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 18th, 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.
