Articles by: Maria Laurino

I have been intrigued to watch how Michelle Obama has been introducing Old World ways into a very New World White House (see my blog post "Living in the New World, Choosing from the Old") but I'm even more fascinated with the new type of feminism that she's introduced in the past few months – one that has been sorely missing for decades and is vital to helping improve the lives of women and children.   Mrs. Obama has shifted from the Seventies paradigm of an equal rights feminism to a broader, and long-forgotten vision of the movement, that seeks to protect the interests of mothers and children.

 

First, Mrs. Obama moved her mother into the White House to ensure the continuity of care that Marion Robinson has long provided for her granddaughters.  Then she announced that her family would grow a garden. Mrs. Obama is making the garden a national symbol of healthy family eating, and says that she was inspired by the idea because working long hours as a professional woman often meant serving her children fast food.  After the Obama’s pediatrician warned of the health risks of processed, high calorie foods, the family changed its eating habits.

 

Both choices have an Old World counterpart.  My grandfather, adopting the traditions of agrarian southern Italian life, planted a large garden in a lot next to the apartment building he owned.   He grew the vegetables that my grandmother would pick fresh each morning for the day’s meals.  Having grandma take care of the children has long been an Old World tradition too.

 

But Mrs. Obama’s decisions can also be traced to a very American tradition – the women’s temperance movement.  Indeed, some women scholars argue that feminism wasn’t always as disconnected from the private realm as it is today, but diverged in that direction in the twentieth century and never returned to its more complicated roots.

 

Janet Giele’s 1995 book, Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism, examined both movements and offered a broader picture of temperance women than the rigid, puritanical teetotaler.  Many temperance leaders took up their crusade because of the profound loss of a husband or a son to alcohol abuse, channeling their grief into creating what they believed was a better society.  The suffragettes, on the other hand, acted more like the precursors to the modern feminist movement, focusing on women’s equality. 

 

Giele argued that mainstream feminism would be well served by adopting strategies similar to those of moderate temperance leaders, who also supported the suffrage movement while they fought for causes such as the purification of drinking water.  For the feminist movement to once again achieve broad support, these two strands – one that sought to protect women’s interests as wives and mothers, the other that fought for universal human rights – must converge again.

 

Former first lady Hillary Clinton’s feminist’s roots were closer to the suffragette movement; she represented the modern feminist movement’s demand for equality.  In fact, Mrs. Clinton alienated a lot of women when she famously commented that she had no desire to stay home and bake cookies.  In the White House, Mrs. Clinton requested a west wing office and took on a policy role.

 

Mrs. Obama, on the other hand, said that her initial responsibility was to be “First Mom” and has been speaking primarily to women’s needs as wives and mothers.  Her charisma and enormous popularity suggest that she can merge these two divergent strands of feminism.

 

A feminist motherhood agenda:  To modern ears, the words ring of contradictions.  If, generally speaking, feminism engages us in the world, motherhood, at least temporarily, draws us away.  Feminism looks outward – a bold attempt to change the values of a society in which men hold positions of power and decision making; motherhood turns instinctively inward, fiercely geared toward protecting your child.


Today, I can no longer dismiss as dusty old relics cultural traditions that sought to protect the sanctity of the family.   I've come to imagine that the Old World's deeply ingrained familial instincts can serve as a backdrop to a broader discussion of care:  Who is going to provide it and who is going to pay for it? 


Perhaps the nature of being an in-between person, those of us who straddle the competing and conflicting values of our hyphenated ancestries, mean resisting cultural extremes, searching instead for a place that, at least in the imagination, melds what's worth preserving with life-affirming change. 


Which leads me to believe that the ancestors of immigrants and the ancestors of those who came here on slave ships, using the New World tools of education and its principles of justice, can help fashion a society that will not undermine our ability to work and to nurture but significantly aid it.


And who better to lead the way than Michelle Obama?

    A few weeks back, I talked about my anger with contemporary Italy.  I lamented the complacency and weary acceptance that’s taken place, which has led to the reelection of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister and the inability to thwart the desires of entrenched interests.

    As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, when I get annoyed at fatalistic Italians I have an odd knee-jerk reaction:  I read English rationalists.   I find their cool composure and emotional distance an antidote to my high opera inheritance.

   This time, I’ve turned to Bertrand Russell writing about the importance of idleness (to be fair, my reading of Russell is also in response to what I’ve seen take place in my own country in the past few decades – the demand for more and more productivity with only a tiny minority enjoying the fruits of this American labor). 

    Although Russell’s ideas sometimes border on the wacky, he can also be brilliant, formidable, and make enormous sense.  Writing in the 1930s, his words couldn’t be more prescient:  “The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy.”

   Or this: “…the world is suffering from intolerance and bigotry, and from the belief that vigorous action is admirable even when misguided; whereas what is needed in our very complex society is calm consideration, with readiness to call dogmas into question and freedom of mind to do justice to the most diverse points of view.”

   I nod along, amazed by how his words apply to both our current fiscal woes and the mess of the Iraq war.   But then, one hundred pages later, I come across this observation in an essay about American homogeneity:

   “Take, for example, what the schools do to southern Italians.  Southern Italians have been distinguished throughout history for murder, graft, and aesthetic sensibility.  The Public Schools effectively cure them of the last of these three, and to that extent assimilate them to the native American population, but in regard to the other two distinctive qualities, I gather that the success of the schools is less marked.”

   Wow.

   And that observation comes from one of the greatest British minds of the twentieth century.

At least Francis Ford Coppola didn’t allow the schools to rob him of his aesthetic sensibility, thus enabling him to beautifully portray those first two qualities and forever embed them in the American imagination.  

   So much for English rationalists to distract me from Italian dysfunction.  I close the book amazed by stereotypes that were once bandied about in intellectual conversation.

   English rationalism.  Italian fatalism.  I need to find, in Russell’s own words, “a balanced adjustment of opposing tendencies.”

    There’s an old Neapolitan proverb:  “Three are the powerful: the pope, the king, and the man who has nothing.”

    To Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, the proverb revealed the essence of the existentialist struggle:  “Being poor is a form of power,” Moravia explained.  “In fact, what is called existentialism was the idea that man exists and that existence is an indestructible strength.”

    I wanted to believe Moravia’s interpretation when I read it years ago, but it always seemed a bit too romantic for me.  I’m not sure if my southern Italian relatives felt particularly powerful.  And to look at southern Italy today, the poor are still poor, and the collusion between the mafia and the government is destroying the land and hopes of the people.  Last week, the New York Times ran an article about the seemingly intractable problems plaguing Naples – the stinking garbage that accumulated on the streets becoming the most visceral reminder of the city’s stagnation.  Artists in Naples – who once believed that their city’s status as a cultural capital could be restored – are mostly in a state of despair.

    Art historian Nicola Spinoza told the Times:  “Today there is no longer a culture of illuminated leadership and Naples has become provincial, closed onto itself.  Now it’s just a producer of poverty, unemployment and trash, and I don’t mean just the trash in the streets, which you can remove, but inside ourselves.”

    Italy’s problems aren’t only in the south.  A rash of racist acts against African immigrants in the north – one man murdered because he supposedly stole a package of cookies from a shop – suggests that provincialism and hatred have no north-south borders .

    I’ve been thinking about Italy during this extraordinary time in American culture and politics.  We are weeks away from the possibility of electing our first African-American president.   We, too, face forces of racism and provincialism that seek to destroy this possibility.  But – and what a lovely but – a strong civic culture is simulatneously flourishing in America today.   Voter registration rolls are growing throughout the country; young people across the land are enthusiastically waiting to cast their vote; and an Internet drive for campaign contributions has helped Barack Obama raise over 150 million dollars in the month of September alone. 

    If Obama wins, his victory may in part be due to another extraordinary phenomenon -- the dramatic downturn in the American economy.  The politics of distraction placed us in a drowsy stupor for too many years.  But this time many Americans are counting the days to depose the king who stole an election eight years ago, and say goodbye to his Republican heir. 

    “Three are the powerful: the pope, the king, and the man who has nothing.”

     We are not the poor to whom Moravia refers.  Rather, we are a rich nation with the ashy taste of loss in our mouthts.  We have lost money, jobs, a sense of security -- the essence of what it has meant to be an American in the postwar decades.

     Can this loss spur us into action?  If Obama wins the presidency, America will have surprised the rest of the world with our optimism and sense of hope.  And why does America's potential feat  seem unimaginable in Italy today -- or in its foreseeable future?  It saddens me that the country of my grandparents seems all the more lost in its past and in its inability to move forward.  For all my longing for an Italian past (and I certainly believe that my past defines a large part of who I am), I am grateful to have been raised in an American political tradition.

    The current political discourse reminds me of an observation James Baldwin made in his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son:  “What time will bring Americans is at last their own identity.” 

    This election has helped secure my sense of identity -- solidified the two sides of my hyphen.  Genectically, I am the grandchild of southern Italians, but a liberal pluralistic tradition has shaped me politically.

    America today is deeply split – one half wants to move forward, the other, like Italy itself, clings to the past.  But if a majority of Americans decides to move forward, we will have accomplished the most formidable task.  We can again export our hope and optimism to the rest of the world – allowing other countries to believe that anything is possible in America. 

    In the past few decades, I have looked across the Atlantic a few too many times, believing that my dreams might best be answered in Italy.  But today, seeing the reality of Italian politics and the solidification of Mafia control, I am more clear-eyed.  Time will bring Americans their own identity. 

     If the once impossible becomes possible – that the son of a white American woman and Kenyan man can become president of the United States – I can see how far this vision of America has carried us; I can better imagine the hope that my grandfather held.   His family had next to nothing in southern Italy, and in his single most powerful act, he chose to leave that land behind.




 

    This summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about Italian fatalism.  During a recent vacation in France, I decided the appropriate reading material for the flight over should start with Vanity  Fair’s interview with my favorite first lady, Carla Bruni (see Carla Bruni, Old World Italian).  The beautiful and talented former supermodel/singer gushed on every page about her new husband, French president Nicolas Sarkozy to Vanity Fair correspondent Maureen Orth.  She told Orth that it would be a “dream” to have Nicolas’s children (the quote landed on the cover of every French glossy magazine).   “I hope to, if I am young enough,” said the forty-year-old Carla. 

     What about fertility treatments? Orth pragmatically asked. 

     No, Bruni replied, she wouldn’t want to “tempt the devil."

    The cosmopolitan former mistress of French philosopher Raphael Enthoven (the father of her son) is no rational woman.  She happily reveals her fatalistic Italian roots – and here, I mean fatalism in the classical sense – that life is dictated directly from above.  (Roots which I thought ran mainly through the veins of those of us who are southerners).  While most Americans would readily turn to science and invest years in extensive fertility treatments – Carla won’t “tempt the devil.”  That’s why I like Carla -- it’s comforting to see someone as poised and successful as she is as inherently nervous about the world as I am. 

     And still the world seems to shine down upon Carla.  If the gossip rags are right, Carla may be getting this dream too.  After Sarkozy was seen patting her bikini-clad belly this summer, rumor has it that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is pregnant. 

     The happy fatalist.  I wonder how she feels about airplanes, I thought, closing the magazine to face the rest of my flight…..

      A more brutal fatalism surfaced in several Italian movies playing in New York this summer, reminding those of us who sometimes fantasize about a life in Italy, the difficult, often impossible conditions of those who live there.   Biutiful Cauntri (a play on the southern Italian pronunciation of English) is a devastating documentary about the Mafia control of waste in Campania, and how a compact between corrupt government officials and Mafia bosses contaminated one town for decades with illegal waste.

     The sheep are dying, the crops ruined; the once-prized buffala mozzarella is contaminated.  The film reminds Italian-Americans of the genesis of our fatalism:  man is powerless to the actions of greater forces.  With a corrupt government and no where else to turn, the residents of this village can only lament the land that they once cultivated. One of the town’s activists spends most of his time in this film yelling into the camera, trying desperately to tell his unimaginable story – that for money men become animals, dumping toxic waste and destroying the lives of their paesani. 

     As an American, it’s hard to watch this film and see the impossibility of fixing this problem.  We no doubt have our own deep levels of corruption and lack of government concern (Hurricane Katrina for starters), but it’s hard to imagine that an environmental movement with the help of a state or local government agency couldn’t stop the illegal dumping.  Watching the film, I thought about my old Italian relatives, and their “what can be done?” attitude to life’s difficulties.  They had hundreds of years to cultivate this belief – one that still has ample reason to exist in southern Italy today.

       The second film, Days and Clouds, is set in Genoa, a rather unattractive port city, but still a world away from Campania’s desultory people and desiccated sheep. The film is also about people succumbing to circumstances beyond their control.  Michele loses his high-paying job and hides this fact from his wife, Elsa, for months.  He uses a chunk of their paltry savings to give her a surprise birthday party and beautiful earrings.  He cannot bear to tell the woman whom he loves that their entire life savings is less than 30,000 euros.

     The plot of the film sets this couple on the worst possible course – part of the equity of their apartment was borrowed against Michele’s company, so they lose their home too.   Elsa, earning a degree in art history and working on the restoration of an ancient fresco, must give up the work she loves but doesn’t get paid for, accepting jobs as a phone salesperson and evening secretary. 

     The  ancient fresco that Elsa helps renovates serves as a metaphor for the film:  this gem of a country is stuck in its past.  With little room for mobility, the fatalistic countrymen must accept their lot.  Elsa may write an art history dissertation but there will no room at the academic inn for her talents.  Michele, once displaced from his vaguely described shipping job, ends up working as a bike messenger as his list of work possibilities dries up.

      Italian filmmaker Silivio Soldini leaves us with one piece of hope.  His ending seems to suggest that  what damns Italy may also save it. The country’s traditionalism, its refusal to change, its museum-like quality has also created a tightly connected family.  Michele begins to slide out of his depression by becoming an informal accountant to a restaurant his daughter opens; and both Michele and Elsa realize that whatever happens to their lives, they’ll do their best to remain a couple and help each other.  

    It’s not Carla Bruni's happy Hollywood ending, but maybe it’s a start.