Motherlands: In Search of Our Inherited Cities

Motherlands

For Annalisa Gueli

Contents

Home

Turin

Benghazi

Rome

Palermo

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Home

The experience of returning to my mother’s city was different from what I had expected. Growing up in Australia, Palermo existed in my mind as a kind of spectral theatre. I had nosebleed seats in this theatre; the curtains opened and closed on disparate scenes that jumped forward and backward through time. It was the stage of many of our family stories, and its setting was tied up with any notion I had of a family history. It was, to borrow a phrase from André Aciman, my ‘soul home’. By which I mean that it was not the city in which I was born, but it was the city that I saw when I glanced back over my shoulder. It was my origin, a place that I returned to rather than visited.

The idea of the originary home is embedded in our global cultural and psychological framework. The world’s religions and cultures contain different origin theories at their cores. From Freud’s theory that the first human desire is to return to the womb, to the Biblical first home of Eden from which humanity was expelled, to Odysseus’ Ithaca, home is both the origin from which we have been expelled and, if we have behaved ourselves, the promised land that awaits us.

When I was three, my parents moved from Sydney to a small coastal town ten hours north of the city. Brief snatches of the trip return to me: being placed into the backseat of my parents’ old Renault Fuego with a trailer of our belongings hooked to the back of the car; the smell of petrol and sticky ocean air when we stopped to fill up at a station on the coastal highway; the swirling sensation of motion sickness in my stomach made worse by the stuffy heat of the car; pulling into the driveway of our new home. In each memory I am crying, which leads me to believe that I cried the whole drive there. I have taken this drive from our town to Sydney countless times since, and in the intervening years it has become unrecognisable. What once used to be a winding ten-hour journey along unbroken coasts and through sleepy town centres is now a streamlined eight hours down a sleek highway.

Our new house was in an area that was just beginning to be developed; our few neighbours were made up of either young families or retirees, and the neighbourhood was a chessboard of zoned-off plots of land and the skeletal frames of future houses. Over the years, the town evolved at the same rate as the drive to Sydney. The landscapes of my youth – the rainforest remnants, the macadamia farms, the green valleys, the abandoned drive-in – all disappeared and were replaced by neat brick bungalows with terracotta roofs. My mother liked to seek out open houses so that she could compare them to our home. With her practised air of a potential buyer, she would tour the rooms, all pungent with the smell of new paint and fresh carpet. These newer houses all seemed to be chosen from six or seven prefabricated open-plan designs. In that subtropical climate, it was always sunny, and you could smell optimism in the air: every open house represented a new beginning. The residents’ gazes were firmly directed towards the future.

Inside our home, it was a different story: all our family stories took place in Italy, all our heirlooms had been shipped over in the white travel trunks that followed my mother to Australia, as did our family recipes and the language we spoke. Our walls were covered in sepia-toned photographs of people I didn’t recognise, the streetscapes and landscapes behind them starkly different from the world outside our home.

In Italian, there is no direct translation for ‘home’. There is casa, literally meaning ‘house’, but used also for one’s apartment, country, origin, town, city. There is no separation, as we have in English, between ‘house’ and ‘home’. All languages have telling gaps or untranslatable terms that reveal something about their culture. A language that has an abundance of terms for a certain emotion perhaps reflects a culture has had more of a need to specify or articulate that emotion, while one which has no word for it has evidently had less. For example, in Italian, there are two ways to say ‘I love you’: ti amo, which is reserved for the expression of romantic love between lovers, and the much more freely used ti voglio bene, which expresses the platonic love between family members and friends. There is a significant difference between the kinds of love, the Italian language is saying. Also telling is the absence of a distinction between house and home in Italian; in Italy, there is no way to articulate that a house – one’s residence – might not also be a home. Correspondingly, there is also no direct translation for ‘homeland’ in Italian. The closest would be patria (fatherland), madrepatria (motherland) or terra madre (motherland again). Origins are often associated with mothers: Mother Russia, or Bharat Mata (Mother India). Personifying a country as a mother also holds imperial connotations – the British Motherland. Or ‘metropolis’, from the Greek: mother city. The mother is the root, the beginning.

My desire to know Palermo was a desire to possess it. Until I returned for the first time as an adult after a decade-long absence, in my early twenties, I took for granted that I did indeed possess all the sites of my family’s past. My parents, my brother and I had made the drive down to Reggio Calabria from Rome, and then boarded the traghetto that ferries passengers and their vehicles from Italy’s mainland to Messina, a city on the easternmost tip of the island, from where the toe of Italy’s boot can be seen. From there it is a three-hour drive west to Palermo, Sicily’s capital and my mother’s city. In the months before the trip, I had referred to it as my homecoming. I would recognise the cobblestone streets and Baroque buildings, not just from childhood memories, but from an innate place within me. Somehow, I would know how to get around the city, my Sicilian blood bestowing me with an internal compass. The gentle ripples of the Tyrrhenian Sea would swaddle my body like a baptism, and when the hot winds of the sirocco whipped my face with the red dust of the Sahara, it would feel like home.

The best way to describe how I felt when actually confronted with the real-life city, driving into Palermo’s smoggy anarchy of traffic, is by using an Italian word, spaesamento. The Zingarelli dictionary defines its root word, spaesato, as ‘the feeling of discomfort and awkwardness due to being among strangers, or people who are too different from oneself, or in an unfamiliar environment’. Used in common speech to describe the feeling of being lost, the term spaesamento (the suffix of ‘mento’ in Italian corresponds to ‘ness’ in English, as in ‘sadness’) is also often used in Italian as a translation of Freud’s concept of the unheimlich. The German unheimlich – literally, the unhomely – is referred to in English as ‘the uncanny’: the unsettling sensation of finding the unfamiliar in the familiar, or vice versa. But spaesamento connotes more than this. Within spaesato, we have the root Italian word for country, paese, and the ‘s’ prefix, which corresponds to the English ‘dis’, as in ‘disappear’, and ‘un’ as in ‘undone.’ Literally, to feel spaesato is to feel un-countried or un-homed. It suggests a dispersal of the self, a confused state of inner unmooring.

I see now that there were two Palermos, which I had conflated – the one that existed in my mind, and the one I encountered. More than this, I associated time with geography – some places held the past, and some held the present and the future.

Depending on the map, Palermo resembles the head of a dog, an ant-eater, a wailing woman. The port is undoubtedly a crooked grin. Topographic maps of the city drawn by Matteo Florimi circa 1580 and G. Brown and F. Hogenberg in 1581 reveal an urban patchwork in the centre dissected by one off-centre thoroughfare that runs from the outer limit of the city directly down to the port, and a haphazard tangle of streets throughout. The maps show the city walls, beyond which the mountains were populated with agriculture. The walls trace the curve of the city and mountains, an off-kilter rectangle with turrets that jut out, like spades on a playing card. The port curls into the city. The mountains, cradling it. Palermo’s geological features determined its current name, which originally came from the Greek Panormos, meaning ‘all port’.

A map is a way of colonising physical space. We shrink terrain down to scale to create the impression that, looking down at it from a godly perspective, we have some control over it. Still, I can’t seem to wrap my head around the city in which my mother was born, even when it’s flattened and printed on a page. Even represented in a book, Palermo seems as untameable and chaotic as it does when one is standing in one of its streets in a sea of its citizens, motorists weaving their way around its roads with one hand perpetually pressing down on their horns, or else gesticulating at other cars and motor scooters, cigarettes clamped in teeth, everyone ignoring any kind of rule that might attempt to govern the road. Zooming out and gazing at the topography of Palermo on the page, I can almost see the roads pulsing.

Recently my mother and I were discussing the concept of home and where it is located for each of us. We decided that home was a physical place which claims a reassuring ownership over us. My mother admitted that the last time she felt this ownership was on via la Farina in Palermo. In her mind, the city had remained her home throughout my childhood. She had come to Australia on what was supposed to be a six-week holiday, met my father, who had migrated to Australia from Sicily twenty years prior, and married him three months later. From when I was born in Sydney until I had my fourth birthday in that apartment on via la Farina, we visited a few times, but we didn’t return until I was eleven. By this point my maternal grandmother, Nonna Annalisa, had sold the apartment on via la Farina and bought a villa in Mondello, Palermo’s beachside borough, which housed my aunt, uncle and two cousins. Despite having left her childhood home fifteen years prior, my mother told me that this was the moment when she felt Palermo truly ceased to be her home. Up until then, the Palermo apartment was her centre, her fixed origin.

When I was lost in Palermo, I walked to my mother’s old palazzo on via la Farina. la Farina is in the centre of Palermo, a road perpendicular to via della Libertà. My mother’s sister, Zia Esmeralda, tells me the palazzo is now full of lawyer’s offices. Now people get divorces and make up wills in the rooms in which my mother grew up. I stood outside, across the street from the butter-coloured building. I tried to imagine my mother flicking ash onto the street while leaning over the balcony railing, tried to see her ducking in and out to answer her mother or a phone call. I was here, metres from what I had presumed to be the centre, and yet, I felt so far away.

The trip was an uncanny homecoming. Certain things that I thought would feel familiar were not, and yet in unexpected moments I experienced rushes of familiarity: a sensation of seeing and being seen by the city. Sights or smells could trigger it: the waft of bread baking in a fornaio recalled a trip to Favignana, a small Sicilian island, taken when I was eleven, or a mother bundled up a sniffling child, and I would think I know this, I’ve been here. Perhaps because it matched some scene or background in a photo back in my parents’ home, or imitated some story my grandmother had told me. It was a similar sensation to that of travelling to a city in which one’s favourite book is set – the sense of encountering fiction in reality, fiction that has affected one’s life in a real way, and having that familiarity confirmed. Within that moment, I think, of recognising and feeling recognised by one’s surroundings, is a sense of belonging.

In spite of my occasional bouts of alienation, I nonetheless felt as though Palermo belonged to me, like a never-met birth parent. When I was young, I had pictured elegant dinners, my mother and her siblings as children clutching silver cutlery in their hands, heavy and gleaming, and parties in the apartments of family friends. In my mind the streets were full of criminals masked by the foot traffic, swiftly snatching the gold chains from women’s necks, sucking the rings off their fingers, tearing earrings from lobes.

This image I had of Palermo was largely due to my mother. If we were out to eat at a café in Australia and I hooked my bag over my chair, for example, she would point out how I could never live in an Italian city: nobody in Palermo would ever do that. In Palermo women would leave the house with their jewellery in their pockets and put it on at the door of their destinations. Or if my brother and I didn’t want to wear our shoes to the supermarket (going barefoot was common in our small Australian town), she would remind us that in Palermo, kids wore their shoes all the time, lest they stepped on a syringe. When I looked in my mother’s wardrobe, I found vintage furs and shirts made of lace; in her jewellery box there were pearls and gold rings. Our family seemed rooted there, and this rootedness both attracted me and made me feel trapped. Naively, I had assumed that Palermo would remain in stasis during my long absence – after all, that is how my mother spoke of it, convinced that the social and cultural customs of a 1980s Italy would be the same decades later.

When I was growing up, my mother would tell me about Palermo, and her mother – Nonna Annalisa – would tell me about Benghazi and Turin. My grandmother’s stories began with her mother: my great-grandmother Rita, who at twenty-nine left her home in Turin, a city at the foot of the Italian Alps, for Libya. At this time Libya was an Italian colony, seized during the European Scramble for Africa. Here she met my great-grandfather Salvatore and had my Nonna Annalisa. My grandmother spent her childhood in Benghazi. Like Palermo, it is a coastal city founded by the Greeks that has since undergone a series of colonisations, by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Phoenicians, the Ottomans and finally the Italians. Each colonisation left its imprint on the cityscape; there is still a hunk of ancient Greek wall, Roman dwellings, a Byzantine church. The Italians constructed a lungomare: a seaside promenade that still skirts Benghazi’s downtown area. Looking at old photographs and postcards, certain places could be mistaken for Palermo. The streets are lined with palm trees and the buildings are all white in colour, as though they have been bleached by the Mediterranean sun. Moorish arches adorn buildings, colonnades provide shelter in a maze of narrow souks and squares, Arab minarets and domes punctuate the skyline, and the neoclassical Italianate buildings along the seafront look like a Cinecittà film set. Much of this – the Benghazi my grandmother pictures when she recalls her childhood – no longer exists, having either been bombed by the Allies and then the Axis forces during the Second World War, or else wiped out by Gaddafi when he seized control of Libya in 1969.

My grandmother left Benghazi and was sent by her parents to Turin at the outbreak of the Second World War. Separated from her parents, she was moved first to her grandmother’s home in Turin, then to a family friend’s house, then to an Alpine boarding school, and then to her aunt’s apartment in the city centre. She was reunited with her parents in 1943, in Rome.

After the war was over, Salvatore was offered bureaucratic jobs in Rome and Palermo. He wanted to go to Palermo, and Rita preferred to stay in Rome, so they enlisted Annalisa as tie-breaker. I never thought to ask my grandmother why she chose Palermo over Rome. I had always assumed that she wanted to be as far away from her wartime experiences as possible. Later, when I was in Palermo, I thought that perhaps it was because the city was closer to the Benghazi of her youth, both geographically and culturally. Historically the point at which the East and the West meet, Palermo is culturally more a Mediterranean city than a European one. The islands and countries that ring the Mediterranean share a deep history of colonisation and cultural cross-pollination, and both Sicily’s fertile terrain and its strategic location as the gateway to Europe made it an essential conquest for empires dating back thousands of years. Of these colonisations, the Arab empire made one of the most lasting impressions on Sicily and Palermo. During this time, Sicily was established as an Arab emirate, with Palermo as its capital. The Arabs transformed the city from a strategic foothold into an actual urban centre. They built roads and planted date palms and citrus groves in the surrounding hills. They filled the city with mosques and souks, four of which wound outwards from the centre and down labyrinthine streets and alleyways.

They still exist today as open-air markets, and as I made my way through Mercato del Capo one morning a few years ago, I watched as fishmongers, lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths, hosed guts off pavements and hoisted swordfish onto trays, slotting tuna and salmon into neat rows. Fruit vendors yelled the prices of their produce beneath white sheets and underwear hung from balconies. One stall had a whole lamb for sale, shorn and halved, strung up so that you could see its gutted insides, its spine, its liver and heart and spleen swinging from its neck in different shades of purple and red. Whole octopuses and squids reclined on beds of ice, and the spice merchants were old men in caps sleepy-eyed on stools, with scales and orange, red and green mounds in front of them. They weighed packages of dates and dried figs and pine nuts. Green and black olives in vats. People clustered around vendors in aprons selling fried things in paper cones. Clouds of steam wafted from windows and women stepped out of the foccacerie with fresh bread wrapped in paper tucked under their arms. Fruit gleamed like jewels: strawberries and mulberries and persimmons and prickly pears. The cobblestones were wet with fish guts and melted ice, and it smelled like steam rising from bread and the sea. The quality of the sun here was different from how it was, as the Sicilians say, ‘on the continent’.

In Palermo my grandmother studied law, political science and music; married, had three children (my mother the first of them) and left her husband by the age of thirty. She could just as easily have chosen to stay in Rome, where she would have lived a different life – one in which her husband wasn’t a drunk and a gambler, but a different man with whom she would have had another host of children. Men were largely absent from my mother’s youth. Until she was four, she and her parents lived with her father’s family. The marriage between her parents was supposed to be a fortuitous match: he came from a ‘good’ family – old money, well educated. My grandmother depended financially on her in-laws; her husband, a spoiled only child, was happy to remain so and spend his family’s wealth on follies. One day, finding her purse emptied out by her absent husband, she asked her mother-in-law for money to buy formula for the hungry baby, my Zia Esmeralda. Her mother-in-law refused; her money was reserved for her son’s wine consumption, and she advised my grandmother to tend to her own children. My grandmother packed her bags, and that night she left her husband and returned with her children to her own parents’ home.

It was my mother who told me this story, not my grandmother, who hardly ever spoke of her ex-husband and gave the impression that she wouldn’t have left him if not for the sake of her children. I imagine that the decision came after a long period of feeling not-home in her husband’s family home, and her mother-in-law’s words only confirmed that she and her children did not belong there. My mother recalls that her maternal grandparents, Salvatore and Rita, who then lived in the apartment on via la Farina, put my grandmother, my mother and her two siblings in my grandmother’s old bedroom. I suppose this was a subtle effort not to make them feel too at home, because after a few months, once they realised their daughter would not be returning to her husband, they surrendered other bedrooms in the apartment to the children. This was 1960. Divorce would not be legal for another decade, and it was unheard of for women to leave their husbands. For the rest of their youth, my grandmother would tell her children that they had to be vigilant about the image they presented to Palermo society. In their social circles, they were watched more closely than others, and any mistake they made would be attributed to my grandmother.

Walking through the streets of Palermo, I thought about how the city would have looked back when my mother and my grandmother lived there. When my grandmother arrived, it was a ravaged city. During the Second World War, Sicily was the target of ‘Operation Husky’, an Allied military campaign to capture the island. The campaign deployed what is called an amphibious assault: a combination of air raids, ground troops and naval attacks. Palermo was so devastated by the bombings that more than 200,000 dwellings in the province were destroyed or damaged, and, as a result, many were left no choice but to live in shantytowns and, in some cases, caves. Even now, many buildings still boast bullet holes, while others are missing entire walls.

When my mother was coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, Italy was going through its anni di piombo: years of lead. This term refers to the chaotic thirty-year period of social and political turmoil that lasted from the late 1960s until the late 1980s. It was a time marked by mass protests, bombings, political abductions and assassinations. It was a time when the car bombings and assassinations of prosecutors and judges regularly covered the front pages of newspapers, such as the murders of the famed antimafia magistrates Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone in 1992. Art Nouveau villas, historic hamlets and the city’s once-famously lush gardens and citrus orchards were razed and replaced by ugly apartment buildings and concrete. These shoddy post-war constructions were so cheaply built that many are now falling to pieces, collapsing in on themselves like paper houses. Palermo is a city that bears its history like an open wound. Strangely enough, seeing all these markers of the past in the city only seemed to highlight how much time had passed. They were ruins, burial sites, memorials. They emphasised the fact that the past was dead, long gone.

The English word ‘home’ derives from the Old English hâm, which itself comes from the Proto-Germanic haimaz, meaning home or village. Thanks to its Germanic influences, English has another word that Italian does not: homesickness, a calque of the German heimweh (literally ‘home-woe’). The closest term that Italian has to homesickness is nostalgia di casa. The term ‘nostalgia’, coined in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, derives from the Greek nostos, meaning ‘home’, and algos, meaning ‘pain’, which derives from Algea, used in ancient Greek mythology to personify sorrow and grief. Hofer proposed entering this state as a medical diagnosis, under the new scientific term ‘nostalgia’. Missing home could literally kill you, and symptoms included fever, indigestion, fainting spells, insomnia, anxiety, loss of appetite and death. These were all symptoms that had been reported to Hofer by the Swiss mercenaries he treated, many of whom actually did die while yearning for their Alpine villages, surrounded by foreign landscapes and tongues. Up until the early twentieth century, ‘nostalgia’ was interchangeable with ‘homesickness’. However, in the last hundred years the meaning of nostalgia has shifted from describing a specific yearning for home to something perhaps closer to the Portuguese saudade: an emotional state of bittersweet longing for the past.

When I was in my early twenties, my grandmother started to get sick. It began when she couldn’t drive anymore. She lived in Australia now, not Italy, in an area where one couldn’t walk places. She didn’t speak English, and needed my mother to translate if she wanted to socialise outside our home. As the number of our English-speaking relatives grew, she could no longer participate in discussions at family gatherings, and I watched her on her throne at the head of the table, eating glumly. I wondered if she knew, when she moved to Australia five years before, that she would never return to Italy and the extent of what that meant. This is a woman who has left many homes in her life without looking back. Before her final move to Australia, she had left Benghazi, Turin, Rome and then her husband’s home. The final move was to Australia, the furthest away, and perhaps the one that hit her the hardest. Most cruelly for someone who was once a great storyteller, strokes had razed her ability to recount the stories of our family’s past. Speaking to her when I called home, I listened to the guttural sputterings of her voice as she attempted to give form to the words that filled her mind.

As my grandmother’s health worsened, I began to notice symptoms of my own: chest pangs, migraines, anxiety, unexplained crying, an unsettling feeling of abstract yearning. I had experienced this before, particularly when I was young, and it was time to go to bed at childhood sleepovers – I was homesick. Not for my parents’ house, or for a specific location, but – as I realised in Palermo – for the past. The situation felt desperate to me, I suppose because throughout my childhood, my grandmother was my most constant tie to Italy, to my family history, to an idea of roots and home. It was in Palermo, in those moments of unfamiliarity, that I was struck most acutely by how much time had passed, to the point that it seemed irretrievable – a sensation I can only compare to standing on the precipice of a gaping crater. My connection to the city felt so circumstantial.

The concept of home is essential in constructing a sense of who we are, which is why those who find their cultural identities at a remove from their surroundings – migrants and exiles, for example – often cultivate an idea of homeland. This origin story is a way of explaining to ourselves who we are, where we came from and how we arrived. We might not belong here, but we belong somewhere. Once a home becomes a homeland, however, we can’t return to it. Homeland is a country that is located in the past. This may be because we were forced to leave it, or it was destroyed. Perhaps we were away for too long, and time has rendered the home that we remember unrecognisable.

My grandmother and I have always shared an intimate bond. We have always understood one another, perhaps in part because there are quite a few parallels in our biographies. Both of us are the product of happenstance. Both of us are the first in our family lines to be born in our countries of birth. Both of us were born in colonised countries, onto earth that had been stolen. Neither of us had any history in the places in which we spent our youths. Questions dogged me when I was young, and still do. What claim do I have to the place I call my country? What is a homeland? What is a home? I have two passports: two pieces of paper that declare me a dual national, a person with two homes. And little claim to either. What determines the granting of a passport, other than politics and paperwork? After that visit to Palermo, my conception of time – the past and the present – as a geographic dichotomy ruptured. Where before there were clear borders, now everything was connected. People who have experienced the dislocation of leaving one home for another know that culture and language are not external or independent of us. Rather, they are the mediums through which we live. To lose a mother tongue or an inherited culture is to become a stranger to something innate within us. We lose the ability not only to articulate, but to speak to a part of ourselves. We dissolve our ties to our histories, and sometimes those close to us. My mother occasionally works as an interpreter for hospital patients, and the majority of her clients are migrants who, in their final years of life, have reverted back to Italian, their first language. This is common in sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease. In many cases their adult children only speak English, and find themselves no longer able to communicate with their parents. For the children, it’s a particularly brutal instance of the unheimlich. Finding the unfamiliar – the unhomely – in our first homes, our truest origins: our mothers.

A Fata Morgana is a type of mirage that appears on coastal horizons. Have you ever gazed at the ocean and seen a bridge stretching across the water, the outline of a sailboat bobbing over waves, or the craggy shore of another island, knowing that there should be nothing? A visual