Recently, I've been reflecting a lot on what my time here in Italy has meant. I am fast approaching the three-year mark of my time abroad and possibly also my farewell (for now) to the life that I've built here. I start to ask myself not only what it all means, but who I am, where I fit. And the answers are perplexing and fraught with contradictions. I've spent too long in Europe to use the unmodified word American to describe myself. I've considered American?, American... and even American-Italian (the inverse of Italian-American), but nothing sticks.
When I'm meeting someone Italian, I usually answer the question of where I come from with a deliberately not-simple response: "SonoamericanamahovissutoinItaliadatreanni." ("I'mAmericanbutI'velivedinItalyforthreeyears.") It's a sentence best pronounced breathlessly, without any spaces between the words. Not until recently did I realize that I could choose to preference a different conjunction, saying with a greater sense of harmony, "I'm American and I've lived in Italy for three years." But and feels somehow sythentic--the clear choice has always been but. It's as if the second part of the sentence somehow negates the first part. In a single word it contains I know the city center of Florence better than my own hometown and I really hate Starbucks* and most importantly, I'm desperately trying to understand the culture here in more than just a superficial way. I would include those details too, if I could talk longer without taking a breath and if I didn't think that most people were asking just to be polite.
But the negation works both ways. After all, I lead the explanation with my American-ness because without that detail, nothing else makes sense. I have a need to speak and read and write in English (a need that someone who has never left the English-speaking world inevitably takes for granted). I have my education, based very much in American methods of thinking and learning. I constantly crave peanut butter and French fries no matter how much I love the food here. Finally, I completely lack the ability to understand the niceties of social context necessary to properly use the infamous formale. These things are a part of my identity too. No matter how long I have been here, I am a foreigner, a straniera. (Thanks to a lovely linguistic trick, the word straniera conveniently has the word strange, strana, built right in, which makes further explanation somewhat unnecessary.)
In the end, I come back to the smallest word, the one that is simultaneously the most and least loaded of all the words: the but. That unresolved tension, the word on which the paradoxes hang is maybe the most important part of my identity at this moment in time. It's the root of all the frustration and uncertainty, that feeling of never being one hundred percent at home anywhere. That said, it's also where the beauty comes from, the thrill and an awful lot of the joy. The magic of the but is that it is necessitated by two things, by two identities, by two different worlds. It implies a life that is confusing and less-than-straightforward, but also extremely rich, textured and diverse. It's everything and nothing, that word. It leaves me feeling full and empty at the same time, loved and lonely, fragmented and complete--but never bored, never unchallenged.
And I could take or leave....but, on the other hand, is here to stay.
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*At risk of being accused of being a fraud by certain people, I should clarify that my relationship with Starbucks falls more on the spectrum between love-hate and love-to-hate than I'm willing to admit.
