Portrait of My Grandfather in Uniform

There is a photo, almost hiding behind the others, on the mantel of my fireplace: a man posing in uniform, sitting proudly on a beautiful white horse. The photo is taken from the ground, so this man is looking down from his height. I can’t quite see his eyes, hidden in the shadow cast by the hat; a half smile seems directed right at me, but it does not register as inviting, as if it was not meant to connect, rather to keep at a distance. His stance is elegant, impeccable. He looks handsome, and he seems aware of it. There is, however, something unconvincing about him; an emptiness, a sadness . . . 

A detail both odd and tragic in my eyes, the horse’s head and tail are cut off from the image, as if the only worthy, interesting subject was the man seated on it, the horse a mere prop. 

This man is my mother’s father. His own mother, a woman very dear to me, is my great-grandmother. With her I associate my felt sense of motherly tenderness, of a loving hug; my cellular memory of a welcoming safety, in her abundant and multilayered traditional Dalmatian clothing, rigorously black for widows, swishing around me as I take my first baby steps. I am part of her bloodline. And her son, my grandfather, is wearing a Fascist uniform. 

It hits me as if I was apprehending this for the first time. And again, I can’t contain the sadness. It feels desperate and raw. It comes from a deep place within where reason and thought have a hard time claiming their role. It is a place that houses my shame.

My shame, with the collective shame of my family.

(Toronto, February 2020, Journal Entry)

 

 

I wonder what it does to a person to feel that underneath a formal, stiff uniform they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, a stained and tattered undershirt. 

 

By association my mind travels to this one morning in elementary school, in a small provincial town in southern Italy; I am eight or nine years old. It is picture day. I have two headshots from that day, same pose. One is taken with my immaculately white smock with a perfect blue bow. The other is with a pink sweater which had seen better days; it is too tight and too short for my small body and it is missing its prettiest feature, three buttons in the front. It gained instead a sloppy repair on one elbow; my grandmother wasn’t very skilled with thread and needle. I can still feel my heart sinking when our teacher asked us to take our smocks off and my painfully useless attempts at pulling the sleeves down. The two photos captured my internal state, my eyes sparkling with pride in one and then glazed with sadness and shame in the next.

 

Today I love expensive, well-tailored pieces of clothing, and I understand why. But what are they trying to hide? What frailty in my sense of self are they scaffolding? 

 

I wonder about my grandfather and his uniform, that uniform; what was he trying to hide? Perhaps his Slavic heritage and who knows what other personal developmental and intergenerational trauma; after all, his life was defined by two worldwide wars. 

 

***

 

My maternal family comes from Dalmatia. During World War II, that coastal region of Croatia was ruled by the Italian regime of Mussolini. The Fascist nationalistic propaganda was particularly active on the borders where Mussolini’s Italy was meeting other ethnic and cultural reality. A systematic and relentless campaign of ethnic erasure was carried out against any Slavic and Rom minority, seen as ignorant and barbaric, under the pretense of assimilation and inclusion into the “superior” Italian culture. Under the Fascist anti-Slavic campaign, Italian replaced the Croatian language in schools, theaters, in government offices; Slavic names were altered so to sound more Italian. My grandfather changed his last name and joined the Fascist party; he worked in a nonmilitary position, as the driver of the Italian ambassador stationed in his hometown. When war ended with the Fascist Italian defeat, Slavic families like mine had turned into a strange hybrid; the older generation hardly spoke Italian, while their children and grandchildren had attended exclusively Italian schools. Faced with the choice of which nationality they wanted to belong to, some families opted to stay in the newly formed socialist Yugoslavia; others, like mine, surrendered their Croatian nationality and opted to leave for Italy, where they were placed in various refugee camps across the country. With the local partisans taking revenge on anyone who had sided with the Fascists, my grandfather fled to Italy first, alone. From Italy a few months later he emigrated to Australia. The rest of the family, his mother, his wife, and children, left Yugoslavia too late to reunite with him; he was already gone and they decided to settle in Italy.  

 

My grandfather’s choice caused much pain and changed the destiny of my family. But I never heard a word of blame directed at his memory, by his wife or his children. On the contrary, they never spoke of his choice as a choice; he was seen as a victim or a tragic hero in his own life. During war and persecution, whether suffered or witnessed, the mere physical survival becomes the ultimate task and a reason for pride. 

 

But perhaps seeing reality this way also provided a protection for all his family from the painful realization that he had in fact abandoned them; and perhaps that they all had in fact, with him, abandoned their own freedom to express their ethnical heritage. It is as if by absolving him from his responsibility in his choices they would be absolved as well and this way spared from having to face the grief for what was done to them.

 

In the midst of my own emotions, I felt with a heavy heart the plight of my grandfather’s situation. Was he secretly troubled by his choice, or was he too in the midst of it to even be able to see critically the gravity of what was happening around him and in other parts of Europe? Or was he feeling the weight of it but chose to deny it? 

 

Was he trying to protect his family from retaliation, by subscribing to the Fascist’s anti-Slavic ideology? Is this why he changed his last name to its Italian version; why he sent his children to an Italian school; why he avoided speaking Croatian himself; why he enlisted in the party? 

 

Sadly, as I look at my grandfather’s image, I struggle to recognize a glimmer of these possibilities, no matter how much I wish they were consciously present in him; there is something in his stance that does not convey an intellectual struggle, a sign of emotional ambivalence and uneasiness regarding the uniform he was wearing. I understand my subliminal acknowledgment of this absence as the source of my uncontainable sadness when I look at his image. 

 

I recognize the seed of that absence in my younger self as well, when in the grip of my defenses I distanced myself from an other with all my disowned shame around my own vulnerability; in the way I was a mother to my child, when unaware of my own dissociated self-states, I shared with them the heavy anxiety of my emotional inheritance. 

 

***

 

The devastations of World War II in the former Yugoslavia, the hunger, the terror, the displacement, the loss, were not etched only on the labile nervous systems of the older generation in my family. From their position of being emotionally unaware of the effects of the continuous trauma they lived and emboldened by their actual physical survival, they told a story of “pride and strength,” which, while providing a useful scaffolding for going on living their day-to-day life, also kept them blind to their devastating emotional damage, and us, the younger generation, chained to distorted absolute truths, captives of our own unexplored fears, of questions never answered and never asked. A price we paid for “belonging.”   

 

Today, however, my effort to understand is less around my grandfather’s choice and the practical repercussions it had on my family, although in itself significant, and more around what made that choice a “viable” option in the first place and how it endured in the future generations in different mental manifestations. 

 

Christopher Bollas¹ says that the pathology at the source of the Fascist ideology can be traced to a fascist “state of mind” which arises from a simple thought, an idea which becomes “total” and rigidifies into a conviction aimed at eliminating any sense of vulnerability and malaise of the psyche, flattening complexity and ambivalence and avoiding self-doubt, uncertainty, intellectual interrogation, and emotional struggle. This way, disowned, vulnerable, shameful parts can stay dissociated. The intellectual and emotional genocide of the most vulnerable and humane parts inside our psyche seems to mirror the intellectual and physical genocides we have perpetrated historically as human beings against our own.

 

Bollas reminds us that a fascist state of mind can and does coexist alongside liberal thoughts and a democratic mind in each of us; becoming aware of the ways it comes alive and active in us can help facilitate the return to a democratic order, in our own psyche and in our external world. 

 

I know something of this state of mind Bollas is talking about, in the narcissistic rigid defenses in my family, in the shame transmitted from one generation to the next. I recognize as familiar that impulse, when vulnerable, to side with the stronger and most powerful; in projectively distancing from the other for their/my weakness. 

 

I am aware of the tone of my narrative; entranced by this reflection, I speak as if in a war zone. I am not, but my family was, and their fear lives on in my cellular memory.
Can this awareness alone be enough?

 

 

¹ C.Bollas, The Fascist State of Mind, in “Being a Character. Psychoanalysis and Self Experience.” Routledge, NY.