Coming of Age among Multiple Languages: Exploring the ‘Polyglot’ as an Intersectional Subject in Claudia Durastanti’s La Straniera (2019)

ABSTRACT

Claudia Durastanti belongs to a new generation of Italian writers who embrace life on the move, writing outside of the borders of Italy and living between different languages and cultures. Durastanti’s memoir, La straniera (2019), is the personal story of the writer moving between New York, Basilicata, Rome, and London. The constant code-switching due to the author’s double nationality is also entangled in the sign language spoken by Durastanti’s deaf mother. By analysing Durastanti’s linguistic coming of age through a second language and the relationship with her mother, this article aims to discuss the writer’s position as a polyglot as well as a nomadic subject. In the representation offered by Durastanti, Italian culture and language do not prevail over other languages and cultures but interact with them, contributing to the creation of a new intersectional subjectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Coming-of-age
• memoir
• nomadic subject
• polyglot
• women writers
• feminism

Millennials Across Linguistic Borders

In 2019, the New York Times published an article by Anna Momigliano titled ‘The Ferrante Effect’, arguing that Elena Ferrante’s best-selling books inspired a new generation of Italian female novelists to challenge ‘the country’s male-dominated literary establishment’.¹ Leaving aside the question of whether women writers in Italy have been inspired by Ferrante, or whether, because of Ferrante, they have (finally) been re-discovered by the publishing industry (and the literary canon), the article brought the case of Claudia Durastanti, amongst others, to the attention of international readers. Her novel was introduced as a story in which the author ‘recalls her upbringing in a dysfunctional family between Brooklyn and Basilicata’.² The book, shortlisted for the Strega Prize 2019, was published in 2022 in the UK by Fitzcarraldo with the title Strangers I Know (translated by Elizabeth Harris), followed by the US version in 2023 (Riverhead). Among the names introduced by the New York Times, Durastanti’s voice is representative of a new generation of Italian authors who have chosen ‘linguistic displacement’ as a distinctive trait for their prose. Since the 2010s and Viola Di Grado’s Settanta acrilico trenta lana (2011), it is possible to record an increasing number of novels written in Italian, by Italian writers who have chosen to live outside of their country of origin. Di Grado (Catania, 1987) wrote her first novel while studying Eastern Languages and Cultures in Leeds, UK; Laura Imai Messina (Rome, 1981) published her debut novel Tokyo orizzontale in 2014 after moving to Japan; Vincenzo Latronico (Rome, 1984) who settled in Berlin, published – among others – the novels La mentalità dell’alveare (2013) and Le perfezioni (2022); Claudia Bruno (Rome, 1984), who moved to London, wrote the novel Sola andata (2022) while facing the cultural and sociopolitical disconnection of post-Brexit society; Francesca Scotti (1981), who lives between Italy and Japan, is the author of novels and collections of short stories, such as Il tempo delle tartarughe (2022), which can be ascribed to the genre of magic realism. This group of writers, mostly millennials, comprises people who grew up with a Euro-mobility mindset, the Erasmus project, cultural exchanges, the rise of low-cost airlines and Internet 2.0. Furthermore – while approaching their first work experiences³ – millennial youth had to face the financial crisis that hit international markets in 2008⁴ and one of the ‘periodi storici più critici della crisi dell’Euro (2011–13)’,⁵ which affected Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal, in particular.⁶ After a brief discussion of specific traits shared by these millennial novels, in this article I aim to offer a closer analysis of Durastanti’s La straniera, with a special focus on the connection between the language-learning process and the author’s transnational coming of age, a detail that makes her work stand out from the others.

Besides the authors’ choice to live abroad while still privileging their mother tongue as a literary expression, the aforementioned novels all have in common the presence of moments of reflection on language itself, either Italian – which seems all of a sudden to reveal whole new meanings for the authors – or the language of their host country, also understood as a portal towards a different culture. Because of their position between languages, these works share similar traits analysed by de Rogatis in relation to ‘translinguismo’, phenomena such as ‘metariflessione’ on the idioms of use, and that of ‘straniamento’, or creating a distance from their mother tongue and its automatisms.⁷ ‘Metariflessione’ and ‘straniamento’ lead the writers and their narrators to a deeper understanding of their own culture as well as the culture they live in, which results in the exercise of cognitive flexibility and a special tolerance towards ambiguity. This is evident from the opening of Viola Di Grado’s Settanta acrilico trenta lana, when the protagonist – an Italian girl who lives in Leeds and studies Chinese – shares with her mother the excitement of learning a language so different from their mother tongue, a language in which ‘la parola “Ma” a seconda delle tonalità può significare o “mamma” o “insultare” o cavallo” o “canapa”!’.⁸ In Di Grado’s latest novel, Fame Blu (2022), set in Shanghai, Chinese language and idiograms offer the Italian protagonist the chance of a deeper, often poetic reception of Chinese culture, such as in the case of the greeting ni-hao, which literally means ‘tu stai bene’ and is used ‘per dare conferma all’altro non solo della sua presenza ma della sua adeguatezza. Tu stai bene, vai bene: l’ideogramma è un bambino con una madre. Ma la madre ha la schiena piegata in modo innaturale. È al servizio del bambino’.⁹ As pointed out by Chianese, ‘in both novels Di Grado’s Italian background interacts with the multicultural environment of the destination country, and specifically focuses on the acquisition of Chinese, which becomes for her protagonists a way of escaping from family tragedies’.¹⁰ Building upon this intuition, Di Grado’s characters embrace a journey towards the creation of an alternative dimension for the self, and they do so through the acquisition of a new vocabulary.

On the other hand, Ludovica, the protagonist of Claudia Bruno’s Sola andata, expresses her feelings of isolation in London and her need for belonging by wishing for a better understanding of the English language (‘Volevo imparare a parlare come parlavano tutti, come parlava Cristian quando ripeteva i suoi discorsi per il centro di ricerca. Come on, move forward, starting over, scrivevo a matita sul secondo quaderno le mie nuove parole, le ripassavo con la penna a sfera’).¹¹ In Claudia Durastanti’s La straniera, the discussion about the protagonist’s (Italian) name, ‘Claudia’, on behalf of her Italian-American family, clearly represents the multiple cultural and social influences which affect the girl’s perception of the world:

mia madre diceva di aver letto da qualche parte che quel nome romano fosse sinonimo di forza. Per i miei cugini americani era troppo vicino a cloudy, che significa nuvoloso, così ogni volta che faceva brutto tempo mi dicevano “Look, it’s a very claudia day, ha ha”. Durante una delle prime versioni di latino da tradurre al liceo, ho scoperto che “claudicante” stava per “zoppa”, e forse non era un caso che mia madre avesse scambiato una lacuna fisica per una risorsa.¹²

While for the Italian-American branch of the family, the name ‘Claudia’ recalls a cloudy day, for the mother it represents somehow a wish for strength and future empowerment (by the Ancient Romans, as she thought, the name was ‘sinonimo di forza’); in later years, studying classical Latin, the protagonist finds out that her name has something in common with the word ‘claudicante’, which signifies lameness, limping. The connection between the concepts of strength and disability are relevant to the development of the story, which was already concealed in the name given to the protagonist by her mother.

What makes Durastanti’s work particularly interesting within this group of millennial novels is its non-fictional nature: as a memoir, the book uses excellent strategies for the telling of a transnational coming-of-age story, representing an identity continuously subjected to redefinition through memory, besides the many variables that shape human beings, such as language, class, gender, and able-bodiedness.

Claudia, the writer’s autobiographical alter ego, shows herself to be the perfect embodiment of the nomadic subject, as defined by the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti.¹³ Shifting and readjusting her borders between the United States, her village in the South of Italy, and the cities of Rome and London, the protagonist rejects any ‘dogmatic, hegemonic and exclusionary power at the very heart of the identity structures of the dominant subject’.¹⁴ Citizen of a globalised world, Durastanti’s narrator as a nomadic subject is able to sustain ‘multiple belongings’ in opposition to a society that still celebrates sameness as a value.¹⁵ While the geographic shift creates a distance between the mother country and the host country, the physical displacement is not enough to determine a nomadic subjectivity. Moving through different cultures, the nomadic subject finally abandons the idea of a privileged language or cultural system; in doing this, gender and social roles are also questioned as cultural constructs. In this regard, Braidotti’s theory of the nomadic subject has much in common with the definition of cosmopolitanism provided by Sunderland, who argues that the cosmopolitan ‘can be thought of as a modern world citizen who can move easily between languages and cultures […] Free of national prejudices and limitations’.¹⁶ Thus, in terms of universal human rights, ‘the notion of cosmopolitanism connects to juridical and moral questions about world law and governance’ and ‘can usefully be related to feminism, to anti-racist and anti-slavery movements, and to minority rights’.¹⁷ According to this view, cosmopolitanism appears more connected to juridical issues, while the concept of nomadic subjectivity refers to the position of an individual in relation to existence, as well as to cultural and social interactions.

Durastanti’s title, La straniera, alludes not only to one meaning but can offer multiple interpretations. One of these is the definition of stranger as the other, a lateral subjectivity which offers the non-integrated and non-aligned position of the outsider. The word ‘outsider’ is also listed in the opening of Elizabeth Harris’ translation among the terms used in English to define the Italian espression ‘straniera’: on the one hand, this condition comes with the negative aspect of marginalisation, although on the other hand, this special perspective is also synonymous with freedom from the constraints of the hegemonic culture. In an interview released in The Brooklyn Rail magazine, the writer reflected upon the definition of stranger and pointed out: ‘There are many heirs to these strangers, including me, but since we’re not in exile and have no common cause that defines our leaving, […] because it concerns a migration we’re almost always free to choose, a migration that never founders’.¹⁸ The movement Durastanti refers to is neither an exile nor a migration, but it has many elements in common with other millennial writers who decided to leave their country of origin to settle elsewhere (even if only for a limited period). Rather than ‘migration’, in relation to these authors we can talk about ‘expatriation’, a concept that – as noted by Green – ‘has been replete with notions of freedom and even happiness’.¹⁹

A central element in Durastanti’s memoir is the relationship with her mother, a deaf Italian artist from Basilicata who moved to New York in her youth with her deaf husband in order to reunite with her family. The protagonist’s transnational coming of age develops in parallel with her understanding of her mother, to the point that it is impossible for the writer to tell her own story without referring to that of her parent. In this way, the mother becomes the only fixed territory in the life of the nomadic subject, according to what de Rogatis describes as ‘homing’: the process of feeling at home not in a physical place, but in what this scholar calls ‘alfabeto comune’²⁰ made of gestures, actions, idiosyncrasies, history, and languages. For Claudia as a nomadic subject, the maternal connection represents a home in itself, the only place where she does not perceive herself as a stranger, una straniera.

By following this argument, I will now analyse the coming of age of the transnational nomadic subject in relation to the figure of the mother. First, I will consider the representation of the author’s transnational education in the memoir; then I will explain how the memories shared between mother and daughter can be seen as a system of micro-collective memory, an act of foundation by which the younger subject is shaped. In this context I will focus more specifically on the use of language, analysing the effect of the mother’s deafness on the style adopted by Durastanti. In the conclusion, I will draw attention to the transnational coming-of-age novel as a new narrative tool for challenging the conservative patterns of the traditional literary genres.

A Transnational Education

Among the layers that underlie the title of Durastanti’s memoir, La straniera, its relationship to her mother is the first and most immediate, since the woman had been called ‘straniera’ in her youth owing to her disability. As a baby living with her family in the South of Italy, she contracted a severe form of meningitis, experiencing very high fever, which irreversibly damaged her hearing system. She learned sign language while attending a special institution, although she never liked to use it outside of her school environment or with non-deaf people. She also decided not to teach sign language to her children. By reading the lips of her interlocutor and talking aloud with irregular accents she could communicate with people, passing as ‘un’immigrata sgrammaticata, una straniera’.²¹

‘Straniera’ is a powerful syntagma which, later in the memoir, keeps mother and daughter together thanks to its ambiguity. Indeed, the writer herself is a stranger, who tells her own story entangled with that of her mother. Born in Brooklyn in 1984, to where her family had migrated years earlier, Durastanti moved back to Basilicata after her parents’ divorce. The memories of her childhood are collected in the central chapter, ‘America’, where the writer recalls funny anecdotes connected to the strange habits of her Italian-American family, scenes in which the Italian culture from Basilicata coexisted in harmony with the modern trends of the New World: ‘Mio nonno mi convinceva a nascondermi con lui nello scantinato per imbottigliare il vino fatto in casa da vendere in nero, per farmi ridere cantava: “tutti i frutti, bimbabbambaloula bibbambaboo” e mi diceva di mandare giù un bicchiere di mosto e gingerella’.²²

In this universe, films starring Nino D’Angelo and Mario Merola are introduced alongside afternoon rides in Coney Island, The New Yorker illustrations and a hybrid new language combining southern Italian dialects and American English. This aspect is evident in the description of Durastanti’s grandmother, who ‘non capiva più tanto bene l’italiano e parlava un dialetto volontariamente buffo: diceva “Bruklì” invece di Brooklyn, “aranò” al posto di I don’t know, la “bega” stava per bag e “porchecciap” per pork chops; “a diec pezz” erano dieci dollari e “u’ bridge” il casello dal New Jersey a New York’.²³ As noted by DeLucia,²⁴ the hyphenated identity links the American context with Italian traditions, recognising the enduring influence of the latter. In the case of Durastanti’s grandmother, this is evident when the writer reveals that while the old woman knew perfectly well how to pronounce certain words in English; she simply chose not to do so in order to demonstrate a stronger personality.

Whereas in New York the young writer is the Italian girl, after moving to Basilicata she becomes the American schoolmate, whose grammatical mistakes seem funny to her teachers and friends. Fitting into the new environment is not only difficult, but also painful, especially for Claudia’s brother, whose teacher ‘il primo giorno gli aveva staccato l’orecchino tirandolo in basso, facendo colare il sangue su tutto il banco’.²⁵ Italian culture as taught in school is hegemonic. It sets a hierarchy and repels any hybridism of forms. This feeling is well represented when the writer denotes on the page specific graphic signs in order to describe her language apprenticeship: ‘Dicevo invece di “ferro da stiro”, invece di “busta”, e quando dovevamo descrivere i nostri piatti preferiti, disegnavo degli hot-dog ma li chiamavo, dalla tipologia che comprava mia madre a Brooklyn, e dunque era sbagliato pure quello’.²⁶

Once settled, together with her brother, Claudia teaches herself how to speak using the standard Italian she hears in the dubbed television shows for teenagers, convinced that correct use of the language would set her free from her parents’ oddities as deaf people. What follows is, once again, a feeling of displacement: mocking and using a standard Italian accent contributes to turning Claudia into an outsider in a region like Basilicata, where the use of the dialect is a form of belonging. Despite this awareness, avoiding the use of dialect is a private rule set by her older brother, but also a choice aimed at creating an inclusive environment for their mother, who could not easily read the lip movements of those who spoke it.

In the Name of the Mother

Durastanti’s narrative does not follow a linear structure, but shifts in time and space according to a thematic order. As a tribute to the mother’s passion for fortune telling, the six sections have the same titles as the main categories of the horoscope, plus what can be read as an epilogue: Famiglia, Viaggi, Salute, Lavoro & Denaro, Amore and Di Che Segno Sei. The writer recalls in this regard how the woman ‘per sopravvivere alla sua quotidianità sbilenca […] si era comprata un manuale sui tarocchi in una libreria dell’occulto nel centro di Roma e aveva iniziato a prendere appunti su come calcolare le fasi lunari della follia domestica’; for her, ‘divinare la tristezza era più importante che prevenirla’.²⁷ Tarot cards have already been used in Italian literature as an integral element of the plot, such as in the case of Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969) by Italo Calvino. In this work, the author imagined the adventure of several pilgrims and travellers who stepped into an enchanted castle and magically lost their voices; the only chance to tell their stories to each other was by using an old deck of tarot cards. The novel is an example of ‘narrativa combinatoria’,²⁸ a creative experiment that Calvino challenged himself to write after being introduced to tarot at a conference in 1968. More recently, Nadia Terranova’s Trema la notte (2022) used tarot cards to name the 22 central chapters of her novel. Similarly to Durastanti’s narrative strategy in La straniera, elements of fortune-telling are used to structure the story, although with substantial differences. Terranova uses the 22 arcana to metaphorically anticipate the events that will happen in each specific section of the story: ‘l’appeso’, for example, the first card of the series, predicts the changes that the character of Nicola will be subjected to as a consequence of the earthquake in Messina. Durastanti instead takes advantage of the horoscope’s categories to organise events in a different chronological order. The story is not linear but follows the movements of memory between past and present, often going back to the same period and exploring it from a different angle. This happens, for instance, with some of the episodes in the section ‘Salute’ concerning the early adolescence of the author (such as watching Nek competing in the Sanremo Festival in 1993): in the book, adolescence had already been reported in the previous section ‘Viaggi’, concluding with a mention of Brexit, an event witnessed by the author in her adult years.

Durastanti’s memoir starts with the description of her parents’ first meeting, which she introduces with this very precise line: ‘Mia madre e mio padre si sono conosciuti il giorno in cui lui ha cercato di buttarsi da Ponte Sisto a Trastevere’.²⁹ According to an anecdote collected directly by the writer from her parent, as a teenager her mother was taking a stroll through Rome when she saw a young man sitting on the edge of the bridge, legs suspended over the water. Jumping from that point, even a good swimmer would be killed due to the violent impact of the water. After she managed to persuade him not to jump, they spend the rest of the evening talking and drinking, before ending up sleeping together in a hotel room. Although she leaves the room the morning after without giving him any contact details, they meet again the following day, when he surprises her at the end of the school day outside the only institute for deaf girls in Rome.

This story, told from the mother’s point of view, is followed immediately by the father’s version. Here, the opening line mirrors that of the first scene, and, just like any mirror image, it produces its exact opposite: ‘Mio padre e mia madre si sono conosciuti il giorno in cui lui ha cercato di salvarla da un’aggressione davanti alla stazione Trastevere’.³⁰ In this version of the story, the mother fits the classic dynamic of the damsel in distress saved by the mighty knight. She is being assaulted by a couple of malviventi who start kicking her in an attempt to steal her bag. The young man sees them from a distance and decides to intervene until they leave for good, consequently inviting the girl to find shelter at his place. The end of this short chapter does not aim to solve the contradiction of these two matching and yet incompatible stories. The conclusion saves them both, somehow rejecting the responsibility of picking one truth over the other, and the possible devaluation of one of the two memories: ‘Mio padre e mia madre hanno divorziato nel 1990. Si sono visti poche volte da allora, ma ognuno dei due fa partire la storia dicendo che ha salvato la vita dell’altro’.³¹ The chapter containing the two stories is called ‘Mitologia’ as an invitation to the reader to look for the meaning of the first episode (the one told by the mother), not through its accuracy as an anecdote, but in its nature as a foundational myth, necessary to understand the whole coming-of-age narrative created by the author – a sort of ‘mitologia della madre’.

According to Sontag, all memory is individual. What is called ‘collective memory’ is not remembering as much as stipulating. Autobiographical memories (so-called episodic memories) cannot be embodied by another person, but can be shared with others. Assman pointed out that ‘once [memories] are verbalised in the form of a narrative or represented by a visual image, the individual’s memories become part of an intersubjective symbolic system, and are, strictly speaking, no longer a purely and exclusive […] property’.³²

By sharing the memory of that first meeting, Durastanti’s mother shapes the episode into a narrative framework in which she portrays herself not as a victim but as a saviour; she does not fit the stereotypical image of a woman as someone to be saved (what some may call il gentil sesso, il sesso debole), nor that of the disabled person as a non-autonomous subject. The mother also shows her daughter – by the very act of telling this story – how the only truthful definition of oneself is self-definition. The maternal transmission of that experience constitutes a micro-collective memory between mother and daughter, a stipulation aimed at reinforcing a sense of identity and belonging for two women who have lived their whole lives crossing geographical and cultural borders.

As Sambuco wrote in Corpi e Linguaggi: Il rapporto figlia-madre, the daughter’s investigation of her mother’s identity coincides with the search for her own self as a woman.³³ This helps the writer to recognise her mother as a subject beyond her maternal role, an image that positions both women outside the patriarchal system of values. ‘Il senso di identità per la figlia e la madre emergono non in relazione al soggetto e ai valori maschili, ma attraverso la re-immaginazione del rapporto madre-figlia e, in maniera interdipendente, alla re-immaginazione della percezione dei loro corpi’.³⁴ Understanding of her mother’s subjectivity grows in Durastanti while attending to the writing of her memoir:

Mia madre è sempre la stessa, ma io sono stata figlia di donne diverse. All’inizio era un’handicappata. Poi è diventata una disabile. Per attimi è stata una donna diversamente abile, ma siamo tutti diversamente abili. A un certo punto non era che una pazza. Oggi è una persona che sta su internet.³⁵

‘Handicappata’, ‘disabile’, ‘diversamente abile’, ‘pazza’, ‘persona che sta su internet’: the list of terms used by the writer represents the stages of a progressive recognition of the woman, a fluid identity that never sets into a fixed form: a portrait of the mother as a subject in transit, or, as Braidotti would say, the nomad’s identity as an inventory of traces. In the aforementioned paragraph, the statement ‘siamo tutti diversamente abili’ is very powerful and should not be overlooked. In this very sentence lies the first identification of the daughter with her mother as a nomadic subject, namely a subject able to transcend the distinction between centre and margins, able-bodiedness and disability. A rhizomatic approach to knowledge and being is set in opposition to a hierarchical organisation of the same elements: while reconstructing her mother’s story together with her own, Durastanti connects to a relationship that is horizontal rather than vertical, which allows the mutual acknowledgement of the two female subjects as women outside of the patriarchal system.³⁶

Mother Tongue

The mother’s disability plays a key role in Durastanti’s development as an adult woman: the need to shift between languages, such as Italian, American English, and sign language, is the first political act that unveils the ‘illusory stability of fixed identities’.³⁷ Furthermore, the deafness of Durastanti’s mother implies significant effort for the writer towards a full understanding of the maternal subject as an individual.

Costa una fatica fisica, questo affetto, questo legame che ci unisce. Parlare con mia madre per giorni di fila significa fare una transizione costante dal suo universo linguistico al mio; arrivata la sera dormo per dodici ore di fila, con il cervello che rimbomba di sintagmi spezzati. Parlare piano mi frustra, ripetere lo stesso concetto in continuazione mi fa venire voglia di chiudermi nella mia stanza e uscire solo quando è impegnata a fare altro. Le dico che è spossante, lei mi dice che è normale.

Che io mi senta stanca. Sedute l’una di fronte all’altra in un caffè dell’aeroporto, dichiara con nonchalance: ‘Per forza sei stremata: è una settimana che parli cinese senza saperlo’. A questo siamo ridotte: a mia madre che pur di difendermi dal dolore di non saperla più capire, si trasforma in un altro continente.³⁸

The mother/daughter bond is described as ‘una fatica fisica’: the body is the centre of the communication between the two women and it gets tired when they spend too much time together in the attempt of understanding and being understood by the other. ‘Spossante’, ‘stanca’, ‘stremata’ are terms used by the writer to describe the effects of the fatigue she is subjected to. At this point the mother reassures her by stating that these feelings are completely normal, since she has been speaking ‘cinese senza saperlo’, with reference to her daughter’s weak knowledge of sign language. The mother’s disability and the evidence of it (sign language) becomes just another foreign culture to which the daughter has to adapt herself. Even if ‘speaking Chinese’ can be read as a common expression used in Italian to address something difficult to understand, in this case we can also see a reference to a whole new cultural, social, and emotional territory (‘a continent’) represented by Durastanti’s mother. While in Viola Di Grado’s novels Chinese was the language of an alternative world in which to seek asylum, leaving the family behind, in La straniera – and more specifically in this mother/daughter exchange – Chinese represents metaphorically a foreign language through which the bond between the two women can evolve and get stronger.

In contrast to all the other Children of Deaf Adults (CODA) she knows, the writer admits her limits in communicating in sign language. This is relevant information, especially considering that the entire memoir started as the development of a personal essay on deafness, as Durastanti declared in several interviews following the publication of the book. There is, at the core of this project, the desperate desire for a deeper understanding of the mother: if it is true, as Durastanti says, that ‘il linguaggio è una tecnologia che rivela il mondo’,³⁹ then not handling each other’s language on the same level implies the impossibility of the two women revealing themselves completely to each other. The perception of irony or metaphor, for example, is different in deaf and non-deaf people. The understanding of the shift that occurs between signifier and signified in these two linguistic manipulations is slower or more complicated for a deaf reader compared to a non-deaf one. This is also true for the writer’s parents, as described in the memoir: ‘Mentre io cercavo di creare un ordine con la scrittura, loro restavano in comunicazione con gli astri superiori e le sostanze ingovernabili, rinviandomi sempre il sospetto che le parole non significano niente se non quando sono letterali e ogni altro residuo è una gran perdita di tempo e di senso’.⁴⁰ Perhaps with this in mind, the writer managed to develop a style enriched by anecdotes and practical information, even in the most intimate reflections. She compares, for example, the irrational and ‘demonic’ nature of her parents to the obscure phenomenon of the whales beaching periodically in the Northern seas:

Ci sono fenomeni opachi, che non si spiegano: gli scienziati faticano a capire perché in certi periodi dell’anno i capodogli si arenano sulle spiagge dei mari del nord. […].

Di recente una squadra di ricercatori ha trovato dei legami tra questo fenomeno e le tempeste solari e ha realizzato alcuni grafici su questa genealogia dell’apparizione, qualcosa che evoca subito demoni medievali, bestiari e cosmogonie inattendibili stampate su pergamena.⁴¹

By introducing this anecdote, the author creates an analogy between an inexplicable natural event (the whales beaching in the Northern seas) and her parents’ irrational behaviour. This also occurs in the description of Dead Horse Bay, ‘una baia paludosa un tempo circondata da mattatoi di cavalli’ and turned into ‘una discarica interrata in cui silenziare la spazzatura di New York’.⁴² Durastanti uses this anecdote to describe her Italian-American family, and more specifically her grandparents, ‘[che] hanno cambiato funzione e aspirazione ogni volta che l’America glielo ha chiesto’.⁴³ The continuous act of changing, losing and forgetting dreams and aspirations made them look like ‘una famiglia che si diceva sempre nuova mentre la sua liscivia euforica e triste veniva a galla, come fosse una discarica riqualificata’.⁴⁴ In making up the analogies, Durastanti does not refer to just any inexplicable natural phenomenon, but to a specific one concerning whales in the Northern seas; she does not refer to just any rubbish dump, but a specific one in Dead Horse Bay.

Growing up, Claudia will not only learn how to communicate with her mother despite not being fluent in sign language, she will also try to understand her as other-from-self, embracing her mother’s specific way of being in the world. This happens, for example, when Durastanti describes the moment she enters Glenn Gould’s anechoic room replicated at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the experiment, which aims to recreate the feeling of absolute silence, is recalled by the writer in order to better describe the world in which her parents had been living:

Nel 2017 il Guggenheim di New York ha riprodotto parte di quella serie realizzando una stanzasemianecoica simile a quella visitata da John Cage tanti anni fa […]. Quando ci sono entrata ho sentito il rumore della mia saliva, il brontolio dello stomaco, persino il battito delle mie ciglia […]. A differenza di Cage non ho avuto una premonizione del mio futuro, ma ho pensato al mio passato e al fatto che i miei genitori hanno sempre vissuto in una stanza come quella.⁴⁵

If the attempt to fully understand her mother is an almost impossible challenge for the daughter, creating a bridge for mutual exchange seems to be more fruitful: ‘Non posso costruire una stanza semianecoica per fingere che il silenzio che condividiamo sia lo stesso, ma come John Cage, posso dire a mia madre il suono del mio sangue e lei può dirmi di quello del suo’.⁴⁶

Starting from her university years when Claudia moves to Rome to study anthropology, the relationship with her mother becomes subject to evolution. At first through letters, then via WhatsApp messages, the two women develop a language of feelings, an idiolect made of English, Italian, acronyms, and jargon, that the author disseminates through the memoir in the form of titles: sentences like ‘Come stai? Sei stanca love your papa’,⁴⁷ ‘Ok ti love you’,⁴⁸ ‘Tvb […] luv’⁴⁹ well represent the linguistic and physical displacement of the two women, who nonetheless are able to find a common territory through the use of technology. This way of communicating overcomes not only the geographic distance that separates them, but also the distance created by the fact that mother and daughter are positioned in the world with different abilities. In La straniera the protagonist inhabits a liminal space but finds her roots in her maternal genealogy, as well as in the language shared between mother and daughter. In this process, the translingual condition of the two women turns into homing, since narrative and linguistic creativity give both a new sense of belonging.⁵⁰ Consistently with what de Rogatis observed about translingual writings, Durastanti’s memoir creates a ‘translingualscape’ in which marginalised cultures and subjectivities find their voice ‘attraverso una tonalità che ha sempre qualcosa di straniero, di esterno e dunque di strano’.⁵¹

At the very end of the novel, in the section titled Di che segno sei, we find out that the mother is also Durastanti’s first reader, since the author reports how the woman ‘legge alcune pagine del libro e mi dice che ho sbagliato tutto’.⁵² In this sentence we understand that the mother has been reading the memoir in its development, helping her daughter to reconstruct the family history from Basilicata to Brooklyn and back by offering memories and information that the author was lacking due to her young age. Because of this collaboration between the two women, the writer found new modes of expressions and a style suitable for her parent to read: she left her linguistic comfort zone in order to get closer to that of the other person, becoming a polyglot in a wider sense. Being a polyglot, as described by Braidotti, is another feature of the nomadic subject, according to which ‘writing is not only a process of constant translation but also of successive adaptation to different cultural identities’⁵³ that are not organised according to hierarchies, but are simultaneously present. ‘Un soggetto nomade è una rete relazionale, un groviglio di cose, gente e passioni provenienti da mille luoghi diversi’; for this reason ‘reti rizomatiche e legami plurimi e multidirezionali sono molto più adeguati a rendere una visione di sé che non è unitaria, né individualista, né fissa’.⁵⁴ In this regard, to develop a polyglot, nomadic identity means to choose for oneself an egalitarian, post-nationalist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist position.

The turning point in this transnational Bildungsroman happens for Durastanti’s character in the recognition of both herself and her mother as nomadic subjects. The change happens during the writing process. In an interview released to the Italian online magazine L’indiependente, when asked about the relationship between memoir and fiction, Durastanti answered:

Uno scrittore che vuole usare la prima persona e affidarsi al memoir deve essere il primo curatore dei suoi ricordi, deve fare un lavoro di selezione attentissimo, ed è questa attività che per me tiene al riparo la scrittura dal melodramma, dal patetico o dalla tragedia. Una buona attività di curatela di sé (che non è censura, anzi, semplicemente capacità di sapersi leggere) significa dimostrare che neanche i traumi più indicibili hanno una coerenza nel tempo, ma si ridefiniscono in base a nuovi dolori o nuove gioie.⁵⁵

Writing becomes an instrument through which to read and analyse one’s own life; in this process events can sometimes gain new meaning when connected arbitrarily on the timeline by the writer (‘rileggere te stessa significa inventare quello che hai passato’). The act of self-editing one’s own memories is also a way for the nomadic subject to constantly reconsider her position, since even the most traumatic events are always in the process of being redefined by new circumstances, and thus so is our understanding of other people.

At the beginning of the novel we read how, according to Claudia, ‘la lingua dei segni è teatrale, ti espone in continuazione. Ti rende subito disabile’.⁵⁶ Further on in the book mother and daughter are travelling on a bus in London, both strangers and far from their mother country; here the way her mother communicates is perceived by Durastanti only as another foreign language among others, as she declares ‘dopo anni trascorsi a vergognarmi di fare gesti in sua presenza per essere capita oggi parlo senza voce scandendo bene il labiale (…). Voglio essere vista dai passanti e che sia evidente che non mi vergogno più di lei’.⁵⁷

Conclusions: Transnational Coming of Age as a Feminist Coming of Age?

Building upon these findings, I suggest reading Durastanti’s La straniera as a feminist Bildungsroman, according to the definition given by Felski. While the classic structure of the female Bildungsroman was aimed at developing in the protagonist a sense of belonging to a family, to a country, to a husband, the protagonist of the feminist Bildungsroman experiences self-discovery and recognition in a wider community of women.⁵⁸

Published in 2019, La straniera can be included in the new wave of contemporary literary works in which reflection on the maternal and the mother-daughter relationship happens to be central.⁵⁹ As observed by Hirsch, while in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature motherhood represented a conservative force of patriarchal values, from the 1970s onwards the quest for the (biological or cultural) mother becomes a way for women writers to challenge and redefine patriarchal power dynamics.⁶⁰ Durastanti positions herself in the tradition of authors such as Goliarda Sapienza (Lettera aperta, 1967; Il filo di mezzogiorno, 1969; L’arte della gioia, 1998), Elena Ferrante (L’amore molesto, 1992; I giorni dell’abbandono, 2002; La figlia oscura, 2006) and Donatella Di Pietrantonio (Mia madre è un fiume, 2011), among others. Her memoir shares with these novels the need to reconstruct the stories of mothers in a society which silenced them, although in La straniera – as will be evident at the end – mother and daughter work together as peers in the making of their own story (‘Mi ricorda le notti incubate nella sua cucina […]’,⁶¹ ‘legge alcune pagine del libro […]’,⁶² ‘tira fuori la storia della sua bisnonna’).⁶³ Another substantial difference between Durastanti’s memoir and the aforementioned novels – beyond the autofictional nature of their genre – lies in the daughter’s personal growth through the very same exchange and negotiation with her mother, necessary to the completion of the story. This is a relevant aspect that makes La straniera stand out among these novels. While Ferrante’s protagonists,⁶⁴ as well as Di Pietrantonio’s and Sapienza’s (in L’arte della gioia), are middle-aged women who try to reconcile themselves with a distant maternal figure,⁶⁵ Durastanti’s recognition of the mother as a peer – both being somehow storytellers, both straniere in their own ways – is the ultimate turning point in a writing process that is also a journey of self-discovery and a coming-of-age story.

As we have seen, the communication between mother and daughter involves the act of sharing one’s own subjectivity, which contributes to the creation of a female genealogy in opposition to the patriarchal language in which ‘woman’ is identified with ‘otherness’. Theoretically speaking, the nomadic subject of this transnational coming-of-age story is also an intersectional subject and therefore a feminist one, where feminism is also identified as opposed to a hegemonic, patriarchal system of thought. The female community in which the protagonist of La straniera finally finds her sense of belonging is what the Afro-Italian writer Igiaba Scego called ‘Matria’,⁶⁶ in opposition to the traditional and more patriarchal ‘Patria’. Matria is an ideal, metaphorical space in which ‘la creazione di una cittadinanza di quelle identità, comunità e nazioni storicamente escluse’⁶⁷ takes place; it is mainly constituted by women, and more specifically it happens in the symbolic recognition between mothers and daughters.

In these terms, Durastanti’s memoir is the feminist coming-of-age story of a nomadic subject written through the mother and for the mother. In the opening scene of the novel, the image of the woman as saviour is transmitted from the elder to the younger individual as a foundational myth; it is a revolutionary image of power which overthrows that of female passivity and weakness as depicted in patriarchal stereotypes. Whether or not the story is true does not matter. The fact that it has been accepted without being questioned constitutes the creation of a legacy between the two female subjects, a pivotal moment described by the author in the closing of the memoir. The setting is Oxford Street in London; the time is Christmas. Mother and daughter are out shopping, a familiar ritual that takes place every time they get bored (‘quando ci annoiamo andiamo a fare spese’).⁶⁸ All of a sudden, such a simple moment turns into a revelation:

Le ho chiesto come sarebbe stata la sua vita se non fosse stata sorda.

“Penso che sarei stata insignificante”.

Dopo anni passati a descriversi come una vittima, mi ha detto anche che tutto quello che le era capitato nella vita lo aveva scelto, e in questa dichiarazione l’ho sentita libera.

[…]

Ho ascoltato mia madre, e non ho dimenticato di essere una persona. Sono la figlia di un uomo che non si è mai buttato dal ponte: ogni volta che sento l’impatto con l’acqua io torno.⁶⁹

Despite her disability and irregular life, the mother is recognised by the end of the book not as a victim but as a non-conventional guide, portrayed once again as the saviour protagonist that the reader met in the opening scene of the memoir. By stating ‘Sono la figlia di un uomo che non si è mai buttato dal ponte’, Claudia as a ‘daughter’ organises on the level of experience her personal hierarchy of truth between the two different versions of the same story; afterwards, Claudia as a ‘writer’ uses the instrument of literary manipulation to position the myth of the saviour-mother at the very beginning of the novel, giving the whole memoir a circular structure which is typical of mythological storytelling.

As Thomson reminds us in the essay Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History, at the core of criticism of oral history as a source for historiography was the idea that memory could be distorted by deterioration and nostalgia.⁷⁰ Nonetheless, I think the definition given by O’Pharrell⁷¹ better suits the way in which memories are handled and shaped in a memoir such as La Straniera: besides deterioration and nostalgia, further manipulation occurs when selective memory meets subjectivity, and this very process allows facts to be turned not into history but into myth. Claudia Durastanti’s memoir is aimed at understanding the language of the mother as a woman. It is the story of a legacy embodied in a myth, which is passed from the elder to the younger individual. Once the myth has been understood, the hierarchy disappears and mother and daughter are connected as peers, two individuals positioned in the dimension of a new symbolic system, in which words like ‘stranger’, ‘other’, or ‘outsider’ are just different ways to refer to oneself as a nomadic subject.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Anna Momigliano, ‘The Ferrante Effect: in Italy Women Writers are Ascendant’, The New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/books/elena-ferrante-italy-women-writers.html> [accessed 2 April 2023].

² Momigliano.

³ Cristina Pasqualini and Alessandro Rosina, ‘La mobilità all’estero dei Millennials italiani e lo scenario post Brexit’, in Rapporto italiani nel mondo 2017, ed. by Delfina Licata (Todi: Editrice Tau, 2017), pp. 138–46.

⁴ Francesco Carlucci, ‘La Grande Crisi e i suoi effetti sull’Europa’, Rivista di Studi Politici Internazionali, 78 (2011), pp. 489–518 (p. 507).

⁵ Sergio Fabbrini, ‘Tecnici al governo e governi tecnici: alcune riflessioni comparative sull’Italia’, Ventunesimo Secolo, 14 (2015), pp. 65–79 (p. 66).

⁶ Carlucci, p. 508.

⁷ Tiziana de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi: Traumi e translinguismi delle migrazioni in Morante, Hoffman, Kristof, Scego e Lahiri (Siena: Edizioni Università per Stranieri di Siena, 2023), pp. 57–61.

⁸ Viola Di Grado, Settanta acrilico trenta lana (Roma: Edizioni e/o, 2011), p. 12.

⁹ Viola Di Grado, Fame Blu (Rome: La nave di Teseo, 2022), p. 65.

¹⁰ Francesco Chianese, ‘“Una tragedia di linguaggio non corrisposto”: Language Between Family Crisis and Transnationalism in Viola Di Grado’s Settanta acrilico trenta lana’, Women Language Literature in Italy Donne Lingua Letteratura Italiana, iv (2022), pp. 17–30 (p. 5).

¹¹ Claudia Bruno, Sola andata (Milan: NNE, 2022), p. 93.

¹² Claudia Durastanti, La straniera (Rome: La nave di Teseo, 2019), p. 78.

¹³ Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 9.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Luke Sunderland, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, in Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook, ed. by Jennifer Burns and Derek Duncan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 69–76 (p. 70).

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Joseph Peschel, ‘Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know’, The Brooklyn Rail <https://brooklynrail.org/2022/02/books/Claudia-Durastantis-Strangers-I-Know> [accessed 10 July 2023].

¹⁹ Nancy L. Green, ‘Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept’, The American Historical Review, 11.2 (2009), pp. 307–28 (p. 327).

²⁰ de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, p. 4.

²¹ Durastanti, p. 20.

²² Durastanti, p. 75.

²³ Durastanti, p. 82.

²⁴ Christine DeLucia, ‘Negotiating the Hyphen: An Evolving Definition of Italian-American Identity’, Italian Americana, 22.2 (2004), pp. 201–07 (p. 202).

²⁵ Durastanti, p. 109.

²⁶ Durastanti.

²⁷ Durastanti, 48–49.

²⁸ Italo Calvino, Il castello dei destini incrociati (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), p. VI. See also Maria Vittoria Pugliese, ‘Il fragile potere della scrittura: “Il castello dei destini incrociati” di Italo Calvino’, Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana, 37.1 (2008), pp. 101–09.

²⁹ Durastanti, p. 11.

³⁰ Durastanti, p. 12.

³¹ Durastanti, p. 14.

³² Aleida Assman, ‘Transformations Between History and Memory’, Social Research, 75.1 (2008), pp. 49–72 (p. 50).

³³ Patrizia Sambuco, Corpi e Linguaggi: Il legame figlia-madre nelle scrittrici italiane del Novecento (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2014).

³⁴ Sambuco, p. 18.

³⁵ Durastanti, p. 215.

³⁶ Sambuco, p. 37.

³⁷ Durastanti, p. 41.

³⁸ Durastanti, pp. 211–12.

³⁹ Durastanti, p. 197.

⁴⁰ Durastanti, p. 68.

⁴¹ Durastanti.

⁴² Durastanti, pp. 30–31.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Durastanti, p. 50.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 197.

⁴⁷ Durastanti, p. 211.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 213.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 212.

⁵⁰ de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, p. 148.

⁵¹ Durastanti, p. 5.

⁵² Ibid., p. 284.

⁵³ Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, pp. 44–45.

⁵⁴ Rosi Braidotti, Fuori sede: Vita allegra di una femminista nomade (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2021), p. 6.

⁵⁵ Francesco Chianese, ‘Claudia Durastanti ci racconta La straniera’, L’indiependente <https://www.lindiependente.it/claudia-durastanti-la-straniera-intervista/> [accessed 2 April 2023].

⁵⁶ Durastanti, p. 19.

⁵⁷ Durastanti, p. 65.

⁵⁸ Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 128–40.

⁵⁹ Outside the context of representation of transnational Italian youth, for an accurate and insightful analysis of female subjectivity in the mother-daughter dynamic, see Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, ‘“Ero separata da me”: Memory, Selfhood and Mother-Tongue in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante’, in Goliarda Sapienza in Context: Intertextual Relationships with Italian and European Culture, ed. by Alberica Bazzoni, Emma Bond, and Katrin Madison Wehling-Giorgi (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), pp. 215–30.

⁶⁰ Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 127.

⁶¹ Durastanti, p. 283.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Tiziana de Rogatis, ‘Ripensare l’eredità delle madri. Cerimoniale iniziatico e strutture rituali ne L’amore molesto, I giorni dell’abbandono e La figlia oscura di Elena Ferrante’, in Nel nome della madre, ed. by Daniela Brogi, Tiziana de Rogatis and others (Roma: Del Vecchio Editore, 2017), pp. 74–95 (p. 77).

⁶⁵ For analysis of the maternal relationship in Goliarda Sapienza’s work see Katrin Wehling-Giorgi, ‘Dislocazioni materne: memoria, linguaggio e identità femminile nelle opere di Goliarda Sapienza’, Nel nome della madre, pp. 147–61.

⁶⁶ de Rogatis, Homing/Ritrovarsi, p. 160.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 6.

⁶⁸ Durastanti, p. 65.

⁶⁹ Durastanti, p. 285.

⁷⁰ Alistair Thomson, ‘Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History’, The Oral History Review, 34.1 (2007), pp. 49–70 (pp. 53–54).

⁷¹ Patrick O’Farrell, ‘Oral History: Facts and Fiction’, Oral History Australia Journal, 5 (1982–83), pp. 3–24 (pp. 3–9).