Written by: Marco Amantangelo
Edited by: Queenie Chen, Dr. Paolo Frascà, Dr. Licia Canton
Telemaco Signorini - Marina a Viareggio (1860) olio su tela
Christopher Sisca is an Italian-Canadian visual artist and writer who has contributed six poems to the second volume of the Here & Now anthology of queer Italian-Canadian writing. He holds a Master of Science in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from York University. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Oxford in the field of Anthropology, pursuing research in Calabrian gastro-tourism development.
“By nature
a confluence is Queer.”
Christopher Sisca
The conclusion of Christopher Sisca’s poem “Confluenza,” cited above, springs from his meditations on a series of maps of Calabria, specifically of Cosenza, the city where the rivers Busento and Crati connect. While the motif of confluence in this context refers to the junction of the two rivers, it is also used metaphorically to describe the intersection of the author’s queer and Italian-Canadian identities.
According to Sisca, a confluence is queer inasmuch as it is the meeting of “separate forces, transforming, non-conforming” (126). Confluences are sites of both disintegration and regeneration, loci where “[t]wo and one are no longer their own” (125), where streams of experience cease to be independent of one another and begin to flow together in unity. A confluence is queer in that it disrupts the partition of identities – in Sisca’s poetry, cultural heritage and non-normative sexuality – that otherwise seem to be incompatible. Just as the Busento and Crati rivers meet within the city of Cosenza, the body is the node in which separate streams of experiences are able to coalesce and, in their coalescence, become unified within an individual. However, as we know, it has been difficult for many Italian-Canadian queer people to reconcile the streams of their identities.
Another of Sisca’s poems, “Cipolle,” presents the Calabrian coastline as a sequence of isolated poetic sketches, each stanza a stroke of paint on an Impressionist’s canvas. Each sketch is an abstraction of the material world, witnessed by the narrative voice. Each serves as a phenomenological vignette of a sight, a sensation: carved initials on a cactus, a solitary boat in the surf (116). The experience of place in Sisca’s poetry is a direct product of the “union of body and nature” (117), the conjunction of the senses and the matter that interacts with them. The poem ends with the image of the body as it floats upon the surface of the sea, “a single pulse [...] hugged by ocean waves” (117). The body, an unstable entity, both creates and apprehends the rippling waves of the equally, perhaps reflexively, unstable body of water. The wave produced by the body’s pulse extends away from it and eventually returns, pushing back onto the body itself. In this suspended state, the body is thus circumscribed not by what it is, but by what it does and, in turn, receives.
In the poem “The Return,” the body is once again presented as a dynamic entity. Here, the narrator, in observing the material culture of a family home, is caught “spectating the self as a museum full of memories” (118). Inanimate objects – a credenza, tablecloths of lace and embroidery (117-118) – surround the narrator’s experiences within the space, and they are in turn storied by these experiences. Unfinished artworks, for example, are no longer seen as “products of procrastination,” but as artefacts of a “valued practice” (119). In a similar way as the body floating on water in “Cipolle,” in “The Return,” the body is an archive that both emanates memory and is subsequently altered by it. Memories, like the returning waves, meet the contour of a body that is unrecognizable from what it was even moments before. This self-spectating process through familiar objects acknowledges the existence of the self in separate timelines and materialities, and distinguishes the past self as an observable object of the present. The body is unstable in its constitution, metabolizing and metamorphosing; in relation to the world around it, the body is perpetually in the process of becoming.
Scholar Elizabeth Grosz states that “[t]he body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production, or constitution. The body is not opposed to culture, a resistant throwback to a natural past: it is itself a cultural, the cultural product” (Grosz, 23). As shown, in Sisca’s poetry, the present state of the body is in conversation with its environment. In emanating experience and in turn receiving the environment by way of the senses, the body becomes a confluence of identities, a node of different streams of being. This process allows for a possibility of queering the Italian-Canadian body, particularly as it returns to its ancestral Calabria: “Cultures and traditions ebb and flow / like the lungs of an aging loved one / who has seen life and experienced time” (119).
Works Cited
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994.
Sisca, Christopher. “Cipolle.” Here & Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian
Writing, vol. 2, edited by Licia Canton, Longbridge Books, 2024, pp. 116-117.
Sisca, Christopher. “Confluenza.” Here & Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian
Writing, vol. 2, edited by Licia Canton, Longbridge Books, 2024, pp. 125-126.
Sisca, Christopher. “The Return.” Here & Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian
Writing, vol. 2, edited by Licia Canton, Longbridge Books, 2024, pp. 117-119.
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