Carmelo Militano
By Alex Boyd
Carmelo Militano was born in Cosoleto, Calabria, Italy, and immigrated to Canada at early age with his parents. He holds a B.A. Honours in English from the University of Manitoba, and an interdisciplinary M.A. from the University of Winnipeg. Carmelo has published two poetry chapbooks: Ariadne's Thread which received the F.G. Bressani award for poetry in 2004 and The Minotaur's Keys. In 2006 he published The Fate of Olives, a prose work, which was short-listed for Eileen McTavis Skyes book award (2007) and F.G. Bressani award for non-fiction (2008). His latest book is 'Feast Days' (Olive Press, 2009), a melody of nearly lost and new poems. Carmelo lives and works in Winnipeg.
Alex Boyd interviewed Carmelo Militano by email in February 2009.
Italy has an almost mythical status in The Fate of Olives, where a bus is "like a mad bellowing bull," and the book is described as "an attempt to break the solitude, honour the past, and be a raised fist against time." At one point a fascinating life is described, but you add "The olive trees continued without her as they had for thousands of years." Can you describe what inspired the book?
The book's inspiration was fed by many different streams, some I can account for, and some I cannot. What I mean is that for example you like pistachio ice cream -- can you explain why and how you like pistachio ice cream? What I do know is that I was very curious about my family's past both on my mother's side and my father's side of the family. I wanted to know its origins and past life. Who were these people in my past? How did they live? How did they understand their world? What did they do with their lives?
I had also lived and worked in Italy for close to a year spending time in the North in the art cities like Florence, Bologna, Rome, and for my breaks I went south. In the South I stayed with my grandparents in a small obscure Calbarian village that was way off the tourist path. The contrast between the Northern Italy with its well-ordered hilltop towns and medieval and renaissance architecture and Southern Italy chaotic, rural, agricultural based, clinging to the side of a mountain was one thing. But what got me was how the face or image Italy put on for the world never included Calabria. It simply does not exist and it has not existed for centuries. It would be as if we in Canada willfully pretended Newfoundland didn't exist and we did that because after all, as we all know, people there are all an uneducated poor lot. So the other impulse was to write about the Italy that for the most part has been ignored and forgotten, yet three quarters of the Italians living in Canada are from Southern Italy and a huge percentage of them are from Calabria.
The other impulse was that I was drawn to the landscape and its connection to antiquity; I have always had a thing for ancient times. Many olive groves and trees date back to Ancient Greek times. So here was this historically rich countryside where nothing happened and a popular image of a corrupt bandit countryside. I guess I wanted to say hey, that is not true and it's more complex than that.
How have you encouraged so many stories from your family history? And how did you manage the level of detail you have? You have a scene in the book where "Mediterranean dolphins follow the ship / A woman looks at them and cries daily," which strikes me as a great detail, but also the level of detail that's difficult to retrieve when stories are related.
The stories came in dribs and drabs. At dinner or lunch when I was in Italy I would ask a few questions to whoever had me over and a story would pour out. After lunch I made notes but it is funny that you comment that I have so many stories. I think I had no more than four or five pages of anecdotes and two or three longish stories such as my father's war experiences. I'm amazed as much as you are I was able to write a book with so little to go on. There was also a strange indifference to the past, which surprised me but now and again a detail would jump out and I would try and reconstruct the past around this little detail, for example, that my father's family was originally from Malta. I then tried to imagine them sailing to Calbaria and wrote about it including the scant facts I had. The detail about the voyage over comes from my mother when I asked her what it was like to sail across the Atlantic with me in tow as a baby. She mentioned remembering seeing dolphins near the ship and women crying -- including herself -- every day because they all had left their families and no clue when they would be back. It was a time before plane travel; it was a long journey. People forget that the majority of people traveled to and from Europe by boat up until around 1960.
The details also came from a bit of research here and there. I looked up, for example, the uniform of Italian fascist youth to describe my father's uniform. Then there were little bits of things, trees, landscape, and buildings, clothes that I had observed while in Italy and incorporated into the family stories so that they felt real. I had a hash of things in my head from living and visiting Italy -- as a student and working in a small university library in Bologna -- and I used that knowledge to add flavor to the stories. Writing family history is a bit like finding the shards of an ancient vase and trying to reconstruct it. Part of the way you do it is based on your knowledge of other vases.
I'm curious to ask for your thoughts on the effects landscape have on people -- people often seem to be embedded in landscape in your book: you stand below the sun glowing "like a solitary orange heart," and a village spills " like salt across the brow of a low mountain."
I have read a fair amount of travel writing and too me the landscape is as much a 'character' as are the real people who move in it. Landscape is place, and place is part of the way we both understand and reveal ourselves because we all interact with our surroundings. And certain kinds of landscapes affect us almost the way some music does -- on a deep evocative and emotional level -- especially an ancient landscape that has known the hand of man for a long time. It works on the same level of seeing the handle of an ancient tool worn and smoothed by human use but also cared for lovingly. I think there is something moving in that.
In lines like "a sack to trade for an unknown future," immigration themes pop up throughout the book, as well as simple travel imagery, in images like "my Uncle Rocco is coming through the door with my luggage, sunlight streaming past him and the half-opened door into the gloom of the back pantry cellar." You seem to have mentally photographed certain moments, and I wondered if you had any comment on travel stimulating perception.
Travel -- real travel -- and not the kind where you plunk yourself on a hot beach beside a resort hotel for ten days or rush about visiting monuments and galleries -- is bound to rearrange your senses. In fact, one of the conventions of travel is that it is a discovery of new culture and a journey towards self-discovery. Robert Krotesch says a journey is always a return. I think it is a return to ourselves, who we are, and part of who we are is our family origins. We want to know what came before us and how it affected us in the present. Travel also can be a place where we reinvent ourselves. The Odyssey in many ways is the original travel book, in my mind.
It is interesting you mention the mental photograph. Krotesch more or less said the same thing when I showed him the manuscript. He said, 'you have an amazing memory.' But you are much closer to what happened mentally. Some scenes on my return to Italy were so moving they engraved themselves into my head.
Where is the book available?
You can order it right now on-line from McNally-Robinson Booksellers, Winnipeg.
We are working on Amazon having it listed and hope to have a distributor for the book in Canada and the US by this summer.
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