Talking about identity: Milanese-Eritreans describe themselves

Abstract

This paper presents a conversation between second-generation Eritreans in Milan. The focus is cast on how the youths speak about themselves and their experiences living in Milan, going to Eritrea, their transnational family and their daily life between different realities. Their words show that belonging is not clear cut, and neither are identities. Blackness, Africanness, Italianness, Eritreanness, race and culture, closed and opened mentality, and civilized versus uncivilized behaviours are the topics they speak about in the group conversation, in which they open the debate as to how they play with existing definitions of the self and how they reproduce them.

Keywords:

• Youth
• generations
• experiences
• identities
• belonging

Acknowledgments

I thank Ralph Grillo for his recent comments on this paper; his support dates to 2005, when he invited me to present at the IMISCOE workshop on families. Special thanks also go to Bruno Riccio for inviting me to present this material at the University of Bologna seminars (2009).

Notes

To define the subjects of this paper I use ‘youth’, ‘young people’, ‘Milanese-Eritreans’, but also Andall's (2002: 1) definition of second generation, which includes those who arrived before the age of 6 years or were born in Italy. I nevertheless feel uncomfortable with the latter definition, which describes these young people as encapsulated not only into their parents' lives but also tied into the in-between-ness that they are struggling to overcome (see Baumann 1996).

The official language in Eritrea and the native language of their Tigrinya parents.

The word is used to speak about Abyssinian cultural and religious traits. The term ‘Habesha’ denotes the people from the plateaus of Ethiopia and Eritrea where Semitic languages coming from a common Ge'ez root are spoken and where mostly Tewaheldo Orthodox Christianity is practised, and other cultural practices such as certain ways of preparing coffee and particular foods are shared.

To make coffee in Habesha style, charcoal is lit in a small stove. Everyone sits around it and a woman performs a set of ritualized actions. First of all, raw coffee is burned and handed around to be smelled. While the coffee is ground (in Italy most people used electrical grinding machines for this end), some chickpeas, barley and corn are toasted on the stove. The ground coffee is put in a jebenà coffee pot, with water. While the coffee is on the stove for the first round, incense mixed with sandalwood and other spices is burned. When the coffee starts boiling, and spills out from the jebenà, it is poured into fenjals, or small cups. This practice is repeated three times with the same coffee grounds, which become weaker and weaker. On the third round, spices are burned again. There are numerous images of this traditional practice depicted with romantic emphasis, with grass and flowers spread on the floor around the stove and a woman dressed in traditional white netzalà shawl and zurià dress.

’Ngera is a spongy bread on which particular meat, fish or vegetable sauces are placed. It also serves to make food balls to be eaten with the hands.

The definition of second-generation ‘Africans’ has to be understood as an etic category that Andall found useful to group the youth, but from the interview presented in this paper, it is clear that it cannot be understood as an emic self-definition.

The Italian language and culture test form part of a political stance that has been going on for years but never decided upon. The proposed enactment adds to the uncertainty following which nobody knows how to move inside the bureaucratic maze.

Being buried in Eritrea is becoming less common, especially for those who have built a family in Italy, but the practice remains an idealized desire of first-generation migrants.