Italian-hyphen-American

A colleague of mine gave a presentation today in which he discussed the nature of the hyphen in the label given to his ethnicity, Greek-American. I've never thought of myself as Italian-American, but at different times in my life, I have been.

I was born and raised in Ohio, so I've always thought of myself as simply American. My father, though, was born in Italy. My Uncle Nick, also Italian-born, taught me the lyrics to La Donna Mobile when I was far too young to think that calling a woman fickle was a problem. We did some things in my family -- ate biscotti, played Scopa, sang opera songs...loud -- that just seemed like normal family things to me. I never really thought of them as Italian.

If you were to see a picture of me as a little girl, you would think I looked Italian: brown eyes, dark brown hair. In "Articulating authentic Chineseness: The politics of reading race and ethnicity aesthetically," Sue Hum explains that such an aesthetic reading of someone's race is highly problematic: When we label someone as a certain race or ethnicity based on the way he or she looks, we perpetuate stereotypes of race and ethnicity and ignore whether a person chooses to enact the roles of a certain culture. While I agree that such aesthetic readings of ethnicity are problematic, they can also contribute in a positive way to a person's self-image. As a little girl, looking Italian was a good thing.

My looks weren't the only part of my childhood that could have linked me to another culture, though. As a little girl, I used to pronounce the word both as "bolth." Not until I was a teenager and someone pointed it out to me did I hear the "l" sound in my pronunciation. I hadn't realized anything was strange about the way I said the word -- my father said it that way, as did my younger sister. Once I realized my pronounciation was wrong -- or, shall we say, not traditional -- I practiced saying "both, both, both" until I trained the "l" out of my speech. Years later, it occurred to me that I had likely learned to pronounce the word from my father who, because Italian does not have a "th" sound, does not enunciate words with "th" sounds in the same way that I do. (I still haven't figured out why my dad and my sister say "sangwich" for "sandwich." If anyone has a theory, I'd love to hear it.)

But back to being aesthetically Italian...as I grew older, I began to dye blond streaks in my hair and stopped singing opera with my father. My uncle was around less, so we played less Scopa. I wasn't consciously moving away from being Italian, but I was noticeably becoming more "American."

The most drastic shift away from my Italian heritage came when I traded my Italian last name for an American one. The American last name was easier to pronounce, and I have to admit that in the time I had it, it was wonderful to not have to repeat my name, or to spell it out, or to explain that my name is "Ann...Amicucci," not "Ann...Micucci." But I missed being Italian.

I'm now happy to have the name Amicucci as a label of my Italian heritage. As an Amicucci, I have an immediate connection with any other (aesthetically labeled) Italian that I meet. With an American last name, I felt like a no-culture individual. I blended in, but not in a good way. Claiming an aesthetic identity gives me a connection to a culture that -- even if I'm actually American, not actually (authentically?) Italian -- I'm proud to be connected with.

Author of your own life

A recent column of Andrew Sullivan's got me thinking about the changing values of authorship. Do I want to be an author? And what do I mean by author?

When I was little, I loved to write. I still do. I started college not knowing what to major in: I considered architecture until I flipped through a few textbooks and then, intimidated, changed my mind. When I finally chose a major, it was magazine journalism. The dream, of course, was to become a columnist, sit by the window of my New York City apartment, and write a monthly column for Vogue. Simple, right? Then I took Print Beat Reporting. I realized that all journalism isn't exciting, but as a journalist, it's your job to make even the blah stories newsworthy. It was time to become an English major.

When I was 20 or so and someone asked if I planned to use my degree to teach, I scoffed at the idea. I had never considered being a teacher. A few years later, though, I realized that I was really in to the idea of getting paid to talk with other people about writing.

I still dream about writing that column for Vogue or publishing a novel someday, but I'm less enthusiastic about doing either. Sure, I love to write, but ultimately, publishing has to do with more than just writing -- the focus is on sharing writing with an audience. I'm just as comfortable talking about writing in a classroom and practicing it on my own time.

If, as Sullivan says, we're all authors, then becoming an author doesn't mean the same thing that it used to. But aren't we all authors already, in other ways? Every time I talk with a student about her writing, I'm authoring another dialogic learning experience. In turn, she is an author even if I am the only one to see what she writes.