I love being Italian. I wish everyone in my family was, on both sides, going back forever. It's not that I don't like the other parts (the Welsh and ?? parts), it's just that I like the Italian ones best. And then Rose Romano wrote some poems about my favorite things.
Italian grandmothers and all their nuttiness.
They always try to feed you even when say you just ate.
I love that she included all the stereotypes that are true.
It makes them more powerful then the ones that are not.
She talks about those too, but they mean so much less to me next to the things I love about myself and my family.
Poems about food and spaghetti sauce as therapy and saints and the secret saved parts of the ends of Italian bread.
I have to be honest, I thought only my mother did that for me because her mother did it for her. I like that there are tons of Italian kids who think the same thing. I like it better that we are all getting it.
I know I should probably write about her profound effect and commentary on being a lesbian Italian-American, about the interracial racism of Northern Italians vs. Southern Italians and Sicilians, and about the racism Italians have suffered for years for not being dark-skinned enough to be a minority, or white enough to be white
but I really just want to write about grandmas and Italian soul food.
Rachael Jones