Goatsong

Goat Song seems on the surface to be an effort to explain the motivations of Brandy, the central character, in the ostensibly unprovoked murder of a man she doesn’t know. But it’s really an extended metaphor intended to describe what it means to be a Sicilian-American lesbian. Brandy was abandoned to an orphanage at birth. Her attitudes and behavior together produce the most brilliantly sustained metaphor in the book: the Sicilian-American lesbian as an unclaimed orphan. Azpadu describes Brandy’s feelings about material possessions: “She took the attitude—thinking it gave the most freedom—that nothing belonged to her that she had to protect.” Sicily has a long history of being exploited. Sicilian-Americans have their own history of exploitation. Brandy lives in a studio apartment in a slum. There’s no door on her bathroom. Although she considers the possibility of asking the building manager to find a door in the storage room, Azpadu explains why she doesn’t: “Of course, that would mean speaking [original emphasis] to the manager, asking for what was over and above what had been given to her. It meant calling attention to the fact that she had to ask for what others were routinely given and took for granted. It meant risking that a word or look would make it clear that he knew she was born to nothing.” This is the typical attitude of Sicilians, an attitude that helped create Omertà. But if Brandy is Sicilian-American, why doesn’t Azpadu just say so? By not naming Brandy Sicilian-American, Azpadu uses Omertà to slip some very politically incorrect stuff past the censors and, in doing so, makes Brandy more realistically Sicilian—and more painfully alive—than she would have been had she actually been named Sicilian. Dodici Azpadu is one of the greatest Sicilian-American writers. Her work deserves much more attention that it’s had. All of her books are available on Amazon. I suggest you get them and read them with all the depth and understanding that Azpadu wrote them with.