Repeated Things

“I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,” says CV Vitolo-Haddad. “I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”

Or again, “I repeated things I heard growing up from my family that I now know to be lies. I am so sorry. I take full responsibility for spreading these lies and am deeply sorry.”

Being mostly of Sicilian and otherwise Southern extraction, as Vitolo-Haddad is, Italian-Americans did used to be classified as nonwhite, and they were so until surprisingly recently.

To affluent Northern Italians, “Garibaldi did not unite Italy, he partitioned Africa”, and “Naples is the only Arab city without a European quarter”. 

Sicilians, by contrast, talk about “the Continent” just as we do, and do so in what for some reason has to be referred to as a particularly impenetrable dialect.

In fact, that language is, like so much else on their island, a living monument to their identity as basically Latins, but Latins who are also in large part Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Jews, all sorts. 

Meanwhile, have you ever seen people from those areas which were incorporated into Spain only in 1492 or not much earlier? How Roman or how Gothic did they look to you? 

The Moors and the Jews were there for a very long time, and what goes on went on, Islam or no Islam, Judaism or no Judaism, and Catholicism or no Catholicism.

Paella is a variant of a dish found all the way to once-Mughal India and thence around the world, even to Saint Helena, where a rice-based, yellowed staple is called “plow”, to rhyme with “snow”. 

Numerous fiesta practices are clearly North African. All those very common “ez” names (Gomez, Fernandez, Gonzalez, Martinez, etc.) are really Jewish. And so on, and on, and on.

Even the Queen is descended, not only from the “negroid” Queen Charlotte, but, through Elizabeth of York, via the Kings of Portugal and Castile, from the old Moorish Kings of Seville. And thence from none other than the Muhammad himself.

But speaking of the Queen, while “race” is thoroughly fluid, biological sex is not, yet Vitolo-Haddad uses the “non-binary” they/them pronouns, not unlike the use of the royal plural. Do they also use and expect a plural verb? Or does they accept that they is one person? Please give generously.