Pro. Clarissa Clò
Part II
Issayas: Rosalia also raised funds for the Eritrean-Italian children.
According to the aforementioned book, She was a brilliant strategist in
raising funds for the children. Why was she interested in the children?
Prof.Clò:
This is an important issue which surprisingly only surfaces toward the
end of the book, with a couple of chapters dedicated to the discussion
of Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi’s philanthropic work in favor of the
children born of the union of Italian soldiers and African mothers, the
so called “meticci.” She was indeed successful in obtaining funds for
the Istituto degli Innocentini, or the Institute of Little Innocents as
the orphanage was named. She seemed genuinely worried about the fate of
these children once their Italian fathers returned to Italy or died in
the battlefield and their mothers would not be caring for them for one
reason or another.
Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi in Eritrea
One cannot help, however, to also note the racial biases behind these concerns. It is well-known that a major preoccupation of colonialism was the fear of miscegenation, the mixing of different bloods, especially in the racialized context of the end of the 19th century ripe with discourses of racial superiority and inferiority, partly devised in Italy by Cesare Lombroso in his observations of various “inferior” social groups such as southerners, prisoners, prostitutes, anarchists and so forth. Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi is explicit about her disgust for the union of a white man and a black woman but I would tend to agree with Jonas that perhaps it
was not so much the racial mixing as much as the fate of the abandoned
children that concerned her. This is in line with the contradictory
position Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi inhabited. And indeed , the issue of
miscegenation became a far more pressing and urgent one at a later stage
of Italian colonialism during Fascism when mixed-race unions were
explicitly banned and forbidden.
Still, Cristina Lombardi-Diop
points out that the philanthropic endeavors of Pianavia Vivaldi had a
self-interested motif to them in that they allowed the author to
navigate the public sphere freely in ways that would have otherwise been
impossible for her. In this way Rosalia Vivaldi becomes a “symbolic
mother” to these children (189) taking a place that did not belong to
her and substituting herself, and “white women’s authority” by
extension, for other local and communitarian forms of child caring. I
agree with Jonas that her gesture, no matter how laudable and
well-intended ultimately was “a palliative” in that “it never addressed the contradictions inherent in empire” (66).
Issayas: In the above mentioned flyer about your lecture, were there similarities between Rosalia and Sibilla?
Prof.Clò:
My lecture, and my research on this topic, brings together texts and
authors that would usually not be discussed in relation to one another.
Although the similarities between the colonization of the Italian South
on the part of the North during the process of Italian unification and
nation-building and the Italian colonization in Africa have become a
topic of study (Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Moe), more needs to be done to
tease out the forms in which such connections manifested themselves or
transpired in various literary genres and at the hands of different,
sometimes unexpected, authors.
Specifically as an Italian
scholar, my interest was in comparing the ways in which Rosalia Pianavia
Vivaldi’s move to Africa resonated with and at times distanced itself
from, Sibilla Aleramo’s novel
Una donna (A woman), in which the
protagonist, a veiled representation of the author herself, moves with
her family to a village in the South of Italy. Una donna is a
foundational book that in the Italian literary canon and especially for
Italian feminism, and I was rather surprised when I first read it to
notice the disparaging terms with which the protagonist of the novel
described Italian Southerners, not dissimilarly to the ways in which
Pianavia Vivaldi was condescending to the Africans. In this sense, the
real surprise for me was Aleramo’s narrative where the Italian South and
Southerners are treated as internal colonies to Italy. It is the
connection between different yet related types of “otherings” that
interests me.
In Aleramo’s novel the journey to the south and
from city to countryside and the changed status from single to married
woman becomes metaphorically and psychologically a descent to hell,
while Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi’s travel to Africa was described quite clearly as
a rise to a terrestrial Eden, a place where an upper-class white woman
could take advantage of a freedom and an independence she would have
rarely enjoyed at home.
Sibilla Aleramo
Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi’s
Tre Anni in
Eritrea and Sibilla Aleramo’s
Una Donna both mediate the experience and
identity construction of privileged women. Yet, even when they most
strongly adhere to the nationalistic rhetoric, as women authors caught
between superiority and subalternity they destabilize the process of
nation-building and its structures of national belonging. At a time when
female authorship, and the education of women and children, generated
much anxiety in Italian culture (Re 159; Stewart-Steinberg), these
two authors adopt writing as a powerful means to articulate and
negotiate their position in a patriarchal society.
Finally, in my
work I claim that these two texts,
Tre anni in Eritrea and
Una donna,
which also represent two distinct literary genres - a colonial diary and
an autobiographical novel – through their alternating “rhetoric of
identification” and “rhetoric of differentiation” (Lowe 32), produce an
unsettling destabilization of the traditional gender role assigned to
women and expose some of the fictive foundations of the nation. One such
fiction is that of citizenship, which far from being universal, in its
abstract connotations really represented only men, particularly
privileged and property owners.
Issayas: Rosalia was in Eritrea
for only three years. Did she ever return? What was the impact of her
stay in Eritrea on her life?
Prof.Clò: To my knowledge, she never
returned to Eritrea nor did she publish any other books. So we do not
know the impact that her stay in Eritrea had on her life, even though we
might venture to imagine that it was probably a transformational
experience of sort. In the last chapter of the book, entitled “Addio,”
she mourns her departure and explicitly acknowledges that by returning
to the so-called “civilized world” she would in effect lose the
independence and freedom that she had
gained in Africa (328-329).
Issayas:
Stephen C. Bruner in his article entitled "Leopoldo Franchetti and
Italian Settlement in Eritrea: Emigration, Welfare Colonialism and the
Southern Question" wrote that "Emigration, Colonialism and the Southern
Question come together in the history of Leopoldo Franchetti's1891 plan
to provide land for Italian peasants in Eritrea. He continues to state
that Franchetti's plan was a political masterstroke in theory, yet
despite burgeoning Italian emigration to other parts of the world and
rural restlessness at home, virtually no peasants sought land in Eritrea
and the plan failed within five years".
My question is, are
there similarities and differences (in the ideas or concepts, but not in
the style) between the aforementioned argument about Franchetti and the
subject of your presentation entitled "Colonialism, Migration, Southern
Question in Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi and Sibilia Aleramo”?
Prof.Clò:
Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi recounts the establishment of the first
emigrant settlement in Eritrea in a couple of chapters entitled
“Tentativi di colonizzazione” (Attempts at colonization) and “Il primo
villaggio italiano” (The first Italian village). It is important to
notice that in Italian discourse colonization and emigration are often
conflated and that in nationalistic rhetoric emigration is often
packaged as a form of colonization (Gabaccia).
Pianavia
Vivaldi’s narrative is invaluable because it carefully records the first
attempt by the Italian government to form a stable settlement in the
region through the relocation of a few Italian farmers’ families to
Eritrea. Her account provides first-hand documentation of the event and
voices upper class concerns about the extent of Italian emigration at
the time. Like a state archivist, she meticulously reports in her diary
the arrival on 10 November 1893 of the first “carefully chosen” (169)
families of Italian colonists destined to cultivate the lands of
Eritrea. Seven families were from Lombardy, and two from Sicily (165).
That the majority of the families were from Lombardy is important,
because it testifies to the fact that emigration at the time was a
phenomenon that characterized both Northern and Southern regions of
Italy. The reference to Lombardy is also important because this is
Aleramo’s
Una donna’s geographical point of departure. This aspect
enables us to see connections and similarities between the situation of
peasant families in different parts of Italy and to cast social
class, rather than just geographical location, as a crucial marker.
Vivaldi’s
position as the wife of one of the highest-ranking officials in Eritrea
grants her a role as representative of the local Italian authorities.
She is among those who welcome this small unit that she defines as “the
avant-garde of a numerous emigration, the substratum of a new Italian
region (in Africa)”(166). Despite all the compliments paid to these
happy and hardy farmers, Vivaldi interestingly comments that on the way
into town, “they sang native songs imitating, without their knowledge,
the customs of the Africans when they celebrate some occurrence or
festivity” (167), thus
equating the lower class Italians to the
Africans. Such analogy is also reinforced by the fact that the village
where the emigrants are lodged is made of tukuls, whereas the author
herself occupies “an elegant palace” in the city (26).
Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi with her husband
Pianavia
Vivaldi provides a careful description of the contract that was offered
to these farmers, detailing the interest that the Italian state had in
establishing a permanent colony in Africa in order to try to solve the
increasing national problems of emigration to the Americas and of social
unrest in Italy. Like other prominent intellectuals of her time, she
sees the creation of the Italian colony in Eritrea as the solution to
social upheaval in the homeland and as a way to control the masses. To
this end, she manipulates and mobilizes topics that would have been
sensitive to an Italian audience of the time, like her subtle reference
to the grave episodes of racism against Italians in America, and more
specifically
to the lynching in 1891 of 11 Italians in New Orleans, the largest
lynching case in US history, which caused a commotion in Italy and would
have been still fresh in the mind of Italians.
In contrast to
the unwelcoming reception in America, Pianavia Vivaldi suggests that
Eritrea is like home, having similar soil and weather conditions (169).
Here it is also interesting to notice, once again, how emigration and
colonialism are treated as linked phenomena by the author, one providing
the solution for the other. Despite Vivaldi’s complicity with the
Italian nationalistic agenda, she is also critical of the faults and
responsibilities of the Italian colonial authorities for the failure to
retain the emigrants. She notes rather sarcastically that if the plan to
emigration to Eritrea failed, the fault cannot solely be attributed to
the “infertile African sands” (170).
Issayas: Prof.Clò, thank you for your time.
Prof.Clò: Thank you.
Bibliography
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