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From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers: Responding to Dante
in Postcolonial Somalia
Mariagrazia De Luca
Dante Studies, Volume 138, 2020, pp. 26-48 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/das.2020.0001
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/836636
[ Access provided at 16 Apr 2023 02:26 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]From Forced Readers to Freedom
Writers: Responding to Dante in
Postcolonial Somalia
Mariagrazia de Luca
1. Introduction
I n the introduction to Freedom Readers, Dennis Looney’s ground-
breaking study of African American receptions of Dante’s Commedia,
the author states: “As far as I know, only African American adapta-
tions of Dante use the medieval author to comment upon segregation,
migration and integration.”1 The African American novelists, poets, and
filmmakers Looney examines are drawn to many of the same aspects
that artists have long found compelling in Dante—his adaptability to
new forms, his calls for moral and political reform, his special relation-
ship to vernacular language—but unique to them is the identification
of Dante as a poet of the struggle for freedom. Looney examines how,
over the past two centuries, African American authors have cast Dante
as a fellow “freedom rider,” who has accompanied them “on a journey
through a harsh landscape of racial inequality”:
After all, he had been to hell and back, so why couldn’t he be expected to help
them deal with the segregated bus stations of Alabama and Mississippi in the early
1960s, to name only one challenge that Black citizens of this country have had
to overcome?2
In this essay I will argue that there is another group of authors who
see Dante as “accompanying” them in a struggle for freedom: authors
of modern Somalia. This similarity, however, straddles significant
Vol. 138:26–48 © 2021 Dante Society of AmericaFrom Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
differences, of course. African Americans were brought to a foreign land
as slaves, and thus underwent an experience altogether different from
the colonial context of Somalis, who were subjugated in their home
country to Italian rule from 1889 to 1941.3 But the even more conse-
quential difference—one that makes Somali authors’ embrace of Dante
all the more surprising and complex—is the nature of their exposure to
the Florentine poet: they did not discover Dante, as Looney’s African
American authors did, but were required to read his works at school
during the colonial occupation by the Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana
in Somalia (AFIS). I refer to this group as “forced readers.”
The phenomenon of forced reading appears in other colonial contexts
with other authors, most prominently with Shakespeare in the schools
of India, where the British Empire’s control on education and policy
remained in place far longer than in its other colonies, protectorates,
and mandate territories (where this control lasted only from the 1920s
to the 1950s).4 As with Dante, Shakespeare was presented in this context
as a Western icon, his status used to reinforce domination and power
in the colony. However, as Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin argue in
their introductory essay in Post-colonial Shakespeares, with the collapse of
empires, the works of such iconic authors are transformed into “colo-
nial battlefield[s].”5 This point undeniably applies to Dante’s reception
in Somalia. In the case of Shakespeare, as Loomba and Orkin put it,
“Colonial masters imposed their value system through Shakespeare,
and in response colonized people often answered back in Shakespearean
accents. The study of Shakespeare made them ‘hybrid’ subjects.”6
Might Somali writers, forced to read Dante as schoolchildren, have
similarly responded to their Italian colonizers in “Dantean accents”?
What were the broader effects of the forced reading of Dante in the
colonial school system? By investigating the special affinity and even
identification with Dante found in works by key Somali writers, an
attraction that continued into the postcolonial context, we come to find
what I argue is an altogether unique, if ambivalent, literary hybridity.
It might be useful here to pause and reflect on the concept of hybridity,
a term that has been used for decades in postcolonial studies without
critics ever unanimously agreeing on its meaning.7 Loomba and Orkin
define hybridity as a “radical state” that enables colonized subjects to
“elude, or even subvert the binaries, oppositions, and rigid demarcations
imposed by colonial discourses.”8 In Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism,
27Dante Studies 138, 2020
however, Loomba concedes that Shakespeare represents “such a wide
territory, appropriated by so many different kinds of readers and audi-
ences” that his works are involved in not just one but a multitude of
forms of hybridity across the vast and varied countries of the former
British Empire9: “As other scholars also argued, English experiences in
the Levant, Africa and India in the sixteenth century were quite dif-
ferent from one another and from those in the Americas.”10 Just as the
reception of Shakespeare in India was not the same as in South Africa
or Australia, Dante’s reception in Somalia differed in important ways
from that in Libya or other former colonies. We should thus keep in
mind Loomba and Orkin’s words of caution: “these encounters can-
not be understood without reference to specific social, political and
institutional histories.”11 To generalize such circumstances would be a
misguided consequence of regarding “postcolonialism” as one consistent
phenomenon, a catch-all that flattens local diversity and disregards the
uniqueness of individual pre-colonial histories. The term “hybridity”
presents a similar risk: as Loomba stresses, the word alone can “fail to
account for the different ways in which colonial and post-colonial sub-
jects can be understood as hybrid.”12
In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon emphasizes how cultural
context, historical circumstance, and political agency all inform what
she calls “transcultural adaptation,” or “indigenization,” the form of
hybridization that most aptly describes Somali receptions of Dante.13
What happens to the Florentine Dante when “transculturally adapted”
into a Somali Dante? By traveling from a Florentine context (which
came to represent Italy as a whole after the nineteenth-century Unità
d’Italia, when Dante was raised to the level of national icon) to a Somali
and postcolonial context, Dante undergoes a process of indigenization,
“an intercultural encounter and accommodation.”14 Hutcheon uses the
everyday analogy of the adapter plug: electricity, always fundamentally
the same, must be delivered in different forms to be used in different
places. Simple though it is, this analogy is effective when we begin to
think about the “electrical current” that runs through Dante’s works:
their literary and cultural power. When harnessing this power by “adapt-
ing” it, do colonized readers and writers gain a sort of agency, a new way
to respond to their colonizers’ cultural oppression? Or are they instead
being further silenced? In the three novels I discuss here, I will argue
that references to Dante’s experience of political marginalization—a
28From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
potent means of artistic agency for Somali authors—respond, sometimes
subtly and other times overtly, to the realities of colonial oppression.
In the same spirit as Hutcheon’s “plug adapter” analogy, Loomba’s
work stresses how context, political value, and time are crucial in Shake-
speare’s reception and postcolonial adaptations: “Any meaningful dis-
cussion of colonial or postcolonial hybridities demands close attention to
the specificities of location as well as a conceptual re-orientation which
requires taking on board non-European histories and mode of represen-
tation.”15 Loomba shows how differently Othello can be interpreted by
an Indian Kathakali production, on the one hand, or by a South African
writer such as William Modisane on the other. In Modisane’s biography
Blame Me On History, Othello becomes a symbol for the fight against
the racism of South African apartheid. Though four hundred years have
passed since the play’s first appearance, and despite the distance between
its European/Venetian setting and Modisane’s South Africa (where
a Black majority is oppressed by a white minority), the Renaissance
Othello nonetheless still resonates for victims of racial discrimination
today.16 In Loomba’s words, Othello in South Africa “[speaks] about
race to an audience whose lives have been, and continue to be, enor-
mously affected by the racial question.”17 As a contrast, Loomba looks
to a 1996 Indian production of Othello, which adapts the play to the
centuries-old Kathakali style of dance-drama. Rather than making a
statement on colonialism, this production advances a monolithic reading
of the play in light of the Kathakali tradition, by styling Othello after a
Hindu warrior. Thus, it skips over the multiple apertures onto gender,
race, class, and religion, as vectors of social hierarchization, that Othello
opens up. “It is not anti-colonial. It does not play upon or transgress
colonial histories of the play, or of colonial Shakespeare in India, except
at the very level of its existence.”18 In other words, rather than using
Kathakali theater as a vessel for Shakespeare, the Kathakali production
appropriates Shakespeare by making Othello a vessel for Kathakali art.
As Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, this production “returns the gaze”
that was taken from colonial provinces,19 doing so by “provincializing”
Shakespeare. Just as this example differs from Modisane’s Othello, so
do Somali authors engage differently with Dante’s Commedia than the
African American authors Looney examines. As I will discuss, Somali
authors do not find in Dante the same “freedom rider” that African
American authors might, but a decidedly complicated figure, both
29Dante Studies 138, 2020
representing the colonizing culture and, simultaneously, giving voice
to the grief of an exile within that very culture. In Dante’s fractured
Italy, in the warring factions of his Florence, Somali authors see their
own clan-divided country. In Dante’s Commedia, Somali authors find
a model for describing the atrocities they have seen in their country, as
well as a celebration of the local dialects that might in some measure
unify that country.
In the sections that follow, I will first give an overview of the history
of Italian education in Somalia, and then explore the reception of Dan-
te in three novels by three different Somali writers: Il latte è buono by
Garane Garane,20 the unpublished “Memorie del fiume ed altri racconti
del Benadir” by Ali Mumin Ahad,21 and Links by Nuruddin Farah.22
All three authors were born in Somalia and attended Italian schools.
Garane and Ahad both chose to write their novels in Italian. Farah,
on the other hand, writes in a uniquely “choral” English idiom of his
own.23 As I will discuss, Dante’s presence in their novels revolves around
interrelated themes of exile, books and book-writing, and language.
Before concluding I will also briefly consider these authors’ silence on
the issue of Dante’s religion and his representations of Islam.
2. Education in Colonial Somalia
The Italian colonization of Somalia officially began in 1905, when the
Italian government (the Governo Giolitti) bought the region from the
Italian Benadir company and the British government.24 During Italian
fascism, from 1936 to 1941, Somalia became part of Africa Orientale Ital-
iana (AOI) and by extension the Italian Empire, but when World War II
came to a close, Italy lost its colonies in one fell swoop. From 1950 to
1960 Italy received a United Nations’ mandate of trusteeship, forming
the Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana in Somalia (AFIS) for the stated
purpose of helping modernize Somalia and guiding it to independence
by 1960. As Italian historian Angelo Del Boca has indicated, howev-
er, the AFIS did not in practice work for the interests of the Somali
people, but was instead motivated by the desire to establish a “pacifica
penetrazione dell’Africa.”25 With the support of the Ministero dell’Africa
Orientale (MAI), many of whose bureaucrats were formally affiliated
with the Fascist party, the AFIS sought to finance “concessionari agrari
30From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
italiani” by providing them with the especially fertile lands of Southern
Somalia.26 Only in the early 1990s, with the beginning of the Somali
Civil War, did Italy lose its diplomatic representation in the former
colony. In the more recent Mediterranean immigration crisis, Italy has
been accused of the “violation of human rights as a result of the policy
of repatriation and patrolling of the Mediterranean Sea promoted by the
Italian government from 2009 to 2012, despite the maritime deaths of
Somalis and other refugees.”27
Del Boca, in describing the education system in Somalia during the
Italian occupation, underscores the bleak record of the Italian approach
compared to those of other European Empires such as England, France,
and Germany (a “squallido primato tra le potenze coloniali”).28 Until
1929, when the Catholic missionaries of the Missioni Cattoliche della
Consolata took on the task of educating Somalis, there had been no for-
mal schooling for the colonized people, the Italian government fearing
the formation of an “intellighenzia somala.”29 Garane writes that the
eventual Italian schools were “luogo d’élite” where both books and
tuition were expensive.30 In the words of his protagonist, Gashan, “I
libri delle scuole italiane erano i più cari della Somalia: era uno dei modi
per scoraggiare la marmaglia a entrare nelle scuole. Solo pochi eletti
potevano frequentarle.”31 Consequently, Gashan continues, only the
Somali bourgeois were able to enroll their children in Italian schools,
while the lower classes and the underprivileged were indoctrinated by
the Soviets and their “teorie socialiste di fratellanza” (53).
The Somali language had been oral until 1972, when it was for-
malized in the Latin alphabet. As a consequence, prior to 1972 Soma-
li parents were required to send their children to Arabic-Egyptian,
English, or Italian schools. As mentioned, the latter were usually private
and Catholic, even though teachers taught to a population of Muslim
children. Ahad, who attended a Catholic Italian school, recalls that he
had to buy heavy Italian books with pictures of Dante on their covers.
Somalis learned Italian by reading Dante at school, and sometimes even
earlier:
La familiarità con la lingua (italiana) antecede anche l’età prescolare. Ma è con la
scuola che la lingua italiana assume per me una dimensione particolare. Negli anni
Settanta gran parte delle scuole in Somalia aveva l’italiano come lingua veicolare.
Soltanto a metà degli anni Sessanta la scuola inizia ad aprire all’inglese.32
31Dante Studies 138, 2020
The school curricula in the colony were the same as those in Italy,
with no adjustments made to accommodate local realities and educa-
tional needs. Italian instructors flew to Somalia regularly in order to
educate young Somalis all’italiana, along with other “missions” such as
to “parlare dei preparativi per il 110 anniversario dell’unità, oltre che
per creare delle classi medie.”33 In The Somali Within, Simone Brioni
explains that during the AFIS Italians continued promoting the Italian
language among Somalis, catering especially to the “Somali élite” and
offering “scholarships for some Somali students to study at Italian uni-
versities.”34 By the 1960s and 1970s many Somali politicians were thus
able to speak Italian. This linguistic affinity did not translate into any
cultural or political equivalent: from the Somali Civil War through the
present day, Italy has been notoriously resistant to recognizing Somali
refugees, many of whom ultimately “moved to places where their sta-
tus would be more easily recognized.”35 As we will discuss, the Somali
relationship to the Italian language would become crucially intertwined
with the Somali reception of Dante, since forced reading of the poet’s
works was a hallmark of the curriculum in the AFIS schools.
3. Exile and Diaspora in Garane’s Il latte è buono
All the Somali writers I discuss here live in some form of exile. The
Somali diaspora began at the end of 1991, when the dictator Siad Barre
was overthrown and war spread throughout the country. Ahad currently
lives in Australia, Farah in South Africa, and Garane in the U.S. Of
the characters I examine here, it is Garane’s protagonist, Gashan, who
most empathizes with Dante. Gashan is an alter-ego of Garane himself:
both studied in Italian schools in Mogadishu and subsequently moved to
Italy, France, and then became academics in the U.S. But while Gashan
ultimately returns to Somalia during the civil war, aiming to take on
the responsibility of rebuilding the country, Garane himself became a
professor at Allen University in South Carolina.
Studying Dante and Italian history in Mogadishu’s Italian schools,
Gashan grows up with a firm belief in the “mito italiano”—something
which Ali Mumin Ahad, in his capacity as historian, describes as “Un
mito di un passato di grandezza, nel mito di una Roma antica riproposta
dal regime fascista durante il periodo coloniale, nel mito di una Somalia
32From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
pensata a immagine e somiglianza dell’Italia, quella della storia inseg-
nata nelle scuole italiane.”36
After leaving Somalia for Italy, filled with the conviction that he
is arriving in his own homeland as much as Dante’s, Gashan becomes
disillusioned as soon as he lands in Rome: he finds that Italians do not
speak the lingua di Dante but rather in dialect, and to him they look
more like Arabs than the heirs of the Roman Empire: “Io parlo italia-
no, quello di Dante, ma questi assomigliano agli arabi” (71). Although
Gashan’s passport is written in la lingua di Dante, presenting it does not
put the immigration officer at ease but makes him more suspicious, and
Gashan becomes immediately conscious of the color of his skin. Still, if
his idea of the mito italiano has been shattered, his connection to Dante
has not. Gashan feels suddenly exiled in a country he assumed was his
own, but as a reader of Dante he finds himself on familiar ground:
“ ‘Italia, perché mi hai tradito?’ si sentiva come Dante abbandonato dai
fiorentini ed esiliato” (34).
Gashan’s “exile” had in reality begun long before, in Somalia itself. It
was in the Italian schools of “Little Italy”—Mogadishu under the Italian
occupation and the AFIS—that he was indoctrinated with notions of
the grandeur of Roman history and Italian literature. The sense of exile
and marginality he became accustomed to there would follow him not
only to Rome, but also to France and the U.S.:
L’esilio lui l’aveva sempre seguito: infibulazione, circoncisione, la Scuola Elemen-
tare Guglielmo Marconi, Scuola Media e Liceo Scientifico “Leonardo Da Vinci.”
Lui era già esiliato a Mogadishu tanto diversa da Qallafo e Laweytile. E a Moga-
dishu viveva in un altro mondo, aveva dei paraocchi culturali. (72–73)
If Gashan represents Somalia, Dante does not represent Italy but a
particular relation to Italy, exilic but also inexorably connected. That
essence proves healing to Gashan, who indeed embarks on his journey
to address colonial wounds by visiting the Dantean landmarks of Flor-
ence, the poet’s birthplace and the church where he met Beatrice: “Si
sentiva Dante. Si ricordò di colpo che il Sommo Poeta fu maltrattato
dai suoi cittadini” (81).
This crucial moment, however, is not the first but the third point in
Gashan’s evolving identification with Dante. From an initial uncon-
scious stage of “paraocchi culturali” during his studies of Dante at school
33Dante Studies 138, 2020
in Mogadishu, he progresses to the jarring sensation of being not-Italian
at the airport. After his pilgrimage to the Dantean sites of Florence,
Gashan’s fourth stage will be a temporary rejection of Dante—along
with a permanent rejection of Italy—when he moves to France and,
soon after, to the U.S. In the fifth and final stage, when he moves
back to Mogadishu to work for a better Somalia, his weapon will be a
libro-fucile: the book-as-weapon in the form of a return to Dante, now
representative of Gashan’s broader education (in school and life) and his
later work as a professor of Italian literature in the U.S. While Gashan
rejects the “colonial Dante” in the fourth stage, in the fifth he reclaims
an “indigenized Dante” in Hutcheon’s sense.
A key factor building up to this final stage is Gashan’s intermediary
experience in the U.S., where he realizes that Somalis and African
Americans belong to the same “Western history” (105), but to radically
different diasporas. Whereas for African Americans, born in the U.S.,
it is a diaspora from an imagined African continent, Gashan leaves not
only a homeland he knew but also a specific tribal affiliation:
La sola differenza tra me e i neri qui è che io ho il mio clan, il mio ceppo etnico e
ho i valori del mio continente. E ne sono fiero. Il nero americano non ha più un
clan perché tutti i neri sono stati mischiati quando sono stati trasportati in Ame-
rica: era il modo più semplice fargli perdere ogni forma di cultura africana. (105)
To understand this, Gashan must first undergo the experience, in the
U.S., of becoming Black: “In America, Gashan si trasformò in un nero,
cosa inaudita per un somalo, discendente del Khuresh” (102). In Mog-
adishu, as a part of the Somali bourgeoisie, Gashan had never before
considered himself “nero.” In the U.S. he confronts the paradox of this
identity in the country he had assumed to be “il paese delle libertà e
della tolleranza ufficiale,” “la terra di Dio” (97). Working as an Italian
professor at the University of Devil, a town of “supercristiani, ma fascis-
ti” (98), he finds that, “In America sono tutti americani. Anche il nero.
Quest’ultimo vuole essere sempre riconosciuto dal bianco. Deve sempre
esagerare e mostrare che è competente in un mondo di incompetenti.
Gli hanno lavato il cervello” (99). Gashan’s experience in America
ultimately prompts his decision to return to Somalia, where he intends
to contribute—in some way—to the good of the country. Throughout
34From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
the novel he has fashioned his sense of purpose in life in Dantean terms:
“Dante peccatore sull’orlo della dannazione, è chiamato a ricevere e
trascrivere verità che saranno ‘cagione’ agli uomini di felicità temporale
(come fu Enea), e verità che daranno ‘conforto’ alla fede (come fu per
Paolo)” (15).
Likewise Dantean is the gnawing question of how Gashan will meet
his own “call”: over the course of the novel this question becomes
known as his selva oscura. In its first instance this motif is simply a poetic
illustration of Gashan’s disorientation during the coup-d’état in Mog-
adishu that culminated with the assassination of the Somali president.
The capital is in turmoil, and Gashan runs with his classmate Mariam,
daughter of the murdered president, out of their school toward her
home. In this moment of uncertainty, Gashan’s mind goes to the open-
ing of the Commedia: “ ‘Nel bel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . .’
continuava Gashan. Lei era felice di sentire che c’era ancora Dante e
che la speranza era ancora lì” (50). Here the Commedia’s opening verses
are a familiar comfort for the two, but when Gashan and Mariam later
separate, each facing their own uncertain future, the meaning of the
verses resurfaces as a troubling, unanswered question:
“C’è una cosa che non ho capito e a cui non trovo risposta ancora dopo un mese”
disse Gashan. “Che cosa?” Aveva l’aria di cercare lei stessa una risposta al subbuglio
in cui si trovava dopo solo poche ore. “Che cosa è la selva oscura?” Lei non rispose.
Neanche la professoressa lo sapeva. “Un giorno lo saprò . . . e te lo dirò” continuò
Gashan. Aveva in mente di fare un giorno la tesi su Dante. Lei si allontanò di
nuovo, in mezzo ai Saraceni. . . . La selva oscura . . . (51)
This open question—“Il cavillo della selva oscura” (82)—continues to
linger in the background of Gashan’s life. He seemingly escapes it by
moving to the U.S., but the alienation he finds there is only another
form of the dark forest: “si sentiva straniero in una terra di stranieri.
Tutti si odiavano in America. . . . Siamo nella storia degli schiavi.
Insomma siamo tutti degli schiavi” (104–5). Gashan finally confronts
this question—the selva oscura of not knowing how he can contribute
to the setting of Somalia on its “dritta via” (115)—by going back to
Mogadishu, twenty-five years after leaving. Once there, he finds only
a void, a kind of no-place:
35Dante Studies 138, 2020
Camminava per le strade di Mogadiscio. Strade senza nomi, senza destinazioni.
Quando era partito dalla sua terra c’era tutto, insieme: la cultura somala, la cultura
occidentale, i semafori, le strade, i cammelli, gli asini. . . . Adesso non c’era più
niente. Niente nomi. Niente cultura. Niente popolo. Solo lui e la sua coscienza e
le sue domande. Il popolo non esisteva più. Il potere non esisteva più. I semafori
non esistevano più. I cammelli non c’erano più a Mogadiscio. Gli asini erano stati
mangiati dalla gente dalle mitragliatrici. Non c’era più niente. Niente di niente.
Anche il latte era sparito. . . . (120–21)
But in the search for his own means to do something meaningful for
his country, Gashan finds a guide. It is a visit to his grandmother, the
Queen of Azania, Shaklan Iman Omar—Virgil to Mariam’s Beatrice—
that solves the mystery of the selva oscura. Shaklan tells him that his life
experience, having left and seen the world, allows him to come back to
his broken country and create something new in the void:
“In questo abisso tu sei un uomo nuovo. Devi portare la domanda del come creare
una società nuova che non mutili più l’uomo.”
Gashan non disse nulla. La nonna aveva ragione. Era una donna fuori dal
comune. Non aveva forse risolto la questione della selva oscura?
“Mia nonna ha ragione. Io sono l’uomo nuovo. Un ibrido non può mutilare,
perché lui stesso è nato da tante culture che si sono mutilate tra di loro. Lui è la
somma di tutte le culture, come il Sommo Poeta!” pensava. (121–22)
Indeed, Gashan’s academic background puts him in a unique position
to preserve his country’s history and truth in written form:
La Somalia è distrutta, la sua memoria è intatta. Il mio viso è distrutto, la mia
memoria intatta, in cocci, plurale, ma intatta. La Somalia sarà la mia opera, non
il mio mestiere. . . . “Bisogna trasportare tutto dall’oralità alla scrittura. Così la
Somalia non sarà negata, persa” (124).
The vehicle of this written memory is of course the novel itself, trans-
ferring Dante’s famous poet/pilgrim dichotomy to Il latte è buono. But
this is not Italy’s “colonial Dante”—it is a personal Dante, the sign of a
reader’s lifelong relationship to the Commedia. It is also an “indigenized
Dante,” through which Gashan finds strength in his own hybridity (“Un
ibrido non può mutilare”) and sets out to write of Somalia itself in all
the hybridity he knows it for, made of “cammelli, asini e di Dante,” of
“ciabatte rivolte verso il cielo” (115).
36From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
4. Infernal Cities and Redemptive Vernaculars in
Farah’s Links and Ahad’s “Memorie del fiume”
The word inferno was easy to associate with the Somalia of the 1990s.
Del Boca, who called the Somali Civil War an “Inferno dimenticato,”
was shocked by the cold objectivity he saw in news footage of that era,
particularly in contrast to the harsh reality lived by the people:
Com’era possibile dimenticare i bambini scheletriti colti dall’obiettivo di Bruce
Haley a Baidoa? E i monatti che gettavano sui carri i morti di fame fotografati da
Christopher Morris?37 E il bimbo in ginocchio, che implorava la madre, ritratto da
Andrew Holbrooke? Chi poteva dimenticare i suoi grandi occhi infossati in una
testa più simile ad un teschio? La sua mano che stringeva un lembo della sottana
logora della madre? E i piedi della donna, colore della terra, infilati in sandali
sgangherati e smangiati? Quando mai si erano viste, tutte in una volta, scene così
atroci, così angoscianti?38
In 2004, a New York Times article about Nuriddin Farah’s Links was
entitled “A Somali Author as a Guide to a Dantean Inferno.”39 Dante’s
Inferno is indeed ubiquitous in Links. The novel’s epigraphs feature the
inscription on the gates of hell from Canto 3, followed by verses 16–18
of the same canto:
For we have reached the place. . . .
where you will see the miserable people,
those who have lost the good of the intellect.40
The novel’s first four chapters likewise open with Dantean verses, and in
Mogadishu during the Civil War the protagonist often witnesses hellish
scenes that feature flashes of Italian culture: eating spaghetti all’amatrici-
ana and drinking espresso outside a dilapidated restaurant while bombs
explode nearby (137–40), or watching enormous vultures land in the
courtyard of a four-star hotel, some as large as a “Fiat Cinquecento”
(65). This cultural mix can also be seen in Farah’s language, a “choral”
idiom that intersperses English, Somali, and Italian throughout.41
Linguistic pluralism links the novel’s author to its protagonist, Shee-
bleh, a former political prisoner who eventually becomes a professor of
literature in New York City, having attempted to translate Dante’s Com-
media into Somali for his doctoral dissertation. He decides to return to
37Dante Studies 138, 2020
Mogadishu to visit his mother’s grave and to secretly help an old friend
find his abducted granddaughter. Upon his arrival, unaccustomed to
modern Somalia after his time in the U.S., Sheebleh regards the strange
and macabre details of the city with all the confusion of Dante-pilgrim
in the early circles of hell. As in Dante’s Commedia, the pilgrim has a
guide: Af-Laawe, an ambivalent and unreliable Virgil, who accompanies
Sheebleh through the Somali inferno (Af-Laawe introduces himself as the
owner of a charitable business that cleans the Mogadishu streets soon
after people are killed, but in truth he also illegally traffics body parts).
Sheebleh’s academic background and return to Mogadishu strike a
parallel with Gashan from Il latte è buono—two cases of former students
of Italian schools reclaiming their connection to Somalia in part through
the writing of a book. But the nature of Sheebleh’s book, an unfinished
translation of Inferno, ties his work more closely to the questions of
language that so preoccupied Dante himself. Dante’s championing of
the vernacular was admired by the African American writers Looney
examines, who found in Dante’s use of the vernacular an “ultimate
political act” that helped them to interpret their “strange experience”
of being, on one hand, citizens of the United States of America, and on
the other hand descendents of slaves. For them, Dante was “a master
craftsman of poetic language who forges a new vernacular out of the
linguistic diversity around him, not unlike what authors of color have
had to do in this country. Creating a poetic language, finding a voice,
purifying the dialect of the tribe . . .—this linguistic task is the ulti-
mate political act.”42 For Somali authors, however, any such connection
between Dante and local languages is likely to be tempered by the fact
that he is the “father” of the language of their colonizers. Some authors
confront this by writing in an Italian that is “indigenized” in the way
Hutcheon discusses. In “Memorie del fiume,” which I discuss next, Ali
Mumin Ahad includes words throughout that combine spoken Italian
and Somali (“Muso-Lini”; “Taliani”; and “Parlamanka”). Gashan freely
mixes Somali and Italian in Il latte è buono: “la sua barba era piena di
cilaan” (8); “Pregheranno di fronte a me. Tutto quello che chiederò è
che i loro sederi siano puliti come quelli delle scimmie! Waxaan wey-
disanayaa in dabadooda nadiif ay ahaato sidii dabada daanyeerada” (10). The
complication here is that many Somalis, even those who speak Italian,
would not be able to read these novels or Dante’s Commedia, not having
been wealthy enough to go to the Italian schools in Somalia. It is only
38From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
Farah’s protagonist, Sheebleh, who steps in to address this incongruity
with his attempted translation.
At first glance, Sheebleh’s attempt to translate the Commedia into
modern Somali puts Dante’s Italian into the position of the grammatica,
aligning Sheebleh’s hopes for Somalia with Dante’s own search for a
volgare illustre, his “dream of a language knitting together all of Italy.”43
For Sheebleh, a Commedia in the Somali language would represent the
Somali unity he desires: a cultural and political identity grounded in
the linguistic kinship of a standardized language. That Sheebleh does
not finish his translation only strengthens the comparison to Dante,
whose unfinished task in the De vulgari eloquentia was the object of an
“impossible desire to reconcile historicity with ideality.”44 Still, if this
unfinished status signals Farah’s pessimism for Somalian unity, it also
points to the message he sends by writing his novels mainly in English:
the novel is addressed to the world outside Somalia. Authors like Garane
and Ahad write in Italian in part to confront Italy’s attempts to erase
the memory of its own colonial past, and in part to call for Italians to
reexamine their country’s contemporary policies as well. As Valentina
Anselmi writes in her 2009 essay “La questione postcoloniale nella
letteratura della migrazione,” by challenging Italians to listen to other
voices and discourses on the matter of colonial history, such writers urge
Italians to reconsider not only this past but also Italy’s current relation-
ship with countries like Somalia, as well as Italy’s checkered response to
the increased migration of refugees to its shores over the past decade.45
Il riconoscimento di questa funzione [pedagogica] avviene nel momento in cui ci
mettiamo in ascolto del loro narrare, rivolto a noi, nella nostra lingua. Scopriamo
allora il prezioso potenziale educativo che ci viene offerto: questi scrittori ci con-
ducono a ripensare la nostra comune storia coloniale arricchita dal loro punto di
vista di ex colonizzati e allo stesso tempo ci predispongono all’incontro con altre
culture di tutto il mondo che avviene ormai quotidianamente in un’Italia non
ancora decolonizzata e quindi più che mai impreparata.46
Farah’s “choral” English—containing within it the idea of a Commedia
in Somali—thus serves both an educative and a therapeutic function.
This dual function is also visible in the language used by Ali Mumin
Ahad, who calls the Italian of Somali writers an “italiano di ritorno.”47
Ahad writes both his novel and his historical essays in Italian in an
effort to confront the painful historical bond between Somalia and
39Dante Studies 138, 2020
Italy that so many Italians have forgotten or were never even aware
of.48 For Ahad, the use of Italian “si ricollega al passato coloniale, alle
culture dei paesi dell’ex impero italiano rimettendo a posto, nella lingua
e nella memoria, ciò che è stato rimosso.”49 The “rimosso” here is the
repressed traumatic experience of a colonized people, compounded by
the collective amnesia of the former colonizers. In naming and address-
ing this trauma, says Ahad elsewhere, the Italian language is the shared
“bene pubblico” that can bridge the cultural distances left in the wake
of colonialism:50
La lingua di Dante diventò anche la lingua di scrittrici e scrittori “italiani” le cui
radici culturali sono radicate in contesti culturali e storici non propriamente ita-
liani. Scrittrici e scrittori moderni (non postmoderni, ma postcoloniali sì) scrivono
nella lingua italiana, senza essere italiani. Vivere in Italia, vivere-con e condivi-
dere la cultura italiana, fa di loro degli italiani più che un semplice atto d’ufficio.
Beninteso, un riconoscimento come la cittadinanza sarebbe la cosa piú giusta nei
confronti di chi con il suo lavoro contribuisce al bene pubblico. E la lingua è un
bene pubblico. . . . Ciò non toglie che essi possano riconoscersi anche nelle loro
radici culturali primarie. Proprio qui sta, secondo me, il valore di quella ricchezza a
cui accennavo prima. Un reciproco contribuire all’accorciamento delle distanze.51
For Ahad, as with Garane and Farah, the Italian language has been con-
nected to Dante since his schooling, when he was first forced to read the
Commedia: “E’ in questa scuola della Missione Cattolica di Beled Weyne
che conosco, per la prima volta, Dante Alighieri, vale a dire, la lingua
di cui lui è considerato il padre.”52 Also like Garane and Farah, Ahad
becomes an academic, a profession that allows him to see the world, but
also to more thoroughly understand (through his archival research as an
historian) the devastation that Italian colonialism and postcolonialism
has wrought in Somalia. And like Garane and Farah’s protagonists, the
protagonist of Ahad’s unpublished “Memorie del fiume” nurtures hope
of a new Somalia, eager to govern itself after Italy’s departure. This
protagonist, Abdi-Nur, is elected Minister of Public Works, but rising
to this position he is only better able to see the truth that the country is
still covertly governed by clans. (Indeed, we learn, this same system is
responsible for Abdi-Nur’s own post, as his clan had intervened to gain
him employment him even though he lacked credentials). When Abdi-
Nur goes, in chapter 20, to visit a wise elder from his clan known as “il
Vecchio del Fiume,” the encounter is made to resemble Dante’s meeting
40From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
with Cacciaguida in Paradiso. The chapter opening with Dante’s words
to his ancestor:53
O cara piota mia che si’ t’insusi,
Che come veggion le terrene menti
Non capere in triangol due ottusi,
Cosi vedi le cose contingenti
Anzi che sieno in sé, mirando il punto
A cui tutti li tempi sono presenti. (Par. 17.13–18)54
This quote—about seeing worldly things from above, in their true rela-
tions—is here cast in a bitter light, both Ahad the author and Abdi-Nur
the character having arrived at higher stations only to see painful truths
in finer detail.55 Much like Garane, Ahad characterizes this perspective
as a state of exile. It seems likely that Ahad had in mind Cacciaguida’s
own words to Dante on the subject, “Tu proverai sì come sa di sale /
lo pane altrui” (Par. 17.58–59), in his essay “Quel pane del mercato di
Beled Weyne,” where he reflects on the pre-war Somalia he remembers
and now feels exiled from, a newborn and peaceful nation:56
Il sapore di quel pane non l’ho più trovato in nessun altro luogo. Sarà perché si
tratta d’un sapore che appartiene all’infanzia, al ricordo di un tempo felice, di
spazi e d’aromi familiari. Quel pane che avevo visto cuocere, prima ancora che
cominciassi ad andare a scuola alla Missione cattolica di Beled Weyne, ha lasciato
nella memoria un sapore particolare.57
But it was of course in that same school that Ahad was taught the myth
of bellezza italiana, of the preeminence of Italy’s arts and history. Among
the works of literature he studied there, Dante’s Commedia would stand
out because, though propagandized as a symbol of Italy, it is known
to come out of the exile’s experience of being alienated within Italy.
Ahad’s memory of the bread of Beled Weyne comes to him during a
stay of several years in Italy, where he conducts the archival research
that reveals to him the unsettling damage of colonialism. Despite ties
of kinship and language, then, he would thus come to feel, again much
like Garane, alienated in Italy as well as in Somalia.
41Dante Studies 138, 2020
5. Dante’s (Christian) Journey
Plugged into the Somali Context
These novelists’ affinity for Dante is especially notable in a country that
is 99% Muslim. It was only in 2003 that Inferno 28, a canto censored
for centuries in Arabic versions due to its damnation of Muhammad
and Ali, was finally included in an Arabic translation of the Commedia
(by Iraqi writer Kadhim Jihad). But in the Italian schools of Somalia,
forced readers read the Commedia in the original Italian, exposing them
to Inferno 28 and to Dante’s deeply Christian world. Neither Garane nor
Farah nor Ahad, however, make mention of the canto or of Christian-
ity in general. This conspicuous omission might be part and parcel of
Hutcheon’s conceptualization of the “adapter” (“adapters purge an ear-
lier text of elements that their particular cultures in time or place might
find difficult or controversial”).58 At the same time, we must remember
that Garane and Farah and Ahad are not casual readers of the Commedia,
and would likely be aware of the complexity of Muhamad and Ali’s
damnation—that Dante puts them in the eighth circle not for being
Muslim but for sowing sectarian discord. As Brenda Deen Schildgen
writes in her Dante and the Orient, Dante “does not promote a crusade
against Islam”; he “instead subjects Islam to the same moral-theological
criteria he applies to those within his own milieu, thereby employing an
Aristotelian ethical system in judging those who lived before Christ and
after, whether pagans or Christians, Hebrews or Muslim.”59 Or as Aijaz
Ahmad puts it, Edward Said’s “disgust” at the treatment of Mohammad,
while understandable, mistakenly puts into the anachronistic framework
of Orientalism something that for Dante would be a matter of the Chris-
tian binary of “belief ” and “heresy.”60
In any case, Garane’s, Farah’s, and Ahad’s silence on this issue might
also prompt us to look for subtler points of contact between Dante and
Islam. In 1919, Miguel Asín Palacios’s controversial essay, “La escatología
musulmana en la Divina Commedia,” suggested that the Commedia was
inspired by Islam.61 Asín Palacios provides a list of common elements
in Muhammad’s and Dante’s journeys—a list that, regardless of the
merits of Asín Palacios’s thesis itself, is a valuable insight into how the
Commedia might resonate for a reader of the Qu’ran. Among these cor-
respondences Asín Palacios counts the Qur’an’s cycle of the isrāʾ (Night
Journey) and especially the cycle of miʿrāj (the ascension of Muhammad
42From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
into heaven);62 the fact that both Dante and Muhammad visit Hell, both
wake up from a deep sleep before starting their journeys by divine order,
and both ascend “un monte alto, aspro e scosceso”;63 and, finally, that
both are assisted by a guide (the angel Gabriel for Muhammad and Virgil
for Dante). For a reader of the Qur’an, too, elements of Dante’s Paradiso
bear a striking resemblance to the Islamic paradise:
permeato di una spiritualità scevra da ogni tipo di materialismo; colori, luci e
musica sono gli unici elementi descrittivi utilizzati da entrambi i pellegrini per
raffigurare la soprannaturale idealità della vita ultramondana, mentre la prossimità
a Dio è descritta, in maniera analoga, come un focolare di luce talmente intensa
e abbagliante da rendere ciechi.64
This familiarity might play a role in a novel like “Memorie del fiume,”
with its echoes of Paradiso. Perhaps even more compelling is Asín Pala-
cios’s observation that, beyond Dante and Muhammad’s similarities
of circumstance, both are the storytellers as well as the protagonists of
their journeys.65 This of course also applies to Garane/Gashan in Il latte
è buono. And it is Gashan’s journey of self-discovery that ends with his
statement, “Io sono l’uomo nuovo. Un ibrido non può mutilare, per-
ché lui stesso è nato da tante culture che si sono mutilate tra di loro”
(121–22). If Garane, a lifelong reader of Dante, is alluding here to the
mutilated Muhammed of Inferno 28, it is a complex reference indeed:
Garane/Gashan becomes in part the mutilated Muhammed, and in part
an anti-Dante who cannot mutilate with his own writing, a status he of
course arrived at through a Dantean journey (“come il Sommo Poeta!”
[121–22]).
6. Conclusion
This essay is intended to spread awareness of these three Somalian
authors, and to urge further investigation of Dante in Somalia. Many
important questions lie before us, including how other traditions might
create or intersect with the “indigenized” Dante in Somalian works of
fiction, and in what other contexts we might find similarly complex
receptions of Dante (if not in other former colonies, perhaps in peri-
ods or locations of Italian emigration).66 There is difficult theoretical
and historical work ahead if we are serious about investigating the
43Dante Studies 138, 2020
cases where Dante’s name was invoked on behalf of the interests of
colonialism.
On the pages of this journal we are accustomed to extolling Dan-
te and his continued presence in classrooms; we tend to focus on the
redemptive qualities of reading his extraordinary works. The fact that
these works were forced onto young readers in the colonial setting is less
comfortable for us to contemplate. In Garane, Ahad, and Farah we do
not find apologists for forced reading—Dante’s presence in their novels
serves in part to remind the reader that Italy is always present in the
background of the atrocities on the streets of Mogadishu. But deeper
into these novels we do find a Dante who stands apart from Italy. That
is, below the surface of his quintessential italianness is the fact that he
was an exile, harshly critical of his own home. Still deeper, an emo-
tionally conflicted relationship to Italy manifests in the ambivalence of
Dante’s Italian language: on the one hand Dante represents the language
of the colonizer, but on the other he was a champion of local dialects.
And finally there is the most personal level of connection, where these
novelists and their protagonists see Dante as a fellow exile regardless of
location, a fellow witness to the divisiveness of human life everywhere,
a pilgrim whose arc is, by virtue of lifelong reading of the Commedia,
always going to be a part of their own experience.
NOTES
1. Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the
Divine Comedy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 2, emphasis mine.
2. Looney, Freedom Readers, 2.
3. Looney notes a paradox: at the same time that Dante was being used in the imperial
project of comparative literature in Europe (e.g., by Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Ernest Robert
Curtius), he also came to represent an anticolonial voice for some African American readers and
writers (Freedom Readers, 5). On the Somali context, see Caterina Romeo: “Letteratura postco-
loniale diretta. Con questa definizione mi riferisco alla produzione letteraria di autori e autrici
provenienti da (originari di) Paesi che hanno un legame diretto con il colonialismo italiano; in
particolare il Corno d’Africa e la Libia, dove la colonizzazione italiana è stata più a lungo presente
e dove essa ha prodotto effetti più duraturi.” Caterina Romeo, Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura
italiana postcoloniale (Milan: Mondadori, 2018), 27.
4. Tim Allender, in “Learning Abroad: The Colonial Educational Experiment in India,
1813–1919,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 727–41, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi
/full/10.1080/00309230903335645, discusses the debates on the role of indigenous languages
in British educational policies in India. Those who favored English-only education prevailed
in 1835, when Governor-General William Bentinck declared that “the promotion of European
literature and science among the natives of India [and] all funds appropriated for the purpose of
education would be best employed on English education alone” (731). In 1919, the education
44From Forced Readers to Freedom Writers de Luca
service was finally “Indianised,” mostly as a consequence of political events in line with the
process of Indian independence (740).
5. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, “Introduction: Shakespeare and the Post-colonial
Question,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London:
Routledge, 1998), 1–19: 2.
6. Loomba and Orkin, “Introduction,” 7.
7. See Looney, Freedom Readers, 7–8, on the hybridity in the Commedia that drew African
American authors to the poem.
8. Loomba and Orkin, “Introduction,” 7.
9. Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 21.
10. Loomba and Orkin, “Introduction,” 12.
11. Loomba and Orkin, “Introduction,” 17.
12. Loomba, “ ‘Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows’: Issues of Race, Hybridity
and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares,” in Loomba and Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial Shake-
speares, 143–63: 147.
13. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2013), in particular the
“Transcultural Adaptation” and “Indigenization” sections in chapter five (141–67).
14. Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 150.
15. Loomba, “Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows,” 144.
16. In her works, Loomba often stresses the malleability of the category of “race.” Terms such
as race did not necessarily carry the same meaning in early modern Europe as they do today, and
even today they lack absolute coherence. In Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Loomba claims
“what we call race does not indicate natural or biological divisions so much as social divisions
which are characterized as if they were natural or biological” (3).
17. Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 5.
18. Loomba, “Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows,” 162.
19. “Taken,” that is, through the colonial assertion of the European gaze as “sovereign, the-
oretical subject of all histories.” Loomba, “Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows,”
163, quoting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s article “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the
Critique of History,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1992): 1–3, which led to Chakrabarty’s important
Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). In Loomba’s words,
this production “is not interested in Shakespeare,” but rather uses Shakespeare to “negotiate its
own future, shake off its own cramps, revise its own traditions, and expand its own performative
style” (Loomba, “Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello fellows,” 163).
20. Garane Garane, Il latte è buono (Isernia: C. Iannone, 2005).
21. The author kindly shared with me a copy of his unpublished manuscript in 2010. See
Mariagrazia De Luca, “Gli scrittori somali decolonizzano l’Italia. Memorie del fiume ed altri
racconti del Benadir di Ali Mumin Ahad” [Somali Writers Decolonize Italy: Memories of the
River and Other Tales of Benadir di Ali Mumin Ahad], Master’s thesis, University of La Sapi-
enza, Rome, 2010.
22. Nuruddin Farah, Links (London: Penguin, 2003).
23. Farah attended the Istituto Magistrale in Mogadishu, and his primary languages are Somali,
Amharic, Arabic, English, and some Italian. His decision to write in English, which in an inter-
view he attributed to having only had access to an American typewriter with English characters,
has allowed him to gain an international readership. See BOMB Magazine: The Author Interviews,
English edition, edited by Betsy Sussler (New York: Soho Press, 2014 [Kindle]), 249.
24. The “Età Giolittiana” is the period of Giolitti’s governments, from 1901 to 1914.
25. Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. Nostalgia delle Colonie, vol. 4 (Milan:
Oscar Mondadori, 2009), 222, 238.
26. At the time, journalist Alessandro Pazzi satirically explained the acronym AFIS as “Anco-
ra Fascisti Italiani in Somalia” (Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale, vol. 4, 238).
45Dante Studies 138, 2020
27. Simone Brioni, The Somali Within: Language, Race and Belonging in ‘Minor’ Italian Literature
(Oxford: Legenda Books, 2015), 3.
28. Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. Dall’Unità alla Marcia su Roma, vol. 1 (Milan:
Oscar Mondadori, 2009), 827.
29. Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale, vol. 1, 827.
30. Garane, Il latte è buono, 48.
31. Garane, Il latte è buono, 50. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
32. Ahad, “Da un emisfero all’altro,” 4.
33. Ahad, “Da un emisfero all’altro,” 6.
34. Brioni, Somali Within, 2.
35. Brioni, Somali Within, 3.
36. Ali Mumin Ahad, “Corno d’Africa: l’ex impero italiano,” in Nuovo planetario italiano:
geografia e antologia della letteratura della migrazione in Italia e in Europa, edited by Armando Gnisci
(Enna: Città Aperta, 2006), 241–93: 249.
37. “Monatto,” a word carrying Manzonian echoes, is a remover of corpses during a plague.
38. Angelo Del Boca, Una sconfitta dell’intelligenza: Italia e Somalia (Rome: Laterza, 1993), 119.
39. Dinitia Smith, “A Somali Author as a Guide to a Dantean Inferno,” New York Times,
May 19, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/books/a-somali-author-as-guide-to
-a-dantean-inferno.html.
40. Farah, Links, 1.
41. Alessandra di Maio, in the preface of Nuriddin Farah’s novel, Rifugiati, Voci della diaspora
somala, describes Farah’s English as “interprete di tutte le voci della diaspora, e contribuendo
così a creare una lingua corale, originale e allo stesso tempo riconoscibile” [interpreter of all
the voices of the diaspora, and thus contributing to create a choral language, original and at the
same time recognizable] (610).
42. Looney, Freedom Readers, 3.
43. Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 166.
44. Ascoli, Dante, 139. It is important to remember that the written form of the Somali
language was only formalized in 1972, and some Somalis of Farah’s generation were only able
to write in Somali as adults. For instance, Bila, another character in Links, taught himself to
write in Somali as an adult in the 1990s when he got out of jail after spending many years there
as a political prisoner.
45. Valentina Anselmi, “La questione postcoloniale nella letteratura della migrazione,” in
Kúmá. Creolizzare l’Europa, no. 17 (2009). See also Valentina Anselmi, “La questione postco-
loniale nella letteratura italiana della migrazione,” Master’s thesis, University of La Sapienza,
Rome, 2009.
46. Anselmi, “La questione postcoloniale,” 13.
47. “Si tratta di un italiano di ritorno, assimilato, adattato alla cultura ed ai costumi delle
popolazioni delle ex colonie, re-inventato nella forma. . . . La lingua italiana che utilizzano [gli
scrittori postcoloniali] è sempre un italiano corrente, ma ricco di sfumature e concetti culturali
della realtà africana, di termini e vocaboli che appartengono alla madrepatria che sono destinati
prima o poi ad aggiungersi al dizionario italiano così come i numerosi vocaboli di derivazione
inglese o francese.” Ali Mumin Ahad, “Per un’introduzione alla letteratura postcoloniale italiana,
con brani di Garane Garane, Gabriella Ghermandi, Ubax Cristina Ali-Farah, Stefano Rizzo,
Igiaba Scego,” Filosofia e questioni pubbliche, no. 3 (2005): 193–240 (199–200).
48. “When I arrived in Italy for the first time directly from Somalia, not as an immigrant
or a refugee but for the strengthening of cultural relations between the two countries within
a program of academic cooperation, I realized how little the Italians remembered or knew of
Somalia, not to mention the colonial history. It was this painful discovery that prompted me to
write about Somalia in Italian for Italians.” Author’s interview of Ahad, April 26, 2017. Ahad’s
latest book, Somali Oral Poetry and the Failed She-Camel Nation State (New York: Peter Lang, 2015)
has been published in English.
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