L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2015 www.italoamericano.com 8 A f t e r e i g h t e e n b o o k s o f p o e m s , t w o n a t i o n a l b o o k a w a r d s , a n d a n o u t s t a n d i n g C o m m u n i t y S e r v i c e i n Literature award, Maria Gillan h a s r e i n v e n t e d h e r s e l f a s a p a i n t e r . T h e G i r l s i n t h e Chartreuse Jackets is a collec- tion of her poems accompanied by her expressive water color and mixed media paintings. Her poems are on familiar themes that run throughout her poetry: growing up Italian in New Jersey at mid-century, fam- ily, women's roles, marriage, mortality, and love. The glue that holds the paintings and the poems together is Gillan's ever- e v o l v i n g i m a g i n a t i o n . T w o y e a r s a g o w h e n s h e w a s i n California on a reading tour, she explained to me and Carole, my wife, over dinner one evening t h a t s h e h a d b e g u n p a i n t i n g again, after a hiatus of many years. At first she said she felt tentative working in a new art form, until someone said to her, "Just paint what you feel, the way you write your poems." I n o n e o f h e r p o e m s s h e writes about an old family pho- tograph of herself and her two siblings. There she is, she writes " m y e y e s w i d e o p e n a n d sparkling. I'm not pretty, but I look / electric, like I can't wait to move, to get on with it, my energy / palpable even in a pho- tograph." That's the sense that I had when I began turning the pages of The Girls: that I was in the presence of a poet and now an artist overflowing with ener- gy and who is naturally com- pelled to create, to keep getting on with it no matter where the heart takes her. There is a synergy between her impressionistic paintings and poems. The facial expres- sions, especially their eyes, of the many women in the paint- ings tell a similar story to that in t h e p o e m s . I n t h e S e v e n t h G r a d e , t h e c h a r t r e u s e j a c k e t becomes one of those American signs that Gillan, as the dark- skinned Italian school girl from N e w J e r s e y , b e l i e v e d w o u l d t r a n s f o r m h e r i n t o a r e a l American girl, making her sexy and attractive to those boys in leather jackets who hung out on Paterson's street corners. She describes Paterson where s h e g r e w u p a s t h e c i t y o f dreams, where the immigrant c h i l d r e n w h o l i v e d t h e r e dreamed one day of rising above their poor, working- class neighborhood. In The City of Dreams: Paterson, NJ, as a famous poet, she returns to give a r e a d i n g . She is confronted by her own mortality when an old friend shows up for the read- ing. Gillan does not recognize him. Time had not been kind to him. But Gillan's imagination resists the onslaught of time. "In the city of dreams," she writes, "no one dies." In her imagina- t i o n , n o t h i n g h a s c h a n g e d : s o m e w h e r e o u t o f s i g h t s h e imagines that children are still playing in the streets and Zio's tomato plants are still growing. The poem is reminiscent of her p a i n t i n g o f t h e t h r e e b l o n d - haired Women with Starry Eyes and another Girls Playing Dress- up, bright-eyed dreamers forever reinventing themselves. As a girl, Gillan writes in Cheap Shoes that her mother m a d e h e r w e a r t h o s e c l u n k y Buster Brown shoes instead of the "ballerina slippers" that all the other girls wore at school. Her mother reasoned that they had more support and were bet- ter for her feet. In her immigrant h o u s e h o l d , practicality w o u l d always t r u m p p e r s o n a l wishes. But as a thoughtful, now successful adult, Gillan does not fault her mother. In My Mother's Tough Love, her moth- e r w o u l d c o m e t o h e r h o u s e when Gillan was at work and clean and wash. Her mother was a p p a l l e d t h a t s o m u c h h a s c h a n g e d i n s o c i e t y w i t h h e r working daughter that she now leaves her house and clothing in such disarray. Never resentful, Gillan understood the source of her mother's criticism. But what could she do? When she went to her mother's house, her mother offered her food and coffee, and s h e s a t s i l e n t l y h o l d i n g h e r m o t h e r ' s h a n d . H e r m o t h e r would tell her, "Cry, cry, it will be good for you." In the water- color Woman in Emerald Dress, the dark-haired woman appears dignified and composed, the pensive gaze of her firm blue eyes suggesting that she is some- one who has an understanding of e x p e r i e n c e , b o t h o f w h a t i s gained and lost in a successful life. Next to the painting, in The First Time I got Drunk, is the opposite Gillan, a careless young woman who is beguiled by a handsome young man at a bar o n e n i g h t a n d h a s t o o m a n y whiskey sours. She remembers little of the night, not even the b o y ' s n a m e . T h e p e r s o n a ' s shameful behavior contrasts with that sheltered school girl from Paterson, who wanted so dearly to be sexy, but did not seem to understand the perils of growing up and away from that clois- tered Italian American house- hold with its rigid boundaries, e s p e c i a l l y f o r w o m e n . T h e w o m e n i n h e r paint- i n g s , with their thoughtful f a c e s a n d always expres- s i v e e y e s , a l l s e e m t o u n d e r - stand the complexi- ty of growing older, from Pensive Woman with Roses, Women in Japanese Robes, to Woman at a Garden Party and Forties Woman. They are mature, thoughtful women engaged in life. But there is more than cau- tionary warnings in Gillan's p o e m s a n d t h e p a i n t i n g s . Though as a professional she has moved beyond that work- ing-class home where she grew up, her persona in her poems always in some form honors her mother's generation. From the outset of her career as a poet, Gillan has always in some form c e l e b r a t e d h e r g i r l h o o d i n P a t e r s o n , r e g a r d l e s s o f t h e humiliation that she sometimes faced as the Italian American other among her classmates. In W e U s e d t o P l a y S c r a b b l e , G i l l a n w r i t e s , " I r e m e m b e r those evenings sweet and per- fect." In Jersey Dinners, she writes lamentably that "only from a distance do we know how protected / we were, how w e ' d m o u r n t h e p a s s a g e o f t i m e . " T h e p a s s a g e o f t i m e includes as well the death of her husband from Parkingson's dis- ease. But despite the sense of loss that runs consistently through- o u t h e r p o e t r y , t h e c o n f l i c t between that Italian American life in Paterson and her success- f u l , m o d e r n s e l f h a s a l w a y s been the well-spring of Gillan's creativity. In My Granddaughter at Nineteen, her granddaughter, who significantly likes to wear "vintage clothing, on the "exte- rior" is both "cool and fun," but on the "interior" is serious, to the point of alienating young men at college. Somehow the thoughtfulness o f t h e g r a n d - mother and great g r a n d m o t h e r h a s been mysteriously transferred to t h e g r a n d - d a u g h t e r . T h e past is present, but in an altered, cre- ative form: that vin- t a g e c l o t h i n g . I n t h e p a i n t i n g s , W o m e n Around the Kitchen Table, Women and Doves, Women with Starry Eyes, Woman with Pink Dress and Flowers, and W o m a n i n B l u e H a t a n d Butterflies, there is a celebration of womanhood, their collectivi- t y a n d c o n n e c t i v i t y . I n M y Mother Had No Cookbooks, she writes of her return to her moth- er's village in Southern Italy, San Mauro, where there she finds the same dishes that her mother prepared in Paterson: "Ah, my mother was an artist, San Mauro in each movement / of hands, San Mauro in home- m a d e b r e a d , S a n M a u r o i n polenta / steaming in its bowl, S a n M a u r o i n s t u f f e d a r t i - chokes, San Mauro in ragù with tomatoes she canned each sum- mer. . . ." She celebrates her c o n n e c t i o n t o h e r S o u t h e r n Italian heritage that has always been present in her life through h e r m o t h e r ' s a r t i s t r y i n t h e kitchen, a creativity impossible to reproduce, certainly not in a cookbook. The Girls in the Chartreuse J a c k e t s i s a c e l e b r a t i o n i n poems and paintings, in words and colors, of women's lives, not their social roles but their less obvious interior lives, their compassion, empathy, humani- ty, and even ambivalence. In Gillan's poems, the passage of time is at best problematic, but a look back at her past reveals the community of immigrant women who made her success p o s s i b l e . B o u n d a r i e s w e r e never barriers, not when the imagination is set free. Gillan just writes and paints what she feels. Ken Scambray latest book is Q u e e n C a l a f i a ' s P a r a d i s e : C a l i f o r n i a a n d t h e I t a l i a n American Novel. He is also the author A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller, The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian W r i t i n g i n A m e r i c a a n d Canada, and Surface Roots: Stories. KENNETH SCAMBRAY The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Binghamton: Cat in the Sun Books, 2014

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