There is No Home to Go Back to. Life Across Boundaries: An Italian-Canadian Literary Perspective

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Tiziana Nanavecchia
University of Ottawa

Abstract

Migrant literature is the artistic exemplification of border-crossing: from the linguistic hybridity that brings the author into breaking the boundaries between native and acquired languages, to the concoction of genres and styles which make migrant works eclectic and unique, migrant words become reminders of the struggle between home and away, a conflict that the itinerant being tries to resolve within literature. The case proposed here is that of Italian-Canadian literature, a sub-system within the multicultural mosaic of Canadian literature: the pluralization of selves, languages, and places enacted in the works by Italian migrant writers becomes symbolic of the border breaking and bridging between genres, languages and cultural experiences. In the process of writing, in their search for identity and roots, the three migrant authors analyzed occupy the space in-between home and away to finally realize that there is no home to go back to, because ‘this’ is now Home.

Keywords: Migrant literature, Italian-Canadians, Boundaries, Identity, Home, Heterolingualism, Translation

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