"This Is Your Fourth Shore": Historical Amnesia and the Return of the Colonial Past in Antonio Tabucchi's Piazza d'Italia

Abstract

"This Is Your Fourth Shore":Historical Amnesia and the Return of the Colonial Past in Antonio Tabucchi's Piazza d'Italia Sophie Desroches À l'évidence, il existe en chacun de nous le désir de dialoguer avec ce qui a été, d'interroger les habitants d'outre-tombe pour savoir ce que signifia pour eux vivre, puis cesser de vivre. Antonio Tabucchi, L'atelier de l'écrivain (Gui and Tabucchi 197)1 Antonio Tabucchi belongs to a genealogy of Italian writers who envisioned literature as a means of political contestation.2 The epigraph quoted above speaks to the ethical imperative he maintained as incumbent upon himself; namely, the necessity to engage with the legacy of the past and its inscription into the present. Writing on behalf of the downtrodden and marginalized-be it the anarchists and communists Tabucchi evidently favoured, or others who opposed the forces of the nation and ended up on the losing side of history-he applied his inquisitive zeal to reveal the myriad elisions involved in collective memory-making. His historiographical scepticism perhaps comes out more sharply, for all its humour and charm, in his first novel, Piazza d'Italia, published in 1975. In a nimble and elegant prose, Tabucchi compacts in very few words a sweeping chronicle of Italy's modern history, filtered through the eyes of a Tuscan family on the periphery of society, from the country's unification under Garibaldi to its post-Second World War reemergence as a fledgling republic. The symbolic quality of Piazza d'Italia as a locus of the nation-state is most conspicuously implied by its title, but the piazza also refers to a physical location in the book: a public square in the centre of Borgo, the small fictional village where the story takes place, in which a monument to the homeland has been erected.3 The significance of the memorial as the site where the nation is constructed-and reconstructed, as statues of great men are toppled and replaced several times whilst the country undergoes political upheavals and regime changes-carries aspects of the allegorical satire. Far from merely being an ironic statement on the "interchangeability of [End Page 237] power" (Hanna 209),4 the repeated motif of the cast-down statue also sows doubts as to the viability of top-down, state-sanctioned historical narratives imposed as truth: if the monument is the symbolic repository of the nation's memory, it is one that is perpetually being rewritten as power changes hands. Tabucchi further plays up the dialectic between remembrance, forgetting, and oblivion by transforming the piazza into an execution site at several pivotal moments during the course of the action, most notably in the opening and closing scenes that retell the murder of Garibaldo: "In quel momento si sentì uno sparo. Uno solo. Garibaldo sciolse l'abbraccio della statua e lentamente si girò su se stesso. Aprì il pugno alzato e il sasso rotolò sulla piazza. Mentre gli andava dietro gorgogliò qualcosa, ma lo udirono in pochi" (236).5 Killed during a violent skirmish between local communist demonstrators and police forces in the first years of De Gasperi's reign,6 Garibaldo's last words at the feet of the monument are but a confused mumble: "Ma invece la lingua liberò un gorgoglio squaccheroso che udirono solo i pochi che gli stavano vicino […] nel breve tragitto dal monumento alla polvere, […] la nebbia della morte gli aveva confuso proprio l'ultima frase" (13).7 By lending symbolic weight to Garibaldo's useless heroism at the piazza and his inane, inaudible last words, the bookend structure of the narrative begets the central question of the novel: whose voices are stifled in the memorialization of national history?8 Given these considerations, it may come as no surprise that Tabucchi experimented with newly emerging historiographical methods in the writing of Piazza d'Italia. As Flavia Brizio-Skov deftly demonstrated in her study Antonio Tabucchi: Navigazioni in un arcipelago narrativo, a hallmark of Tabucchi scholarship, the young author drew extensively from Carlo Ginzburg's microstoria, a genre of history writing that emerged during political and cultural debates in the social sciences in the 1970s. Critical of large-scale investigations...