The Color Line: A Novel - Softcover

Scego, Igiaba

 
9781635420869: The Color Line: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1635420865 ISBN 13: 9781635420869
Verlag: Other Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Inspired by true events, this gorgeous, haunting novel intertwines the lives of two Black female artists more than a century apart, both outsiders in Italy.

It was the middle of the nineteenth century when Lafanu Brown audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for Black women, but she didn’t let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opportunity to study, travel, and follow her dreams, thanks to her indomitable spirit, but not without facing intolerance and violence. Now, in 1887, living in Rome as one of the city’s most established painters, she is ready to tell her fiancé about her difficult life, which began in a poor family forty years earlier.
    In 2019, an Italian art curator of Somali origin is desperately trying to bring to Europe her younger cousin, who is only sixteen and has already tried to reach Italy on a long, treacherous journey. While organizing an art exhibition that will combine the paintings of Lafanu Brown with the artworks of young migrants, the curator becomes more and more obsessed with the life and secrets of the nineteenth-century painter.
    Weaving together these two vibrant voices, Igiaba Scego has crafted a powerful exploration of what it means to be “other,” to be a woman, and particularly a Black woman, in a foreign country, yesterday and today.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Igiaba Scego was born in Rome to a family of Somali ancestry. She holds a PhD in education on postcolonial subjects and has done extensive academic work in Italy and around the world. Her memoir La mia casa è dove sono won Italy’s prestigious Mondello Prize, while La linea del colore was awarded with Premio Napoli and Scego received the International Award Viareggio-Répaci in 2021. Her other novels include Oltre Babilonia (2008) and Adua (2015), both available in English. She is a frequent contributor to “La Lettura”, literary supplement to Corriere della Sera, and to the magazines Internazionale and Confronti. She also co-edited the anthology series Africana (Feltrinelli), with Chiara Piaggio.

John Cullen (1942–2021) is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Siegfried Lenz’s The Turncoat, Juli Zeh’s Empty Hearts, Patrick Modiano’s Villa Triste, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, and Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck.

Gregory Conti has translated numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Italian including works by Emilio Lussu, Rosetta Loy, Elisa Biagini, and Paolo Rumiz. He is a regular contributor to the literary quarterly Raritan.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PROLOGUE
 
Rome, 1887 Tumult in the Square

The first news of the massacre appeared in the French-language Journal de St.-Pétersbourg, closely followed by The Times of London.
Meager information, scanty details. A few hackneyed words. The darkness of unexpected loss.
The news came out of East Africa and was received in Rome with ever-increasing dismay.
Italians had died.
They had died in battle, or maybe in an ambush. Neither the Journal nor The Times was definitive on this point.
The only certainty was that Italians had died far from home, and that they had died most horribly.
One hundred corpses on the battlefield. Two hundred corpses, and then three hundred.
No, five hundred. Five hundred Italian corpses. A round number.
Five hundred dead in East Africa.
But how had they died? And what had they been doing down there in Africa, among the palms and the baobabs? Among the mirages and the mermaids?
And then a name suddenly leaped out of the pages of those European newspapers.
The name was Dogali.
A name known, before the tragedy, to very few people in Italy.
The incident seemed just as obscure in Rome as anywhere else. There hadn’t been any official communication yet. Politicians were keeping quiet, and journalists were awaiting confirmation of what The Times and the Journal had reported in brief, third-page articles.
In the city, the name of Dogali was pronounced through clenched teeth. People in the highest military circles were especially concerned about the general bewilderment that would soon afflict the country.
Rome, however, was not daunted.
Nothing could bring her down. Decrepit millenarian that she was, Rome had seen some troubles in her life: arrogant condottieri, avid Landsknechte, corrupt clerics, young girls sacrificed for reasons of state. By now, the city was used to the rot.
Dogali. The name menaced the City of Seven Hills like a pack of mad dogs.
 
It was February 1, 1887, and Rome was enveloped in cold, crystal-clear air, in a great icy bubble. And so rich aristocrats took from their armoires their satin cloaks and their pure woolen overcoats, while poor people cast about desperately for some rags to cover their unhealthy limbs, prematurely aged by toil and rancor.
Rome, in the first hours of that first day of February 1887, was clad in hope. With a smile, she tried to defeat the icy air that had taken possession of her inhabitants’ fragile souls.
It was in such moments that the city shone like an Indian emerald. It was in such moments that Rome became Rome again.
But it didn’t last long. A vexing rain, an insidious wind, a crowd in tumult could suffice to undo all the magic. And on that day, the spell had been broken by a name: Dogali.
Dogali, an Eritrean city one hundred two meters above sea level and around twenty kilometers from Massawa. In Dogali, the sand was soaked with blood. In Dogali, an invading army—the invaders were Italians—had been surprised by wily Abyssinian patriots, who defended their land with honor and the sword.
But before Dogali, there had been Sahati. There, inside a stronghold, a small fort, were some Italians.
They were tattered and besieged, parched and starving.
Their skimpy provisions were almost gone. Their food would last two days at most. Their condition was critical. They needed reinforcements, which they urgently requested in a telegraph to Massawa.
The Italians were desperate. They were all reciting the Lord’s Prayer, giving each other extreme unction, confessing their sins before it was too late.
“When will the reinforcements come?” the frightened soldiers asked. But nobody knew. Nobody had enough strength to hope. And more than one wondered, “What am I doing here, with broken boots and a torn uniform?”
They were Italians, the officers had told them before they left Italy. They’d told them, “Go and win the fatherland a place in the sun.”
And they, they had believed that lie about the sun. They’d even believed in the Italy that Cavour and the House of Savoy had crudely cobbled together. Only forty years earlier, Italians had been Bourbons and Papists. They’d been abruzzesi and piemontesi, from Abruzzo and Piedmont. And now they were all supposed to acknowledge their union in “a single hope,” according to the lyrics of the song “Fratelli d’Italia” (“Brothers of Italy”) by Goffredo Mameli, who had died defending the Roman Republic in 1849.
But “a single hope” wasn’t something anyone in the little redoubt felt, not in the midst of all that piss-colored sand.
They were all different, those new Italians, and they loved being themselves. They loved their accents, their elongated vowels, their tousled locks of brown hair.
There were no mirrors they could look at themselves in, down there in Sahati. But many of them knew in their hearts that they weren’t so different from the abissini, those Ethiopians they were supposed to do battle with and conquer. Same amber skin, same big eyes, same long limbs, same unruly curls.
But the pay was good, and back home there were bawling infants and waiting women. Back home, they were hungry. A soldier’s pay could plug up all the holes.
It was the prospect of money, more than patriotic sentiment, that had brought them to East Africa. And then there was a beguiling thought, one each of them harbored deep down inside: that a beautiful Ethiopian girl with large, opulent breasts would soon be pressing herself against his pallid chest.
But there was no beautiful Ethiopian girl inside that redoubt of theirs. Only a bunch of starving grunts, ready to stage a rebellion and surrender to the enemy.
The officers were overwrought. Who was it they were supposed to fight? The Ethiopians outside the little fort or the rebels inside?
“When will the reinforcements from Massawa arrive?”
Rome knew nothing of the dilemmas her soldiers were facing in East Africa. She knew nothing of the siege, nothing of the urgent request for help telegraphed to Massawa, nothing of the relief column that was about to be massacred at Dogali. Rome was too wrapped up in herself to care about a handful of rag-tag soldiers catapulted into the sun of darkest Africa. The city was all wrapped up, as usual, in her own trivial little affairs: the premieres at the Teatro Argentina; the juicy gossip about the commendatore’s daughter, who had run off with that French lady-killer; and then there was politics, omnipresent politics, always center stage.
In the drawing rooms of Rome, nobody was talking about the African enterprise. Only in socialist and anarchist circles were there people who condemned that waste of public funds, that governmental rhetoric about colonies, that aggression against free nations.
But apart from a few rare exceptions, as far as Rome was concerned, Dogali didn’t yet exist.
Rome didn’t know that in a few days’ time, Italians, troops in that African wasteland, would be slaughtered, between a brook and a hill. She didn’t know that an Ethiopian commander named Ras Alula Engida, a native of Mennewe in the district of Tembien, the son of a modest farmer, had prepared a plan to teach the invaders a lesson.
After an unsuccessful attack on the fort at Sahati, the Ethiopian ras had decided to abandon his position. He’d feigned a total withdrawal but instead had remained, along with his troops, in nearby Dogali, where they waited in a hollow and readied themselves for a surprise attack on the reinforcements the Italian officers in Sahati had requested from Massawa. Sooner or later,...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1635420865
ISBN 13 
9781635420869
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
544
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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