The strategy of ‘contesting’, Ferraro argues, ‘consists in the ability to expose the fallacy of certain notions and perceptions of spaces that discourage any intercultural dialogue’.20 The hotbed of Ragusa’s discomfort during her childhood is situated in her perception of not belonging to either her paternal or maternal family; she felt like an outsider. In chapter six of her book, for instance, Ragusa describes the neighbourhood of the Italian East Harlem. She recalls the way her Italian American family extolled this place in their memories. To her family, East Harlem was a place so safe that the doors could be left open, where all the relatives were living at arm’s length, and the children kept away from danger and violence. At that time, Ragusa was, instead, living in West Harlem. There, danger and violence were, conversely to East Harlem, an everyday
19 Ferraro, ‘Southern Encounters in the City’, p. 220. 20 Ferraro, ‘Southern Encounters in the City’, p. 223.
reality. The author wishes she had a place for herself in that enchanted realm, where everything seemed to be so harmonious and serene. As she writes: ‘I devour these words of safety, gorge myself in this fantasy of total community, total belonging. Imagine a place for myself in these rooms with their open door.’21 Nonetheless, the author looks back at these images from a present time and she is able to realize they were a mere fantasy of her Italian American family, an imaginary construction of a world where they could live peacefully and fulfil their migration dream. Ragusa feels the need ‘to break the spell, refuse the seduction’22 of being caught in the fantasy of a world that was not real and in an immobile past and defines her family’s memory of East Harlem as ‘the mythology of East Harlem’.23 In her memoir, one example of her
attempt to contest the past is a conversation between the author and her uncle. To remember her uncle’s words is important for Ragusa to understand and question the reality depicted by her Italian American family and their construction of borders against other ethnic groups that wanted to settle down in East Harlem. In the 1930s and 1940s Italian Americans patrolled the streets armed with bats to defend the borders of the Third Avenue from any Latinos. Ragusa, thus, reveals that the halo of intimacy that enshrouded the Italian neighbourhood was nothing more than another form of racism exhibited by the Italian community, as the following excerpt exemplifies:
My Uncle Tony once told me how when he was a student at Benjamin Franklin High School, a race riot broke out because African American students were being bused in from other side of Harlem. The fighting went on for days. We only brought our bats because they already had knives, Uncle Tony said. Finally, the progressive neighborhood politician Marcantonio invited Frank Sinatra and Paul Robeson to come address the students and try to broker a truce.24
21 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 119. 22 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 119. 23 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 119. 24 Ragusa, The Skin between Us, p. 120.
The racist tensions that divided the Italian American and African American communities, as well as America at large, affected the sense of safety Ragusa experienced during her youth and it consequently marked her process of identity construction. This is beautifully exemplified by Ragusa in her short film fuori/outside (1997), which retraces Gilda’s life in America as the daughter of Italian immigrants.25 The documentary opens with Gilda sitting at the kitchen table of her New Jersey house while Ragusa is filming her from outside a big window. The grandmother is aware of her niece’s presence and seems to be at ease, even amused by the camera and the filming. Watching the video, however, one gets the feeling that Ragusa is spying inside the house; there is, indeed, a sense of discomfort (recreated also through the silence as there is no background music or sound). After Gilda’s image blurs, we can glimpse Ragusa’s image reflecting on the windowpane through which she is filming Gilda. Interestingly, Ragusa’s image reflected on the window conveys the idea that she is not filming from outside anymore and she is now inside the house. As Ragusa confirmed in an interview, in that footage she was trying to capture this condition of being both inside and outside, ‘the feeling of being an interloper, a spy, but also at home’.26 If ‘home’ conveys the idea of safety and security, then Ragusa is contesting this preconceived notion in her works. As Giunta argues:
The family house, a paradoxical site of inclusion and exclusion, represents safety – the house is conceptualized by the family as a ‘fortress’ – and yet one cannot overestimate the danger that this same house posed for the young Ragusa’s
25 fuori/outside, dir. by Kym Ragusa (New York: Third World Newsreel, 1997). 26 Interview with Kym Ragusa, (13 December, 2014). See appendix p. 274.
developing sense of identity, as she finds herself in enemy territory, in a troubling repetition of her maternal grandmother’s experience in Passing.27
If we look at the myth of Persephone, for instance, the scene of the abduction occurs right in the goddess’s most familiar place, the lake of Pergusa, where she was used to playing with her nymph-friends. Ragusa reveals a narrative in which what we call and consider home, ‘the site of inclusion […] and safety’, is a place where dangers and insecurity dwell. Ragusa, thus, calls into question biased assumptions which should be subjected to a revision. The process of revision then carries with it a degree of disordering. In this sense, the boundaries of what we know are reshaped and relocated. One poignant example that explains the strategy of disordering is the phenomenon of ‘racial passing’.