Female literature of migration in Italy
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abstract Starting symbolically from a place of transit and mobility such as the Galleria in Naples, I look at the pace of immigration movements to Italy from both ex-colonial territories and other countries. Precarity characterizes the migrant condition in Italy: entrance and stay permits; work and housing, which are difficult to obtain and always temporary; bureaucratic control is severe and the right to citizenship is distant. The collective amnesia of the colonial enterprise obscures the fact that at least some of the guests of today were the hosts of yesterday. I analyse these, and other aspects, in the literature of migration that in recent decades has emerged in Italy, focusing on women’s writing and confronting the problem of how long it will take for this literature to receive recognition in the Italian literary canon. In women’s narratives, precarity emerges in the journey of emigration, described as a real odyssey; in tensions over identity and language; in contrasting cultures of departure and cultures of destination; in the problematic concept of ‘home’. Racial and gender differences subsumed in the colour of skin are a recurrent motif. For women, hardships may be more deeply felt: isolation and loneliness is augmented by the distance from children and family; the relationship between past and present more troublesome as it often leads to a double oppression. Independence is more fiercely fought for in the affirmation of identity. Finally, I show that, alongside conditions of isolation and despair, strength and hope in the new life emerge from these writings, touching on the importance of writing in Italian and on the motives leading to this choice.
keywords Italian colonialism; Somalian diaspora; migrant writing; another language; racism; precarity; plural identities
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feminist review 87 2007 c 2007 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/07 $30 www.feminist-review.com (60–75)
the arcade, a precarious space The Galleria Umberto I, an arcade in the elegant centre, housing boutiques, cafe´s and a large post office, is one of the landmarks of the city of Naples. It is this nineteenth-century monument that John Horne Burns, in his 1947 work, The Gallery, describes as the unofficial heart of Naples: ‘a large arcade, a cross between the hall of a train station and the nave of a church y. The arcade was secretive y it seemed like being inside a Baroque Underground station’ (Burns, 1970: 1). The stress on mobility and precariousness can be found again in Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, where the arcade is described as a place of flaˆnerie, which, alongside the main railway station, provided an ideal site for the beginning of cinema in Naples in the 1920s. With its transient and transgressive de-territorialized architecture, the arcade was also the sphere of ‘spatial mobility as pleasure’ where women could perform their conquest of metropolitan space (Bruno, 1993: 66–67).
1 Burns too had offered an apocalyptic vision: ‘ya living and subdividing cell of vermouth, Allied soldierly and the Italian peopl
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