Transgenerational shame in postcolonial Italy: Igiaba Scego’s Adua

ABSTRACT

This article reads Igiaba Scego’s 2015 novel Adua as an expression of shame within the parameters of transgenerational emotion. The passage of shame is traced from a Somali subject of 1930s Italian colonialism to his daughter, Adua, in 1970s postcolonial Somalia, who later suffers the reverberations of the affective charge of shame in modern-day Italy. Grounded in psychoanalytical theories of individual and transgenerational shame, the article argues that Scego uses the repetition of linguistic patterns to elucidate how shame is passed down and experienced across two bodies, coming to the fore in a Rome characterized by postcolonial attitudes and the “European migrant crisis”. This article proposes that shame is a significant feature of Italian postcolonial writing, and enunciates a theory of transgenerational shame as a key aspect of the postcolonial aesthetic.

KEYWORDS:

• Somalia
• postcolonial Italy
• Igiaba Scego
• shame
• transgenerational emotion
• Adua

Acknowledgment

The ideas and structure of this article were developed during the writing of my dissertation during the MA in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol, so I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Caragh Wells.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For earlier criticism of Italian migrant writing, see Gnisci (1992, 2001), Wright (2004), Carroli (2013), Coppola (2011) and Reichardt (2013).

2. Igiaba Scego’s novel is also available in English, in Jamie Richards’s translation: Scego, Igiaba. 2015. Adua. Translated by Jamie Richards. New York: New Vessel Press (2017) and London: Jacaranda (2019).

3. Italy also colonized parts of Libya, the Dodecanese islands and Albania, and had a concession in China during this period.

4. For more on Italian colonialism, see Del Boca (2005), Ben-Ghiat and Fuller (2005) and Andall and Duncan (2005).

5. All translations from the Italian are my own.

6. In the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Italy aimed to get revenge for Ethiopia’s defeat at Adwa (English spelling).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucy Rand

Lucy Rand studied Spanish and Italian at the University of Bristol, UK, where she also graduated from the master’s programme in comparative literatures and cultures. She has volunteered with migrants and refugees in centres for settlement and integration in Verona and in London. Her academic research focuses on the negotiation of emotion in postcolonial Italian writing. She is also a literary translator from the Italian. Her website is www.lucyrand.com