Edvige Giunta, featured in the new Ocean State Review
From Exiled from Myself
8. Back to Sicily
One of the first times I returned to Sicily after I had left for America, I saw my mother at the airport in Catania. Family and friends surrounded her. They were all waiting for me.
She did not see me among the travelers. I did not approach her. I stood aside and, through my peripheral vision, glanced at her. Her face eager, her body thrust forward, searching the crowd.
Had I not recognized my own mother?
Would she know me?
My spirit tried to catch up with my old form.
For a while, I had to stay invisible, weightless, a ghost who floated among those Sicilians who were no longer my people, not the way they used to be.
I waited to be found.
No one saw me.
11. Shadows
At dusk my N95 and I walked up and down the streets of my suburban neighborhood.
With my bad eyes I was unable to see who wore a mask and who didn’t. I crossed to the other side every time I saw another human shape, even the small one with blinking sneakers.
What if someone were to surprise me from behind, grab me, tear my mask from my face for reasons of political allegiance?
I braced myself for the fight.
The sound of my steps and the shape projected on the ground stopped me in my tracks.
I splintered in so many parts. I did not recognize any as mine.
Startled, my shadow froze, right there, to the left of me.
13. My Sister Visits Me During the Early Lockdown
I don’t go out, not even the backyard. Maybe four times in six weeks. But today I strap the mask on and venture beyond the threshold. She hasn’t parked.
The car doesn’t seem to come to a full stop.
Her voice.
My hand covers my mouth to contain a sob,
Ciao. Ciao.
We repeat a hundred times.
I blow kisses.
Ti voglio bene.
I am too nearsighted to see her face. Mine is wet.
My sister’s car drives away and disappears into Queen Anne Road. I cross myself.
Then the house swallows me again.
14. Pandemic Passeggiata
There are no statues, no churches, no piazze. There are no beaches, no volcanos, no pine forests. No bars for granita or gelato, no pizzerias. No Scala dei Turchi. No Piazza Castello. No Santa Maria La Scala. No Capo Mulini.
Up and down the streets of this suburban purgatory, I cross from one side to the other, back and forth, to avoid un-fellow humans.
I live in a spaceship and sometimes I float around tethered through live wires.
Who was dismembered and scattered everywhere?
*
Who is the betrayer? Who abandoned whom? Who no longer recognizes whom? Over the years, these questions have surfaced again and again in my writing about immigration, that never-ending journey. I uprooted myself from an island where generations of my family were born, had children, and those children had children, and on and on, even as a strain of migration runs through our veins—Malta, Argentina, Switzerland, the United States, Spain, other regions of Italy. We are our own very diaspora.
Migration transforms you, your former self “dismembered and scattered,” at the same time as it yearns, like a damned soul, for some utopian reunion with its origins. In “Back to Sicily,” I am the returning immigrant, “invisible, weightless, a ghost who floated among those Sicilians who were no longer my people, not the way they used to be.” In “Pandemic Passeggiata,” Pia de’ Tolomei’s words to Dante in “Purgatorio V” (“Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma”), reverberated in my memory, a trace of my early education in Italian schools—a soothing connection when the original connection had been broken.
For me, the pandemic magnified the perennial purgatory that the immigrant psyche inhabits. The emotional lines of demarcation between lockdown and displacement became blurred. I spun in the dizzying exacerbation of distance, isolation, misrecognition, incurable loss. That in the early days of Covid-19 Italy was hit hard, before the United States, heightened old feelings of betrayal and abandonment towards the country where I was born and lived for the first twenty-five years of my life. How could I not go home now?
Muzzled by masks, terrified of contagion, forcibly separated from and powerless to care for my family of origin in Italy, but also my children, who lived only three hours away, and my sister and her family, who lived in the town next to mine, I struggled with agoraphobia. The all-Italian ritual of the passeggiata became my cure, even as it was diminished and thwarted, not just because it had been transplanted from the bubbling Corso of my Sicilian hometown onto the solitary streets of suburban New Jersey, but because it was also strangled by the fear and anxiety every human encounter produced. The passeggiata had lost its social core: no walking arm in arm, no handshakes, no kisses on both cheeks. Those rituals had been lost to migration. When I began to venture outside during the lockdown, I no longer relied on the disembodied intimacy of phone calls with friends that once approximated the rhythms of a Sicilian passeggiata in America. In this new world, I had to be watchful. My passeggiata became as unrecognizable as the human shapes I eyed with suspicion, even the “small” ones “with blinking sneakers,” or my own shadow. The pandemic made us strangers to each other and to ourselves.
Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone, a key cultural reference of my Italian adolescence–“Dante, Petrarca, e Boccaccio”—offered a model for navigating forced isolation. While I could not retreat with friends in a villa outside Florence, I could and did expand the number of 100-word groups of which I had been part for years. In 2009, my friend, the writer Emily Bernard, had started an online 100-word writing group and had invited me to join it: seven writers were to post 100 words on their assigned day of the week. The words would be inspired by the previous writer’s post, creating an evocative storytelling chain. After that first group, I had started several others. At the beginning of the lockdown, I was in three groups. As I watched videos of Italians singing from their balconies and spoke to family and friends on Facetime and WhatsApp, I craved connecting with Italian writers. I started two new groups, “100 words/100 parole” and “America chiama Italia chiama America,” bilingual groups in English and Italian with writers in the United States and Italy. These groups became places of solace and communion where we could express our individual and collective emotional upheaval as witnesses and protagonists of the Covid-19 historical times. I first wrote many of the pieces that became part of “Exiled from Myself” as posts for 100-word groups.
As I tap into the fear of breathing contaminated air and draw from all the concurrent and reverberating emotions evoked by the pandemic, each piece is an exhalation, at times rushed, even interrupted, at others, slow and deliberate. Sometimes the writing is the involuntary escaping of air while holding my breath. Newly released emotions take shape, one word at a time.
Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent and coeditor of several anthologies, including Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (New Village Press). Her writing appears in anthologies and in magazines such Creative Nonfiction, Mutha Magazine, Jellyfish Review, December, Pithead Chapel, and Paris Lit Up. She is Professor of English at New Jersey City University. Read more at www.edvigegiunta.com