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Stability, security, and housing – these are three factors that even Italian citizens sometimes find difficult to come by, and so when an immigrant faces these issues it is naturally even harder for them to establish a secure place for themselves. Often marginalized and lacking a political voice, these immigrants can only make their experiences visible through the written word, finding in literature the opportunity both to relate their lives and to express their emotions regarding the new situations in which they find themselves. In examining the writings of two Italian immigrants – Pap Khouma, a first generation immigrant, and Igiaba Scego, of the second generation (that is, born to immigrant parents in Italy)1 – the value of housing and the path it provides to the stability and security necessary for an immigrant to put down roots in a new country and become assimilated becomes apparent. Differences between these generations include the extremely mobile life of a recent arrival to the country as compared to the desire to settle down and establish roots often seen in the second generation. The two literary works selected - Io, Venditore di Elefanti (1990), Khouma’s memoir, and Dismatria, Scego’s short story from the collection Pecore Nere (2005) - display the clear contrasts between each writer's experiences. When taken together, however, this literature gives much more personal insight to a topic that otherwise could be reduced to policies and statistics.
In the narrative time of the text, the protagonist/narrator Khouma is a recent undocumented immigrant to Italy working as a street vendor, whose life seems never to slow down. His work is a whirlwind of activity as he moves from street to street, house to house, and even country to country, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, but always trying to stay one step ahead of the law that is a constant threat. In fact, it seems as if the only stable element of Khouma's life is its instability. For many months, the only reliable place Khouma has to stay is a car, which is in its essence not stable at all, but something that is meant to move from place to place. Khouma relates that a house was an “unattainable dream” for clandestine of any nationality, not only Senegalesi like him.2 Often Khouma had to rely on the kindness of friends or other immigrants from Senegal to put him up for a night or two. Apartments seem to change frequently and are always overcrowded – not the kind of place one would want to stay permanently. In addition, the lack of documentation for these immigrants adds yet another layer of difficulty in the search for housing. Without the proper documents, immigrants can face not only legal hardships, but also racial biases as they search for apartments, thus forcing them to live either in overcrowded apartments or to sleep wherever they can – for instance, in a car. This vagabond lifestyle is indeed the definition of instability.
It bears mentioning that in Khouma's work, the image of the car is crucial in understanding this instability. Not only did the car, owned by Khouma and several of his companions, serve as a home for them, but they also used it as a place of entertainment and even, on occasion, as a religious space. Certainly, the car is a constant presence in Khouma's life for some time. But as used in the book, the car only reinforces the lack of stability facing immigrants, given its nature as a mobile object. In the world Khouma describes, it is a telling irony that the only stability in his life is a necessarily unstable thing. Interestingly, in the midst of this precariousness, even personal identities become mobile, as many undocumented immigrants give the authorities incorrect spellings of their names in order to keep their real identities outside of police record. However, Khouma's experiences were not unique to him; rather he was the first to articulate situations that have been shared by countless others who have come to Italy in search of a better future.
While Khouma describes an incredibly precarious lifestyle in Italy, he also describes how, the longer he stayed, the more attractive Senegal became for him and many of his fellow immigrants. He and his friends often spoke of “the future, the return, and [their] hopes. Dakar grew in dreams and in nostalgia rose up to heaven” (74). This longing for the mother country underlines a clandestino's lack of roots because in the back of one's mind there is always another country, and another culture – one to which one feels he truly belongs. No matter how long Khouma stays in Italy, Senegal will always be his mother country, and Italy his adopted land, even though in the closing line there is a sense of the inevitable changes both societies and its individuals will be undergoing.
The strong desire to return to one's native country is a fundamental difference between the first and second generations of immigrants, as Scego clearly illuminates in her work.3 Scego is of both an entirely different generation, and an entirely different mindset. The narrator in Dismatria finds herself torn between the cultures of Rome and Somalia, where her family is from. For her, her family's instability is symbolized by luggage. The members of her family choose to keep their most prized possessions packed away in suitcases, which is, to her, a crazy idea. Instead she would rather have a “solid and robust wardrobe,” which to her represents stability.4 Scego writes that words like “wardrobe” were not used in this home, along with other words such as “house,” “security,” “roots,” and “stability” (10). It seems in this regard the narrator is rebelling against the older generation of her family. Indeed, the real reasons these bags exist are as a hiding place for the family's anguish and fear. To her mother, having these bags already packed means that should that fateful day arrive, the family would not be hurried but instead would be able to leave calmly and return triumphantly to Somalia. What Scego sees, but the family does not acknowledge, is that the Somalia they left behind no longer exists, and that this dream of returning is just that – a dream. However in order to keep that dream alive, they must live with these suitcases; they must not become settled and Italian, because to do so would mean to destroy the dream of returning to the life her mother once knew. Accepting stability in the destination culture means making a break with one's culture of origin that oftentimes first generation immigrants are unwilling or unable to make. On the other hand, second generation immigrants (those born in Italy to immigrant parents), or first generation immigrants who relocated at a very young age, frequently do not have these same problems given the simple fact that they have spent most of their lives in Italy and therefore think of themselves as Italian. As Scego’s protagonist says, her family
The desire, or lack thereof, to assimilate entirely to the Italian culture in which they now live marks a major distinction between the two generations of immigrants in Italy.
In Dismatria, the suitcases resemble the car in Io, Venditore di Elefanti, as a suitcase can symbolize mobility and instability in the same way a car can. Yet these characteristics are also essentially cages, whether physical or mental ones. Without a stable, physical, home it is possible to float around from place to place forever without ever having somewhere to return to, and for Khouma the car is his only option, making it not freedom but instead a prison. Likewise, by clinging to their suitcases and the dream of one day returning to Somalia, Scego’s immigrants refuse to accept their reality and instead remain shackled to their suitcases, preferring them to something more permanent. And so while the first generation tends to hold on to the security of home (in this case meaning their native country), the second generation often realizes that their home is actually in Italy, and they want to establish themselves there.
This literature elaborates upon the very real issue of housing for immigrants in Italy. As Fabio Amato relates a brief section from the larger work he edited, Atlante dell'immigrazione in Italia, housing is a major problem for many immigrants. Over the course of several years, an immigrant might be forced to change living situations almost continuously, even within the same city or province. Furthermore, these living situations, according to Amato, may even be worse than the conditions endured in the immigrant's country of origin.5 Finding a place to live is made even more difficult due to the lack of public housing available in Italy, with the percentage of housing allocated to foreigners decreasing annually. This situation is only compounded by the inadequate amount of public housing. As a solution, Amato advocates the self-construction of housing, where the units are constructed by those who will live in them – an approach that has been used in much of Europe, and has now begun in Italy (94-95).
A number of immigrants have also been able to purchase their own homes, as the narrator in Dismatria longs to do – Amato relates that in 2006, 131,000 foreigners in Italy were property owners (93). Furthermore, the 2008 Dossier Statistico Immigrazione published by Caritas estimates that the number of foreign residents in Italy at the end of 2006 reached nearly 3,000,000, which means that only a small percentage of the immigrant population own their own homes.6 In addition, the survey goes on to state that 8 out of 10 Italians are homeowners, but only 1 out of 10 immigrants are, although this number is increasing. According to the same compilation, in 2007 immigrants made 120,000 purchases (2). The number of immigrants willing to make such a purchase and settle themselves and their families in Italy is clearly growing.
What Khouma and Scego are able to do, however, is to put a human face and human emotions on what are otherwise bare facts. While reading lists of statistics and policies can be informative, such documents do not provide the emotional connection needed to spur the general population into action. Graziella Parati alludes to this in her work on migration, when she asserts that in the absence of a legal voice, a narrative voice must be used in order to articulate the issues that thousands of immigrants face on a daily basis.7 Both Khouma’s and Scego’s works demonstrate the divide between two worlds that immigrants often find themselves stuck in. Rather than being completely in either culture, often these people remain in the middle, unable to let go of the past or move forward towards the future. In writing their stories, Khouma and Scego are able to give a voice to these feelings of inertia that claim them. However, this voice not only depicts the situations as they are, but also molds the world in which they live.
As more and more immigrants move to Italy and have families, they will become increasingly integrated into Italian society. The establishment of roots can be an important step in this integration process, and one major component is a permanent residence. Without a house to call their own and often lacking the documentation necessary to get one, many immigrants, as relayed in Khouma's work, are forced to move constantly, and are never able to develop a true place for themselves in one city. Literature such as Io, Venditore di Elefanti relates the struggles new immigrants to Italy have making a place for themselves and the continued identification with one's native country. Khouma published his work nearly 20 years ago, and although the situations he describes may not hold true for his life at the present after so much time spent in Italy, the struggles he relates are nonetheless still relevant for the thousands of newcomers to Italy each year. Other writings, like Dismatria, explore the desire to settle down and establish permanent roots in Italy in order to become part of the country in more concrete ways. But both of these works also express the human emotions associated with these transitional phases in the immigrant’s life, from one generation to the next. Between the hard facts (the numbers of immigrants who purchase homes in Italy has been on the rise) and the literature (autobiographies like Khouma’s and stories like Scego’s) the culture of immigration in Italy is shifting to allow room for immigrants both physically and intellectually.
1 For more information on Khouma and Scego, please see their biographies on the El-Ghibli website at www.el-ghibli.provincia.bologna.it/chisiamo/khouma.html and www.el-ghibli.provincia.bologna.it/id_1-issue_00_03-section_1-index_pos_1-author_27.html, respectively.
2 Pap Khouma, Io, Venditore di Elefanti, 1990, Milano, Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2006, p. 60. Subsequent references to pages will be included in parenthesis after the citations in the article.
3 For a review of the entire collection of short stories, Pecore Nere, which includes Dismatria, please consult the essay by Raffaele Taddeo on El-Ghibli’s website:
www.el-ghibli.provincia.bologna.it/index.php?id=6&sezione=4&idrecensioni=24.
For the analysis of second generation writers, including Scego, see Raffaele Taddeo’s L’espressione letteraria nelle seconde generazioni in El Ghibli at www.el-ghibli.provincia.bologna.it/id_1-issue_05_22-section_6-index_pos_2.html
4 Igiaba Scego, Dismatria, in Pecore Nere di Gabriella Kuruvilla, Ingy Mubiayi, Igiaba Scego e Laila Wadia, a cura di Flavia Capitani ed Emanuele Coen, Bari, Laterza, 2006, p. 10. Subsequent references to pages will be included in parenthesis after the citations in the article.
5 Fabio Amato, a cura di, Atlante dell'immigrazione in Italia (Società Geografica Italiana), Roma, Carocci, 2008, p. 93. Subsequent references to pages will be included in parenthesis after the citations in the article.
6 Dossier Statistico Immigrazione 2008 Caritas-Migrantes, Scheda di sintesi, www.caritasitaliana.it/pls/caritasitaliana/v3_s2ew_consultazione.mostra_pagina?id_pagina=1090, p. 2.
7 The title of her work sums up her argument incisively. Graziella Parati. Migration Italy. The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005.