Night Bloom Author:Mary Cappello Of the mysterious Night Blooming Cereus, Mary Cappello writes: "The flower fell into our neighborhood like a shooting star." — That neighborhood was a working-class suburb of Philadelphia riven by class distinction and haunted by contradiction: her father, between fits of rage, tended the neighborhood's most beautiful garden; her mother, gutsy po... more »et and activist, suffered from paralyzing fears that kept her from leaving the house.
In Cappello's hands, agoraphobia, usually considered a private malaise, is understood as a social condition, and Cappello deftly, lovingly reads her family's "symptoms" for what they were trying to say.
Delicately interweaving the bilingual journals of her grandfather (a southern Italian shoemaker), her mother's poetry, Sicilian folklore, and dreamwork with her own story, Cappello writes as witness of the marks left on her family by immigration and assimilation. "Night Bloom" counters America's obsession with mafiosi at the same time that it exposes the daily violence of grinding poverty.
As a lesbian who has entered the middle-class Cappello celebrates the subversive desire in her immigrant family's responses to the forces shaping their lives, and in the Catholic icons, television superheroes, and disco divas with whom she identified as a child.
"One never cultivates a flower without also provoking a dream." In "Night Bloom", Cappello resuscitates such dreams and offers us her family's unsung art - their gardens, letters, and rosary beads - for the lessons they teach us about creativity and loss.« less