Castaways and Other Writings, 1996–2024

Castaways. What an appropriate term to include in the title of this collection of various writings by Diego Bastianutti. The Italo-Canadian author is an admired professor, a capable artist, an engaging writer and a deeply reflective poet. Nonetheless, in his heart he continues to see himself as a castaway, a sea traveler who, beyond his will and control, has become shipwrecked and isolated, and who remains in search of the harbor where his heart will find comfort, acceptance and rest.The forty-three brief chapters of this book are not easily classified as an autobiography of the vicissitudes that have shaped and molded Bastianutti. Instead, the author offers us stories (fictional and based on documented events), verses, and evocative drawings to help us understand why he has yet to find home. He has had many homes, in fact, where family and close friends have welcomed him. However, he cannot shake the feeling that such welcome still lacks some element of fulfillment for him. As a young man, he was propelled by the storms of World War II, literally, across an ocean. He had to leave his home in Fiume, his language, and his childhood; he became, through no fault of his own, one of the compelled spirits, the spiriti costretti that the renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto depicts in his epic poem Orlando Furioso. These are exiled souls who wander incessantly, in a seemingly fruitless search for some respite from their suffering. Bastianutti cannot simply return to Fiume because his Fiume no longer exists (it is now called Rijeka). It is no longer Italian but Croatian, and his people, the Giuliano Dalmati, many who were similarly cast away, have now landed on faraway shores.And yet he continues to search.In this book he reveals his psychological encounters with the deep anxiety of being a castaway. He moves to the United States, to Canada; he returns to Italy and then goes back to Canada. Page by page, he paints for us a picture of his soul so that we can come to know him in his restless wandering. He describes his life and his work in pages from his speeches to members of Julian-Dalmatian associations, among whom he is a popular speaker because he represents the language, the attitude, and the morbin (sense of humor). His talent as an effective storyteller most comes to the fore in accounts like “A Home in a Fig Tree.” The tree, gifted by the narrator Nino, and lovingly tended by Marco, was brought into the basement each fall to protect it from harsh Canadian winters and then reintegrated into the garden with the arrival of spring. Neither Marco nor his tree ever felt fully settled into the Canadian environment. At the end of his life, Marco returned to Italy to die. He left the fig tree in Canada, also to die. A year after Marco's passing, Nino drives by the old house in the dead of winter; on seeing the fig tree covered by snow, he is overwhelmed by the sense that something inside of himself has also died. Similarly, in the piece titled “I Had a Little House in Canada,” Bastianutti uses vivid descriptions of the biting cold, and the thunder of the nearby frozen lake cracking open and sending thick slabs of ice almost to the front door of his house, to show how Canadian winters only increase his desolation. Even as spring returns, and new life begins, he remains unconvinced about the tender roots he has begun to put down in Canada, and he heads for Italy. There, too, the anxiety of exile remains, however. It insinuates itself even into the historically oriented pieces of this book like “The Drama of Dalmatia between Imperialism and Nationalism,” “The Many Deaths of the Most Serene Republic of Venice,” and “The Duce's Grandson and the Friar.” Even in Italy, he cannot avoid the discomfort of an unabating sense of otherness, and he moves once again to Canada, this time to British Columbia.Whether poetry or prose, fiction or not, Bastianutti's pages offer words of authentic understanding of what it means to be without a homeland. While in this book he addresses the Giuliano Dalmati, and more specifically, the Fiumani, his work invites all those who have had to leave a home territory behind and settle as best they can in other parts of the world. In sharing his experiences, his emotions, reactions, disappointments, and also hope, he calls his fellow castaways into a community of solidarity and understanding. He asks his exiled compatriots to look beyond themselves and to share their stories with the next generation. “We can't afford to wait for the young to come to us,” he advises; “[I]t is we who must reach out to them, we who must stimulate them, arouse their curiosity, make them fall in love with History through the small, personal, intimate histories” (153).Highly engaging, filled with historical accounts complemented by deeply personal reflections, this volume reveals the spirit and soul of Diego Bastianutti far more than any biography or autobiography. Our world today is one of numberless castaways, as a result of exile, all in pain, all feeling isolated. This work invites them to enter and find a sense of being heard and understood. In addition, Bastianutti's words are a gift also to those who have not experienced exile. His words call to all readers to empathize with a human condition that can arise with unexpected suddenness, leaving relentless trauma and injury.

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