Our guest today is Estelle
Jobson. Estelle has more than a dozen years of experience in book publishing as
well as a master's degree in publishing from New York University, which she
attended on a Fulbright. She has done just about everything you can do with a
book, except eat it. Estelle, who is South African, speaks five languages and
has lived in as many countries. She now lives Geneva, where she works in
communications, writes, edits, and takes empowering naps. She is active in
promoting women’s health. She wrote about wire word art in Cape Town for Novel Adventurers last January.
How did
I, a born-and-bred South African, end up speaking, living, and becoming
Italian? And how did I find my way to writing my first book, a
travel narrative about cross-cultural immersion, set in Rome?
Way
back when, via marriage to my (first and thankfully last) swarthy husband of
Sicilian ancestry, I became eligible to acquire Italian citizenship. The
Italian passport was a magical ‘Open Sesame!’ to the European Union. Almost
every occasion I went through passport control on it, anywhere from Dublin to
JFK, an uprooted Italian customs officer would bear down upon me, delighted to
be meeting a fellow Italian. Invariably, he would ask why I had such an odd
(non-Italian) last name, how many bambini I had (none) and where the
Italian husband was? (Dismissed eventually, for shoddy performance.)
I was
officially Italian. But I wasn’t, neither in heart nor blood. Yet I wasn’t
cheating, was I? What kind of Italian speaks not a word of the language and
cannot distinguish tagliatelle from tortellini? What a
disgraceful specimen I was. And my ill-fitting, fake-Italian identity made me
quite sheepish.
Some
years passed and I fell into the company of another man, less swarthy but with
a majestic Roman nose. Being a Florentine, he claimed to speak the best Italian
of all, and he set about imparting to me invaluable lore, above and beyond his
language: food, fashion, music, olive oil and the Houdini-like convolutions of
Italian families. So when his job transferred him from South Africa back to
Rome, we moved there together. It was exhilarating for me, as a fake-real
Italian, to be coming ‘home’ for the first time.
Clutching
my passaporto, I set out on the quest to becoming a real-real Italian.
And step by step—registering my residency, getting a health card, obtaining a
scooter license—did.
Muscling my way through this Olympian obstacle course of bureaucracy, sustained
by cappuccinos, I became more confident, sassy and tenacious. The more I said,
‘I know my accent is funny, but I am Italian!’, the truer it became. And
the truer it was, the less it needed saying.
Soon
enough, when crossing paths with a homesick customs officer, I got chatting
about my Italian home. I gesticulated about the eternal traffic of the eternal
city, he shook his head about nationwide unemployment, and we both smacked our
lips about carciofi alla romana (artichokes cooked the Roman way). All
quite fluently, in Italian.
And
nowadays, if somebody asks me where I come from, I say, ‘Rome’ or
‘Johannesburg’ or ‘Italy and South Africa’, depending what comes out. And quite
easily, I say, ‘Well, I’m South African, but Italian too. Both, you know.’ This
declaration falls from the lips effortlessly and quite of its own accord. Just
like the pit of a freshly consumed and delicious Tuscan olive as one reaches
for another to savour.
