I Was an Elephant Salesman: Adventures between Dakar, Paris, and Milan

Selling

xiv Pap Khouma tive, and even traumatic—challenge of collaborating with someone who occupies a position of power because of his or her standing in the local culture and the publishing market. At times these relationships could become conflictual, but they often allowed a migrant’s text to be made public soon after the migrant writer’s arrival in a destination culture. For many writers, co-authoring was quickly replaced by publishing texts without the mediation of the linguistic expert. Khouma published his second novel, Nonno Dio e gli spiriti danzanti (Grandfather God and the Dancing Spirits), in 2005 after contributing articles to newspapers for years. Initially viewed as a passing phenomenon, narratives by migrants have become instead a powerful cultural force in Italy. Over the past twenty years dozens of novels and collections of short stories have circulated in Italy and have become more and more sophisticated. Narrative strategies have become more complex and subject matter has become less autobiographical than in earlier texts. In this landscape, Khouma’s text represents a model that opened doors to the other texts that followed and courageously redefined the parameters used in describing and narrating Italian culture through non-Western eyes. The foregrounding of the gaze of the other has uncovered traditionally unspoken topics such as Italian racism and the country’s long history of racist practices. These writings demanded an open discussion of Italian colonialism, which had been conveniently forgotten or labeled as “only” a phenomenon during fascism. They also demanded an examination of Italian migrations and their role in a number of disparate cultures. Only in the 1990s were foundational texts about the emigrations of Italians , such as Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) and Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979), made available in Italian translations. These translations and the works authored by immigrant writers have invited native Italians to think of themselves as “others” as they highlight those similarities that connect Italian histories and stories to contemporary migratory experiences in Europe. Introduction I Was an Elephant Salesman xv Migrating cultures hybridize destination cultures, modify communities, and create new allegiances. The protagonists of migrations challenge what being Italian means and inflect the debates surrounding migration and local cultures. Texts by migrants articulate the possibility of rethinking cultural boundaries: the historical and politically charged boundaries between a North and a “global” South, as well as divisions inherent in larger dichotomies such as Western/non-Western , and belonging/non-belonging. Pap Khouma’s I Was an Elephant Salesman is a foundational text. It sought to provoke a rethinking of who the incoming others are, and as such it has succeeded in becoming a mandatory point of reference for talking about contemporary Italy. Khouma has also made it possible for his readers to rediscover the power of literature in public discourse and to imagine future dialogues about culture that might not be dominated by a majority and contaminated by negative rhetorical discourses pertaining to “fortress Europe.” Introduction xvi Pap Khouma ...