I am told that my mother’s grandfather was born in 1902, poor and hungry in a small mountain village where the pine trees reached out to the Mediterranean sun. With little opportunity in Serra Pedace, my mother’s nonno travelled across continents in search of work, always with the desire to one day return home. He left Southern Italy for Mogadishu, Italian East Africa, where he laid bricks until he was taken as a prisoner of war by British forces in 1941. After the war that had landed him in an English prison, he returned home without teeth or hair, entirely unrecognizable to his family. He left Serra Pedace again, this time travelling to Toronto with the dream of returning home after finding quick riches on a continent that had been described as having “money in the streets.”

In Toronto, he found just enough work to encourage him to stay. He sent for his family and together they became increasingly settled in their new home. In fact, Italian North Americans have often celebrated life in the Americas and reaped the benefits of settler society by aligning themselves with whiteness and their adopted country. And yet, I am told of moments when he became dissatisfied with life in Canada. In these moments of frustration, he enlisted God to help him curse the man who, by initiating European settlement in the Americas, inadvertently enticed many disadvantaged Southern Italians to leave their homes: “Mannaia Cristoforo Colombo!” God damn Christopher Columbus!

I know of my bisnonno only through these stories that reveal a quintessentially modern experience. I wonder if embedded in his curse of Columbus is a desire to return home and escape the conditions of modernity that distance immigrants from their families, cultures, and lands. Of course, he did not phrase it that way, nor did he articulate this particular feeling beyond that fleeting curse, for he was generally happy with his life in Toronto. And yet, I want to rekindle the spark of protest against modernity’s dislocations that I have been gifted through his stories.

I want to reimagine what it would mean, for me as a settler with Italian heritage, to curse Columbus in this moment when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s findings have turned public attention toward historic and ongoing violences against Indigenous peoples. It would mean not only acknowledging the loss and disillusionment that immigrants and their descendants face under modernity, but also that colonialism is a central organizing principle of modernity wherein immigrants to settler-colonial societies and their descendants benefit from actions that harm Indigenous peoples and the land. For me, these acknowledgments emerge from reflecting on my identity and by setting my family history within larger historical and social contexts. Such self-reflection seems like a more promising, albeit challenging, part of the relation building process between settlers and Indigenous peoples than does deferring to the Canadian government’s recent reconciliatory rhetoric and thereby risking absolving oneself from the responsibility to actively build better relationships as individuals.

If the obvious connections between Columbus and settler-colonial violence are acknowledged, then my bisnonno’s curse of Columbus can be reworked so it does not culminate in anger with the challenges he encountered as an immigrant. The reworked curse would instead involve using personal experience and family history as the starting point from which to decry colonialism and build relationships that encourage the flourishing of all peoples and the more-than-human world. In an era when crises such as climate change are stressing the intimate interconnections between all beings and the unsustainability and undesirability of settler colonialism, it seems to me as if living well is only possible if we live well together. Iamu. Iamu tutti assiemi. Let’s go. Let’s all go together.

Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)