


In recent years, several audiovisual works made in Italy by (partly or wholly) people hailing from the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia have contributed to a challenge to the notions of displacement, deterritorialization and belonging in contemporary Italian society. They trouble the spaces of contact between people, of experiences and memories, therefore highlighting ‘the historical continuum and cultural genealogy’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2012) between the colonial past and the present. By examining displacement and deterritorialization as possible expressions of belonging, rather than polarized elds in relation to it, this essay explores several examples where characters and lmic narrations assume the presence in the ‘here’, and the possibility to convert the ‘here’ into ‘home’, by modifying relations with people and places.



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Farah Polato
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Where Are My Houses?
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17
Where Are My Houses?
Farah Polato, University of Padova




Abstract

    In recent years, several audiovisual works made in Italy by (partly or wholly)
    people hailing from the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia
    have contributed to a challenge to the notions of displacement, deterritorialization
    and belonging in contemporary Italian society. They trouble the spaces of
    contact between people, of experiences and memories, therefore highlighting
    ‘the historical continuum and cultural genealogy’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo,
    2012) between the colonial past and the present. By examining displacement and
    deterritorialization as possible expressions of belonging, rather than polarized
    fields in relation to it, this essay explores several examples where characters and
    filmic narrations assume the presence in the ‘here’, and the possibility to convert
    the ‘here’ into ‘home’, by modifying relations with people and places.


   During the last years some audiovisual works, realized by or in collaboration
with Africans or Afrodescendants born or living in Italy, have contributed to
question the notions of displacement, deterritorialization and belonging in
contemporary Italian society.
   In this essay, I have selected a cluster of these works made and performed by
people hailing from the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Their narrations, marked by the experience and/or the memory of Italian colonization
and African diaspora, take part in the Italian postcolonial debate. Referring to the
‘dubious spatiality’ and the ‘problematic temporality’ of the term ‘postcolonial’ in
Ella Shohat’s Notes on the ‘Post Colonial’, Lombardi-Diop and Romeo state that
in the Italian context, differently from others countries, the term ‘postcolonial’ is
‘beginning to be employed to explore the historical continuum and cultural genealogy
that link the colonial past to the contemporary Italy’, both in order to reposition
colonial history and its legacy, and to underline the continuity existing between
the colonial era and the present in term of relations of power. One of the issues of
concern is to question and redefine Italian cultural history and national identity.1


1
  Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, ‘Defining Postcolonialism’, in Postcolonial
Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. by Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo

                                                 Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                            Farah Polato


   Migration is a central topic in the postcolonial landscape, involving both the
heritage of colonialism and the persistence of a colonial condition reinstated in the
postcolonial era.2 In accordance with it, a specific interest has been devoted to the
representation of the immigrant in Italian cinema and media. This investigation,
variously imbricating national identity, race questions and racism, is recently having
a dialogue with the growing audiovisual production by filmmakers and authors
from the so-called ‘second generation’ or ‘new Italians’.3 If on the one hand this
production corroborates and validates the stratified field delineated above, on the
other it contributes to expand the spectrum concerning individual experiences
and positions. Additionally, within the frame of the imbalance of power, these
audiovisual narratives highlight the complexity of an emotional landscape and
its controversial dynamics issued by the different ways to stay and live in Italy:
confined in reception centers, born in Italy, living in Italy for years or generations…


(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–2. For a detailed review on postcolonial studies in
the Italian context: see ivi, pp. 11–13, and Postcolonialitalia <http://www.postcolonialitalia.it/
index.php?lang=en&Itemid=156> [accessed 20 April 2017]. For the relation between film and
postcolonial studies, with specific attention to the Italian landscape, see L’Africa in Italia. Per una
controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano, ed. by Leonardo De Franceschi (Rome: Aracne, 2013);
Postcolonial Cinema Studies, ed. by Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller (London and New
York: Routledge, 2012); Aine O’Healy, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Italy’s “Multicultural” Cinema’, in
The Italian Cinema Book, ed. by Peter Bondanella (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 295–302.
2
  See Shelleen Greene, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa — Constructions of Racial and
National Identity in the Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2014); Italy In&Out. Migrazioni
nel/del cinema italiano?, ed. by Vito Zagarrio, Quaderni del CSCI, 8 (2012); Sandro Mezzadra, La
condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008).
3
  For a critical approach to the authority of Western cinematic realism in the construction of ethnic
and racial others, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and
the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994). On Italian cinema: Aine O’Healy, ‘Race, Ethnicity, and
the Dream of Multiculturalism: From Pummarò to L’articolo 2’, Romance Languages Annual, 12
(2002), 232–38; and ‘Mediterranean Passages: Abjection and Belonging in Contemporary Italian
Cinema’, California Italian Studies, 1.1 (2010), <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qh5d59c>
[accessed 20 April 2017]; Derek Duncan, ‘Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and its Histories of
Representation’, Italian Studies, 63.2 (2008), 195–211; From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New
Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema, ed. by Grace Russo Bullaro (Leicester:
Troubador, 2010); The Cinema of Italian Migration, ed. by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013); Vito Zagarrio, ‘Diversamente emarginati? Personaggi
migranti nel cinema italiano contemporaneo a confronto’, in L’Africa in Italia. Per una controstoria
postcoloniale del cinema italiano, ed. by Leonardo De Franceschi (Rome: Aracne, 2013), pp. 171–
88; Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative, ed. by Emma
Bond, Guido Bonsaver and Federico Faloppa (Oxford and Bern: Lang, 2015). On national identity
and race-question, see Il colore della razza, ed. by Gaia Giuliani Romeo (Florence: Le Monnier,
2015). On the new landscape, see also Alessandro Jedlowsky, ‘Una nuova voce nel cinema italiano?
L’emergenza di forme di cinema migrante in Italia’, in Camera Africa. Classici, noir, Nollywood e la
nuova generazione del cinema delle Afriche, ed. by Vanessa Lanari (Verona: Cierre, 2011), pp. 69–
76; Farah Polato, ‘Il cinema, il postcoloniale e il nuovo millennio nel panorama italiano’, Aut Aut,
364 (October–December 2014), 173–82. For the effect on practices, see the new law on Italian
cinema and its criteria on funding audiovisual productions (Legge 14 novembre 2016, n. 220 —
Disciplina del cinema e dell’audiovisivo). Concerning representation and self-representation: Alice
Cati and Maria Francesca Piredda, ‘Racconti dal mare. La difficile rappresentazione del Sé nelle
testimonianze mediali dei migranti’, Bianco e Nero, 582–83 (May–December 2015), 126–33.

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   Several contributions have investigated the common features of the cinematic
productions by filmmakers from different originating and receiving countries,
marked both in a thematic and stylistic level by figures of exile and diaspora, such as
the liminal panic, the feelings of being confined within alien borders, illuminating
that domestic spaces are also haunted by various modalities of foreignness
within national borders.4 Recently other perspectives of research have looked at
displacement and deterritorialization as possible expressions of belongingness,
rather than polarized fields in relation to it. From this perspective, cultural
geography provides useful insights. In an article significantly titled Searching
for Belonging: An Analytical Framework (2010), Marco Antonsich provides an
extensive and systematic review on the Anglophone literature across academic
disciplines. Drawing on the definition given by Elspeth Probyn’s in Outside
Belonging (1996), the author affirms that belongingness, as the term suggests,
should be regarded in itself as an instable and dynamic condition, a ‘longing’,
always negotiated and projected on somewhere / something else.5 In his analysis,
organized around the two main intertwined axes of place-belongingness and
politics of belonging, he assumes that ‘contemporary societies are characterized
by the co-presence of a plurality of forms of belonging’. Promoting the mapping
of the different ways in which belongingness are acted and performed, he finally
exhorts us to focus on the plurality of geographical scales at which belonging
can articulate itself, both at a national and transnational level. If the interrelation
between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of belonging has been already investigated, he
argues, the different modalities in which the ‘here’ displays itself in all its multiple
scales and in their connections are still largely unexplored.
   In my article, I will question several examples in which the characters, claiming
their presence ‘here’ and their right to convert ‘here’ into ‘home’, envisage the
possibility of modifying their relations with people and places. Belongingness is
here considered, in a very extensive way, as the ‘longing’ to change these relations,
prompted by personal feelings and/or material circumstances. Filmic narrations
by people hailing from the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia and
Somalia configure here spaces of troubling contacts between people, experiences
and memories which claim to be negotiated. In their ‘searching of belonging’ the
above mentioned films show on the one hand conditions for virtuous dynamics,
and on the other hand strategies to encourage positive emotional connections
towards one or more places. Indeed, some of these audiovisual narrations
highlight how the search of belonging frequently concerns simultaneously a
plurality of spaces, differently articulated in multiple scales: nation, city, territory,

4
  Among them, Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 3; Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, ed. by
Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikò Imre and Aine O’Healy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
5
  Marco Antonsich, ‘Searching of Belonging. An Analytical Framework’, Geography Compass, 4.6
(2010), 644–59. On multiscalar approach, see also Tania Rossetto, ‘Performing the Nation between
Us: Urban Photographic Sets with Young Migrants’, Fennia: International Journal of Geography,
193.2 (2015), 165–84.

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quartier, house, in their interconnections with the hosting and/or receiving-place,
the birthplace, the place left behind, the ‘here’ and the ‘there’.
   All the films considered in my essay are characterized by a cooperative
work, and realized by minor productions and/or by social/cultural networks.
Neglected by the mainstream market, they are distributed and shown in Festivals
and digital networks.
   The diptych consisting of Auló (Id., Ermanno Guida, Graziano Chiscuzzu
and Simone Brioni, 2009–2012) and The Fourth Road (La quarta via, Ermanno
Guida, Graziano Chiscuzzu and Simone Brioni, 2009–2012). The first film
features the writer Ribka Sibhatu, of Eritrean origins, and the second one the
writer Kaha Mohamed Aden, of Somalian origins; both authors contributed to
the screenplays written by Simone Brioni, who coordinated the projects as well.
The production company Redigital and the distributor Kimera Film were set
up by some members of the crew. The Fourth Road was created thanks to the
support of Pavia University and is part of a research project on social-media
communication.
   The work of the Ethiopian director Dagmawi Yimer, deriving from his personal
experience at the school for migrants Asinitas-onlus, was developed through the
activities of the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti (AMM) foundation as well
as various ongoing collaborations, such as those with Zalab, Andrea Segre and
Giulio Cederna. In my article, specific attention will be paid to: Like a Man on
Earth (Come un uomo sulla terra, Andrea Segre and Riccardo Biadene, 2008),
produced by Asinitas Onlus and Zalab, C.A.R.A Italia (2010), and Nothing but
the Sea (Soltanto il mare, Dagmawi Yimer, Fabrizio Barraco, Giulio Cederna,
2011), which was made with the support of Giulio Cederna and Fabrizio Barraco
on direction, screenplay, photography and sound, and was produced by AMM.
   Asmarina. Voices and images of a postcolonial heritage (Asmarina. Voci e volti di
un’eredità postcoloniale, 2015) was realized by Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos,
who was born in Italy from Eritrean parents, in collaboration with Docucity
Festival of Milan. The film is inspired by the 1983 work of photojournalist Lalla
Golderer and Vito Scifo, Stranieri a Milano. Focusing on the last fifty years of
the habesha comunity in Milan, Asmarina is the result of a year and a half of
archival research and interviews. The movie is part of the Asmarina project,
which includes a photographic book of private and public materials gathered
during the shooting of the film.6


6
  About Auló and The Fourth Road: Simone Brioni, ‘Memory, Belonging and the Right for
Representation: Questions of “Home” in Kaha Mohamed Aden’s Fra-intendimenti’, in Shifting
and Shaping a National Identity: Transnational Writers and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today, ed. by
Grace Russo Bullaro and Elena Benelli (Leicester: Troubador, 2014), pp. 23–42; Simone Brioni,
‘Un pas que ma jambe se refuse à faire: expériences collaboratives et croisement de regards sur le
colonialisme italien’, in De la voix à l’auteur. De l’auteur à la voix, ed. by Paola Cabot-Ranzini (Paris:
Karthala, 2016), pp. 173–201; Franca Sinopoli, ‘Storia e memorie non condivise: il contrappunto
dell’identità e la cultura italiana contemporanea’, in Identità, migrazioni e postcolonialismo in
Italia. A partire da Edward Said, ed. by Bruno Brunetti, Roberto Derobertis (Bari: Progedit, 2014),

74
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Setting Another History: On Forgotten and Missed Encounters

   The aim shared by all the selected films is the reconfiguration of the historical
narration and the promotion of a cultural turn after the historical one led by
historians, such as Nicola Labanca quoted in a caption of The Fourth Road.
The opposition to the collective process of removal of the colonial past and the
effort done to produce a deconstruction of colonial rhetoric (‘Italians are good
people’) are adopted by most of the films here considered. Nevertheless, these
two essential steps appear useless if the epistemological approach is not able
to save the relational dimension and to consider the ‘other’ as part of our own
history. Obviously, this process is not intended to remove the ongoing relation of
power produced by the colonial order and the present mobility.7
   This perspective arises at the very beginning of Like a Man on Earth as well as
of C.A.R.A Italia.
   Before introducing those who reached Italy from the Horn of Africa after a
nightmarish journey through the Libyan desert, Dagmawi Yimer, who also acts in


pp. 135–49 (pp. 147–49); Itala Vivan, ‘Postcolonial Discourses in Italy’, Borderlands, 12.2 (2013)
[accessed 20 April 2017]; Clotilde Barbarulli, ‘Kaha Mohamed Aden e Ribka Sibhatu in dialogo
con Clotilde Barbarulli’, in Poetiche politiche. Narrazioni dell’(im)politico: figure e figurazioni della
prossimità nell’intercultura di genere, ed. by Cristina Bracchi (Padua: Poligrafo, 2011), pp. 157–75;
Danyel Ghidini, ‘Per un nuovo orientamento. I documentari La quarta via e Auló’, Affrica, 12
September 2012 (<http://affrica.org/per-un-nuovo-orientamento-i-documentari-la-quarta-via-e-
aulo> [accessed 7.5.2017]; Daniele Comberiati, ‘Raccontare l’Italia postcoloniale: note sparse di
identità e cultura nei documentari Auló e La quarta via’, Nazione Indiana, 14 December 2012.
On Dagmawi Yimer: Come un uomo sulla terra, ed. by Marco Carsetti and Alessandro Triulzi
(Rome: Infinito, 2009); Farah Polato, ‘Rachid, Theo, Dagmawi e gli altri. Voci e forme di un nuovo
cinema’, in L’Africa in Italia, pp. 139–56; Simona Wright, ‘Lampedusa’s Gaze: Messages from
the Outpost of Europe’, Italica, 91.9 (2014), 775–802; Federica Mazzara, ‘Spaces of Visibility for
the Migrants of Lampedusa: The Counter Narrative of the Aesthetic Discourse’, Italian Studies:
Cultural Studies, 70.4 (2015), 449–64; Aine O’Healy, ‘Imagining Lampedusa’, in Italian Mobilities,
ed. By Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Hom (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 152–73; Derek
Duncan, ‘“Il clandestino è l’ebreo di oggi”: Imprints of the Shoah on Migration to Italy’, Quest:
Issues in contemporary Jewish History, 10 (2016), 60–88; Elena Korzhenevich, ‘Changing the
Narrative of the World: Interview with Gabriele Del Grande and Dagmawi Yimer’ and Alessandro
Triulzi ‘Empowering Migrants’ Voices and Agency in Postcolonial Italy’, Critical Interventions:
Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, 10.1 (2016), 107–14 (pp. 58–70). On Asmarina:
Camilla Hawthorne, ‘Asmarina: Postcolonial Heritages’, Doppiozero, 13 May 2016, <http://
www.doppiozero.com/materiali/why-africa/asmarina-post-colonial-heritages> [accessed 20 April
2017]; Leonardo De Franceschi, FCAAAL 2015: Asmarina, CinemAfrica. Afriche e diaspore nel
cinema, 10 May 2015, <http://www.cinemafrica.org/page.php?article1549> [accessed 20 April
2017]; Igiaba Scego, ‘Un angolo di Eritrea a Milano’, Internazionale, 5 May 2015, <http://www.
internazionale.it/opinione/igiaba-scego/2015/05/05/eritrea-milano-asmarina> [accessed 20 April
2017]. For an overview see the site Asmarina project, <http://asmarinaproject.com/it/project/>
[accessed 20 April 2017].
7
  See in this regard the archive project Immaginari (post)coloniali. Public and Private Memories of
Italian Colonialism, in Giulia Grechi, ‘“Le storie più belle sono raccontate da cose, cose che stanno
morendo”: immaginari (post)coloniali, memorie pubbliche e private del colonialismo italiano’,
From the European South: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities, 1 (2016), 139–50
<http://Europeansouth.Postcolonialitalia.it> [accessed 01 August 2016].

                                                                                                      75
                                     Farah Polato


the film, recalls the historical ties between Italy and these countries, considering
other possible trajectories which are not limited to the present ‘migration
pressure’: ‘I think I should start telling this story going back to 100 years ago
when our great-grandfathers met each other…because of the war, when Italy
tried to invade Lybia first and then Ethiopia. But now…’.
   At the visual level, archive images relating to the Italian colonial enterprise,
which has been removed or differently narrated by the Italian institutional
history, follow the shots of Yimer looking at the coming and going of people in
a bus station in Rome. This editing makes images of the past enter the present.
They mingle with the space of the bus station and become closer.
   C.A.R.A Italia is filmed at the Centro di Accoglienza per Richiedenti Asilo
(reception center for asylum seekers) in Castel Nuovo di Porto, Rome. In a dialogue,
the refugees express their sufferance caused by exile and the feeling of being uprooted
as well as by immigration policies and perceived hostility from Italian people. One
of the refugees points out that the relationship between Somalia and Italy dates back
to the past, in the colonial context, and that this relationship has been shaping life
of both countries and peoples for a long time. He claims the existence of a relational
network between Somalia and Italy ‘that cannot be forgotten’.
   The relational dimension is also relevant in Nothing but the Sea, in which
Yimer comes back to Lampedusa where he arrived as refugee. His coming back,
his ‘return’, is the answer to the need to recover the missed encounter with the
island and its inhabitants because of the migration procedures that expropriate
people from their individual and relational agency.
   Proximity appears in this regard as a recurring reference and a discursive
strategy.


Reconfiguring Spaces and Emotional Landscapes: ‘We Are Old Neighbours’

   In Asmarina, some characters claim the cultural ties and similarities between
Italians and Ethiopians. This notion of proximity is expressed in different ways,
as something both material and symbolic. It seems to me to be a central issue in
the narratives considered in this essay: proximity as affinity (cultural affinities),
as neighbourhood, coexistence and familiarity. It looks at an idea of relational
community.
   The period considered by Asmarina, which covers a long period in history and
more than one generation, from the fascist colonization up to the present time,
moves against that representation of the presence of the habesha community in
Milan and in Italy which relegates it to some specific historical episodes, such as
colonization or the so called ‘migrant emergency’ of today.
   This notion of familiarity and proximity also works at the visual level. As
Medhin Paulos remarks, Asmarina is not ‘just a story about Ethiopians and
Eritreans, it was intended to be a story about Milan.’ Asmarina does not reveal
a ‘hidden’ city, rather it makes visible what already exists, replacing it in our

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urban imaginary, ‘rediscovering’ the urban landscape.8 The interaction between
the temporal and visual levels shows streets, shops, houses, public gardens,
buildings, restaurants, quartiers shaped by the women and men who lived and
are living there, according to a familiar proximity.
   In Asmarina the belonging questions different places and communities. Where
is the ‘here’ in Asmarina? ‘Here’ is Italy and Milan from where the characters
speak, where they live, but in their narrations the boundaries between ‘here’
and ‘there’ are sometimes clear, sometimes not so evident (see the reference
to the Bologna Festival). It is interesting to underline that even the definition
of habesha is differently claimed by the characters, depending on their age or
personal biography, and refers to cultural definition or affective experiences.
   From this perspective the cross-cutting technique in these films has a peculiar
relevance, specifically in Auló and in The Fourth Road. Auló takes its title from
Eritrean oral poems performed in public events. During the movie, Ribka Sibhatu
plays a number of Auló, included some composed by her relatives. She speaks
about her life and the personal and national events that in the 1980s forced her
to leave her birthplace. Italy is concerned in all of these levels: as the nation that
colonized Eritrea and as the nation in which Sibhatu lives. She describes herself
as a sycamore with three roots. The first one is Eritrea, the land of the ancestors
and the birthplace. The second is Italy because of Rome, the city where she is
living, and because of the Italian language, the very first foreign language learnt
and conceived as her own. Finally, the third root is France, the country where she
was recognized as an European citizen for the very first time and where she gave
birth to her daughter. The belongingness concerns here the policies of belonging
(to be recognized as citizen) as well as the personal affective realm.
   The film is structured upon two audiovisual series: the first one is marked
by the presence of Ribka Sibhatu, the second one by that of Ermanno Guida,
who is shown during his urban crossing in the city of Rome. Roman landscape
and architectures accompany Sibhatu’s speeches and are always relevant to
them. Sometimes they are representative of Roman/Italian imperial/imperialist
history (e.g. the via Appia and the Vittoriano); sometimes they refer to personal
memories, such as a church attended by Eritrean people in Rome. The sound
of prayers coming out of the religious building reminds Sibhatu of a catholic
church in Eritrea, which is the starting point for talking about the three major
religions in Eritrea.
   Yet Rome is also ‘the other Rome’, the ‘Little Rome’ as Asmara was named
during the fascist colonization. Introduced by Sibhatu this line is developed in
the audiovisual series characterized by the presence of Ermanno Guida. It shows
buildings, shops, cinemas and all sort of Italian architectures shaping Asmara’s
urban landscape, as a brand and legacy of the Italian colonization. In a sort of
reverse-shot Ermanno Guida, walking around Rome, reveals the persistence of

8
 See Hawthorne. The statement was released at a screening of the film at Rome’s Palladium theatre
in March (quoted in Hawthorne).

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                                         Farah Polato


colonial marks: among them, Piazza dei Cinquecento, consecrated to the Italian
soldiers dead in the battle of Dogali in 1887 and the relative commemorative
stele, now located elsewhere, or Amba Alagi road.
   In The Fourth Road, Kaha Mohamed Aden is questioned about forms of
definition and self-definition. She rejects for herself the definition of ‘italo-
somala’, and its additional meaning. At the beginning of the film, the over-titles,
written in first person, state the date and place of birth (Mogadishu, 1966), the
place and period of residence (Pavia, since 1987), finally her own name and
profession (‘I’m a writer’). Two spatial series compose the film, one related to
the city of Mogadishu and the other one to the city of Pavia. In some cases,
Mogadishu stands for Somalia.
   The title The Fourth Road refers to the four roads drawn by Kaha Mohamed
Aden in different colors representing the history of Mogadishu, her place of
birth and the capital of Somalia. The history of Mogadishu is conceived as a
biography of the city, with the different ages of its life shaping its character:
the green one, which is also the oldest, is the Islamic soul, the black recalls the
fascist period, the red is evocative of the socialist dream, which spread after the
independence of the nation. All these roads concern specific quartiers, associated
with these historical events as well as to the writer and her family life. The fourth
road is grey: this is the road of the so-called ‘Signori della guerra’ (Men of war),
referring to the civil war which broke out after the collapse of Mohamed Siad
Barre’s government in 1991.
   The starting point of The Fourth Road is indeed the search of a lost place, the
city of Mogadishu, ‘a place I have loved, a place I have known’, the belonginess
of which seemed obvious to Aden. It is a city which has been both materially
and psychologically lost, destroyed during the civil war. To tell personal tales
about Mogadishu is for Kaha Mohamed Aden a way to make the city live once
more after its destruction. Nevertheless, the reconstruction and the narration
of Mogadishu, the old home, can restart only in Pavia, when the city becomes
a ‘new home’, thanks to the acquired citizenship (politics of belonging) and a
restored affective landscape (friends, love).


From Maps to Mapping

   Maps are a constant presence in the films analysed, playing different functions.9
Some of them visualize dislocations, such as the migratory routes (e.g. Like a Man
on Earth) or the geographical position of nations/cities/places involved in the
discourse (e.g. the map of the Horn of Africa on the atlas shown by Asli Haddas
in Asmarina). The people interviewed in Auló, for example, do not know exactly
where Eritrea is, nor are they aware of the colonial ties with this part of Africa. In

9
 For an extensive analysis, see Tania Rossetto, ‘The Map, the Other and the public visual image’,
Social & Cultural Geography, 16.4 (2015), 465–91.

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this perspective, maps also become a concrete object that symbolically contrast
the removal of the colonial past and simultaneously highlight the ideologically
and power-related practice of mapping. In Auló, again, the urban map of Rome
points to the persistence of colonial rhetoric in the urban fabric, disclosed
by the names of streets and places. Power-related maps, such as the colonial
maps exposed at the Associazione Nazionale Reduci Rimpatriati d’Africa —
A.N.R.R.A, appear in Asmarina. Nevertheless, the aerial view of Asmara on a
serving tray at an Eritrean restaurant seems to display a sentimental feeling, an
emotional connection with the country.10
   In The Fourth Road the map in the atlas shows us that ‘Mogadishu does
indeed exist’, that the beloved city (and Somalia as whole) is not an ‘invented’,
phantasmatic or ‘dreamt’ space. Moving from this anchor point and from her
new house, Pavia-Italy, Kaha Mohamed Aden is able to draw and shape her
own colored maps, originating from interconnected geographies. In so doing
she takes her biographical and emotional space back, but she also creates a new
space of belonging, a new house in which to live, linking past with present in an
experiential dimension.
   In C.A.R.A Italia too, self-made maps come into view. They are assembled
with colored strings, visualizing the itineraries that refugees must complete to
reach strategic places, such as the route from the reception center to a school.
Other colored maps display instead the personal itineraries conceived in order
to discover a new, unknown space. In this regard, it is relevant to note that the
action of walking through the city appears as a way to embody this. In Aulò
Ermanno Guida’s promenades throughout Rome display the persistence of
colonial rhetoric, but they also reveal the city, through its architecture and
through people who live there, as the result of its history, relations and influences:
‘everything I see around here takes me to a faraway place’ which made Rome the
city we know today.11 These are embedded, dynamic maps.
   In the last sequence of Auló, Ermanno Guida, a ‘non-Roman’ living in Rome,
claims that ‘Roma isn’t in the genes’. Echoing Igiaba Scego’s novel La mia casa
è dove sono ([My Home is Where I Am], 2011) he affirms that Rome belongs
instead to the people who live there. According to the narrative strategies and
practices developed in the analyzed films, he reminds us that belonging is not a
problem which concerns only specific people: it concerns a network of relations.
In that sense, belonging is ‘our’ affair.




10
  See Hawthorne for this detail.
 Regarding promenade as performative act in a postcolonial perspective, see bell hooks, Belonging:
11

A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2009).

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