Narrating the Nation: Language and the Landscape of Time in Scego’s Adua

Abstract

In Adua (2015), Igiaba Scego illuminates the legacy of Italian colonialism by chronicling the intergenerational trauma passed from Zoppe, a Somali translator working for Italians during the fascist ventennio, to his daughter Adua, an actress exploited by the Italian film industry. This study analyzes Scego’s use of perspective to represent fundamentally different experiences of time in Adua, emphasizing Scego’s unique contribution to a postcolonial aesthetics that combats colonial temporality as defined by Johannes Fabian. In Time and the Other, Fabian asserts that time has not yet been decolonized, and thus has not been deconstructed as an ideological instrument of power. Scego unflinchingly documents the effects of colonial chronopolitics through her third-person narration of Zoppe’s perspective, which deteriorates into a series of invectives that portray his complete arrest in time. Adua endures similar traumas, but she embraces narration as a means of refashioning her voice and restoring community. In depicting Adua’s story as a triumph over colonial temporality, Scego champions first-person narration as a tool for the construction of a postcolonial chronopolitics that decolonizes time in order to work towards a more ethical geopolitical order.

Keywords:

• Igiaba Scego
• postcolonial literature
• Fabian
• Italian Fascism
• temporality
• Adua

Notes

1 Scego won the Eks&Tra prize in 2003 for her short story Salsicce. Her novels Oltre Babilonia and Adua have generated enough interest abroad to be translated into English, and her autobiography has been taught in Italian grade schools. Her most recent novel, La linea del colore, won the Napoli Prize in 2020 and is currently being translated.

2 In “(Instrumental) Narratives of Postcolonial Rememory,” Marta-Laura Cenedese nods to the multiple levels of Scego’s narrative technique along with Ghermandi’s, claiming that they “create history from absences and to supplement the canonical archive with a new one that attempts to overcome the erasure of subaltern knowledge” (2018, 96–97).

3 For considerations of Italy’s demographic and social transformation in the 1990’s, see Fiore (2017) and Lazzari (2021). For a brief but excellent overview of the development and reception of this literature in Italy in the 1990s, see Simona Wright’s (2004) “Can the Subaltern Speak? The Politics of Identity and Difference in Italian Postcolonial Women’s Writing.” According to Wright, though these works faced resistance in conservative Italian academic circles, progressive scholarship of the 1990s focused on classifying this emergent literature amidst shifting definitions of national identity. Gabriele Lazzari elaborates on the dangers of this early practice in “Rethinking Diaspora through Borders: Contemporary Somali Literature in English and Italian,” arguing focusing exclusively on the political value of this literature can obstruct its acceptance into the canon by shoring up aesthetic barriers to entry. Franca Sinopoli (2006) provides a helpful historical overview of Italian scholarly discourses of the 1990s around this literature in “La critica sulla letteratura della migrazione italiana,” in which she describes a transition away from preoccupation with classification of this literature to the analysis of its common themes. For an in-depth analysis of the development of postcolonial literature in Italy, see the first chapter of Caterina Romeo’s (2018) Riscrivere la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale.

4 For more on Italy’s failure to address its colonial history, please see Alessi (2019), Ben-Ghiat and Fuller (2005), Burdett (2020), Cenedese (2018), Fiore (2017), Lazzari (2021), Lombardi-Diop and Romeo (2014, 2015), Nathan (2017), Parati (2005), Ponzanesi (2012), Rand (2020), and Siddi (2020).

5 For more on colonialism’s importance to Italian national identity, see Fiore (2017), Forgacs (2014), Nathan (2017), and Burdett (2020).

6 According to Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo in “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern Frontier of Europe,” (2015) the lack of consideration of colonialism can be traced to Italy’s colonial enterprise being deemed ‘minor’ in comparison to other European nations.

7 To this end, both Mellino (2012) and Trouillot (1995) point out that the scientific racism justifying European violence and domination developed out of ideas inherited from Renaissance humanism about the inherent gradations of man. Burdett agrees with Mellino’s directive to deprovincialize Italian history, asserting that studying Italy as a hermetically sealed entity leads to blind spots regarding the importance and legacy of colonialism.

8 Fabian ([1983] 2014) notes that Europe or “the West” is also a fiction constructed by the countries wishing to participate in colonization. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, makes a difference between the geographical entity of Europe versus conceptual Europe, which includes the European intellectual tradition and its concepts of modernity. When referring to Europe in this article, I mean to include all of these problematic connotations and allisions.

9 Chakrabarty warns that power, politics, and violence sit at the heart of European cultural values and truth regimes, which are often considered to be sanitized, rational, and scientific. Zoppe’s adoption of a European modern perspective is thus the result of coercion rather than a simple embrace of superior values.

10 Cenedese reads this touching friendship as proof of Scego’s championing of intersectionality, which allows her readers to “reflect on the links between minorities and vulnerable communities” in a non-competitive manner (2018, 109).

11 History in this paragraph refers to history as defined by European modernity. Trouillot notes that Europeans were able to dismiss colonial “Others” as ahistorical because their societies conceived of time differently and did not apply the same criteria to evidence their histories. For Trouillot, claiming that colonial Others had no history was yet another form of domination that evacuated local histories by denying their legitimacy.

12 For more on Zoppe’s unacknowledged shame and its effect on subsequent generations, see “Transgenerational Shame in Postcolonial Italy: Igiaba Scego’s Adua” (2020) by Lucy Rand.

13 During her discussion of the counternarratives of postcolonial female writers, Romeo characterizes the chronicling of erotic colonial history as one of Adua’s chief characteristics.

14 For an in-depth analysis of the temporality of the Italian Empire, see Burdett’s “Addressing the Representation of the Italian Empire and Its Afterlife” (2020). Burdett argues that anticipating an imperial future functioned as a powerful means of garnering support for Italian fascism, as the transformation of the colonies became evidence of fascism’s accelerated modernity.

15 For more on the portrayal of Adua’s exploitation and rape, see Benedicty-Kokken’s “A Polyvalent Mediterranean, or the trope of nomadism in the literary oeuvre of Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman A. Waberi.” She argues that Scego manages to “shift the focus to the vitality of the body that survives, rather than lingering on the pain of the body that is victimized “(2017, 114). Serena Alessi (2019) analyzes the function of female heroines in Scego’s, Gabriella Ghermandi’s, and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s work in “Le protagoniste della letteratura italiana postcoloniale: quali eroine?” claiming that these heroines’ triumphs unmask the myth of colonial Italian male heroism.

16 For more on the refugee crisis’s connection to colonialism and precolonial Africa, see Ali (2020), Benedicty-Kokken (2017) and Siddi (2020).

17 In his discussion of the autobiographical past, Fabian touches on the relationship between a subject’s past and future, claiming that the past must be “present to us as a project, hence as our future. In fact, we would not have a present to look back from at our past if it was not for that constant passage of our experience from past to future” ([1983] 2014, 93). For Fabian, therefore, the past is essential in creating an orientation to the future. Both must be present in order to fully experience the present.

18 For more on recasting the past to reimagine the future, please see Cenedese (2018), who defines this act as rememory, a term coined by Toni Morrison in Beloved and adopted by postcolonial studies as a technique of collective decolonization. In her consideration of the heroines of Italian literature, Alessi posits that heroines are unique in their relationship to the past because they do not support the myth of the nation, but rather depict a difficult reality.

19 For more on the importance of national canons in delimiting national identity, see Benedict Anderson’s (1983) landmark study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and Marie Orton’s (2012) “Writing the Nation: Migration Literature and National Identity.” In Migrant Imaginaries: Figures in Italian Migration Literature, Jennifer Burns (2013) discusses resistance on the part of critics and writers in the 21^st century to the label of literature itself, due to its connection to traditional barriers to heritage, legitimacy and authenticity. In Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture, Graziella Parati argues that migrant and second-generation narratives deconstruct older models of national literature because they “successfully negate the possibility of a singular imagined Italian community.

20 This idea follows Fiore’s (2017) compelling case in Preoccupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies for a more expansive Italian geography that considers Italy’s long history of emigration, its internal fragmentation and the resulting intranational migrations. In his discussion of the centrality of borders in Somali literature, Lazzari (2021) defines borders as both conceptual and geographical, asserting that shape the configuration of social spaces while simultaneously establishing cognitive hierarchies, which are in turn used to reinforce material inequalities” (67).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan Crognale

Megan Crognale is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Fairfield University. She obtained a Ph.D. in Italian Language and Literature from Yale University in 2020. She adapted her dissertation research into articles such as: “Paradise Lost on the Hills above Alba: Nostalgia in Fenoglio’s Una questione privata” (Italica, Spring 2020), and “Land of Extremes: The Power of Sicilian Landscapes in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo,” (Italica, Fall 2021). During the 2020–2021 academic year, she was a recipient of Yale’s Alumni Fellowship Award. In Spring 2022, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University.