From a Place in the Sun to the Heart of Darkness: Contemporary Crime Fiction and Italy’s Colonial Past

ABSTRACT

Focussing on a group of recent novels set against the background of Italy’s colonies in East Africa during the Fascist period, this essay aims at investigating a fundamental tension within the tradition of Italian crime fiction, and, more specifically, of historical crime fiction. On the one hand, by shedding light into the darker and less explored corners of Italy’s past, the genre aims at serving as a sort of ‘new social novel’, to paraphrase the title of a 2004 book by Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò. On the other, the conventions and generic requirements of crime and detective fiction – in particular, its frequent recourse to stereotyped situations and characters – can hamper the reconstruction of complex experiences such as that of Italian colonialism. A detailed discussion of Giorgio Ballario’s novels featuring the Major of the Carabinieri Aldo Morosini (2008–2012), Davide Longo’s Un mattino a Irgalem (2001), Luciano Marrocu’s Debrà Libanòs (2002), and Andrea Camilleri’s La presa di Macallé (2003) will show how for contemporary Italian writers, as for many authors of late 19^th- and 20^th-century colonial novels, Africa often continues to be an empty space upon which to project European fantasies, regardless of whether the author’s intention is a critique or a celebration of empire. Only Camilleri manages to provide a more complex account of Italian imperialism by shifting his attention from the colonies themselves to the impact of colonialism upon the ‘motherland’, thus bringing into relief the constitutive function of colonialism in the formation of Fascist ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Noir
• crime fiction
• detective fiction
• colonialism
• fascism
• post-imperial fiction
• historical fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Come un uomo sulla terra, dir. by Andrea Segre and Dagmawi Yimer (ZaLab, 2008).

² Angelo Del Boca, ‘Una lunga battaglia per la verità’, in I gas di Mussolini. Il fascismo e la guerra d'Etiopia, ed. by Angelo Del Boca (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996), pp. 17–48.

³ Del Boca, ‘Una lunga battaglia’, p. 24. In this essay, Del Boca also recalls the remarkable difficulties, including threats to his personal safety, that he encountered when he first wrote about the use of chemical weapons in the colonies under Fascism. For a more detailed account of ‘[l]a rimozione (conscia o inconscia) delle colpe del colonialismo e il mancato dibattito in Italia sul periodo dell’espansionismo imperialista’ see his L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani. Miti, memorie, errori, sconfitte, (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1992). The quote is on p. XI.

⁴ Giovanna Tomasello, L’Africa tra mito e realtà. Storia della letteratura coloniale italiana (Palermo: Sellerio, 2004). Selections from a number of Fascist colonial novels, along with short bio-critical notes on their authors by Maria Pagliara, can be found in I best seller del Ventennio. Il regime e il libro di massa, ed. by Gigliola De Donato and Vanna Gazzola Stacchini (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991), pp. 365–457.

⁵ For an overview of recent literature on the colonial experience, see Silvia Camilotti, Cartoline d’Africa. Le colonie italiane nelle rappresentazioni letterarie (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2014).

⁶ Laura Lori, Inchiostro d’Africa. La letteratura postcoloniale somala fra diaspora e identità (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2014), p. 12. The question of the uses and limitations of the category of the ‘postcolonial’ in the context of Italian literature is notoriously complex, and its discussion falls outside the scope of the present essay. For an introduction to the debate, see Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, ‘Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy’, in Postcolonial Italy. Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. by Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–29; Daniele Comberiati, ‘La letteratura postcoloniale italiana: definizioni, problemi, mappature’, in Certi confini. Sulla letteratura italiana dell’emigrazione, ed. by Lucia Quaquarelli (Milano: Morellini, 2010), pp. 161–78; Silvia Contarini, ‘Le postcolonialism Italian et ses “differences”’, Babel. Civilisation et societies, 31–X (2015), 25–46. Lori’s distinction between postcolonial and post-imperial fiction recalls that between novels that write ‘the memory of the colonial archive’ and novels that ‘adopt vividly exoticized colonial settings shrouded in nostalgic and quasi-elegiac atmospheres’ proposed by Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, pp. 8–9.

⁷ I am admittedly not drawing sharp boundaries between the detective and the crime novel, which often in Italian critical discourse are brought together under the category of ‘giallo’ or, more recently, ‘noir’. On the difficulties and problems in separating detective from crime fiction, see Martin Priestman, ‘Introduction: Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Martin Priestman. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–6. For another study of crime fiction set in the Italian colonies, see Luciana D’Arcangeli and Laura Lori, ‘Il giallo in colonia: Italian Post-Imperial Crime Fiction’, Quaderni d’italianistica, 37.1 (2016), 73–88.

⁸ See Claudio Milanesi, ‘Il romanzo poliziesco, la storia, la memoria. Introduzione’, in Il romanzo poliziesco, la storia, la memoria. Italia, ed. by Claudio Milanesi (Bologna: Astræa, 2009), pp. 13–25; Clélie Milner, ‘Il paradigma indiziario: strumento dell’investigatore, strumento dello storico’, in Il romanzo poliziesco, la storia, la memoria. Italia, ed. by Claudio Milanesi (Bologna: Astræa, 2009), pp. 399–408; Barbara Pezzotti, Investigating Italy’s Past through Historical Crime Fiction, Films, and TV Series. Murder in the Age of Chaos (New York: Palgrave, 2016).

⁹ Margherita Ganeri, Il romanzo storico in Italia: il dibattito critico dalle origini al postmoderno (Lecce: Manni, 1999), p. 28.

¹⁰ Loriano Macchiavelli, ‘Loriano Macchiavelli e il destino del giallo’, interview with Maria Agostinelli, n.d. http://www.loriano-macchiavelli.it/interviste/destino-giallo/ [accessed 22 May 2018].

¹¹ In 2012, asked about the reasons for the success of the genre, Macchiavelli answered: ‘Non dà più fastidio’. See Loriano Macchiavelli, ‘Loriano Macchiavelli@Noir italiano’, in Noir italiano, 17 September 2012 https://noiritaliano.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/loriano-macchiavellinoir-italiano/ [accessed 22 May 2018].

¹² Il giallo italiano come nuovo romanzo sociale, ed. by Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò, (Ravenna: Longo, 2004).

¹³ For a lucid account of the aims and strategies of historical revisionism, see Sergio Luzzato, La crisi dell’antifascismo (Torino: Einaudi, 2004).

¹⁴ A fourth novel, Le nebbie di Massaua, is set for release from the publisher Edizioni del Capricorno in the Summer 2018.

¹⁵ Susanna Dolci, ‘Susanna Dolci intervista Giorgio Ballario e Nino Truglio’, Il Fondo magazine di Miro Renzaglia, 1 December 2008 http://www.mirorenzaglia.org/2008/12/morire-e-un-attimo/ [accessed 22 May 2018].

¹⁶ See for instance Chiara Bertazzoni, ‘C’è sempre una prima volta’, interview with Giorgio Ballario, Thriller Magazine, 15 luglio 2008 http://www.thrillermagazine.it/6652/giorgio-ballario-morire-e-un-attimo [accessed 22 May 2018]; Giulietta Iannone, ‘Intervista a Giorgio Ballario’, Liberi di scrivere, 15 September 2009 https://liberidiscrivereblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/56/ [accessed 22 May 2018]. It is worth noting, however, that the comparison between the Italian colonies and the Far West appeals also to writers that have a more critical perspective on Italian colonialism. Speaking of his 2015 novel Il tempo delle iene, Carlo Lucarelli has said: ‘Da tempo mi ballavano in mente immagini, costoni desolati da cui spuntano cavalieri armati, truppe che avanzano nel niente tipo indiani e cow-boy. Poi, iniziando a studiare i documenti, ho scoperto che Custer e i Sioux non c’entravano niente: era tutto più complesso’, Massimo Vincenzi, ‘Racconto il grande noir dell’Italia coloniale’ Interview with Carlo Lucarelli, La Repubblica, 25 November 2015, p. 49.

¹⁷ Giorgio Ballario, Morire è un attimo. L’indagine del maggiore Aldo Morosini nell’Eritrea italiana (Turin: Edizioni Angolo Manzoni, 2008), p. 38.

¹⁸ See Lori, Inchiostro d’Africa, p. 43.

¹⁹ Giorgio Ballario, Una donna di troppo. La seconda indagine del maggiore Aldo Morosini nell’Africa Orientale Italiana (Turin: Edizioni Angolo Manzoni, 2009), p. 141.

²⁰ Scium basci or sciumbascì (from the Tigrinya expression meaning ‘invested with authority’) was the highest rank that Abyssinian and Eritrean native soldiers could reach in the Italian colonial army; see Riccardo Busetto, Il dizionario militare. Dizionario enciclopedico del lessico militare (Bologna: Zanichelli, 2004), p. 779.

²¹ Ballario, Morire è un attimo, p. 144.

²² Ballario, Una donna, p. 56.

²³ On Graziani, see Angelo Del Boca’s profile ‘Graziani, Rodolfo’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2002), vol. 58, pp. 829–35. Del Boca notes that after World War Two, the Ethiopian government petitioned for Graziani’s extradition to try him for war crimes, but the request was ignored by the Italian government (p. 835).

²⁴ Ballario, Morire è un attimo, p. 59.

²⁵ One suspects that the novel might be here playing with the notion of the ‘morte della patria’ after Italy’s surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943 that has enjoyed a certain degree of popularity in the circles of revisionist history after the publication of Ernesto Galli della Loggia’s book of the same title in 1996. On the ‘morte della patria’ in contemporary detective fiction, see my ‘Fighting Crime in Times of War: Visions and Revisions of Fascism in Contemporary Detective Fiction’, in Trends in Contemporary Italian Narrative 1980–2007, ed. by Gillian Ania and Ann Hallamore Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 6–28.

²⁶ See Giulietta Stefani, ‘Eroi e antieroi coloniali. Uomini italiani in Africa da Flaiano a Lucarelli’, Zapruder, 23 (2010), 40–56; Camilotti, pp. 45–50. Nicola Labanca has related the lack of distinctive features in Longo’s description of the colony to the general ignorance of Italians regarding their colonial past. N. Labanca, ‘History and Memory of Italian Colonialism Today’, in Italian Colonialism. Legacies and Memories, ed. by Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 29–46 (p. 30).

²⁷ The comparison with Flaiano, for instance, opened Bruno Quaranta’s review on La Stampa: ‘È degno di figurare vicino a Flaiano, a “Tempo di uccidere”, il primo romanzo di Davide Longo’, Bruno Quaranta, ‘Nell’Africa d’Italia è nuovamente tempo di uccidere’, ttL, supplement of La Stampa, 28 June 2001, p. 4. On the early reception of the novel, see Luigi Preziosi, ‘Come cresce uno scrittore: Davide Longo’, BombaCarta. N.d. https://bombacarta.com/wp-content/uploads/monografie/mangiatoredipietre.pdf [accessed 22 May 2018], esp. note 1. Franco Manai’s comment is in his ‘Note su Conrad e il postcolonialismo italiano’, in Memoria Storica e Postcolonialismo. Il caso italiano, ed. by Martine Bovo-Romeœuf and Franco Manai (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 59–82 (p. 71).

²⁸ Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario’, in Miti emblemi spie. Morfologia e storia, 1986 (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), pp. 158–209.

²⁹ Irgalem, a town with a current population slightly under 44,000 (Wikipedia), is located about 260 kilometers south of Addis Ababa.

³⁰ Camilotti, p. 46. Sandra Ponzanesi makes a similar point, describing Teferi as an updating of the colonial stereotype of the ‘black Venus’: ‘Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices’, in Italian Colonialism. Legacies and Memories, ed. by Jacqueline Andall & Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 165–89 (pp. 177–178). On the femme fatale, see for instance Leonard Cassuto, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality. The Secret History of American Crime Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 115–22. A further element of connection between the two figures is the use of animal metaphors in their description: see Stefani, ‘Eroi e antieroi coloniali’, pp. 48–49; and Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 132.

³¹ The classic text on the uses of the colonial Other in the production of self-images of the West is of course Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

³² On the ‘certainty of the immanence of truth’ [emphasis in the original] (rather than of justice) as the defining characteristic of the detective story, see Nancy Wingate, ‘Getting Away with Murder: An Analysis’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 12.4 (1979), 581–603 (p. 581).

³³ The six novels (so far) of the Carruezzo and Serra series take place between the 1930s and the late 1950s. In the postwar period, the professional roles of the two characters change: Serra becomes a lawyer and Carruezzo, forced into retirement, is his assistant or, as Serra calls him jokingly, his ‘giovane di studio’.

³⁴ Luciano Marrocu, ‘“Africa, bel suol d’amore”: La memoria, la storia, il romanzo’, in Memoria Storica e Postcolonialismo. Il caso italiano, ed. by Martine Bovo-Romeœuf and Franco Manai (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 51–58 (p. 53).

³⁵ For a historical overview of the Debre Libenos massacre, see Angelo Del Boca, ‘Debrà Libanòs: una soluzione finale’, in Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2008), pp. 213–36. The figures for the number of victims, from the research of historians Ian L. Campbell and Degife Gabre-Tsadik, can be found on p. 229.

³⁶ Luciano Marrocu, Debrà Libanòs (Nuoro: Il Maestrale, 2002), p. 74.

³⁷ Fracassi’s guilt is established more clearly, although still somewhat elliptically, hors-texte, so to speak, in the following novel of the series. In recalling the conclusion of the investigation, Serra refers to the murderer using a masculine noun: ‘il colpevole si era alla fine rivelato da sé, riuscendo poi a dileguarsi’ (Scarpe rosse, tacchi a spillo (Nuoro: Il Maestrale, 2004), p. 35.

³⁸ Giuliana Pias, ‘La pratique intertextuelle dans les romans policiers de Luciano Marrocu’, Cahiers d’études romanes 25 (2012), par. 9. http://etudesromanes.revues.org/3727 [accessed 22 May 2018] (my translation).

³⁹ The failure of the ‘quest-for-truth’ plot positions Debrà Libanòs close to the territory of the ‘anti-detective novel’, although it does not share the sub-genre’s frequent concern with metaphysical issues. See Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

⁴⁰ Pezzotti, Investigating Italy’s Past, p. 73.

⁴¹ Unusually for a book by Camilleri, La presa di Macallè received mixed reviews upon its publications. Early reviewers took the novel to task on two counts: its linguistic experimentalism, that, as Giuseppe Amoroso wrote, ‘fa scendere una barriera imperforabile tra il lettore e il romanzo’ (‘Michelino non fa né ridere né piangere. È soltanto una maschera priva di senso’, La Gazzetta del Sud, 17 November 2003); and the rawness of its characters and situations, verging on the grotesque (see for instance Stefano Malatesta, ‘Il Camilleri sbagliato’, La Repubblica, 15 October 2003, or the unsigned review ‘Smarriti nei labirinti di Macallè’ in Il Corriere della Sera, 9 November 2003). All reviews are available in the ‘Rassegna Stampa’ section of Andrea Camilleri’s website, http://www.vigata.org/rassegna_stampa/Archivio_Storico.shtml [accessed 22 May 2018]). For Camilleri’s reflections on the reception of the novel, see Gianni Bonina, Tutto Camilleri (Palermo: Sellerio, 2012), pp. 284–88. More recently, Giuliana Benvenuti has related the ‘minor fortuna’ of La presa di Macallè to its linkage of colonialism to the formation of the nation-state ‘in un’Italia ancora incline a considerare il proprio colonialismo come mero epifenomeno di quanto accadeva in altri imperi’. G. Benvenuti, ‘Un dittico fascista’, in Gran Teatro Camilleri, ed. by Salvatore Silvano Nigro (Palermo: Sellerio, 2015), pp. 51–65 (p. 53)).

⁴² David Glover, ‘The Thriller’, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Martin Priestman. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 135–53 (p. 148). Glover is quoting an expression used by Ellroy on several occasions to refer to US history.

⁴³ On the ‘adozione sistematica del punto di vista di Michilino’, see Mauro Novelli, ‘Il rosso e i neri. Fascismo e religione, sessualità e violenza in Andrea Camilleri, La presa di Macallè’, in Il romanzo poliziesco, la storia, la memoria, vol. 1 Italia, ed. by Claudio Milanesi (Bologna: Astræa, 2009), pp. 93–101 (p. 95).

⁴⁴ Bonina, Tutto Camilleri, p. 285.

⁴⁵ Andrea Camilleri, La presa di Macallè (Palermo: Sellerio, 2003), p. 38.

⁴⁶ Bonina, Tutto Camilleri, p. 288. On colonialism as an integral part of Fascist ideology, see also Benvenuti, ‘Un dittico fascista’, p. 52.

⁴⁷ Wu Ming 1, review of Andrea Camilleri, La presa di Macallè (2003), Nandropausa 5 http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/Giap/nandropausa5.html [accessed 22 May 2018].

⁴⁸ For an overview of Italian historical detective fiction, see Pezzotti, Investigating Italy’s Past.

⁴⁹ This essay began as a keynote address at the 2015 Biennial Conference of the Australian Centre for Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. I am grateful to ACIS Chair David Moss and to Barbara Pezzotti for their kind invitation and hospitality. I am indebted to Stephanie Hom, who also brought Come un’uomo sulla terra to my attention, Simone Brioni, Sonita Sarker and the two anonymous readers for Italian Studies for their invaluable comments and suggestions, and to Giorgio Ballario for making copies of his out-of-print novels available to me. The last draft was finished in the shadow of resurgent and rampant nativism in Europe and the United States and of the ensuing policies against immigrants, including refugees fleeing the consequences of colonialisms old and new. For what such gestures are worth – and I am well aware it’s very little indeed – this essay is dedicated to them.