Contemporary Authors

• Adua - 2017 New Vessel Press; Translation edition, https://smile.amazon.com/Adua-Igiaba-Scego/dp/1939931452/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1514266911&sr=8-1&keywords=Scego%2C+Igiaba

• Words without borders - https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/contributor/igiaba-scego

  Contributor
  Igiaba Scego

  Igiaba Scego, born in Rome in 1974 to a family of Somali origins, is a writer and journalist. She holds a PhD in education (on postcolonial subjects) and has done extensive academic work in Italy and around the world. Among her books are a YA novel, La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock (Sinnos), and the novels Rhoda (Sinnos) and Oltre Babilonia (Donzelli). Her memoir La mia casa è dove sono (Rizzoli) won Italy’s Mondello Prize in 2011. She has also written the nonfiction title Al Roma Negata. Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (Ediesse) in collaboration with the photographer Rino Bianchi, a book that treats a broad range of subjects in the history of Italian colonialism. She is a contributor to the magazine Internazionale and the supplement to La Repubblica, Il Venerdì di Repubblica. Her latest novel, Adua (Giunti), a portrait of a woman seeking herself in a long journey from Somalia to Italy, was published in English by New Vessel Press.

  Igiaba Scego's work
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  First Read—From “Adua”

  June 19, 2017

QUOTED: "Igiaba Scego's Adua is a memorable, affecting tale of postcolonial Africa."

Adua
Susan Waggoner
ForeWord.
(Apr. 27, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Igiaba Scego; ADUA; New Vessel Press (Fiction: Translations) 16.95 ISBN: 9781939931450
Byline: Susan Waggoner
Adua is a memorable, affecting tale of postcolonial Africa.
Igiaba Scego's spare Adua brings the decolonialization of Africa to life through the stories of Zoppe and his estranged daughter, Adua.
In the 1930s, Somali native Zoppe is hired to work in Italy as a translator. He is disrespected by his employer, resented by strangers, and brutally beaten by Mussolini's thugs. Decades later, his daughter, Adua, who fled Somalia as a young woman and also ended up in Rome, reflects on her long residency there, and on a life lived in a country that has never felt like home.
The structure of the book allows for both stories to unfold simultaneously. Adua's story is told as first-person reverie, recounting her brief and relatively happy childhood, its abrupt end, and her naA[macron]ve joy over being "discovered" by an Italian director and coaxed to Italy with promises of becoming an international film star.
Loneliness echoes through every aspect of Adua's life, and her story is all the more affecting for being told without sentimentality or self-pity. Zoppe's story, told from an omniscient point of view, is equally affecting; he ends up living in undeserved isolation.
Zoppe's and Adua's stories are joined together by brief sections with conversations and instructions from Zoppe to Adua, allowing for a deeper and more complete understanding of both characters than either has of the other. This is the book's standout achievement and the heart of story's tragedy.
Both father and daughter feel they have failed each other: Adua for disappointing her father's
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hopes for her, Zoppe for failing to equip his daughter with the wariness and skepticism she needed to survive Western culture. Neither guesses that the other harbors such regrets, and both imagine only rejection and contempt coming from the other.
Their stories are told in fragments, with events out of order and questions left unanswered, accurately reflecting the fractured nature and abrupt shifts in the characters' lives.
Igiaba Scego's Adua is a memorable, affecting tale of postcolonial Africa. Susan Waggoner
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Waggoner, Susan. "Adua." ForeWord, 27 Apr. 2017. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A490947761/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ca7060c8. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490947761

QUOTED: "The lovely prose and memorable characters make this novel a thought-provoking and moving consideration of the wreckage of European oppression."

2 of 6 12/25/17, 11:23 PM

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Adua
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p36. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: * Adua
Igiaba Scego, trans, from the Italian by Jamie Richards. New Vessel, $16.95 trade paper (185p) ISBN 978-1-939931-45-0
Scego showcases a talent for portraying intense and quiet suffering in this intergenerational novel tackling European colonialism and the continued mistreatment of migrants. Faced with the possibility of returning to claim an ancestral home in Somalia during a tenuous break in the civil war, Adua reflects on her original journey to Italy 40 years ago. Her abusive, exploitative treatment by the makers of a film she was in soured her dream of becoming a movie star. Her current life as a wife to a much younger Somali refugee who nearly died crossing to Europe disappoints, too; their relationship is more mother-son than husband-wife. Her father, Zoppe, came to Rome on the brink of World War II to work as a translator. His firsthand experience of racial violence in the shadow of rising fascism resulted in his return to Somalia as the servant of a count that altered the rest of his adult life. In between their two stories, Scego includes brief "Talking-To" chapters that capture Zoppe berating Adua, distilling their tense relationship and inability to connect in impressive shorthand. Scego reveals the horrifying details of both characters' stories in unornamented prose, from Zoppe's extreme experience of police brutality to Adua's infibulation. The measured and calm presentation amplifies the impact of these traumas. The lovely prose and memorable characters make this novel a thought-provoking and moving consideration of the wreckage of European oppression. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Adua." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 36. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A490820742/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1f0ce630. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820742

QUOTED: "Bearing witness through fiction, Scego’s Adua gives urgent voice to the silent caught between shifting loyalties, abusive power, and nations at war."

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'Adua' explores the relationship between
colonizer and colonized
Terry Hong
The Christian Science Monitor.
(June 16, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Terry Hong
Before Igiaba Scego's novel, Adua, even begins, what's instantly striking is the "Contents" page, which reveals a trio of chapter titles - "Adua," "Talking-To," "Zoppe" - that repeat over 30 chapters. Adua is the daughter, Zoppe the father, and the "Talking-To" segments are Zoppe's admonishments of Adua which, ironically, link the two more closely on the page than they ever were during their lives.
As the narrative opens, Zoppe is dead and Adua holds the deed to the family home in Somalia, relatively peaceful after decades of upheaval. After 37 years of living in Rome, Adua is unsure whether she will return to her birth country: "I wonder if I ... will be able to build what future I have left in our land." Her current life includes a younger refugee husband, whom she refers to as "a Titanic, someone who'd risked drowning at sea to come here." Adua is fully aware that their relationship is conspicuously practical: "He needed a house, a teat, a bowl of soup, a pillow, some money, hope, any semblance of relief. He needed a mama, a hooyo [mother], a whore, a woman, a sharmutta [prostitute], me."
Lacking true companionship, Adua regularly visits nearby Piazza della Minerva, where she talks to a "little marble elephant holding up the smallest obelisk in the world." Dismissing the strangers who point fingers "'at that black lady talking to herself,'" she confides, "I need to be heard, otherwise my words will fade away and be lost."
When Adua was "seven or eight years at most," Zoppe cleaved her from the caretakers Adua and her sister believed were their parents, unaware that Adua's birth had caused her mother's death. While her sister readily "bowed to this new father," Adua was whipped into submission and fainted. "When I came to," she recalls, "I had become an actress. No one would ever see my real face again." At 17, Adua flees Somalia - and her domineering father - chasing promises of film stardom. Her one-and-only celluloid performance costs her "everything," and yet she must continue to survive in an unwelcoming foreign country for decades to come.
Zoppe, for all his estrangement, is not unlike Adua. He, too, was a motherless child, and left Somalia for Italy to work as an interpreter, "a linguistic ambassador." Zoppe's ability to speak Italian, as well as "Arabic, Somali, Swahili, Amharic, Tiginya, and several minor languages ...
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[made him] useful in the coming war," what would become the Second Italo-Abyssinian War of 1935-1936. As an African in Rome in the 1930s, Zoppe thought he "was a miracle"; the local military police, however, react differently and imprison him without cause. Surviving vicious torture, he returns to Somalia, where he works - with considerable success - as a translator in Mussolini's regime.
Perhaps from guilt, from doubt, or from anger over his inability to protect his child from violent humiliation despite what he already suffered, Zoppe is unrelenting in his criticisms and warnings leveled at this daughter. His "Talking-To"s include his justification for Adua's forced infibulation, even as he admits that his late wife would never have allowed such mutilation to occur; that butchery will signal the unbridgeable separation between father and daughter. As Adua and Zoppe's diverging narratives highlight their mutual failure to communicate, the interstitial "Talking-To"s reveal a longing to understand, to connect, even to forgive.
The Italian-born daughter of Somali parents, Scego, who is also a highly-regarded journalist with a PhD in education specializing in postcolonialism and migrant experiences, writes with forthright simplicity and unblinking honesty. Her unadorned sentences - concisely rendered from the 2015 original Italian by Milan-based translator Jamie Richards - might initially suggest a straightforward narrative of generational family dysfunction, but Scego's ending "Historical Note" clearly suggests something more substantial than mere storytelling. Scego notes "three historical moments" that define "Adua": "Italian colonialism, Somalia in the 1970s, and our current moment, when the Mediterranean has been transformed into an open-air tomb for migrants."
In just over 200 pages, Scego exposes the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized over decades, addresses the personal price of working for (in collusion with?) the colonizer, and examines the ongoing status of peripatetic refugees arriving on Italian shores - at least those who survive the treacherous journeys. Bearing witness through fiction, Scego's "Adua" gives urgent voice to the silent caught between shifting loyalties, abusive power, and nations at war.
Terry Hong writes BookDragon, a book blog for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "'Adua' explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized." Christian
Science Monitor, 16 June 2017. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A495715769/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2f277440. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495715769
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Waggoner, Susan. "Adua." ForeWord, 27 Apr. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490947761/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ca7060c8. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017. "Adua." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 36. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820742/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1f0ce630. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017. Hong, Terry. "'Adua' explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized." Christian Science Monitor, 16 June 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495715769/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2f277440. Accessed 26 Dec. 2017.

• Africa is a Country
  http://africasacountry.com/2015/10/italian-writer-igiaba-scego-rewrites-the-black-mediterranean/
  Word count: 1378

  QUOTED: "Adua is deeply and thoroughly researched, a process Scego describes in the “Historical Note” after the epilogue. It is also a captivating read: the novel is sweeping in its geographical and temporal scope, yet Scego nonetheless renders her complex protagonists richly and lovingly."

  Italian writer Igiaba Scego rewrites the Black Mediterranean
  October 14, 2015 by Camilla Hawthorne

  The past year has thrown into sharp relief the complicated and power-laden connections between Italy and the African continent. Refugees fleeing violence and upheaval in countries from Eritrea to Nigeria add to the horrific tally of death in the Mediterranean or on the shores of Lampedusa. They are casualties of the replacement of the Italian navy’s maritime search-and-rescue Mare Nostrum program with the EU Frontex agency’s Triton border securitization initiative, and–more broadly–of a systematic devaluation of black and brown life in Fortress Europe. This summer, in fact, the Mediterranean has been dubbed by many analysts the deadliest sea in the world and the deadliest migrant crossing in the world.

  In the Italian political sphere, a lengthy investigation into right-wing Lega Nord minister Roberto Calderoli’s 2013 comments comparing Cecile Kyenge (former Minister of Integration and the first Black cabinet member in Italy’s history) to an “orangutan” recently concluded that his remarks constituted defamation, but not racial discrimination. (Earlier this month, another Lega Nord politician was fined for a 2013 Facebook post in which said that Kyenge should “go back to the jungle.”) Kyenge was subject to a staggering number of racist attacks during her tenure in the Letta government, from thrown bananas to hanging nooses to calls for her rape.

  Alongside these shockingly transparent examples of racism in Italy, at the time of writing the Italian Senate is considering landmark legislation that would grant Italian citizenship to many children of immigrants who were born or raised in Italy (members of this so-called “second generation” make up almost 10 percent of minors in Italy). This is a limited, yet important and arguably symbolic reform to the country’s restrictive jus sanguinis citizenship laws, the product of years of organizing by a multi-ethnic coalition including many Afro-Italians.

  The complicated and contradictory events unfolding in contemporary Italy require a significant reconsideration of Italy’s relationship to Africa. This critical work has been undertaken by radical historians, postcolonial scholars, novelists, filmmakers, and others, linking the racialized economic and political subjugation of Southern Italy, Italy’s own colonial entanglements in Africa, and forms of exclusion, racism, and violence waged against immigrants in Italy since the 1970s. Some writers have begun to group these multifaceted interventions under the rubric of the Black Mediterranean (a term first used by scholar Alessandra di Maio). This homage to Robert Farris Thompson and Paul Gilroy that emphasizes the dense relations of cultural exchange (but also racial violence) linking Europe and Africa. Multiple generations of Black writers, from Pap Khouma to Gabriella Ghermandi, have been at the forefront of this movement by rethinking the boundaries of Italy and exploring the complex life-worlds of African and Afro-descendant communities in Italy through memoir and fiction.

  Igiaba Scego is one of the most prominent voices of a new cohort of Black writers in Italy. Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to parents from Somalia; her father served as a high-ranking official in the Somali government before the 1969 Siad Barre coup d’etat. A prolific novelist, journalist, social commentator, and activist, Scego has won numerous awards for her writings on African-Italian identities and the legacies of Italian colonialism. Her newest book, Adua, released in Italy by Giunti this September, represents a welcome intervention into the diversity of Black experiences in Italy. Indeed, Adua can be read as an exploration of what Jacqueline Nassy Brown has termed “diaspora’s counter/parts”–relations among the African diaspora that are based not solely on affinity and sameness, but also on differences and antagonism.
  Igiaba Scego in 2008. Image Credit: Lettera27, via Wikimedia Commons
  Igiaba Scego in 2008. Image Credit: Lettera27, via Wikimedia Commons

  Adua is told through two voices and over three historical moments, which Scego describes as “Italian colonialism, Somalia in the 1970s, and our current moment, when the Mediterranean has been transformed into an open-air tomb for migrants.” Zoppe is a polyglot Somali, descended from a family of soothsayers, who works as an interpreter in the 1930s under Italian fascism. In many ways an embodiment of the tragic maxim “translator as traitor,” Zoppe is torn between his struggle for survival and his deep sense of ethical obligation toward family and nation. A survivor of brutal racist attacks while in Rome, Zoppe’s translation work also affords him a terrifying window into the impending and bloody Italian re-invasion of Ethiopia.

  Adua, Zoppe’s daughter and the book’s namesake, was born in Somalia but left for Rome at the age of seventeen. She is known as a “Vecchia Lira” (Old Lira), the irreverent term used by younger immigrants to describe women of the Somali diaspora who arrived in Italy during the 1970s. Adua’s young husband is a recent Somali refugee who came to Italy via Lampedusa escaping civil war; she calls him “Titanic” in reference to the precarious boat on which he arrived, and the two share an ambiguous relationship that oscillates from the maternal to the hostile.

  Young Adua dreamed of becoming a movie starlet like Marilyn Monroe–her romantic images of Italy were shaped by the films she watched as a child in a theater built by the fascists. Yet after decades in Italy, she only has one title to her name: a humiliating and degrading erotic movie exploiting Italian stereotypes of Black female sexuality. Adua’s own tragic tale is belied by her triumphal name, bestowed by her father to represent the first African anti-imperialist victory.

  Adua is deeply and thoroughly researched, a process Scego describes in the “Historical Note” after the epilogue. It is also a captivating read: the novel is sweeping in its geographical and temporal scope, yet Scego nonetheless renders her complex protagonists richly and lovingly. Adua makes two critical contributions. First, she centers Italian colonial history (particularly Italian colonization and occupation in East Africa) and its reverberations in the present through the lens of lived experience–the layers of intimacy and violence that characterize imperial entanglement. Contrary to the rabid rhetoric of ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, and border securitization in Italy today (seen in the aggressive taunts launched against the likes of Mario Balotelli that “there are no Black Italians”), Scego’s book underscores that “Africans” are not foreign Others intruding into bounded Italian space; rather, these intertwined histories predate Italy’s “official” transformation into a country of immigration during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.

  And second, Scego dispels the notion that there is any sort of unitary Blackness in Italy. Her characters are colonial subjects and aspiring freedom fighters, migrants and refugees of multiple backgrounds and generations–in other words, Afro-Italians of many stripes and political valences. Scego has taken us beyond the all-too common invocation of subjects “trapped between two worlds,” instead portraying a range of experiences that–while still structured by racism, misogyny, and other axes of power–can do justice to the changing face of Italy today.

  Adua is available in print via Giunti Editore, and can also be purchased as an ebook. While the novel is currently available only in Italian, Scego and her editor are hoping to eventually offer translations in multiple languages. In the meantime, you can read an English translation of Scego’s 2003 Eks&Tra prize-winning short story “Sausages” over at Warscapes.

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  Camilla Hawthorne

  Camilla Hawthorne is a doctoral candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research addresses the politics of Blackness in Italy, diaspora theory, and postcolonial science and technology studies.

• Counter Punch
  https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/07/review-igiaba-scegos-adua/
  Word count: 1456

  QUOTED: "The novel skillfully draws together the changing aspects of colonialism over a period of more than a century, asserting the obvious: Europe’s immigration problem today is the result of the ex-colonial subjects’ desire to seek security (from war, from famine, from climate change) in what was once considered the 'mother country'? Some mother."

  July 7, 2017
  Review: Igiaba Scego’s “Adua”

  by Charles R. Larson

  The seductive pull of Western cinema becomes an increasing sub-text in Igiaba Scego’s visceral narrative, Adua, the story of a Somali young woman who becomes a movie star in Italy in the 1970s. It isn’t until the end of the novel, however, that Adua confesses to the lure of those films: “I wanted to be Marilyn. I wanted to Audrey, I wanted to be Katharine or at least Kim Novak. I wanted to tap dance like Ginger Rogers and do the splits like Cyd Charisse. I wanted flowers from Gene Kelly and looks full of respect from a passing Jimmy Stewart. I wanted the white clothes, the crinolines, the puffy sleeves.” (169)

  She wanted another life, anything to remove her from Somalia, but what she got instead was the short-lived career of a porno-star and all of the subsequent humiliation after she realized what had happened. Which is only to say that Adua is the sad account of a young woman’s shattered expectations and escape from her culture and environment. Her one big movie, Femina Somala, was filmed after she was totally inebriated and required to act like a creature of the jungle that has a sexual encounter with a great white hunter. Besides the sex, the movie was a racist smear of African women. The director paid for her airline ticket to Italy with one goal in mind: exploiting her and making a sexploitation movie in the years after Western cinema began making porno movies for mainstream movie theatres. (Remember Deep Throat, playing in your local family-run movie theatre?)

  Adua is left with nothing after the movie is filmed, but she stays on in Italy for many years; and much, much later she marries an illegal Somali man in order to save him from the authorities, from being sent back home. He’s half her age, at most, and she wonders why she “saved” him. “Every night my little man falls asleep on my droopy chest like a baby hungry for milk. I rub his head and nestle my hand in his hair. It makes him forget the cruel waves of the Mediterranean that nearly swallowed him up. It makes him forget the tranquilizers they put in the bland soup at the immigrant welcome center. It makes him forget the girl he used to love, who was raped and murdered by Libyans in the desert.” (23)

  The novel skillfully juxtaposes the fate of Somali immigrants, today, seeking a better life in Europe, with that of much earlier Somalis who were often lured or sent to Italy for exploitative purposes. Adua’s beauty inspired the Italian film director to bring her to Italy. She is old enough to be her young husband’s mother, and she even refers to him as her “little husband, my sweet little Titanic,” (51) a derogatory reference to the American film. But there’s an earlier generation also, her father’s, equally used and abused. His story begins in 1934, when Zoppe is a translator for the Italians. Barely more than twenty, “He spoke Arabic, Somali, Swahili, Amharic, Tigrinya, and several minor languages….” (12) He’s brilliant obviously, but that will not prevent Italians from humiliating him, once he’s brought to Italy by an Italian Count who identified his brilliance.

  I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, but Zoppe’s humiliation is actually even worse than his daughter’s. Eventually, he will come to understand that as a translator he has facilitated the exploitation of his own people. There’s an interesting parallel here with a short story by the great Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah, one of the continent’s finest writers. Years ago, Farah published a short story (“My Father, the Englishman, and I”) that draws on the same issue of how translators—who facilitate colonialism’s implementation and success—are often involved in dicey matters that require them to compromise their own people. Shades of recent accounts of Iraqi translators denied entry into the United States because of Donald Trump’s entry restrictions.

  Thus, Igiaba Scego’s Adua is an indictment of one colonial power, Italy, over several generations and how it destroyed the lives of many of the people “employed” by that power. This is something we have seen before in the works of other African writers who grew up in the countries controlled by the other major colonial powers in Africa, but the story of Italian fascism in East Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eretria) has mostly been unrecorded. The novel skillfully draws together the changing aspects of colonialism over a period of more than a century, asserting the obvious: Europe’s immigration problem today is the result of the ex-colonial subjects’ desire to seek security (from war, from famine, from climate change) in what was once considered the “mother country”? Some mother.

  Igiaba Scego: Adua
  Trans. by Jamie Richards
  New Vessel Press, 183 pp., $17.95

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  Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C. Email = clarson@american.edu. Twitter @LarsonChuck.
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• Christian Science Monitor
  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0616/Adua-explores-the-relationship-between-colonizer-and-colonized
  Word count: 836

  'Adua' explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized

  Somali-Italian author and journalist Igiaba Scego writes with forthright simplicity and unblinking honesty.
  What Are You Reading?
  Tell us about the book that's currently on your bedside table.

  Terry Hong

  June 16, 2017 —Before Igiaba Scego’s novel, Adua, even begins, what’s instantly striking is the “Contents” page, which reveals a trio of chapter titles – “Adua,” “Talking-To,” “Zoppe” – that repeat over 30 chapters. Adua is the daughter, Zoppe the father, and the “Talking-To” segments are Zoppe’s admonishments of Adua which, ironically, link the two more closely on the page than they ever were during their lives.

  As the narrative opens, Zoppe is dead and Adua holds the deed to the family home in Somalia, relatively peaceful after decades of upheaval. After 37 years of living in Rome, Adua is unsure whether she will return to her birth country: “I wonder if I ... will be able to build what future I have left in our land.” Her current life includes a younger refugee husband, whom she refers to as “a Titanic, someone who’d risked drowning at sea to come here.” Adua is fully aware that their relationship is conspicuously practical: “He needed a house, a teat, a bowl of soup, a pillow, some money, hope, any semblance of relief. He needed a mama, a hooyo [mother], a whore, a woman, a sharmutta [prostitute], me.”

  Lacking true companionship, Adua regularly visits nearby Piazza della Minerva, where she talks to a “little marble elephant holding up the smallest obelisk in the world.” Dismissing the strangers who point fingers “’at that black lady talking to herself,’” she confides, “I need to be heard, otherwise my words will fade away and be lost.”

  When Adua was “seven or eight years at most,” Zoppe cleaved her from the caretakers Adua and her sister believed were their parents, unaware that Adua’s birth had caused her mother’s death. While her sister readily “bowed to this new father,” Adua was whipped into submission and fainted. “When I came to,” she recalls, “I had become an actress. No one would ever see my real face again.” At 17, Adua flees Somalia – and her domineering father – chasing promises of film stardom. Her one-and-only celluloid performance costs her “everything,” and yet she must continue to survive in an unwelcoming foreign country for decades to come.

  Zoppe, for all his estrangement, is not unlike Adua. He, too, was a motherless child, and left Somalia for Italy to work as an interpreter, “a linguistic ambassador.” Zoppe’s ability to speak Italian, as well as “Arabic, Somali, Swahili, Amharic, Tiginya, and several minor languages ... [made him] useful in the coming war,” what would become the Second Italo-Abyssinian War of 1935-1936. As an African in Rome in the 1930s, Zoppe thought he “was a miracle"; the local military police, however, react differently and imprison him without cause. Surviving vicious torture, he returns to Somalia, where he works – with considerable success – as a translator in Mussolini’s regime.
  How much do you know about African literature?

  Perhaps from guilt, from doubt, or from anger over his inability to protect his child from violent humiliation despite what he already suffered, Zoppe is unrelenting in his criticisms and warnings leveled at this daughter. His “Talking-To”s include his justification for Adua’s forced infibulation, even as he admits that his late wife would never have allowed such mutilation to occur; that butchery will signal the unbridgeable separation between father and daughter. As Adua and Zoppe’s diverging narratives highlight their mutual failure to communicate, the interstitial “Talking-To”s reveal a longing to understand, to connect, even to forgive.

  The Italian-born daughter of Somali parents, Scego, who is also a highly-regarded journalist with a PhD in education specializing in postcolonialism and migrant experiences, writes with forthright simplicity and unblinking honesty. Her unadorned sentences – concisely rendered from the 2015 original Italian by Milan-based translator Jamie Richards – might initially suggest a straightforward narrative of generational family dysfunction, but Scego’s ending “Historical Note” clearly suggests something more substantial than mere storytelling. Scego notes “three historical moments” that define “Adua”: “Italian colonialism, Somalia in the 1970s, and our current moment, when the Mediterranean has been transformed into an open-air tomb for migrants.”
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  In just over 200 pages, Scego exposes the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized over decades, addresses the personal price of working for (in collusion with?) the colonizer, and examines the ongoing status of peripatetic refugees arriving on Italian shores – at least those who survive the treacherous journeys. Bearing witness through fiction, Scego’s “Adua” gives urgent voice to the silent caught between shifting loyalties, abusive power, and nations at war.

  Terry Hong writes BookDragon, a book blog for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

• The Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-adua-by-igiaba-scego/
  Word count: 1407

  QUOTED: "The novel is not a linear, autobiographical tale; instead, the author merges African fable and folklore, family anecdotes, and a sophisticated knowledge of literature and cinema to explore themes of colonialism, racism, and power."

  A Review of Adua by Igiaba Scego

  Gretchen McCullough
  Translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards
  (New York, NY: New Vessel Press, 2017)

  Adua, by Igiaba Scego, translated by Jamie Richards, is a lyrical novel that describes the cultural alienation of Somalis living in Italy, both in the present and during the 1930s under the reign of Mussolini. While Scego’s family is originally from Somalia (her parents fled the country because of a coup d’etat in 1969) the novel is not a linear, autobiographical tale; instead, the author merges African fable and folklore, family anecdotes, and a sophisticated knowledge of literature and cinema to explore themes of colonialism, racism, and power.

  Adua centers on the idea of a split identity. In the opening chapter, the main character, Adua, who is herself from Somalia, is confused about which country she should call home, Somalia or Italy. Her friend, Lul, has decided to repatriate to Somalia, yet Adua wonders if she wants to return. And, even though she has inherited her father’s house, she reflects upon her strained relationship with her father. She loves the seagulls in the summers in Rome and talks to Bernini’s elephant in the Piazza, who listens, unlike her father. She feels a connection with the African elephant, who, like her, is “from the Indian Ocean.” However, she is unsettled when an African woman on a tram recognizes her from her past role in a movie.

  Movies are important in the novel. Adua remembers the little cinema named Il-Faro, or the Lighthouse, in Magalo from her childhood there. For African housewives, Western movies are fantasy, an escape from household drudgery and their “fat husbands.” All they needed were a few minutes “to get lost in the blue eyes of Paul Newman.” For Adua, movies represent adventure, romance, and the world of the imagination; an escape from her traditional African background and family life; and the freedom that she naively believes Italy will offer her. In reality, she is bought by traffickers who sell her to a couple, Arturo and Sissi, producers of a porn flick, who exploit her. Adua tries to convince herself that she will become a star, like Marilyn Monroe. Yet this self-delusion shatters when Arturo and Sissi take her to their beach house, get her drunk, and violate her to satisfy their sadistic, depraved fantasies, as Adua is the victim of female genital mutilation: her clitoris has been clipped and her vagina has been sewn up. In a harrowing scene, Sissi and Arturo hold her down and “deflower” her with a pair of scissors so that Arturo can sleep with her while Sissi watches.

  Adua’s jungle poses in Arturo and Sissi’s movie might seem mild, if we compare them to the cruel rape of their seventeen-year old starlet. The Italian producers rely on African sexual clichés, which appeal to Western Oriental fantasies. In their tawdry flick, Adua is “a panther” who splays herself open, ready to be conquered, or runs naked on a beach with a man, Nick, who, in actual fact, is gay. Nick is gentle with her, and they “fake love talk and orgasm” and dream of acting in better movies. She dreams of being another Judy Garland, “skipping around like a baby butterfly.” Because of Nick’s sensitivity and kindness with her on the set, she does not necessarily feel degraded by the sexual postures. Instead, her feelings of humiliation are heightened off-camera, where she is continuously degraded.

  Besides Adua’s perspective, the novel rotates between two other points-of-view: Adua’s authoritarian father, Zoppe, lecturing and scolding his daughter in a section called “Talking To,” as well as her father’s uncensored first person point-of-view in a section simply titled “Zoppe.” Tragically, Adua’s father’s harsh experiences in Italy and on the African continent do not necessarily make him kinder to his daughter. His sermons, rants, and homilies on life, love, and gender offer Adua little guidance for finding her way in the world. He says that “the world is cruel,” but does not explain why. He “spits on love” because he is disappointed his wife died in childbirth, which is hardly the fault of the daughter. When Adua finds a picture of him in military uniform, he refuses to talk about his past or his role as a translator in imperial Italy.

  When we are first introduced to Zoppe, he is a young man being “pummeled” by other soldiers in the army because he is black. He finds refuge in visions and hallucinations of the “giant and his blonde girl,” a Jewish father and daughter he met by chance on the street, who invited him to their home. He wanted to thank them for coming to him at his dark hour, but “they were neither made of flesh nor bone.” Zoppe wishes he could actually embrace the father and daughter, but he “didn’t know how to embrace people.” When he is tortured in jail, the visions of the Jewish family return to him and he senses that they are in danger because of the increasingly hateful, anti-Semitic mood in the city.

  Zoppe acknowledges that this extraordinary clairvoyant power does not necessarily help him change the course of anyone’s destiny: “I can see things before other men, but I wasn’t granted the power to change the future, neither theirs nor mine.” These dream-like, surreal visions are highlighted by Jamie Richard’s agile translation. For example, in this passage Zoppe foresees the grisly violence of Italian conquest:

  Detached rooster heads, tongues hanging from pomegranate trees, a sea red with blood, and him with wounds all over his back. And as the voyages progressed and he could feel Mogadishu approaching, his visions became more outrageous. A man riding a leopard laughed wildly, while a crow made a nest on the snakelike head of a monster with swollen lips. Zoppe didn’t recognize anything. In those monstrous visions nothing had a human form. People with three layers of teeth were talking to oxen that had rabbit ears, and crouched next to them was a giraffe’s head excreting butterflies over a pile of corpses…

  Bestiality is represented by beheaded creatures, mutilated tongues, and blood. People are no longer human, but have transformed into animals during the massacre. Zoppe is not only an observer of the massacre, but is also hurt with “wounds all over his back,” the moral price for collaborating with the occupiers.

  The conclusion of the novel returns to Adua in the present and explores another variation of the master/slave relationship. In a surprising reversal, an older, less attractive Adua pays a young, handsome refugee for sex and affection. In the end, though, she lets the young man, Ahmed, go free at the same Piazza where the novel began. A seagull snatches the blue material of her father’s turban off her head, the symbol of Zoppe’s enslavement to the Italians. Relinquishing symbols of slavery or oppression isn’t hard, like knocking down statues or burning flags. It is much more difficult to break free of insidious historical patterns of master and slave; instead, racial and gender relationships have to be renegotiated in a world, still unjust, imperfect, and inequitable.

  Ahmed gives Adua a parting gift, a video camera, and urges her to tell her story, “however you think and feel.” Maybe remembering and recording stories honestly, even if they are painful, is the first step toward liberation.

  | | |

  Gretchen McCullough is a writer and translator, teaching at the American University in Cairo. Her stories and essays have appeared in:The Texas Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Barcelona Review, NPR, Storysouth and Guernica. Translations in English and Arabic with Mohamed Metwalli include: Nizwa, Banipal, Brooklyn Rail inTranslation and Al-Mustaqbel. Her bi-lingual book of short stories in English and Arabic, Three Stories from Cairo (2011) and a collection of short stories, Shahrazad’s Tooth, (2013) were published by Afaq Publishers in Cairo. You can read more of her work by visiting her website.

• i-Italy
  http://www.iitaly.org/magazine/focus/op-eds/article/igiaba-scegos-adua-linking-italys-past-and-present
  Word count: 1044

  QUOTED: "Novelist Igiaba Scego, the author of Adua, interweaves time, people, and tragedies, as her solitary character, Adua, whispers her most secret thoughts and dreams to Bernini's marble statue of an elephant in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva."
  "Igiaba Scego is a strong, intense writer, and this reader admits difficulty in grasping her account of the horrid racism inflicted upon black Africans."

  giaba Scego's "Adua": Linking Italy's Past and Present
  Judith Harris (July 12, 2017)

  Santa Maria sopra Minerva (Rome)
  Novelist Igiaba Scego ©Simona Filippini
  Cover of the book "Adua" (Publisher: New Vessel Press)
  Santa Maria sopra Minerva (Rome)

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  Novelist Igiaba Scego, the author of "Adua," interweaves time, people, and tragedies, as her solitary character, Adua, whispers her most secret thoughts and dreams to Bernini's marble statue of an elephant in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
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  Adua is a solitary woman, born in Mogadiscio but living since her late teens in today's Rome. She has no one better to whom she can bare her soul than the marble statue in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. To Bernini's sculpted elephant, upon whose shoulders rises a tiny obelisque, Adua whispers her most intimate and painful thoughts about identity, which are the warp and weave of this novel by Igiaba Scego. Among these painful memories are her relations with her difficult father, Zoppe, whom she sees as compromised for having worked as a translator in Somalia for Mussolini's Fascists, but who was himself a victim of Fascist violence.
  Novelist Igiaba Scego ©Simona Filippini
  Cover of the book "Adua" (Publisher: New Vessel Press)
  Igiaba Scego is a strong, intense writer, and this reader admits difficulty in grasping her account of the horrid racism inflicted upon black Africans.
  Santa Maria sopra Minerva (Rome)

  In Italy, the novel "Adua" was published by Giunti in 2015, and by New Vessel Press this June. with a translation into English by Jamie Richards. The author, Igiaba Scego, is often described as a "transcultural" journalist. She interweaves time, people, and tragedies, including today's: her character Adua is wed to a considerably younger husband. He was one of the desperate migrants who had landed at Lampedusa, and she met him when he was drunk at the train station in Rome. Ambiguity is the name of the game: she treats him kindly at times but then loses her temper. While fearing that sooner or later he will leave her for a younger woman, she knows that he needs her.

  Despite the past between the two countries, for both Adua and her father Italy loomed as a mythical state. Now, however, her father dead, she inherited the family home and daydreams of returning to the "brand-new, peacetime" Somalia. Still, as she writes with elegance:

  I love Rome in the summer, especially the light in the evening when the sun is setting. It’s hot, even the seagulls seem nicer and make you want to hug them.

  They dominate the piazzas, but here you are, my little elephant, and they don’t dare. Shoo, away from Piazza della Minerva! I feel safe when I’m around you. Here,

  I’m in Magalo—at home. My father had big ears too, but he was never good at listening, and I was never able to talk to him. It’s different with you. That’s why I’m

  grateful to Bernini for having made you. A little marble elephant holding up the smallest obelisk in the world. A toothpick.

  The character's name, Adua, was her Somali father's choice and recalls the famous Victory of Adwa of 1896, celebrated every March 1 in Ethiopia as a public holiday. At that time Italy had colonized two African territories, Eritrea and Somalia, and was keen to expand its African empire by invading and conquering Ethiopia. It failed, and the battle, in which 7,000 Italians and over 4,000 Ethiopians died, was the first ever decisive victory of a African army over a European army. Its outcome was Italy's signing the Treaty of Addis Abeba, which recognized Ethiopia as an independent state. In 1991 Somalia then saw a civil war, in which half a million people died.

  Carlo Lucarelli described her book as "a sweet sorrow that made me wish it were much longer," whereas a critic for the Huffington Post called it a "punch in the stomach." And acritic for Blog.Graphe.it wrote that the novel "provokes a disturbing sensation in the stomach for its harshness -- a contemporary story that we do not really want to know about because it is uncomfortable and capable of removing our easy sense of being extraneous to certain arguments."

  As this suggests, Igiaba Scego is a strong, intense writer, and this reader admits difficulty in grasping her account of the horrid racism inflicted upon black Africans. Having been raised in the North of the U.S., and indeed upon what was called during the American Civil War the Underground Railroad Freedom Trail, I knew little of the degree of racism Scego describes. But then, recalling the savage violence of Mississippi's Freedom Summer of 1964, in which friends were among the 700 Northern volunteers participating along with Southern activists, I was obliged to rethink.

  Until that time in what was the most racist and retrograde part of the American South complete segregation existed. During that year dozens of protesters were murdered, tortured, castrated and beaten, and there were 50 explosions. As later was shown, fully half the Mississippi police were members of the Ku Klux Klan; one of the murderers was a county sheriff, another a state legislator, according to a memoir by Nikole Hannah-Jones, published in The Atlantic.

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• EuropeNow
  http://www.europenowjournal.org/2017/08/23/adua-by-igiaba-scego/
  Word count: 1619

  Adua by Igiaba Scego

  This is part of our special feature The Gender of Power.

  Adua, the titular character of Igiaba Scego’s Adua, does not lay claim to her name. Her identity—and the very crux of her appellation—are ruled by the people designed to love her. The novel begins in an impoverished state in Somalia before Adua finds a permanent home in Italy. The men who occupy the years of her life are Zoppe, the father, and the husband she nicknames “Titanic.” Scego’s close examination of these relationships—mirrored in the divergence of their control—is framed against an urgency for autonomy. Both men, introduced to us at the beginning of the novel, immediately offer the dichotomy through which Adua’s narrative evolves. Of her father, she states, “To me, my father was ‘the one who brought me into the world’ or ‘the man who impregnated my mother’ or ‘the person who tore me away from real life’” (20). Of her husband she is similarly removed: “My husband, the boy I married, I never talk to him. I don’t even know why we got married. He was a Titanic, someone who’d risk drowning at sea to come here…” (21). With her heightened disconnect emerges all of the ways in which her men have failed her; apathy she uses to deflect a myriad of disappointments.

  Before Zoppe, she was raised by a man she identifies as “papa” and a mother she calls “mama.” Her mother, known as “Asha the Rash,” died in childbirth. On the day Zoppe comes to claim them, Adua resists, asserting that papa is her father and mama is her mother. The emotional weight that is attached to these names—Asha The Rash, mama, papa, Titanic—is a singular way in which Scego allows the characters to place meaning to the people who are unknowable to them. Zoppe, the most unknowable, immediately becomes a dictator. It is in Adua’s desire to escape for a better life that she finds herself tacked to the tyrannical oppression of others in the most dire circumstances. The distinct pattern in this repetition is that Adua’s gender provides her with the deepest repression.

  Italy, Adua tells us, is freedom:

  “I wanted to dream, dance, fly. I wanted to escape. Italy was everywhere in my life. Italy was kisses, holding hands, passionate embraces. Italy was freedom. And I so hoped it would become my future” (67).

  Scego skillfully encapsulates Adua’s independence to a country—the irony lies in the country, a place laden with fascism. But this Italy does not exist in Adua’s mind. Adua dreams of a place where the taboos surrounding sex, romantic idealism, and uninhibited aesthetic pleasures are not censored or damned. Her idealistic portrait of Italy is what drives her into reckless stardom. Her film, Femina Somala, is a box office success in 1977. She tells us about her director Arturo and his wife Sissi, a controlling and abrasive woman who appropriates Somali culture. She dresses Adua in traditional Somali clothing, perching her on a plastic baobab; “like Jane from Tarzan” (112).

  It is Sissi who wants Adua “at all costs;” (113) who continues to degrade Adua to a “negress” whose long arms she touches in flight, signing fascist songs to her as they fly from Somali to Italy. Adua describes her assault with a particular regard for detail—her Italy does not equate to freedom. Adua is wasted, cold, aware that they are after her body (116). Sissi, the puppeteer, demands Arturo undress her: “‘Arturo, she’s yours, do whatever you want with her,’ Sissi said in a hard military voice that froze my blood” (118). We can hear the brittleness in Sissi’s voice; the way it stills Adua inside. The moments that follow are violent, removing Adua from herself. What is most compelling is not the gratuity of the scene, but the fact that it is Sissi who orchestrates the rape. Other men will touch her, but it is striking that in this first assault, a woman forces Adua open. A woman controls the heat of Adua’s blood. What Scego does here is unnerving, but it speaks volumes: Arturo, passive and unremarkable, is the director of a prominent film. Sissi is his wife, and in an industry at a time where women were not afforded those same opportunities as men, she finds ways to measure her own brand of sovereignty. If Arturo is given public glory, then Sissi sulks between shadows, playing conductor where she can. In a narrative where the women struggle to regain some semblance of independence, Sissi breaks through the glass ceiling in a manner that is truly horrifying, corrupting a young girl in order to rupture through the paralysis placed on her gender. For Adua’s part, the assault she endures follows her through the duration of filming, and Somali continues to seep into her life.

  There are subheadings in which Zoppe speaks to Adua. Entitled “Talking-To,” these sections span the duration of the novel, and in these sections Zoppe criticizes every vein of his daughter. One section describes the genital mutilation he imposes on Adua without empathy or regret:

  “Now you’re free, Adua, just think about that. You don’t have that damned clitoris that makes all women dirty. Snip, it’s gone, finally! Thanks be to God. The pain will pass. The pain is momentary. Whereas the joy of this liberation, Adua, endures” (84).

  His deliberate control of her sex and the callous way in which he refutes her pain is perhaps the most obvious example in the text of a man suppressing a woman—here, he literally hacks away at her femininity, cutting the cord of her womanhood. The irony is this notion that he has somehow freed her, a conviction that feels even grimmer when we remember that Adua desires nothing but her independence. Later, when she is forced by Sissi to open herself to Arturo, the stitches that hold her amputated body are exposed. In a rare moment of profound assertion, Adua tells her story: “They do it to all the girls in my county. They cut our siil, the part that hangs down” (118). Then, there is a reference to scissors. She is cut apart, again, but nothing about the unraveling of her stiches feels liberating At her point of violent penetration, her hymen is forced from her, too, and nothing in her biology belongs to her. She is cut and sewn; ripped and maimed over and over again, slowly losing every inch of her being. Soon she has nothing of herself, reduced to cheap stardom and neglect.

  Later, when Adua has aged and is left with her memories, she still faces subjugation. Scego skillfully rounds the narrative, ending Adua’s story at the same place it began. She looses her turban while with her husband, and it is then symbolically torn by a bird. A seagull picks at the fabric until it is too damaged to repair. Rather than appease Adua’s distress, her husband declares, “You looked terrible with that dull rag on your head. Right over there, at Habshiro, they sells scarves from the Emirates, the latest fashion. Now my wife will be beautiful and chic too” (168). Adua laments that it was her father’s turban. She reflects on the strain of her relationship with Zoppe, mourning years of turbulent grief. The turban, she maintains, represents her slavery. Her shame. The yoke she chose to “redeem herself.”

  Further sections that stem from Zoppe’s point of view give us insight into his remorse. There is some mending between them, empathy and regret that is felt before and after his death. Despite the nuances that define her relationship to Zoppe—to her husband, and Arturo, and Sissi—some solace is found. These moments depicting pain soon followed with redemption are sometimes slight, as simple as the remorse felt over broken cloth. Or they angle over decades, the years fraught with pride. Some sympathy is found for Zoppe, but the bulk of our grief is felt for Adua. The girl who is stitched and cloaked. There are moments, too, (although they are few and far between) where she finds herself at the mercy of herself. She exudes a subtle autonomy when she speaks of her mutilation; or when she touches on her past, articulated with a dimension of detachment that is made of absolution rather than regret. Scego does not feed us these nuances. They are salted into the prose, through Adua’s telling of her life. They are between the lines, intricately weaved into a nostalgia that is not romantic, but potent in mourning.

  Ultimately, Adua is a product of her time and her homeland and in the repressed duality of both things. We examine the will in her survival; a strength she harnesses. What the novel is, then, is an ode to that survival. The ways in which Adua resists the limitations placed on her gender; the first place she calls home. Repeatedly she fails; in different countries, in different homes, but she tries. Unabashedly she tries.

  Yasmin Roshanian holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She is currently writing a novel surrounding a family of Iranian immigrants. She lives in New York.

  Adua
  by Igiaba Scego, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards
  Publisher: New Vessel Press
  Paperback / 185 pages / 2017
  ISBN: 978-1939931450
  To read more book reviews, please click here.
  Published on July 6, 2017.
  Tags: book literary, italian, italy, literary, translation

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