The relatively recent arrival in Italy of a plethora of migrants from the four corners of the world, many of whom from African countries, has urged Italians to recuperate their African past as an essential, and often problematic, component of their national identity. Colonialism, removed for a long time from both history books and the national conscience, has been partially uncovered and increasingly talked about. In particular, Somalia, one of Italy’s former colonies, recently at the center of international attention due to its fundamentalist Islamic turn, has been re-discovered by the Italian media, while a polyphonic counter-voice has been offered recently by a number of artists from the Somali diaspora, who have recounted their transnational stories in their fictional and non-fictional works.
The paper analyses some short narratives by two Somali Italian women writers born in the Seventies, Ubax Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego. I am interested in seeing how these writers’ texts differ from those by Somali Italian writers from an older generation, such as Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and Sirad Hassan, and in exploring the ways in which younger Somali authors ‘write back to the center’, in Rushdie’s words, or ‘talk back in a destination culture’, in Parati’s words—in particular, how they reconstruct colonialism and deconstruct postcolonialism, and what they contribute to the narration of a multicultural Italian nation. I am also interested in seeing how these works relate to each other, to other Italian migrant writers’ texts, and to those by other Afro-European, postcolonial authors.