The Milk of Almonds

Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture

Edvige Giunta, Louise DeSalvo, Edvige Giunta, Louise DeSalvo

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781558614536
• eBook ISBN: 9781936932108
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women Authors Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"A vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories . . . that defines today's female Italian-American experience" ( Publishers Weekly).
 
Often stereotyped as nurturing others through food, Italian-American women have often struggled against this simplistic image to express the realities of their lives.
 
In this unique collection, over 50 Italian-American female writers speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memories rooted in experiences of food, they dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir.
 
This collection also delves into unexpected, sometimes shocking terrain as these courageous authors bear witness to aspects of the Italian American experience that normally go unspoken—mental illness, family violence, incest, drug addiction, AIDS, and environmental degradation.
 
As provocative as it is appetizing, "this collection of verse and prose pieces . . . reveals the evocative and provocative power of food as event and as symbol, as well as the diversity of these women's lives and their ambivalence regarding the role of nurturer" ( Library Journal).

Part One

BEGINNINGS

Rose and Pink and Round

Carole Maso

The day is warm and beautiful. The day is also night—it is summer, I am putting the baby to bed 8 P.M., still light outside. The house is quiet. The world’s spinning slowed up somehow, so that now it seems as if it is nearly perceptible. One can feel it—the rotation of things: planets, crops. Milky orb and globe and world. Lobe. Engorged. The hum and song of the nursery. The world is pink and round. In this delirium of hormones, dizzied, depleted, I turn. The chair’s slow swivel. Bathed in an extraordinary glow. Outside boisterous life goes on: neighbor’s children putting wood in a truck. Children fishing in the pond. At the window considerable birdsong still, the whole sky now pink as the sun begins to fall and darkness comes on. Universe of pure health and option. This irrefutable feeling of being at the center of one’s life—with all the serenity and awe that comes with that recognition. This slow-moving liquid I am filled with. How to describe the feeling? The dream of these days—how unable to lift myself from it—this feeling of impossible fullness. Every motion, every thought and sentence is milk-inflected.

I pass her a perfect sphere of peace, health, well-being. Immortal life—nothing, nothing shall ever perish . . .

This mythic elixir—so elemental, so essential. At the center of our living: a fountain. The very essence of how we live—since we have arrived, since we have been asked to enter this pact: curve of world—earth-bound, earth-linked, the love we pass. I am drinking the stars, the little monk said upon his chance invention of champagne. I look at her drunken, pleasured face. That magic potion, her satiated face—a heady brew. With her small hand she pats my breast three times and she is at home.

And when the bough breaks? From time to time odd intimations enter this meditative space. Children walking an odd zig zag. The sound of a woman weeping. The liquid gaze of the cat. The baby’s backward peddling in air. How utterly dizzied one feels, and opened up, and vulnerable. Filled up like this with milk. My heart bursting. My heart and body aching.

And I pass her perfect nutrition, immunization, long life, intelligence. One part dream, one part sacrifice, one part future, one part mystery, one part salvation.

Things that must have been inscribed in the cellular memory returning now: my mother coming into a room, and then leaving, and the way she brought light with her when she came and then took the light away. World dimming . . .

A beautiful, sad lullaby, sung in Sicilian. Unstoppable emotion. This feeling of nothing being held or holding back. The dam does break, the river overflows its banks—how can I describe this season of rain—plenitude—this fluid world where I am small like she is, and then a child, and then dead. And then alive again, at the center of my life.

The baby cries in the dark. Reaches for the milk she smells in sleep. Makes that little tonguing motion:

A cistern in France overflows.

My mother’s hair escapes the pins.

A woman’s eyes brim over as we move again tonight through that incomprehensibly sorrowful city of water.

A flood of memory—from the time before my birth. I feel overcome. A song played on a flute made of bone. A harp made of human hair. Animals gaze out of the ark.

In the elongation—day merging with night—where time and desire are dismantled, I carry a star, a cup, to her—the best part of me. Vessel for one instant of perfection. Rosebud lips of the child. Clear eyes of the child, as she nurses moving back and forth, back and forth, as if she were reading.

She sucks the world into focus—becomes so entranced by what she sees that for a moment she stops sucking, and the world blurs back again. I look at the place she is looking so intently. I think of what I see, and what I cannot see at all.

For those of us brought up on bottles, who never once tasted that charmed potion, there is a little moment for mourning now. The clear, the calm. In this space by the window the light gone to rose. The thing we cannot do without and have, already for so long. My own infancy comes back—and the woman I have become—the kind of peace that has eluded me—that missing fragment of living in me.

My grandmother singing a Sicilian lullaby—the sorrow and beauty and bitterness of the world gray—gives way to five children sleeping who once more, as they have done for all time, redefine the world, change the world with their dreaming. The child cries. Reaches out in the night.

And we pass the enzyme of sleep back and forth to one another. Dream. Deepest of privileges. Grace notes. 3 A.M. The chirping and burbling and tinkling things—the little toys and rattles and singing stars are now at rest. Only Rose and I awake. Now and then the sound of the cat’s paws. Outside the whiteness of moon, and milk, and (winter arrives) snow.

Sometimes, delirious, a little saintly feeling comes—depletions—exhaustion, as if one were offering one’s very soul. Heart’s fire, devotion. This miraculous fluid. A squirt in a wound would heal—AIDS patients open their mouths to it like baby birds. The desire to live. Wish.

One feels marked by milk as if by visitation or vision. As the forest is marked by flame, or the forehead by ash, as each and every word I write is carved, engraved by ghosts.

Sometimes a vacant feeling comes—it stays at times a little longer than you’d like. Drunk up, emptied—you’ve lost again your train of thought—your ability to think precisely—what by now you begin to take as normal—the blur . . .

Flood of milk when the baby cries. My life is pure sensation. Rush and sound in my whole being it seems.

Mama, mammalian, mommy, mammary, the heart of the language world—the small mouth reaches for the breast, says Mama, Mommy, and minna minna minna, and begins to drink. Rose at one year old. The time I had imagined I would end this back and forth, this extraordinary cult of milk. But she is clearly not done. What to do? I think of all in this world that is arbitrary, senseless, cruel, stupid—and do not wish to be a part of it. I wonder why, since I have the luxury of the choice, would I for no reason take away something such as this? The world will begin its own inevitable subtractions soon enough. And so we go on.

Designed with utmost subtlety, there are enzymes to speed the digestion of the lipids, lactose, and proteins. I have decided to do a little reading. A complexly designed, ever-changing milk.

A truly living fluid in which antibodies and cells move about. The cells in mother’s milk not only attack bacteria that could be harmful to the baby, but have the ability to produce antibodies that destroy bacteria and viruses as well. In the case of many viral diseases the baby brings the virus to the mother and the mother’s gut-wall cells manufacture specific antibodies that travel to the mammary glands and back to the baby.

To protect directly from disease. I close my eyes. My body in front of the black car streaming.

Heightened, photographic flash before my vision field: the child inside the pure center of protection, a circle of always and forever.

This flexible fluid—the balance of nutrients adjusting according to the infant’s needs—and continuing to evolve as the child grows. During a single feeding the concentration of milk even changes between early feeding and late feeding. Theories as to why suggest that the beauty of the design, the ability to shift, to change shape, to accommodate, is naturally inherent to the female body.

In a study in Bangladesh, breastfeeding was a protective factor for night ...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• EDITORS’ NOTE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: BEGINNINGS
• PART TWO: CEREMONIES
• PART THREE: AWAKENINGS
• PART FOUR: ENCOUNTERS
• PART FIVE: TRANSFORMATIONS
• PART SIX: COMMUNITIES
• PART SEVEN: PASSINGS
• LEGACIES
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• CREDITS
• ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS
• ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS