A LOOK AT ITALIAN COLONIALISM: THE WRITINGS OF ERMINIA DELL'ORO
UNO SGUARDO SUL COLONIALISMO ITALIANO: GLI SCRITTI DI ERMINIA DELL'ORO*
https://academia.edu/79272187/Uno_sguardo_sul_colonialismo_italiano_gli_scritti_di_Erminia_Dell_Oro
Erminia Dell’Oro, an Italian born in #Eritrea, is one of
the few writers to have addressed the issue of Italian colonialism in her works
from the point of view of the colonized. She describes the consequences of
domination based on racial laws, massacres,, and deportations. Asmara addio
(Goodbye Asmara), L’abbandono (The Abandonment), Il fiore di Merara (The Flower
of Merara), Vedere ogni notte le stelle (Seeing the Stars Every Night), La gola
del Diavolo (The Devil’s Throat) are some of her works dealing with cruel
aspects of Italian colonialism, such as the "madamato," the
concubinage between Italian men and Eritrean women, and “meticciato”, children
born from the concubinage, that led to the humiliation of the Eritrean woman
and to the identity crisis of so many children. https://academia.edu/79272187/Uno_sguardo_sul_colonialismo_italiano_gli_scritti_di_Erminia_Dell_Oro
The scents of spices fill the air, the clear skies and the red hues of African soil are visible in the novels of Erminia Dell’Oro. Like Elisa Kidané, Ribka Sibhatu, Igiaba Scego, Cristina Ali Farah, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, and Gabriella Ghermandi, Erminia Dell’Oro comes from a former Italian colony and writes in Italian, her mother tongue. Dell’Oro is, according to Daniele Comberiati’s definition, a “postcolonial” writer of the “fourth shore.” The first term refers to the themes in her works, particularly Italy’s relationship with its former colonies and the consequences of colonialism, while the second term recalls the phrase used in Fascist propaganda to designate the then Italian colony of Libya and, by extension, the other colonies of the Horn of Africa in addition to the three shores (Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and Ionian) of the national territory.
However, unlike the aforementioned writers, Dell’Oro, along with Luciana Capretti, born in Libya, is the only one to have both parents of Italian origin, thus fully belonging to the colonizers rather than the colonized. A rather unique case in a literary landscape of names like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Abdulrazak Gurnah, or Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, to name a few. Yet, her voice, arriving in Italy from the “fourth shore,” is fundamental for gaining a different and less idealized perspective of Italian colonialism.
Born in 1938 to Luigi Dell’Oro and Gioconda Vespa in Asmara, Eritrea—the earliest Italian colony—where her paternal grandfather Carlo, who came from Lecco, had settled as early as 1896, Erminia was the first of four children. For the small city situated on a plateau at 2,400 meters above sea level, this was a period of maximum splendor in terms of infrastructure, industrial, and economic growth. The presence of Italians at that time was significant, considering that, according to the 1939 census, Asmara had a population of 98,000 inhabitants, 53,000 of whom were Italian. The Asmara of Erminia’s childhood would always remain an enchanted land for her, with its breathtaking landscapes: the Dahlak Islands and their coral sea, walks along the dry bed of the Anseba River, trips to Keren for the Monday camel market, and overnight stays at the “Sicilia” hotel, picnics at Hebo, and train journeys on the littorina from Asmara to Massawa, where her grandparents lived, among the mountains covered with prickly pear cacti and populated by baboons. Tunnels piercing through the mountains, cliffs, and bridges suspended over ravines. Camel drivers, veiled women walking along with caravans and driving mules and donkeys with sticks. And then, the Green Island off the coast of Massawa, inhabited only by hermit crabs and birds.
For Erminia, Asmara is also a city of smells and colors: the coffee drunk by her father and uncles at the Vittoria Bar on Viale della Regina, the colorful fabrics, the zuries (long dresses worn by Eritrean women), the multicolored beads, the berberé (red chili pepper mixed with other spices), the scirò (fava bean flour), and the taff (a local grain) used to make anghera (a thin flatbread), all products sold at the grain market. And in addition, the blue skies, the red earth, the colorful birds, a city where crickets sing and hyenas and jackals howl, where children play and laugh outdoors. A charming city also because of its multi-ethnic nature, where along with the Eritreans, Indians, Arabs, Greeks, and people of various races and religions coexist: Copts, Jews, Muslims, Catholics. An aspect of Asmara that, as Daniele Comberiati states, is also highlighted by another writer born in Eritrea, Elisa Kidané.
After Italian colonialism, on April 1, 1941, the British took over as the new administrators of the country. Viale Mussolini, the majestic main street lined with double rows of palm trees, known as the “closed field” by Eritreans because it was closed off to their passage, became Corso Italia, symbolizing that the era of Italian colonialism was over. In the 1950s, Eritrea was first federated and then annexed to Ethiopia. Erminia, who attended Italian schools, remained there until 1958, after which she moved to Italy, feeling like a magical plant in one of her recent stories: “torn from its roots” (2006:16), from a land where the sky seemed to be “washed every morning [...] and then spread out entirely above the earth, clear and blue” (2006:19).
“Arriving in Milan in April,” Dell’Oro recounts in an interview she graciously granted us, “thanks to a train pass that I received as a gift from my father to explore the country of my origins, which I had never visited before, I began to travel mainly in the north.” In Milan, she collaborated with the daily Il Tempo, and in the ‘68 era, became socially engaged, married, and from 1975 to 1990, managed the Einaudi bookstore. Later, she worked for Einaudi as a reader of foreign texts. Meanwhile, she became a writer, first with novels for adults, and from 1993, she started publishing children’s stories. “I never imagined I would write for children,” Dell’Oro confesses. “The first story, Matteo and the Dinosaurs, published by Einaudi ragazzi, was born from an experience accompanying my grandson to the Natural History Museum in Milan. Since then, I have continued to write for children. My latest book is titled The Kidnapped Cat, published by Battello a Vapore.”
I arrived in Italy. I did it thirty years later, but inside me, unconsciously, it was already formed. To be honest, I initially wrote a 400-page novel, but it was lost. It contained memories of Asmara, but it was more of a love story; I hadn’t yet fully processed my life experiences. Then, after many years, one early morning, I woke up and began to write its beginning. Something, I don’t know what, had unlocked. It was what the poet Franco Loi talks about: what was already inside me surfaced.”
In an interview published on El Ghibli, Erminia states: “When I arrived in Italy, I realized that almost no one knew about the history of the Italian colonies in Africa. It was a part of our past that no one knew about or wanted to know about. Our colonies were small, quickly lost, and populated mainly by fascists... there was no literature on this subject, unlike in other European countries. So, when I returned to writing, I positioned myself on the side of the Eritreans.” Dell’Oro, more than anyone else, sought to dispel the myth of a “humane” Italian colonialism, which was established from the very beginning of our colonial policy. Her demystification of the myth of Italians as “good people” — supposedly more tolerant, humane, and magnanimous than other conquerors — is driven by the desire to clarify what our colonial adventure really was, from its origins to the fall of the Fascist Empire. Even in our colonial history, Dell’Oro points out, there were massacres, deportations, and racial laws. And while distinguishing between the early colonialism, characterized by a desire to improve the lives of African populations, and Fascist colonialism, which was marked by oppression, Dell’Oro does not hesitate to highlight the different living conditions between the privileged class of whites and that of blacks, presenting us with a city divided in two.
In Asmara Addio, she describes Sunday at the Campo Polo stadium, where trotting and galloping horse races were organized. There, the elite of Asmara gathered, with ladies flaunting elegant dresses and binoculars to better follow the races. “My mother,” Erminia recalls, “detested the strolls on the main avenue and the social scene. She also avoided attending the Italian Club, a somewhat snobbish and Fascist place, where people spent evenings playing canasta and bridge, and where dance parties were often organized.” Besides the parties, there were tennis tournaments, outings, and hunting trips. There was the time for a stroll through the central streets: “Hats, veils, pipes, canes [...] It was the Asmara of the whites, and at the time, Eritreans were not allowed to walk on Corso Mussolini, later renamed Corso Italia” (1997:22). They were relegated to Abbasciaul, on the outskirts of the city. They would come to the center only to sell eggs and poultry, while children went there to beg for bacscisc, or tips. “It was from our domestic staff,” Dell’Oro recounts, “that I learned the local language, Tigrinya, not from Eritrean children, as they were not allowed to attend Italian schools.” In fact, many Eritreans worked as servants or gardeners in European households. The city was structured according to who governed it, and as Erminia Dell’Oro emphasizes in La Gola del Diavolo, “It was the whites who considered themselves masters, in a land where blacks had always lived” (25). The same infrastructures built—roads, bridges, the Asmara-Massawa railway, hospitals, factories—according to Dell’Oro, served Italian interests exclusively, not those of the conquered country, and what was considered advantageous for the conquerors was not necessarily beneficial for the conquered.
The pages of many of Erminia Dell’Oro’s novels also reveal underlying racism on the part of the Italians. The concept of Eritreans as an inferior race was deeply rooted in our colonizers and manifested itself in the sexual advances they made toward Eritrean women. Characters like Sahira, the Bilena maid of the Conti household, are portrayed in her novels. With her splendid, sinuous body wrapped in long, colorful dresses, Sahira became the object of desire for many men who frequented the Contis’ home, until she met a tragic end due to a bad affair with an Italian who killed her with twelve stab wounds in the middle of an Asmara street for having ended the relationship (1997:172-173). Then there’s Elsa, whose real name is Haimanot. The Italian engineer she works for as a maid refuses to pronounce a name that is too difficult for him and renames her Elsa. Every night, the engineer goes to Elsa’s room, until she becomes pregnant and is sent back to her village with a little money. “A beautiful baby girl was born, with skin as pale as the moon, almost too delicate for Elsa to dare to touch” (1991:101). A year later, the engineer returns to Italy, taking the child with him and leaving Elsa to her sad fate. Finally, there is “the beautiful Nura, with curly black hair, golden melancholic eyes, and the bearing of women from the lowlands; [...] she worked on a banana plantation just outside the village; the owner, who had been occupied with other affairs in Asmara for some time, had been her man. Nura was fourteen when she met him, and he was already old. [...] One morning, while she was going to her wells, she saw Nura—a child-woman—washing herself” (1994:70). Nura had a child with this man who came from Southern Italy, who later abandoned her.
Another theme widely addressed in Dell’Oro’s novels is that of the madamato, an institution that existed since the first Italian colonialism in Eritrea and later spread to other Italian colonies, referring to concubinage between Italian men and Eritrean women. In Eritrea, it was justified as part of a local tradition, the “marriage by wage” of limited duration, called dumoz: the groom was required to provide for the bride by giving her a fixed compensation until the contract expired. However, Italians did not care much about the obligations implied by this contract and understood the madamato as the possibility of freely enjoying domestic and sexual services, which ultimately devalued the Eritrean woman and her personhood. Moreover, these peoples—as Major Donati claims in the novel L’abbandono—“forget quickly, they don’t have feelings like us, they are different” (1991:44).
Dell’Oro thus sketches the character of Lisetta’s mother in Asmara Addio. Lisetta is a mixed-race child, the daughter of an Italian who, in old age, fathered three children with a young native woman. While the girl listens to the words her father says to her mother as he leaves for Italy, her gaze is lost in the void: “Don’t worry [...] I’ll bring you to Italy, I’ll send you money soon” (138). But the mother “nodded in agreement and said nothing. She knew hard times were ahead, the man would disappear; she didn’t want to hope, like other women who lived in the futile expectation of a letter” (138). Lisetta reappears in the following pages when, in order to survive hunger, she ends up becoming a sciarmutta, or prostitute. There are many references to sciarmuttismo in Eritrea in Dell’Oro’s works, especially in L’abbandono, where in the opening pages, the character of Salvatore the Calabrian appears, who, despite the declaration of love tattooed on his chest for his fiancée Rosalia waiting for him back in Italy, spends every night with the sciarmutte of Massawa (1991:28).
Starting in April 1937, with the introduction of racial laws, unions with local women were punishable by imprisonment of one to five years, and mixed marriages were prohibited, leading to the denial of recognition for children born from such relationships. Mixed-race children, called “missions” because they were often abandoned in orphanages run by Catholic missionaries, were considered the fruits of sin.
Cinzi overcomes his fears of the racial laws when he realizes that “a relationship with an Eritrean woman was tolerated as long as it was not too conspicuous. The Duce was far away, and with that climate and those women, it was impossible to expect that the laws would not be modified to suit personal needs and passions” . But when Italy enters the war, Carlo sends Sellass and their children back to their native village and abandons them, boarding a ship to South Africa. As a result of this marriage, Sellass will be rejected not only by the Italians—since mixed families were not well accepted—but also by the Eritreans of the village of Adi Ugri, because she made herself a servant of the “bad people who came as masters” (36) in their country. The same happens to her children, Marianna and Gianfranco, who belong fully neither to one people nor the other, but are simply considered “mixed,” “bastards,” or “pro-Italy.” Erminia Dell’Oro recounts: “It was the story itself that sought me out in the person of Marianna, the mixed-race daughter of Sellass. One day, I was presenting Asmara Addio in Milan when a woman of my age approached me to ask for an autograph. As I signed the book, she told me that she remembered seeing me often pass by on Corso Italia, in Asmara. That’s when I began to think about when, as girls, we would take evening strolls along the avenue, we Italian girls all well-dressed and groomed, while Eritrean or mixed-race girls were kept out of that world, and I thought to myself that I would like to write something on the subject. Then one day, this person called me and asked me to write her story. I did, and I added some imaginary elements to soften her loneliness, such as the bush in front of her house with which young Marianna continuously talks.”
Another terrible aspect of colonialism highlighted by Dell’Oro is the use of gas in the war for the conquest of Ethiopia. A chapter of Asmara Addio is dedicated to the fascist attack on Ethiopia in 1936 and the battle in which mustard gas, a poisonous gas, was used against the defenseless population. This sad truth, denied until a few years ago, came to light thanks to films and documents preserved in the State Archives. Dell’Oro herself admits she knew nothing about it until she read the works of Angelo Del Boca, one of the few historians committed to reconstructing our colonial history. As she writes in Asmara Addio: “For two days, the men stationed around the lake to fight against the white men had waited in vain for reinforcements, food, and water [...]; instead, another attack came from the enemy, poison gases were dropped from airplanes, and many of them died in terrible agony” (139).
“In Asmara,” Erminia Dell’Oro recalls, “we did not have precise news about what was happening in Ethiopia, we only knew that atrocities were being committed. In 1989, a few months after the release of Asmara Addio, before the historical documentation on the war in Ethiopia had been made public, I was invited to the television show of journalist Maurizio Costanzo, who provocatively asked me if what I claimed in my book about the poisoning of Lake Ashanghi with mustard gas by Italian troops was true. I replied yes and said that documents would soon be released to prove it. The next day, I received many letters of protest, but the facts proved me right.”
To complete the picture of Italian colonialism, there is still one of Erminia Dell’Oro’s unpublished works, written in 1999 and titled Il Re di Pietra (The Stone King). “I will propose it to a publisher soon,” says Erminia. “I had Angelo Del Boca read it, and he liked it very much. It tells the story of a storyteller from Axum who arrives at the court of Haile Selassie and falls in love with a courtesan. The book describes the attack on the Viceroy of Ethiopia, Rodolfo Graziani, who had committed horrific acts in Addis Ababa.” This book would complete the history of Italian colonialism that Erminia Dell’Oro has skillfully depicted in her novels to ensure that Italians know or remember it.
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*Translated from Italian to English by: OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com
