87  Female literature of

migration in Italy

Lidia Curti

abstract
Starting symbolically from a place of transit and mobility such as the Galleria in
Naples, I look at the pace of immigration movements to Italy from both ex-colonial
territories and other countries. Precarity characterizes the migrant condition in Italy:
entrance and stay permits; work and housing, which are difficult to obtain and always
temporary; bureaucratic control is severe and the right to citizenship is distant. The
collective amnesia of the colonial enterprise obscures the fact that at least some of
the guests of today were the hosts of yesterday. I analyse these, and other aspects, in
the literature of migration that in recent decades has emerged in Italy, focusing on
women’s writing and confronting the problem of how long it will take for this literature
to receive recognition in the Italian literary canon. In women’s narratives, precarity
emerges in the journey of emigration, described as a real odyssey; in tensions over
identity and language; in contrasting cultures of departure and cultures of
destination; in the problematic concept of ‘home’. Racial and gender differences
subsumed in the colour of skin are a recurrent motif. For women, hardships may be
more deeply felt: isolation and loneliness is augmented by the distance from children
and family; the relationship between past and present more troublesome as it often
leads to a double oppression. Independence is more fiercely fought for in the
affirmation of identity. Finally, I show that, alongside conditions of isolation and
despair, strength and hope in the new life emerge from these writings, touching on the
importance of writing in Italian and on the motives leading to this choice.

keywords
Italian colonialism; Somalian diaspora; migrant writing; another language; racism;
precarity; plural identities

60 feminist review 87 2007

(60–75)
c 2007 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/07 $30 www.feminist-review.com
 the arcade, a precarious space
The Galleria Umberto I, an arcade in the elegant centre, housing boutiques, cafés
and a large post office, is one of the landmarks of the city of Naples. It is this
nineteenth-century monument that John Horne Burns, in his 1947 work, The
Gallery, describes as the unofficial heart of Naples: ‘a large arcade, a cross
between the hall of a train station and the nave of a church y. The arcade was
secretive y it seemed like being inside a Baroque Underground station’ (Burns,
1970: 1). The stress on mobility and precariousness can be found again in
Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, where the arcade is described as
a place of flânerie, which, alongside the main railway station, provided an ideal
site for the beginning of cinema in Naples in the 1920s. With its transient and
transgressive de-territorialized architecture, the arcade was also the sphere of
‘spatial mobility as pleasure’ where women could perform their conquest of
metropolitan space (Bruno, 1993: 66–67).

The bustle and hustle of consumerism and tourism have now replaced the dubious
atmosphere of post-war Naples, traversed by, as Annamaria Ortese says, ‘y a
1 Burns too had lava flow of pus and dollars’ (Ortese, 1975: 99).’1 Not too long ago, however, that
offered an
apocalyptic vision: elegant patina was disrupted one afternoon a week, by an assembly of people
‘ya living and chatting animatedly, dressed in the colourful festive clothes of their afternoon
subdividing cell of
vermouth, Allied off. They looked starkly different from everybody else and, alongside the kids who
soldierly and the
Italian people y play football late at night despite all prohibitions, were the only ones to interrupt
most of the modern the parade of Italian passers-by. The Galleria has in fact been for some time one
world could be seen
in ruins there in of the meeting points of domestic workers, in this case mainly women from
August 1944’ (Burns, Eritrea. With its post office and telephone centre, this space constituted a bridge
1970: 311).
between their new residence and home, a material and symbolic link with their
distant homeland, and a meeting place. Further, it offered a way of inhabiting
the city – being separate and at the same time proximate to their ‘others’, us,
me, the natives. With its simultaneously closed and open architecture, it evoked
the patio: a hybrid space destined for women in most of the countries they come
from.

There have been other sites of encounter such as the near-by Town Hall Square,
the main railway station and the town park, the latter mainly used for Ramadan
celebrations, but immigrants are increasingly withdrawing from public spaces as
their stay becomes less provisional (although Naples is still considered a place of
transit to destinations offering better work opportunities). Most of them are now
acquiring residence, however precarious, and there are now whole areas of the
city where immigrants live, in particular around the station and the ‘quartieri
2 Here they take the spagnoli’.2 Women rarely have their own lodgings; their type of work as domestic
place of some of the
old inhabitants in workers or carers encloses them within somebody else’s home, where they are
the ‘bassi’, the one subject to the precarity of the old who can die, or children who grow out of their
room flats opening
care. Their workplace offers a space for nostalgia, in the ambiguous condition

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 61

 between this home and the one they have abandoned. The child and the house of out on the street,
described in so much
the Italian woman, who is away most of the day, take the place of what was left literature since the
behind: an involuntary substitution in which memory, past and present, distance nineteenth century,
and more recently by
and immediacy are intertwined. The kitchen is central in representing the Norman Lewis in
everyday space of activity and social exchange and of the meeting with the new Naples ’44 (1983).

culture. But it is also the space of conflict between two women, the ‘native’ and
the ‘alien’, where profound cultural differences can emerge around food and ways
of cooking. It may turn into a hostile environment, with the result that one’s
personal experience has to be cancelled in order to satisfy the employer’s
requirements. Space is essential in the immigrant’s condition of life. In ‘An exile
who says: where?’, Julia Kristeva comments that the first question the stranger
asks is not ‘who am I?’ but ‘where am I?’ (Kristeva, 1981). This question always
awaits an answer (what is the space for them? and how is it made for them?) and
puts us, our space, our city, in question. In Naples, the answer is yet to come.
Most of the immigrants in Naples, as in the rest of Italy, were originally from
north and east Africa, a movement from the southern to the northern coast of the
Mediterranean recalling many a colonial link.3 This occurs in a context in which 3 They have been
followed by people
the south of Italy is still fundamentally based on a rural economy, and is in turn from Senegal, Sri
exploited by the north for cheap labour and the location of its polluting Lanka and the
Philippines, Brazil
industries. It confirms the crux of Gramsci’s vision in his unfinished 1926 essay on and Egypt, lately
the southern question, echoed by Norman Lewis in 1944: ‘The facts are, as every from China, Russia
and Eastern Europe.
Italian will admit, that the South is virtually a colony of the industrialised North’ The largest group
was originally from
Lewis (1983: 59).4 In spite of that, the difference in the levels and conditions of Morocco; Albanians
life between the local population and immigrants is immense. Here, as elsewhere, and Rumanians are
presently the most
the empire strikes back in reaction to the predatory act our country performed in numerous ones.
its colonial heyday, albeit less successfully than others. This has also brought 4 Nelson Moe writes
of the widepread
racism to a part of Italy historically used to being at the receiving end of vision of the
discrimination. Mezzogiorno as the
borderland between
Europe and its
others (Moe, 2002).
See also ‘Images of
the uninvited guest the South’ by
Gabriella Gribaudi
(1996).
In recent decades, Italy has experienced what Europe and other parts of the
Western world had experienced earlier, in accepting (although not welcoming)
immigrants, often of a different race and colour. Italy, a nation of emigrants
especially in the south, unconsciously mirrors itself in these figures, whilst
ignoring or preferring to forget that a part of them come from our ex-colonies.
The colonial adventure is removed from the Italian imaginary and from historical
memory; it is not studied in school, and until recently has rarely been the object
of research and reassessment. Fascism has been recalled and re-appraised, but
Italy’s colonial chapter is still erased, consigned to cultural amnesia.5 If 5 The Italian
presence in Africa is
commented upon, Italian colonialism is remembered as a humane colonialism. considered short and
Massacres, concentration camps, indiscriminate warfare, along with the everyday limited, and

62 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

connected to the routine of authoritarian colonial rule, are forgotten. Such a repression of the
fascist
‘parenthesis’. In violent and brutal character of that colonialism also expresses the desire to
actual fact, the ignore the defeat and the loss of the colonies, a mourning that is never really
colonial adventure
started in 1882 with confronted. Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) deals with French colonial
the occupation of amnesia and collective responsibility in the events of the Algerian liberation war,
the Assab Bay,
whose rights had invoking the self-analysis stubbornly refused by the protagonist of the film. In
been bought by the
Compagnia Navale Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy has written of the British impossibility of
Rubattino in 1869, mourning the loss of empire, while in Precarious Life, Judith Butler deals with the
followed by the
proclamation of refusal to acknowledge the damage and violence inflicted on others in post-9/11
Eritrea as the first
colony in 1890, of America: ‘ya national melancholia, understood as a disavowed mourning,
Somalia in 1908, follows upon the erasure from public representations of the names, images, and
Tripolitania and
Cirenaica in 1934 narratives of those the US has killed’ (Butler, 2004: 14).
and Ethiopia in
1935. In 1941, the
colonies passed Sandra Ponzanesi has appropriately spoken of a ‘postcolonial unconscious’ for
under British
protectorate and in Italy (2004: 26). Despite the flowering of recent research (see, among others,
1947 were granted Angelo Del Boca’s extensive work from 1980s onwards and Patrizia Palumbo’s rich
independence.
collection of essays, 2003), there is little awareness of the essential role that the
colonial discourse has played in the formation of a national identity. The cultural
components of the colonial experience have left a long trail in the popular
imaginary, through songs, images, stereotypes, caricatures, slogans that have all
contributed to racist attitudes in Italy. It is easy to forget that the hybridity of
contemporary immigrants includes us. ‘Strangely, the stranger inhabits us: as the
hidden face of our identity, the space that ruins our habitationy’, as Julia
Kristeva says. ‘In recognising them in us, we render the ‘us’ problematic, perhaps
impossible’ (Kristeva, 1990: 9). Jacques Derrida observes that in the encounter
with this other it is important to search for the common past. He recalls that in
French and Italian, the term for host and guest is the same: respectively, ‘hôte’
and ‘ospite’ but even in those languages that have two different words, each of
them leads back to the other (Derrida, 2000).

Such ambivalences are to be found in Nuruddin Farah’s novels describing the

connections and interchangeable identities between Somalia and Italy. In
Sardines (1981), he describes Somalia as a country in constant dialogue with
Italian traditions and ways of life. Apart from the colonial heritage and a
consequent linguistic and cultural vicinity, he writes of the respective experiences
of political struggle and resistance as creating reciprocal ties and support, but
also differences and antagonism. The central character Medina, while challenging
ancient female oppressions, calls attention to women’s important role in the
recent political struggle in Somalia, underlining the link between the Italian
movements of the 1960s and the 1970s and the struggles of their own troubled
post-colonial period. As has happened to many other countries, Somalia has
experienced decolonization as the substitution of a colonial by a national regime,
in many ways a passage of privileges and powers (Ahad and Gerrand, 2004: 17).

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 63

 More recently, authors belonging to the Somalian diaspora in Italy, from Ali
Mumin Ahad to Cristina Ali Farah, from Sirad Hassan to Shirin Ramzanali Fazel
and Igiaba Scego, have added their voice to Farah’s considerations on the
proximity between the two countries. Scego declares that her formation is Italian,
her parents and brothers attended Italian school and her father, who wore the
‘balilla’ uniform in childhood, later became an important political figure in
Somalia (Scego, 2004b). Similarly, Fazel had Italian school friends or friends from
mixed families, and recalls growing up in the shadow of Italian culture, cinema,
music and literature (Fazel, 1994). It is repeatedly noted, however, that the
proximity is rarely reciprocal as Somalia is an unknown in contemporary Italy.
Racist attitudes are invariably underlined, or at best there is a curiosity for
diversity that does not arrive at solidarity. Fazel notes that although she spoke
Italian well, people insisted in speaking to her in a loud voice and using the
infinitive form of verbs. The colour of her skin was undoubtedly the factor; the
lighter-skinned Palestinian Salwa Salem notes on the contrary that Italians treat
her as one of them, differently from the Austrians (Salem, 2001).

writing across borders

Italian, as language, as culture, as history, is inhabited by others and is
destined, just as the physical space of Italy itself, to be transformed by this
inhabitation. Western languages – English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch,
Italian – common to both the colonized and the colonizer, have become
ambiguous zones belonging to different worlds. What was once an instrument of
colonization now lives on and develops through appropriation and differentiation.
Much has been said of English having become the permanent abode of strangers;
it would now be important to give attention to the consequences and trails of
lesser empires. As Sandra Ponzanesi points out, the preeminence given to
anglophone migration in post-colonial criticism can, in turn, become another
kind of imperialism. The result is to reinforce Italian amnesia and to marginalize
promising writing in the minor European languages (Ponzanesi, 2000: 19;
2004: 29).
There is now a substantial body of literature by migrants who choose to write in a
Western language: the language of domination that was not intended for them. In
Italy, this started later than in other countries due to the limited diffusion of
Italian in the world and even in its colonies where mixed schools were not
encouraged, and education for ‘the natives’ was neglected or kept at an
elementary level. This is in sharp contrast to the British imperial care over
literacy as a means of indoctrination, and the consequent diffusion of English
schools in colonial territories. Thus the growth in recent decades of a diasporic
literature in Italian is all the more surprising. Here, the term diasporic seems to

64 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

be able to describe both writings linked to the ex-colonies and those by authors
from other countries, all expressing a transcultural condition.
It is important to recall that the condition of ‘foreignness’ has also been present
in the works of Italian writers living in the ‘in between’, such as Fabrizia
Ramondino, Toni Maraini and others. More interesting for this discussion is
Erminia Dell’Oro, born in Eritrea in 1938 to a family of Italian colonialists (her
grandfather emigrated in 1896). Although she left Asmara in her early twenties
and has lived in Milan ever since, she has maintained strong links with the
country she considers hers and writes about the world of her childhood and
adolescence. Asmara addio (1997) describes the rapid dissolution of Italian
domination during World War II and reconstructs Eritrean history through her own
family saga. In L’abbandono (2006), she writes of Sellass, abandoned, like many
other Eritrean women, by the Italian father of her two children. After his
desertion, prompted by the fascist laws against mixed unions but also by his
nomadism, she feels rejected by her own people as well and is thrown into a
lifelong, proud and disdainful loneliness. Her love for him turns into rancour and
hate, a kind of metaphor of the feelings of the East Africans towards the ex-
colonizers. Both books are written in an Italian reminiscent of the various local
languages of Eritrea, and express the enchantment and love the author feels for
that land, whose beauty has left an open wound in her soul. Alongside this
romanticized view, she never stops denouncing the injustice and the violence of
colonization and its consequences, both in her journalistic writings and in her
militant activity.
For Annamaria Ortese, Libya is ‘a land of dream’. Although born in Italy, she lived
part of her childhood in North Africa and then spent her life between Naples and
various northern cities, feeling misplaced everywhere. Estranged from Naples, her
adopted city, she felt an exile in an ‘unknown world’. All her books speak of a
nature for which she feels a deep nostalgia but also overwhelming awe: ‘Such
experience I found in Libya y how nature, sand and sky, knows the stillness and
extension, in stillness, of a dream’ (Ortese, 1997: 63). She rarely speaks of Libya
but, in an interview (De Caprio, 2003), recalls the African house in which the
family lived, half finished, a house of ghosts: through the unfinished roofs and
windows she could see the sky and the immense spaces that will represent the
elsewhere recurrent in her subsequent works.
Similar emphases come from other, well-known writers in the francophone and
anglophone world, estranged as they are from their cultures of origin, whether as
migrants or exiles. For many, writing itself provides a home: the stories they tell
offer cohesion for their fragmented identities (Lazaroo, 1994). In a similar vein,
migrants writing in Italy and in Italian today express the same feeling of urgency
and necessity, the same insistence on the value of writing as a bridge between
cultures: ‘the place where we exchange our experiences, and each of us meets the
other’ (Lamri, 1999: 27). Palestinian Salwa Salem speaks of the book she is

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 65

 writing in Italian as indispensable in putting together the various parts of her
nomad life: ‘I hate nothingness. I hate disappearing. y This is the reason I really
want to tell my story and make a book of ity’ (Salem, 2001: 122). The
insistence on the importance of writing in Italian comes mainly from those who
have no connection to the ex-empire, such as Lamri and Salem, to indicate a
choice that, by not being obvious, acquires particular significance.

translation, transformation, transit

Diasporic writings had an initial difficulty in being published in Italy beyond a
limited circle of small, alternative publishers, specialized magazines or voluntary
organizations. Even Nuruddin Farah’s writings appeared in Italy only after their
publication in English. The situation is different today: major publishers have
started to accept diasporic literature and there is some critical attention to it
abroad and, to some extent, in Italy where resistance to a transformation of the
canon, or its creolization, is still high.6 Daniela Merolla and Sandra Ponzanesi, in 6 Ali Mumin Ahad
and Vivian Gerrand,
their introduction to Migrant Cartographies (2005), examine the question of the authors of an essay
relationship of migrant writing to the canon of the host nation and wonder how on the Somalian
diaspora, call for
many generations will have to wait for a migrant to stop bearing the mark of cultural hybridity
otherness. There are, of course, limits in the term migrant and in its possible and a polyphony of
voices that could
alternatives, such as italophone literature. It is desirable to avoid ghettoizing bring about new
perspectives in
labels and to speak of a literature, which, in crossing borders (of nations, Italian culture and
cultures, ethnicities), exhibits the aesthetics of interruption and dissonance, of literature. The word
reciprocity
the discontinuous, in sympathy with the disposition of the exiled (Said, 2001). I (appearing with a
question mark in
would like to use such a perspective here in order to describe the condition of their title) points
living ‘in between’, of writing from a border where the contact with difference out an important
element in this
leads to a new sensibility and a hybrid location (Bhabha, 1994), an unhomely process (2004: 19).
place that is transformed and ‘translated’. Barbarulli explains that by migrant
writing, she refers to ‘a nomadic experience crossing the senses of language’
(Barbarulli, 2003: 182).
In a recent dialogue with Tahar Lamri, Iain Chambers asked who defines the
migrant: how is this figure identified and measured? The question serves to
underline the importance of questioning concepts such as ‘culture’ (that of origin
and of the host country), ‘migrancy’ and ‘identity’ in order to dislocate inherited
assumptions and ready conclusions. Lamri, an Algerian writer living in Italy,
replies with a fascinating description of migration narratives as a world
experience y the elective ‘place’ – especially for the atopos stranger – of
relation and interaction. ‘If you know my stories, you do not fear me and
establish a relation with me and this relation will be our place’ (Chambers, Lamri
2006, www.librialice.it/news/primo/paesaggimigratori.htm). The Mediterranean,
as a sea washing southern and northern shores, western and oriental perimeters,
uniting multiple historical formations and diverse colonizations, could provide

66 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

this sense of an intermediate communality (Chambers, 1994: 134). Today it is
actually the site of a crossing that recalls the atrocities of the ‘middle passage’
so recurrent in the post-colonial imaginary. Alessandro Portelli, in an interesting
essay, suggestively links Italian migration writing to slavery literature in the
Americas, recruiting Europe and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic passage,
without simply collapsing the one into the other (Portelli, 2004). In an English
anthology Mediterranean Crossroads, Parati includes authors from the southern
shore of the Mediterranean. In her Introduction, she insists on the proximity of
French and Italian in this kind of writing and on its interesting hybridization,
giving the example of Nassera Chohra. In this writer’s work, as in other African
francophone authors writing in Italian, the presence of French structures and
phonemes leads to a further ‘de-territorialization’ characteristic of so much
migrant writing (Parati, 1999: 16).
Complexities over identity are added to linguistic or lexical contaminations, as in
the case of Salwa Salem, first exiled in Kuwait and Syria, then migrating with her
husband and children to Vienna and finally Parma, where she finds a community
of women sharing her experience as a mother and her new beginning in pro-
Palestine politics. With one of them she wrote her autobiography, Con il vento nei
capelli: Vita di una donna palestinese (1993), published only after her premature
death. She sees Italy as an interstice between her own country and the rest of the
Western world, an intermediate place between north and south reflecting her
doubly isolated condition as an exile and a woman. A life in translation, a double
non-belonging, somehow similar to the isolation Rosalba, her closest friend,
experiences as an immigrant from southern Italy in the country still divided into
two that Gramsci had described. In her autobiography Lontano da Mogadiscio
(1994), Shirin Ramzanati Fazel also presents space and time in fragments that
describe a nomadic route from Somalia to Italy and the United States, and Italy
again. Against this fragmentation, she builds a nostalgic vision of her country
and of the nomadic life of her family of origin – a kind of earthly paradise –
before war and tyranny obliged her to become a refugee.
Maria Abbebù Viarengo, the daughter of an Ethiopian mother, from the Oromo
language group, and of a Piedmontese father, is another example of nomadism
between languages and cultures. In Scirscir’n demna (Let’s go for a walk), she
narrates how once she had emigrated to Turin from Ghidami in Ethiopia, she
moved among three languages: Oromo, Italian and the local Turin dialect. The
passage from one vernacular to another is a thread uniting the old and the new
life (Abbebù, 1990: 75). Oromo lingers on as the language of sister and mother, a
young mother who died too early, the language of her first games. Later when the
rest of the family finally settles in Turin, she finds a sort of home in the local
dialect; it reminds her of expressions that her father once used in Ghidami.
Language, which is usually talked about in terms of the dividing line between us
and them, the oppressor and the oppressed, the global and the local, in this case

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 67

 operates as a flexible mediation: ‘I have inside me fragments of many languages:
Oromo, Amharic, Tigrinya, English, Arabic, of gestures, tastes, religions,
perfumes, costumes, feasts, sounds, music, looks, faces, places, spaces,
silences’ (Abbebù, 2000: 21). She writes of the difficulty of identifying with any
one culture while others want to file her away in a neat pigeon hole. She recalls
her many names and identities: ‘I have heard myself defined as hanfez, klls,
meticcia, mulatta, caffelatte, half-cast, ciuculatin, colored, armusch.y I have
been Indian, Arabian, Latin-American, Sicilian’ (Abbebù, 1990: 74). More than
once she refers to the contrast between the two emigrations, one internal, from
southern Italy, the other external, mainly from Africa. On the subaltern chess
boards, she notes how ‘i napuli’ (a term for southern immigrants in general, not
limited to Neapolitans) are being substituted by the ‘marocchino’, to indicate
anybody who is below white (ibid.).
Fragmentation between countries and identities is also described in Volevo
diventare bianca by Nassera Chohra, born in Marseille from an Algerian family of
the Sarahawi people and living between France and Italy. She grew up in that ‘city
within the city’ which is the African community of Marseille, split between the
Islamic traditions, imposed by her mother, and her European dreams (Chohra,
1993: 133). She gives voice to the difficulty of going back home, narrating her
isolation during a holiday spent in Algeria with her parents, a theme later to be
found in other migration writings. Later on, quite casually, Italy becomes her
third home and she writes her autobiographical book in Italian, with Alessandra
Atti di Sarro’s assistance.
Works written in collaboration with Italians have been quite widespread in Italy
due to the linguistic difficulties encountered by first-generation migrants. This
has often led to these writings being assigned to the category of inferior
literature, although others see in this meeting of two authors an important
cultural significance (Portelli, 2004). Parati quotes Chohra’s unease and
underlines the limits and shadows of double authorship, although recognizing
that it may be a necessary condition (Parati, 1999). Unavoidably, the migrant’s
voice is weakened, particularly in Salem’s case as Laura Maritano finished
transcribing the tapes only after her death. On the other hand, the book is the
fruit of close collaboration between the women (including Maritano and Salwa’s
daughter) who shared her feminism and her political commitment and were very
close to Salwa during that last year of her life when her autobiography was
elaborated. The cultural and linguistic encounter of the ‘native’ with the ‘alien’
(and who is who here?) is fruitful also because it can propose new styles of
writing, modalities for breaking the patrolled frontiers of our language and
literature, ‘a way of opening up the Italian literary system still closed to the
voices of women on the margins’ (Barbarulli, 2003: 169). Laura Maritano, in her
postscript to the book, describes the phases of their collaboration and her efforts
to reflect the idiosyncracies of Salwa’s Italian. She follows the indications of oral

68 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

 history: attentive listening to the authorial voice, awareness of her own
influence, the rendering of symbols and images alongside facts.
The journalist Raffaele Masto collaborated in the production of Libera, a novel
written by an Eritrean woman who hides behind the pseudonym Feven Abreha
Tekle (but who is Feven really?). The odyssey of the heroine, in flight from
compulsory military service in the endless war that her country wages against
Ethiopia, documents the harsh trials she encountered in Sudan and Libya before
reaching Tripoli where the long, eventful crossing to Lampedusa starts. With its
difficulties and risks, the crossing reminds Tekle of the other passage, two
centuries earlier, of the African slaves over the Atlantic. Thrown together for days
on an insecure vessel, tormented by hunger, thirst and lack of vital space, the
migrants drift for days, because of a storm and the lack of petrol, and end up
back at the point of departure. The whole exhausting process has to start all over
again (Tekle and Masto, 2005).
The poet Ribka Sibhatu is in flight from Eritrea as a political refugee, first to
Addis Ababa, where she completes her schooling, then to France and Italy, where
she studies at the university of Rome. Her poetical works, particularly Aulò
(1997), describe the experience of people she met while imprisoned in Eritrea: for
example, Abebà, who continues to weave a basket and prepares Eritrean coffee
daily, whose perfume invades the cell in the two weeks before her execution; or
Mebràt who finds refuge in a mental labyrinth that permits spatial and temporal
7 Prison stories and wanderings.7 For Sibhatu, in her present privileged condition, the memory of such
poems have an
important space in negative experiences does not cancel the vision of Eritrea as a lost paradise to be
diasporic literature. re-conquered.
Italian examples
are, among others,
Princesa (1994) by
the Brasilian
transexual Fernanda
Farı́as de the journey out of precarity
Albuquerque with
Maurizio Jannelli, The attempt to move from precarity to stability, from initial arrival to final
Ndjock Ngana’s
Prigione (1994) and destination, from the real to the imaginary, from document to fiction is at the
the collection of
women’s writings at centre of many more recent narratives. In Pecore nere, this change is illustrated
the Pozzuoli female by the tales of four young authors on whom I would like to concentrate in this
jail, Davanti a me è
caduto il cielo last section. They were born or grew up in Italy and have no memory of the
(2002).
journey, or of the first encounter with diversity; the stories show hardly any
nostalgia for the country of origin but rather interrogate the senses and events of
their new lives, and the aspiration to belong, shadowed by the troubled theme of
the return ‘home’. Sometimes, there are parents or grandparents who represent
tradition and inspire the need for rebellion; at other times there is the wilful
return to traditional religion and customs, or at least the need to re-create them
poetically.
The wish for integration into Italian life contrasts with the wish to maintain a
double identity, to be the same and different at the same time. The ambiguity

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 69

 between past and present is evident in Ingy Mubiayi’s story Concorso (2005),
centred on two Muslim women, born and educated in Rome, and their Egyptian
mother.8 Simona, the narrator, is fully intent on integrating into Italian society 8 Ingy Mubiayi
emigrated to Rome
and finishing her degree in law, but is also tempted to take the exam for from Egypt in 1977,
entrance to the state police. The indecision is between being a black Italian attended French and
Italian schools and
attorney or a black police woman, both unlikely figures in contemporary Italy, earned a degree
even in the more imaginative world of TV fictions. Her sister, on the contrary, in from La Sapienza in
the history of Arab-
spite of her lay education, has converted to radical Islamism to her mother’s Islamic culture.
Today she runs a
dismay (a possible reference to Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic?). Her new bookshop in Rome.
zeal bans all music or talk while washing, a great sacrifice required of mother She defines herself
both as a Muslim
and sister, who consider the pleasure of listening to the radio essential to the and as a Westerner.
leisure afforded by their new bathroom. The presence of the media, in this case a
particular television police series, is constantly evoked in these narratives as a
background more real than the real.
The relative luxury of their new condition contrasts with the extreme poverty of
the Arab woman immigrant they assist in a dramatic situation (perhaps Simona’s
first detective task?). The overall playful tone of the tale does not leave out the
detailed description of the one-room house in which Azira lives with her two
children (one of whom has run away in search of an absent father) and above all
of the very poor and degraded Roman suburbs in which immigrants, alongside
gypsies, are housed. Mubiayi’s other story Documenti Prego speaks of the
immigrant’s confrontation with Italian bureaucracy in the incessant encounter
with different laws. Faced with the request for help by a newly arrived immigrant,
the narrator returns to the memory of the odyssey her small family of women
(again an absent father) had to confront in order to pass from the status of
illegal immigrants to that of ‘non-EU citizens with work permit’, and to the long
wanderings on the streets in Rome to escape police visits at home.
The other writers in the volume are Igiaba Scego, born in Italy from Somalian
parents, Laila Wadia and Gabriella Kuruvilla, both of Indian origin; their stories,
too, describe a world pitched between modernity and tradition, with a constant
reference to a cosmopolitan youth culture with its music, films and media
alongside the ironic indulgent look at traditional customs. Such emphases recall
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and the consonance with other post-colonial works is
frequent. I have already noted the one between Mubiayi and Kureishi; elsewhere,
it is Kuruvilla in an interview who makes reference to Rushdie and Kureishi
(Kuruvilla, 2006).
Scego’s story Dismatria – the title itself is a newly coined word indicating the
loss of the mother country – is located in an all-female household again, with
many suitcases and no cupboards. It suggests a condition of impermanence and
transit while waiting, in hope or fear, for the (im)possible return home (Scego,
2005: 11).9 Such an impossibility is present in India by Kuruvilla who, born in 9 In her novel Rhoda
(2004a), Scego
Milan where she lives with her Italian mother, remembers as a nightmare the

70 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

narrated the sad visits with her Indian father to Kerala where, not unlike Nassera Chora, she feels
fate of a Somalian
emigrant to Italy isolated and estranged. In a subsequent journey there as an adult, she
who becomes a experiences the same prejudices and fears, the rejection of smells and noise, the
prostitute. Fatally
ill, she goes back to same sense of failure. India seems an extension of her mostly absent father who
Mogadishu and is has left the family for another woman. Her conflictual relationship with him (and
killed in a casual
street assault. the troubled one with her mother who on the contrary is always present) is at the
centre of an earlier novel Media chiara e noccioline (2001) written under the
pseudonym Viola Chandra. The result is a double exile for her, too ‘white’ in India,
too black in Italy, divided between hate and love for both countries, for both
10 Her story Ruben parents (Chandra, 2001: 78).10 A similar displacement is experienced by Dell’Oro,
tells of the
conciliation with the who, although white, feels at home in Eritrea while in Italy, where she looks like
black part of her everybody else, feels a stranger (2003).
soul in the vision of
her blonde clear-
skinned half-Italian Racism is a constant element in the life of a migrant. In Sausages, Scego writes
son beside her black of the bad luck of being born black: if you go back to where everybody is black,
Indian father, ‘a
splendid picture in you die from hunger, illness, natural catastrophes or civil war; if you live where
black and white. everybody is white you are in constant risk of being beaten, or at best you are
Blatantly different,
closely united’ judged by the colour of your skin (Scego, 2005). On the other hand, Simona, in
(Kuruvilla, 2005:
94). Concorso, makes a list of all her friends, and discovers that among them ‘there is
not one black person. Or yellow. Or any other colour’ (Mubiayi, 2005: 117). They
are all white. In a more sombre vein, others write of racial harassment – from
verbal and physical aggression, housing discrimination and negative stereotyping
to the association, in the media and press, of immigrants with criminals – in a
country that has witnessed an escalation in acts of racial violence (Balbo, 2006).
The house is recurrent motif in these stories, as embodying the ever present
aspiration to security and belonging, to stability and affluence, and for the
young as the desired independence from the traps of family and tradition: a
means to escape the grip of past and present. In Dismatria, as we have seen, the
suitcases are the symbol of a dream, the return to Somalia, and at the same time
the reaffirmation of a life in which each phase of a nomadic life is represented by
a different suitcase. They are a sign of impermanence as well as of the
acceptance of nomadism as a way of life. In reaction to this, the daughter wishes
to move to a house of her own (equipped with proper cupboards) and must face
the trial of telling her mother. At the end, when the decision is communicated
and approved, the suitcases will be opened as a memento of past moments in
their nomadic lives: to everybody’s surprise, the mother opens one full of objects
as a memento of the Roman stay, should they return home. ‘We did not know but
we had another motherland’, is the narrator’s comment referring back to the title
where ‘patria’ is substituted by the word ‘matria’ (Scego, 2005: 21).
For a migrant the house is a way of confirming one’s existence in the elsewhere,
as well as providing the material basis to escape the initial conditions of
exclusion and poverty, as we have seen in the description of the comfortable flat
of the three women in Concorso (Mubiayi, 2005). The kitchen is central in these

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 71

 representations, and so is food. The families represented in these tales, even
when relatively affluent, use the kitchen to study and work, to write documents,
to receive friends, to discuss and make decisions. It is above all the place for all
the crucial confrontations with the new culture: kinds of food, ways of cooking
and eating underline cultural diversity. Igiaba Scego’s Sausages proposes this
particular food as the emblem of integration with Italian culture: the Sunnite
Muslim heroine decides to buy and eat it in the attempt to be at one with Italy,
to become ‘equal’. The news that non-EU citizen will have to provide fingerprints
re-kindles the problems of her split identity. When she is asked whether she feels
more Italian or Somali, she feels pulled apart by two parallel lists of replies, two
belongings, two identities or no identity: ‘ymust I thank Italy for still having my
clitoris? And Somalia? Don’t I owe it my respect for others and the splendid
nature surrounding me in the glorious land of Punt?’ (Scego, 2005: 30). In the
end, vomit and disgust will dissuade her from eating the sausages that end up in
the garbage. Chicken curry in Laila Wadia’s tale with the same title is the
obstacle to the entrance of the heroine into Italian society, as are in general the
traditional customs of her family who still behave, in her dismayed words, as if
they lived in a hut in the village of Mirapur in central India (Wadia, 2005: 399).
Later she discovers that her school friends love Indian food and are even fond of
exotic folklore, in an ironic reversal of her own unconditioned enthusiasm for
Western ways and fashions.
Comments and observations on the host country emerge more and more
frequently: Italian racism, bureaucracy, incomprehension and closures appear
alongside friendship and solidarity. In some cases, the protagonist of the stories
is an Italian, as in Scego’s interesting La strana notte di Vito Renica, leghista
meridionale, presenting a Southern immigrant who joins the northern right-wing
separatist Lega party. Once again, the split between the two Italys appears in the
writings of the newcomers. Italians who now find themselves mirrored in the gaze
of the ‘other’ also discover themselves through that gaze. It is to be expected
that these other and ‘othering’ representations find their space and place in
Italian culture and literature, and that the traces and transformations of alterity
become an integral part of its history and its imaginary.
The arguments I have discussed in this overview are subject to constant changes;
today, there are signs that even the material conditions of life for Italian
migrants are undergoing transformation. Since I first started working on
immigrant writing, the voices of many authors have come to the forefront,
acquiring a presence in Italian cultural life. The uncertainty of whether it is more
important to be considered an Italian writer or to remain ‘foreign’ is now
debated, alongside the important choice of writing in Italian, a choice that partly
mirrors the wish to create a bridge, a way of belonging: at once a path to
reciprocal knowledge and a mode of survival. In the texts I analysed in the last
section, and others I have not touched upon, conditions of unease and isolation

72 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

give way to an opening up of new possibilities and new paradigms. Symbols,
images and icons acquire an ambivalent value; memory is accompanied by
desire; the loss of the past and the anxieties of the present meet in dreams of
reconciliation. The dreams, the stories, the images of these ‘others’ can give a
new life to Italian language and culture. This suggests the political importance of
listening attentively in order to confront the difficult and delicate prospect of
unconditioned hospitality.

author biography
Lidia Curti is Hon. Professor of English at the University of Naples ‘L’ Orientale.’
She studied at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of
Birmingham, translated Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy into Italian and
made important contributions to the establishment of the field of cultural
studies in Italy. Her interests have centred on the avant garde and the popular,
on theatre and television, on modernist and post-modernist theory. In recent
years, her research has focused on the field of women’s studies, with a particular
interest in cultural and racial hybridity. Her recent publications include books
and essays on feminist and post-colonial literature.

references
Abbebù Viarengo, M. (1990) ‘Andiamo a spasso?’ Linea d’ombra, Vol. 54: 74–78.
Abbebù Viarengo, M. (2000) ‘Scirscir’n demna: extracts from an autobiography’ Wasafiri, Vol. 31:
20–22.
Ahad, A.M. and Gerrand, V. (2004) ‘Italian cultural influences in Somalia. A reciprocity?’ Quaderni
del ‘900, IV. La letteratura postcoloniale italiana, 13–24.
Balbo, L. (2006) In che razza di società vivremo? L’Europa, I razzismi, il futuro, Milano: Bruno
Mondadori.
Barbagallo, L., Cacciapuoti, F., Nappo, A. and Rea, L. (2002) editors. Davanti a me è caduto il
cielo, Napoli: Filema (Collection of poems by women in the Prison of Pozzuoli).
Barbarulli, C. (2003) ‘L’immaginario dell’erranza delle parole: scritture migranti in lingua italiana’
in Barbarulli, C. and Borghi, L. (2003) editors, Visioni in/sostenibili. Genere e intercultura,
Cagliari: CUEC, 169–185.
Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge.
Bruno, G. (1993) Streetwalking on a Ruined Map – Cultural Theory and the City Films of ELVIRA
NOTARI, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Burns, J.H. (1948, republ. 1970) The Gallery, London: Secker and Warburg.
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso.
Chambers, I. (1994) Migrancy, Culture and Identity, London: Routledge.
Chohra, N., with and Arti di Sarro, A. (1993) Volevo diventare bianca, Roma: Edizioni e/o.
De Caprio, C. (2003) ‘Anna Maria Ortese o dell’impossibile conciliazione tra io e mondo’ in De
Caprio, C. and Donadio, L. (2003) editors, Paesaggio e memoria, Napoli: Dante & Descartes,
125–142.
Dell’Oro, E. (1997) Asmara addio, Milano: Baldini e Castoldi.

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 73

 Dell’Oro, E. (2006) L’abbandono. Una storia eritrea, Torino: Einaudi.
Derrida, J. (2000) Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, Rachel
Bowlby (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Chandra, V. (2001) Media chiara e noccioline, Roma: DeriveApprodi.
Farah, N. (1981) Sardines, London: Allison and Rubby.
Farı́as de Albuquerque, F. and Maurizio, J. (1994) Princesa, Roma: Sensibili alle foglie.
Fazel, R.S. (1994) Lontano da Mogadiscio, Roma: Datanews.
Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1926, republ. 1970) ‘Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale’ in Gramsci, A., De Felice,
F. and Parlato, V. (1926) editors, La questione meridionale, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 131–160.
Gribaudi, G. (1996) ‘Images of the south’ in Forgacs, D. and Lumley, R. (1996) editors, Italian
Cultural Studies. An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 72–87.
Kristeva, J. (1981) Poteri dell’orrore. Saggio sull’abiezione, Roma: Spirali Edizioni.
Kristeva, J. (1990) Stranieri a se stessi, Milano: Feltrinelli.
Kuruvilla, G. (2005) ‘‘India’ and ‘Ruben’’ in Kuruvilla, G., Mubiayi, I., Scego, I. and Wadia, L. (2005)
editors, Pecore nere. Racconti, Bari: Laterza, 69–82 and 83–94.
Kuruvilla, G. (2006) ‘Migranti o vincenti, ma scrittori’ Il Manifesto, 28.2.2006, 13.
Lamri, T. (1999) ‘E della mia presenza solo il mio silenzio’ in Sangiorgi, R. and Ramberti, A. (1999)
editors, Parole oltre i confini, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna: FaraEditore, 22–28.
Lazaroo, S. (1994) The World Waiting to be Made, South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Lewis, N. (1983) Naples ’44 – An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth, London: Eland.
Moe, N. (2002) The View from Vesuvius – Italian Culture and the Southern Question, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Mubiayi, I. (2005) ‘‘Documenti. Prego’ and ‘Concorso’’ in Kuruvilla, G., Mubiayi, I., Scego, I. and
Wadia, L. (2005) editors, Pecore nere. Racconti, Bari: Laterza, 97–108 and 109–138.
Ortese, A. (1975) Il mare non bagna Napoli, Milano: BUR.
Ortese, A. (1997) Corpo celeste, Milano: Adelphi.
Palumbo, P. editor. (2003) A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-
Unification to the Present, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Parati, G. editor. (1999) Mediterranean Crossroads. Migration literature in Italy, Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Parati, G. (2005) Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture, Toronto, Buffalo,
and London: University of Toronto Press.
Ponzanesi, S. (2000) ‘The past holds no terror? Colonial memories and Afro-Italian narratives’
Wasafiri, Vol. 31: 16–19.
Ponzanesi, S. (2004) ‘Il postcolonialismo italiano. Figlie dell’Impero e letteratura meticcia’
Quaderni del ‘900, IV. La letteratura postcoloniale italiana 25–34.
Ponzanesi, S. and Merolla, D. editors. (2005) Migrant Cartographies – New Cultural and Literary
Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, Lanham and Oxford: Lexington Books.
Portelli, A. (2004) ‘Le origini della letteratura afroitaliana e l’esempio afroamericano’ El Ghibli,
Vol. 0, No. 3: 4–9.
Said, E. (2001) Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Salem, S., with and Maritano, L. (2001) Con il vento nei capelli. Una palestinese racconta, final
note by B. Donini, postfaction and bibliography by L. Maritano, Firenze-Milano: Giunti.
Scego, I. (2004a) Rhoda, Roma: Sinnos editrice.
Scego, I. (2004b) ‘La seconda generazione di autori transnazionali sta già emergendo’ El Ghibli, Vol.
1, No. 4: 1–3.

74 feminist review 87 2007 Female literature of migration in Italy

Scego, I. (2005) ‘‘Dismatria’ and ‘Salsicce’’ in Kuruvilla, G., Mubiayi, I., Scego, I. and Wadia, L.
(2005) editors, Pecore nere. Racconti, Bari: Laterza, 5–22 and 23–36.
Sibhatu, R. (1997) Aulò. Canto-poesia dall’Eritrea, Roma: Sinnos, I Mappamondi.
Tekle, F.A. and Masto, R. (2005) Libera, Milano: Sperling & Kupfer.
Wadia, L. (2005) ‘‘Curry di pollo’ and ‘Karnevale’’ in Kuruvilla, G., Mubiayi, I., Scego, I. and Wadia,
L. (2005) editors, Pecore nere. Racconti, Bari: Laterza, 39–52 and 53–65.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400361

Lidia Curti feminist review 87 2007 75

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.