Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: In the past thirty years Italy, like other southern European countries, has become a destination for migrants in search of a better way of life.Initially indifferent to the incoming others, as their numbers increased and public discourse began to talk about a social emergency, Italians started to perceive migrants as a threat to their safety, their economic conditions, and their imagined identity as a culturally homogeneous community.By the late 80's, immigrants came to be seen as an unwanted category of people, and were increasingly subjected to negative stereotypes and racist attacks.First released in 1990, Pap Khouma's autobiographical novel I was an Elephant Salesman was one of the first attempts to challenge discriminatory discourses and reclaim the immigrants' right to self-representation. Khouma's novel gives a name and a face to the African migrants who were settling in Europe in the 80's, and familiarizes readers with their struggle to make a dignified living as salesmen, while coping with the dangers and the hardships of a life lived at the margins.The novel's translation, today, brings to English-speaking readers a sad yet hopeful story of modern migration, while introducing them to a crucial aspect of contemporary Italy and other European communities who are struggling to come to terms with their multicultural identity.After leaving his home country of Senegal, a place where social immobilism and corruption have taken away even people's desire to dream, the narrator heads first to the Ivory Coast and then to Europe, where he settles temporarily on Italy's Adriatic Coast.Unable to make it to Germany, or to settle in the land of the former colonizer, where the Senegalese community is hostile to newcomers and the Foreign Legion turns him down, the narrator eventually returns to Italy.Here, with his travel partners, he faces once again the challenges of being a poor, illegal and dark-sinned immigrant.Because of their fear of being deported, the narrator and his companions live under false identities and are unable to make connections with anyone, including the people who show them solidarity.Furthermore, in order to keep a low profile, immigrants cannot respond to the humiliations, the threats or even the physical abuse received from the locals or the police.Their situation worsens as immigration increases, and, in 1987, the government grants immigrants residency permits, changing their status from "shadows" to "men."As the narrator experiences first-hand after his second return to Italy (he temporarily goes back to Dakar), in the late 80's the country's indifference towards immigrants turns into hostility, and the police are constantly at the immigrants' back, confiscating their goods, which is practically everything they own, and challenging their newly gained rights to speak up and defend themselves against discriminations.However, these difficulties do not discourage new associations, such as the one directed by the narrator, from fighting for the immigrants' right "to live like regular people".Migrants like Khouma fight back also by telling their side of the story.Literature becomes a counter-narrative of power, the means to subvert hegemon-
Source: Quaderni d italianistica
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1572791067