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.
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Notes
Burns too had offered an apocalyptic vision: ‘…a living and subdividing cell of vermouth, Allied soldierly and the Italian people … most of the modern world could be seen in ruins there in August 1944’ (Burns, 1970: 311).
Here they take the place of some of the old inhabitants in the ‘bassi’, the one room flats opening out on the street, described in so much literature since the nineteenth century, and more recently by Norman Lewis in Naples ’44 (1983).
They have been followed by people from Senegal, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, Brazil and Egypt, lately from China, Russia and Eastern Europe. The largest group was originally from Morocco; Albanians and Rumanians are presently the most numerous ones.
Nelson Moe writes of the widepread vision of the Mezzogiorno as the borderland between Europe and its others (Moe, 2002). See also ‘Images of the South’ by Gabriella Gribaudi (1996).
The Italian presence in Africa is considered short and limited, and connected to the fascist ‘parenthesis’. In actual fact, the colonial adventure started in 1882 with the occupation of the Assab Bay, whose rights had been bought by the Compagnia Navale Rubattino in 1869, followed by the proclamation of Eritrea as the first colony in 1890, of Somalia in 1908, Tripolitania and Cirenaica in 1934 and Ethiopia in 1935. In 1941, the colonies passed under British protectorate and in 1947 were granted independence.
Ali Mumin Ahad and Vivian Gerrand, authors of an essay on the Somalian diaspora, call for cultural hybridity and a polyphony of voices that could bring about new perspectives in Italian culture and literature. The word reciprocity (appearing with a question mark in their title) points out an important element in this process (2004: 19).
Prison stories and poems have an important space in diasporic literature. Italian examples are, among others, Princesa (1994) by the Brasilian transexual Fernanda Farìas de Albuquerque with Maurizio Jannelli, Ndjock Ngana's Prigione (1994) and the collection of women's writings at the Pozzuoli female jail, Davanti a me è caduto il cielo (2002).
Ingy Mubiayi emigrated to Rome from Egypt in 1977, attended French and Italian schools and earned a degree from La Sapienza in the history of Arab-Islamic culture. Today she runs a bookshop in Rome. She defines herself both as a Muslim and as a Westerner.
In her novel Rhoda (2004a), Scego narrated the sad fate of a Somalian emigrant to Italy who becomes a prostitute. Fatally ill, she goes back to Mogadishu and is killed in a casual street assault.
Her story Ruben tells of the conciliation with the black part of her soul in the vision of her blonde clear-skinned half-Italian son beside her black Indian father, ‘a splendid picture in black and white. Blatantly different, closely united’ (Kuruvilla, 2005: 94).
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Curti, L. Female literature of migration in Italy. Fem Rev 87, 60–75 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400361
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400361