51)

With the snake metaphor superstition comes in, too. Alfredo tells Vittorio that the baby Cristina is going to get will have the head of a snake: 'They say that if a woman goes with another man and gets bitten by a snake, then the next baby she has will have the head of a snake. And then the only thing you can do' – he made a sudden jabbing motion with a clenched fist, and I started back – 'is to kill the baby the minute it's born, and cut out its eyes, so the evil eye won't follow you.' For an instant then I wished I hadn't come up to the mountain at all, wanted to bolt into the woods and be away, my mind filled suddenly with the vision of the two eyes that had lunged at me from the stable the day of the snake, and with the fear that I had been party to some unspeakable crime which Alfredo would slowly unmask now; (LOTS : 124f.)

20 Chambers cites Friedrich Nietzsche. See also: Daybreak , quoted in R.J. Hollingdale (ed.), A Nietzsche Reader , Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977, p. 87.

It is interesting to see that religion and superstition co-exist in Valle del Sole. One of the few exceptions who does not believe in either of the two is Cristina. Her father, "at least, sang the hymns": Until I’d begun hearing these stories from la maestra I’d never thought very much about religion. My mother, certainly, had never made an issue of it – she attended church every Sunday with my grandfather and me, shared the front pew, a portion of which was always reserved for my grandfather because of his position in the town; but though I had quickly memorized all the Latin responses and spoke them out in alta voce , as the teacher had taught us, my mother did not even bother to move her lips. [...] My grandfather, at least, sang the hymns, his voice rising clearly above the rest, sounding like the wails of old women at funerals, though his face never lost its crusty composure. But towards the religion itself he was skeptical. 'My grandfather used to read the bible,' he'd said, 'and it drove him crazy. Before he died he used to see angels coming down on the clouds to get him. All those old stories.' ( LOTS: 41)

Father Nicola, the priest in the village knows how to advise against the people's belief in superstitions: The priest, Father Nicola – Zappa-la-vigna, he was known as, hoer-of-the-vineyard, because that was what they'd called his grandfather – preached a sermon about San Camillo and about how we had to help the sick. [...] Finally, as if to take full advantage of the large audience the feast day had brought in, he closed with a warning about the villagers' superstitions, which he said he would not name but which he assured us came from the devil. (LOTS : 43)

Guiseppina, another woman from the village wants Cristina to make a "cure", at least, if she is not willing to see the priest. She tells her how she should go about it, choosing either a chicken or a goat and draining out its blood in which she should wash her hands. Cristina's reaction to this suggestion is simply laughter: 'Look, Cristí,' she [Giuseppina] went on finally, dropping her voice low, 'if you won’t see the priest you should at least make a cure.' [...] 'It worked for my cousin in Rocca Secca,' Giuseppina continued, her voice still low and eerie. 'The old woman in Belmonte told her how to do it – you take a chicken or a goat and drain out the blood. 73

Then cut out the heart to put in your soup later, to give you strength. You have to wash your hands in the blood and then pour it into the ground and say three times, "This is my blood, which comes out of me like a river to the sea." Then in the same place where you poured the blood you make a fire for the offering - ' But my mother burst suddenly into laughter. 'Giuseppí, you're not serious! A good God-fearing woman like you talking to me about these stupidaggini ! I thought you had more sense than that.' ( LOTS : 56f.)

Speaking of Roman Catholic upbringing, one also has to consider catechism, fear and hypocrisy. Cristina does not believe at all in the priests of the Catholic Church, although when insisting on something she would say " per l'amore di Cristo !". She calls father Nicola a "fatted calf" who puts all the collected money in his own pocket. At school the children fear him because he has his ritual of testing the students on their catechism and his own way of dealing with an incorrect answer: My mother called Father Nick 'our fatted calf' – since he’d taken over the parish, she said, the church had gone to ruin, because all the money he collected went into his own pocket. Other people made fun of him too, behind his back; but if they saw him in the street they would still bow respectfully towards him and speak to him shyly, with their eyes averted downwards. At school we feared him because he would test us on our catechism, administering three thwacks to the buttocks with a short paddle for every incorrect answer, one for the Father, one for the Son, one for the Holy Ghost. (LOTS : 43)

Vittorio hears all kinds of stories how to treat certain illnesses or how to deal with certain situations by applying superstitious rites and traditional ceremonies. He then decides to try out the cure that Giuseppina has suggested to his mother: But now all the lore I had ever collected, from schoolmates, from overheard conversations, from my grandfather's stories, from the random horde of facts Fabrizio shared with me, seemed tangled in my head in a great muddled heap. There were the ways of hurting an enemy, by putting glass in his footprints or by roasting his coat over a fire; there were the birds that shouldn't be killed except at certain times of the year, pheasants and wrens, because the killer would break a bone or his cows would give bloody milk; there were the places it was forbidden to spin or carry a spindle, 74

along the high road or in front of a freshly seeded field, because the crops would grow up crooked and dwarfed. Then, already in the stable stuffing the chicken and its severed head into a burlap bag, I remembered my mother's bloodied hands and the whole sequence came back to me with a sudden clarity, from the draining of the blood to the final fire; [...] I retrieved the pan of blood from the stable and hid it along with the burlap sack underneath the pile of branches, covering the pile with a curtain of dead leaves to camouflage it. [...] Now I had only to wait for night, when I could carry out the burning undetected. (LOTS : 111f.)

The first book of the trilogy is called after the book 'Lives of the Saints,' by Giambattista del Fiore (see LOTS : 132) that the teacher is reading to Vittorio. The reading of the saints is something that Vittorio enjoys, a refuge, so to speak: Every day after my sweeping the teacher would call me up gently to her desk, and read to me the deeds of the saints. At first I kept up my grudging resistance; but finally I could no longer hide from myself the vague longing that focused each day now on the teacher's afternoon readings, when I seemed to drift briefly out of the world as into a dream, or deny the disappointment I felt when the reading was finished, and I had to return again to the thickening gloom of my grandfather's house. [...] When she read the teacher seemed suddenly to lose her flesh and blood presence, to become merely a voice, disembodied and pure; and it was always a shock at the end of a reading when I became aware again of her strange mountain of flesh, with all its swells and summits, sitting real and solid beside me. ( LOTS : 134)

The story of Santa Cristina, is of great interest here, since there are a lot of similarities to be found between Vittorio's mother and the biblical Santa Cristina: Santa Cristina had been born into the house of a rich Roman nobleman, but at a young age she became a Christian and broke up all of the gold and silver images of the pagan gods in her father's house, selling the pieces to help the poor. When her father discovered her crime he beat her without mercy and brought her before the magistrate for final judgement, and thus began a long series of chastisements. [...] The judge ordered her tongue cut out; but Santa Cristina, still talking freely, threw the tongue at the judge's eye, which immediately went blind. Finally the judge ordered Santa Cristina to be cast into the sea. [...] A great slab of stone was strapped to her body with 75

chains [...] But just as Santa Cristina was about to strike the water, the stone and chains slipped mysteriously from her: for an instant she hovered above the surface of the sea like a shade [...] Then the archangel Michael was standing beside her; [...] At last he reached out his hand to her and he led her up into the heavens, while on the earth a great storm was finally unleashed, and the Roman ship and all aboard it were swallowed into the sea. ( LOTS : 135f.)

When thinking about another culture one immediately thinks of language, traditions, religion or, for example, food. Italian cuisine is famous and enjoyed all around the world. In the novels Italian food is hardly ever mentioned. At one point Guiseppina brings a tray of ostie : She [Giuseppina]'d brought a tray of ostie , paper-thin wafers like large communion hosts sandwiching a thick layer of honey and chopped almonds. Every family in the village had irons for making their ostie and their cancelle , crusty diamond-shaped waffles, at holiday times, the irons made up by the blacksmith in Rocca Secca and bearing the family name or initial on the plates, so it came out in relief on each pastry; but this Christmas our own irons had sat in their corner of the kitchen untouched. (LOTS : 141)

In IAGH , Vittorio one day wanders through Little Italy, the Italian part of Toronto. He sees a passion play and remembers the Good Friday processions he watched as a child in Italy. The image of the half-naked Jesus being roped to a cross persisted in his mind: It was Good Friday, I remembered now; this was a Passion play. I had seen them in Italy as a child, had a sudden vivid recollection of the smell of horses on the air, of the clatter of hooves against cobblestone. In my father’s town the procession had ended on a windswept hill above the cemetery – I had an image of a half-naked Jesus actually roped to a cross and raised up there. That couldn't be right, the barbarism of that. But still the image persisted, the grunting heave of men as they lifted the cross into its hole and Jesus splayed and sweating against a background of graves. ( WSHG : 77f.)

After seeing this passion play on the streets Vittorio goes into a Catholic church there. He is longing for the God of his childhood, reflecting on the fact that he never stopped to believe, but has only grown distant from "these things": I had a sudden sharp pang of regret for the loss of that older God, the simpler one, for 76

my stories of sinners and saints, the hope of some sudden flash that could cleanse things, make them right again. At bottom I had never quite ceased to believe in these things, had only grown distant from them like some subtle turning I'd missed, the point on a path between wandering lost and going home. ( WSHG : 81)

Vittorio is back in Italy. During his stay he remembers the spirits and the dead of his childhood. He compares them to the childhood stories of saints that "brought you to your knees and then the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting.": I remembered how when I was a child here the world had seemed peopled by spirits, how every cranny and field had had its ghosts, how the dead had not so much gone from us as simply crossed over, always beckoning from the other side. Perhaps my own dead were calling to me now, had some message to pass on or would lift some weight from me, restore an old innocence like in those childhood stories of saints, the blinding light that brought you to your knees and then the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. ( WSHG : 289)

5.9 The Language Debate and "Double Consciousness"

Language is not just a means of communication, it is, above all, a means of cultural construction in which our very selves and sense are constituted. There is no clear or obvious 'message', no language that is not punctuated by its contexts, by our bodies, by our selves, just as there is no neutral means of representation. (Chambers 1994: 22 21 ) Language is essential when discussion migration and trans-culturalism. All forms of migration include movement and changes. Not only the person migrating and the language that stays behind is subject to changes, but the language he/she takes with him/her on the journey also changes. So, language, no matter where we go or stay, is constantly changing. In the novels one can see this mixture of the Italian and the English language that the main characters are using. It is obvious that in certain situations one or the other language is preferred for certain reasons. Another feature worth analyzing are names, for example, the question when Vittorio is called by his full Italian name and when he is called "Victor", the English equivalent for the Italian name "Vittorio".

"Double consciousness" is a term which was used for the first time in an Atlantic Monthly article in 1897 (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness 22 ). The concept is normally used in connection with African Americans: The concept of Du Boisian "double consciousness" has three manifestations. First, the power of white stereotypes on black life and thought (being forced into a context of misrepresentation of one's own people while also having the knowledge of reflexive truth). Second, the racism that excluded black Americans from the mainstream of society, being American or not American. Finally, and most significantly, the internal conflict between being African and American simultaneously. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness) In more general terms, "double consciousness" – and this is how it is used in this analysis – denotes "an awareness of one's self as well as an awareness of how others perceive that

21 Chambers cites Vicki Kirby, 'Corporeographies', Inscriptions 5, 1989, p.112-113.

22 Accessed on May 20, 2009

person. The danger of double consciousness resides in conforming and/or changing one's identity to that of how others perceive the person." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness )

So, applying this definition to LOTS , IAGH and WSHG , this chapter also deals with the awareness of the characters of how they see themselves and how they are perceived by others – in connection with language.

Language is always an indication for identity. In LOTS Vittorio speaks about the local dialect of the mothers in Valle del Sole, who only had a very basic education, compared to Vittorio's mother, who even had a better formal education than her husband: Mothers in Valle del Sole [...] formed a class: ruddy, swollen hands, thick skirts of home-spun wool, hair short and tucked under a kerchief, round bellies protected with aprons of burlap or grey linen, like sacks of wheat. [...] They spoke the most flattened form of the local dialect, because unlike the men – who at least would have improved their Italian during their army service, and who travelled more often to other districts – they were far from any edifying influence, whatever proper Italian they might have learned in their five years of schooling in Valle del Sole long-forgotten (though my own mother had got as far as la terza media in Rocca Secca, and I'd sometimes heard her talking with merchants in an Italian more rounded and precise than la maestra 's. (LOTS : 49) The fact that Cristina speaks "very well for someone from those parts [that is Molise]" is also visible when the third mate on the ship checks her passport: 'Molisana, ' he said, looking up from her passport. 'I thought so, when I heard you talking to your son. Though you speak very well for someone from those parts.' 'You mean for a peasant?' my mother said. Darcangelo blushed. 'Scusi , I only meant – you see I know very well the Italian they speak there. I come from Termoli.' ( LOTS : 192)

A lot of times the Italian words paesano or paesani are mentioned in the books when comparing Italians to the English, i.e. Canadian/US-American, or to German people. The term paesano denotes a "countryman, brother, or pal in Italian. The equivilent of "homie" to 79

Italians and Italian-Americans. Sometimes shortened to paesan. Occasionally mispelled as 'paisano' or 'paisan' " ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=paesano 23 ). This binary structure of paesani vs. inglesi can be seen in the following example: [Gelsomina says:] "I was there before but I had to leave because one of the inglesi told the boss I wasn't sixteen yet and it was against the law. But it's just they can't stand to see the Italians make the same money they do when they've been in the country a hundred years." ( IAGH : 7f.) Another example of paesano appearing in the text is: "That was the guy I bought the farm from," he [Mario] said. "Those Germans – paesano this, paesano that, everyone's a paesano." (IAGH : 31) Vittorio consciously wants to set himself apart from the other Italian boys, the "paesani " with "their strange half-language": "When other boys got on the bus and came to the back, the black-haired boy said they were paesani as well, and each in turn smiled broadly at me and shook my hand. They tried to talk to me using their hands and their strange half-language." (IAGH : 49)

Mario, as Vittorio observes, changes into a different person when he switches from Italian to English. It seems that using the English language takes him away from being such a serious, brooding, pessimistic and silent person. Instead, he blossoms, is "more relaxed and good- humoured": "But after his greeting he and my father began to speak in what must have been English […] it seemed from the way my father was laughing and smiling that speaking in English brought out some different person in him, one more relaxed and good-humoured." (IAGH : 31) Vittorio, equally, thinks that Mario changes languages to hide his truer self: "My father would lapse into English sometimes, retreating into the formality of it as though to guard from Colie his truer self;" ( IAGH : 74) So, when talking to non-Italians he would use English and a different tone of speaking: "He'd taken on the special tone that he used with non-Italians, forcedly casual and authoritative, though it seemed oddly misplaced on this mountainous, thick-voiced man." ( IAGH : 94)

23 Accessed on April 28, 2009

With Aunt Teresa's arrival at the house things change. First of all, she cannot believe that no one had thought to name the baby girl yet. " 'Mario, don't tell me you haven't given her a name! You can't treat her like an animal.' […] 'We'll call her Margherita,' she decided finally." (IAGH : 39) Even though Rita has an official name now, Mario "referred to Rita as 'cchella catrara,' 'that girl,' never by name." ( IAGH : 120)

At the beginning of his Canadian life Vittorio finds himself having a hard time adapting, mainly, because of the language barrier. The church is one place where he feels "secure" because of the Latin responses that he was familiar with in Valle del Sole: "I didn't mind those morning services [...] the church seemed the one place where my language wasn't held against me, and I could relax into the familiar sounds of the Latin responses like a fist slowly opening." ( IAGH : 53)

As soon as his English speaking skills improve Vittorio feels optimistic and more at home in Canada. With the better understanding of the English language the country opens up for him. He sees new possibilities before him now: I began to spend lunch hours with Sister Mary studying English. With her lessons and explanations English began to open before me like a new landscape, and as it took shape in me it seemed that I myself was slowly being called back into existence from some darkness I'd fallen into, that I'd been no one till I'd had the words to be understood. Later on, when I saw how I continued to make mistakes, how my tongue still refused to form around certain sounds and how my brain still fought to make sense of the things people said, it seemed that I hadn't learned English at all, hadn't got inside it, or that I could never see any more than a part of it, would always feel lost in it the way I felt in the flat countryside that surrounded Mersea; but that initial surge of understanding was like a kind of arrival, the first sense I'd had of the possibility of me beyond the narrow world of our farm. ( IAGH : 56)

In comparison to Vittorio, who has to acquire English as his foreign language, Rita already grows up in trans-cultural surroundings because even as a child she would mix English and Italian words: She'd spill long strings of words sometimes as she played, in mixed English and Italian, rolling them out as over a hilly landscape, racing them into a blur and then 81

gradually slowing them to a strenuous clarity, cryptic declarations that moved in and out of sense; ( IAGH : 83)

As far as names are concerned, Vittorio and John have a so called "double consciousness" or a double identity, mainly because they are the ones who bear two names: Vittorio/Victor and Johannes Elias/John. When Vittorio is looking for some documents in John's apartment to prove that he is Rita's father he comes across John's certificate of citizenship and finds out his real, that is, his German name. At the same time he comes to realize that another name has the power to create a different self: In the bottom drawer, the files were labelled in German. There was one that held a certificate of citizenship, issued in 1966: he had likely come to the country [Canada] in the early sixties, then, the same time as I had. The certificate was issued in the name "Johannes Elias Keller," written out in large, florid calligraphy. It was strange how the name, set out in full like that, seemed to open up some new side of him, as if names had the power to create our different selves. ( WSHG : 148) Aunt Teresa calls Vittorio by his English name and speaks to him in colloquial English after some time, so one could say that the more people feel at home in another country the more they call other people by the names in the language of the new country: Only Aunt Teresa [instead of Tsia Teresa] seemed comfortable around me, casual and confidential, speaking to me in an unusually colloquial English and calling me Victor instead of Vittorio, something I couldn't remember her doing in the past. ( IAGH : 224) Sometimes Vittorio himself gets confused about his name. In Canada he is usually called Victor, in Italy Vittorio. Still, he feels he always needs to clarify what his real name is. Speaking to John's secretary he says: " 'Oh. I'm Victor. Vittorio really. It's Italian.' " (WSHG : 144)

During the summer Vittorio interviews Italian Canadians. This way he mingles with people coming from different regions of Italy, especially with those from Molise, the same area he is originally from. While doing these interviews he notices that they lack a "proper" language. English was not very common among them and standard Italian sounded unnatural to them, so they communicated in a "new", a kind of half-language, an Italian local dialect mixed with anglicisms:

There were three distinct groups among the people we interviewed, the molisani , my own group, [...] and then the ciociari and the Sicilians; and with each year we moved up, the task of interviewing the molisani fell more and more to me since I spoke the dialect, English becoming less common among them the later they'd arrived and standard Italian bringing out in them a second level of strained formality. Even their dialect was so riddled now with unthinking anglicisms that it had perhaps lost any reference point outside the small colony they belonged to in Mersea; I imagined ethnographers in years to come going through our tapes to chart the contours of this new language, respecting it like a relic, but to me it seemed no language at all, merely the tattered, imprecise remnants of one, a gradual dimming of the world that words lit up until all that remained was the pinprick of consciousness their own community formed. ( IAGH : 276)

Vittorio, while teaching in Nigeria, and Mario are also trying to find a common language between them in their letters. Vittorio wants to meet his father half way, so he writes his replies in a simplified English mixed with Italian. This way he tries to keep up the illusion of a common language between them: "[...] for a while I simply went on with my same empty replies, in my simplified English at first but then switching from time to time to Italian, borrowing his own rote phrases to try to forge some illusion of a common language between us." ( IAGH : 313) Hence, the language between them is a forced one, a compromise, an unfamiliar idiom reflecting the unfamiliarity between father and son: I had a premonition then of his [Mario's] death [...]. I began a letter to him in English but was afraid of some misunderstanding, began one in Italian but felt reduced in it to the merest commonplaces – we hadn't so much as a language between us, had always been forced, especially in our letters, to some compromise, my simplified English, his careful Italian. It occurred to me, exactly now when it seemed already too late, that perhaps all along I'd misread him, missed some crucial clue, had mistaken for maudlin what had been merely a lack of skill, such a little thing as that, the uneasy forcing of emotion into the unwieldiness of an unfamiliar idiom. ( IAGH : 324)

Being back in Rome, after having spent some time in Valle del Sole, he talks to the taxi driver. Vittorio feels a "double foreignness" during the ride in the taxi, which can also be seen as a "double consciousness": 83

"I'm going near the Piazza Navona," I said, in Italian. "Ah, è italiano ." But it was clear from his forced smile that he'd in fact surmised the opposite, that I was a foreigner. [...] "Americano? " the cabby said. "Sì. No ." I had to struggle to dredge up my Italian. "Canadense . But born in Italy." "Ah." He cast a glance into his rearview mirror to get another look at me. "Your first time back?" "Sì." The car shot through vast, fountained squares, past cupolas and colonnaded façades, as if the city was merely so much space to traverse, to make a beeline across. Passing through it, I felt a double foreignness, that of not knowing the names of things, what their history was, but also of not being able simply to take them for granted. I might have been anywhere, just a traveller who'd picked up a few stories of a place, a few words of the local idiom, before arriving there for the first time. ( WSHG : 167) The taxi driver himself is not sure if Vittorio is "italiano" o "canadense". First he thinks he is Italian, but then he changes his mind and assumes that he must be a foreigner, an "americano". Vittorio does not really know where he belongs to, that is why he says "Yes" and "No". Vittorio knows that his identity is somewhere in between, so he explains himself, saying that he is Canadian but was born in Italy. The taxi driver seems to know that many of those who have emigrated have come back for a visit once in a while. That is why he asks Vittorio if that is his first time that he has come back.

To sum it up, it can be said that Vittorio constantly feels this "double consciousness". He knows there is not only one place, one language, one culture he belongs to. There is always this two or many-sidedness in him. So, he can truly be considered as trans-cultural.

5.10 Migration and Movement

Migration is a very general term. Above all, it includes movement, change or transformation. It further includes the direction of the movement, being either to another country ( immigration ), or away from a country ( e-migration ). If someone is forced to live somewhere else because of political or religious reasons, the appropriate term for this condition would be exile . Taking Argentina as an example, during the dictatorship of Perón, a lot of artists, especially writers, had to leave the country to live and write in exile. To clarify another important term in this regard, namely diaspora , it should be said that the word diaspora , generally and originally, refers to "the population of Jews exiled from Israel in 607 BCE by the Babylonians, and from Judea in 70 CE by the Roman Empire" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora 24 )

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, migration and movement belong together. Migrancy, though, should not be equated with travelling. Chambers explains: For to travel implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, the knowledge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a potential homecoming. Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming – completing the story, domesticating the detour – becomes an impossibility. (1994: 5) In other words, migration involves taking a great risk, for one does not know where one will arrive, or if at all. It is this in-between state, the constant journey that, on the one hand attracts many adventurous or desperate people, and on the other hand prevents them from departing from the start. Or, as Stuart Hall puts it: "Migration is a one way trip. There is no home to go back to." (Chambers25 1994: 9).

24 Accessed on April 17, 2009.

25 Chambers cites Stuart Hall, "Minimal Selves', in L. Appignanesi (ed.), Identity. The Real Me. Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity , ICA Documents 6, London, ICA, 1987, p.44.

Applying these thoughts to the novels, one can say that the region of Molise has always been a place where people have been moving away constantly: "For many years now the people of Rocca Secca had been moving away, to Argentina mainly; whole sections of the town stood abandoned, the houses boarded up and crumbling." ( LOTS : 60) The men of Valle del Sole have always been migrant workers, leaving their wives and family behind: If the cock was in the fields, the men of Valle del Sole said, the hen would lay her eggs in someone else's nest. Yet that was what the men had always done, left their wives behind while they travelled out to farm their own fields or to earn a wage, away for days or months at a time, or now, if they worked in France or Switzerland, or across the sea, sometimes for years. ( LOTS : 140) But if there was a traditional festa to celebrate, most of the workers would do everything to get back home for the celebration. Sometimes even Americani would appear: "Sometimes even a few Americani appeared, planning their return to their native village to coincide with la festa ." ( LOTS : 72)

The myth of The American Dream , i.e. making a fortune in America and sending money back home, also worked for the Italian migrants. There were a lot of departures to America, but most of the time these emigrants would lead a mysterious life on the other side of the globe, leaving their wives and children behind who were waiting for letters and money to come: While my grandfather was still in the hospital, letters began to arrive at our house from America. [...] The inevitable had happened – someone had poured some poison in my father's ear. Some word from a friend or a family member or from one of the messengers who departed regularly from Castilucci and Valle del Sole for America (and from Valle del Sole itself there had been already three departures since la festa ) had finally pierced the veil that shrouded my father's mysterious life across the sea; (LOTS : 152) The word America would conjure up a lot of images, dreams, fears and contradictions in the minds of people from Valle del Sole. Tales of America, i.e. the USA and Canada, "had been filtering into Valle del Sole for many years already": America. How many dreams and fears and contradictions were tied up in that single word, a word which conjured up a world, like a name uttered at the dawn of creation, even while it broke another, the one of village and home and family. In Valle del Sole 86

the men had long been migrants, to the north, to Buenos Aires, to New York, every year weighing their options, whether the drought would ruin the year's crop, or a patch of land bring a sufficient price to buy a passage, whether to strike out for Torino or Switzerland, with the promise at least of a yearly return, or to reckon on an absence of years or a lifetime, and cross the sea. Tales of America had been filtering into Valle del Sole for many years already. (LOTS : 160) "Others, too, had been swallowed up by America" ( LOTS : 161). Some of them disappeared completely, others came back after many years, like Vittorio's great-grandfather, "but most, after an absence of years, had returned to the village, using their savings to build a house and to live out their years in relative ease. There were several houses in Valle del Sole that had been built with foreign earnings". (LOTS : 161)

There were "mainly one-way departures" now from Valle del Sole to a place called the "Sun Parlour". It was located in a new place called Canada . Still, to most people, "America was still all one", and it remained a mythical place in the minds of the people: The Sun Parlour was in a new part of America called Canada, which some said was a vast cold place with rickety wooden houses and great expanses of bush and snow, others a land of flat green fields that stretched for miles and of lakes as wide as the sea, an unfallen world without mountains or rocky earth. But for the many of us [...] America was still all one, New York and Buenos Aires and the Sun Parlour all part of some vast village where slums and tall buildings and motor cars mingled with forests and green fields and great lakes, as if all the wide world were not larger than Valle del Sole itself and the hollow of stony mountains that cradled it. And for all the stories of America that had been filtering into the village for a hundred years now from those who had returned, stories of sooty factories and back-breaking work and poor wages and tiny bug-infested shacks, America had remained a mythical place, as if there were two Americas, one which continued merely the mundane life which the peasants accepted as their lot, their fate, the daily grind of toil without respite; the other more a state of mind than a place, a paradise that shimmered just beneath the surface of the seen, one which even those who had been there, working their long hours, shoring up their meagre earnings, had never entered into, though it had loomed around them always as a possibility. And these two natures co-existed together without contradiction [...] ( LOTS : 162) 87

When Vittorio leaves with his mother on the ship to Canada neither of them knows what will expect them on the journey. It could be heaven or hell. For the two of them it is going to be both, in a way: Here and there whole families were bedded down on the dirty pavement with bundled undershirts for pillows and thin coats for blankets; and from all along the mile-long pier came the great collective wailing of a thousand agonized goodbyes, women and men alike crying and clutching their sea-bound relatives as if seeing them off to the very bowels of hell. ( LOTS : 189) With the ship's departure Vittorio feels optimistic and relieved. The ship is described as a great tired whale. The same description could be used in a figurative way to describe Cristina: Slowly the ship, like a great tired whale, pulled back into the waters of the bay and began to turn its nose to the sea. At last the people on the pier had become a single undulating wave, their shouts barely audible, and as the ship slipped away from them I felt a tremendous unexpected relief, as if all that could ever cause pain or do harm was being left behind on the receding shore, and my mother and I would melt now into an endless freedom as broad and as blue as the sea. ( LOTS : 200f.)

At the beginning Vittorio has a hard time adjusting to his Canadian life. In fact, he never manages to adjust completely to his new home. He is always torn, but gradually he gets on with his life, so at least he is moving forward which allows him to change and grow: And yet I'd got on with my life [...] and then slowly I'd begun to make friends, to do well in my classes, till gradually the largeness of my despair had seemed to dissolve into the everydayness of things, into my small, familiar frustrations and hopes. Nothing had happened and yet everything after all had changed, not the making over I'd hoped for but the subtle shifting of things that made them once again bearable. (IAGH : 222) Vittorio is moving, he is not so sure, though, if he is moving toward or away from something. Again, his unstable and confused state is visible: And there was something I was moving toward or away from, it was never clear which, something inevitable and large, unnameable, but also, in a way, banal, all the more horrible for that. ( WSHG : 72)

At one point in the story, before Vittorio goes back to Italy, he sees himself "like an exile living a spare but leisured life in some foreign city" ( WSHG : 163) who is waiting to be sent home. Chambers (1994) writes about exile, citing Edward Said 26 : The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. (Chambers 1994: 2)

Vittorio towards the very end of the story, before his suicide attempt, feels it is important for him to keep moving, no matter if there is a destination or not. This way he can avoid the sense of being at a precipice: [...] the train finally hobbled into Genoa, hours behind schedule. An announcement was made: the train would be cleared here, it would not be continuing onward. On the platform people stood amidst their suitcases and bags looking abandoned, cut adrift, as if we had been cast out like stowaways. There was no other train for Paris until the evening. I decided to take a mid-afternoon one for Lyons – it seemed important simply to keep moving, to avoid the vertigo that set in when I stopped, the sense of being at a precipice. ( WSHG : 307)

To Vittorio it seemed important to simply keep moving. Chambers says in this respect: "In movement we recognise the impossibility of completing the journey. Between a here and a there (fort... da), however, we experience the possibility of the promise... of the impossible." (Chambers 1994: 42) So, what can be summarized in connection with migration and movement, is that one can never be sure to arrive somewhere, for the way, as is generally known, is the destination.

26 Chambers cites Edward Said, 'Reflections on exile', in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (eds), Out there, Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures , Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990, pp. 357-63.

5.11 Trans-Culturalism and Being "In-Between"

A lot has been said about Trans-culturalism and of being between cultures. Terms, such as hybridity / hybridization , fragmentation or the third space have to be included in this discussion. Boundaries are shifting and blurring, something cannot be clearly categorized as belonging to one or the other culture. Often negative emotions appear with people living trans-cultural lives. Still, one should not forget the possibilities such an "in-between life" implicates, and that "we all find ourselves on the road." (Chambers 1994: 18f.)

Talking of hybridity, there is an Indian folk tale 27 that Chambers (1994) mentions in Migrancy, Identity, Culture , which illustrates perfectly what hybridity implies: There is an Indian folk tale about some people who saw a pig for the first time. At first they were bewildered, then one of them confidently claimed that it was a rat that had eaten too much. Another disagreed, and as confidently said that it was an elephant, shrunken due to starvation. Neither was willing to give up his or her categories and admit that this was a new experience. (Chambers 1994: 27) So, what can be learned from this tale, agreeing with Chambers, is simply that there is "no single narrative or authority – nation, race, the West – [that] can claim to represent the truth or exhaust meaning." (1994: 27) There is never just one truth or one meaning, but many differing versions co-existing. And the space for this many different versions could be seen in the third space .

One of these so called third spaces or a link between the "old" and the "new" world would be the ship that takes Vittorio to Canada. Being on the ship implies being in-between. So, the ship could be taken as the perfect metaphor for a trans-cultural state, in particular, that of Vittorio. Carrying this thought still further, the storm on the ship could be regarded as a symbol of or a reminder for Vittorio that it is high time for him to grow up, for he soon will have to cope with life on his own. The sea, at the same time, would symbolize then this connection between his homeland, full of memories, and the new world that lies open before

27 Chambers cites here Ashis Nandy, 'Dialogue and the Diaspora', Third Text 11, Summer 1990, p.102.

him. The whole journey, in this sense, is reflecting a "trans"- kind of state, being in-between, between two countries, two worlds, two states of minds, two languages, etc. When the ship then leaves Italy, Vittorio and his mother have the feeling of being "melt now into an endless freedom as broad and as blue as the sea" ( LOTS : 200f.) Not having seen much of the world, to Vittorio the engine room on the ship is already like a big and new country to him: We looked down from a high railing into a dim cavern that stank of steam and coal; everything seemed larger than life, as if made for giants, the huge pipes that ran overhead and along the walls, the great outsize boilers that rose up like vast oxen. (LOTS : 203)

As suggested above, being on this ship means for Vittorio to be in a trans-cultural state, also as far as age is concerned. It is a state between childhood and adulthood. He is not really a child anymore, yet not an adult: But in a brief instant before the wave fell, all my fear suddenly drained away and I felt a tremendous power surge in me, as if a I had grown god-like [or like a grown-up] and could command the movement of the world at will; and for a moment it seemed the world had obeyed me, had become suddenly silent and still and calm again, frozen in an instant that might stretch on endlessly, give me time to crawl into the sea's belly [alluding to Cristina's state of being pregnant] and find whatever spoils of storms and tempests lay half-digested there. Then as if in a dream the wave finally closed over me [like a blanket], and the world went black. ( LOTS : 219)

Not only Vittorio, but also Mario finds himself in an in-between state most of his life. Vittorio describes his father as being like a spirit, coming and leaving: My father was working shifts at the canning factory then, [...] he came and went like a spirit, his presence never certain but somehow lingering around us always, like the house's strange smell. ( IAGH : 9)

Vittorio is moving, or torn, between two lives, his life at home on the farm and his life at school. He is in two minds about not knowing where his real life lies, waiting for his other, truer life to come: And I both used it [the distance from the others] and resisted it, uncertain any more 91

where my real life lay, both home and school now merely two limbos I moved between, each a waiting for an ending, for an opening into some truer other life. (IAGH : 140)

Vittorio's regular visits at the Amhersts is to him like a crossing over into another world and a different country being separated from his home by a chasm: It was understood afterwards that I'd go to the Amhersts' every Sunday after mass. My father never offered to drive me, seeming to relinquish at the church doors any claim he had to me; and the few blocks I walked to the Amhersts' was like a chasm I crossed from our world to theirs, coming into their street as into a different country [...] (IAGH : 145f.)

In the novels the metaphor of a mosaic is not used to illustrate Canada as a state of various cultures which live peacefully next to each, but as a kind of disease that the plants in the greenhouses contract: "In the meantime we'd begun to have problems in the greenhouses. Some of the plants had contracted mosaic disease. Tsi' Alfredo noticed a patch of it when he came by one day [...] Other patches began to appear, small islands of plants here and there with heads stunted as if by frost." ( IAGH : 154) Here it could be argued if the "mosaic disease" is to be understood as a hidden critique of Canada's mosaic-metaphor by the author, or not.

After Vittorio gets to know Crystal, he spends a lot of time at her family's house. Being not used to feeling really like a part of a family, he cannot cope with this "half-familyness", as he calls it: I seemed to have entered there as by a kind of inevitability, this house of women I'd somehow become the man of, there to complete its half-familyness with my own. Yet even in that first flush of acceptance there was already the doubt. It was the quickness of things I couldn't understand, how I'd earned this ready entry when I'd shown them all so little, remained forever awkward and inarticulate with them for fear of contradicting whatever image it was they had of me; and then the longer things went on the more I felt torn between my relief at the effortlessness of it all and my unease at how much appeared already taken for granted. For Crystal it seemed that whatever it was that had formed between us had become already immutable. 92

(IAGH : 171f.)

Vittorio is aware of these in-between lives at home, which means that not only he senses this disruption or inner conflict, but that the whole family is somehow torn apart or fractured: "It was as if this part of the house had been saved as the truer refuge against which the upstairs remained merely the idea of what was possible, the promise we held out to ourselves while continuing on with our in-between lives." ( IAGH : 252) He also calls them "half-strangers", meaning the members of his family: "I had the sense briefly of what it might mean to be accepted by these people, these half-strangers, my family, how it might feel to see myself as the flourishing of their collective will, the one their hopes resided in, instead of being so far from them, going out from their alienness now as toward some return to my truer self." (IAGH : 252)

Rita and Vittorio have always been very close, at some point too close for being siblings. After Vittorio and Rita talk about their mother and the past events, a rift seems to be opening up between them. Rita feels as if being two people at the same time: But there seemed a rift between us now. "Anyway if you ever want to talk about it again–" "Sure." But there was such a relief between us dropping the matter, such a tangible drawing away, that it seemed unlikely we would speak of it again. […] "It's weird how things happen," Rita said. In our silence I'd imagined her hopelessly lost to me, was surprised now at her note of timid intimacy. "I mean how I came to live with the Amhersts and all that, it all seems so unreal now." "Anyway it looks like everything worked out in the end." "Yeah, I guess so. It's just, I dunno, I feel like I've been two people or something, it's been so different." But I could feel myself withdrawing from her, resisting this intimacy though it was what I'd thought I wanted. ( IAGH : 262) Rita, when still a child, felt there were two of her: "When I was a kid," she said, "I used to think there were two of me. The real one, the ugly one, that I was on the inside, a kind of freak but also special in some strange way, and then this other one who wasn't special at all, who was just completely normal and 93

average and ordinary, who got average grades and wasn't especially kind or mean and who had average friends and did average things. Then I found out I could fool people, that I could pretend I was just the average one and people would believe me. For the longest time I thought that that was what I was doing, just pretending. But suddenly it was like I didn't know any more which was the real one. It was like I had to choose: this is who I'm going to be." ( WSHG : 257f.)

During the summer, when Vittorio is working for the Italian community, doing the interviews with the Italian Canadians, as Nino Ricci himself did, he needs to write reports. He comes to the conclusion, that the most interesting interviews, the atypical ones, do not fit any pattern. Consequently, the most interesting state is the one "in-between": But when I came to write up the report it seemed impossible not to leave out what mattered most, the countless things that were known but never discussed, the truer, finer, more vulgar things, the garish furnishings in people's homes, what they might say over supper, how they held in their hearts' fonder remembering until the moment the machine was turned off and they'd sat back in pleased relief at their careful deceptions. The most interesting interviews, the atypical ones, were the hardest to use, didn't fit any pattern; and the very act of summarizing seemed to steer me toward exactly what I wished to avoid, a kind of panegyric that sifted and levelled all differences into a bland, harmonious whole. I was reduced finally to a sort of doltishness, to stating the obvious, to charts and statistics and glosses that left out a haze of impression and nuance that couldn't be put into words. I worked in my room, conscious of being there at a desk while outside my father and the others worked on the farm seeming at once the fulfilment and contradiction of my report. ( IAGH : 285f.) Another contrast can be established here between Vittorio and "the others", meaning the rest of his family, in so far as Vittorio is working at the desk, with his mind, whereas the others work outside in the fields, with their hands, which means that his destiny has always been somewhere else, but definitely not on the farm.

Rita not only can be seen as "changeable, shifting, someone who blended into things like camouflage" ( WSHG : 101f.), but she is also in this unstable state, "a complex thing in between with half-formed hopes": 94

[In a letter to Vittorio] she'd included a school photo of herself, an odd gesture, inscribed "Hot stuff!" on the back [...] it seemed once again I'd misread her, shifting from one imagined extreme to the other when she was merely this simpler, more complex thing in between, a sixteen-year-old, my sister, guarding her own unknown fears and half-formed hopes. ( IAGH : 311) All her life Rita has been in a trans-cultural state, crossing different roads. She remembers how good it felt crossing the road and going to the neighbours when she was five. It was like entering a new world: "I went over there once on my own. I remember it so clearly. I must have been about five – I just crossed the road like that, as if it had only just occurred to me that it was possible to do that, that there wasn't some invisible wall holding me in. And then there I was in this completely new place, with that little red house they had, and the barn across from it, and the trees, those huge trees." (WSHG : 39)

Another sort of line is crossed when Vittorio and Rita get too attached to each other, ending up having sex with each other: I stood behind her [Rita] and instinctively opened my own coat to enfold her within it, holding her to me; and then for several minutes we stood like that without tension, staring into the falls, though it was clear in the way I held her, in the way she leaned in against me, that some line had been stepped over, that some emotion that had been hovering between us barely acknowledged had grown suddenly real. I remembered a picture in my grade-one reader of a young boy and girl, brother and sister, making their way alone a rotting footbridge over a rocky chasm, and had the same sense of beginning a dangerous crossing. (WSHG : 48f.) After their sexual encounter the relationship between Victor and Rita changes. They grow distant of each other with only tensions and half-shades of dependence and power left between them: There couldn't be any emotion between us that wasn't tinged with these half-shades of dependence and power. It had been a life's work just to reach a point of sanity between us, of normality, and now in a matter of weeks, of days, an hour, all that had been wrecked. [...] I thought of the letters I used to write her from Africa, with their careful weighting of implication like a balance set to tip – the tension between us then, the very possibility of expression, had been all in that balancing, the constant 95

featherweight of difference between what we said and what we held back. (WSHG : 119)

Vittorio then falls into a kind of fog. He does not have any energy to do his tasks. He spends hours and days in front of the television not doing any productive work. The days simply pass, merging one into another: With Rita's departure I fell briefly into a kind of a fog, unable for a while to muster the energy to perform anything more than the simplest daily tasks. I would rise and for a few hours feign the semblance of intention before ending up huddled in front of the television again or drifting back into sleep; and eventually the days began to merge one into the other, the separate islands they formed eroding into this general wash of decaying awareness. It was like the body's slow shutting down for the half-deadness of some long, long-awaited animal sleep: one day my heart would slow to nearly stopping, and I wouldn't rise at all. ( WSHG : 133)

Always caught between "a here", in the present, in Canada, and "a there", this other present, in Italy, Vittorio reflects on his existence: I remembered a man who had come once to sit cap in hand in my father's kitchen in Mersea to tell me that back in the village, my grandfather had died: he had seemed like a messenger from the void then, from a world that could not possibly, in my absence from it, have continued to exist. He'd mentioned some property that had been bequeathed to me, some land, my grandfather's house, and yet in all the years since then I'd never been able to trace a line between my existence here in this other country, this other present, and the stones and beams of an actual physical place that could be travelled to and walked around in. ( WSHG : 155f.)

Vittorio flies and stays a short time in Rome before he plans to go back to Valle del Sole. But now, with Valle del Sole being within reach, he thinks about staying in Rome, another third space , a place near home but not quite there: With Valle del Sole it was the same: now that I was actually near the place, within reach, all sense of urgency, of purpose, had left me. [...] With each day that went by, each passage I made through the city, I felt this leaking away of intention: I could simply remain here in this place, disappear here, and nothing would change, no one 96

would come after me, none of the questions I'd carried with me would need to be answered. ( WSHG : 170) Still in Italy, Vittorio feels like being in a sort of limbo, somewhere between the past and the future: "I awoke around dawn to the continuing patter of rain against my balcony door. For a moment, in the room's wash of grey light, I wasn't certain where I was, back in my apartment in Toronto or simply in a sort of limbo without dimension, without future or past." ( WSHG : 282)

When Fabrizio and Vittorio find an old photo in a crumbling farm house Vittorio thinks about the story behind this photo and concludes that it must be about one of these many lives that is lived in between: The photo called up a whole vision of what America was, of the entire civilized outer world, of what it must have seemed like from here in this crude peasant farm house at the edge of nowhere. [...] It seemed amazing that a hundred, a thousand times this same story had been repeated here: the husbands had gone, the wives had bided their time. Whatever had been individual in this seemed almost irrelevant now, just as we remembered of those ancient half-humans who had come up from Africa along the animal roads only the broadest strokes of what they had suffered or known. And yet everything that mattered was lived in the spaces in between [...] ( WSHG : 287f.).

After his stay in Valle del Sole, Vittorio goes back again to Rome. He feels an infinite exhaustion and plans to go to London. This would at least be some sort of destination, a way out of Rome: I could not imagine boarding a plane, traversing an ocean again, stepping off on the other side, all the effort it would take to carry my life so far again, for so little purpose. [...] There was no other resolution; and yet the thought of Rita still on this side of the world, still not yet returned to the fixity of things as they must inevitably be, gave me a sense of last desperate hope. The light at the balcony door faded as I sat in my chair, to twilight, to dark, though at the top of the deep well of the courtyard there remained a fugitive shimmer of pale evening blue. I went out into the streets to catch this last bit of light but the buildings closed me in, all long and humid shadow, no escape. [...] The schedule showed a train leaving at midnight for Paris, with a change there for the boat- train to London – it was something, at least, a destination, a way out of Rome, the 97

oppression of its history, its heat. ( WSHG : 304f.)

At the very end of the story, after his suicide attempt in London, Vittorio finds himself on an island in Kenya - another place "in-between" – trying to work his way back into life: When I first arrived here [in Nigeria], after two weeks in a London hospital, I thought I had made a mistake in coming, to simply another destination where I was anonymous, where I had no reason to be. But in the end my anonymity has grown on me, is perhaps the thing I will have to fight to abandon as I try to work my way back to my life. It was only after a month here that I was able to write to Rita, and then it was a month more before she replied: she was back in school by then, seemed to have fit herself back into the normal flow of her life, though she was no longer living with Elena. ( WSHG : 319) Vittorio is working his way back into life, while seeing things in retrospective, meaning from a distance. Summarizing, one could say that a third space can serve as a kind of refuge to come to terms with one's identity, but, at the same time, it brings out the numerous possibilities in one's self and one's life. Speaking in Chambers words, "there is no single model of a hybrid or composite culture, but many different possibilities." (Chambers 1994: 84)

6 Conclusion

Coming to a conclusion, after a lot has been said about migration and trans-culturalism, one can summarize that the aspects analyzed in this thesis are of great interest in the field of literary studies these days. In the future it will be more and more difficult to analyze these cultural phenomena, since it will be even harder to clearly define boundaries. Cultures and life styles are more and more mingling, people are constantly on the move, and trans-culturalism will not be anything unusual or exotic anymore. In this thesis I have started out by explaining the different concepts of culture, which is essential when discussing migration and trans-culturalism. It has been clearly shown that in today's societies one cannot talk of single cultures any more, instead one has to accept the fact that we in our daily lives, as well as the characters in the novels, are living in a trans-cultural world. The main focus of my thesis has been on the aspects of migration and trans-culturalism in Nino Ricci's novels Lives Of The Saints , In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone . Having discussed and illustrated through numerous examples of the trilogy key concepts, such as, Identity , Difference , the "Other" , Alienation , Memory , Language or the "Third Space" , I have demonstrated how important they are to the story line and to what a great extent these aspects appear in the novels. Concluding I would like to quote Ulf Hannerz, as Chambers 28 (1994) does, on the question of what world culture means: There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure that we understand what this means. It is marked by an organization of diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity. No total homogenisation of systems of meaning and expression has occurred, nor does it appear likely that there will be one any time soon. But the world has become one network of social relationships, and between its different regions there is a flow of meanings as well as of people and goods. (Chambers 1994: 108)

28 Chambers cites Ulf Hannerz , 'Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture', in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London, Newbury Park & New Delhi, Sage, 1990, p. 237

7 Bibliography

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Ricci, Nino (1990). Lives of the Saints . Dunvegan: Cormorant.

Ricci, Nino (1993). In A Glass House . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Ricci, Nino (1998). Where She Has Gone [1997]. London: Chatto & Windus.

Secondary Sources

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. (2002). The Empire Writes Back [1989]. London: Routledge.

Barry, Peter (2002). Beginning Theory : An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory [1995]. Manchester: UP.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1990). "The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha". In: Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference . London: Lawrence & Wishart. 207-221.

Bhabha, Homi K. (2004). The Location of Culture [1994]. London: Routledge.

Chambers, Iain (1994). Migrancy. Culture. Identity. London: Routledge.

Deu čmann, Ulrike (2008). "A discussion of 'Orientalism' " Seminararbeit im Rahmen des Engl. Lit.wiss. Seminars: Postmodern American Literary Criticism . U of Graz.

Dickinson, Peter (2007). "Subtitling CanLit. Keywords". In: Smaro Kamboureli / Roy Miki, eds. Trans.Can.Lit. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier. 45-54. UP.

Di Giovanni, Caroline M., ed. (2006). Italian Canadian Voices: A Literary Anthology 1946-2004. Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic.

Gross, Konrad, Wolfgang Kloos, and Reingard M. Nischik, eds. (2005). Kanadische Literaturgeschichte . Stuttgart: Metzler.

Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. (1996). Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. Oxford: UP.

Kamboureli, Smaro, and Roy Miki, eds. (2007). Trans. Can. Lit : Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Waterloo, Ontario.: Wilfried Laurier UP. 100

Kröller, Eva-Marie, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Cambridge: UP.

Löschnigg, Maria, and Martin Löschnigg, eds. (2001). Kurze Geschichte der kanadischen Literatur . Stuttgart: Klett.

Löschnigg, Martin (2004). "Historical Perspectives on Migrant Communities in the Contemporary Canadian Novel: The Case of Rudy Wiebe’s ‘Sweeter than All the World’ (2001)". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du trans-culturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 183-194.

Mertz-Baumgartner, and Erna Pfeiffer, eds. (2005). Aves de paso: autores latinoamericanos entre exilio y transculturación (1970-2002). Frankfurt, Main: Vervuert / Madrid: Iberoamericana.

Said, Edward W. (1979 [1978] ). Orientalism : 25 th Anniversary Edition With a New Preface by the Author (2003). New York: Vintage.

Sautter, Udo (2007). Geschichte Kanadas [2000]. München: Beck.

Tyson, Lois (2006). Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide . New York: Routledge.

Welsch, Wolfgang (1999). "Transculturality - the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 194-213.

Electronic sources from the Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora [Online] [2009, April 17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness [Online] [2009, May 20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Canadians [Online] [2009, April 18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_literature [Online] [2009, May 20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nino_Ricci [Online] [2008 March 04] http://www.ninoricci.com [Online] [2008, March 06] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=paesano [Online] [2009, April 28]

101

Kirman, Paula E. (1999, Dec. 20). "An Interview With Nino Ricci". Suite 101.com. The genuine article. Literally . [Online] http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/canadian_literature/30045 [2008, May 13]

Kirman, Paula E. (2000, Jan. 21). "An Interview With Nino Ricci – Part Two". Suite 101.com. The genuine article. Literally . [Online] http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/canadian_literature/31651/1 [2008, May 13]

Ricci, Nino (2005). "The Writer and Canadian Multiculturalism. A Talk for the National University of Mexico in Mexico City". Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses (nueva época) . amec [Online]. http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/739/73901012.pdf [2009, Feb. 16]

Ricci, Nino (2003 [1992] ). "Questioning Ethnicity" [Online] http://www.ninoricci.com [2009, March 30]

Works Consulted

Adam, Barbara (1999). "Radiated Identities: In Pursuit of the Temporal Complexity of Conceptual Cultural Practices". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. London: Sage. 138-158.

Bhabha, Homi K., ed. (1990). Nation and Narration . London: Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1990). "Introduction: narrating the nation". In: Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration . London: Routledge. 1-7.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1990). "DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation". In: Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration . London: Routledge. 291-322.

Brandt, Di (2004). "Je jelieda, je vechieda. Canadian Mennonite Alteridentifications". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du transculturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 153-182.

Brennan, Timothy (1990). "The national longing for form". In: Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration . London: Routledge. 44-70.

Comellini, Carla (2000). "Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Canadian Literature". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale. Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 71-80.

102

Dear, Michael, and Steven Flusty (1999). "The Postmodern Urban Condition". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 64-85.

During, Simon (1990). "Literature – Nationalism’s other? The case for revision". In: Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration . London: Routledge. 138-153.

Ertler, Klaus-Dieter, and Martin Löschnigg, eds. (2000). Canada 2000. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale. Frankfurt/Main: Lang.

Ertler, Klaus-Dieter, and Martin Löschnigg, eds. (2004). Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du trans-culturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme , Frankfurt/Main: Lang.

Eyerman, Ron (1999). "Moving Culture". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 116-137.

Friedman, Jonathan (1999). "The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 230-256.

Friese, Heidrun, and Peter Wagner (1999). "Not All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Modernity and Contingency". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 101-115.

Gadpaille, Michelle (2000). "The Swimmer’s Moment: Canada at Fin-de-siècle and Millennium". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale. Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 63-70.

Gadpaille, Michelle (2004). "Tropes of Transition: Words, Memory and the Immigrant Experience". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du trans-culturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 47-60.

Hall, Stuart (1990). "Cultural Identity and Diaspora". In: Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference . London: Lawrence & Wishart. 222-237.

Hamann, Christof, and Cornelia Sieber, eds. (2002). Räume der Hybridität: Postkoloniale Konzepte in Theorie und Literatur . Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

Hier, Sean P., and B. Singh Bolaria (2006). Identity and Belonging: Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Canadian Society . Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.

103

Klooß, Wolfgang (2000). "Forms of Identity Construction in English-Canadian Historical (Meta-) Fiction". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 81-94.

Kustec, Aleksander (2000). "Northrop Frye on Literary Criticism, Identity and Canadian Literature during His Visit to Slovenia in 1990". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 117-121.

Löschnigg, Maria (2004). "Mavis Gallant’s Dramas of Displacement". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans- Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du trans-culturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 83-95.

Mercer, Kobena (1990). "Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics". In: Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture,Difference . London: Lawrence & Wishart. 43-71.

Mulhern, Francis (1990). "English reading". In: Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration . London: Routledge. 250-264.

Renan, Ernest (1990). "What is a nation? ". In: Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration . London: Routledge. 8-22.

Roche, Jörg (2001). Interkulturelle Sprachdidaktik: Eine Einführung . Tübingen: Narr.

Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. (1990). Identity: Community, Culture, Difference . London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Rutherford, Jonathan (1990). "A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference". In: Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference . London: Lawrence & Wishart. 9-27.

Seeber, Hans U., ed. (1999). Englische Literaturgeschichte . 3 rd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler.

Sennet, Richard (1999). "Growth and Failure: The New Political Economy and its Culture". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 14-26. 104

Shapiro, Michael J. (1999). "Triumphalist Geographies". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 159-174.

Staines, David (2004). "The Globalization of Canadian Fiction". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans- Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du trans-culturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 17-25.

Stanzel, Franz K. (2000). "The Making of a Canadianist". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 13-17.

Stanzel, Franz K. (2000). "Afterthoughts on Canadianness". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Identity and Transformation / Identité et transformation. Central European Perspectives on Canada / Le Canada vu à partir de l´Europe centrale . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 199-204.

Venn, Couze (1999). "Narrating the Postcolonial". In: Mike Featherstone / Scott Lash, eds. Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World . London: Sage. 257-281.

Weeks, Jeffrey (1990). "The Value of Difference". In: Jonathan Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference . London: Lawrence & Wishart. 88-100.

Wolf, Werner (2004). "Migration Towards a Rewarding Goal and Multiculturalism with a Positive Centre: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as a Post-Postmodernist Attempt at Eliciting (Poetic) Faith". In: Klaus-Dieter Ertler / Martin Löschnigg, eds. Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism / Le Canada sous le signe de la migration et du trans-culturalisme. From Multi- to Trans-Culturalism / Du multiculturalisme au transculturalisme . Frankfurt/Main: Lang. 107-124.

Electronic sources from the Internet

Behling, Mario (1999): "Multikkulti zu Transkulti. Auf dem Weg zur Einheitskultur? Multikulturalität, Interkulturalität, Transkulturalität". [Online] http://www.student.euv- frankfurt-o.de/~euv-6136/seminare/transkultur.html [2008, Jan. 30]

Genetsch, Martin (2003). "Difference and Identity in Contemporary Anglo-Canadian Fiction: M.G. Vassanji, Neil Bissondath, Rohinton Mistry". Diss. U of Trier. [Online] http://ubttest.opus.hbz-nrw.de/volltexte/2004/136/pdf/20031104.pdf [2009, Feb. 16]

Seminar paper

Deu čmann, Ulrike (2008). "Aspekte der Transkulturalität im Roman Aves sin nido von Clorinda Matto de Turner." Seminararbeit im Rahmen des Span. Lit.wiss. Seminars: Migration – Exil – Transkulturalität . U of Graz. 105

E-Mail Messages

Ricci, Nino ([email protected] ). (2008, July 30). "Re: An Austrian student who is reading your trilogy…" E-mail to Ulrike Deu čmann ([email protected] ).

Ricci, Nino ([email protected] ). (2008, November 06). "Re: Thanks for answering my email" E-mail to Ulrike Deu čmann ([email protected] ).

106