I had just read Giada Scodellaro’s debut short story collection, Some of Them Will Carry Me, when I went to an event in Palermo called Arte Migrante, or “Art in Migration.” Essentially an open mic, these weekly events are a way for “students, migrants, unhoused people, workers, the unemployed, the young, and the elderly” to meet through shared art. The evening started with an old man named Nino who told riddles in Palermitano dialect. “Liccu liccu e in culu ta ficu,” he said, which was then translated into Italian, French, Wolof, Akan, and English: “Lick it, lick it, then put it in the ass.”
“It’s a thread that goes inside a needle!” cackled Nino in Italian. Then Lamin, a university law student originally from Gambia, played djembe, joined by a shy teenager who shared that he had recently arrived in Sicily by boat. The pulse of the stretched drum head seemed to explode the room, pulling everyone inside its rhythm. Then Francesca from Turin but born in Sicily sang a Celtic ballad, drawing us to the tip of each haunting word: “I just returned from the salt, salt sea, all for the love of thee.”
There is a particular way that arte migrante, or art shaped by migration, distinguishes and blurs boundaries at once. To be at a distance from home, or for home to change before your eyes, creates a certain clarity of vision. Everything is compared to something else. Everything becomes sharper, set in relief.
The evening of Arte Migrante felt like a lens into Giada Scodellaro’s work. Born in Naples and raised in the Bronx, the author has a sharp-eyed perspective on America and Italy, an insider and outsider to both. Fittingly, her prose makes the borders of genre feel irrelevant: Are these short stories? Essays? Film stills? Dreams? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is Scodellaro’s exhilarating freedom of mind. The order of the stories, the sentences, the plots feels totally unpredictable, yet cohesive at the same time. In many ways, the book is a meditation on hybrid identity itself, the gaze of a viewer on two sides of the ocean at once.
Here is an example of what I mean. Halfway through the book, there is a short piece (essay? ode?) about D’Angelo, specifically his naked body in the video for the song “Untitled.” On the facing page is an inherited recipe for spaghetti with clams. I keep returning to this sequence, and not just because I have a deep love of both D’Angelo and spaghetti with clams. “There’s D’Angelo’s Gap” starts mid-sentence, sensually:
but it’s also his bottom lip, his rotating bones, and how he seems taller, 5’6”, but the torso seems longer, the yards of arched torso, the two front teeth like hard candy, a rope chain with a cross pendant, Yahshua, and his body hair…
We slowly trickle down D’Angelo’s torso, then plummet into mourning the very objectification we have just enacted: how it eclipsed his ingenuity as a musician.
One the opposite page, “A Dry Drowning, Spaghetti alle Vongole” picks up the same rhythm, a coalition by comma:
place clams in a pan without water, a dry drowning, 1 kilogram for 4 people, wait until they open, but don’t add salt, clams still have the sea in them so take them out of their shells, or keep them inside, if you want, throw them in the hot pan with garlic…
Recipes are a traditionally feminine literary form, one that travels across borders. As with the piece on D’Angelo, Scodellaro looks closely at the art she has inherited. She has an uncanny ability to evoke the deep pleasure and pain of that inheritance simultaneously: As I read this book in Southern Italy, where Scodellaro was born, it was hard to read the words “dry drowning” without thinking of the thousands of migrants—poets, families, everyday people—who have drowned entering Italy by crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa. Or those who survive the journey but live here in a state of “dry drowning,” without rights, often working in exploitative conditions, if not worse. How would it feel to inherit this recipe? To cook spaghetti with clams as a Black Italian woman, when the state considers Black Italian women second-class citizens (when citizens at all)? This is the kind of associative thinking Scodellaro’s work invites.
I decided to re-watch “Untitled” from my small apartment balcony in Palermo. The old women who yell in dialect across the alley 24/7 could see D’Angelo’s abs on my laptop screen. I wondered what they made of the scene: Something that would have felt normal to do on a fire escape in Brooklyn, where I’m from, but in Palermo felt out of place.
Mixing Italian and English throughout, Scodellaro creates defiant unity out of a state of in-between-ness. In “Hangnails, and Other Diseases,” she writes:
The loss of language is dizzying. There are times when it’s lost. Words cannot be found and they will not come. It’s a blurry loss, sorrowful. Like the word for grapefruit. Yesterday, it was lost. Popillo? Popello? The word escapes me. To be bilingual is to be in a state of recovery.
Yet rather than writing elegy, Scodellaro imagines a redistribution of power. On the book’s thrilling first page, a narrator guides a stranger’s hand to finger her on a bus, taking a common space of sexual harassment and inverting it. Similarly, in this collection Black women control the gaze, the room, the situation, the next sentence. It doesn’t matter what country Scodellaro’s characters find themselves in. In “540i” a character named Bruna repeatedly renames herself. In “Haint,” the narrator examines a litany of treasures in the garbage: “I found pickled daisies, lockets, coarse salt, whole grains, swans, wooden chairs, and mortadella.” In a literary period where identity is regularly commodified, these sharp, unexpected details feel like freedom. A pledge of allegiance to the unexpected, Some of Them Will Carry Me models a nonconformist way towards unity.
*
In a totally dissimilar, yet deeply connected book, Amaryllis Gacioppo’s travel memoir Motherlands makes an art form out of generations of migration in her family. Like with Scodellaro’s collection, there is an irresistible freedom of mind in Motherlands, as if traveling thousands of kilometers on the page has inspired a similarly unbounded perspective. Reflecting on migration and colonialism, the Australian writer profiles the Italian cities of her maternal line, leading up to her birth in Australia, on stolen Bundjalung land. From Turin to Benghazi to Rome to Palermo, every woman in her family migrated to a city that was not her own. In each chapter, Gacioppo invents new ways of depicting each woman and each city against the backdrop of Italian history.
Fittingly, the opening chapter picks apart the meaning of “home.” The critique at the heart of Motherlands is introduced here in deceptively simple language:
Questions dogged me when I was young, and still do. What claim do I have to the place I call my country? What is a homeland? What is a home? I have two passports: two pieces of paper that declare me a dual national, a person with two homes. And little claim to either. What determines the granting of a passport, other than politics and paperwork?
I thought about Gacioppo’s questions as I navigated the Italian immigration system as a white American, seeing the radically different racial and ethnic treatment of other people requesting the same papers. I think about these questions while I read about the inhumane conditions of migrant detention centers in both the US and Italy. What is my claim to my home—wherever that home is––and what is my responsibility to it?
Throughout Motherlands, Gacioppo shows how deeply intertwined family and state history are, making the point that state shame is often as closely guarded as a family secret. Everyone in her family is quick to claim anti-Fascist history, without ever talking about her great-grandparents’ life in Benghazi as part of the Fascist colonial regime. Similarly, there was never an equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials for Italian war crimes. Many Fascist leaders quietly continued in politics.
The opening chapter “Home,” a brilliant example of literary essaying, shows how the domestic and public sphere conflate. The word “metropolis” comes from the Greek for mother city. In Italian, the word for homeland is “patria,” (literally “fatherland”), or “terra madre” (“motherland”). Through a wide-ranging constellation of facts, Gacioppo arrives at sharp reflections on where home, country, colonialism, and family inheritance overlap. Every country has a dark past: Is that past hers to claim as well? And what would it mean to claim it?
As Gacioppo unwinds these ideas, she invents new forms to explore each city’s history. In the first chapter, she explores her great-grandmother Rita’s roots in elegant Turin by foot, in the literary style of a flȃneuse. The urbane movements of writers like Olivia Laing, Valeria Luiselli, or Lauren Elkin come to mind most here. Then, in a departure of both style and setting, the next chapter follows Rita to Benghazi in the Fascist period, where she gets married and gives birth to Gacioppo’s grandmother Annalisa. The Benghazi chapter is structured around family photos that become increasingly disturbing as Gacioppo lays plain the violent legacy of Italian colonialism. A photo can conceal as much as it reveals. Gacioppo’s use of image, historical fact, and meditative prose puts the book in conversation with W.G. Sebald, though where Sebald’s prose gains power through avoidance, Gacioppo cuts straight to the core of what she does and does not know. When the family relocates to Rome at the end of World War II in the third chapter, she brings the city to life through its historical buildings. The last chapter arrives in Palermo, where Gacioppo’s mother grew up and where the author now lives, which she retells through antique maps.
“A map is a way of colonizing physical space,” Gacioppo writes. “We shrink terrain down to scale to create the impression that, looking down at it from a godly perspective, we have some control over it.” Here and throughout, Gacioppo’s lucid observations feel cool yet haunt. She has a poet’s touch when it comes to word choice: maps “colonize”, home is “ownership.” Why do descendants of Italians have the right to citizenship—jus sanguinis—when over one million people live in Italy without documents while contributing to its economy, studying at its schools, speaking better Italian than someone whose distant relative emigrated generations back?
Above all: Why does the eerie silence about Italian colonialism continue to this day? Benghazi is not Gacioppo’s homeland, in the sense that reassurance and ownership are far from her connection to it. Still, it is firmly part of her family lineage, as a place Italians (and to some extent her ancestors) destroyed in the name of “la Patria”—the Fatherland. I was struck by the integrity of Gacioppo’s exploration of her roots, publishing in print what few Italians will talk about. There is shockingly little discussion in Italy about the country’s 60-year colonial history. The murder of one million civilians through the use of chemical weapons, concentration camps, deportation, and forced conscription is only briefly touched on in schools. Notably, the book is not yet translated into Italian.
But Gacioppo is not so keen to erase the country’s bloody past. She firmly lays down the numbers about the violence occurring while her ancestors lived in Libya. It’s worth quoting a passage in full:
In 1930, after the fence had been built along the border between Libya and Egypt, whole tribes were made to march to concentration camps. According to official Italian census records, the population of Cyrenaica, in 1928, was 225,000. In 1932, four years later, it was 142,000. The resulting orphans were sent to Fascist re-education camps, and in 1937 they were shipped out as soldiers for the Fascist Italian campaign in Ethiopia. Human life was not the only target—to denude the tribal populations of their resources, Italian soldiers machine-gunned livestock from aeroplanes, so that, by the Vice-Governor’s own estimation, the number of sheep and goats went from 227,000 in 1930 to 67,000 in 1931.
These are difficult topics, but as we follow Gacioppo across the map and through time, the book is both sensitive and gripping. I couldn’t put it down. Motherlands is a master class in research, with brilliant facts, anecdotes, interviews, and images bursting from the pages. But it’s also the way Gacioppo trusts you to make connections as fast as she does, swoop with her from a bird’s eye view to peck at a word, a number, an image.“A country is just as much an idea as it is a territory, an idea that is deliberately fashioned,” she writes, “Gaddafi’s nationalist regime sought to define an independent Libya by eradicating the relics of the past.” Here, rather than ignoring the past or treating it with nostalgia, Gacioppo refashions it into trenchant ideas about nationhood. Unlike much Italian travel writing that romanticizes the country, Gacioppo makes Italy’s plurality glint in the light. As in Some of Them Will Carry Me, or the Arte Migrante event, this irresistibly composite work points towards a new national narrative: one defined by interrelation.
