Writing beyond History: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry

Writing Beyond History: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry. Licia Canton, Delia De Santis, and Venera Fazio, eds. Montreal: Cusmano Communications, 2006. 178 pp. $20.00 sc. This anthology of thirty authors of Italian heritage edited by Licia Canton, Delia De Santis, and Venera Fazio came out of the tenth biennial 2004 Association of Italian Canadian Writers conference held in Udine, Italy. While some lesser-known writers express themselves in these pages, there are also contributions by award-winning writers such as Carmine Starnino, Mary di Michele, and Fulvio Caccia. The majority of the contributors write in English, but five use Italian, emphasizing that the language of expression does not matter as much as the creative exchange between conference participants. For example, native Italian speaker Fulvio Caccia, the Governor General's Award-winning poet now residing in France, contributes a poem in French. This collection is an eclectic mix of poetry, prose, biography, testimonials, and journalistic writings. According to Domenic Beneventi, who authored the volume's preface, the writings explore the variety of ethnic experiences and subject positions in those histories. He writes, These writers explore various 'versions' of themselves in relation to their Italian heritage and their Canadian upbringing a type of ethnic 'self-fashioning' or performance each of us goes through every day. Specifically, he explains, the goal of the conference-and therefore, these writings--was to explore the in-between-ness of the immigrant experience and validate that space as a basis for a and hybrid cultural identity. That hybrid cultural identity is keenly revealed in these writings. There is clearly a very particular mentality and approach in the Italian immigrant community--a feeling of not belonging to the new country, yet a stark feeling of disjunction in the old country as well. This is adeptly explored in From Italian-Canadian to Canadian-Italian, by Canadian-born Deborah Saidero, who at the age of thirteen moved back to Italy with her parents. They had never been able to become Canadian, and dreamed of returning to Friuli for years. When they were finally able to do so in 1985 after a fourteen-year stay, their daughter found it a terrifyingly alienating experience. Saidero approaches the immigrant perspective from another angle--one we don't very often encounter. She expresses it well with, Displacement from my homeland, my friends, from all I had achieved in Canada, and the difficulties of adaptation, which was further hindered by an ever-growing homesickness and desire to go back, led me to a profound identity crisis which completely estranged me from any sense of who I was. It is estrangement and all the related emotions that this anthology so aptly explores. Saidero's piece is the only one that treats the hybrid identity highlighted by Beneventi from this perspective. Most of the other selections consider immigration to Canada instead-either from the perspective of the immigrants themselves or from their children's or grandchildren's point of view. …

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