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
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
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,
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
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:
What does it mean to me to be Italian…
I had no answer. I had a hundred.
I am Italian, but also not.
I am Somali, but also not.
A crossroad. A junction.
A mess. A headache.
I was a trapped animal.
A being condemned to eternal anguish (Scego 2012 [2010], p. 159).
3All translations from the Italian are the author’s if not otherwise indicated.
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 whiteness of that skin [her grandfather’s skin] disturbed the idea of my proud African identity which I had constructed. No one is pure in this world. We’re not just black or white. We are the result of a meeting or of a collision. We are crossroads, crossing points, bridges. We are mobile. (Scego 2012 [2010], p. 81)
The protagonist of ‘Salsicce’, published as one of a collection of short stories entitled
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
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:
Let’s see: I feel Somali when 1) I drink tea with cardamom, cloves and cinnamon; 2) I pray five times a day facing Mecca; 3) I wear my dirah; […]; 9) I speak Somali and add my two cents worth in loud, shrill tones whenever there’s an animated conversation; 10) I look at my nose in the mirror and I think it’s perfect; 11) I suffer the pangs of love; 12) I cry for my country ravaged by civil war; 13) Plus 100 other things I just can’t remember right now! (Scego 2005a, p. 29)
And some of the things that make her feel Italian:
I feel Italian when: 1) I eat something sweet for breakfast; 2) I go to art exhibitions, museums and historic buildings; 3) I talk about sex, men and depression with my girlfriends; 4) I watch movies with the following actors: Alberto Sordi, Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, […] Roberto Benigni and Massimo Troisi […]; 9) I rant and rave for the most disparate reasons against the prime minister, the mayor, the alderman or whomever happens to be the president; 10) I talk with my hands; 11) I weep for the partisans, all too often forgotten; […] 13) plus 100 other things I can’t keep track of! (Scego 2005a, pp. 29-30)
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
‘Would I be more Italian with a sausage in my stomach? Would I be less Somali? Or the complete opposite? No, I would be the same—the same mix—and if this bothers someone, I won’t give a damn in the future!’ (Scego 2005a, p. 35).
In my opinion, the young woman in ‘Salsicce’ and Igiaba from
Although Igiaba from
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).
I pull out my burgundy passport. I watch it. Zuhra Laamane. Me with my mother’s last name, even if she doesn’t use it. Me, me myself, in person, flesh and bones, tits, pussy and all. Me, Italian. Me, Italian? And the film club card? Well, I’ll bring that one with me too. And the supermarket fidelity card? The one from the National Library? Yes, I’ll bring them all. And even the one from the gas station. Every little bit will help. Each one of these damned cards have my name in capital letters, don’t they? Proof of my residence in the Eternal City as well. Unfortunately, they don’t say that I am Italian, but at least they show that I live here. They’ll strengthen the Italianness of my passport. (Scego 2008, p. 39)
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
Tunis, sustainable Africa. Africa for experienced pockets, white, fat, and dirty pockets. A surrogate of Africa. Fiction. Almost a joke. Like her, Mar Ribero Martino, an endless simulation. A bit of Africa, a bit of Latin America, a bit of Europe. In one word, empty. She, Mar Ribero Martino, was always a foreigner. She belonged to no one. An eternal vagabond. (Scego 2005b, p. 326)
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
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
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
Faced with the doubt of her identity, the protagonist in ‘Salsicce’ decides to buy some sausages from her local butcher, cook them and eat them. In order to prove to herself that she is sufficiently Italian, and that she belongs to the Italian culture, the young woman, a Sunni Muslim, decides to break an important religious taboo. The attempt to eat the sausages ends in the young woman throwing up before she has even tasted them:
Looking the other way, I put them on the blue dish. The beauty of the dish has highlighted the ugliness of these badly boiled sausages. I sit down. I get up to fetch a glass of water. I sit down again. My legs won’t stop trembling, and my wrist shakes. I stick my fork in the smaller sausage. I raise it to my nose—yuck, it stinks!
I shut my eyes and bring the filthy sausage to my lips. I am conscious of an acid, vomit-like taste in my mouth. So this is what sausages taste like—vomit? Then I feel something wet on my chest, so I open my eyes. I’m shocked to see that I’ve thrown up my breakfast: a bowl of cereal with cold milk and an apple. And the sausage? Where’s the sausage? There it is, still whole, stuck on the fork. I didn’t have time to put it in my mouth before I threw up. This is a sign!
I am not meant to eat this sausage. For the first time my head begins to form conscious thoughts. “What if it was all a mistake?”
Sure, if I eat this pseudo-sausage covered with canary yellow scales of vomit I might (possibly) be Italian, but then, what about Somalia? What am I going to do with Somalia—trash it? (Scego 2005, pp. 31-32)
The sausages become an enforced mark of identity of Italianness, which the protagonist physically repulses. This is not only because they are made of pork, but just as much because they represent a forced intrusion into her identity, threatening to annihilate or make her renounce a large part of her selfhood. In ‘Salsicce’, the body becomes a meeting place for the public and the private, between society’s persistent demands on the protagonist to demonstrate her belonging to Italian culture, and her private and intimate relationship with both her religion and her sense of identity. In this sense, it could be stated that she takes part in what Vetri (2011) calls a bodily sense war, in which the migrant character is regarded a ‘transgressor of the senses as well as a cultural transgressor’ (p. 171). According to Vetri, the body is always changing, realigning itself ‘to comply with the body norms of the new cultural environment and thus achieve a feeling of solidarity’ (p. 171), as we have seen the protagonist of the short story initially try to do. Her attempt to comply with the pre-given norms of Italianness, represented by the sausages, fails to succeed thanks to the act of abjection, leading her instead to accept her hybrid identity. Instead of a complete integration of the migrant character and a neutralisation of differences, the young woman represents the literary characters of those authors who ‘by overriding ethnic, linguistic, sexual, and cultural barriers, through new shades of realism that center on the sensorial body […] have begun to explore the possibility of a suspension of such identities in favor of a solidarity through the universal condition of bodily suffering and pleasure’ (Vetri 2011, p. 173).
Sciubba (2016) carried out an analysis of Scego’s first novel,
7Rhoda gets infected with HIV, and moves back to Mogadishu where she dies after being wounded by a rapist gang, but her story doesn’t end with her death because her grave is dug up by vandals.
The plots of ‘Salsicce’ and
The five narrators of
As a child still living in Somalia, Zuhra was sent to a convent school where she was sexually abused by one of the teachers, an Italian man by the name of Aldo, implying, as I see it, an acute postcolonial critique from the author’s perspective: the innocent Somali child and the abusing white man violently taking advantage of her functions as a comment on colonial Italy during its brutal imperial regime in Italian East Africa (1936–1941) in the Fascist era. Shortly after the abuse was discovered, Zuhra emigrated to Italy with her mother Maryam, to be reunited with Zuhra’s father, Elias, who had escaped the Somali military regime before Zuhra was born. Although Elias was nowhere to be found, Maryam decides to stay in Rome and make a future there for her daughter.
Walking around Rome during a school excursion, Zuhra realises that she can’t see the colours surrounding her, and she reflects upon the connection between the sexual abuse she has suffered and the long-term consequences, such as the loss of colours and her difficulty in letting herself love and be touched by a man:
I am colourless. Without defenses. Virgin. Alone. […] I’m a little ashamed of this, it’s just that the virgins are a bit discolored, very nervous, too. I’d love to find a guy, I’d really like to see the colours again, but no one goes to the supermarket to buy a colour or a guy, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Sure, of all the girls in the fifth grade, I’m the only one still with her heart’s hymen intact. Out of eight girls, I’m the only one still in this absurd state. Only I have a stitched membrane in my heart. (Scego 2008, p. 9)
In order to feel whole again, Zuhra very meticulously searches every corner of the city to get her colours back, and when the narration begins, the only colour she is still missing is the colour red. The colour of love and blood:
That uncle [title given to men in Somalia] took all my colors, all of them. He took them with him, but it is not OK. He had already taken another part of me; couldn’t he have left me at least the colors? Because of this I now look for them like a madwoman all over Rome. Ranieri [Zuhra’s teacher] said that in Rome we stumble on colors. That’s why I keep walking deeper into the city. At the Park of Veio I found the yellow one, dangling lazily.
Exploring the different zones of Rome, Zuhra, slowly, but surely, as we see in the previous quote, recovers the lost colours connecting them closely with the places in which she finds them.
As mentioned previously,
People are afraid of the word menstruation; they have a total panic. People panic when something is too true. Before going to Dr. Ross [the nickname of Zuhra’s psychologist], I was afraid of it too. I didn’t mention it; I didn’t say anything about it. I was under the illusion that it would disappear from my life forever if I didn’t name it. I dreamt of a permanent menopause. I don’t hate it. At first a bit, yeah. […] But not because it is painful. Everyone else hates it for that reason. […] But it was not because of the pain that I didn’t mention it. Not because of the physical one, at least. It was because of another pain. Every time it arrived, every time I saw my dirty underpants, it saddened me. […] I looked at my underwear, at the toilet paper and it saddened me. I looked carefully at everything. I stood there, hoping that something would happen. Usually nothing happened. They have told me that menstruation has the color of blood […] It is red. But I only know it from hearsay. When I look at my underwear, I only see a gray dot. […] I’d like to see that thread of red gushing from my legs. (Scego 2008, pp. 16-17)
The long internal monologue takes place in a café in Rome. Zuhra realises that her period has started, and the thought of ruining her new white pants, thus underlining the contrast between the whiteness and the innocence of the white pants and the filthiness of the menstrual blood, makes her reflect on both her own and others’ relationship with the word ‘menstruation’. Not, as she says in the monologue, the
While Zuhra is waiting for the red colour to return to her, she starts to write down, in red notebooks of course, memories of things she experiences, people she meets etc., regarding her life-experiences as proper for a novel. Her psychologist, who connects Zuhra’s somatic expression of the childhood trauma to her loss of female identity, thinks that the writing process will allow Zuhra to get in touch with her femininity:
the doctor […] liked the idea of me writing. Because of that feminine which should come out. I didn’t understand it, though. Feminine? Why, can’t they see that I’m a girl? I have a big bum, tits, small though, a pussy, […], a heart-shaped mouth— what do I miss to demonstrate it? And then, once every twenty-eight days, I have the menstruation. (Scego 2008, p.16)
Zuhra sums up some of her physical characteristics; she has a vagina and menstruation, so she is a woman, but she also has noticeable buttocks and heart-shaped lips, attributes that coincide with a gender-stereotypical and hetero-normative conception of femininity. So, which one of the so-called feminine characteristics is she missing in order to be a complete woman? Warmth? The ability to care for others? She doesn’t care about fashion, and she cuts her hair short, but does this really mean that she’s not in contact with her femininity? Does her psychologist’s view on Zuhra’s femininity concern her behaviour or any of her physical attributes? Or perhaps it is her way of thinking about, and dealing with, her surroundings and her own body? Or does it pertain to her difficulties in having a physical relationship with men? Which of the gender stereotypes describing femininity should Zuhra get in touch with, according to her psychologist? The novel doesn’t reveal any answer to these questions. In my opinion, it instead emphasises and criticises stereotypical notions of gender through the voice of Zuhra.
Every time Zuhra gets too physically close to a man, she ends up with anxiety attacks and breakdowns, but during her stay in Tunis, a healing process starts. The turning point comes when she returns to Rome after the Arabic language course, symbolically represented in the following, liberating, dream of giving birth:
I had stronger and more frequent contractions. After that I do not remember what happened [….] Instead of a baby, only long iron bars. They looked horrible, heavy and some of them were even rusty. […] I got up feeling well from that dream. Sweaty, but with a heart beating at the correct pace. […] I touched my belly and I felt light as a butterfly. […] I did not give birth. I just expelled it […] Then, when I was awake, I touched my belly, I even touched my vagina. I felt so light! I have gone beyond Babylon, do you understand? Beyond everything, to a place where my vagina is happy and in love. (Scego 2008, p. 449)
Although the abject movement in Zuhra’s case previously revolved mainly around her complex relationship with menstruation, at this point in the healing process it manifests itself through labour and the final expelling of the symbolical iron bars that have so far kept her captive. It may also appear that the pain of abjection that Zuhra has experienced may be required of her to live in order for her to find answers to the quest for a more unified identity.
As we have observed, the Arabic language course Zuhra attended initiates her healing process, and, introducing the novel’s last chapter, the epilogue, Zuhra connects the Somali language to motherhood and pregnancy:
I wonder if my mother’s mother tongue can be a mother to me […] In Somali I found the comfort of her uterus, in Somali I’ve heard the only lullabies she sang to me, in Somali I certainly had my first dreams. […] When she talks, my mother is always pregnant. She gives birth to the other mother, to her mother tongue. I like to listen to her. It makes me travel inside her. I want to be silent forever, just listening to her. Witness a mother giving birth to a mother. (Scego 2008, pp. 443-445)
Once again, the author turns to the images of pregnancy and childbirth, but this time it is not the atrocious but liberating birth of iron bars, but instead the desire to be reunited with the mother’s safe womb as a metaphor for coming home and feeling at peace with the Somali language and culture.
The last piece of Zuhra’s identity puzzle appears to fall into place shortly after her return from Tunis and the dream quoted above, when she receives her father’s recorded life story. In the recordings, she finds not only an account of her father’s life, but also of her close relatives, all of the stories that lead to her own and her mother’s life stories. These stories enable her to find a sense of a self, represented through the redness of her menstrual blood, and, although the concluding part of the epilogue changes from first to third person narration, the focus remains on Zuhra:
She picks up her panties. […] They are dirty. A wet, large spot. It looks like a star. Maybe it is. It is a red star. A bit wet. But beautiful. It emanates light. A menstrual star that shines only for her, endlessly. The form is dispersed. The star expands. A constellation. Inside the constellation, the story of her womanhood. And in her story, the one of others before her and others after her. The stories are interwoven, sometimes they converge and often they create each other. All of them united by a love of color. [..] In a moment the constellation dissolves lightly. Fades, leaving a halo of red. And if this was love in Rome? A shade of red? (Scego 2008, p. 456)
As we can understand from the quote, the redness of her menstrual blood makes Zuhra step into the story of womanhood; she is finally able to see the red colour of her own blood, she feels like a woman so alike to those in the generations before her and to those that will come.
Opening and concluding the novel with the focus on menstrual blood, the polyphonic structure resembles the menstrual cycle. It also demonstrates Zuhra’s focus on the abject. The colourless menstrual blood, which both saddens and makes her long for its redness, not only marks the distinction between the inside and the outside of Zuhra’s body, it also marks the difference between Zuhra herself and other women. The blood, just like the mother in Kristeva’s theory of abjection, becomes both the repulsive abject and something with which the protagonist desires a reunion. And it is through that same blood that Zuhra gains a more complete sense of identity: she has suffered sexual abuse from which she slowly heals; she is the fruit of two different cultures, the Somali and the Italian, a background that makes her a racialised black woman in a white Italy, but, as the novel concludes, she is also part of a long line of women telling their story.
The centrality given to the body ties together the projects of the protagonist of ‘Salsicce’ and of Zuhra in
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
Already in school, Igiaba, the autofictional protagonist of
Then I remembered a story by Karen Blixen […] I was struck by the title “The Cardinal’s First Tale”. I remember that a lady asked the Cardinal: “who are you?” The Cardinal replied: “Allow me to answer you in the classic manner, and to tell you a story”. […] It was better to do as the Cardinal: try to tell the story up until then […] Here I have tried to tell the shreds of my story. Of my paths. Shreds because the memory is selective. Shreds because the memory is like a shattered mirror. We cannot (nor should we) glue together again the pieces. We shouldn’t try to make a beautiful copy of it, sort the pieces, clean them of every imperfection. Memory is like a doodle. (Scego 2008, p. 160)
In both
By paying homage to the long history of women’s suffrage and writing Scego affiliates herself with and celebrates women’s cultural and literary genealogies that trespassed and transgressed all sorts of boundaries to overcome aphasia. The writer also places herself side by side with women still fighting to use their voice—recognizing that this long history of struggle is by no means over. (Carroli & Gerrand 2013, p. 98)