‘Sei diventata nera‘
It never stops… her interior monologue on race, racism, blackness, whiteness, appearance, culture and identity. Her search for belonging is at the heart of it though she’s long stopped searching.
To look at her now, you might wonder what the problem is. Why she finds it difficult to move on from her imaginary struggle with an identity once shaped by seasonal processions – when the Sun darkened her skin and changed her ethnicity. Of course, the Sun did no such thing. It only changed the colour of her skin. Not to an ideal golden tan, but a deep muddy brown that made her palms seem pink. With her curly black hair, big dark eyes and full lips, her grandmother used to say ‘sei diventata nera’ (you’ve become black) and sing that song to her. The Italians have a song for it – they have a song for everything. It’s the playful lament of a girl who turns black in the Sun. Not lightly tanned, not golden brown. She becomes Nera, Black. So black that she can’t be seen at night unless the moon is full.
We’ve never had an Aussie in here before
She’s pulled out of a queue at Heathrow airport. Her bag and passport are confiscated. She’s interrogated, then held in a special glass room for hours and bundled onto a bus with meshed windows, which takes her to a detention centre on the outskirts of London. Believe it or not, it’s because she has diventata nera.
She lays across a row of stiff grey velveteen seats with her head tucked into her cashmere coat to block the stark fluorescence. Her hand is buried deep in her pocket, clasping her lucky stone as she sits in a fishbowl full of very quiet, dark-skinned people.
A First Nations American boy makes a furious entrance breaking the solemn silence:
…And WHY IS EVERYONE in this room black!? Do you know who my father is?
She sits upright because of it,
I’m not, she says, I’m not black – this is a suntan,
He looks surprised then annoyed,
Lady…You’re black! Ok?
But she insists,
I’m telling you I’m not black, I’m white – it’s a bloody suntan. It’s summer in Australia.
The boy is perplexed,
It’s my southern Italian features, she explains, when I’m tanned, my perceived ethnicity changes.
Well, that’s near enough to what she says, but no one cares about her fucking suntan, least of all the Navajo boy. She experiences a familiar mix of alienation and powerlessness. It’s confusing. It frightens her as she tries to make sense of the situation.
The boy gets out quickly. They must have found out who his father is. And, lucky for her she’s a temporary black person who’s only seasonally privy to the treatment reserved for poor black people getting off planes. The experience gives her a deeper understanding of the world. She mulls over the bullshit printed on the first page of her Australian passport; ‘Let the bearer pass without let or hindrance’ or some such shit. She’s not even going to double check that.
She was born in Crows Nest Sydney. Australia is not her country but neither is the rest of the world.
None of her story checks out. Her host is in Zurich on business, though she manages to get a message through. He sends an envelope of cash, delivered in person by a tall young man in an expensive suit. Immigration finds that as suspicious as her skin colour, and her trendy cap with the red star brooch she bought in New York. It’s a life-changing event. Not the man in the suit. Not the envelope of money. Not the cap with the red star.
We’ve never had an Aussie in here before! Says a cockney cleaner when she asks where the kitchen is. It’s the first time she’s referred to as Aussie.
Never?
Forty-eight hours later she’s back at Heathrow. Pan American Airlines foots the bill for her deportation to Australia. She can’t pick up her things from Hackney or collect her open-return ticket from a Piccadilly Circus travel agency. She’s given a whole row of seats on her own and told the pilot will personally return her passport when the plane is in the air and out of British air space. This is the way it’s done.
By now she’s sure the flights cursed and the plane will crash, because everyone is so damned ugly. All of them look demonic, even the whimpering toddler sucking on his chunk of snotty apple. There’s doom on every face. She asks the hostess to hold her hand at take-off because then has a panic attack thinking they’re all going to die. To say she’s traumatised is understating the event. It reopens an old wound.
She remembers walking to school with her little sister and the relentless verbal assaults. She was so ashamed of herself she hid her face whenever possible under her hair. And it was bewildering that every summer the insults changed from wog to abo, boong or black cunt. Her sister didn’t hide though, she was the fighter,
Ha-ha you fucken’ idiots!… Come here and say that
And little sis’ always got a few good punches in. They didn’t belong. They were on someone else’s land, on someone else’s planet. She still believes this is the case and works hard not to emanate the alien spirit. She would gladly go back to wherever the hell she comes from but obviously that conduit’s closed. She exists somewhere in between, in the spaces she finds herself, as an unwelcome guest on her planet of birth. Her despicable skin and features are her prison, but also her redemption. You can’t see it now, but it’s there grounding her whenever she gets complacent.
Where my mother comes from
The Ottomans laid waste to my mother’s island in the 1500s. Before that, it was the Saracens, the Bourbons, the Normans, the Portuguese, the Moors, the Ostrogoth’s and the Aragonese, who dominate the island in the 1500s after defeating the Ottomans. They claimed the Castello Aragonese, which dates back to the 5th century BC when it was known as the Castrum Gironis – attributed by historians to Girone (Hiero) of Syracuse. He rescued the Cumaeans in a war with the Tyrrhenians in 474 BC. The story is chiselled into the round outer walls of a castle carved from a huge rock, which sits in the island’s bay. The rock was named Insula Minor to distinguish it from Insula Major – the island of Ischia – a complex volcano that rumbles from time to time. You can wade to the rock from the island at low tide.
Our family descends from the original inhabitants who were absorbed by a growing population in the Middle Ages. The land is still there, on the peak of the island in Serrara Fontana. I imagine it was the safest place to live, with its 360-degree view of the sea from an ancient tower. Those at the top are always last to fall in battle, and the remnant still stands. There are endless assaults on the island by pirates of all colours, between occupations. Ischian legends tell the heroic stories of brave canonised martyrs and the miraculous victories of the saints. For thousands of years, marauders kill the men and fuck the women. My DNA represents thousands of years of rape and murder.
In the 1700s, Lord Nelson orders the execution of my rebel paisan. The British must have been invading Australia around the same time.
My mother is green-eyed and freckled, but my grandparents had a rainbow brood. It’s called atavism, more commonly known as the ‘throw-back’. Aunty Angela looks Moorish, while Uncle Charlie looks like a Scottish pirate. The Tyrrhenian Sea has a long and bloody history, with its smattering of volcanic islands situated in an ancient maritime thoroughfare. The islands were missing from most contemporary maps, which turned out to be a good thing because WWII passed right over Ischia. My mother remembers the sunset blackout rule and the sudden adult hush when children entered a room. It isn’t right for children to think about war. Ischia is one of the few European communities where the children were not aware of WWII, which is astonishing because Ischia is only 30 km from Naples by boat.
Warm and safe in their beds at night, they heard muffled radio broadcasts; the occasional hum of planes overhead, and faint distant booms they thought was thunder.
The stone
Naples smells like rotting garbage in summer, and the underground is stifling.
The ferry leaves from Porto di Napoli at sunrise and stops at Capri, Procida, then Ischia, which shines like a jewel in the distance.
An island sunlit gold in sea mist
This is the last thing her mother saw
Awe becomes sorrow
Familiar, unstoppable
She sobs and a tourist asks, Ok? Ok?
Oh, Mama, it’s so beautiful
The ferry moors at Ischia Porto
She walks uphill with her stone in pocket, to find a place to stay
Senti – my mother was born here…
Who are your genitori?
Ettore e’ Ida Trofa…
NO! Trofa!? Who is your mother?
Tee-Tee…
TEE-TEE!?
The small hotel keeper swoons and shakes his hands in prayer
But we went to school together when we were this high!I sat behind her – I used to dip her plaits in the inkpotMa-ma-meee, she beat me senseless…she fought all the boys She was the brightest in the classThe best at everything!Your mother liked to swim right out to the rock She was the most beautiful girl on the island… Oh yes!
She walks and walks, wrapped in the silk of a Tyrrhenian breeze,
Did my mother run here, ride there, swim in that bay, climb that tree? Walk to school down this cobbled lane past ancient ruins and wild violets? Play under these grapevines? Sit under those fig trees by her sapphire sea?
She eats pizza and gelato, drinks coffee and sketches. She sits on the beach until sunset then walks the vertical slope and falls into deep sleep and vivid dreams with the windows open. Her mother’s right – there are no mosquitoes here. In the mornings, she eats polenta and figs. She could eat this forever.
One morning she wakes up and reaches for her stone. She searches every pocket, turns everything inside out and upside down but it isn’t there. She has to find her stone. She retraces her steps. Returns to every shop, every laneway, every café, even searches the beach sifting through sand. She can’t sleep.
It’s a fucking stone
At three am, she stops staring at the ceiling and goes looking for the stone, taking her torch. A black sea sighs to the shore, below a steep and narrow road.
She’s crying for a stone
Then back up the vertical road exhausted, hating herself. Not for losing the stone but for loving it. She stops under a street lamp and says it aloud,
IT’S JUST A STONE
At that moment she hears a gentle tapping on the ground, looks down and sees the stone, between her feet. She heard it drop – a gentle rattle – not from a great height but placed, enough to make a sound but not so hard it might shatter. A warm gust circles her too many times for a breeze. Stone in hand, she laughs like a child. Her spirit lifts and soars to the sky. And she goes to bed and laughs herself to sleep.
At eight am, she wakes to a ruckus at the door, and a tribe of cousins bum-rush the room. The shopkeeper told the butcher told the hairdresser told her cousin,
Tee-Tee’s daughter is staying at Erasmo’s!
Big news, big fuss! She’s a long-lost relative. She can’t find the words, but their blood understands. They stroke her head and kiss her face, one after another. Laughing, crying, talking at once, asking about her mother, crying for her grandmother, thanking God she came and packing her things without asking.
She’ll stay with them on her ancestral land in Serrara Fontana.
They’ll feed her family secrets, and she’ll sit in the room where her mother was born.
Castello Aragonese, Ischia
Rozee Cutrone ©
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