“I wanted to become an Abyssinian”: Rewriting Indro Montanelli’s memories of colonial Africa in Francesca Melandri’s Sangue giusto (2017)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on journalist Indro Montanelli’s memories of Destà/Fatìma or Fatuma, the 12-year-old child he bought as his “wife” while he was a volunteer in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, and on a colonial narrative echoing his story in the 2017 novel Sangue giusto by Francesca Melandri. It considers the roles of race, gender, sexuality, and national memory in the texts, moving from the debate around the monument dedicated to the prominent journalist in the city of Milan to the analysis of the power dynamics in the novel. John Akomfrah’s notion of memory as “a deconstructive gesture against white mythologies” and Aimé Césaire’s and Michel Foucault’s idea of memory as counter-cartography are used to analyse both Montanelli’s recollections of Destà and the relationship between Attilio Profeti, the main character of Melandri’s novel, and Ababa, the girl he turned into his servant and lover during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia.