My Family History, Communication Technologies, and Personal Identity
My mother’s parents come from a small town in Italy called Celano. Luckily for me, my mother’s sister has spent the last couple of years assembling a family tree that goes as far back as the 1700s. My grandparents were married in Italy in 1951. Only weeks after they were married, my grandfather moved from Italy to Avola, BC. My grandmother followed him a year later. When my grandmother left Celano they had one electric light and it only had electricity for so many hours a day. In Avola however, they didn’t have electricity at all, or phones. They eventually moved to Vancouver where they raised three children, all born in Canada. Both of my grandfathers’ grandfathers went to the States through Elis Island. They came back to Italy because of an earthquake that affected Celeno. Shortly after, the 1st world war happened and the borders were closed.
Communication was only through letters as they didn’t have the money for telegraphing. Most of the women were illiterate. So when people wrote it was the men who would read the letters for everyone else. If you wanted to know what was going on in neighboring towns, you had to wait for a traveling peddler to bring you news and it was word of mouth. They didn’t have a newspaper until they came to Vancouver. The paper was labored over by my grandparents every morning, and it was in English. My grandfather read the paper because it was important to him to know what was going on, and my grandmother wanted to learn English.
Eventually, my grandfather’s sister got the first phone in Celano and it was for the whole city. It had a lock on it, and if you wanted to use it either to call or receive a call it was a planned event and extremely expensive.
When Italy united, they needed a common language. However, Celanese doesn’t have a written version of the dialect. It was when Mussolini insisted on using Italian in the schools that there was a common language. However, the dialects didn’t usually have a written form. The written language taught in school before this was Latin. It was only well-off families that could afford to pay for school and it was only the men that went to school. If anyone wanted to go to high school they would have to go to the next town over.
Celano was a tiny town away from any big city. They were the last to get running water, electricity, or telephones. They might have had a radio in Celeno but there wouldn’t have been one in every house and there wasn’t a radio station broadcasting from Celano. During the war, the radio would have been the main way for people to know what was going on. Only the well-off or those who were running the town would have had a radio. This information would have been disseminated during regular everyday life, getting water, going to the bakery, or going to church. It was an extremely social way of life and news traveled fast, even though it was all by word of mouth. Celano was small and most people were related to each other. In some ways, news could travel faster than it does now. There was no need to deliberately make sure all the right people knew when some important event happened- like a birth or a death — because it would happen organically as their daily lives were so social.
In Celano, they knew everyone. Even though bad things did happen there, they felt their small Celano was safer than the outside world. When my grandparents came to Vancouver and were raising their children, they had access to the news via the newspaper. My mom and aunt recall that when they were kids, the neighborhood they lived in was almost 100% Italian and related to them so they felt safe with their children being out on their own as long as they were home by dinner.
Many of their Italian neighbors weren’t interested in learning English. They went shopping at Italian stores and they watched the Italian news on TV. They also went to a church that had a service in Italian. My grandparents were not the norm in their interest in learning English and following the Canadian news. When it came to local news happening in the Italian community it was still generally received by word of mouth. It was similar to how it was in Celano for them even now that they were in Vancouver. Any news that had to do with English-speaking Canadians or world news they only knew about because they made a point of learning English and reading the paper, listening to the radio, and watching the news on TV. My aunt recalls one news event that changed how safe her parents viewed the neighborhood. After a nine-year-old vanished only blocks from their home in Vancouver many across B.C. locked their doors for the first time. Children were suddenly escorted to school, even to close friend’s homes. The reports of missing children and eventually the arrest of serial killer Clifford Olsen were followed on TV and in the newspaper by my grandparents. This isn’t something they would have known about if they hadn’t learned English and continued to get all their news by word of mouth in the Italian community. My aunt was the same age as Clifford Olsen’s victims at the time. My grandparents felt the world had become a much more dangerous place.
My dad’s parents’ story is a little more complicated. This assignment gave me a chance to learn more about my dad’s life and his parent’s lives in a couple of hours over dinner than I’ve been able to get out of him my whole life. For this, I am incredibly grateful. My father’s mother was born into the Russian Aristocracy. When the Russian Revolution happened in 1917, they were forced to flee Russia and go to Iran. His father was born to parents of Arab and Jordanian descent but spent most of his life living in London.
My dad grew up in Iran with his mother, his brother, and his mother’s parents until he was 10 years old. His father was a rare presence and he doesn’t have many memories of him. Before the Iranian Revolution that would come to a head in 1979, my dad and his brother were smuggled out of Iran by their mother in 1970. By this time, my dad’s father had disappeared, suspected of belonging to the Freedom Movement of Iran, and the law did not allow children to be taken out of the country without their father’s permission.
My dad was ten years old and his brother was only seven when his mother paid off the people necessary to have her two boys smuggled out of the country. They were put in wooden boxes transported in the cargo area of the plane as she sat in the passenger seats. My dad describes a light with a pull chain and an upside-down water bottle like a hamster would have in the box with him. He doesn’t remember being scared. Somehow his mom had convinced him it was an adventure- he felt just like James Bond. My dad’s grandparents fled Iran in 1974, when it was becoming clear to everyone the revolution was imminent, and joined my dad’s family in Canada.
While still in Iran, my dad recalls watching mostly American programs on TV and in the cinema though they were all dubbed in Farsi. They had the BBC also dubbed in Farsi. America was perceived as a lot safer than Iran. They lived in gated communities, there was a policeman on every block, and nobody went out on the street for fear of being attacked by a mob. My dad remembers his uncle being approached by the policeman on his block when they moved into the neighborhood and told him he had to give the policeman money every month so he would make sure nobody broke into his car. His uncle didn’t have the money and declined. The next day he found that very same police man breaking into his car. It sounds like a tall tale, but the police were that corrupt.
Similarly to my mom’s parents in Celano, communication in Iran was mostly spread by word of mouth. They lived surrounded by family and were very involved in each other’s lives. I find this fascinating and am a little bit envious of their way of life. The concept of community as your extended family doesn’t exist in North America right now. The encouragement of individualism and the ties built through cohabitation ending when you turn 18 have all but erased this way of life. I think a lot of people are very lonely because we are told we have to live this way. Even though we have all the technology to theoretically stay “connected” to anyone at any time, we are more isolated than ever. When my grandparents lived without telephones they stayed far more connected to each other than we do now. We have access to all the news or information we want through the internet, yet I believe we are more unsure than ever about who we are, where we stand in the world, or who we can trust.
My average day, in terms of how I communicate and consume media, is largely through technology. There are even days when I only communicate through technology. This doesn’t only apply to days when I stay in my apartment alone. It is possible to drive alone in my car, go shopping, and use a self-checkout while never speaking face-to-face with another human being. My grandparents hardly went a day without talking to another person. My aunt says that the only people who stayed in their homes alone in Celano all day were the disabled. And even they had people visit them, or who lived with them to talk to every day. In contrast to my grandparents pouring over the paper every day at breakfast, I rarely consume media with such focus or undivided attention. I think that a big reason for this is that there is an overload of information being thrown at us through all types of media and it’s difficult to know where to put your attention. There are only so many hours in the day. The other reason is the constant demand for your attention coming from all directions. Having a smart phone means anyone can call me at any time, text me, or message me on social media. Gone are the days when your phone stayed at home, and someone trying to contact you would either have to try again later and hope you’re home, or leave a message on your machine which you could address at your discretion. I often wish I could leave my phone at home, but I feel oddly naked without it. I also use it for so many things during the day. I use it as a map, a phonebook, a clock, and for security. I rarely walk places alone at night. I’d never walk anywhere at night without my phone.
