a history of the dispossessed

adeodato piazzi nicolai

Every group that lives under the naming and image making power of a dominant culture is at risk from this mental fragmentation and needs an art which can resist it. ⁽¹⁾
Adrienne Rich

"Hey Dago, do you know what noise two Italian tires make? Wop! Wop!" Grease-ball, Wop, Dago, Spick: it was no different than being called Nigger. I came to the Midwest in '59 speaking no English. At Wilson Jr. High School the all-American kids took me by hand from classroom to classroom. The Principal feared I would get lost and somehow go home. After six months I learned to play football. Like other northern Italians I was tall and strong, or so the coach said, besides he needed someone who kicked the ball well. Ethnic racism didn't exist in those pre-Camelot years. Everyone lived on his own side of the track without complaining, without any racket but then came the 60's ... all hell breaking loose. By '64 I was out of high school and had my first breakdown. Why did I feel so left out? I shovelled coke in the steel mill to pay for college; I lived alone for the very first time. Twenty years later: "by the way, Nick, you still talk funny, but maybe you know it by now." Thanks, buddy. I think it's time for me to go home. But where is home? Not near Chicago, not in central Indiana and I can't afford life in Venice. I'll move back to Vigo. That's what I did in 2001. Bought a small place right in the town square. The problem is that everyone there calls me The American. Hell, I was born and raised in that mountain village and did not leave until I was 15. I don't belong here, I don't belong there. What does it mean to be-long? Is it to be without a country to call one's own? To hold no possessions? To move like a hobo from train to train going nowhere? Another American friend asked if I knew why Italians were called "Dagos". I answered, No. He said: "because they go here ...they go there ...they go everywhere except going back to where they belong..."

Adeodato Piazza Nicolai , born Vigo di Cadore (Bulluno Province) in 1944 and emigrated to the United States in 1959, is a poet, essayist and translator. Born in 1969, he received his Masters of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1986. He worked for thirty years for the Inland Steel Company of Chicago. He has authored four volumes of poetry: La Visita di Rebecca (1979), I Due Volti di Janus (poetry and translations, 1980), La Doppia Finzione (Introduction by Rebecca West, 1988) and Diario ladin, Ladin poetry with translations into Italian and English (Introduction by  Giulia Niccolai and Postscript by Luciano Zannier, Grafica Sanvitese 2000). His poems have appeared in the trilingual edition of the American anthology Via Terra. An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Dialect Poetry (Legas 2000), while his translations of dialect poets (among whom are Pier Paolo Pasolini and Biagio Marin) are included in the anthology Dialect Poetry of Northern Italy (Legas, 2000). In 2000 he translated the poem by Luigina Bigon Cercando "O", followed by a critcial essay; in 2002 he translated Saccade, poesie di Cesare Ruffato; in 2004, the verse anthology Vajont. Padova e i suoi artisti, un libro di fiabe di Enrico Rossaro and the poem Sequenza friulana by Marilla Battilana. He is now working on translations of various Italian poets from Italian into English and from American English into Italian and Ladin. Soon to be published are Nove Poetesse Afroamericane and the poetry volume L'apocalisse e altre stagioni. He has taught Italian and American literature at Purdue University in Calumet, Indiana. He is now living in Italy, where he writes and translates poetry and conducts workshops on Ladin for the Centro Cadore, where he is a member of the Comitato Scientifico of the Istituto Culturale Ladino delle Dolomiti Bellunesi.