Igiaba Scego at Duke

“Non sono un cento per cento, non lo sono mai stata e non credo che riuscirò a diventarlo ora. Credo di essere una donna senza identità. O meglio con più identità.” (Pecore Nere, 42)[1]

Identity is a shapeshifter. You never know when one part of it is going to manifest itself to remind you of your roots, your people, or your life experiences. It is easy to take for granted the simplicity of saying “I am Italian” or “I am American” (as problematic as that term can be), as if one’s whole existence could be neatly defined with a one-word label. Is that truly all we are — a one-word label? Igiaba Scego, among many other Afro Italians, has been loud and clear about the challenges of defining and accepting one’s own identity. All we have to do is to listen.

During the Fall semester 2022, Italian author, journalist, and activist Igiaba Scego took on a visiting scholar appointment at Duke University. Not quite as familiar as her hometown of Rome, Durham became her second home for six weeks, a period of time over which she did not rest. Between her arrival in September and her departure in November, she joined several panels of scholars to discuss topics such as “What is citizenship?” and “Being Black in Venice;” she launched her new English translation of La linea del colore (The Color Line), and had insightful conversations with local artists and educators about the power of literature and black writers around the globe; she participated in language events organized for students of Italian (proficiency levels from elementary to advanced), for which she read selections from her work, as well as answering questions in a fluid, bilingual environment; finally, she co-taught a course called “Race, Class, and Family in Contemporary Literature,” exploring a variety of literary traditions and their transnational commonalities.

For those who are not familiar with her work, she should definitely be on your reading list. Her stories occupy that delicate space between the fictional and the autobiographical, often evoking historical happenings and figures. That’s not all: her short stories and novels alike stretch across geographical boundaries, languages, traditions, and — most of all — identities. Identities, plural. In a world in which people and ideas travel long distances, whether for leisure, for opportunity, or for necessity, grappling with the fact that we are never one is becoming a more common topic of discussion inside and outside the classroom.

***

It is from this premise that our semester at Duke began. How do we tactfully and productively tackle a topic as vast as identity, without losing sight of our broader goal — teaching Italian language and culture? Everyone in the Italian section felt we should incorporate Scego’s valuable contribution to Italian (and world) literature into our language courses, especially now that we had the opportunity to meet her in person. Students of ITAL 101 and ITAL 102 explored the concept of “home” and identity through La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I Am), as well as completing a mini research project about Italian colonialism, fascism, and citizenship laws; students of ITAL 203 and ITAL 301 reflected on issues of identity and immigration by reading “Salsicce” (“Sausages”), allowing the most advanced students to create resources for their lower proficiency peers in order to facilitate their reading experience.[2]

The question of identity did not materialize itself immediately, but it became a constant presence in our everyday sessions of intermediate Italian (ITAL 203), prompting interesting discussions about citizenship, migration, and belonging. In fact, the course I was teaching had already been designed to dedicate an entire unit to the topic of immigration in Italy, allowing students to simultaneously learn new, meaningful vocabulary and to reflect on current social and political issues. The inclusion of special activities dedicated to Scego’s works — especially her short story “Salsicce” — did not require too much adaptation for our syllabus, and they became the perfect bridge into the most challenging part of the course.

Discussing such topics was a combination of shocking discoveries, frustrated resignation, and a couple epiphanies. My students were so receptive and sensitive during every class meeting, creating connections between immigration and citizenship laws in Italy and in their own country of origin. What struck me the most, however, was my own realization that an average Italian wouldn’t know half of the information I was teaching.

Starting from a basic history lesson, the Italian colonial past has been mostly erased from our curricula and swept under the rug since the fall of the Fascist regime. Out of sight, out of mind. I genuinely do not remember learning about Italy’s presence in Africa (even less so in other areas of the Mediterranean) other than the swift mention that, indeed, it had happened. All the death and devastation left behind by the dictatorship became a tale of sorts, geographically and emotionally distant from us Italians, brava gente. The myth of “Italians, good people” has received some attention in recent years thanks to the efforts of historian Angelo del Boca, a pioneer in the field of Italian colonial studies, but the country has yet to internalize the horrors it caused before, during, and after WWII.

As our students of Italian can now attest, the afterlives of colonialism are still very much present in the peninsula: only last year, the Italian government recorded that over 100.000 migrants sailed across the Mediterranean and reached our ports searching for better work opportunities or as an attempt to escape war, civil unrest, and poverty. These migrants are often the target of right-wing political campaigns that claim that immigrants will eventually outnumber us [Italian citizens] and relegate us all to the squalors of a dystopian scenario. If one can’t see the irony in this yet, perhaps it would be worth returning to the beginning of the 20^th century, when Italy was one of the biggest exporters of manodopera, with millions of nationals emigrating to the United States for better opportunities. Before their full acceptance into “the land of the free,” Italians were denigrated, marginalized, and racialized for decades; their place in society was eventually going to improve, they thought, especially knowing that their children would be born US citizens.

In contrast, Italian citizenship laws are based on the “right of blood”, or ius sanguinis, which secures a child’s nationality, regardless of birthplace, for as long as Italian blood flows in their veins. The reason for abiding by the ius sanguinis was quite logical: all children of those displaced Italians were guaranteed their parents’ citizenship in order to maintain strong ties with the country of origin. Students were very intrigued by this piece of information but started to wonder why this was so relevant. Their preconceived idea of citizenship is very simple: you are a child of a US citizen (ius sanguinis) and/or you are born on US territory (ius soli), hence you are a US citizen. Now, this is true for other countries in the world, but not for Italy. Precisely because Italian law follows blood and not birthplace, any child born in Italy by foreign nationals will most likely never become an Italian citizen. Thousands of children are born in Italy every year, and a substantial percentage of them is the progeny of foreign parents who can only pass down their own citizenship to them, but who cannot guarantee the Italian one because they are not Italian citizens themselves. These same children are born in Italy, speak Italian as their first language — often not being able to speak their parent’s native language, depending on the situation —, receive an education in Italian schools, eat pizza wurstel e patatine (a delicacy when you are seven years old) and bomboloni alla crema like any other Italian kid, dream in Italian, and make plans for their future in Italian. Despite the fact that they grow up alongside Italian (as in Italian citizens) children, they might not ever be considered Italian by the law. Like Schrödinger’s cat, they are Italian, and they are not. This is not all — lack of citizenship also means lack of opportunities, as several state jobs will not allow a foreign national to apply for that position. What then? Stuck in a country that they feel it’s their own, but unable to be recognized as such.

Utter shock took over our class discussion. Suddenly, everyone could see how all these pieces fitted together to create a narrative: our identity is a mosaic of historical happenings, blood relations, social and political circumstances, and a will to mold ourselves as something we want to be rather than something we ought to be. I asked my students if anything had changed for them after watching films, documentaries, reading about history, colonialism, and immigration — did their view of “Italianness” stayed the same or did it assume a different form? As I waited for their answer, I asked myself the same question, over and over again. Am I more Italian than some of my peers just by virtue of blood or skin color?

We reached a consensus. Legal documents like birth certificates and passports may be part of why one considers themselves Italian, but they are certainly not all there is to it. If identity cannot be discussed in a vacuum, and one person’s Italianness cannot invalidate another’s, then perhaps there should be a re-evaluation of what being Italian looks like in practical terms. For the particular case of Afro-descendants/Afro-Italians/Second generations — the multitude of terms used by each individual truly reflects how identity can be malleable —, the challenges that come with not conforming with the ideal we associate with Italianness have been self-evident. They have been the ones advocating not just for a change within the legal system, but also within the broader Italian consciousness, hoping to one day feel like they belong in their own home.
In the past few years, thanks to their voices, there has been evident change in the right direction. More and more people are re-evaluating what it means to be Italian, walking in the shoes of Afro-descendants/Afro-Italians/Second generations through their music, films, art, novels, short stories, social media campaigns and more. More diversity workshops and educational events are taking place in grade schools and, unsurprisingly, more university courses are starting to appear in US academia and beyond, highlighting Afro-Italian excellency in the arts and in literature. This is by no means the end of a journey, but rather the initial steps towards a fairer and more inclusive environment.

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The make-up of our identity, as this past semester reminded me, is a combination of biological and social factors, and it becomes what we make of it. Our students, who come from diverse geographic, social, and ethnic backgrounds, were able to explore their own identity/ies while consolidating the unbreakable bond between language and culture. Of the three units we covered in this course (1. Food & sustainability; 2. Immigration; 3. Art), the second one was undeniably the most appreciated, maybe because Scego’s presence allowed for consistent open dialogues about who we are and where we are going. While she expresses on paper what it is to struggle with clashing identities, she seamlessly embraces this coexistence by teaching about acceptance and diversity.

The thread that connected people and ideas together for the entirety of this past semester was evident after some final reflections. Through Scego’s visit at Duke, students of Italian re-evaluated how they see themselves and others by immersing themselves in both the literary and the every-day world. That initial one-word label perhaps became a two-, five-, or ten-word label; perhaps it remained the same but displaying a brand-new label with the word “ME” on it; or perhaps it simply got larger to accept that our identities take up more space than we initially thought. Regardless of how others view us, only we are able to label ourselves, and sometimes this realization comes in unexpected ways.

[1] “I am not a 100% anything. I never have been and I don’t think I can be now. I think I am a woman with no identity. Better yet, a woman with several identities.”  Metamorphoses, 2019. Translated by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto.

[2] All lessons and activities were created collaboratively by Italian language instructors, lecturers, and graduate students: Laura Bilanceri, Della Chambless, Mattia Begali, Pierpaolo Spagnolo, Tessa Warren, Pietro Tripano, Matías Sur, and myself.

“We are here because you were there” is how Sri Lankan political essayist and anti-racist scholar-activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan (1923–2018) framed the entangled relationship between Britain, its former colonies and territories, and the migrants from those places now settled in the U.K. Although the aphorism refers to British imperialism, it can also be applied to the colonial histories of many European empires and their impact on contemporary diasporic experiences, which include violence, hostility, rejection, and erasure.

Igiaba Scego’s family is an example of that idea. The granddaughter of the interpreter for Rudolfo Graziani, the former Governor of Italian Somaliland, Scego’s parents chose Italy after fleeing Somalia during the dictatorship because Italy’s occupation of Somalia rendered them Italian speakers. Yet, Scego’s family history, why they ended up in Italy, and how they encountered Italian in the first place will surprise many white Italians. Despite being born in Rome, Igiaba Scego is a product of Italy’s two-century colonial legacy in Africa, which started in Eritrea in the 19th century and spread to Somalia, Libya, and Ethiopia. That legacy and even its erasure is not unique to Italy.

Using literature to consider colonial encounters and their enduring legacies, our “Race, Class, and Family In Contemporary Literature” class has spent the semester traversing literary works, most of which are yet to be translated into English, written in and about Italy, Brazil, and Portugal. As a first-year Ph.D. student concerned with the entangled histories, identity formation, placemaking, erasure, and literary productions of Black Italians, I began the course familiar with many of the books on our reading list from Italy. Nevertheless, books from Brazil and Portugal such as Paulo Scott’s Phenotypes (translated by Daniel Hahn), Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memorias Coloniais, Itamar Viera Junior’s Torto Arado (forthcoming English translation by Johnny Lorenz for Verso Books 2023), and Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair (translated by Eric M. B. Becker) have provided interesting insights into and prompted new questions about the afterlives of colonialism and the interconnectedness of transnational experiences of Portuguese coloniality.

Encountering how these writers bear witness to their countries’ colonial pasts and the ways that anti-black violence repeats and reinvents itself have expanded my research interests beyond Italy. Isabela Figueiredo, for example, who was born in the Lourenco Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, during Portugal’s colonial regime, uses her book Caderno de Memorias Coloniais to examine her experience of both living as a white settler in Mozambique and then as a returnee to Portugal following Mozambique’s independence. Reading Carderno and diving deeper into Figueiredo’s memories about the Portuguese post-colonial existence, the complexities of colonial nostalgia, and her process of identity formation between two worlds, drew my attention to the possibilities of mapping colonial linkages between Portugal and Italy. I’m particularly interested in the following: How can we consider Italy’s hidden colonial history in tandem with Portugal? In what ways can we consider how Blackness is shaped and negotiated in both Brazil and Italy? What can the distinctive Black diasporic communities of these three nations, their languages, and their ways of being teach us about Black consciousness and identity formation? Sitting with the bibliography that Igiaba curated for the class, considering her own literary practice of interweaving geographical and temporal throughlines in her work, and examining questions of identity and citizenship that emerge along the way, I’m excited to continue unraveling these questions.

“Innocence is a crime,” Igiaba Scego said during our very first class, citing James Baldwin. I have been thinking about these words ever since, perhaps because they have come up regularly throughout the past six weeks. What is meant here by innocence and who gets to claim it? In the context of Italy, innocence may be easily claimed through ignorance. As Barbara Ofosu-Somuah pointed out during our discussions, when confronted with their colonial past, many white Italians tend to use ignorance to protect themselves. “I am not a bad person, I’m just ignorant,” may be a standard response. There is also the other side of the coin: “I know, but I was not responsible, so why should I feel bad about it?”

As a PhD student that studies feminist perspectives on violence in Italy and France, I am fascinated by the form that violence can take and how it is hidden. As someone from Albania, I have always questioned Italy’s relationship to my home country in the framework of its colonial history, both past and present.  It seems to me that the relationship between innocence and ignorance is crucial to unpacking Italy’s continuous erasure of its past and present violences.

Through Igiaba Scego’s lectures, we were introduced to the various attempts made by the Italian government to suppress the history of its colonial endeavors, at best relegating it to a sin of its Fascist period. But even that form of acknowledgment is usually limited. It is enough to look at the case of Rodolfo Graziani, a Fascist general responsible for many atrocities in Ethiopia, and the statue erected in his native Affile with public funds as recently as 2012. Or the way Mussolini left his mark on the architecture of Rome, his words adorning, to this day, the monuments built to his empire. But in the attempt to portray Italians as “brava gente,” Italy’s involvement in the horn of Africa or Libya, both before and in the aftermath of World War II, become invisible ghosts. In that case, it is hard to bring to the surface Italy’s colonial crimes, and how their consequences live on in the humanitarian catastrophe that continues to unfold in the Mediterranean. Italy’s response to this crisis can be understood precisely through the alibi of “I am not responsible, so why should I have to deal with it,” a refusal to understand how one’s current wealth and privileges rest on violence and exploitation.

But even the language I am using here feels imprecise: in speaking of Italy’s colonial past, I am putting some distance between Italy—the country, or its government—and its implicated white citizens. And yet if there is one thing that we had the opportunity to investigate with Igiaba—in particular through a wide-ranging bibliography that allowed us to explore the afterlives of empire in both Portugal and Italy—it is precisely the human face of colonialism and the complicated networks of blood and relations that tie us to the past. Whether Zoppe aiding Italians as translators in Adua during World War II, or Attilio Profeti’s past in Ethiopia in Sangue Giusto, colonialism is a family affair. And even the most morally upstanding people (or characters) struggle to reconcile the love they feel for their family members, with the violence they have caused. Love shows the fault lines in our moral commitments, or perhaps it causes them. But it also shows that there is no such thing as an uncompromised person. We are all, if not complicit, at least implicated.

I’m Mateus Sanches Duarte, first-year Ph.D. Student in Romance Studies at Duke University, originally from Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. One of the strange characteristics of being outside your country is that you start to recognize yourself in things that are particular to it, or that you can at least associate with it. Some people would say that the fortunate ones are those who are able to detach themselves from the notion that they have of themselves and from these elements that constitute them, because once you are in a foreign territory, it no longer makes sense to be what you were in another country, and so you need to be something else. But if this strange feeling of being a foreigner can be appeased by meeting friends, family members, and people who show some affection for those things that mean so much to you — as has been my case with Brazil — I can say that the experience of being taught by Igiaba Scego led to the creation of another space, in which a sense of familiarity made space for this strangeness too. Far from my country, I was able to visit it through the selected works, and with great openness, to share the afflictions and the love for this land, whether discussing the unfortunate Brazilian colonial heritage explored in through Itamar Vieira Jr.’s Torto Arado or in the construction of another possible heritage as in Emicida’s documentary AmarElo – É Tudo para Ontem.

Throughout her stay at Duke University, Igiaba Scego spoke with great insight about the silence that permeates European society, selecting a bibliography that made us question what we inherit and what we accept as our inheritance, in a well-thought provocation that made us examine our personal history, made us ask ourselves about the trajectories of our families and those who preceded us, knowing that someday we will also be in the position to pass on a certain type of inheritance to our descendants. In the traumas explored by the books assigned to us, in this Brazil-Angola-Mozambique-Portugal connection that paralleled the Ethiopia-Somalia-Italy one, I was able to see how historical traumas are often passed on for generations, and how writing can be a way to break this vicious circle of silence in our societies. This influenced me to think about the racist arrangements that were elaborated over centuries and that have constituted the national identity formation of our countries, while at the same time it made me aware that we can act to write better pages of our history.

Before Igiaba Scego arrived at Duke to co-teach the “Race, Class, and Family in Contemporary Literature” course, I looked up her profile on Twitter and noticed a picture of Aleksandr Pushkin on the header. For me, it was not difficult to trace a connection between the contemporary Italian writer of Somali origin and the nineteenth-century Russian poet since Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, was African. In Russia, we often say that “Pushkin is our everything,” but we do not reflect much on the African heritage of the creator of the Russian literary language (though, to begin with, it would be sufficient to look closely at one of his portraits, for instance, at the famous painting by Orest Kiprensky).

During our classes with Igiaba Scego, I recalled the image of Pushkin and thought about how something so present in our history and culture becomes invisible. In the classroom and beyond, we often discussed erasures and silences in diverse contexts that nevertheless were strikingly similar: from the hidden memories about Italian and Portuguese colonialism in the works of Francesca Melandri and Isabela Figueiredo to the legacy of slavery in Brazil in Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel.

Not only literary works but also places, especially familiar ones, can reveal concealed stories if we pay attention and “read” them differently. As Igiaba Scego put it during one of the first lessons, “cities could talk about colonialism and racism.” Since I have always been fascinated by the remapping of the Eternal City in her novels, one of my most vivid memories from our classes is when she was drawing maps of her Rome on the whiteboard. She traced boundaries of multicultural neighborhoods like Esquilino and Tor Pignattara not far from the Termini Railway Station and Piazza dei Cinquecento, demonstrating how the Italian fascist and colonial past is embedded in the Roman geographies.

Similarly, Igiaba Scego’s talk with Shaul Bassi, “Being Black in Venice” (October 18^th, 2022), offered a “remapping” of Renaissance art. A couple of years ago when I visited the Gallerie dell’Accademia, I certainly saw some of the works that they discussed: “Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross: Healing of a Possessed Man” by Vittorio Carpaccio and “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo” by Gentile Bellini. However, among the festive crowds in the Venetian paintings, I ignored black bodies.

Compared to Carpaccio’s gondolier, Bellini’s character looks more ambivalent and disturbing. As Igiaba Scego pointed out, it is not clear who this almost naked black man is and what he is going to do in the depicted scene. His vulnerable figure calls for our attention, while his untold stories ask to be uncovered. This is highlighted in the powerful photo of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that Igiaba Scego took during his visit to Venice and shared with us at the event. In the picture, the Kenyan writer almost enters the space of the painting, as if he is about to talk to the unknown black man, and it seems that their eyes meet across time and space (like in Igiaba Scego’s latest novel, The Color Line, Lafanu Brown and Leila look at the eyes of the enslaved Black people from the Fountain of the Four Moors in Marino). If there is a way to break these invisibilities and silences, the first step would be to notice what is overshadowed and disguised around us.

I attended “Being Black in Venice” with Igiaba Scego and Shaul Bassi on October 18th and wow–that was one of the best two hours I’ve ever spent. It was a perfect addendum to the Race, Class, and Family in Contemporary Literature course (co-taught by Igiaba Scego), and it put a lot of things that we’ve covered in lecture into perspective. Coming into this semester, my conception of Italy was very narrow: I knew it as the land of the Renaissance, high fashion, pizza, pasta, and emotive, tan white people. The last facet was precisely why I never foresaw myself studying Italy or wanting to learn Italian in the first place; my work for the past several years has focused on the African diaspora (primarily in North and South America), but I never foresaw Italy as forming part of that narrative. However, after reading Adua, meeting Igiaba Scego for the first time, and listening to her and Bassi’s discussion, I realized that I was dead wrong. 

 Scego and Bassi opened the event with images of a black gondolier from the 15th century “Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Rialto Bridge” painting and a black servant in another around the same period. A ways after, they spoke about Shakespeare’s famous 17th century tragedy Othello, which centers on the life of a Moorish military commander in Venice. Outside of fiction, they mentioned Alessandro de’ Medici–the biracial grandson of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who served as the Duke of Florence in the 16th century. It is evident from these four examples that black people have been in Italy for a long time and, before colonization, were thought of positively and occupied positions of power. 

The story after colonization changed. Black people were conspicuous in Italian artwork, but in demeaning ways–as slaves submitting to the degrading treatment of their white masters. While I viewed this imagery as normal for what colonial empires produced at the time, what utterly shocked me was the recreation of black people’s heads into doorknobs and chandeliers. These images elicited a visceral reaction from me because they showcased the lack of humanity with which black people were regarded; they weren’t treated as thinking, feeling human beings, but rather as props and decorations. Artwork made of their bodies, as well as their bodies, could be bought, sold, and exchanged as presents, but only one was considered beautiful. 

When taken together, all these representations contradict the construction of Italy as a white nation. People of African descent have been in the country for centuries and have contributed significantly to the artistic, economic, political, and architectural landscape. These images also refute the Italian motif of “brava gente.” If Italy was completely innocent in the European colonial project, then how can one explain the racist monuments and their normalization within Italian society? How can one explain the turmoil in Italy’s former colonies that have sent waves of African immigrants to its borders? And, how can one explain the harsh discrimination that these immigrants and their offspring experience while trying to define where they fit within the nation? Scego and Bassi’s talk raised many important questions and was an incredible step in the right direction with respect to Italians reckoning with their colonial past and present.