Persephone Return to the Underground

Adjusting ancestral stories to fit the places immigrant cultures live

Nothing quite works in Florida — meaning Fiorita or the Flowered Lands — the way Euro-based logic expects. Our overculture treats the peninsula like it’s the tropics (it is not) and then lays on top of that imagination, the old Euro seasons found in the Wheel of the Year.

Life, Death and Rebirth as told through the 4 Seasons works well enough in many places on Turtle Island (North America) as both this continent and Europa are both largely northern places shaped by seasonality.

But here, in the subtropics, the foreignness of this cultural narrative shows more readily.

In this place, every season — Fall, Winter, Dry Season, Spring, Fire Season, Rainy Season, Summer, Ultrasummer, and Hurricane Season —

brings Death and Rebirth while some other element of Life, completely unbothered by the change, continues enjoying the stable middle of their biological cycle.

For instance, in Autumn — when Persephone returns to the Underground — we see no grief here. Her mother, Demeter, is not mourning. Life is not leaving. Life in the form of butterflies, people, and birds, is returning.

By my Italian-American logic, that must mean:

This place is part of the Underground.
Or a Borderland of it.

My point is twofold:

~There is nothing to mourn about the ill-fit of ancestral concepts in offshore — meaning post/colonial, diasporic, and settlement — places. Nothing except the suffering that often, although perhaps not always, surrounds the way they arrived there.

~Do not be afraid to respectfully adjust the good old fabric of your ancestral stories to the places they now live. Let them adapt, naturalize and find harmonious rhythms that accompany Life in their present-day homes.

That is why Here in the Flowered Lands, in Autumn — not Spring — we greet Persephone’s return and celebrate the sweet, generous Death of the Heat.

And come the cusp of Spring, we will feed her at St. Joseph’s table as we always have. Her, the butterflies, the people, and the birds.

Here in the Underground or the Borderland of it, we do so — not to greet them as is the old tradition — but to prepare them for their journeys back North where Demeter’s house awaits them.