Laura Pariani’s Novels of Migration: From Transnational Memory to Cosmopolitan Ethics

Abstract

This article focuses on two novels by Laura Pariani: Quando Dio ballava il tango (2002) and Il piatto dell’angelo (2013), both of which recount tales of travel and migration between Italy and South America across a broad historical timeframe. These novels represent a challenge to narrow constructions of Italy as a monocultural and monolingual nation, foregrounding cultural and linguistic hybridity and highlighting patterns of belonging that do not map smoothly onto national borders. I argue that while the earlier novel explores the interconnectedness between Italy and Argentina, reconstructs Italy’s past as a nation of emigrants, and gives voice to the historically marginalized, the later novel uses the past more pointedly as a key to understanding the present. Il piatto dell’angelo’s juxtaposition of stories of Italian emigration from the early twentieth century with personal accounts of present-day migrants to Italy reminds Italians of their own emigratory past and aims to elicit empathy with their contemporary counterparts. In highlighting the economic exploitation of migrants in Italy, the novel explores the ethical dilemmas posed by globalization and raises pertinent questions about Italy’s and Europe’s response to the contemporary movement of people from the Global South to the Global North. Rather than viewing migrants as marginalized others, these novels place a cultural memory of migration and movement at the very center of their understandings of italianità.

Keywords:

• Laura Pariani
• migration
• Italy
• memory
• cosmopolitanism

Introduction

Since its establishment as a nation-state, Italy has been shaped by the ebbs and flows of migration. Italy’s past as a nation of emigrants is well documented - some 27 million migrants left the country between the end of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (Baily 1999; Gabaccia 2000; Choate 2008). According to Italy’s Istituto nazionale di statistica (ISTAT), as of January 1, 2022, there were just over five million foreign residents in Italy, while the website of the Anagrafe degli italiani residenti all’estero (AIRE) records 5.8 million Italian citizens as officially registered as living abroad.¹ A number of novels, films, and scholarly works in the last few decades have drawn parallels between the Atlantic crossings of Italian emigrants to the Americas in the early twentieth-century and the journeys made by present-day migrants in their attempt to reach the “promised land” of Europe.² The layering of Italy’s past and present is intended to remind Italians that they, too, experienced hardship, poverty, and discrimination, thus fostering greater understanding of the plight of their contemporary counterparts. Alongside a growing body of writing by transnational writers in Italy, these works challenge the notion of Italy as a monocultural nation and question constructions of national identity and patterns of belonging and exclusion.³ As Parati has argued, they “talk back” (2005) to stereotyped images of migrants perpetuated by the media and to Italy’s image of itself. Indeed, Bouchard (2010) suggests that it is precisely the emergence of narratives by migrants to Italy from the 1970s onwards that has facilitated the recovery of Italy’s repressed migrant and colonial past in cultural production and has given voice to similar stories of displacement by autochthonous writers. The moral impetus of such works is even more pressing, given the success of populist parties in Italy’s 2018 elections and the strong anti-immigrant rhetoric that underpinned their electoral campaigns (Bellucci 2018). In a hostile political climate, migrants are increasingly stigmatized, while xenophobic sentiments risk becoming normalized within mainstream society.⁴ As Parati and Tamburri insist, “interpretations of old migrations are necessary in order to talk about contemporary Italy” (2011, 2).

This dual temporal perspective on migration is central to the works of Laura Pariani, whose writing draws on her family history of emigration to Argentina and her own journeys between Italy and South America.⁵ Pariani’s maternal grandfather was one of the three million Italians who emigrated to Argentina in the first part of the twentieth-century (Gabaccia 2000, 5, 93; Schneider 2000, 19). Even today, around 60% of the Argentine population can claim Italian descent (Schneider 2000, 19, 316), with 903,000 Italian citizens currently registered by the AIRE as living in Argentina. Pariani’s writing provides a valuable framework for considering the impact of this large-scale displacement on individual subjectivities and exploring transnational connections across a broad historical timeframe. Many of her works are set in Argentina, including the fictional novels Il pettine (1995), La straduzione (2004b), and the travelogue Patagonia Blues (2006). Il paese dei sogni perduti: anni e storie argentine (2004a) reconstructs memories of Italian emigrants assembled from interviews conducted by the author, while Argentina is also the setting for fictionalized journeys to South America by the French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Tango per una rosa (2005) and the Italian poet Dino Campana in Questo viaggio chiamato amore (2015). Pariani’s novels offer an intricate blend of autobiography, fiction, official history, civic memory, and oral histories, as Giuseppe Mazzocchi comments, “Il tratto distintivo della scrittrice è la fusione fra vita e cultura. Vicenda autobiografica e ricerca intellettuale si intersecano costantemente” (1997, 375).

This article focuses on two of Pariani’s novels, Quando Dio ballava il tango (2002) and Il piatto dell’angelo (2013), both of which relate intimate tales of travel and migration between Italy and South America. I argue that while Quando Dio ballava il tango looks to Italy’s past through a gendered lens as a personal quest for origins, Il piatto dell’angelo looks to the past as a way of casting an ethical eye on the present. Quando Dio ballava il tango draws on Pariani’s research into her family history and highlights many of the features of early twentieth-century migration from Italy to Argentina documented by scholars such as Baily (1999), Gabaccia (2000), and Schneider (2000): Argentina as a land of promise and modernity, the phenomenon of the seasonal migration of Italian workers, the so-called golondrinas (rondini), the enduring magnetism of the home village, and the “white widows” who were left behind. The novel weaves the stories of sixteen fictional women into a hundred years of Argentine history in order to construct a female genealogy spanning five generations, six families, and two continents.⁶ Pariani’s protagonists are women who are abandoned, waiting in vain for their husbands to return, and women who are uprooted from one hemisphere to another to follow their families to la Mèrica. Each chapter is dedicated to a different female character and uses a combination of narrative strategies from first-person narration in which the narrator and character coincide, to third-person narration with internal focalization and frequent use of direct quotation and free indirect discourse to convey a sense of orality and spontaneous recall of the eponymous character. The intertwining histories, multiple voices, and various narrative perspectives combine to suggest that the stories of migration are both individual and collective. Although only one chapter bears her name, Corazón Bellati could be considered the central character of the text, whose presence in the lives of others provides continuity across generations. She appears as a child, as a young woman at university, in the first chapter as a migrant to Italy and in the final chapter as a woman of almost fifty years of age revisiting Argentina in 2001 to collate material and record interviews for a documentary on Italo-Argentines. Her story thus operates as a metafictional frame narrative as the stories of the previous fifteen women become part of her project of gathering memories.

Il piatto dell’angelo returns to similar themes of migration and movement between Italy and South America but in this novel the past is more strongly used as a device to inform and interrogate the present. Indeed, each alternative chapter is entitled “Ieri è oggi” which reinforces the connections between past and present. The novel weaves together three narrative threads. The first, told by an unnamed first-person narrator and addressed to her mother, focuses on the sense of loss and anger felt by the mother who was abandoned as a young child when her father emigrated to South America. Although the autobiographical pact is not fully established, there are clear resonances with the life of the author; indeed Medaglia (2016, 140) notes that this is the first time the author uses “io” to speak openly in one of her novels about the pain and legacy of her grandfather’s departure. Also contained within the “Ieri è oggi” chapters are tales of previous Italian emigrants (mostly male) to South America juxtaposed with the stories of their present-day counterparts (mostly women) who undertake the journey in reverse, heading to Italy in search of employment as domestic workers. Finally, each alternate chapter relates the contemporary fictional story of two Milanese tourists, Marina and Piero, who are travelling around South America. During their stay, Marina decides to take a detour from La Paz to a remote village in the Bolivian altiplano to find the family of Lita, a Bolivian woman who migrated to Italy four years prior and now works as the live-in caretaker for Piero’s elderly mother. All three narrative strands share a close interest in the transgenerational impact of migration on those left behind.

Critical studies on Pariani’s work tend to focus on her representations of past Italian emigration and address questions such as motherhood and migration (Rorato 2018), the female perspective (Urbani 2008), the impact of displacement on identity and belonging (Camilotti 2015), or the depiction of space and recovery of erased voices (Fiore 2017, 83–103). Scholarly discussions coalesce around two key features of her writing: the plurilingual quality of her prose with its unique blending of standard Italian, local Lombard dialect, Argentine Spanish, and the vernacular of immigrants in Buenos Aires (Sulis 2013; Medaglia 2016; Courriol 2017); and her use of stylistic devices such as multiple focalizers, complex narrative structures, blending of oral and written sources, and the foregrounding of plural and hybrid identities (Medaglia 2019; Sulis 2012). The ethical dimensions of Pariani’s novels, particularly the use of the past to confront contemporary dilemmas, remain underexplored. Medaglia (2019) alludes to ethics when discussing the post-postmodern features of Pariani’s writing. She cites from Gibbons who proposes that the cultural shift that follows postmodernism is characterized by “a legacy of modernist and postmodernist stylistic practice and a rehabilitated ethical consciousness” (Gibbons 2017 online, cited in Medaglia 2019, 26). While Medaglia goes on to provide an extensive analysis of Pariani’s stylistic practices, the ethical implications are not explored to the same degree. Sulis (2012) foregrounds Pariani’s ethical agenda to a greater extent, situating her novels within a wider body of Italian writing that concerns itself with the plight of those who live on the geographical, social, and linguistic margins of society. She argues for an Italian-specific form of postcolonial writing that exposes forms of colonial control and alterity which are both internal and external to Italy. Sulis (2015) later proposes that Pariani’s works can be considered a form of postmodern impegno in their use of metafictional and metanarrative strategies, multilingual prose, the insistence on plurality, and the privileging of marginal perspectives. Urbani (2008), too, refers to the politically engaged nature of Pariani’s writing, which she considers to be a prime example of “impegno femminile” for the way it sheds light on the oppression and suffering of past generations of women and gives voice to those whose stories have been left out of official histories. I argue that Il piatto dell’angelo, with its present and future orientation, moves beyond a mission of recovering the voices of historically marginalized women, or what Sulis (2013, 412) refers to as “impegno dei vivi verso i morti.” It does so by drawing parallels between the lives of Italian emigrants of the early twentieth-century and the experiences of immigrants in Italy today, revealing hierarchies of power between the Global North and Global South, drawing attention to exploitative practices toward migrants in contemporary Europe, and posing ethical questions in relation to Italy and Europe’s response to present-day immigration.

This article thus traces the trajectory of Pariani’s writing from an empathetic reconstruction of Italy’s emigrant past in the earlier novel toward a consideration in the later text of the ethical dilemmas posed by globalization and the mass movement of people in the twenty-first century. Globalization, understood as a process of increasing global interconnectivity and an intensification of social relations across national and regional boundaries (Scholte 2005; Robertson and White 2007; Steger 2019), has been experienced unevenly, resulting in growing socioeconomic inequalities both within and between nations (Bauman 1998; Scholte 2005, 316–347).⁷ The rise of populist politics and reactionary forms of nationalism in Europe has been interpreted by some as a backlash against these inequalities and the perceived threat that the movement of people poses to concepts of national identity (Gamble 2019; Thorleifsson 2019). The first section of this article demonstrates how the two novels respond to such positions by moving away from the idea of cultures as bounded and discrete, insisting on the hybrid and plural nature of languages and cultures and emphasizing local and translocal attachments over belonging to a nation state. The second section explores the function of memory within the novels and proposes that a cultural memory of movement should be embedded into understandings of what it means to be Italian. The final section focuses on Il piatto dell’angelo and argues that Pariani’s response to the forces of globalization is one of cosmopolitan ethics as outlined by Kwame Anthony Appiah:

There are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value of not just human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. (2007, xiii)

Il piatto dell’angelo, with its juxtaposition of past and present migrations and its contemporary story of the two tourists, raises important moral and ethical questions about the value of each human being and our obligations toward others, whether they be our near neighbors or those in distant lands. I argue that while Quando Dio ballava il tango explores the transnational and translocal connections between Italy and Argentina, reconstructs Italy’s past as a nation of emigrants, and gives voice to the historically marginalized, the later novel uses the past more pointedly as a key to understanding and interrogating the present.

Hybrid and Translocal Identities

Parati has claimed that the political rhetoric surrounding Italian belonging is dominated by “a historical narrative about Italy based on continuity, homogeneity and linearity” which is frequently accompanied by media representations of migration as an invasion and threat to a monocultural national community (2005, 23; 139; 151). Quando Dio ballava il tango and Il piatto dell’angelo are texts which “talk back” to the myth of Italy as a culturally or linguistically unified nation and counteract sensationalist narratives of migrants, old and new. Rather than presenting Italian migration to the Americas as unidirectional, Quando Dio ballava il tango situates the phenomenon in its wider historical context and emphasizes the circularity of migratory patterns over time. In fact, the exodus to the Americas was characterized by a high level of return migration as around half of those who left moved back to Italy (Baily 1999, 59–60). The novel highlights the circular journeys of the golondrinas who would work the harvest in the southern hemisphere before returning to Italy in time for harvest in Europe. The journey of the fictional Corazón, too, is circular: she was born to Italian migrants living in Buenos Aires, flees to Italy after her husband is killed by the military junta in 1976, and revisits Argentina in 2001 for her research project. It is not just the physical journey which comes full circle, but also as the text demonstrates, it is the reversal of economic fortunes for Italy and Argentina. The opening chapter, set in 1978, depicts Corazón’s first meeting with her Italian grandmother, Venturina Majna, in her home in Cascina Malpensata. Venturina recalls the end of the nineteenth-century when her father left for la Mèrica, fleeing poverty and hunger in Italy. It was a time when, according to a popular saying, “God danced the tango” and when Argentina was the epitome of modernity.⁸ In contrast, the final chapter demonstrates how, by the turn of the twenty-first century and after years of military dictatorship, war, and economic instability, popular images of Argentina had changed, and Italy had become “la vera America,” the destination of choice for contemporary migrants (Pariani 2002, 295).

The tango of the title reveals its own migratory past, reinforcing the theme of cultural hybridity and exchange between Europe and South America. Tango developed as a fusion of cultures and musical influences within the immigrant communities of Buenos Aires and travelled to Paris and Europe where it was transformed before returning to South America (Archetti 1999, 131).⁹ Each chapter of Quando Dio ballava il tango starts with an epigraph consisting of a verse from a popular tango song. The first chapter, “Il passato che torna,” opens with an extract from “Volver” by the lyricist Alfredo Le Pera, whose own life was shaped by migration: he was born in Brazil to Italian immigrant parents, raised in Argentina, and later settled in Paris. The title of the chapter, the lyrics of the tango, and the personal story of the lyricist all underline the circularity of migratory patterns, the temporality of migration, and the cultural hybridity and movement at the center of the novel. By situating migration in its long-term historical frame, insisting on the cultural exchange between Italy and South America, and highlighting the circular nature of migrant journeys across generations, the novel counters dehumanizing narratives of migrants which often dominate media discourse.¹⁰

Quando Dio ballava il tango and Il piatto dell’angelo further undermine claims to national or linguistic purity by insisting on the hybrid nature of language and highlighting translocal forms of attachment. This is most evident in the plurilingual quality of Pariani’s writing, which has been the focus of considerable critical attention. Sulis (2010, 147) argues that Pariani’s multilingual prose and the attention to linguistic, gendered, and geographical marginality operate to challenge binary constructions of identity and question notions of a fixed Italian identity. Medaglia, too, draws attention to the choral or polyvocal nature of Pariani’s writing and proposes that Pariani’s creation of new creolized forms of expression underscores “la non appartenenza monolitica ad una linea identitaria immobile e stereotipa” (2016, 131). Similarly, Courriol (2017) argues that linguistic hybridity of Quando Dio ballava il tango explodes the myth of singular and fixed identities. The blending of standard Italian, Argentine Spanish, local Lombard dialect, and the vernacular of Buenos Aires within the same sentence can be seen as an example of translanguaging in which multilinguals draw on their personal linguistic repertoires and “transcend culturally defined language boundaries to achieve effective communication” (Wei 2018, 25).¹¹ For example, on returning to Buenos Aires, the character Raquel Potok comments that “la ciudad ya no es la misma che credevo di conoscere” (Pariani 2002, 124). In Il piatto dell’angelo, Marina and Piero’s driver speaks “in un italiano abbastanza comprensibile, intercalando ogni tanto parole spagnole e inglesi” (Pariani 2013, 10). The mixing of languages rarely represents a barrier to communication but rather gives a sense of common origins and mutual intelligibility. The reader not only becomes actively involved in the process of building bridges between cultures through deciphering the multilingual prose, but also through the practice of translanguaging, is invited to reassess the artificial boundaries between national languages and between language and dialect. Pariani’s representation of plurilingual spaces defies normative constructions of monolingualism as languages are shown to be the product of multiple crossings and exchanges rather than discrete systems belonging to separate national cultures.¹²

The use of dialect and vernacular forms in both novels reflects the strength of local attachments above that of identification with the nation state, a phenomenon noted in Gabaccia’s (2000, 60) analysis of Italian emigration. Gabaccia further argues that the patterns of migration from Italy and the subsequent connections that formed across boundaries reflect the loyalty of Italians to their native town or village, and that this sense of allegiance was put above any sense of national identity. Gabaccia and Baldassar (2011, 5) later propose the concept of translocality as a way of understanding these local-local migrations. As a theoretical tool, translocality is useful as it shifts the focus away from movement between nations toward an emphasis on the processes by which meanings are attached to place or, to use Appadurai’s (1996, 178–199) terms, how locality is produced. In Quando Dio ballava il tango, local attachments and local-local patterns of migration are indicated by northern Italian dialects and the vernacular of immigrants living in Buenos Aires. Pariani depicts the Sunday afternoon aperitif in Mendoza in which Amabilina and her niece, the young Corazón, are surrounded by “un gran cicalare polifonico di dialetti italiani, soprattutto piemontesi. La signora Bertinotti si scusava con l’Amabilina: ’I sai nen al Tuscan” (Pariani 2002, 142). Notably, here even standard Italian is referred to as a regional variation which is alien to many emigrants. In Il piatto dell’angelo, Ana Clara’s cousin writes letters urging her to join her in Turin, saying, “c’è tanto lavoro […] vedrai la guita que se gana” (Pariani 2013, 20). Guita, meaning money, comes from Lunfardo, a form of slang spoken by immigrants in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century that remains a rich resource for contemporary Argentine speech (Grayson 1964; Pariani 2010, 151). The term Lunfardo is etymologically related to the name of the region of Lombardy in the North of Italy, the origin of many emigrants to Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century (Annecchiarico 2012, 101). As Courriol (2017) points out, Pariani does not use typographical features, such as italic font, to distinguish between languages and dialects; they are all placed on the same level. The use of dialectal forms and vernacular expressions further shifts the focus away from national languages and identities and invites the reader to consider migration as a local-local phenomenon.

Translocality recognizes the importance of emotional attachments to place in the construction of subjectivity and captures the tensions between mobility and stasis (Freitag and von Oppen 2010; Brickell and Datta 2016). Many of the characters in Quando Dio ballava il tango express an intense attachment to their native village and a nostalgic longing for an idealized lost home. In South America, they attempt to inscribe new spaces with meanings and build attachments through construction of their own homes or through farming the land (Pariani 2002, 87; 240). Again, dialect plays an important role in establishment of these emotional attachments to home, while the loss of the ability to speak dialect is interpreted as a loss of part of the self. The link between dialect, home, and subjectivity is illustrated by the character of Mafalda, who regrets that her younger siblings speak Spanish rather than dialect, as they have little memory of their early years in Italy. Mafalda never tires of hearing older relatives speaking in dialect, as it evokes fondness for her childhood home:

[Le bambine] parlavano spagnolo meglio del dialetto. Avrebbero dimenticato, perché non avevano fatto in tempo a affezionarsi all’Italia. Mafalda, invece, il suo paese ce l’aveva nel cuore. In questo paese estraneo Mafalda si sentiva insicura, spogliata di una identità che fin da piccola aveva creduto inalienabilmente sua. […] Sua cugina Teresa a volte la trascinava con sé a passeggiare per il parque di Palermo. […] Non era mai stanca di sentirla parlare in dialetto. (Pariani 2002, 169)

The importance of locality in conceptualizations of the self is emphasized in the novels as they each begin with a return journey to an ancestral home in a small village in Italy. In the first chapter of Quando Dio ballava il tango, the reader is presented with five generations of one family within the setting of the home, underscoring the significance of local origins for the saga of migration that follows.

In Il piatto dell’angelo, the former family home is a mere apparition; it no longer exists, yet is described in intimate detail and underpins the narrator’s sense of self (Pariani 2013, 7–8). Furthermore, a translocal perspective incorporates internal movements, such as rural-urban migration as well as virtual connections to place through imagination, hope, and memory by those who are immobile (Bromber 2013). Both novels focus attention on the psychological impact of migration on those who are left behind, showing that local places are connected to distant locations through memory and the hope of return. Those who do not migrate participate in translocal relations mediated by objects, such as photographs and letters:

La valle dov’era nata, laggiù in Italia, era sempre stata terra di emigranti. […] Una terra, la sua, segnata dall’esodo dei maschi. In ogni casa, sulla credenza, lettere e cartoline: dal Canada, da San Francisco, dall’Australia, da Montevideo, posti di là dal mare, di cui le donne pronunciavano i nomi con angustia e timore, come se si trattasse di trappole misteriose che potevano inghiottirsi figli, fidanzati, mariti. (Pariani 2002, 161)

In ogni casa stavano in bella mostra fotografie scattate all’altro capo del mondo, disposte sulla credenza come in improvvisati altarini: immagini di fratelli, padri, fidanzati, mariti, che si erano persi in luoghi dal nome esotico – Chacabuco, Tucumán, Jujuy, Cochabamba. (Pariani 2013, 40)

These homes, with their antiquated furnishings and remote locations, appear detached from the modern world, but nevertheless bear signs of their connections to peoples and places in distant localities.

Quando Dio ballava il tango further illustrates how translocal social networks operate across hemispheres. The golondrinas return to their towns in Italy each year for the harvest and encourage other villagers to join them with exaggerated tales of life in Argentina. Settlers in South America send for wives from their local villages back in Italy, often distant cousins whom they marry by proxy (Pariani 2002, 87; 67; 128). The local and national are shown to intersect in various ways as these local-local movements and marriages are mediated through transnational entities, such as the Italian consulate or Italian cultural associations in Buenos Aires. Identities, however, tend to be bound up in small towns and regional affiliations rather than the nation state. Indeed, in both novels the characters show weak, if not problematic, relationships with Italy as a nation. In Il piatto dell’angelo, Cesare leaves Italy during fascism to avoid being arrested for his anarchist beliefs while his family is prevented from joining him after restrictions are imposed by the regime in 1939. Togn and Peppino both journey to South America to avoid military service, unwilling to sacrifice themselves for a distant concept of nation (Pariani 2013, 15). In these cases, emigration occurs precisely as the result of not identifying with the values and ideologies of the nation state. The two novels highlight patterns of belonging which do not map smoothly onto national and political borders. They emphasize how local attachments are created and maintained across boundaries, yet recognize the power and control that national policies and institutions can exert over the movement of individuals. The use of dialect and the practice of translanguaging further undermine the dominant monolingual paradigm which associates the nation state with a single language and demonstrates that from its very inception, Italy was a multilingual space shaped by regional differences and contact with elsewhere, an aspect which is often overlooked. The next section moves on to address how the novels operate to remind Italians of this emigrant past and embed a cultural memory of Italy’s migrant past into interpretations of Italianità.

The Imperative of Cultural Memory

Both Fiore (2017, 7) and Bouchard (2010, 108) assert that the Italian emigrant experience has left only a faint trace on Italy’s collective imaginary. This is unsurprising, given that many who left Italy in the early twentieth-century were poor and illiterate and, as Aleida Assmann (2011, 52) reminds us, the workings of structural amnesia condemn to oblivion the stories of the marginalized and the dispossessed, particularly those of women. Pariani’s novels address this lacuna by assembling personal stories of migration in order to construct a cultural memory of Italy’s emigrant past. Her project of recovering and preserving individual memories of displacement is most explicit in Il paese dei sogni perduti (2004a) which reconstructs the stories of past generations of migrants from interviews that the author carried out in 2003 with her Argentine-born friends of Italian descent. Yet, Pariani admits that her text is not a precise transcription of the conversations she held with her interviewees, but that she adapted their family histories with the aim of providing a wider representation of the Italian experience of emigration: “In queste pagine, perciò, ai ricordi individuali ho mescolato la memoria civica” (2004a, 8). Although Quando Dio ballava il tango is presented as a fictional work, it is loosely based on the author’s research into her family history and an illusion of realism is created through the use of names, dates, and places at the start of each chapter. Autobiographical traces are also apparent, particularly in the character of Corazón whose life is an inverted image of that of Pariani.¹³ Both author and character are engaged in memory projects, collating materials and recording interviews to document the lives and histories of Italo-Argentines. Similarly, the three narrative threads of Il piatto dell’angelo weave together the author’s own family history with fictionalized accounts of migration and the invented story of the two Milanese tourists. On the one hand, Pariani’s insistence on blurring the lines between fact and fiction in her novels might be read as a reflection on the unreliable and subjective nature of personal memories, particularly oral histories. However, on the other hand, her polyvocal novels and use of the vernacular privilege oral recollections over written documents, such as letters and diaries, despite the greater proximity of the latter to the actual lived events. Moreover, references to such personal documents in the novels highlight their silences and falsifications. Il piatto dell’angelo recounts how the letters sent home by past and present migrants convey positive images of prosperity and integration, but fail to mention exploitative employers, long-working hours, rigid controls, and frequent discrimination:

Oggi

Emerenciana scrive ai figli che a Milano va tutto bene, che frequenta la scuola per imparare l’italiano. […] Tace sul fatto che la signora per cui lavora la tiranneggia e trova tutti i pretesti per non darle mai un giorno libero. (Pariani 2013, 89)

Ieri

il Sandrino e il Beppe scrivevano in Italia che in Merica si mangiava e il salario era buono. Tacevano sul fatto che dovevano lavorare sedici ore al giorno. (Pariani 2013, 90)

Likewise, on her arrival to Buenos Aires, the authorial protagonist starts writing a diary, yet her mother destroys the original and forces her to write a more sanitized version of events which is less revealing of family tensions and emotions (Pariani 2013, 132). Rather than creating a rigid distinction between true and false memories, or between oral and written sources, Pariani suggests that the truth of the Italian migratory experience is contained in the overall collective account. Even if individual recollections are distorted, there is authenticity in the emotions stirred by recalling the trauma of displacement or the heart-breaking loss of being left behind. As Aleida Assmann suggests, “memories, even if they are manifestly false, may reveal a truth on another level” (2011, 265).

In both novels, memory provides a critical perspective on modernity and its tendency to erase the past in the name of progress. The female protagonists of Quando Dio ballava il tango reject changes enforced by modernity as all too often they bear the emotional cost of so-called progress. While the male characters willingly discard the past in search of a more prosperous future, women are cast as the custodians of memory which serves to underpin their identities. Mafalda Cerutti grasps hold of memories of her past home in Italy which she considers important for her identity in the present: “Se una perde i ricordi, non le resta più niente… Si aggrappava a piccoli esercizi mnemonici per ricostruire il suo paese in Italia, il bosco, la cascata” (Pariani 2002, 163). Catterina Cerutti goes to the cemetery in Buenos Aires every week to tend the graves of her loved ones. Her devotion to this task symbolizes the importance of remembrance and the connection between family memories and place. She laments what she sees as the current tendency to neglect memories: “A 'sto mondo-qui non c’è più rispetto per la memoria” (Pariani 2002, 68). Modernity, according to Catterina, is transient and superficial, characterized by “spazzatura che domani si dovrà buttare,” or “giocattoli di plastica che si rompono in un minuto” (Pariani 2002, 69–71). The pace of modern life leaves little time for contemplation and remembrance: “Ché tutto deve esser fatto in fretta. La gente mica va più a cavallo o sul carreto, adesso ci son le macchine” (Pariani 2002, 71). In Corazón, she finds the person who will become the depository for her memories, and she raises the interesting possibility of memories being inherited by subsequent generations:

Certo bisognerà insegnarle tutte le storie di famiglia, coltivare in lei il gusto del ricordare: perché apprenda a guardare con gli occhi della bisabuela, palpare con le sue mani, tremare con le sue stesse paure. Sicuro. Perché un bambino non dovrebbe poter ereditare la memoria? Non si ereditano forse il colore degli occhi o il modo di sorridere? (Pariani 2002, 70)

In memory studies, transgenerational memory is normally associated with the recall of a traumatic or catastrophic event (Hirsch 2012). Here, Catterina experiences the upheaval of departure and the guilt of leaving home as a trauma. She wishes to pass on to Corazón not just the memory of events, but the embodied experience, the fears, and pain of separation. The act of passing down memories through generations occurs later in the novel when Corazón’s mother-in-law, Socorro López, hands her a box of photographs, letters, and newspaper cuttings: “Le piaceva l’idea di forgiare un altro anello nella catena delle generazioni” (Pariani 2002, 248). Transgenerational memory is presented in the novel as both an antidote to modernity and as a lynchpin of personal and collective identities.

The opening chapter of Il piatto dell’angelo reinforces the theme of preserving family memories which are under threat of erasure from the passage of time and modernity. Pariani relates her vision of the former home of her mother and grandmother, evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of the courtyard that no longer exists: “non rimane nulla: tanto cemento recente ha cancellato la mia e la tua infanzia” (Pariani 2013, 7). The destruction of an important site of childhood symbolizes the violence that modernity enacts on memory and identity. The vision is interpreted as a message from her mother to restore these lost memories, and she embarks on a project of excavating and recording the personal stories that may otherwise be lost. An act of remembrance is also implicit in the novel’s title, Il piatto dell’angelo, which refers to the tradition of setting a place at the table for missing family members during important mealtimes and celebrations. The narrator recalls her childhood memories of when her grandmother would set a place for the absent Cesare. The angel’s plate functions as a metonymic reminder of the missing family member, while the association with the spirit world suggests the improbability of return. The tourists Marina and Piero witness the same ritual in Bolivia where the uncle, Nicolas, sets an empty place for the absent Lita which further emphasizes the shared cultural traditions across continents and across time.

Jan Assmann (2011, 34–41) distinguishes “communicative memory” from “cultural memory” in that the former is a non-institutionalized form of memory, passed on by informal oral communications and related to a living past which tends to have a limited timeframe of three generations. The latter also involves memories of a more remote past which can function as a myth of origins and is transmitted by means of institutions, rituals, ceremonies, and often mediated through specialists. Although little more than a decade separates the publication of the two novels, there is a sense of advancing time, and therefore urgency, in preserving the past as the generation who experienced mass emigration first-hand is passing. This sense of progression is conveyed through the style of the narration in each novel. Quando Dio ballava il tango employs first person narration or free indirect discourse in which memories are focalized through the eponymous character of each chapter to create a sense of spontaneous recall of the female protagonists. In Il piatto dell’angelo, however, stories of past emigration under the sub-headings “ieri” are narrated in the third person by an external narrator using the historical past tense. The generational time shift implies progression from communicative memory toward the imperative of embedding a cultural memory of emigration into Italy’s self-image. Il piatto dell’angelo’s juxtaposition of accounts of Italian emigrants with those of present-day migrants from South America to Italy extends the function of memory beyond personal or family identities to shape attitudes toward current migrants. It highlights shared experiences in order to foster a sense of solidarity with present-day counterparts. It insists that “ieri è oggi” and “lontano è qui” (Pariani 2013, 22) collapsing time and space that separate these events and creating a collective experience. The recognition of a common shared experience at the foundation of Italy’s history negates constructions of self and other on which much anti-immigrant sentiment is based. Migration thus becomes a myth of origins which shapes Italian identities past and present; indeed, many present-day migrants to Italy from South America can trace their family origins back to Italy or other European countries. By reminding Italians of their own history as a nation of migrants, Pariani provides a lens through which to understand and respond to contemporary migration. The cultural memory of past migrations impinges on the present and demands an ethical response. It is, in Jan Assmann’s (2011, 62) terms, a “hot memory” which provides a dynamic force for change in the present. This ethical impetus and present orientation of Il piatto dell’angelo will be explored in the following section.

Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics

The ethical stance of Pariani in Il piatto dell’angelo can be described as a form of cultural or rooted cosmopolitanism. Theories of cosmopolitanism encompass a range of positions from a socio-cultural condition arising out of increased exposure to cultural and linguistic diversity; a philosophical sense of belonging to a wider human community which confers moral and/or legal obligations on global citizens; a political project which aims to establish transnational institutions that transcend the nation state; a recognition of multiple allegiances and overlapping identifications; an open disposition toward diversity and willingness to engage with others; and a set of cultural competencies gained from moving between different cultural contexts (Vertovec and Cohen 2002). It is sometimes used in a pejorative sense to refer to the outlook of a global elite and maligned, too, by political theorists as in its strong form expressing desire for an imperialist world government and in its weak form a general expression of empathy for humanity which is too vague to hold any practical meaning (Miller 2002; Pogge 2002). However, the concept has been revived in recent years by philosophers and cultural theorists such as Appiah (2007) who see cosmopolitanism as an ethical position which assumes a duty of care for other human beings regardless of their nationality, ethnic origin, religion, or other forms of attachment. It entails an openness to difference and a commitment to understanding, respecting, and engaging in dialogue with others while recognizing local attachments and affiliations.

Il piatto dell’angelo explores questions of responsibilities toward a broader human community which includes not just migrants in Italy, but also their families and communities on the other side of the globe. It does so within the “Ieri è oggi” chapters by alternating stories of previous Italian emigrants with the stories of present-day migrants to Italy, reminding Italians of their own emigratory past in order to elicit empathy with their contemporary counterparts. Despite being separated by a century, there is a striking similarity in the experiences of both groups: perilous journeys, unscrupulous traffickers, precarious work, discrimination, abuse, and unfulfilled dreams. The shared experiences of the two groups underline the moral obligations of Italy toward its migrant population. Il piatto dell’angelo also draws attention to the ways in which the first world exploits the developing world for its own convenience. It presents an Italy, and by extension Europe, in crisis with an ageing population and a state that fails to provide adequate care for its own citizens. The demographic situation in Italy is commented on by Lita - “qui a Milano sono tutti vecchi” (Pariani 2013, 70) - and reinforced by Marina and Piero’s decision not to have children (Pariani 2013, 48). Marina rarely visits her elderly mother-in-law; instead, the caring duties are performed by a Bolivian woman who has left her own children behind in order to earn a living in Europe. The “Ieri è oggi” chapters reveal the exploitative and predatory nature of Italy’s reliance on migrant domestic workers, drawing attention to the uneven power relationships inherent in their roles.¹⁴ The domestic helpers featured in the novel are shown to be living and working in Italy as undocumented migrants with precarious contracts which leaves them open to exploitation: they are forced to work long hours, are too afraid to report abuse for fear of deportation, and frequently suffer physical and sexual abuse:

Vanno a lavorare in prova come tuttofare o badanti. Sii gentile. Sorridi sempre. Ricordati che, se fai la difficile, ti mandano via e prendono un’altra al posto tuo. Ce ne sono a migliaia che accetterebbero. Ritieniti fortunata. Porta pazienza se sono esigenti, se sono maleducati, se gridano, se ti trattano dall’alto in basso. L'hanno loro il coltello dalla parte del manico. (Pariani 2013, 41)

Sebastiana non ride più: il vedovo a cui deve badare allunga le mani a palparla, è insistente, noioso, le ha proposto di occupare la parte destra del letto che la defunta ha lasciato vuoto. A volte acconsente. Perché lo fa? Non lo sa. Forse per paura di perdere il posto: la paga è buona. (Pariani 2013, 68)

The sheer number of analogous reports, told by a third person narrator, suggests the scale of exploitation, while the use of personal names combined with internal focalisation reminds the reader that behind each story, there is an individual human being. The moral message here is very clear: those who perform caring duties for an ageing western population have the right to a reciprocal duty of care.

The novel continues in this ethical vein with the narrative thread of the two Milanese tourists, Marina and Piero. Pariani exploits the conventions of travel writing in their story to draw attention to the moral dilemmas of travel in an increasingly interconnected, yet unequal, world. The traveler/tourist dichotomy of contemporary travel writing juxtaposes an “intrepid” traveler who seeks a meaningful and authentic engagement with cultural difference with the consumer-led tourist who is easily satisfied with inauthentic experiences which replicate the comforting familiarities of home (Lisle 2006, 77–80). This common trope is embodied by Marina and Piero, but here it is presented with an ethical twist. Marina adopts a cosmopolitan outlook: she is portrayed as open and curious, eager to meet local people and stay in their homes; she attempts to speak their language and understand their culture. Piero, on the other hand, is inflexible, he is not interested in any meaningful encounter with difference and passes negative judgement on the unfamiliar culture. He does not want to eat “le loro schifezze” and calls the roads “mulattiere,” an openly racist term which reveals his view of the place as primitive and backward (Pariani 2003, 10–12). For Piero, the journey to South America is intended as a pleasure trip involving luxury hotels, entertainment, and the consumption of tourist sites; he views the detour to the hometown of Lita as “un perditempo” and tries to convince his wife that the journey is pointless (Pariani 2003, 25). Initially, they only intend to pay a short visit to Lita’s family, but when the vehicle they are travelling in breaks down, they are forced to prolong their stay. Breakdown, in this case mechanical failure, is another common device of travel writing which facilitates deeper engagement with the host culture and prompts introspection (Phillips 2019). During their unintentionally prolonged stay, they discover that Lita’s mother is gravely ill (she subsequently dies during their visit), and that Lita has left behind two daughters, Alicia aged six and Carmen Rosa aged 15. The elder daughter, still traumatized by the departure of her mother, has recently given birth to a child. The only male figure in the family is the uncle, Nicolas, who travels from a nearby town to support the desperate family. For Marina, at least this leads her to a deeper understanding of the consequences of Lita’s decision to leave her family in search of work in Italy. She begins to question her own values and decisions as well as reflect on her personal responsibilities toward the Bolivian family.

Appiah has argued for a partial or rooted form of cosmopolitanism which accepts that humans establish emotional attachments to their closest relations and communities and that what we owe to our closest companions may be more than we owe to strangers (2007, 164–166). While Pariani’s works appear to subscribe to this notion in their attention to close family relationships and local affiliations, Il piatto dell’angelo goes a stage further in collapsing the distinction between close relatives and distant strangers. The story of Lita suggests to the reader that distant communities are intimately connected and that the distinction between kin and stranger is increasingly difficult to maintain when we rely on the labor of people from the other side of the globe within our own homes.

Il piatto dell’angelo’s representation of the relationship between the two tourists and the Bolivian family indicates that a cosmopolitan disposition is not limited to a global elite with the financial means to travel in search of an exotic other, but extends into the lives and practices of migrants and their families (Vertovec and Cohen 2002). The novel deconstructs the typical positioning of the traveler and travelee so that rather than being the passive object of tourist gaze, Lita’s family become the subject of the story. The power relations between the western travelers and the Bolivian family are reversed when the Italian couple become dependent on the family for food and shelter when they are left without transport. Their assumptions of status based on superior cultural competencies and knowledge are also overturned when their poor attempts to communicate in Spanish and English are met by Nicolas responding to them in Italian and explaining he had worked in Italy for several months (Pariani 2013, 47). The “Other” is no longer an object for touristic consumption but demonstrates agency through local knowledge and considerable cultural and linguistic expertise.

Conclusion

The two novels look to the past as a way of understanding Italian identities in the present and offer a response to the challenges posed by the mass movement of people in an increasingly interconnected world. Pariani’s transhistorical approach provides an understanding of globalization as a long-term process rather than a recent phenomenon, while her insistence on the circular nature of migratory journeys counteracts sensationalist narratives of invasion found in the media. Rather than globalization necessarily leading to the homogenization of culture, the novels highlight the forms of cultural and linguistic hybridity that result from contact between peoples. This in turn challenges monolingual and mono-identitarian myths of nationhood; indeed, Italy’s identity as a nation is shown to be bound up with migration, incorporating plural and diverse cultures from the start.

Pariani, nevertheless, draws her readers’ attention to the more negative aspects of global movements and of Europe’s reliance on its migrant workforce. Both novels focus on the impact of mass migration and globalizing forces on the peoples and communities left behind which, it is suggested, have a long-term legacy, and can be experienced as transgenerational trauma. Il piatto dell’angelo depicts Italy today as a country in crisis, where migrants are exploited as cheap labor or as substitute domestic workers when the family or state are unable or unwilling to provide. By highlighting such unscrupulous practices, the novel prompts reflection on the first world’s ethical responsibilities toward its migrant population. Furthermore, in its layering stories of past and present migrants, the novel reminds Italians of the parallels between Italian emigration to the Americas in the early twentieth century and migration to Italy today, thus reinforcing a sense of compassion and duty toward others.

The article has suggested that Pariani’s ethical positioning in the novels is one of rooted cosmopolitanism which accepts that people hold stronger allegiances to close family and local places but sets this alongside obligations to a broader human community. Her works recognize the significance of place and locality in the construction of personal identity, yet foreground the interdependency of peoples and places in an increasingly mobile world. The character of Marina embodies a cosmopolitan outlook in her desire for meaningful engagement with other cultures, her embrace of cultural difference, and her ability to reflect on her personal responsibility toward the Bolivian family. Il piatto dell’angelo explores cosmopolitan ethics further through the figure of Lita and the family that she has left behind, showing that any moral distinction between kin and stranger collapses when the first world relies on so-called “strangers” to care for members of their own family.

The dilemma faced by the two Italian travelers in Il piatto dell’angelo remains unsolved as they leave the Bolivian family and continue their holiday. Marina expresses her wish to help Carmen Rosa and Alicia in some way, but her husband refuses to engage in the discussion. Alicia asks the couple to take her back to Italy, but her request is dismissed as futile. The final chapter of their story is entitled “Sull’impossibile” and ends with Marina closing her eyes, symbolically turning a blind eye to a problem that is too complex for her to solve. What responsibility do Marina and Piero have toward the Bolivian family of their badante? What responsibility does Europe have toward its migrant population? The reader is left to contemplate these questions to which there are no simple solutions. In Appiah’s words, “there’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge” (2007, xiii).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joanne Lee

Dr. Joanne Lee is Associate Professor in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published articles on twentieth and twenty-first century accounts of travel and migration, examining questions of belonging, transnational identities, and the memory of Italy’s colonial past. Her current research and teaching interests focus on the ethical implications of travel writing and ways in which travel writing engages with questions of decolonization, cosmopolitan ethics, sustainability, and the climate emergency.

Correspondence to: Joanne Lee. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The figure is 5,806,068 as of 31 December 2021. Since 1988, Italians living abroad for more than a period of twelve months have been legally required to register with the Anagrafe degli italiani residenti all'estero (AIRE). Tintori and Romei (2017, 53) suggest that the figures recorded by the AIRE underestimate the number of Italians abroad as there are few incentives to promote registration and many emigrants are uncertain as to the duration of their stay.

2 Cinematic works include Gianni Amelio's Lamerica (1994) and Emanuele Crialese's Nuovomondo (2006). In literature, notable examples include Erri de Luca's Tre cavalli (1999) and Melania Mazzucco's novels Vita (2003) and Io sono con te (2016) which respectively present an account of Italian emigration to New York and the story of a refugee from the Congo in contemporary Rome. The temporalities, trajectories and spaces connecting Italian emigration, colonialism, and immigration are explored in Fiore (2017).

3 Notable examples of transnational writers in Italy include Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, Gabriella Ghermandi, Pap Khouma, Amara Lakhous, Salah Methnani, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Igiaba Scego, and Ornela Vorpsi. I use the term transnational to refer to authors whose lived experiences and interactions extend beyond the confines of one nation state and whose writing foregrounds linguistic, cultural, and stylistic hybridity. The contested term “migrant writer” does not represent fully the experience of this group, some of whom were born in Italy, have an Italian parent, or have gained Italian citizenship. See Bond (2014).

4 In a study of the motivations of voters in the 2018 elections, Corbetta et al. (2018) suggest that support for the right-wing populist party La Lega was linked to high levels of cultural disorientation, stemming from negative perceptions of immigration. On the connections between negative media representations of migration and voting patterns, see Roncarolo and Mancini (2018).

5 Biographical information along with a complete list of Pariani's works can be found on the author's webpage: http://www.omegna.net/pariani/start.html. Accessed 26 August 2021.

6 For a detailed overview of the interconnecting stories of the individual female characters, see Nocentini (2011, 147–156).

7 Theorists contest the timeframe over which these shifts have occurred, yet most agree that the process accelerated in the latter part of the twentieth century. For a discussion of the debates on the historicizing of globalization see Jay (2011, 34–40) and Scholte (2005, 85–120)

8 In an interview for Lo specchio di carta, Pariani explains the significance of the novel’s title: “Quanto al titolo, gli argentini dicono che Dio è argentino, per questo balla il tango. Dire Quando Dio ballava il tango è come dire 'c'era una volta…', il che evidenzia la dimensione favolistica del romanzo” (Perrone 2003).

9 Azzi (1996) and Cara (2016) both point to the strong imprint that Italian immigrant culture had on the development of tango in Buenos Aires, particularly the influence of the Neapolitan canzonetta tradition in the shift to tango as a lyrical form in the tango canción.

10 Dal Lago (2004) has analyzed media discourses and social mechanisms which operate within the Italian context to stigmatize migrants and assign them the status of non-persone.

11 The term translanguaging was first used in the 1990s to describe pedagogical practices in the bilingual Welsh/English classroom and subsequently has been extended to denote the porosity of languages and the fluid, everyday practices of multilinguals who draw on their unitary linguistic repertoire to negotiate meaning in different contexts. The term has the potential to disrupt language hierarchies and marks a shift away from the concept of languages as separate and autonomous systems. See García and Wei (2014).

12 In Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012), Yildiz calls for a rethinking of the connections between language and identity and greater recognition of the coexistence of multiple languages. She shows how monolingualism became established as a societal norm at the end of the eighteenth century while multilingualism was perceived as a threat to collective identity and was subjected to institutionalized erasure.

13 The fictional Corazón Bellati is born to Italian migrants in Buenos Aires in 1952, flees to Italy in 1978 to escape the military junta, and returns to Argentina in 2001. Laura Pariani was born in Busto Arsizio, Lombardy, in 1951 and travelled to Argentina for the first time in 1966 along with her mother in search of her grandfather. While Pariani acknowledges the similarities, she insists that Corazón is not her alter ego and that the thoughts and experiences expressed in the novel belong to the fictional character rather than to the author (see Perrone 2003).

14 Andall (2000) argues that Italian women's emancipation has been at the expense of migrant women who are often forced to abandon their own families or desire for motherhood to work as live-in domestic workers. See also Pojmann (2011).