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Migration and Literature: the therapeutic effects of writing on the figure of the migrant.
A study of Canadian and Italian different ways to cope with diversity, starting from Julia Creet's MUM (2008). Introduction Were we to draw up a short list of the topics most frequently covered by Italian press last year, we should not be surprised to come across the migration issue. Among other things, in fact, 2011 is unfortunately to be remembered for the poor reaction of the Italian government and the EU policy to this ever more demanding matter, as thousands of asylum-seeker sailed from North Africa and reached the coasts of the island of Lampedusa (Sicily), desperately striving to gain better life conditions. In order to increase knowledge on the subject of migration and diversity, the University of Bologna (in the persons of professor Elena Lamberti, coordinator of the Program of Canadian Studies, and professor Giuliana Gardellini) together with the Government of Canada and the Canadian Embassy in Rome promoted during 2011 a number of encounters and lectures under the title Rethinking Otherness, to which this essay would like to be my personal contribution. I have decided to work on the lecture given by professor Julia Creet on the theme of memory and migration as I have found it personally and academically inspiring. Last year I was fortunate enough to attend professor Fulvio Pezzarossa's class on the subject of migration, its perception by Italian public opinion and researchers and the figure of the immigrant in our literary scene so that I am now very much interested in the matter myself. But, being most of all a passionate lover of literature, what definitely struck me about Professor Creet's lesson was the idea she suggested of an existing link between migration and the act of writing. However, let us first begin with a brief introduction to the

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Canadian cultural diversity panorama that would help us solving one basic question: why Italy met Canada to discuss the displacement issue? Why Canada? A short history of the Canadian immigration policy. Canada has always had to deal with resettlement and newcomers. Look at the European colonization, for instance. The arrival of English and French settlers drastically changed the course of Canadian history. All things considered, one might even say that migration (especially immigration) is part of the Canadian DNA. In fact, the 2006 Census showed through data that the Country is nowadays home to more than two hundreds different ethnic groups1. Actually, it was only in the 20th Century that the ever increasing number of incomers asking to be admitted beyond Canadian borders became such a phenomenon to need thorough discussions. To cope with ethnic diversity became thus a priority. In his book Canadian Mosaic (1938), the Scottish-Canadian writer John Murray Gibbon describes Canada as a mosaic of cultures in opposition to the American model of the melting pot2. While the latter results in the assimilation of the various ethnic groups into the mainstream culture (i.e. the American one) progressively leaving back most significant aspects of their own culture of origin, the Canadian mosaic ideal attempts to draw different populations near without merging them into one dominant culture. The mosaic figure has been relevant hence forward and it is the key idea in which multiculturalism has its origins. In order to reach equality for every Canadian citizen and against the so-called

1 See 2006 Census release topics : Ethnic origin and visible minorities, in Statistics Canada <URL=http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/censusrecensement/2006/rt-td/eth-eng.cfm> (accessed January 09, 2012) 2 See Cultural Mosaic in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia <URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_mosaic> (accessed January 09, 2012)

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bilingualism and biculturalism3 (i.e., the overwhelming supremacy of the English and French communities over other minorities) rose multiculturalism. The Canadian Encyclopedia states:
The term [multiculturalism] is used in at least 3 senses: to refer to a society that is characterized by ethnic or cultural heterogeneity; to refer to an ideal of equality and mutual respect among a population's ethnic or cultural groups; and to refer to government policy proclaimed by the federal government in 1971 and subsequently by a number of provinces4.

The Canadian multiculturalism policy was adopted also by other Countries (Australia, for instance) and, even it is not completely immune to critics5, it is positively regarded as one possible solution to the migration matter. Migration, memory and literature: MUM Thus multiculturalism strives to guarantee the independence of all the diverse cultural traditions and memories of Canada. Professor Julia Creet says in the introduction to Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies that
Memory, in all its form, physical, psychological, cultural, and familial, plays a crucial role within the context of migration, immigration, resettlement, and diasporas, for memory provides continuity to the dislocations of individual and social identity6.

Being a second generation Canadian immigrant, Creet started working on the connection between memory and displacement as a personal matter, when she discovered the long-hidden past of her mother. She began with the creation of a short documentary film called MUM. The film, despite being not even 40 minutes long, is significantly evocative of the status of the migrant and has therefore been used for academic purposes too.
3 See Multiculturalism in The Canadian Encyclopedia <URL=http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/multiculturalism> (accessed January 10, 2012) 4 Ibidem 5 Some people may argue that, without being openly encouraged to the assimilation, the various ethnic groups would tend to ghettoize themselves... 6 Julia Creet, Introduction: The Migration of Memory and Memories of Migration in Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011

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Creet's mother left Hungary after the traumatic experience of being one of the few survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. Escaping from her homeland meant to her escaping from her nightmarish past. She reached Canada, started anew giving birth to a new family and decided not to talk about her previous life ever again. But, she could not fulfill the promise she made to herself. She felt the urge to tell her own story and to revisit her hidden-but-never-lost memories and, in doing so, she naturally elected the blank page and the typewriter as her communication vehicles. The example of professor Creet's mother is mostly remarkable for a number of reasons. First of all, even though it seems that the woman was far more than willing to completely forget her past, she clearly could not succeed in this purpose. I think this happened because of two main reasons. Primarily because the past she was trying to delete was extremely painful (she lost her own mother and her little child in Auschwitz and always condemned herself for it). There are a few way to cope with past sorrows but the grief from the death of someone deeply loved cannot be mastered or conquered and there can never be full recovery. Moreover, leaving Hungary she was to all extents a migrant, who left everything behind her: her language, her birthplace, her whole way of life. As Zofia Rosiska states in her essay entitled Emigratory Experience: The Melancholy of No Return:
Memory plays a tripe role: it is identity-forming by maintaining the original identifications; it is therapeutic because it helps bear the hardships of transplantation onto a foreign culture; and it is also community-forming, by creating a bond among those recollecting together7.

Ergo, professor Creet's mother needed the intervention of memory. What is also much interesting to note as well is the medium chosen by Magda Creet to reconstruct her past life and consequently her own identity. She instinctively chose writing as if she were unable
7 Zofia Rosiska, Emigratory Experience: The Melancholy of No Return in Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011

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to tell her story aloud but, in the same time, could not leave it passed over in silence. This behaviour is proved to be common to a number of expatriates. In an essay on the writer Gnter Grass (a notable expatriate himself), for example, the famous British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie talks about the migrant status.
A full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own. [...] The migrant, denied all the three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human8.

great

Let me focus for a moment on the last sentence. What Rushdie is implying here is that literature may be (and in fact is) one of that new ways of describing [oneself]. This idea is an extremely democratic one but it needs to be further specified. Of course, not only best selling authors can benefit from the therapeutic effects of writing. However, the mere act of putting memories and personal experiences down on paper does not mean that the final work would be literary worthy. In MUM, for instance, professor Creet shows a number of refusal letters her mother received from various editors as a reply to her manuscript. The book the woman wrote had been considered unpublishable but it is not less interesting as a subject of study for this reason. Such an example, in fact, helps to understand what the main purpose of this kind of writing and writers (especially first-generation immigrants9) is. Rather than literary quality (often sacrificed to content instead), they needed memory and truth. What Magda Creet actually told was not a thrilling familial story but her own appalling past.
8 Salman Rushdie, Gnter Grass in Imaginary Homelands, London, Granta Books, 1992 9 It is obviously no absolute truth but, generally speaking, we can oversimplify this matter by operating a division. First-generation migrants tend to use the written channel to recount personal traumatic experiences and losses, with little or marginal interest in the literary quality of the account. Second-generation writers, instead, being more aware of the linguistic tools that the hosting Country offers them, consciously aim to reach good prose levels. For a more exhaustive insight on the subject, see Luisa Quaquarelli, Introduzione and Fulvio Pezzarossa, Una casa tutta per s. Generazioni di migranti e spazi abitativi, both in Certi Confini. Sulla letteratura italiana dell'immigrazione, Milano, Morellini Editore, 2010.

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Italy and migrant writers: what can we learn from Canada. Situations like that of Creet's mother are not new to our Country, even if most of our public opinion probably ignores it. We surely are less accustomed to dealing with incomers than Canada and that reflects in every aspects of our lives. Racism is a sad reality in our towns and little is being done to fight against ignorance and prejudices. When people are not openly racists, they are not at all aware of the heterogeneous world that shines behind the foreign faces and languages of the newcomers. Even the Italian literary scene tends to be oblivious to the contribution given by migrant writers. Critics and main publishers are not so keen to discuss migrant writers' place in the industry and these new literary voices are forced to find other ways to be listened to. The web (home of El-Ghibli, online Italian magazine of the literature of migration), for instance, or by self-publishing and hawking their own books. And yet, some of the most promising authors of our cultural panorama are Italian-born immigrants. So, what can be done to give these new writers an audible voice? It is once again professor Creet who comes to our rescue, during the very same lecture from which I started in composing this essay. When asked about the way even authors from ethnic minorities manage to gain the attention of the general public in Canada, she simply stated that literary prizes play a major role in promoting them. Retracing the process of enhancement of memories and traditions of minor cultural groups, one would find a correspondence between the history of migration and the history of literary prizes in Canada, she added. Oddly simple as it may sound, this is surely a suggestion. Actually, there already are a few literary contests for migrant writers in Italy (e.g., the one sponsored by the EKS&TRA. cultural association) but again, such an event would reach just insiders and experts. What we definitely should do is to give these new voices a chance to be

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heard, even if some things are far more easier to say than to achieve.

MAGLITTO MORENA Bibliography:

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Creet, Julia and Kitzmann, Andreas Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011 MUM, directed by Julia Creet, 2008 Quaquarelli, Lucia Certi confini. Sulla letteratura italiana

dell'immigrazione, Milano, Morellini Editore, 2010 Salman, Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, London, Granta Press, 1992 The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica-Dominion Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation Inc.