Building multilocal belongings : a comparative study of Somali postcolonial novels in English and Italian

Abstract

This thesis provides a comparative study of contemporary novels written in English and Italian by authors of the Somali diaspora, including Nuruddin Farah, Garane Garane, Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego, Afdhere Jama and Shirin Ramzanali Fazel. By reading them contrapuntally, this study offers an original framework for developing a multicultural and multilingual analysis, since it brings Anglophone and Italian literary studies together. The thesis demonstrates how the novels provide a more holistic understanding of Somali literature and an epistemological rethinking of the postcolonial paradigm. The first chapter analyses the representation of spatiality focusing on Mogadishu and Rome, as two fictionalised urbanscapes at the centre of Somali diasporic literature. The chapter shows how authors deconstruct Western narratives of Mogadishu as a failed city engulfed in tribal wars and, also, analyses the strategies of re-appropriation and reterritorialisation of Rome, namely one of the centres of the diaspora. The second chapter shifts the focus on language, investigating Nuruddin Farah’s late works. It claims that his use of Italian suggests a re-examination of the critical terminology employed to describe the relationship between colonisers and colonised; the chapter also proposes a new understanding of Somalia’s civil war period by providing an intertextual reading between Farah’s Links (2005) and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The following chapter, focused on Garane’s Il latte è buono (2005), proposes an innovative approach towards orature: instead of relating it to a generalised African affiliation, the analysis grounds orature within the specificity of the Somali context. Finally, the fourth chapter charts the critically neglected influences of the Italian literary tradition on Somali Italian writers. The chapter illustrates how Italo Calvino’s aesthetics, developed after fighting in the anti-fascist resistance movement (la Resistenza, 1943—45), offers fruitful parallels with that of Somali postcolonial writers. In doing so, the analysis moves away from the conventional reading of postcolonial novels in Italian as unrelated to the national culture and the literary canon. Accordingly, I show how their transnational features should be investigated according to their multiple literary networks, stretching from multilocal backgrounds to the Italian and English literary traditions. Taken together, these chapters propose an innovative multilingual and multicultural reading of Somali novels of the diaspora, inviting us to reassess the current critical approaches, mostly based on same-language analyses. Also, they show how the comparative investigation of Somali diasporic novels, from geographically and culturally distinct areas, advocates for a reassessment of the notion of literary tradition as based on the same nationality and language.