Artist statement: It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood how traumatic immigration had been for my nonna, my grandmother. I also witnessed how that trauma got passed down through the generations as well as the process of “becoming white.” My mother once told me that each member of our family made a choice – to embrace whiteness, forgetting all the prejudice they had endured as Sicilians or to remember what they had gone through and empathize with Black people and other people of color facing racism. She chose the latter path and instilled that in me.

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I cry Nana’s tears 
for her Sicily,
island of the familiar
sun-scorched hillsides,
anise along dusty roads,
her dog running 
behind the train.

Nana is nine years old,
frantic, crying.
Her puppy cannot 
travel with them on the 
train to the 
coast to the
ship to the
city where 
papà waits, with
tenements and clogged streets,
the sun dodging behind icy concrete,
the garbled words of pale people, 
the cacophony of human hearts,
the smell of sweat from heat 
that cannot breathe. 

I cry Nana’s tears 
for her Sicily.
She is a child
confused by their reasons:
“The mines are dying, 
the land is dying, everyone 
is dying 
to leave…
(they pause)
for a better life.”

But will it be better? There 
on the factory floor, on her feet
twelve hours a day, her brow
soaked by the steam rising 
from the machine 
that presses the garments she knits?

Will it be better? There 
in the house where she raises 
four children alone, knitting 
into the night 
until her fingers are 
gnarled, bent bone?

Perhaps in the end,
it was a better life.
But Nana, with 
tears in my eyes,
decades later,
still cries for 
her sweet Sicily 
and the puppy
she left behind.

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