Memories of the Italian colonial past

Paolo Jedlowski

Public memory and its struggled against the oblivion to which certain
failings themes have been consigned; however, it has almost
never dealt with colonialism. This is not only true of
I am not an expert on colonial history. My perspec- cinema: until the last few years, none of the media
tive is that of the sociology of memory. The theme dealt with this subject. It is a theme on which public
came to me when I was working on a book about memory as a whole long remained silent.
Edgar Reitz’s film Heimat and its role in the A few years ago, Marita Rampazi and Anna
history of the construction of European memory.1 Lisa Tota, two promoters of the sociology of
Heimat opens with the memory in Italy in recent
image of a survivor of the years, published a book on
battlefields of the First World Paolo Jedlowski is Professor of Sociology public memory (Rampazi and
at the University of Calabria (Cosenza,
War. Like the survivors Tota 2007), containing essays
Italy). His main research fields are social
Walter Benjamin describes in theory and sociology of culture. He has by authors from different
Der Erzähler (The Story- written widely on collective memories and countries. The definition of
teller) (Benjamin 1937), this edited the Italian translation of Maurice “public memory” it presents
young man is dumb: he has a Halbwachs’ La Mémoire collective. is anything but unequivocal.
Email: jedlowsk@unical.it
wealth of lived experiences In introducing the book, I
(Erlebnisse), but no experi- suggested an interpretation of
ence (Erfahrung). His past is foreign to him. the term as a set of images of the past that circulate
Beyond the figure of the survivor, the film keeps in the public sphere (Jedlowski 2007).
returning to the issue of the inability to tell one’s In modern democratic societies the public
story and, through telling, to appropriate one’s own sphere is where the citizens’ beliefs concerning
experience. Heimat relates the history of a German matters of collective importance come into contact
family through the twentieth century. Connected at and mutually influence each other, gradually
certain crucial moments to some of that century’s becoming modified and contributing to the forma-
most traumatic events, including the Nazi years tion of public opinion. This understanding coin-
and the Holocaust, this is nevertheless a history of cides with Habermas’s (1962) concept and refers
the inability to tell one’s story, for which the film to a set of accessible discursive practices
seeks to compensate. It replaces a narrative circuit, expounded in public, where “public” is understood
broken several times at comparatively crucial not in the institutional sense, but as a space in
moments in the century, with a mediating circuit which private citizens interact, a network of dis-
that offers both compensation and the possibility of courses through which a society’s members define
reconstructing the repressed past. and discuss matters of collective importance.
Working on all of this and living in Italy, I For Habermas, the discourses and texts that
wondered what an Italian Heimat might be like. circulate in and define the public sphere relate to
Such a film would work on many repressed ele- “the general interest”, in other words primarily the
ments of the past. Arthouse cinema in Italy has often evaluation and monitoring of government action.

ISSJ 203–204 © UNESCO 2012. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DK, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
34
But the public sphere has never been and is not
solely about politics in the strict sense. At first, as
Habermas himself notes, it was identified primarily
as a sphere of debate based around literary texts:
people meet, acknowledge, and criticise each other
in public, and also through narratives and images,
expressing and comparing tastes, feelings, and
emotions. All this can relate to purely political
subjects, and also to the definition of collective
identity and its history, the reference values of the
collectivity and the norms that should embody
those values. Through the circulation of all
these discourses, certain interpretative frameworks
are publicly established, bringing order and
also giving meaning to the lived experience of
individuals.
I shall leave aside here the discussions that
Habermas’s concept has engendered and the dif-
ferent refinements it has undergone.2 The point is
that discourses circulating in the public sphere
often also concern representations of the past. In
this case it is possible to speak of “public
memory”, as the image of the past that is publicly
discussed. Here we should note that, as the concept
of public sphere does not refer to what is public in
the institutional sense, but to a framework of public
communication between private citizens, in the
same way public memory is not the memory pro-
moted by institutions, but is constituted by dis-
courses and cultural artefacts dealing with the past
and located in the public space of communication.3
It would be equally deceptive to think in terms of a
single image. The public sphere is an open space,
inhabited by concrete subjects, driven by pro-
cesses, conflicts, and negotiations. Similarly,
public memory is the ever-changing motley of
countless interactive processes.
Public memory fulfils two crucial functions.
First and foremost it is the site of processes for
constructing the past which define the criteria of
plausibility and importance using which, from the
vast heritage of traces of the past that are poten-
tially available to the society and the groups of
which it is composed, certain elements are selected
and re-offered to the society as a whole. Second-
arily, it is the site where the collective memories of
groups living within a single society are juxta-
posed: the space in which each memory is exposed
to criticism from its counterparts. This juxtaposi-
tion can lead to dominance by one group or
another. Public memory is also the site of a recur-
ring struggle for hegemony over legitimate repre-
© UNESCO 2012.
Paolo Jedlowski
sentations of the past. But when the public sphere
is fully functional, it tends, at least in principle, to
favour reciprocal forms of recognition and thus,
where memory is concerned, the expression of
concurrent interpretations of the past.
Cultural media and public
memory
Today the public sphere usually involves the
media. Similarly, the constitution of public
memory has largely been transferred to the world
of media interactions. The fact that public memory
is widely present in the media makes it possible to
study its processes using notions from the field of
media studies. Tools that are now classic, including
agenda-setting analysis, and concepts such as the
“spiral of silence” are similarly pertinent to the
study of the formation of public memory. If a
certain aspect of the past is never publicly dis-
cussed, the amount of consideration given to it by
each citizen is greatly reduced. If it is discussed the
converse is true: it is talked about, everyone can
link their own memories to it, people adopt posi-
tions in relation to it. When they circulate in the
public sphere, the representations of the past
offered by the media construct a background of
importance and plausibility within which indi-
vidual memories and knowledge can have a place
(Zerubavel 1997).
The available studies tend to concentrate on
the daily press and television. In addition, they are
almost exclusively concerned with information.
But there are other media and other types of dis-
course, such as novels, films, and plays – the vast
motley world of fiction. All these elements are
fully involved in public memory. They belong to it
because they circulate and are discussed in public
and because they contribute substantially to the
construction of the images of the past that audi-
ences remember, and which are afterwards
regarded as plausible and important.
Fiction often deals with the historical past. It
is not historiography, but in its own way it teaches
history. The presence or absence of a particular
historical theme at different periods in a country’s
films, for example, is an indicator of the attention
granted to it and indeed the degree to which citi-
zens are able to discuss it. Not that cinema reflects
widespread orientations precisely. Cinema never
“reflects” reality; indeed sometimes it acts as an
Memories of the Italian colonial past
expression of “active minorities” seeking to put
something on “the agenda”. Be that as it may, the
consideration or not of certain themes and the
methods used (how much? and how?) makes a
difference. This is particularly true in relation to
the audience’s ability to reappropriate their own
experience of the past, which they may struggle to
share and understand.
Public memory is made of circular flows of
communication. What is said in a speech or shown
in a film is taken up by someone else, discussed in
conversation, cited in a documentary, and so on.
Not everything appears: what matters in the public
sphere are the resources of those engaged in the
exchanges and the power relations between them.
But it is here that the possibility that a particular
theme will or will not be publicly represented is
played out.
For example, let us look at the Holocaust
(obviously a paradigmatic example). Film and lit-
erature have helped to make it an important part of
our past. This was a gradual process, marked by
different phases. However, the appearance of films
and books on this theme is a clear indicator of the
attention that has gradually been collectively paid
to it, in synchrony with the successive phases of its
historiography and public debate in general.4 In
their own way and according to their own possi-
bilities, film and literature have contributed to the
constitution of the Holocaust as the quintessential
“cultural trauma” of modern western civilisation.
The lack of a cultural trauma
of Italian colonialism
The same has not happened with colonialism, at
least not in the Italian case that I shall consider
here. In reality, the very notion of “trauma” is hard
to apply in the case of Italian colonialism. I shall
leave aside here the psychoanalytic and philo-
sophical aspects of the term, approaching the issue
by considering the paradigmatic validity acquired
by the notion of cultural trauma in the sociology of
memory. Starting from and generalising the case of
the Holocaust, Jeffrey Alexander and others have
recently suggested that what we mean by “cultural
trauma” is constituted not of particular events, but
the collective process that leads certain events to be
identified as traumatic (Alexander et al. 2004).
For these authors cultural trauma is an
image of the past publicly maintained by a large
© UNESCO 2012.
35
social group and referring to events or situations
interpreted as a threat to the very existence of that
society or a violation of its fundamental cultural
suppositions. A cultural trauma can be identified
when the members of a collectivity feel they have
been involved in something horrible that has left
an indelible mark on the consciousness of the
group, marking their memories forever and irrevo-
cably altering their future identity. But all this
does not occur “naturally”: if it takes this form it
is to the extent that it has been constructed as such
by the society. As Alexander says, “No trauma
interprets itself. Before trauma can be experienced
at the collective (not individual) level, there are
essential questions that must be answered, and the
answers to these questions change over time”
(Alexander et al. 2004, p.202). It is a matter of
representation.
The construction of this representation takes
place in the public sphere and is integral to “public
memory”. As Alexander also notes, it implies the
existence of social groups with the power and
desire to take charge of the memory of the events in
question, to promote their importance, define the
damage they caused, identify victims, and attribute
responsibility.
We know that the memory of the Holocaust
did not develop easily. Its emergence into the
public sphere was due to pressure from different
active minorities – true “memory entrepreneurs” to
borrow Gérard Namer’s term (1987). The victims
also participated in its emergence. The survivors
did not keep silent and, over time, their voices
gained enough strength and recognition to be lis-
tened to (that of the Jews at least; the same was not
true of the Gypsies or homosexuals).
But the victims of colonialism are primarily
people “of colour”. In general, it has been hard for
them to construct themselves as “memory entre-
preneurs” in Europe. Conversely, at least where
Italy is concerned, many “oblivion entrepreneurs”
have acted with great success: all the specialists
who have looked into the issue have noted the
degree to which the civilian and military offices in
charge of colonial archives long opposed their con-
sultation (Del Boca 1992; Labanca 2002). So the
definition of the damage, victims, and responsibili-
ties of colonialism has been, to say the least, full of
gaps. From this point of view the absence of any
prosecution of the perpetrators of the most striking
colonial crimes is only one aspect of a general
failure of recognition.
36
This situation helps to explain why the
process through which colonialism is transformed
into cultural trauma has not taken place, in Italy at
least.
Indicative filmography of
Italian colonialism
During the colonial period, and particularly the
fascist years, the colonies were depicted in films
and narrative; but, after the end of the Second
World War, Italian cinema avoided them. Recent
years have seen the release of Enzo Monteleone’s
El Alamein, La linea del fuoco (El Alamein, the
line of fire, 2002) and Mario Monicelli’s La rosa
del deserto (Desert rose) (2006). Both films tell
stories about Italian soldiers in North Africa during
the Second World War. It has been said that these
films do not succeed in “de-colonising” the repre-
sentation of the Italian colonial past (Capussotti
2009). But in reality the theme of colonialism
(what are the Italians doing in Africa?) is simply
absent.
The only film that has explicitly dealt with the
memory of colonialism is Giuliano Montaldo’s Un
tempo per uccidere (A time to kill, 1989), taken
from the novel of the same name by Ennio Flaiano.
There was, of course, Pontecorvo’s Battle of
Algiers (1966), but that was about other people’s
colonialism, in this case the French. When, con-
versely, films made in other countries have
depicted the crimes of Italian colonialism, they
have not been screened in Italy. This was true of
The Lion of the Desert (1979), a big budget inter-
national film featuring stars such as Anthony
Quinn and Rod Steiger. The film portrayed the
vicissitudes of the Libyan resistance and its former
leader, Omar al-Mukhtar, who was hanged by the
Italians. It was seen across the world, but has never
been screened in an Italian cinema.
Documentaries have also been subject to cen-
sorship. Fascist Legacy, a BBC documentary of
1989 on the crimes of the Fascists, led to protests
from the Italian embassy in London. The film was
bought by the Italian broadcaster Radio Televisione
Italiana, but never shown.5 In other cases, some
very recent, the reason was not censorship so much
as lack of interest. Haile Gerima’s documentary
Adwa: An African Victory (1998), depicting the
battle of Adwa from the African point of view, won
prizes in Italy, but was not shown in cinemas and
© UNESCO 2012.
Paolo Jedlowski
was screened on television only late at night. And
while his later film Téza (2008), which takes a
complex look at contemporary Ethiopian history,
received two awards in Venice, the reviews in Italy,
though full of praise, barely mentioned its refer-
ences to the Italian occupation.
The recent processes of immigration have
provided material for many films. Their directors
often tend to criticise the growing racism with
which Italian society is imbued, but very few of
them feel a need to talk about the colonial past. It is
true that very few of the immigrants to Italy come
from former Italian colonies. So it is perhaps
hardly surprising that the only film to refer to this
is Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a man on earth)
by Andrea Segre, Dagmawi Yimer, and Riccardo
Biadene (2008), which gives a voice to Ethiopian
refugees. But this film – one of the most raw docu-
ments on current migratory processes – is screened
only in arthouse cinemas, universities, and on
YouTube.
Italian colonialism in
literature
The situation is much the same for stories told in
writing. The few novels that have dealt with the
Italian colonial past have been called a literature of
“attempts at remorse” (Gnisci 1999). Flaiano’s
novel Un tempo per uccidere, mentioned above and
written immediately after the end of the Second
World War, comes into this category.6 It was based
on Flaiano’s own experience during the war of
Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia 1935–1936. In the
novel an Italian officer meets an Ethiopian girl. He
rapes her. Later, in other circumstances, he acciden-
tally kills her. After this he seeks to cover his tracks.
No one seeks to punish him for this crime apart from
– obscurely and indirectly – his own conscience.
But where the colonial memory is concerned,
Flaiano’s book acts as a fable. From Nicola
Labanca (2002) we learn that the history of colo-
nialism can be split into different phases and relies
on the presence of many actors. While, on the one
hand, some works focusing on memories have
been produced by former Italian colonisers, on the
other hand, the veterans’ associations, military
hierarchies, and parties have long cultivated a nos-
talgia for the colonial empire. In both cases the
production of memory is confined to restricted
circles. However, the states that have emerged in
Memories of the Italian colonial past
the former colonial territories have frequently
asked Italy for aid and compensation and, in so
doing, have compelled a certain reappraisal of the
colonial past. But in the media these questions
have been discussed only partially and are gener-
ally overlaid by the stereotype that sees Italians as
“good people”, a stereotype reflecting the “Italian
ideology of the decolonization period” (Labanca
2002, p.456).
The most important role in the attempt to
revive the memory of colonialism and the denun-
ciation of its misdeeds has been played by histori-
ans (for a long time almost solely by Angelo Del
Boca). The debate they have generated has pro-
duced some results. For example, in the 1990s an
Italian Minister of Defence officially admitted that
the Italians used gas banned by the Geneva Con-
vention in Ethiopia, in this case the “mustard gas”
of the trenches of 1917. In 1997 the then Italian
President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro stated in Addis
Ababa that Italian colonialism was stained by
serious crimes and was a tragic mistake. He prom-
ised his government would return the obelisk of
Axum (which arrived in 2005, ambiguously termed
“a gift”). More recently, the Prodi and Berlusconi
governments acknowledged the right of Gaddafi’s
Libya to some forms of compensation for occupa-
tion. But most people have remained unaware of
these things, which have surfaced in the public
sphere only occasionally.
For a long time the colonial memory
remained in a kind of limbo. The same may be true
elsewhere, but in Italy I am convinced that it is the
case. Italy lost its colonial territories at the end of
the Second World War and has not experienced the
debates generated elsewhere in Europe by the
processes of decolonisation and struggles for inde-
pendence in colonised countries.
Sandra Ponzanesi sums the situation up as
follows: in the discourses circulating in the public
sphere,
The Italian presence in Africa is often denied or marginalized
as being too brief from a historical point of view and too
limited geographically compared to other European empires.
. . . So it seems that for more than fifty years the African
venture . . . has formed our “national unconscious”.
(Ponzanesi 2004, p.26)
We have seen recent developments in this regard.
On the one hand, in the last few years novels have
been published by migrants from the former Italian
colonies, often sons and daughters of mixed mar-
© UNESCO 2012.
37
riages. On the other, several famous authors have
published new stories with colonial settings. This
is linked to the entirely new presence in Italy of
many immigrants who are mainly from Africa. As
Alessandro Triulzi and Ruth Iyob write in the
recent issue of a magazine devoted to the return
of the colonial memory, “the growing flow of
immigrants from the formerly colonial world has
reopened the memory of ‘colonial divisions’ eve-
rywhere in Europe” (Triulzi and Iyob 2007, p.23).
In reality, the flow of immigrants to Italian soil has
been apparent since the start of the 1990s, but it is
only in the last five or six years that the narratives
I refer to have been published.
So it can be said that a process is now under-
way to constitute the colonial past as a cultural
trauma. However, the past can be revisited in dif-
ferent ways. The attention paid by some media is
important here: it helps to restore the broken nar-
rative circuit I mentioned at the start in relation to
Reitz’s Heimat. But the way this attention is
expressed also matters. To take this further we need
to consider some examples in more depth.
Modes of self-critical
memory
The first is the novel L’ottava vibrazione (The
eighth vibration) by Carlo Lucarelli (Lucarelli
2008). Lucarelli is a thriller writer, very well
known in Italy, notably through television. The
novel is set during the days before the battle of
Adwa in 1896: the Italians were moving up
through Eritrea in an unsuccessful attempt to
occupy Ethiopia. Adwa was the greatest defeat suf-
fered by a European army in the history of coloni-
alism. For Africans it is a symbol (as documented
by Gerima’s film Adwa). For Italians it was a long
nightmare.
In the novel the colony appears as a place
where Italians give free rein to their desires in a
way that would not have been permitted in their
homeland. This particularly applies to sexual
desire, with local women reduced to the status of
prostitutes and concubines, but other desires figure
too: an entrepreneur find opportunities to launch
particularly ambitious projects; merchants trade
illegally; officials steal and act with unbridled
opportunism; one murders children; a woman kills
her husband with an impunity she would not easily
enjoy in her home country. It is all reminiscent of
38
Flaiano: “That’s right, Africa is a storeroom for
dirty business, you go there to loosen up your con-
science” (Flaiano [1947] 1990, p.71).
The novel leaves no doubt that this was im-
perialism. However, the accent is primarily on the
fact that in its Italian form it was an imperialism of
rogues: ineffective, badly organised, and corrupt.
This may be true. But there is no sign of the idea
that colonialism, however successfully carried out,
is in itself execrable. Moreover the publisher’s
blurb on the cover, including the phrase “where a
dark page in our history becomes legend”, is de-
cidedly ambiguous. The word “legend” evokes
something distant and blurred, but also heroic, in
a sense not readily understood as pejorative. It
certainly does not include or foster any kind of
critical attitude.
One thing Flaiano’s book did was to make us
feel guilty. What of? That was not so clear – Tempo
di uccidere is no explicit critique of colonialism.
But it did generate disquiet. Not so Lucarelli’s
L’ottava vibrazione. If there is disquiet here, it is
focused on the perversions depicted, which are not
exclusive to colonialism. Although Lucarelli docu-
mented his work with care, here colonialism is a
background. The stereotype of “good Italians” is
not endorsed, but the image of a rogues’ imperial-
ism acts to minimise the crimes. The effect of the
book as a representation of the colonial past is
ambivalent: on the one hand it reflects a degree
of attention, an “unfreezing” of the theme in
the public sphere; but on the other, it adopts
certain commonplaces. So it reactivates the
memory of colonialism, but does not adopt a
position.
The case of Volto Nascosto (Hidden face) by
Gianfranco Manfredi is different. This is a comic
book series (Manfredi 2007–2008) from Bonelli, a
publisher highly respected in Italy. The book is
aimed at children and young adults, who are
readers of comics and graphic novels.
Manfredi is also something of a celebrity. He
is the author of the very successful Wild West
adventure series published by Bonelli, Magico
Vento, in which the “good guys” tend to be Indians
rather than cowboys, and Native American culture
is appreciated and described in detail. The author’s
sympathy, and that of his readers, is with the his-
torical losers. In Volto Nascosto he shows the same
attitudes to those who were oppressed by the Ital-
ians. Like the Native Americans, the peoples
invaded by Italy also fought back; their cultures
© UNESCO 2012.
Paolo Jedlowski
deserve respect and it is possible to imagine heroes
among them. Volto Nascosto is just such a hero:
head of a band of rebels, he joins forces with
Menelik and takes part in the defeat of the Italians
at Adwa. In each album Manfredi provides histori-
cal and bibliographic information to accompany
the story. In the first episode the author notes that
this story is fiction, with history simply providing
the backdrop to its fantastical adventures, but in
reading each album the reader becomes better
informed about historical episodes and individuals.
Unlike Lucarelli’s novel, Volto Nascosto has
an overtly critical emphasis. Manfredi is taking a
stand. There is never any doubt that an act of
aggression is taking place, and most importantly
that it is unjust. Thus the story provides a self-
critical memory: its theme is the wrongs we have
inflicted on others.
Self-critical memory is not so easy to recall.
In Manfredi’s case, the operation’s success
depends on what I might call the “intertextual invi-
tation” offered by the text. Through the meanings
attached to the author’s career, the album’s pub-
lisher and its style, Volto Nascosto recalls not only
colonialism, but also what we know of the relation-
ship between whites and Native Americans, an
association which sets the critical tone. Manfredi’s
readers are invited to shift their consolidated
sympathy for Native Americans to the more prob-
lematic case of the peoples oppressed by the Ital-
ians themselves. This is not simply a matter of
mentioning particular events. The work associates
one memory that has a particular meaning with
another memory. It is a remarkable characteristic
of public memory that the meaning of what we
remember is often generated by association. In the
case of Volto Nascosto, beyond its invitation to
remember certain things, the text almost seems to
suggest a certain “mnesic position” (just as the
semiologists speak of “interpretative posture”).
The specific memory takes on a particular meaning
through the constellation that is evoked.
I now come to my third example: Gabriella
Ghermandi’s novel Regina di fiori e di perle
(Queen of flowers and pearls) (Ghermandi 2007).
The author was born in Addis Ababa to an Italian
father and an Ethiopian mother, and moved to
Bologna when she was very young. The narrative
genre is properly “postcolonial”: the author’s ex-
perience is clearly a hybrid of two cultures and she
deals with the problem of having an opaque, nec-
essarily multiple identity. The theme is precisely
Memories of the Italian colonial past
the memory of colonialism and what it has left
behind (Sossi 2008).
This is a captivating book with a complicated
narrative structure. There is a framing narrative
and, inside that, a succession of other narratives,
using turns of phrase reminiscent of the oral tra-
dition. The framing story is about a problem of
remembering. The protagonist has been in Italy
for a long time, having received a student bursary
in the 1990s. She goes home for the funeral of one
of her family’s elders, to whom she was close as
a child, but the mourning process proves difficult.
Resolution comes only when she remembers the
stories the elder used to tell her, and the promise
she made him to become a storyteller. During the
mourning period, her friends and family tell her
stories about the past in Ethiopia. At first she
resists this, but later it proves to have been a good
thing.
So the story is one of regaining memory, at
once personal and collective. But it is the memory
of a past that the Ethiopians and Italians broadly
share. The stories that the narrator gathers from her
African friends and family are full of Italians, of all
kinds. The memory of the Italians’ use of mustard
gas during the war in Ethiopia appears in many
stories. But there is also the soldier forbidden by
fascist law to take an Ethiopian girl as his wife –
determined to marry her at any cost, he escapes and
eventually joins the Resistance – and the Italian
sergeant who secretly helps the young newly-weds.
The stories of Ethiopians who came to Italy after
the war tell of Italians who underpay coloured
workers; “Are there cannibals where you come
from?” an old lady asks her Ethiopian house-
keeper, “Do you have houses?” and “Do you have
hair between your legs?” When, in exasperation at
this last question, the housekeeper lifts her skirt,
the old lady screams that she has gone mad. There
are also decent Italians who pay fairly. There are
people who go back to Ethiopia to be teachers.
Most importantly, there is Mr Antonio, who for-
merly worked in Ethiopia, fell in love with the
country, and learned Amharic. But he never went
back. First he says this was because it was no
longer Italian soil. Later he corrects this: it is
because he is ashamed.
Ghermandi’s story does indeed reveal all that
Italians should be ashamed of. But rancour is not
its dominant emotion; the discourse is not unilat-
eral. As Cristina Lombardi-Diop says in the post-
face, the novel is “a gesture towards the
© UNESCO 2012.
39
construction of a memory that, in contemporary
Italy, finally marks the moment when this wound
can heal” (Lombardi-Diop 2007, p.258). It is an
invitation to construct a self-critical Italian
memory, but in this case the self-criticism stems
from dialogue. In reading this book, the memory of
Italians is enriched by what we do not remember,
or remember differently. When those who have
inflicted wrongs listen to the memories of those
who have suffered them, the memory of their
actions themselves are irreversibly altered. Shame
is no great reparation, but it signifies that one has
made the other person’s point of view one’s own.
The texts cited thus far circulate in the public
sphere. They have been made accessible by the
publishing market; readers read them, and can
comment on them, lend them, give them as gifts or
recommend them to friends; reviews are published;
their authors are invited onto talk shows; their ref-
erences are on the internet. Like all products des-
tined for the market, they were created for target
audiences, which constitute partially distinct
public spheres; but, by their very nature, public
spheres tend to intersect. So what emerges is thus
the start of, if not a discussion proper, at least a
spread of collective attention directed towards a
particular past, the first steps towards the construc-
tion of a public memory of colonialism. I said
above that Italy has not turned its colonial experi-
ence into a cultural trauma: some of these narra-
tives can be interpreted as an attempt to start the
process of transformation.
Where the society as a whole is concerned,
this attempt does not so far seem to have had much
success. We should note that the attention paid to
the colonial experience through these texts cohab-
its with the emergence of totally different attitudes.
In this regard the photographic exhibition
“L’epopea degli Ascari Eritrei” [Epic of the Eri-
trean Ascari] mounted at the Vittoriano in Rome in
2004 is exemplary. The exhibition, the opening of
which was attended by ministers and senators
linked to the right-wing government, used
“themes, images and stylistic characteristics that
are features of colonial propaganda” (Palma 2007,
p.57). It magnified the loyalty of the Ascari –
“savages freed” by the uniform they wore – to
Italy; nothing was said of their motives for joining
up, the discipline they were subjected to or the
discrimination they suffered.
The exhibition on the Ascari did not receive a
great deal of media attention. In any case it sug-
40
gests how much the return of the colonial repressed
takes place in a potentially conflicted context in
Italy. The public memory is open to more than one
discourse. As Labanca notes, “There is a risk, in a
now openly bipolar phase of the country’s political
development, that we will see a repolarization of
memories, rather than a dialectic and recomposi-
tion at a higher level” (Labanca 2002, p.461).
The tricks of public memory
During colonial expansion, Italians and other
Europeans maintained that they were the “most
civilised” people on Earth. It is embarrassing to
repeat this in the face of eye-witness accounts of
the violence in which colonial conquests and
regimes were steeped. Not only were these mani-
fest, specific crimes, for which no European has
ever been prosecuted; in the light of what we now
regard as human rights, colonialism was a crime in
itself: subjection, humiliation, the negation of the
most basic rights (moreover it is inconceivable that
entire peoples could be conquered without the use
of extraordinary violence).
The Italian colonial presence in Africa con-
tinued for over fifty years. Roads and other modern
infrastructures were built. But despite the myth of
the “civilising mission”, the civilisation brought by
the Italians stopped there. Their behaviour was
predatory: theft and corruption were habitual;
justice was exerted summarily, to say the least. In
1888 General Baldissera, commander of the troops
in Eritrea, declared that the country “must be ours,
because such is the fate of inferior races; the
Blacks are disappearing a few at a time” (Del Boca
2005, p.74). The Italians used mustard gas against
their opponents in the war to conquer Ethiopia, but
they also repeatedly demonstrated their brutality
during the occupation. The indigenous peoples
were subjects, not citizens. The Italian colonies in
Africa were clearly discriminatory regimes which
used racial segregation (a form of apartheid) after
the passing of the “racial laws” (Leggi per la difesa
della razza) in 1938 (De Napoli 2009). The “civi-
lising mission” was never more than an ideological
veneer.
But discourses referring to the “supremacy”
of our civilisation matter when we are thinking
about memory. We should recall here that the texts
circulating in the public sphere interact with other
types of memory. Memory is never just a matter of
explicit representations: it also finds expression in
© UNESCO 2012.
Paolo Jedlowski
behaviours, attitudes, practices, and widespread
notions seen as valid, which stem from the past and
remain over time. Taking this into account, I think
we can say that, even if it is not much discussed in
public, the memory of colonialism has survived to
the present day in Italy in other forms: for example
in reiterations of a crude denigration of Africans, in
negative stereotypes, linguistic habits, and igno-
rance legitimated by the idea of one’s own superi-
ority. Ultimately, this memory survives in the form
of racism, which is a continuation of the ideologi-
cal presuppositions that justify colonialism.
Racialising taxonomies and colonialist policies
persist in representations, attitudes, and the rules
concerning migrants, currently supported by a
majority of Italians.
Those things that public memory does not
develop remain latent within a society: the ways in
which colonialism justified its own aggression,
which have never been critically revisited, resur-
face like an underground river, ready to be rea-
dopted by the unscrupulous political elites, whom
society as a whole seems incapable of opposing. In
Italy today these unscrupulous political elites
include the Northern League (Avanza 2010). Com-
menting on a terrifying selection of phrases uttered
by representatives of the Italian government and
local authorities, primarily members of the North-
ern League (invitations to take up arms against
immigrants, reminders of the usefulness of crema-
torium ovens in relation to “Moroccans”, countless
insults and scornful epithets), the journalist Gian
Antonio Stella rightly noted, “the idiotic ease with
which Northern League sympathizers call blacks
Bingo Bongo . . . is engendered by an almost total
ignorance of what our own colonialism was like,
and the absence of any sense of guilt for Italian
fascist racism. . . . And we keep coming back to the
same thing – our unfinished business with our past”
(Stella 2009, p.67).7
Such business must be settled in the public
sphere. The issue is precisely one of public
memory, or of the way that the past is publicly
revisited and offered up for reconstruction by indi-
viduals. In this context, the self-critical attitude,
although far from a majority position – today at
least – has its own value: self-critical memory is
the exact opposite of self-congratulatory memory.
In modern times the latter is the form that the
institutional public memory has most often taken,
occasionally celebrating the past most appropriate
to the vision of the victorious elites. Outside more
Memories of the Italian colonial past 41

institutionalised discourses (and also often within
them), memory is just as often expressed in tones
of nostalgia or demand, generating and justifying
recurrent conflicts.8 Self-critical memory is differ-
ent: it is the most inconvenient of all, the memory
that remembers not the things one can be proud of,
or which can form the basis of a demand, but those
that lead to shame; it is the painful preservation of
one’s own “negative tradition” (Siebert 1992).
The development of a self-critical attitude in
relation to one’s own past (individual or collective)
is part of the process of “working through” the past
itself. The concept of “working through” is in turn
derived from Freudian psychoanalysis: it refers to a
particular kind of mnesic work in which the spon-
taneous mechanisms of private and (often deliber-
ate) public forgetting are replaced by a conscious
engagement with aspects of the past that are more
worrying and hard to acknowledge. When these
involve wrongs inflicted on others, a moment of
dialogue necessarily results: this mnesic work
involves engaging with the memory of the victims;
it involves recognising other people’s memory.
It follows that the development of the collec-
tive past of colonialist countries leads to a self-
critical moment and invites us to interpret
colonialism itself as a cultural trauma, where the
trauma consists not of something we have suffered,
but the recognition of the wrongs that our civilisa-
tion has been capable of inflicting – in the non-
absolving discovery of our violence. We must do
this not to “repent” – which is not very useful – but
in order to understand the mechanisms and causes
of that violence, to construct the past, and take
responsibility for it for ourselves.9
Today the idea of self-critical memory is part
of European institutional discourse. In 2005 the
European Union invited all member states to insti-
tute a Day of Memory (already established in some
countries), expressly dedicated to the memory of
the wrongs that Europe inflicted on the Jews.10 This
institutionalisation of a self-critical memory was a
consequence of the discourses (books, narratives,
films, etc.) that had long been circulating in the
public sphere, and kept reappearing there, and
which set out the parameters of any discourse
acceptable in Europe today concerning the persecu-
tion and extermination of the Jews. The colonial
past will no doubt have to wait before being recalled
to the public sphere in this way, but, where Italy is
concerned, some of the texts I have cited seem to be
moving in that direction. There is some resistance to
this process and its consequences are not easy to
predict. Personally I think it should be emphasised
that self-critical memory is an important variant of
public memory, without which it is difficult for a
country to maintain a credible identity as “civi-
lised”, given the incivility it has perpetrated.
The quality of public memory is dictated by
the texts in circulation. Advocates of a self-critical
memory are in the minority, but they possess an
ethical value that should not be ignored. The issue
is not simply to restore the discursive circuits in
which the past can be mentioned. The way in
which it is mentioned and understood is at least as
important. As Mr Antonio discovers in Gabriella
Ghermandi’s novel, a self-critical memory of colo-
nialism involves a certain degree of shame.
Translated from French

Notes

1. Jedlowski (2009). Reitz’s film,
released in 1984, stimulated a major
international debate (for the early
stages of this, see Hansen 1985).
2. Notably Calhoun (1992), Cross-
ley and Roberts (2004), and
Jedlowski and Affuso (2010).
3. Some authors hold that public
memory largely coincides with
institutional memory (notably
Havel 2005; Phillips 2004). Public
memory then becomes the
memory promoted by the domi-
nant elites. Others conversely
emphasise the difference between
the two and call for analysis of
the effects of today’s media (Perra
2010, p.16). For a discussion, see
Tota (2006).
4. The way it is formulated differs
from one country to the next. For
Europe, see Traverso (2004); for
Italy, see Gaetani (2006), Minuz
(2010), and Perra (2010).
5. For a more extensive account,
see Siebert (1992).
6. Flaiano’s book was first pub-
lished in 1947; it was reworked
several times by the author. The
last and final variant dates from
1968.
7. Stella has published another
narrative set in the Italian colonies
(Stella 2008) and on Italian emigra-
tion (Stella 2003; Stella and Teti

© UNESCO 2012.
42
2006); as with Manfredi’s Volto
Nascosto, these publications seem
to have a strategy of selecting asso-
ciations in order to operate on the
public memory. Associating the
memory of Italian emigration with
the current immigration to Italy
alters ways of seeing, generating
more sympathy than the fear and
embarrassment engendered by
other contemporary discourses.
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