PÉGALO COMO SI FUERA PEGAMENTO

The formation and transformation of Eritrean identities has been discussed throughout the thesis through a careful attention to the implication of movement, and how people perceive

themselves as a collectivity (as people in exile first or as a diaspora after). Finally it focuses on how the latter two are enhanced through the use of mnemonic tokens which reflect the past in the present, but also the present in the way the past is perceived, “remembered”, experienced and thus transformed into a meaningful token of the present identity.

The first generation of arrival built a collective exiled identity through narratives reinforcing the importance of the journeys to Italy and the impossibility of returning home, through historical reconstructions and commemorative events. Nevertheless neither the newly arrived nor the second-generation youth are included in this type of perception of the self.

The newly arrived are still building an identity, which for now focuses on the experience of the journey to Italy and a collective memory built around this experience, thus allowing them to meet their shared experiences in a community of memory. The young people who did not undergo a journey to Italy, a flight from war or a collective nation-building from abroad, have nevertheless been able to play with an identity whose outcomes negotiate with the parent’s one. They yearn for an identity where one can be and not be, enjoy it or not, re-produce traditions or follow them as desired; they juggle with a transnational space which is the production of exile but has ceased to be only that. At the same time, though, they are still tied to definitions and notions of Eritreans identity, linked both to the community’s narratives and practices of identity based on nationality in its more recent

“ethnic” connotations rather than the previous “civic” one and to the definitions and stereotypes found in Italian discourses of the past colonial period and the recent legislations against migration.

If someone were to ask an Eritrean in Milan, but probably all around the world, what it means to be Eritrean, the representation of the Eritrean individual and collective self would certainly begin from this “history” or “memory”. These “collective memories” (Connerton 1989) become fundamental in talking about Eritrean identities and echo, in different ways depending on the context, the voices and their application to specific events, spaces and places, present or past and sometimes even future. The analysis of the role of the past in the

Eritrean formation of identities is highly important. Collective memories do not appear only as narratives of the past, as histories of pain; on the contrary they are manifested through silences, or can be obsessive repetitive statements; they are also productions of visions of the past applied to new identity formations and vice-versa re-productions of significant narratives of the self.

There are several ways through which a researcher may observe history in the present. The first approach is to actually study the past in the present, a strong example of which can clearly be found in Sòrgoni’s book (2001) on the life of a colonial official. It shows how Italian colonialism is a past that permeates and spreads into the present. Sòrgoni reached this objective by searching for details of his life today, meeting his living relatives and reading his diaries. The second way to relate to the past through the present is by studying those generations who have not experienced past events, but have been affected both through a certain reproduction of narratives on identity and through the ways their life experiences have developed together with family strategies, following historical events. In my research, for example, the words of the young people (in chapter 6) enable us to understand how far the past echoes in people’s lives and in their discourses, in a linguistic but also a bodily way.

For instance, one of the young Milanese-Eritreans I interviewed incorporated the history of Eritrea starting from (in his recounting) colonialism with his two Italian colonial grandfathers, from where all the history of the country can be narrated through family experiences.

In my hypothesis (Arnone 2003), the past was in the past: I did not foresee such an impact of history on the present and vice-versa the present constructing the past. I included the history of Eritrea with its submission first to Italian colonisation, then to the British protectorate and finally to the Ethiopian Empire, the liberation movements and struggles and so on up until the liberation. I somehow separated the present from the past, looking at the present as a paradigm, a new genealogy springing from the struggle but now independent. I assumed that for the past to be connected to the present the issues around mnemonics, linguistic heritage and identity conceptions had to be raised. I considered it to

be found in possible narratives, however difficult they might prove to narrate. But I had not taken into consideration one other aspect of the past in the present and its most vivid manifestation: incorporation, not only in the sense of Bourdieau’s habitus (1977), but in its literal meaning of carrying history in the body, of being the history. Thus not only is a mixed Italian-Eritrean 60-year-old man telling the history of colonialism through his skin and body features, as is its most expressive and manifest example, but so is a twenty-year-old man embodying the recent 1998-2001 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia through his presence in Milan. This has been understood as the pain of history, as in the “experiences” and the

“bodily incorporations” of the past in the present. Thus another strategy to look into the past through the present is by studying the ways in which people actually use, and thus shape, the system through their knowledge of its weaknesses and strengths in time. For example, Eritrean people of mixed backgrounds with, for instance, an Italian father, have carved the system in such a way that even today people try to juggle with the bureaucracy through the same route: they find an Italian who reports to be their father and thus receive Italian citizenship. Some pay Italian men to do so. Others say their ancestor was an Ascaro who fought for the Italians and try to achieve a pension in this way, by using history today (Law 194 of the year 2004 and 1117 of 1955). In all these and many other ways we can see how the past affects the present and see the past through the present.

However there is another history which is a reappropriation of the past in the present: the history of pain, the linguistic narratives of the past in the present. Skultans argues that

“Language absorbs and reflects history and social structure. Individual narrators draw in varying degrees upon conceptual structures derived from history and literature in order to rearrange disrupted lives into a meaningful pattern” (1998: 24). This certainly is the case when speaking about the recent development of a historical literature and its reflection into a collective discourse. Nevertheless, in the Eritrean case another dynamic has developed and it resembles the religious conversion described by Harding (2001) who analyses the link between linguistic reproductions of religious discourses and the way the latter creates a

dynamic of conversion. He talks about the process by which speaking is believing: it is through speech that one is converted and converts; it is a complex language code that allows such dynamics to occur. Nationalism speaks a similar language: one who “believes” in

“history”, when speaking, produces arguments that set in motion a “conversion” into becoming “a friend of Eritrea” and warding off the possibility of becoming an “enemy”. The process of listening leads into some paradigms of reality that convert the idea of historical contingencies around the Horn of Africa into an ongoing plot against the small nation state of Eritrea. It is through the process of listing to the injustices, which the “nation” has undergone, that this linguistic process takes place among Eritreans in Milan. The listener is thus brought to believe in a plot of a worldly structure against a small victim state⁹²

Historical accounts that are today being forwarded by Eritrean intellectuals come after the EPLF liberation movement’s collective action had taken place and succeeded in its mission.

Today the historical process of reconstruction of the past and commenting on the present are part of the latter process of conversion. Thus the “intellectual” and literary development of written material is part of a re-production process, but it is not constructing a collective memory from scratch or creating the bases for an understanding of the past.

.

To explain who they are, all the generations of Eritreans in Milan would not only describe their country’s struggle, but also their cultural tradition. Shared collective memory and cultural traits built on their perception of belonging stretched across time and space through narratives and certain commemorative practices, for a sense of continuity. Nevertheless, people's lives included other types of experience and daily practices; rarely had they actually fought in person in the war, nor did they follow the tradition in the way they described it.

The outspoken ethnic and national categories are incorporated in the body through ritualised and repetitive set practices, so that history is not only linguistically spoken about but is experienced through the body; it is shown, consumed through objects, remembered

92 See also in chapter 2 in Mebrat’s presentation.

with the Orthodox cross tattooed on the women’s foreheads, and in images. In people’s homes I often noticed they all had mementos of the war; all had the Eritrean flag, pictures of the Shaebia warriors and other more folk symbols such as fenjals, coffee cups, jebenà, the coffee machine, the little stove and many others.

One woman had a famous poster of a smiling Tigre boy on her kitchen wall. The picture has been used by the Ethiopian ministry of tourism to show the Ethiopian ethnic groups since before the liberation of Eritrea. However, today the Tigre are one of the 9 ethnic groups that are part of Eritrea. She had thus brutally erased the word Ethiopia with brown adhesive tape. Another woman had a large poster showing a cat running after a mouse, in cartoon style. When I asked why she had such image in her house, she said the cat was Ethiopia and the mouse was Eritrea “because Eritrea is small and Ethiopia is always trying to get Eritrea”

and she laughed.

Natzennat, one of my second generation informants, during geography revision at the after school club of the Comitato Inquilini, marked the lines of the borders of Eritrea with a black pen on an old world-map which included the small young nation state inside Ethiopia.

People had videos of the history of Eritrea and also of traditional celebrations; they used to put them on while serving coffee and talking with their guests. One day I asked Hywot, one of my informants, to lend me her videos. There were recordings of the past festivals of Bologna and other “cultural” performances, but there also was one video which truly sickened me. It was a documentary of “the 30-year war” and showed the filming of the war in the trenches, with people actually fighting, killing and dying, in front of the video camera.

It was so shocking I could not believe one could have such material at home to view during coffee.

For long I wondered how to distinguish the history of pain from the pain of history. I assume it is a slippery distinction, which I have however spelled out through the various cases of this research. It is a relevant definition to distinguish between discourses and experiences. The experiences of life and the embodiment of the past build up the pain of history, while the

narratives of the past are part of the history of pain reproduced through a collective memory not always lived in person, but emotionally charged. In the latter we may find relevant silences, secrets, obsessions, incorporations, discourses and reproductions. My informant from the consulate, who had fought the liberation war in person, once told me: “you now know more than 60% of the history of Eritrea.” And I thought to myself: “and where does the other 40% lie?” Now I think the rest is the unsaid pain of history, the experiences of war, the secrets that people keep inside. When talking about the issue of war and silence, someone once said: “In war nobody is innocent…” Silences, however, are not only an individual reflection of guilt, they are also reformulations of the past through the present.

There are certain issues to be obscured or emphasised depending on the reading one wants to give about an identity through time. Through narratives such as the one reproduced in the extensive interview in chapter 3, history is almost visually described as if it were experienced and lived; it thus becomes alive and permeates the present, constructing identities and categories.

The identity of Eritreans in Milan showed how time and space are fundamental terrains of change but which nevertheless end up into some sort of freezing of narratives and practices of the self as if placed in a continuum. Change is seen in a progressive development and

“origins” are thus placed into an ideal past, which gave birth to who Eritreans are today. In contradiction to a self perception placed in a continuum, the findings show how different temporal and circumstantial periods differ from each other as divided into sets of discourses and practices of the self which shift rather that develop one from the other.

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