This paper intends to explore some short stories and novels by Ubax Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego. Ali Farah was born in Verona from an Italian mother and a Somali father and lived in Mogadishu until 1991; Scego was born in Rome from Somali parents who left Somalia after Barre’s golpe. Their stories deal with the vicissitudes of the Somali diaspora, and in the background the trails of Italian colonial occupation of Somalia are ever present and visible. Indeed these stories often go back and forth from contemporary everyday life to the past by means of digressions and memoirs.
These literary writings become crossroads where the forgotten Italian colonial past meets contemporary transnational migrations, thus showing how second generations re-shape colonial memories in the migration context of the former colonizing country. If observed from this perspective Italy finds itself in the middle of space and time flows of the actual postcolonial condition, in which Italian identity can no longer be approached as a singular monocultural body but must be seen instead as fraught with interruptions, displacements, and neglected creolizations.
The title of this paper (which is a quotation from Ali Farah’s brief memoir) aims at expressing the efforts and the complexity of dealing with identities that are made of several and not always matching pieces. Therefore, such writings interrogate contemporary Italian culture, its roots and amnesias and, at the same time, they force Italian literary criticisim and historiography to open up to postcolonial theories in order to imagine new futures.