Citizens of Sorrow

Figures

Perhaps it is no surprise that Somalis are nearly invisible in Italy. The connections between Italians and Somalis are obscure on both sides, a curious legacy of their colonial encounter. Italian colonists in Mogadiscio lived apart from their subjects, in far more sumptuous circumstances. There were no channels of communication, no places or occasions for encounter. “They were two societies, in parallel existence, neither taking account of the other,” as the political scientist Mohamed Aden Sheikh observed in Arrivederci Mogadiscio.

There is a certain amnesia about the whole affair. Sheikh was “truly surprised” to discover that present-day Somalis knew little about the era of Italian colonial rule. Italians, in turn, are convinced that their colonialism was less brutal than the empires of Britain or France.

I doubt it. As conquerors, the Italians were citizens; Somalis were indigenous noncitizens in their own country. Italians belittled their African subjects, whom they saw as “negri”—uncivilized primitives, on par with the beasts in the jungle. The Italians never signed treaties or entered into agreements with Somali sultanates (whose authority they never recognized); they did their business with other imperial powers. Somalis were just a mass of subjects.

Things are not so different today. Although the Italians ceded their territory in Somalia at independence, in 1960, somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand Somalis now live in Italy. They are part of an African diaspora that includes Nigerians, Gambians, and Senegalese, as well as refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea, both former Italian colonies. Until recently, all Africans in Italy were called Marocchini, Moroccans. The Senegalese, who are engaged in petty trade all over Italy, are known by the pejorative appellation “Vous comprez?”—a reference to their question in French: “Would you like to buy?” For better or worse, Somalis did not earn a name for themselves in Italy until 1991, when their country fell apart.

In Naples, I invited myself to dinner at a Somali apartment. There was not much to see. The main meal consisted of soggy spaghetti, eaten with burnt bolognese sauce or maraq bilaush, a vegetarian variant of the same. For drink, they consume bottles of orange juice, family-size jugs of cola, oversugared tea. They sleep a great deal, and they are forever talking on the phone. The men readily accept what little their working sisters can supply them and stretch it a long way; they spend most of their allowance on a mild stimulant called quat, which they chew. In Somalia, quat chewing was something of an epidemic, ruining relationships between husbands and wives, between fathers and the children they came to neglect. Clan warfare saw deadly decisions made in councils of men high on quat. The drug was the ruin of Somalia, and by the look of things it will be the ruin of these men, too.

On the day I visited the apartment, the air was full of dried sweat. Someone told me that the men clean up on Wednesdays in preparation for the rent payers who come on Thursday. But the noise seldom abates. The radio is on almost all the time, sometimes accompanied by the television (set to ear-bursting volume) or Somali music playing on a tape recorder. Now and then, all three are on at once.

In 1991, a senatorial decree granted all Somalis a renewable two-year right of residency in Italy, complete with a work permit. The women had no problem finding use for their permits: there are plenty of Italian families willing to employ African women as domestic servants, and Somali women are believed to be particularly honest, sober, and clean. Somali men, on the other hand, are known as layabouts and liars.

It’s true that Somali men tend to work as little as possible. Many do not work at all; they subsist on the incomes of their female counterparts, who often work seven days a week. Men who do work gravitate toward the black market. A smuggler can gain in a matter of minutes what Somali women earn in a month. One unintended consequence of the 1991 decree was that Somali passports have become more...