Narrating the Nation: Language and the Landscape of Time in Scego’s Adua

Abstract

In Adua (2015), Igiaba Scego illuminates the legacy of Italian colonialism by chronicling the intergenerational trauma passed from Zoppe, a Somali translator working for Italians during the fascist ventennio, to his daughter Adua, an actress exploited by the Italian film industry. This study analyzes Scego’s use of perspective to represent fundamentally different experiences of time in Adua, emphasizing Scego’s unique contribution to a postcolonial aesthetics that combats colonial temporality as defined by Johannes Fabian. In Time and the Other, Fabian asserts that time has not yet been decolonized, and thus has not been deconstructed as an ideological instrument of power. Scego unflinchingly documents the effects of colonial chronopolitics through her third-person narration of Zoppe’s perspective, which deteriorates into a series of invectives that portray his complete arrest in time. Adua endures similar traumas, but she embraces narration as a means of refashioning her voice and restoring community. In depicting Adua’s story as a triumph over colonial temporality, Scego champions first-person narration as a tool for the construction of a postcolonial chronopolitics that decolonizes time in order to work towards a more ethical geopolitical order.