The quest for identity through bodily pain: Female abjection in the literary work of Igiaba Scego

A recurring aspect of contemporary migrant narratives, be they literary, cinematic or aesthetic, is the representation and problematising of such concepts as home, belonging and identity. In the present article, I focus on how three of the protagonists in the literary works of Igiaba Scego, an Italian-Somali author, undergo processes of bodily pain in order to come to terms with their identity which, in the terminology of postcolonial studies, is characterised by hybridity and in-betweenness (Bhabha, 1994 [2004]; Bhabha, 1996).

Igiaba Scego, one of Italy’s leading authors of so-called migrant literature, was born in 1974 in Rome to Somali parents, who had settled in Italy after fleeing the Siad Barre coup in 1969. Scego, who holds a PhD in pedagogy, collaborates with major Italian newspapers, such as La Repubblica, L’Unità and Internazionale, as well as literary magazines that address migrant issues, such as the online magazine El-Ghibli, and she is one of the most prominent voices in the cultural debate on topics such as the situation of second and third generation migrants, racism and cultural identity. She has been awarded several literary prizes for her novels and short stories, including the Mondello Award for the autobiographical novel La mia casa è dove sono (2010, My home is where I am) in 2011, and the Eks&tra Prize for migrant writers for the short story ‘Salsicce’ (‘Sausages’) in 2003.

Scego’s literary characters are, in many ways, inspired by the author’s own life experience of being born and raised by migrants in Rome; her protagonists are often of the same cultural background, experiencing similar challenges to those that the author herself has probably encountered, and Scego frequently debates issues of identity and belonging in Italian settings, not only in her essayistic and journalistic works, but also in her literary production. However, the definition of Scego as a migrant author is debatable, being born in Rome, she herself is not a migrant

1The International Organization for Migration (IOM) defines the migrant as ‘any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of (1) the person’s legal status; (2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary; (3) what the causes for the movement are; or (4) what the length of the stay is. IOM concerns itself with migrants and migration-related issues and, in agreement with relevant States, with migrants who are in need of international migration services’ (IOM, https://www.iom.int/key-migration-terms).

Many of Scego’s protagonists are oscillating and searching between, and choosing from, different expressions of identity, and they are also often confronted with other people’s pre-established conception of their sense of belonging; standing out as black Italians in a still fairly homogeneous white Italy, at least according to a stereotypical idea of Italian society, demanding of them to choose between either a Somali or an Italian identity. Thus, when reading Scego’s literary work, the conflictual relationship that many of her protagonists have with notions such as identity and cultural belonging is striking. Her protagonists’ autoanalytical questioning and lack of unity in terms of identity sometimes results in painful and self-inflicted bodily expressions, such as mutism, bulimia, violation of religious taboos, headaches, shame, destructive sexual relationships and rage, among others. Therefore, the destabilising of concepts such as culture and identity that occurs in Scego’s texts is not a peaceful, joyous or harmonious process. Therefore, I claim here that the questioning of, and the search for, identity and belonging that Scego’s protagonists carry out, in regard to both migrant hybrid identity and gender identity, are painful physical and psychological processes. What is the relationship between these physical expressions of pain and the literary characters’ questioning of identity? Do they find the answers to their questions, and is there an end to the painful processes leading towards acceptance of their identity? In order to discuss these questions, I will focus on the representations of belonging and identity quest through processes of bodily pain, as portrayed by several of Scego’s literary female characters. The discussion will be primarily based on the autobiographical novel La mia casa è dove sono, the short story ‘Salsicce’ and the novel Oltre Babilonia (2008, Beyond Babylon).

As previously stated, many of the characters in Scego’s literary works struggle with their identity, and I will introduce my discussion on painful belongings with the autofictional novel La mia casa è dove sono. It was first published in 2010, and tells the story of Igiaba Scego’s childhood and of her family, which is spread across the world. At the same time, the author-protagonist comments on contemporary issues in Italian society, such as the situation for second-generation young people confronted with the jus sanguinis principle for citizenship and the Bossi-Fini law of 2002

2The Bossi-Fini law, decree law no. 189, named after the Minister for Devolution and the Deputy Prime Minister, the leaders of the right-wing parties Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale, respectively, at that time, introduced a number of alterations, including one stating that immigrants without residence permits will be accompanied to the border and expelled immediately after the law is introduced, and another stating that asylum seekers will be placed in detention while awaiting asylum review, and that all foreigners applying for a residence permit will be fingerprinted.

The story starts with Igiaba visiting her brother, who lives in Manchester, UK, and, in order to remember the Mogadishu of their childhood and adolescence, they, together with other family members, begin to draw a map of the city, which, now, ruined by years of civil war, does not exist in its former state. The sketched representation of the city, and all the memories connected to it, leads Igiaba to ponder on her conception of identity and reflect upon her multiple sense of cultural belonging:

As can be observed in the above quote, the protagonist’s double identity is experienced as a crossroads between several identities, making it difficult for her to choose between them. Interrogating this multiplicity, she feels like a trapped animal, restless and without escape routes, and like someone condemned to eternal torment, alluding to an infernal state of anguish without any solutions to improve things. One of the answers to Igiaba’s troubled identity quest is to be found earlier in the novel when the author-protagonist is looking at a photo of her grandfather, and she concludes her pondering with a comment on the hybridity and flexibility of all human kind:

The protagonist of ‘Salsicce’, published as one of a collection of short stories entitled Pecore nere

4The collection includes short stories by three other migrant female authors writing in Italian (Ingy Mubiayi, Laila Wadia and Gabriella Kuruvilla).

That vile question of my damned identity! More Somali? More Italian? […] I don’t know what to answer! I have never “fractioned” myself before […] Naturally, I lied. I don’t like doing it, but I had no choice. I looked right into those bulging eyes of hers and said: “Italian”. And then, even if I’m as black as coal, I turned red as a beetroot. I would have felt like an idiot even if I had said “Somali”. I am not a 100% anything. I never have been, and I don’t think I can be now. I think I am a woman with no identity. Better yet, a woman with several identities (Scego 2005a, p. 28).

5In the following I will make page references to the Italian text, but the translation into the English of this short story is carried out by Bellesia and Offredi Poletto and retrievable at http://www.warscapes.com/retrospectives/food/sausages (Bellesia and Offredi Poletto 2005).

In a similar manner to Igiaba in the autofictional novel, the young woman is unable to make a clear choice between an Italian and a Somali identity; she emphasises the fact that she, as the autofictional Igiaba, has multiple identities, by creating a list of things that make her feel Somali:

And some of the things that make her feel Italian:

The young woman realises that she is the sum of all the things she has listed, and they make her feel simultaneously Somali and Italian. As pointed out by Hanna (2004), Scego’s ‘Salsicce’ insists on multiplicity and hybridity, and I believe that the two lists quoted above replace the conception of identity as either/or, and rather emphasise the fact that different identities or expressions of cultural belonging can co-exist within the same individual without suppressing or favouring any of them. And for the short story’s protagonist this is crucial, from now on she will not hide her hybridity and pretend to be someone she is not:

In my opinion, the young woman in ‘Salsicce’ and Igiaba from La mia casa è dove sono both represent what Homi Bhabha calls in-betweenness, and they come to terms with their puzzle of identity through what Bhabha defines as the Third Space (Bhabha, 1994 [2004]): a space that is created when cultures or individuals meet and interact. According to Bhabha, meaning is produced when entities such as you and I, familiar culture and new culture meet in this metaphoric Third Space. Thus, the Third Space is a position of conflict in which we are confronted with the new and the unfamiliar, but it is also a space that opens up a dialogue between individuals and cultures. A negotiation of cultural identity and mutual understanding or recognition of cultural differences can be produced via the meetings occurring in this Third Space. According to Bhabha, this does not mean a neutralisation of the differences, rather, a productive dialogue between those same differences. I assert that, with one foot in each culture, the two women of ‘Salsicce’ and La mia casa è dove sono represent Bhabha’s in-betweenness. The protagonists’ different cultural experiences exist side-by-side, and the two women converge and intermingle multiple identities, exemplifying an in-between hybrid identity. Furthermore, the doubts they both feel and the conflicts they experience, demonstrate a position similar to Bhabha’s Third Space, and the conflict becomes a critique of essentialist understandings of concepts such as fixed identity and original culture. I assert that they launch themselves into the Third Space, in which entities like identity and cultural meaning have no ‘primordial unity or fixity’, as Bhabha claims, and in which the ‘same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew’ (2004 [1994], p. 55).

Although Igiaba from La mia casa è dove sono and the protagonist of ‘Salsicce’ are bewildered because of the many accessible expressions of culture and identity they have at hand, in the polyphonic novel Oltre Babilonia, published in 2008, Zuhra Laamane and Mar Ribero Martino experience other sides of the in-between position and the hybrid identity they embody.

6The novel is structured in eight parts (plus a prologue and an epilogue), each containing a chapter narrated by the novel’s five main characters, always in the same order, thus presenting five alternating voices: the two mothers, Miranda, from Argentina, and Maryam, from Somalia, their two daughters, Mar and Zuhra, respectively, and their common, but unknown father, the Somali Elias. The novel’s chapters are named after the narrators’ nicknames: La Nus-Nus (Mar), meaning ‘the half-half’ in Arabic, la Negropolitana (Zuhra), la Reaparecida (Miranda) meaning ‘the reappeared’ in Spanish, la Pessottimista (Myriam), and Il Padre (the Father).

During previous travels and stays abroad, Zuhra has encountered difficulties regarding her Italian citizenship (Scego, 2008), putting her in humiliating situations because of her non-stereotypical Italian looks; difficulties that now make her even more conscious of her norm-divergent appearance and that also make her feel uneasy.

The in-betweenness that we meet in Scego’s literary texts is played out in both cultural and bodily contexts: from the music they listen to and the TV shows and films they like to watch, as we have seen in ‘Salsicce’, to the manner in which they walk (Scego, 2005b) and the way they relate to their skin colour. However, not all of Scego’s literary characters come to terms with their hybridity; at times, the hybridity that they live every day is harshly judged by the migrant character her/himself, as in the case of Mar:

Of all the characters in migration, in Oltre Babilonia, Mar is the most troubled about her hybridity, having severe difficulties coming to terms with her mixed Somali-Argentinian origins, not being either white or black, not being either African or European or Latin American. As shown previously, although the protagonists of ‘Salsicce’ and La mia casa è dove sono realise that they must accept their identities as something hybrid, and that their identities are enriched by their heterogeneous and mixed backgrounds, Mar feels empty and never at peace with her in-between and hybrid existence. Instead, she feels rootless and without a place to call home, like an eternal stranger and imposter, as we shall see in the following quote. Mar, travelling to Tunis with her mother, the celebrated poet Miranda, to follow a language course in Arabic at the same language school that Zuhra attends, compares Tunis to herself:

In Mar’s eyes, Tunis is a hybrid fake of the African continent, analogous to her own way of being. Mar, then, appears to represent those who search for surety and stability in terms of identity. Far from the autofictional Igiaba in La mia casa è dove sono and the protagonists of ‘Salsicce’, Mar rather represents those who struggle with migrant rootlessness and emptiness, feeling that they don’t belong anywhere. She depicts the opposite frame of mind to the two aforementioned protagonists, turning the novel Oltre Babilonia into a realistic representation of the world, marked by mobility, migration and hybridity.

Abject artworks, as defined by the Tate gallery, are: ‘artworks which explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety particularly referencing the body and bodily “functions”’ (Tate Gallery 2018), and according to the psychoanalytic theorist and critic Julia Kristeva, literature is one of the privileged places for exploring the abject, because it makes it possible to examine what happens when boundaries break down, such as the distinction between the self and the other, the subject and the object (Kristeva, 1982).

In the following, I explore the concept of the abject, and I will discuss how acts of abjection form part of the identity quest carried out by the character Zuhra from Oltre Babilonia and the young woman in the short story ‘Salsicce’. Is it possible to interpret Zuhra’s focus on menstrual blood as an abject movement within the novel? Does she, with the return of her capacity to see the red colour of her own blood, succeed in bridging the gap between herself and the estranged and colourless menstruation blood, between the subject and the abject? Will the return of the colour red make her reconcile with a more unified identity? And what happens when the young Sunni Muslim in ‘Salsicce’ vomits before eating the sausages she has cooked for herself in order to prove her Italianness? Is it possible to consider the vomiting as a violent act of abjection, and will it break down the protagonist’s attempt to convince herself of the sincerity and purity of her Italianness?

According to Kristeva, ‘what is abject […] is radically excluded and draws me [the subject] toward the place where meaning collapses’ (1982, p. 2). The abject is thus what threatens constructs such as ‘identity, system, order’, and it is ‘what does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (1982, p. 4). The abjection, then, is the response to that which threatens to break down the distinction between the inside and the outside of the body, between the self and the other, between the subject and the object, what, in other words, threatens to break down pre-established meaning and boundaries. In Kristeva’s theoretical discussion, the abjection becomes the subject’s experience of the liminal space, or the encounter between the subject itself and the object, the other. Bodily fluids, such as vomit, blood and semen, as well as excrement, might provoke the sensation of abjection, as well as a corpse and wounds because this makes the subject aware of the body’s boundaries. To exemplify her reflections on the abject, in ‘Approaching Abjection’, published in Powers of Horror (1982), Kristeva presents the example of skimmed milk and nail parings as an everyday experience with the abject: ‘when the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring— experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasm in the stomach’ (1982, pp. 2-3). Using the example of skimmed milk, she turns to the core of the abject: ‘[…] since food is not an “other” for “me”, who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out. I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself’ (1982, p. 3). According to Kristeva, abjection must occur before the subject can enter the mirror stage, during which the boundaries and distinctions between the self and the other occur. She therefore relates the abject to the maternal because the creation of these boundaries is initiated by the separation from the maternal body, that is, when the child no more considers the mother an extension of its own body. Paradoxically, this symbolic separation from the mother’s body, which initiates the child’s process towards subjectivity, also inaugurates the desire for a reunion with the maternal body and a return to a phase in which the child’s needs were taken care of, without question. The mother, then, becomes both the abject and the desired object.

As both Vetri (2011) and Barbarulli (2012) show, Scego writes herself into a tradition of migrant literature that emphasises an embodied experience of pain and trauma, and in which ‘the relationship between language […], identity, and the ontological status of the body becomes a crucial concern’ (Vetri 2011, p. 169). In this analysis, I have examined the relationship between the bodily pain and the identity quest that Scego’s female protagonists experience. In an interview with Daniele Comberiati (2007), Scego stated that what interests her is to analyse what happens to people’s bodies when history marks them (Comberiati, 2007, p. 80).

8‘[…] quello che a me interessa è piuttosto analizzare cosa succede ai corpi quando la storia li investe’ (2007, p. 80).

As this article shows, Scego’s use of vomit and blood, represented through the protagonist of ‘Salsicce’ and Zuhra in Oltre Babilonia, respectively, and semen, fetus and abortion through some of the other narrative strains of this novel, transgresses our sense of cleanliness. I claim that the aesthetic use of the abject emphasises the literary characters’ outside position which is, at the same time, shaking pre-established conceptions of Italian culture and identity. They have themselves become abjects in the eyes of many of their fellow Italians. The characters also use acts of abjection as a means of dealing with their complex identity; through the pain of abjection, they safely establish themselves as hybrid individuals. However, it is not only through acts of abjection; Scego’s literary characters also turn to storytelling and writing as means of healing and support during their identity quest. I will conclude my article on pain and abjection in Scego’s literary works by turning to the metanarrative conclusion of La mia casa è dove sono.

Already in school, Igiaba, the autofictional protagonist of La mia casa è dove sono, finds a solution to some of her identity questioning, via literature and storytelling. In school she feels different, she is bullied, and she is an outsider. She becomes mute among her classmates, but through reading books suggested to her by her teacher, she finds her voice and place among her peers again. Then, as an adult, she again finds the answer to her identity quest through storytelling. She has, as we have previously observed, felt like an animal trapped in a cage or like someone lost at a junction, but the process towards accepting her own complex identity starts with the map drawing of the lost and destructed Mogadishu. The act of telling and writing her own and her family’s story becomes a healing process during which Igiaba finds a sense of being; but not one that is unitary and fixed, rather, one that consists of shreds and pieces and memories of different places and cultures. When, towards the end of the autofictional novel, Igiaba rhetorically asks herself what it means to her to be Italian, she doesn’t give the reader a specific answer; she rather cites the Danish author Karen Blixen:

In both La mia casa è dove sono and Oltre Babilonia, writing and storytelling represent important steps in the healing process and identity quest, and maybe one might apply what Piera Carroli and Vivian Gerrand state regarding La mia casa è dove sono to almost all of Scego’s fictional works: