Excavating Alternate Narratives in an Italian American Family: A Poetic Inquiry
The subjective experience of each family member regarding his or her treatment by a mother or father is interesting to say the least. Each has their own story to tell, which has the power to, by turns, confirm and/or contradict one another’s experiences. This can create ripple effect among extended members of a family and influence the intergenerational impact. This article will attempt to explicate, using poetic inquiry, the subjective experiences that each member of a family has had with the father, a Sicilian immigrant, creating evidence of another side of a man for whom only once side of a story has ever been told. It is important to disrupt the prevailing (negative) narrative to show a dimensional and more fully lived experience of a man whose angry and abusive temperament is legend. Poetic Inquiry helps to explicate these narratives in ways that are both truthful and evocative, offering insight into how we evaluate ourselves against our family history and how it affects our relationships with one another and with our own families in the present.