Translanguaging: Claudio Giovannesi’s postcolonial practices

Abstract

Claudio Giovannesi’s Fratelli d’Italia (2009) is a documentary about the lives of three teenagers of non-Italian origins living in the Roman periphery. The third episode of the film features Nader, a second generation Italian–Egyptian and his conflicts both at school and in his family. Nader Sarhan starred in Giovannesi’s later Alì ha gli occhi azzurri (2012), a feature film whose plot was loosely inspired by the life in Ostia of his younger self. Giovannesi blurs the line between documentary and fiction by casting Nader as ‘himself’ (members of his family also appear in both films). This blurring can be seen as one example of ‘translanguaging’, a way of moving across linguistic and cultural systems which suggests their permeability. Practices of translanguaging allow a movement across the familiar binary logic of the bi-national, pointing to quotidian practices of cultural difference with no clear culture of origin nor host. Nader’s family’s move between Arabic and Italian as they constantly re-negotiate their cultural values. Giovannesi reworks the familiar defining link between territory and language, yet the films offer no celebratory account of multilingual and multi-ethnic Europe.

Keywords:

• Giovannesi
• translanguaging
• modern tongue
• Italian
• Arabic

Notes

1. Italian films which specifically foreground the postcolonial condition, like much Italian cinema, are primarily a local enterprise (Zagarrio 2015, 325–328). In terms of production, distribution and exhibition, they generally register little presence outside the nevertheless important international festival circuit. Yet films dealing explicitly with Italy’s postcolonial experience are essential for apprehending the nation’s conflicted response to global mobility, demographic change and cultural memory. The earliest Italian films about migration tended to focus on the catastrophe of migration with an emphasis on homelessness and return as the inevitable, tragic consequences of failed assimilation. Gradually, however, films of social critique have been replaced by genre products – comedies, romantic-comedies, thrillers – in which the migrant has become a resident if not always citizen, and what remains to be explored are the actual terms of that permanence. Most of these films have been directed by white Italians who have been able to draw on funding opportunities offered by government bodies or privately owned television companies, as well as on established channels for European co-production. Few have been directed by non-Italians or recent migrants to Italy (Bonsaver 2015, 346–357).

2. The focus of my discussion will be on how so-called migrants speak in Italian postcolonial cinema. I am specifically not referring to films which might be encompassed under Naficy’s (2001) rubric of ‘Accented Cinema.’ His hugely influential work relates primarily to the accent of film-makers themselves and its translation into the aesthetic structures of their work. I am interested here in the management of voice (including accent) in films which in his terms are ‘unaccented.’.

3. Films which feature more than one language test the limits of national cinema which is often characterised by a rigid monolingualism. The exclusion of Saverio Costanzo’s Private (2004) from the Oscars because Arabic and Hebrew are the languages spoken in what purported to be an Italian film demonstrates the degree to which national cinema has been determined by language and its conflation with territory. This restriction was subsequently lifted.

4. ‘Second generation’ is a widely used albeit very ill-defined category in Italy. As well as serving to create a fissure in Italian identity, it has also been used by groups such as ‘Rete 2 – Seconde Generazioni’ as a channel for social activism. The group now conducts most of its activities through Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/41820491538.

5. As well as Saimir, films such as Botrugno and Coluccini’s In terra pax (2010), and Noce’s Good Morning Aman (2009) situate themselves self-consciously in this tradition of representation. Rhodes notes that the location of Accattone (1961) was in the mid-2000s, being used as a temporary migrant settlement (2007, 50), drawing attention to the palimpsestic layering of connectedness, and the intersections of filmic and pro-filmic versions of the city. In addition, all the films mentioned contain a homoeotic/queer stratum which I do not have the space to explore here, but which underlines and is underlined by the recourse to Pasolini’s aesthetic repertoire.

6. Nader also features in an episode of Permesso di soggiorno (2012), a series of short films about young people of non-Italian origins living in Italy made by Avoicomunicare, a Youtube channel set up by Telecom Italia. Nader talks about himself and his family in ways which echo the two films, but carry more nuance. It adds a further intertext to Nader as a postcolonial subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4mCMzgCSt0. It should be pointed out that as an Italian citizen, Nader does not need a residence permit, the ‘permesso di soggiorno’ of the series’ title.

7. While the subtitling of Arabic dialogue into Italian underlines the power differential between the languages in the context of the film’s production and distribution, it does not disguise the fact that the conversation is a remarkable instance of the linguistic displacement of the nation as Arabic becomes an Italian language.