Picturing the Other: Woman and Land in Italian Colonial Postcards

Women and Land: The Other in Italian Colonial Postcards

1969. Indro Montanelli, a famous Italian journalist and intellectual, is the guest of the show L’ora della verità (The Hour of Truth). Although he eventually repudiated his support of the Fascist regime, on the air Montanelli recalls the Ethiopian campaign, in which he participated as a twenty-year-old volunteer in search of a beautiful adventure. Of the war he remembers many horseback rides (and very few battles), the “immense and mysterious” land and his twelve-year-old native “wife.” When faced with the pressing questions raised by the Ethiopian-born feminist Elvira Banotti, Montanelli justifies himself with this sentence: “Am I sorry? But in Africa it’s another thing.” This striking television episode is the source for the title of our exhibition. Sensuality, exoticism and primordial beauty are recurring elements in the representation of African women. The series of ethnographic and racial postcards feature the female figure. The predatory gaze that organizes these images has been dissected and ruthlessly analyzed in Ennio Flaiano’s 1947 novel Tempo di uccidere (literally, Time to kill). His words, quoted in the showcase, highlight the self-deceptions of the white male and the contradictions of Italian colonialism. In the collective imagination, women and land are connected in a synecdochic relationship as symbols of a primitive mystery and intrinsic otherness. It is on the female body that territorial aggression left its most long-lasting mark. Given the short-lived nature of the Italian Empire, it is arguably the sexual conquest that continued to play a compensatory role in the Italian male imagination. In addition, the regime made heavy use of popular racial songs for propaganda purposes. Faccetta nera (Little black face) sings the dreams of the colonizers: Africa as a virgin land and a land of virgins, the destination of a fantastic and savage eroticism where everything is morally acceptable. World War II ends and the years go by. Then in the 1970s, the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini returns to the colonial subject, speaking of the supposed inherent and natural vitality of “African” women in Appunti per un’Orestiade africana. In recent years, new voices have started telling yet another story, the story of the native populations and of the children born after this colonial “clash-encounter.” One of these voices is that of Gabriella Ghermandi, author of the novel Regina di fiori e di perle (Queen of flowers and pearls).

The women represented in these postcards are not merely stereotyped objects fixed in immutable and timeless poses by the gaze of the Italian colonizer. The dignity of their gazes reaches us through the power of photography. The voice of Ghermandi helps us to deconstruct the colonial imaginary and to reconsider the history, which remains all too obscure, of the Italian involvement in Africa.

Indro Montanelli (1909-2001) was a well-known italian journalist, who was both the founder of Il Giornale, as well as the author of many popular books of history and inquiry. The video, an excerpt from the show L’ora della verità (The Hour of Truth, 1969), brings to light an event of Montanelli’s youth as a Fascist supporter of Mussolini, a fact that he never denied. He volunteered in April 1935 as second lieutenant in the Abyssinian war, where he would stay until the late summer of 1936. Based on this experience, Montanelli wrote the book XX Battaglione eritreo (XX Eritrean Battalion), a bestseller at the time. As did many Italian soldiers, Montanelli had a madamato relationship with a very young Eritrean, Fatima, just 12 years old, whom he purchased from her father for just 500 lire with a horse and a rifle; her picture remained in Montanelli’s office even into his old age.

Montanelli’s terrifying candor in narrating this episode is also accompanied by the claim that his choice, so widespread during the colonial period, should be declared normal and perfectly in line with the customs of the place. Additionally, he furthers the stereotypical traits of native women, including their docility, exoticism, and eroticism.

Faccetta nera (Little Black Face) is doubtless the most (in)famous popular song of the Fascist period. Composed in April 1935, in conjunction with the propaganda in favor of the Abyssinian war, this song was initially sung in the Roman vernacular by Carlo Buti, and its resounding success with the public was immediate. As with the celebrations of war in Libya (particularly Tripoli, bel suol d’amore), Faccetta nera was widely distributed and held a strong grip on Italian troops in Ethiopia. Ennio Flaiano cleverly highlights this phenomenon in the opening of his Aethiopia, in which he links boosts in recruitment to colonial songs and their inflaming of sexual desire. He adds: “I have the impression that Faccetta nera has contributed much to fill the hospitals with wounded…for love.” This song contributed even more to the image of the “Black Venus,” a sensual and sexually available African woman, a myth that would have a long-lasting grip on the popular and literary collective imagination. The myth persisted even as late as 1981, when Paolo Conte’s hit song, Boogie, celebrated that “her body released an African burst of heat.” The Fascist regime appropriated Faccetta nera in 1936, translating it into standard Italian and modifying in part its lyrics (after the original, there were three different versions). The reference to the Italians’ defeat at Adwa was totally eliminated, as well as the definition of the Abyssinian girl as Roman. If the original was more generally intended to enhance the civilizing mission of Italy in East Africa, the lyrical changes imposed by the regime transformed the song into a hymn of conquest and submission of the Abyssinian people.

Africa Italiana, nn. 13-15, 1939-1940 [Italian Africa, monthly publication of the Fascist Institute of Italian East Africa]

This volume of the journal Africa Italiana illustrates the Fascist regime’s articulation of racial and social policies in the Italian colonies in East Africa at the end of the 1930s. You can see the dossier entirely dedicated to the Donne italiane in Africa (Italian Women in Africa) with articles focusing on the role of Fascist women in the colonies and in their administration. Women were supposed to have spiritual and practical duties: on the one hand they had to raise the morale of the soldiers involved in colonial conquest, and on the other they had to shoulder all the housework, freeing men from all non-military concerns. It is interesting to notice that this dossier closely resembles a previous one, dedicated to Disciplina e tutela delle razze nell’Impero (Protection and Discipline of the Races in the Empire). A main concern of this program was aimed at “racial preservation,” in the attempt to stem the phenomena of the madamato and meticciato, which constituted real “threat to the white race” (the title of one of articles), a danger to health and even to DNA. A steady presence of Italian women in the colonies was meant to curb these mixed-race births when racial laws did not have the desired impact. “White women” (i.e. Italian women) would also advance the population policy advocated by the Fascist regime: a new generation of Italians born in Africa would ensure a lasting colonial power, through training in loco of future Italian leaders and officers. Shifting attention to these Italian women radically alters the collective imagination of the colonial space. Far from a land of conquest and fulfillment of sexual desire, the colony becomes a “familiar” space, which must accommodate the young Italians who will become “wives of the regime and mothers of a new Italian race.” Once objects of exoticism and sexuality, the native women have now become invisible subjects of the empire, unworthy of any space.

Alberto Pollera (1873-1939)
La donna in Etiopia, Roma, 1922 [The woman in Ethiopia]

Alberto Pollera was defined as a respectable example of “old colonial” and “ethnographer by chance,” whose figure reveals the close relationship between ethnography and administration of the colonies. Known primarily for his studies on Eritrea, Pollera distinguished himself as a scholar and as a politician because of his proximity and openness toward colonized peoples, especially considering his family ties (he had six children born from two native women). Pollera’s approach, although not devoid of some gray areas, would be replaced within a few years by propagandistic and pseudoscientific ethno-graphic works, directed exclusively to the study of alleged physical and “racial” characteristics of “human types” of the colonies. Such a program was intended to strengthen and justify the imperialist policy of Mussolini. Pollera’s La donna in Etiopia is not merely a narrative description on the role and status of women in Ethiopia; it often provides Pollera’s personal interpretation as well, as though he wants to justify the cultural differences for the Italian reader. An interesting example is the chapter on the Unioni precoci (Early unions), an enduring theme of Italians’ colonial fantasies (as you can see in Montanelli’s video). The last chapter, devoted to the topic of Unioni miste (mixed-race marriages), is more problematic. On the one hand, he complains about the deplorable behavior of many Italians who, after having taken advantage of native women, abandon and condemn them to a miserable life. On the other, Pollera does not take a position or propose a change in legislation that might protect local women. Even though Pollera considers these marriages inevitable in a colonial context, he calls them “rightly repugnant to anyone for the great disparity between the two civilizations.” It is difficult to reconcile this statement with his life choices, which represent a happy exception in that period (all the more so considering the fact that Pollera married Chidan – his second native partner – when the racial laws and the imperialist policy were fully in force). We should not forget, however, that the volume was a ministerial publication by Pollera, a public officer in the colonies. Furthermore, even before the Fascist racial legislation was promulgated, the problem of mixed marriages did not elicit voices in favor of a non-discriminatory treatment of indigenous women. On the contrary, mixed marriages were always strongly opposed, as can be seen in the note on the madamato.

Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia) was shot by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1970, but it remained unreleased for more than two years, rejected by both public television and the film distribution industry, for its difficult thematic material and lack of marketability. As it is often the case in his works of the 60s and 70s, Pasolini turns to the African continent in the attempt to escape the neo-capitalist world and the homogenization of Italian society. In his poem Frammento alla morte (Fragment to Death, 1960) he directly address the nature of this flight: “I have been rational and I have been | irrational: right to the end. | And now…ah, the desert deafened | by the wind, the wonderful and filthy | sun of Africa that illuminates the world. | Africa! My only alternative.”

Tellingly, the movie begins with a shot of Pasolini’s image reflected in a shop window. This suggestive moment illustrates that the willingness to observe Africa dissolves, at times, into a representation of the self and of a European collective imagination. Despite the fact the movie is made in the 70s and despite Pasolini’s extraordinary acumen, the reference to Africa (with the usual reduction of a number of different nations to a single, unified continent, as the Eritrean student notes in the video) often relies on cliché and long-standing stereotypes. In particular, female figures, stylized through the Greek myth, are defined according to their alleged spontaneity and gaiety: they are only able to laugh in the background of a mythological and primitive “elsewhere,” in which it is possible to recover the lost values of European society.