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Feile-Festa – Spring 2010

Spring 2010

Annual

Laura Bones

Feile and festa mean “festival” in Irish and Italian, and indeed there are many pieces in this journal from the Mediterranean Celtic Cultural Association worth celebrating. Much of the work explores the effects of Irish and Italian diaspora in the United States, particularly New York City.

Feile and festa mean “festival” in Irish and Italian, and indeed there are many pieces in this journal from the Mediterranean Celtic Cultural Association worth celebrating. Much of the work explores the effects of Irish and Italian diaspora in the United States, particularly New York City.

At once celebrating and mourning the loss of their direct cultural contact, the writers make use of familiar motifs—Italian food, Irish Blessing songs—which makes us feel invited into a small parcel of the writers’ preoccupations with identity and how those identities are constructed away from home. “Family Portrait,” written by Marisa Frasca, grapples with leaving Italy behind while painting a familiar snapshot: the Vespa, the sea, and olives. But the heartache that accompanies this piece and many others, turns what would be “familiar” writing into something new—especially for a reader who may not be so acquainted with Irish or, in this case, Italian culture:

Part of me would always sit on his apple green Vespa, low below his knees, mother behind him in a flowered sundress…

…when my family was still one and I belonged somewhere, whole, familiar, as our piece of Mediterranean Sea.

This is the leading strength of the journal—the pursuit of wholeness, the desire to overcome a fragmented existence.

Another standout aspect of the journal is its easy sense of humor. One poem by Gil Fagiani “The Little Flower Dethrones the Artichoke King” is rife with irony as we learn that Fiorello La Guardia had it out for the mob and banned the selling of mini artichokes—a million dollar business even in the thirties—and when the uncorrupt La Guardia succeeds,

the paesani go back to eating
their spiny delicacies without
fattening the wallets of mobsters,
while the guardians of free commerce
remain on the lookout for more
attempts at vegetable oppression.

The mobsters are thwarted from their illegal selling practices, but the Italians, with their unwavering love of food, kept right on munching.

As a first-generation American, it seems my family’s ties to the past simply snapped. Reading the depth with which these writers explore the sense of loss, the terrain of memory, and the need for assimilation, I am prompted to do my own, much-needed investigation into my cultural heritage. A few days after I gobbled up the last pages of Feile-Festa, I realized I had found a real shamrock in an often times drab and dreary field of journals.
[www.medcelt.org/feile-festa/]

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