The Place of Italian-Canadian Writing

The Place of ItalianCanadian Writing ITAL/AN CANADIAN VOICES: ANANTHOLOGY OF POETRY AND PROSE (1946-1983). Ed. Caroline Morgan DiGiovanni. Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic, 1984. CONTRASTS: COMPARATIVE ESSAYS ON ITAL/AN-CANADIAN WRITING. Ed. Joseph Pivato. Montreal: Guemica, 1985. The remarkable thing about the current explosion of Italian-Canadian writing is that less than ten years ago there was very little writing going on at all and certainly no awareness in literary circles of what was to come. Though Italian immigrants have been arriving in Canada in substantial numbers since the tum of the century, it is the post-World War II immigrants and in particular the younger generation (those who came as children or who were born in Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s) who are mainly responsible for this sudden finding of voice. The two works which are the starting point of this review essay, themselves wide-ranging collections of primary texts and critical essays, are thus to be seen as representative of a much larger scale of activity. To the anthology, Italian Canadian Voices, we could add Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's earlier collection Roman Candles, Tonino Caticchio's La Poesia italiana nel Quebec, and Fulvio Caccia and Antonio D'Alfonso's Quetes: Textes d'auteurs italo-quebecois.1 To the collection of essays in Contrasts, we could add the new journal Italian Canadiana , the magazine Vice Versa, the publishing house Guemica, a recent issue of Canadian Literature (Fall 1985) devoted to "Italian-Canadian Connections ," and Caccia's Sous le signe du Phenix: Interviews avec des createurs italo-quebecois. 2 Also noteworthy and somewhat daunting is the scope and range of this 138 literary activity. Most of the writers are bilingual or trilingual: the bibliography of Contrasts lists more than seventy-five writers whose works divide fairly evenly into Italian, English, and French titles. Though most are now located in the major Italian-Canadian centres of Toronto and Montreal, many also have their roots in other parts of Canada: Vancouver (C.D. Minni, Romano Perticarini ), Edmonton (Caterina Edwards, Joseph Pivato), Sault Ste. Marie (Frank Paci), Windsor (Len Gasparini), and so on. In addition, all forms of writing are well represented - poetry, novel, short story, drama, critical essay - and the literary styles used range from traditional realism to post-modernist and post-structuralist approaches. My aim in this article is to attempt to put this impressive flourishing of Italian-Canadian literature into a context - that is, to try to understand the place of Italian-Canadian writing in Canada today . This will take the form not of a comprehensive survey of the diverse body of writers, but of an analysis on three different levels of the idea of "place." First, a number of the issues which dominate Italian-Canadian writing are examined. If individual writers vary in their responses to these issues, they nevertheless, to use Joseph Pivato's words, "demonstrate similar themes and values, ... concrete affinities" (Contrasts , 31). By seeing what these shared issues are and how they are reflected in a selection of writers, we may come to understand better the commonality of Italian-Canadian experience. In the second part, Italian-Canadian writing is considered in the context of minority writing in Canada. In this section, Italian-Canadian writers are compared and contrasted, in an admittedly preliminary way, with a brief selection ofother minority writers. Part of the aim here is to focus attention upon the sorts of issues that need to be addressed in comparative analyses of this kind. In part three, Italian-Canadian writing is considered in its broadest aspect, namely as part of the Canadian literary tradition as Revue detudes canadiennes Vol. 21, No. 4 (Hiver 1986-87 Winter) a whole. A number of important issues are raised here - the nature, scope, and limits of "ethnic literature," ethnicity and the Canadian "mainstream," the desirability of using "minority" (as opposed to the new sense of "ethnic") as a key critical term. My aim here is to further discussion of the critical and conceptual framework in which Italian-Canadian writing may properly be placed. These three critical areas are large and I am aware of the difficulty of attempting to generalize about such a diversity...