fmapril07

What are the roots of “Furniture”?

My family, like the family in “Furniture,” came to the United States from Italy in the late 1970s. It was an interesting and turbulent time in Italy’s history and when I think back on the pessimistic predictions my father made about Italy’s future -- about how Italians in general felt about the political stability of Italy at that time -- I find it very interesting how entirely off the mark we all were. This is an important point for me because it forces the question of whether or not all the pain and suffering of immigration and adaptation was necessary. I don’t regret my becoming an American, and I am ever grateful for my father’s cautious nature and his far-sightedness, but on a psychological level, the issue of willful, deliberate abandonment (of my culture, of my mother tongue and of my native land) is something that interests me very deeply.

I can’t say that my father was the typical immigrant. He came to the United States for a VIP position with full sponsorship from a big international corporation. Our family’s experience, therefore, differed significantly from the immigrant mythos of American culture. There were no issues of legality for us, and we didn’t struggle to find jobs and to hide from deportation squads. Although my father’s move was motivated in part by the threat of the communist Red Brigades in Italy, which were wreaking havoc and targeting especially the upper middle class, our coming to America was still for the most part an indulgence. It lacked all of the desperate inevitability of, say, rafters trying to escape Castro’s communist Cuba. We came here because we were uncertain whether or not Italy would undergo a communist revolution, yes, but also because it was the right move for my father’s career, and because it would open up financial and educational opportunities to myself and my brothers and sisters. We came here with the idea that unless the worst happened, we could go back after a few years, enriched by the experience and the career advancement. We came here, in other words, because we could, not because we had to. As it turned out, Italy stabilized and became a world power. That we didn’t go back was only a matter of habit. We had worked so hard at adapting that we felt too lazy to put ourselves through a new rigor of re-integration by returning to a country that had changed in our absence. So all of us, with the exception of my older sister, chose to stay here.

When I first started writing seriously, my colleagues often asked me why I was writing stories about love and lust, why I wasn’t tapping into my experience as an immigrant for writing material. On some level I felt offended by this. I think I harbored an immigrant’s obsession for acceptance that was willing to adopt all and every measure of cultural effacement. Though I was the last in my family to learn how to speak English, I was the first to adopt it as my first language, refusing to speak to my parents in their native tongue, and snubbing any cultural or social event labeled Italian or as belonging to the Italian culture. In part, this rebellion was motivated by the usual adolescent angst, but in part it was motivated by my fear that I would never find a social niche in which I could comfortably fit. The Italians I met in school were third, fourth, even sixth generation. I did not understand their dialects, and I did not recognize the traditions they honored or the foods they ate as having much to do with the Italy I knew and left behind only so recently. By calling themselves Italian Americans instead of Americans, I understood that they had created a new ethnicity, one that had less to do with Italy than it had to do with the inevitable isolationism of immigrant adaptation. They scared me because they were even more alien to me then Americans, and because they represented yet another layer of separation and loneliness. When people asked me why I wasn’t writing about being an Italian immigrant, the real answer I never gave was that I was not sure I knew what it meant to be an Italian immigrant.

There were other ways in which my background wasn’t so clean cut. I had lived in Spain and fallen in love with the Spanish culture. Then I moved to Miami, and I adopted it as my surrogate home. I found that everything Cuban excited me, especially the music and the visually stunning salsa dancing. The Yoruba roots of Santeria were a refreshing departure from the steadfastness of Catholicism. I felt that I belonged best with Cuban Americans, Spaniards, and especially well traveled Americans who had once lived abroad. I knew the Italian culture intimately, but I did not feel as free with it as I did with the Miami remix culture that I was so deeply immersed in. So where did that put me as a writer? Did I really have to limit my writing according to my birth certificate?

It took a long time for me to understand that there were, actually, ambiguous Others in the literature of immigrant cultures that did not necessarily fit by the standards of the better known mythos; in other words, it took years to realize that I didn’t need to let the mythos define my own experience. Ironically, two things happened. On the one hand, when I wrote about my childhood, I received comments that doubted my authenticity: “I think this narrator has never been to Italy!” and “These characters sound American. They don’t ever say ciao bella and things like that.” On the other hand, I sometimes received hearty praises from editors who nonetheless rejected my writing because it was “the immigrant story,” as if there were only one story an immigrant could tell, and it had already been told ad nauseam. In retrospect, I’m glad that I didn’t let these comments discourage me.

I did not have an agenda when I started writing “Furniture.” At first, I thought it might be a nonfiction piece, and, without knowing what I would write about except that it would be about being an immigrant, I started from the most logical beginning I could think of, the day when my father and mother first transported us to the United States. However, something compelled me to write in third person, and after the first few paragraphs, it became clear that the freedom of the omniscient point of view was seducing me away from the shores of nonfiction. Someone once said, “Once it’s on paper it’s fiction,” and I think what I got out of that is that even when we start with every intention of telling the truth, what comes out is always just a story, something that happened to people, but not “the truth.” What I believe, in any case, about realist fiction, is that every story is both true and untrue, fiction and nonfiction. To the extent that every story is the product of the writer’s thinking, so is every fictional character, every dramatized situation, somewhat a product of the writer’s personality, political or social views, and experience. This, to me, makes a story both true and untrue.

With “Furniture,” I wanted to stay true to the characters of my mother and father, brother and sister, but the more I tried to recall and recreate events from my past, the more the changes towards fictionalization became deeper, more important, departing ever more dramatically from “the truth” in order to deliver the essence of some ripple of suffering that is as mercurial and subterranean as any of our most defining experiences. What I ended up with, though, was a fair compromise. Although the story does not recreate my family’s story factually, it delivers the drama behind our individual choices, the betrayals and renunciations that paid the price for our version of the American dream.

In the end, I feel satisfied and reconciled to the version of truth rendered in “Furniture.” When I try to explain what the story is about, I find that I can’t do so without obscuring some important subtlety. I think that the story explains what it is about much better than I can, and this after all, is what fiction is about.