Mina Boulhanna’s “Immigrata” and “Africa”
In this chapter, I closely read two poems—“Immigrata” (Migrant Woman) and “Africa”—written in Italian by Mina Boulhanna. Both appeared for the first time in Nuovo Planetario Italiano (New Italian Planetarium), a volume edited by Armando Gnisci and published in 1996, when literary works by migrant writers living in Italy started to attract the attention of critics and the general public.1 As Anika Kosic and Anna Triandafyllidou write with reference to the history of immigration to Italy, “Like other countries in Southern Europe, Italy has, in the course of less than two decades, rapidly and unexpectedly changed from a country of emigration to one of immigration.”2 Boulhanna’s poems are emblematic of this change and clearly reflect Italy’s discursive and political construction and widespread negative perception of migration as a “problem,” “a threat to jobs,” “a threat to cultural and religious identity,” and, in its more recent formulations, “a security threat.”3
After her first public appearance as a poet in 1996, Boulhanna’s name has only been included in Paola Ceola’s Migrazioni narranti (Migrant Narrations), an anthology collecting literary works written by migrants of African origin. Ceola, in particular, includes Boulhanna’s name in a footnote of the section “Morocco,” a subchapter of the anthology, which maps a wide galaxy of works written by African writers, coming to Italy from different areas of the continent.4
My intention in this chapter is to sketch an alternative geography—a jughrāfiyā badīla, in Mersal’s sense of the term—in which Morocco, Boulhanna’s country of origin, is not eclipsed by the blinding light of Italy and does not get lost in the galaxy of Africa. This is why I have included Boulhanna’s two poems in this volume and placed them in close proximity to the works of the other women discussed in this book, so that a new sense of kinship may emerge.
In “Immigrata,” Boulhanna expresses the difficulties experienced by a migrant woman who has left her homeland and takes her first steps into a new country. The speaker compares her current life to a thick layer of fog, which renders her walking purposeless and uncertain, despite her great care and application: “Fog, this (life) of mine / It is random, my walk Even if I am very careful.”5 Boulhanna’s poem emphasizes feelings of disorientation and alienation in ways comparable to the poet Gëzim Hajdari, winner of the prestigious Montale prize in 1997. To quote one of his poems: “Piove sempre / in questo / paese / forse perché sono / straniero” (It always rains / in this / country / maybe because I am / a stranger).6 Besides communicating with efficacy a deep sense of discomfort and isolation, Boulhanna’s “Immigrata” has the merit of introducing a gender dimension to migration, by placing at the center of the poem a migrant woman. Her rather conventional representation of the racialized and gendered immigrant body as coerced and victimized is, however, problematic. Boulhanna’s sorrowful and lonesome newcomer, for instance, is quite distant from Mersal’s resolute and single-minded (anti)heroine who makes fun of migrants belonging to earlier generations, still “dream[ing] of returning when they become corpses.”7 In opposition to Boulhanna’s restless and destitute speaker, whose home is a tent and who keeps her treasures hidden in a suitcase, the woman portrayed in Mersal’s “Why Did She Come?” owns a house and has exchanges with fellow newcomers, who have arrived on foreign soil before her. Not so, for Boulhanna, who was among the first migrants to reach Italy in the 1990s. Accordingly, not only practically as a newly arrived person but also aesthetically as an emerging poet, Boulhanna had no established multiethnic network to rely upon, since in Italy the “symbolic space in literature has historically been constructed as a white space” as Caterina Romeo explains.8
Despite the lack of established literary models, Boulhanna’s bleak description of the condition of the migrant woman appears in fact to take up one of the most recurrent motifs in Arabic (particularly Maghrebi) literature: the topos of al-ghurba.9
According to sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, the term al-ghurba concentrates three different, dark meanings in one word: first, the meaning “sunset,” and attached to it the fear of losing one’s way and getting lost amid total darkness; second, “exile,” with the consequent sense of disorientation and isolation produced by the strangeness/foreignness of the place; and, third, a more generic sense of inner turmoil and loss that gives rise to feelings of misfortune and fright.10 As Sayad observes, the idealized image associating migration with “a source of wealth and decisive act of emancipation” is to a certain extent neutralized by these other, more negative connotations, thus restoring al-ghurba to its original dark meaning.11 Boulhanna’s poem reinforces the negative qualities of migration, echoing Mersal’s dark-humored description of the hijra as a grim condition. The urban landscape, in particular, both in Mersal and in Boulhanna is described as bare and unyielding. To quote Boulhanna: “My sky is gray Trees and branches bare Freezing air, humid.”12 These gaunt images juxtaposed with no interconnection call to mind T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket / no relief, / and the dry stone no sound of water.”13 Both in Boulhanna and Eliot’s poems the surrounding environment is experienced as barren and harsh.
Nomadism in Boulhanna’s poem is not an abstract theoretical construct but a deeply concrete, quotidian experience marked by weariness and instability, as the two objective correlatives (a pair of worn-out shoes and a suitcase) suggest.14 Accordingly, the conclusion cannot be but desolate and hopeless: “Saddening this life of mine / and the destiny that has chosen it for me.”15
The urban space in Boulhanna’s poem is outlined as anonymous and unavailable; it presents itself under a dark light, thus resonating with the following lines by Eliot: “Unreal City / under the brown fog of a winter dawn.”16 Far from being just a literary homage to Baudelaire’s spectral city of Paris or a modern rendering of Dante’s Inferno, as it happened in Eliot’s poem, the urban landscape in Boulhanna’s “Immigrata” stages and epitomizes the migrant’s tangible and factual exclusion not only from the city she arduously traverses but also from the nation she spectrally inhabits. This eradication will become clearer in the next section.
Not only migration but also colonialism and racism have been largely removed from Italy’s public consciousness. “As a crucial dimension of Italian colonialism in East and North Africa,” Cristina Lombardi-Diop writes, “race has undergone a process of removal akin to the one described by Angelo Del Boca with regard to Italy’s colonial crimes (and the memory of colonialism tout court) that he views as ‘a product of the total denial of colonial atrocities, the lack of debate on colonialism, and the survival in the collective imaginary, of convictions and theories of justification.’”17 In “Africa,” Boulhanna forces readers to come to terms with this double denial by turning the reader’s gaze toward Africa. The poem opens with a rather stereotypical representation of Africa as a bunch of sweet, warm, black grapes,18 which revives to a certain extent bell hook’s “over-riding fear . . . that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate—that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.”19 Africa is further outlined as “simple and sincere Wild, spontaneous Victim of iniquity / Of torment and nature.”20 In the closing lines, the African continent is further reduced to an immense mourner dressed in black, whose embrace is full of warmth and generosity. The poem ends with the brutal question “And who understands you?” followed by the violent statement “You are black and ugly / You are poor foredoomed / You are the Africa that must remain in Africa.”21
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison urges both readers and writers to critically interrogate “the associative language of dread and love that accompanied blackness.”22 Solicited by Morrison’s call, I wonder whether Boulhanna is really capable of disrupting the racist language that associates Africa with darkness, death, and poverty, employed by colonial powers to support and justify their mission civilisatrice,23 a stereotypical representation that is still being used in the media up to this very day.24 Has Boulhanna learned, I ask borrowing Morrison’s question, “how to maneuver to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains”?25
In “Africa,” Boulhanna undoubtedly targets issues relating to vision and representation, which are crucial sites for intervention and change, particularly in postcolonial literature.26 In particular, the poem exposes and denounces a certain European gaze, a regard sur l’Afrique, that Europe has cast upon Africa in colonial times and that disturbingly continues to circulate even today as, among others, the controversial book Sexe, race, et colonies proves.27 Moreover, by mobilizing a group of images related to death and mourning, Boulhanna’s “Africa” seems to anticipate not only the innumerable deaths of Black men, women, and children in the Mediterranean Sea; also and in retrospect, it revisits the old and repeatedly violent encounter between imperial Europe and Africa as its colony.28 This is a topic that public opinion, at least in Italy, has to a great extent failed to address. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller write with reference to Italian colonialism: “In the Italian case, it is not only colonialism’s many violences that were rimosse—to use the Italian word that means both removal and repression—but also the shame of its defeat.”29 Boulhanna, I suggest, forces her readers to reorient their looks toward Africa, thereby indirectly urging them to excavate Italy’s obliterated history of colonial domination in the Horn of Africa and Libya, and ultimately to acknowledge together with the Italy that was and still is in Africa, the Africa that has historically been and currently is in Italy.30
Boulhanna’s poems of the 1990s inaugurate a debate on colonialism and racism, which will be taken up in the new millennium by writers such as, among others, Gabriella Ghermandi, Kaha Mohammed Aden, Igiaba Scego, Ribka Sebhatu, and Cristina Ali Farah, who have contributed to unearth through their creative works Italy’s colonial history and bring it back to public consciousness, while also shedding light on the durable impact of colonial and imperial histories on the present with their painful legacy of stereotyping, discriminating, and justifying racist and xenophobic violence.31
With their emphasis on violence, loss, and mourning, Boulhanna’s poems function today—thirty years after their first publication—as a powerful reminder of the transformation that the Mediterranean has recently undergone, from “a varied yet also integrated space,” to use Karla Mallette’s apt formulation, to an entrenched and patrolled border.32 No longer a highly heterogeneous and interconnected space, marked by mobility and interaction, the Mediterranean Sea with its overloaded boats and drowned Black bodies has become a huge graveyard, while Libya has basically turned into a market for human trafficking and a penal colony, as documented by the photographer Narciso Contreras in “Libya: A Human Marketplace.”33 Khaled Mattawa’s recent poetry collections Mare Nostrum (2019) and Fugitive Atlas (2020) provide another poignant account of the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and of the EU’s failed military attempts to stem it. In the 2016 documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) by filmmaker Domenico Rosi, viewers see what the inhabitants of Lampedusa (in particular, its fishermen) have been witnessing for decades: the transformation of the Mediterranean Sea into the front line of an undeclared war and of Lampedusa as its military outpost. Fuocoammare proceeds with no commentary or soundtrack but with long silences, offering viewers disturbing glimpses of the strange immobility of everyday life on the island, with its regular rhythms and quotidian rituals, contrasted with the vortex of rescue operations happening offshore. These two universes, despite being so proximate, never in fact overlap.
Writing on the new migratory routes taken by migrants to reach Europe, Ali Bensaad underlines the central role played by the Sahara and the subsequent “inevitable drawing together of the Maghreb and black Africa.”34 To quote Bensaad: “If the Mediterranean is a line of demarcation between Europe and the South, the Sahara functions very much in the same way, an echo of the northern line, bringing Europe even further south.”35 This is why we can talk of the Mediterranean Sea as a desertsea, as Najet Adouani’s poetry collection (Ṣaḥrā’u al-baḥri / Meerwüste) clearly suggests.36 As Bensaad claims, North African countries have become the “sentinel outposts” of Fortress Europe, which imposes on them a repressive role rather than coresponsibility in the management of common concerns, jeopardizing these countries’ slow transition toward democratic forms of government.37 One of the most striking examples of this fatal venture being the memorandum of understanding signed by the Italian government and the Libyan Government of National Accord in 2017 and tacitly renewed in 2020, a deal that as Alessandra Generale notes has “provoked waves of indignation from the civil society, NGOs, and associations for human rights, who accused Italy and the European Union, to be guilty and co-responsible of violation of human rights (and consequently of duties coming from the International Conventions) which occurred in the African country.”38
In “Africa,” Boulhanna represents Africa as a mourner. Is she mourning, I ask, the many deaths taking place in the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, as migrants attempt to reach Europe? Is she also mourning the radical effacement that migrants underwent in the mass media in the 1990s, where they were mostly represented as “non-persons”?39 Finally, shouldn’t we all mourn the failure of a Euro-Mediterranean partnership inaugurated twenty-five years ago and, more generally, the failure of Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi’s idea of Europe?
Writing in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and in protest against US war campaigns and the increase of surveillance and securitization measures, in Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler rejects the idea that security problems require and justify violent measures, arguing that attacks to first world privilege should be seen as a chance to reimagine global relations in more equal terms. To quote Butler: “The dislocation from first world privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community.”40 If the events of September 11 have displayed the vulnerability of the United States, the daily deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, and the terrorist attacks involving European capitals and cities are revealing Europe’s extreme fragility. Following Butler, I suggest that these tragic occurrences should not reinforce existing divisions but rather prompt a conceptualization and realization of an alternative political, which does not content itself with providing trade concessions and financial forms of cooperation in exchange for migration control, particularly the surveillance of maritime borders and the detection of small vessels. Excavating and unearthing the history of the Mediterranean as a sea that binds rather than kills may be a good starting point to imagine and realize a more sustainable political.
In The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1500, Karla Mallette reconstructs the history of Sicily, and, more broadly, of the Mediterranean, as one made of “complex cultural affiliations,” without forgetting the tensions, conflicts, and deportations that characterized centuries of strong interaction.41 In particular, the Kitāb al-Rujāri / Book of Roger, commissioned by Roger II at the Norman Court of Palermo to the geographer al-Idrisi, is emblematic of this eclectic and multilayered history of intercultural and interfaith collaboration, as Malette argues. According to a tale told by al-Idrisi himself and reported by Malette, the Norman king had “required representatives from the merchant ships that called at Sicilian ports to state their accounts of all the lands they knew from personal experience.”42 It is important to note that al-Idrisi was born in Sabtah (now Ceuta) in 1099. A Spanish enclave on the Moroccan northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, Ceuta is sadly known today as a patrolled patch of land surrounded by a double fence and barbed wire. I wonder what al-Idrisi, as a man who crossed the Mediterranean Sea many times, would think of the militarized transformation of his native town Sabtah/Ceuta and of the shutting down of ports periodically invoked by anti-immigration politicians in Italy. What kind of tales would he collect today from the fishermen’s ships and inflated boats that call at the Lampedusa port? Finally, would his geographical treatise still carry on its cover the poetically far-flung title Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Book of the Journey for One Who Longs to Pierce through the Horizons)? As Malette explains in European Modernity, al-Idrisi compiled his ambitious work of geography by listening carefully to the stories told by the travelers who had reached Sicily on board of their boats. From these narratives, he constructed “a silver globe” and compiled his geographical masterpiece “as a descriptive accompaniment to the globe.”43 The “Book of Roger,” as Malette points out, was to become “one of the most ambitious and accurate geographies of the Middle Ages.”44
Let me ask provocatively: What kind of geographic treatise are we compiling today? Are our government authorities still guided by the genuine curiosity and by the stupor/marvel that was moving Roger as he commissioned the work to al-Idrisi and contemplated the silver globe while listening to his stories? I think we are in great need today of subjective atlases similar to the ones conceptualized and designed by Annelys de Vet in partnership with local communities—atlases that “construct new narratives” capable of “distinguish[ing] and preserv[ing] the differences” and of “critically question[ing] the apparently objective.”45
There is yet another story to be told as we proceed to the end of this chapter, involving multiple Mediterranean crossings and breakthroughs. It is a tale involving another prominent Andalusian notable: the famous Ibn Rushd/Averroes.46 The story—half legend, half historical account—is narrated by Toni Maraini in Ballando con Averroè (Dancing with Averroes) and takes place after Ibn Rushd’s death. It chronicles the strange ways in which his corpse crossed the Mediterranean Sea on board a mule from Marrakesh, where he had been buried, to Cordova, his native town.47 Ibn ‘Arabi, who was born in Al-Andalus like Ibn Rushd and was known in the Middle Ages as “Doctor Maximus,” confirms the story, by declaring that the curious caravan had approached unexpectedly one day in front of his very eyes: a mule carrying on one side a breadbasket with Ibn Rushd’s corpse and, on the other side, one containing his medical and astronomic treatises, the only ones that had not been burned by the religious zealots of the time, the Almohadi.48 The two baskets functioned as a balance.49
Ibn Rushd was the illustrious descendant of a family of famous jurists who had worked at the service of the caliph in Cordova. Later, he had been appointed at the Almohadi court in Marrakesh as the personal doctor of the caliph Abu Ya‘qub Yusuf and as the commentator of Aristotle’s oeuvre.50 Here, he had also discovered a luminous star—known today as Canopo—and had meditated on the rotation of the earth and its spherical form, thus preparing the ground for one of the major discoveries that would take place in Europe some centuries later, the “Copernican revolution.”51 At the court of Abu Ya‘qub Yusuf in Marrakesh, Ibn Rushd had also met the renowned mathematician, doctor, astronomer, philosopher, and writer Ibn Tufayl, whose fame would cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe. According to Maraini, his groundbreaking work, known in its Latin translation as Philosophus Autodidactus, would inspire later generations of philosophers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, and Jacques Rousseau.52 The philosophical theories of Ibn Rushd, however, which supported the “equality of all human beings” and the possibility of a fruitful coexistence between the reason of philosophy and that of religion, did not win the sympathy of either the Almohadi rulers or his fellow compatriots. Accused of heterodoxy, Ibn Rushd was expelled from the Almohadi court and his philosophical books burned.53 Confined in Lucena, an important Jewish center in the Andalusian province, his thought had a deep impact on medieval Jewish philosophers, which played a crucial role in circulating his knowledge.54 Long after his death, as historian María Rosa Menocal writes, the Christian Inquisition joined the Islamic censors and banned his work in 1210.55 The seed of his insurgent philosophy, however, did not die out and survived in underground currents contributing to keep alive the principle of equality and the belief that religion and reason may exist yet in separate spheres and thanks to a precarious balance. As Maraini claims, Ibn Rushd’s audacious and pioneering thought in the field of philosophy would later inspire a long current of thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.56
Malette and Maraini’s recuperation of historical figures such as al-Idrisi and Ibn Rushd provide readers with an alternative atlas of the Mediterranean basin, as an intricate and dialectical network of both maritime and terrestrial crossings that favored intellectual exchanges, transmissions, and translations between the two shores. This is a complex web that counterpoints the usual description of the Mediterranean basin as the theater for holy wars, religious obscurantism, and piracy. I am not implying that religious fanaticism, cultural antagonism, and tyrannical power did not exist. Still, the anecdotes involving al-Idrisi and Ibn Rushd/Averroes prove that even in those dark times there were men and women who engaged in concrete actions to extend human knowledge and realize more equilibrated, discerning, and therefore nonviolent societies freed from the disasters provoked by dogma, ignorance, and hatred.
Historical figures like al-Idrisi and Ibn Rushd/Averroes are rarely mentioned in our classrooms. This is also true for writers who breach the general agreement that the literary and national space—at least in the case of Italy—should be homogeneous and recognizably white. As Caterina Romeo writes in “Racial Evaporations”:
For more than twenty years, migrant and postcolonial writers in Italy have denounced racism as a pervasive element in Italian society, articulated through exoticism, patronizing attitudes, microscopic and macroscopic racist acts, systematic marginalization, and state racism. . . . They have represented Italian social space as diversified, a space in which the juxtaposition of terms such as “black” and “Italian” does not constitute an oxymoron.”57
Examining the emergence of literary works produced by so-called migrants within their respective national literatures, in the introduction to Migrant Cartographies (2005), Daniela Merolla and Sandra Ponzanesi call into question the invisibility of these new voices within the Italian literary canon.58 Boulhanna herself is a ghostly figure in the Italian literary panorama. What do we know about her life and work thirty years after she published her first two poems? As I see them, “Immigrata” and “Africa” represent a bare beginning; they bear witness to the immense effort that this woman, this yet-to-be poet made to describe things from the beginning, in history, as Edward Said would have it.59 In Boulhanna’s poems, readers do not only find the words of a newcomer giving an account of herself and of her painful experience of dislocation. Theoretically, she is not very different from those traveling merchants who would be invited at the Norman court in Palermo to recount what they had seen and witnessed during their journeys across the Mediterranean and well beyond it. Unfortunately, in her case, listeners were not as dedicated as al-Idrisi and Roger II.
Yet the account she gives is novel and engaging. In her beginning as a poet, Boulhanna returns to, repeats, and revises the classical image of the migrant as a displaced, marginalized subjectivity filled with nostalgia and loss. Her embodied representation of the migrant woman inaugurates a different production of meaning, one that bears the mark of her gendered body and deliberately produces an alternative sense of the migratory experience with respect to that produced by male writers. Through her writing, Boulhanna not only mobilizes and neutralizes, in Morrison’s own words, the symbolic figuration of blackness with “delicious sensuality” that the initial metaphor of the black grapes repeats and revises.60 By uttering clear audible words, she manifests racism as pervasive and widespread.
Since Boulhanna writes in Italian, she expects to be recognized as an insider; by appropriating the language of the supposed host, she refuses to be a guest. In Je Parle Toutes les Langues Mais en Arabe, Abdelfattah Kilito claims that one can never free herself completely from the familial, familiar language. To what extent, I ask, does Arabic make itself audible in Boulhanna’s Italian? Does she somehow speak Italian with an Arabic accent? To my ears, Boulhanna’s language is paradoxically monolingual. Readers do not encounter Arabic words or Arabic sounds and rhythms in her poems, not even hints of these. Similarly, there is no explicit sign of her Moroccan roots anywhere. It is as if these cultural traces had been willfully eradicated. And yet both poems seem to have been swallowed up by a typical Moroccan, Maghrebi preoccupation—al-ghurba. This is an aspect that should not go unnoticed.
Reflecting on the fragile nature of many new projects, Said explains: “It is, however, very difficult to begin with a wholly new start. Too many old habits, loyalties, and pressures inhibit the substitution of a novel enterprise for an established one.”61 What kind of pressures and old habits, I wonder, have contributed to stall Boulhanna’s funambolic walk? Why has her writing after the first beginning not began again anew? What kind of obstacles—political, social, material—have emerged along the way to inhibit, mine, and ultimately block her writing process?
As Said makes patently clear, beginning to write always implies a good dose of optimism, since one usually finds numerous obstacles on her way; as Virginia Woolf convincingly argues, in order to write, a woman needs a room of her own.62 What happened, then, to Boulhanna’s initial optimism? Did she ever find that quiet room of hers?
As a female writer who has encountered discouragement many times, and whose writing has been stalled by obstacles of different sorts, I have looked with wonder at Boulhanna’s first intrepid steps on the global rope; I have been intrigued by her timid beginning, by her radical starting point. Accordingly, I have also been deeply disappointed by the realization that her writing has stopped, that she may have lost sight of a direction, trust in continuity.
As I am confronted with Boulhanna’s aborted beginning, I wonder if the ways in which we tend to study, organize, circulate, and evaluate literary works may have inexorably compromised the development of her talent and her confidence in continuity. Her silence, I believe, is eloquent on this regard and raises a set of uncomfortable questions relating to visibility, audibility, recognition, and inclusion.
My aim in this chapter then, has been precisely to pay tribute to Boulhanna’s first steps as a promising poet, while also calling attention to the feelings of frustration, abandonment, and failure that may seize a funambulist like her.