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Abstract
Just as the physical presence of migrants in Italy’s national space has prompted re-evaluations of how national identity is formulated, migration literature in Italy calls into question those overarching discourses that inform cultural constructs of nationality and national literature. This paper traces the ways in which the works of five migrant writers interrogate the intertwined and mutually reinforcing assumptions that have traditionally shaped the idea of national literature: first, that the construction of national identity and national literature require exclusion of otherness; second, that national identity and national literature style themselves as ahistorical; and third, that national identity depends of a social construction of space that binds identity to a single territory. This paper examines how the writings of Komla-Ebri, Khouma, Scego, Ali Farah, and Lakhous give visibility to the hidden racial exclusions, the obscured historical and colonial memory, and the invisible spatial assumptions that have all served the construction of italianità.
Notes
1 Citizenship legislation generally follows one of two traditions, either according citizenship by birthplace (jus soli) or by parentage (jus sanguinis). Current citizenship legislation in Italy ascribes to the latter: though born and raised in Italy, children of foreign parents who do not have citizenship inherit their parents’ nationalities. If their births in Italy were regularly registered, and if at age eighteen they can verify they had continuous residence in Italy (i.e. did not return to their parents’ homelands for more than three months), children of foreign parents can before their nineteenth birthday apply for naturalization. If citizenship is not granted, they must request a residence permit that will allow them to remain in Italy for up to three years. Due to the involved and complicated nature of the procedure, fewer than half of the children of foreign parents who are raised in Italy obtain citizenship when they reach adulthood (Daher, Citation2007).
2 The event was co-sponsored by the Italian branch of the international organization Save the Children, which works to protect children worldwide. In addition to reading from Manzoni, a letter of support from former president Ciampi was read, and forty children of migrant parents performed in the program with personal stories and music, joined by more than twenty other actors and performers. The performance was repeated the following day in Rome’s Piazza di Pietra. For a full report of the events relative to this performance, see “Festa triste per 900 mila: restano fratellastri d’Italia.” <http://www.secondegenerazioni.it>. The performance was entitled “Promessi Sposi ... d’Italia: questa cittadinanza s’ha da fare.”
3 Rete G2 was founded in 2005 by so-called second-generation migrants in Italy. One of the organization’s key concerns is the debate on citizenship, and the group supports many initiatives to promote the extension of citizenship to the children of migrants. The organization has a wide spectrum of activities from offering practical advice to those applying for citizenship, to sponsoring cultural activities that promote understanding about the situation of second generation migrants. See the organization’s official website at www.secondegenerazioni.it.
4 See also Banti, Citation2002. In this intervention Banti examines how poets, musicians, and painters during the eighteenth century, and particularly during Romanticism, cultivated the idea of a national identity even before the political existence of the nation-state. Banti emphasizes that two formidable thematic elements gave force to Risorgimento ideals: 1) the harking back to historical models, and 2) the emphasis on narrative in all aspects of the arts (painting, music, poetry). Banti sees these two elements as inter-dependent, and narrative as the main motor for creating national cultural myths based on writers’ creation of a literary genealogy and a constructed view of history.
5 See also Banti, Citation2002: here, following Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” (2006: 6), Banti explores in greater depth how directly the Risorgimento’s development relied on print culture.
6 Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giacomo Leopardi all used the term in connecting Italy with its past greatness during the Renaissance.
7 Ciccarelli points out the irony of Dante, a political exile, becoming the emblem of the political establishment during the Risorgimento, and explores how later writers rejected their predecessors’ emphasis on Dante.
8 See Piromalli and Scafoglio, Citation1977; and Scafoglio and Cianflone, Citation1977.
9 For an analysis of how the Risorgimento has been reinterpreted, see Bouchard, 2005.
10 The production of literary texts by migrants to Italy began in 1990 with the publication of predominantly autobiographical texts about the difficulties of the migration experience which were frequently edited by or co-authored with native Italians. See CitationKhouma, 2010; Methnani and Fortunato, Citation1990; Bouchane, Citation1990; Ba and Micheletti, Citation1991; Chohra, Citation1991; and Salem, Citation1993. Since the early 1990s, hundreds of texts by migrant authors writing directly in Italian have been published in all literary genres including texts whose authors have garnered prestigious literary awards, such as Gezim Hadari, who was awarded the Montale prize for poetry in 1997. Francesco Cosenza catalogues over 800 texts by more than 600 different writers in Letteratura nascente e dintorni.
11 Parati also discusses the role of literary prizes in migrant authors’ infiltration of the “Olympus” of the Italian literary market and literary canon (2005: 61–64).
12 Casanova’s ambitious study of world literature explores this same issue of literary legitimacy in terms of writers’ inclusion in the canon on a global level, emphasizing how writers from former colonial and economically disadvantaged countries are excluded from world markets: “The original dependence of literature on the nation is at the heart of the inequality that structures the literary world. Literary resources, which are always stamped with the seal of the nation, are therefore unequal as well, and unequally distributed among nations” (2004: 39).
13 Parati lists the handful of texts by migrant authors that have been published by major houses such as Garzanti (Io, venditore di elefanti, 1990, by Pap Khouoma, which became a bestseller), Feltrinelli (Rometta e Giulieo, 2001, by Jadelin Gangbo), DeAgostini (La promessa di Hamadi, 1991, co- authored by Saidou Moussa Ba and Alessandro Micheletti), Giunti (Con il vento nei capelli, 1993 by Salwa Salem), and Bompiani (La Straniera, 1999 by Younis Tawfik). Parati points out that these publishing houses made no attempts to capitalize on the sucess of these texts by establishing series or creating a reading audience for texts by migrant authors, but rather supported the publication of “one time token texts” (2005: 99).
14 For example, one of his colleagues who is a physical therapist is not allowed into a home when the maid sees he is African (2002: 41–42); relatives visiting a patient in the hospital assume that the black head nurse must be the cleaning lady (2002: 21); clients leave an office claiming “no one is in” when the journalist working at the desk is black (2004: 21–22); people in a public park assume his African friend must be a babysitter, since he is with fair-skinned children who, however, are his own (2002: 9).
15 On the use of humor as a form of resistance to ethnic discrimination, see Sollors, 1986; and also Davies, 1996.
16 Khouma illustrates the insidious nature of racism with the following example: the author had been invited to speak to high school students about being “italiano-africano.” When the students were shaking his hand after the lecture, he asked a young woman who looked Middle Eastern where she was from, and she answered, “Italy.” The author admits, “Mi vergognai. Pure io predicavo bene ma cadevo negli stereotipi nei confronti dei ‘diversi.’ A dimostrazione di quanto è contagiosa l’assuefazione al pensiero dominante” (2010: 14).
17 Sniderman and his team undertook a quantitative analysis of the rise in racial discrimination in Italy following the increase in international migration. Their research examines the multiple contributing factors, and shows that Italy’s undoubted surge in ethnocentrism (which they define as “ingroup identification and outgroup hostility” [2000: 144]), is distinguished from racial discrimination in other countries by what they term “consistency” (low differentiation between outgroups) and “pluralistic intolerance” (hostility toward one group increases intolerance toward other groups [2000: 140–48]).
18 See Fazel, Citation1994; Garane, Citation2005; Ghermandi, Citation2007; Hassan, Citation1996; Scego, Citation2010; Dell’Oro, Citation1991 and Citation1997; Sibhata, Citation1993; Viarengo, Citation1990; Ali Farah, Citation2007.
19 The text was awarded the Premio Mondello in 2011. Scego was born in 1974 to Somali parents living in Rome. She holds a Ph.D. from the Università di Roma Tre. Her journalistic articles have appeared in la Repubblica, Internazionale, and Il Manifesto.
20 See Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, 2005, who point out that Italy’s racial laws, heavy uses of chemical and aerial warfare, genocidal tactics, and mass detentions in concentration camps tell a different story.
21 See also Del Boca (Citation1992), who argues that the longevity of the myth of benign Italian colonialism is the consequence of Italy’s decolonization being a slow process. He also attributes the persistence of traditional quasi-positive images of Italian colonialism to lack of contact between Italy and the colonies, the restricted number of people who traveled to the colonies and their education level, and the paucity of historiographical work on the period. See also Labanca, who explains the dearth of historiographical work on Italian colonialism as a consequence of inaccessible relevant government archives. Both Del Boca and Labanca demonstrate how the repression of history was a way to officially silence not only facts about Italian atrocities, but also the shame of Italy’s defeat and loss of colonies.
22 The Somali Diaspora refers to the dramatic increase in expatriate Somali internationally following the utter collapse of the Somali state after the downfall of Siad Barre’s repressive regime and the outbreak of civil war in 1991. See Farah, Citation2007.
23 The novel was awarded the prestigious Flaiano literary prize and was made into a film in 2010, directed by Isotta Toso.
24 Located in the historic Esquilino district, Piazza Vittorio has been a locus of identity construction since it was re-named for the first king of United Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy, after the resolution of the questione romana in 1870. See http://www.rioneesquilino.net/storia.
25 Kurosawa’s mystery film, Rashômon (1950), relates the story of the same crime from four different points of view. The film has become a classic reference point and its title shorthand for multiple (and often contradictory) perspectives of the same event.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marie Orton
Marie Orton is Professor of Italian at Truman State University. With Graziella Parati, she co-edited Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy, an anthology of migrant writers in English translation. She translated Alessandro Dal Lago’s Non-Persons: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Global Society and is currently writing a book on the uses of humor in migration literature.