“L'altro versante della storia: dalle memorie rimosse dell'Africa italiana alle antanaclasi di Carla Macoggi”

Abstract

The other Side of History : from the repressed Memories of the Italian Africa to Carla Macoggi’s Antanaclasis Within the growing corpus of migrant authors writing in Italian, the focus is put on writers who are filling the gaps in Italy’s memory of colonialism. What particular posture unites them (...if there is any)? This paper aims at remembering the stakes of this literature and at exploring the practical ways in which the work of re-elaboration is undertaken by the different authors who are claiming a space “in-between” Italy and Africa. Among them we can quote Igiaba Scego, Ribka Sibhatu, Gabriella Ghermandi and Kaha Mohamed Aden. Finally, a special attention will be paid to Carla Macoggi’s Kkeywa – storia di una bimba meticcia (2011). The narrator remembers how, as a child, she has been taken from her etiopian family without any explanation and sent to be brought up in the social environment of her italian father after he passed away. Placed at the exact converging point between two legacies – African and Western – and in the attempt (in vain?) to heal the wounds, – following from its Greek etymology, the author defines the word “trauma” as “a wound by fracture” – she makes use of the rhetorical figure of antanaclasis to put into words a persisting discomfort.