The Privilege of Memory Goes to the Women: Melania Mazzucco and the Narrative of the Italian Migration

In recent years, the novels of Melania Mazzucco and Laura Pariani¹ have skillfully filled thematic gaps in contemporary Italian narrative. Indeed, their works lean toward the investigation and description of peripheral spaces that, for their importance, of both a historical and social nature in regards to Italy and Italian migrations, deserve discussion and perspectives within the literary realm. Migration represents a topic that Italian writers at large have considered marginal; this despite the fact that many Italians dealt with the loss of contact with those relatives who migrated in search of economic amelioration. The present study investigates in particular the techniques by which Mazzucco's prize-winning 2003 novel Vita² constructs a story that brilliantly incorporates narratives of, and about, a traumatic migration of two children from southern Lazio to the United States of America. Without shying away from predictable displays of Italian ethnicity—namely problems of adaptation and assimilation, difficulties arising from the lack of knowledge of the language, confronting the urban chaos of New York City—Mazzucco revisits the forms of the conventional immigrant novel, adding to the peripatetic story of her protagonists the personal and unquestionably metanarrative traits that her readers have already experienced in her other novels. Indeed, while in some passages Vita indulges in what Martino Marazzi's sees as an "impressionistic use . . . made of their [Italian Americans] habitats,"³ it also describes historical events in a manner that best epitomizes the hybridity of genre—oscillating between the novel and the essay, between personal criticism and romantic tale—that has become increasingly fashionable in contemporary Italian literary narratives. Mazzucco's attention to balance, her proclivity for details on life in tenements and her reflections on her own agency within the text make Vita a novel that—to borrow Fred Gardaphé's definition⁴—is undeniably a philosophic one, for it fully embodies the novelist's aesthetic project. The validity of it resides primarily, but not exclusively, in the reworking of the aforementioned uses and customs of Italian Americans that came to be well known in Italy through different channels. Commonplaces about young immigrants are skillfully woven into a web of complex snapshots, of authorial annotations, statements, and reflections of an Italian intellectual who, no longer considering Italian migration to be an undignified theme, embraces it in full. She appropriates the discourse of migration and turns it into a problematic lack of national memory.

The Italian Diaspora: A Strategy of Silence?

In Italy's Many Diasporas,⁵ historian Donna Gabaccia argues that what modern anthropology terms "transnationalism" harkens back to Italian migrations, the latter being a "way of life . . . that connects family, work, and consciousness in more than one national territory" (11). For Gabaccia, Italy's most important "proletarian diaspora" (10) is best embodied in the mass departure spanning three generations of Italians who, between 1870 and 1921 (and then again in the postwar period), abandoned their place of birth to migrate chiefly to the United States. It is to this flight, to this diaspora, to this historical phenomenon of astounding proportions which Italian literature until now has given scant attention. Martino Marazzi expounds multiple reasoning for the lack of attention Italians gave to this phenomenon. Chiefly, Marazzi indicates the relevance of the role played in this matter by the "[l]ong-standing unease of the Italian intellectual toward another Italy" (293). For migrants, the nation is an "Italy so subordinate as to be far away, unknown at home, and not easily defined by using the tools of an abstract ideology" (293), this being often, in fact, the tool utilized by Italian writers. Quite literally, for Marazzi "Italian literature [has] been an accomplice in this strategy of silence" (293). As Italian writers and their literary products are firmly tied to their social and political context, often driven by an ethical and ideological pursuit in their artistic endeavors, it is difficult not to agree with Marazzi. In fact, Italian writers often seek the best aesthetic medium and system of signs with which to represent society from a politically charged and...