History’s Flagstones: Nuruddin Farah and Other Literary Responses to Italian Imperialism in East Africa

Abstract

In this essay I revisit Nuruddin Farah and argue for the importance of reading his work in conversation with the work of so-called second-generation Italian migrant writers like Igiaba Scego, Ubax Ali Cristina Farah, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, and Gabriella Ghermandi. I present an argument for viewing these writers as part of a transnational and translinguistic tradition of novel writing which responds to Italian imperialism in the Horn of Africa both during the colonial and neo-colonial periods. Nuruddin Farah's internationally acclaimed voice is part of a multilingual diasporic postcolonial tradition with an urgent ethic of remembrance and redress focused on Italian colonial discourses and the history and stories of the victims of Italian imperialism. This is an element of his work which has been seen as peripheral in Farah scholarship in the English-speaking Academy, while Italian scholars have noticed Farah's links with Italy but failed to recognize their importance or draw his work in a meaningful way into studies of Italian postcolonial literature. This state of affairs arises out of a failure to take a transnational and translinguistic view of what is essentially a novelistic tradition born in exile. This essay cannot pretend to be a comprehensive comparative reading of these writers; instead, it presents an argument for the urgency of such a reading. I show that Nuruddin Farah, despite his choice to write in English, is one of the most important contributors to the tradition of postcolonial Italian literature. I understand this to be not a national literature that is necessarily written in Italian, as has traditionally been the case, but rather as literature that contributes towards, to use Ato Quayson's terms, postcolonializing the Italian cultural sphere.