“I wanted to become an Abyssinian”: Rewriting Indro Montanelli’s memories of colonial Africa in Francesca Melandri’s Sangue giusto (2017)

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on journalist Indro Montanelli’s memories of Destà/Fatìma or Fatuma, the 12-year-old child he bought as his “wife” while he was a volunteer in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, and on a colonial narrative echoing his story in the 2017 novel Sangue giusto by Francesca Melandri. It considers the roles of race, gender, sexuality, and national memory in the texts, moving from the debate around the monument dedicated to the prominent journalist in the city of Milan to the analysis of the power dynamics in the novel. John Akomfrah’s notion of memory as “a deconstructive gesture against white mythologies” and Aimé Césaire’s and Michel Foucault’s idea of memory as counter-cartography are used to analyse both Montanelli’s recollections of Destà and the relationship between Attilio Profeti, the main character of Melandri’s novel, and Ababa, the girl he turned into his servant and lover during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia.

KEYWORDS:

• Destà/Fatìma
• Indro Montanelli
• Francesca Melandri
• Italo-Ethiopian war
• memory
• colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The double name Destà/Fatìma may have been used by Montanelli to undermine the reliability of his own story. In this paper, the little girl will be referred to as Destà in ways similar to most publications where her name appears such as, among others, Marco Lenci (2003) and Annalisa Frisina and Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfaù (2020).

2. I Sentinelli are a non-party activist group from Milan whose members define themselves as “secular and antifascist”. See https://isentinelli.it/

3. This and all subsequent translations from Italian are mine, unless otherwise stated.

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Notes on contributors

Serena I. Volpi

Serena I. Volpi holds a PhD in English from Brunel University, London where her thesis won the 2014 Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Doctoral Research. She is an adjunct professor of English at Roma Tre University, Rome, and a lecturer in anthropology at Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Italian International Institute, Florence. Her latest book-length publication is Heading South with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (2021), co-authored with Adriano Elia.