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ARTS NEXUS - REVIEW BY SENIOR LECTURER IN ENGLISH OF ANTONINO'S NICHE "In my own climate of Gascony, they find it funny to see me in print. I am valued the more the farther from home knowledge of me has spread." So said Michel de Montaigne, author of the Essais which is now considered one of the great works of Renaissance thought. In our own "climate" of North Queensland, we should pay attention to Cairns author Letizia De Rosa's charming and intellectually enticing Antonino's Niche, because there is no doubt that it will be valued greatly by discriminating readers 'farther from home'. At first glance Antonino's Niche is a biography of the author's father. Such biographies tend to offer a neatly packaged, authorized account of their subject, with all the infelicities, complexities and ambiguities of a life quietly underplayed or entirely suppressed. Not so here: De Rosa's book is a way of coming to understand a life with all its joys and sorrows, its achievements and errors - underlying the narrative is the sub-text of a daughter's search for an authentic comprehension of her father's identity, not a simplification of it.
Essentially though, this work focuses on De Rosa's father, Antonino, beginning with his birth in Sorrento, and ending with his settlement in Cairns. It's indicative of the author's narrative skill that integrated with the chronological unfolding of biographical facts and details, is the theme of her father's search for peace and happiness. Antonino's life is a journey towards self-realization and independence, and, as such, fits the shape of a bildungsroman, a "story of formation" in which the subject is the development of the protagonist's mind and character in the passage from childhood through varied experiences - and usually though a crisis - into maturity and the recognition of his identity and role in the world. This blending of the narrative modes of biography and bildungsroman is achieved with remarkable skill and subtlety.
De Rosa opens the story with an account of her father's ancestry. We hear of the proud and vivacious families whose fortunes cross when Antonino's father and mother marry. Through charming anecdotes, we are given a lively picture of the centuries-old social mores and customs which shape individual, family and social life in the Neapolitan province of Italy. On the 21 September 1925, the first child and son of the De Rosa family, Antonino, is born, and "all my father's troubles began on that day of days, and so did everyone else" (51). This handsome and charming first-born male heir is indulged by the women in his extended family, and as a result grows up "totally oblivious of the societal expectations in his culture" (52). A growing independence and self-sufficiency contribute to expectations which will be severely tested by life's exigencies: "Free-spirited, he believed he could fly. Believing in the impossible, he wanted to live forever and be free Oblivious to everything and everyone, he would spend his days joyfully alone, away from the growing number of brothers and sisters, avoiding anything and anyone who annoyed him." (54) But fate and history draw Antonino increasingly into the annoyances of life. Minor troubles with school, with priests ("men in black dresses"), and with family teach Antonino the skills of both cunning and charm. He mixes with the "scugnizzi" (street urchins) and "these streets taught him how to get what he wanted, taught him about the nature of man, his strengths and his weaknesses" (68). A climactic event occurs when Antonino's father, in punishing him for forgetfulness, misjudges the strength of a blow which knocks his son unconscious. His father flees to the hills, and Antonino remains in a coma for many months. His maternal grandfather takes the boy on a desperate and perilous journey to Milan where he is eventually brought back to consciousness by a surgeon. After this, things are never the same again: Antonino transfers his affection to his loyal grandfather, while preserving a core of fear and anger towards his father. On the death of this grandfather, Antonino vehemently vows to "be loyal to those who return your loyalty and be wary of everyone, everyone!" (94). Antonino is now apprenticed to a tailor, but soon the war breaks out, and, when his father is lost at sea (he has been working on cargo ships supplying the Italian government's colonisation of Ethiopia) Antonino, at the age of 14, suddenly finds himself the breadwinner for a family of nine: "Bewildered and outraged at his father's disappearance, the boy with the joyful mischief no longer wanted to live forever. He wanted to fly alright, right out of this impossible dilemma and right away from all the responsibilities which lay ahead he now wanted to die" (107)
Too young to be enlisted (and in any case opposed to the policies of the Mussolini government which did nothing to help the numerous impoverished families of the South) Antonino does what he must to support his family in this "most challenging time where the dangers of war were trivial in the face of sheer survival" (109). These central chapters recounting the protagonist's trading in contraband goods and involvement in smuggling are full of suspense and excitement, but, thanks to De Rosa's research, also give us a painfully vivid and authentic picture of the injustice and degradation suffered by the poor in Italy during the years of World War II, first as a result of the social negligence of the Fascist Party, and then as a result of the occupation by German and then American forces. After the war Antonino emerges from a period of deep depression and must go as far north as Genoa to find employment. His mother dies, making the children even more dependent on his financial support. Eventually, Antonino receives a commission on a Panamanian liner transporting immigrants around the world in the post-war European diasporas. After a number of trips to Australia, he skips ship in Melbourne in 1951 after playing a significant role in a union challenge to the exploitative practices of the Panamanian line's captains, and "this step would change his life forever" (240). Thus begins Antonino's life in Australia, at that time not a place for someone who has been branded as a "militant Communist - sympathizing unionist". He decides to leave the dangerous political scene in Melbourne and head north into the wilderness, seeking a job in the canefields of North Queensland. The work is excruciatingly hard and the climate unbearably hostile for Europeans, but eventually work leads to relative self-sufficiency. Settling in Cairns, Antonino meets his wife-to-be: "They each had left Italy for different reasons, from different circumstances. Vincenzina tried to regain the prosperity of her youth, whilst Antonino tired to forget the lack of prosperity in his" (299). Antonino marries, builds a house in Grafton Street, Cairns, and, says the author in concluding her story, "It was finished in 1961, the year I was born, and together we moved" (301). Although this is the story of Antonino's De Rosa's life up to his marriage, it is also more than that: it is a story of the nature of the world in which Antonino's life unfolds. De Rosa's research into her father's life has resulted in a realistic but wonderful story which plays itself out against an authentic historical, political, social and cultural background. If you are tired of the increasingly formulaic "Kitchens in Tuscany", "Houses in Umbria" and "Villas in Venice", then read Antonino's Niche.
You will learn more from this work than from many histories or sociologies, more about Italian culture, about families, about fear and love, about conditions in the second world war, the realities of Fascism, the motives for immigration, the difficulties of pioneering life in the cane industry in North Queensland, and certainly about the courage required to leave one of the most developed and traditional cultures of Europe to embrace the frontier culture of a distant land. Dr. Stephen Torre Senior Lecturer in English Stephen Torre is a lecturer and researcher in modern and Australian literature at James Cook University Cairns. |
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LETIZIA C DE ROSA
Fiction/Non-fiction
BOOK CREATORS CIRCLE |
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