Poem: Claiming My True Name

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the poet of the month at Seventh Quarry poetry magazine and press in Swansea, Wales. The magazine with an international perspective appears twice a year, in winter and summer. Edited by Welsh poet and dramatist Peter Thabit Jones, the first issue was launched at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, in January 2005.  Peter is also the Founder and the Editor of The Seventh Quarry Press.

The site featured five poems by Maria which we will reprint here this week.

 

Claiming My True Name

It took me years to claim my true name,

so many years layered in shame,

so many years trying to hide my immigrant self and my true name.

Looking back, I know what I wanted when I saw you,

Love, that first time at your friend’s house,

you with your blond boyish looks,

your handsome face,

your wide gray eyes,

your big white colonial house,

your educated American parents.

Did I imagine that by marrying you

I could erase all those z’s and t’s in my name,

change it all like an old coat I could give away,

and put on instead what I thought

was the sleek Americanness of your name

and I would be able to erase my ethnic face,

my frizzy hair?

How I wanted to deny the foreign girl I was,

the one who didn’t speak English when I went to school,

deny my Italian parents, and the cold water flat,

leave them all behind and slide

right into the life of America that I was sure I wanted.

Years later, I realize I had traded away everything

that shaped me, traded away

this song that beat in my blood,

the aroma of the ethnic food I loved,

and only then staring into a void as big as the Grand Canyon,

did I claim my true name,

wrap all those z’s and t’s around me like a cashmere shawl,

and force people to use my true name,

even when they stumble over it and they have to ask,

“Is this the way you pronounce your name?”

And I pronounce it for them,

waving it in the air like a banner, proud of my Italian-self,

proud of all the things that marked me

as unique, as different, a foreign creature

who can at last claim my own true name.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter. The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets pairs her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.