“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.
