sienna helena
Facial Hair, the 'W' Word, and My Sniffer
A personal essay expressing my struggles with sense of self, having grown up in country Victoria as a 3rd-generation Italian girl . . . who also had an identity crisis after getting a nose job.
Edited by Drémy Bartolo
I’ve always felt like an imposter. Not because I was too different from white people, but because I didn’t feel ethnic enough not to be considered white.
Post-nose-job, post-little-black-stitches,
post-1-week-recovery-after-having-my-face-broken-and-put-back-together, I stared into the mirror. This wasn’t my real face, but rather the face I had always wanted. I looked less … woggy.
I told myself it wasn’t for aesthetic reasons but because I needed it to breathe. I mean, if I could deal with the sinus infections every couple of weeks, I might not have gotten it altogether. $20,000 just for my sniffer? Ma che cazzo fai, Sienna? But 10 years after (maybe) breaking it on the soccer field, my bones had settled in the wrong places.
Under all the swelling, my nose had been shaped to be slender. No bumps or harsh ridges. No downturned point that made me feel like a witch from an episode of Scooby-Doo. No lopsided nostrils that I actually had the surgery for. I looked away and looped a blonde curl around my finger, the brown roots coming through after weeks of not being dyed.
Image 1: Side profile photo of 19 year old Sienna in October 2021, one year before surgery.
Image 2: Side profile photo of 19 year old Sienna in September 2022, one week after surgery.
Who was I?
Allora, I was the little girl with dark brown hair, olive skin and a loud voice; the little girl with a monobrow, moustache, thick body hair and a big nose. It was cute until it wasn’t, and at 8 years old, my classmates were already making fun of my body.
“Your arms are so hairy!”
“Forget her arms, look at her legs!”
“Hey, you didn’t shave your moustache today.”
I started bleaching my leg hair so it was blonde, then waxed it off when it became noticeably worse. After worrying they would become thin, I left my eyebrows until high school. I waxed the middle of them, proving I had two eyebrows instead of one, and then off came my moustache too. Boys would frequently notice the hair on my lips, and after ignoring their jokes and small insults, I started to fight back. I became known as “feisty” and “hot-headed”, and heard people say it was because I was Italian. But it wasn’t because I was Italian, it was because of the merda that came along with it.
It wasn’t my fault they couldn’t grow facial hair.
The kids I grew up around always had more Italian-sounding names than mine. “Sienna” wasn’t considered very Italian; anyone could have that name, and a lot of non-Italians did. French, Aussie, you name it. My Italian peers in school never had their names misspelt or mispronounced, instead, everyone could say their names perfectly. You had the DeAngelos, the Delicatos, the Rossis and the Marinos. My last name was always butchered, whether on purpose or not. And look, I get it, it reads like it should be pronounced “mobile” (at least I’m self-aware), but it’s not that it's mispronounced upon your first go, It’s that afterwards, when I correct you on how to say it, it’s just easier to default to what you initially thought it was. Eventually, I gave up on correcting people. I settled for the Aussified version because the people in country Victoria didn’t want to conform to diversity, even though it was basic respect for your neighbour to learn how to pronounce your name. Not to mention, they dined at the same Italian restaurant every Friday night. Did they even know what “Evviva” meant?
And don’t even get me started on the w word. Managgia.
The people I knew with the same blood as me didn’t practice our traditions, nor did many of them take pride in being European until it gave them attention. Most of them were quiet until Italian week at school, then everyone was my paisano.
“I’m one-eighth Italian on my grandmother’s side.”
“My uncle on my mum's side is Italian, so I’m practically Italian.”
“My great-great-great-grandfather was from Sicily.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about staying true to your roots. It’s great if you know that you’re ethnic, even if it is one eighth, but don’t be the person who turns your nose up at the drink I order at a restaurant if you don’t know what it is. And it’s pronounced ki-not-or, not chi-not-oh.
Image 3: 7 year old Sienna in Summer 2010, stirring pasta sauce at her Nonni's house, in her pink tights, denim skirt and bright blue tee.
Once I reached high school, I slowly tried to assimilate into “white person culture”. I tried to skip notable family events to be with the kids whose families didn’t expect them to be home by 6pm, which resulted in an abundance of arguments with my parents. I tried to dye my hair blonde to look less European and more “white” – but I am white, am I not? I’m not a person of colour, nor is my skin white as paper. I sit somewhere in the middle of the scale but occasionally get knocked down a notch or two when a white person fake-tans and comments that they’re darker than me. Not cool, Bianca. So not cool.
As you’d expect, racism was prominent, and I copped it multiple times a day from teenage bigots, mostly telling me to go back to where I came from (Original, I know). Unfortunately for them, I was Australian, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe 45 minutes down the road, if we were being technical about it. However, when the topic of racism arose, I didn’t feel I had the right to comment on it. I’d seen Indian, Bangladeshi, Sudanese and Chinese kids my age deal with more racism than I had ever gone through. I’d never been mocked for the size of my eyes, nor had I been hated for the colour of my skin. The things about my body I had been teased about, I could change without hurting myself, and changing the way I pronounced my last name was easy. We went to a Catholic school, too, so no one insulted my religious beliefs, even though they probably should have. But the kids around me were being discriminated against for things that they couldn’t change, and that they shouldn't want to change.
(Although I did occasionally get the “your lunch smells so weird, what even is that?” comments, so I guess we had that in common).
The most pitiful part of my ethnic melancholy is that I cannot speak Italian; the birthplace of my impostor feelings. It’s not like I’ve never spoken Italian – I could speak (or rather sing) and understand from age 2 – but lost all of that ability when my Nonna died. There was no reason to converse in her mother tongue, or my other grandparents, when she was no longer here. Yes, from time to time, we speak broken Italian, but it mostly consists of dialect, shortened versions of phrases. Vieni qua became veni ca, and aspetta just became aspett. But overall, what was the point? None of our cugini wanted to speak Italian when they came to Australia, and whatever they knew in English from kindergarten onwards was light years ahead of what I could learn in high school.
Image 4: Baby Sienna sitting on the table, cuddled up next to her passed Nonna Lina
Upon turning 18, I did what most small-town kids do: I moved to the big city and travelled overseas. To my surprise, upon doing so, I was not recognised to be Australiani, ma Italiano.
Jumping into a taxi on the streets of Seminyak, Bali, the driver asked me where I was from.
‘Australia,’ I replied.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Where are you from?’
I had to think about it for a moment, unsure of what he was actually asking me.
‘Italy,’ I responded, unsure of my answer, but the driver nodded his head and looked at me through the rearview mirror.
‘I knew, so. It’s your nose, very – ahhhh – ethnic.’
After a plastic surgery that was meant to minimise my most noticeable feature, my westernised self felt somewhat disheartened, but the European part of me also felt contenta from still being recognised. All the moments in the mirror, the past time I spent swiping through photos of what I used to look like versus now, started to fall into place.
They continued to as I looked for a new home in Melbourne, jumping from suburb to suburb. Bentleigh was too Greek, Cheltenham was too Aussie, and Elsternwick was too Jewish. Eventually, I landed in Brunswick. 3 years later, I’m still there. Strolling up Sydney Road to The Mediterranean, sitting in the doctor's office listening to the Nonnas gossip ,and picking fruit just about to ripen at the grocer, just as my Nonna taught me to do. Finally, I’m reconnecting with a part of myself and my culture, after living my first 23 years in which I knew neither.
So now, when I look in the mirror, I still see my wog nose, albeit slender and upturned. I see dark brown hair, strong eyebrows and the faint shadow of a moustache. Allora, as we say. At least I can grow facial hair.