Ethnic outsiders: the hyper-ethnicized narrator in Langston Hughes and Fred L. Gardaphe

MELUS, Fall, 2003 by Paul Giaimo

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   I have so many numbers in my life is no wonder they come up with
   computer. Soshsecurity, telephone, address, pension, identicaysh,
   is enough to drive an old time like me craze. Is easy to get in big
   trouble if you doan keep track of all you numbers. If you lose you
   number you don't get anywhere. (29)

Pietro here narrates the impact of technology on personal identity. He realizes the encroachment of the impersonal realm on the personal which the technological destruction of privacy entails: "when evertin' becomes a science I think maybe we got too much progress.... Prett soon maybe we goan lose names and take on numbers. What you wann be called? Joe or 1731, Julie or 1219?" (30). Clearly then, the issue in question goes beyond the confines of the Italian American neighborhood, but it also encompasses this community as well: Pietro has a problem with numbers when he is reprimanded for not moving when his is called on the line at a local bakery in Chicago's Little Italy: "Can't a man be friendly and make a little talk without having a number? Wasn't like this in the old days!" (29). Here numbers prove to be dangerous in their reduction of human identity and human interaction: "I'm joosta say that behind the number is someat'ing human, someat'ing real and if you forget about that maybe you goan someday hurt somebuddy" (30). This treatment again can be called dietrological in that it exposes the hidden realities beneath the surface as personal identity is increasingly automated.

Finally, like Langston Hughes's narrator Simple, Baffo Pietro evokes a central metaphor which in this case imparts to the reader a sense of the narrator's position and function. The Roman God Janus, "who has two heads: one that looks forward and one that looks back" (53), can be seen as a metaphor for Pietro's function in the narrative, reflecting back on the conditions which Italian Americans of his generation faced and looking forward in his discussion of current issues. His function for Italian Americans of the current generation is to "look back upon" the experiences of their elders so as to use the elder's wisdom in "looking forward" to their own ethical struggles living between two cultures. The "time of Janus" for Pietro is "a time to connect ourselves with where we come from and how we get to where we are today" (53).

As a further example of Pietro's function as a Janus figure, Gardaphe includes the story of the well-to-do "Fortunati" family, who, again like Hughes's Mr. Boyd, adopt the culture, language, and values of mainstream Americans. Irony is created as the Fortunati children complain about "icky orange Chef Boo-Jar-Dee," the artificial tomato sauce on the heavily advertised and unpalatably non-Italian pasta they have pestered Mrs. Fortunati to cook (54). The comic situation reflects how Americanized later generations, the children and grandchildren of the "Moustache Petes" of Little Italy, have become. Baffo Pietro later recounts that the voyage of the eldest child, Primo Fortunati, back to the old country to claim his inheritance demonstrates a recovery of old-world culture, family recipes, and old-world values. Primo, following Pietro's example of Janus, "looks back and looks forward," negotiating a recovery of the culture lost by a dispersed populus (54-55), an example, I would suggest, that can be pondered in many ethnic literatures.

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Ethnic outsiders: the hyper-ethnicized narrator in Langston Hughes and Fred L. Gardaphe

MELUS, Fall, 2003 by Paul Giaimo

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