ALL THAT REMAINS FROM THE POEMS

Anna Iachino

After spending 5 days in Skálholt, famous for the tragic love story of the illicit love affair between Ragnheiður, the bishop’s daughter, and her teacher Daði Halldórsson, the workshops of the NAIP Introductory course shed a light onto my poetry at Skálholt’s church in an improvised musical setting.

For those that don’t know the 17th century story which became a famous opera in Iceland, the bishop of Skálholt, Brynjólfur Sveinsson, was a man of strong will, and when a rumor of the love affair reached him, he demanded that his daughter should swear a public oath that she was ‘untouched by all men’, in order to save her honor and her marriage opportunities. But Ragnheiður had just a strong will as her father did, and after the public humiliation she went to Daði that same night to consummate their love. Nine months later, at the farm of her aunt, she gave birth to their child and the fury of her father knew no bounds. He ordered her back to Skálholt, where she now had to undergo an even worse public ceremony: absolution for her sins. She never again saw her child or her lover and one year later she died. Ragnheiður died of a broken heart all because of religion. 

This story resonates with me, as my grandfather from Reggio di Calabria, Italy, a powerful man in his village, ordered my father not to marry the woman that he had an illicit love affair with, because custom ruled that daughters were to be married first and the first born son was to be married last. Unbeknownst was the fact that she was pregnant and to save her honor, my father had to give up the woman that he loved and his future child by asking a saintly man in the village to marry her. 

Being raised in a Calabrese household dancing to the Calabrese tarantella as a child, it quickly became a passion for me and an artistic expression for my ardent fire to dance. My father was so proud of me that he would proudly pick me up, put me on the church's basement stage and show off his little girl dancing to the delight of the parishes congregation. This socially approved outlet was accepted for women whose self-expression and emotional expression is often muted by local customs. However, it was not accepted for a good Calabrian woman to become a dancer, dancing was for whores. When I became a teenager, my father demanded me to stop dancing, in order to save my honor and marriage opportunities, just like Brynjólfur Sveinsson. Strong willed as he was, I defied my father’s authority and danced behind his back. My siblings were then forced to tell my father where I was and when I came home, dancing to the beat became beatings because of dancing in front of my whole family. Humiliated and hurt to the core of my being, my father was the first man who broke my heart all because of religion. The music stopped, the dancing stopped, a vacuum of silence filled the house with severe restriction of any self-expression - I just wanted to die.  All for the sake of honor and marriage opportunties, my human right to be an artist, to be who I was and do what I wanted was aborted. 

This is when I started to write poetry, filled with sadness, I would hide and pour all my sorrow in words. This was my soul's secret sanctity, I didn’t tell anyone for fear that my father would take that away from me too – words became my lifeline.  The fear of being found out was so strong, that I would swallow the poems I wrote on paper or flush them down the toilet.

My mother, the performer, experienced an even worse fate, beaten and denied school, they made sure she would become illiterate, fending off any male advances. She only delivered herself from the shackles of conformity and religion in the last years of her life with dementia living in an old folks home. There my mother regressed into an innocent child happily clapping, singing, laughing, and entertaining all the residents with her humor - free at last to be herself, she died this year at age 91. 

All that remains from the poems I wrote as a teenager is a poem called, The Child, a poem that I neatly tucked away in a secret compartment in a wallet that I carried with me for many years.  My husband, Arnold Ludvig, composer, arranger, and bassist surprised me when he dug up my poems, found it, put music to it with Ableton live, in honor of my mother who's funeral in Canada I could not attend, she died of Covid. When asked by my family, what words I would like to be said at my mother's funeral, I chose the words of my poem, The Child.