Clio in Words and in Motion:
Practices of Narrating the Past

Bruno Ramirez

In participating in the debate on national and transnational perspectives on American history, I offer the reflections of a historian whose practice has unfolded along two parallel courses: that of the professional historian working in academia and that of a screenwriter of feature films whose stories are embedded in the past. Each has forced me to approach history, the past, in a different manner and has helped me become more aware of the intellectual and cultural stakes involved in narrating the past. Drawing from that composite experience, I address this debate as one who believes that the issue of national or transnational history may hardly be disassociated from the question of our historical practices. Or to put it differently, I believe that practice, perspective, and personal experience interact in a dynamic way in each one of us, influencing what we choose to narrate and how we do it. An openness toward this interaction may help us both to see the transnational where we have only seen the national and to place the nation in its proper historical dimension and spatial scale.	1
How I arrived at producing migration history both as a scholar and as a screenwriter—as well as the perspective I came to adopt—is intimately bound up with my personal experience. As I look back, from the time when, as an adolescent growing up in Sicily, I first became interested in the United States till now, when I am writing these words in freezing Montreal, I see an intellectual trajectory punctuated by strong experiential moments and by places that constantly reoriented my course. In his introduction to four of Federico Fellini's best-known screenplays, the Italian writer Italo Calvino recounts the fascination that movies had for him as a youngster and how through those mostly Hollywood-made films he constructed a vision of America. His fascination did not prevent an awareness of the mystificatory process going on in his head and in his guts, but he chose not to resist it, for "it was a particular mystification, different from the mystification that submerged us for the rest of the day." Why? Because "as a spectator belonging to another system of mystifications I had something to learn both from the little truth conveyed and from the great deal of mystification those Hollywood products gave me."1	2
That film-produced image of America was still as real and insidious years later among youth of my generation; had I been able to articulate the feelings produced by those two-hour immersions in that movie-made universe, I probably would have used similar words. Though I came from a humbler and less cultured milieu, I found myself in a much more privileged position than Calvino's. For America did not come to me merely in images and cultural symbols, it came to me in flesh and blood in the persons of Jack Hawkins, Bob Ewart, Carmen Fontana, Paul Littleton, and many other United States servicemen stationed in the nearby Sigonella navy base who came to worship in my church. Far from their homes and communities, and finding their base's ghetto life unbearable, they were courageous enough to venture into a city that may have puzzled them by its mixture of Greek, Arabic, Norman, and Spanish architecture, its hybrid faces and dialect. Every Sunday they crossed the threshold of a modest church where they sought fellowship with Sicilian Protestants. If I disrobe the term of its religious connotations, "fellowship" in this case meant the interpenetration of two universes where languages, lore, and temperaments ceased to be barriers, becoming instead vehicles of knowledge, understanding, and mutual appreciation. I must have been fifteen or sixteen when another American, out of the blue it seemed to me, showed up in our church. The elders made me step near the pulpit to translate the testimonial of this brother Herman (I forget his last name), who, after his experience with the air force photographic crew in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or both, had repented of his sins, though he had never managed to erase from his memory those mushroom-like images. Perhaps the obsession caused by those scenes of devastation stuck in his brain had pushed him to become an itinerant preacher, touring the world and warning congregations such as ours of the evils mankind is capable of. A few days later he left, headed for some other Sicilian town.	. . .