Comparative Seas and the Question of Exile

Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s introduction to The Literary Channel presents the stakes of boundary crossing and the border space, both conceptual and geopolitical, as integral to the lineage of the modern novel.Footnote ¹⁰ In contrasting the paradigms of the nation-neutral Chunnel (a portmanteau of the Channel Tunnel linking Folkestone, Kent, with Coquelles, Pas-de-Callais) and transnationalism in the afterword, Emily Apter emphasizes the “state of postnational borderlessness” that defines the narrative Chunnel. This imaginary, which occupies the link between Anglophone and Francophone literary histories, is posited as the future condition of our world, predicated on the academic criticism directed at the nation and the destabilization of the homogenous European nation-state via an influx of large immigrant communities.Footnote ¹¹ Apter situates postcolonial comparisons within a transnational paradigm, offering as an example Anglophone and Francophone literatures of West Africa and the Caribbean, while simultaneously acknowledging how colonialism and postcolonial theory have shaped contemporary European studies. Rey Chow’s diaspora canons, Perry Anderson’s cartography, and Franco Moretti’s philosophy of distant reading are presented as evidence of a new literary history that circumvents the nation.Footnote ¹² Cohen’s “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe,” published in PMLA 125 further addresses this circumvention through a maritime perspective of novel studies.Footnote ¹³ She describes the revisionary accounts of literature that come from a maritime focus, shifting away from landlocked terrestrial scales to oceans, continents, islands, archipelagos, coasts, and the ships that facilitate mobility in and through those spaces.Footnote ¹⁴ In this same volume of PMLA, Patricia Yaeger reminds us that maritime mobility in the romanticized seafaring sense of mare liberum cannot coexist with capitalist modernity. The sea is not, she writes, an idealized “commons, a collectively owned space serving interlocking sets of national and international interests,” as it is fishing industries and trade conglomerates that dictate policies of maritime management often at the expense of individuals and sustainable practices.Footnote ¹⁵ Yaeger speaks to a long history of juxtaposition between the illusions of the mare liberum or the collectively owned commons and the reality of capitalism’s profit making and exploitation.

Beyond a question of transnationalism, other scholars have drawn attention to the colonial dynamics of the sea. The colonialist spatializing processes—both a conceptual and a geopolitical “shaping” of the idea of Europe—gestured to in Cohen’s work are discussed explicitly in Ato Quayson’s “Periods versus Concepts: Space Making and the Question of Postcolonial Literary History,” published in PMLA 127.Footnote ¹⁶ The author notes that “while postcolonial literary studies may have helped define the parameters of the practical seminar on world history, its full implications are still somewhat obscured by the arguments about periodicity that are often taken as a terminological necessity in applications of the term postcolonial.”Footnote ¹⁷ Addressing the fallacy that periodicity is necessary to defining the postcolonial, Quayson’s suggested foregrounding of space making in our readings of postcolonial literature can be read alongside the earlier work of Nikos Papastergiadis. Applying the concept of deterritorialization to exile studies, Papastergiadis critiques past readings of migration that treat space as a “vacant category, reduced to a neutral stage upon which other forces were at play.”Footnote ¹⁸ Both scholars emphasize the need to incorporate space making, which is never neutral, alongside discussions of other forces such as temporalities. As an example, Quayson traces the mobility of Columbus’s sugar cane from its arrival in the New World in 1493 to the commercial quantities shipped to Lisbon by 1526, noting specific dates as well as the “progressive incorporation of the West Indies into the world capitalist economy through a particular spatial arrangement of centers and peripheries.”Footnote ¹⁹ Agnant’s novel directly addresses the historical violence of colonialist space making described by Quayson, as the maritime trade of sugar cane in the titular character Emma’s thesis also signals the incorporation (by force) of black women’s bodies as currency within this economy.

Le livre d’Emma frames the sea as a sepulcher for traumatic memory and loss, resonating with one of the most influential manifestos in Francophone Caribbean studies, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Mohamed Bouya Taleb-Khyar’s Eloge de la créolité. Speaking of the Antillean context, the authors write that restoration of “la mémoire vraie,” or true memory, is barred by dislocation: “notre Histoire (ou plus exactement nos histoires) est naufragée dans l’Histoire coloniale.”Footnote ²⁰ The visual contrast between Histoire and (histoires) brackets and deemphasizes the plurality of histories produced by colonized subjects; those voices are rendered parenthetically irrelevant to the colonizer’s master narrative of History. Eloge de la créolité draws on both the metaphor and the literal significance of the sea through use of the word naufragée, or shipwrecked. Not only does this term evoke the trafficking of human bodies across water in slave ships, and those who did not survive the passage, but it also calls forth Proma Tagore’s practice of testimony, which both speaks out against silencing and makes space for the inarticulations of trauma by those who are unable, or unwilling, to break their silence.Footnote ²¹ If “naufragée” does not always imply death, it is always a situation of loss and displacement. A ship at sea geographically and politically occupies a space between landmasses and nations, belonging to none until it reaches port. Although sea may be used interchangeably with ocean, it is this in betweenness that geographically distinguishes the former (landlocked) from the latter.

In their introduction to a special issue of Philological Encounters entitled “Lingua Franca: Towards a Philology of the Sea,” Michael Allan and Elisabetta Benigni map a geographical shift in recent scholarship decentering the nation-state as the default lens through which we analyze literature in favor of maritime spaces.Footnote ²² This collection of essays not only presents the possibility of a “transnational literature of the Mediterranean, where the sea emerges as a metaphor for a system of nets of intertwining lines of political imaginaries,” but also suggests a practice of reading the circulation, trafficking, and translation of texts and of languages within the region.Footnote ²³ Consider the definition of a net: “an open-meshed fabric twisted, knotted, or woven together at regular intervals,” emphasizing not a linear link of threads as might describe a chain but a continuous and inclusive integration of disparate parts.Footnote ²⁴ The image of the net corresponds with the metaphors glossed by Karla Mallette in her contribution to “Lingua Franca” from John Wansbrough’s circulating orbits of “ships, sailors, commodities, and linguistic matter through the Mediterranean basin” to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s use of the noun connectivity to describe the mercantile networks of the pre-modern Mediterranean.Footnote ²⁵ The sea is both figuratively and literally a source of ongoing dissolution and (re)combination, and to use this as a frame for reading allows us to circumvent what Ato Quayson glosses as a tendency in both postcolonial and transnational studies: “to study the center and the margin but rarely examine the relationships among different margins.”Footnote ²⁶ A net, like the sea, does not have a center, which makes it an apt metaphor for subverting the hierarchy of conventional literary studies.

What we could call a maritime practice of reading encourages lateral (margin to margin) as well as vertical (margin to center) studies, and it is also a productive frame through which to analyze exile in Le livre d’Emma and Regina di fiori e di perle. Citing Edouard Glissant’s poignant observation that the world is creolizing, Martin Munro asks at the conclusion of his book Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, “does this mean that we can now talk of a universal experience of exile?”Footnote ²⁷ The sea figures into postcolonial mobility and exile in the works of Agnant and Ghermandi, and similarities may be found in the long history of forced migration that characterizes both the modern Mediterranean and the Caribbean. As Munro notes, however, again with a nod to Glissant, African slaves’ forced migration was geographical, cultural, and bodily, which creates a very specific experience of exile for later generations. This means that, after the dissolution of the slave trade in the Caribbean, “any further movement into exile from the islands does not take place against the background a solid, rooted sense of self and place, but in the context of a fluid, unfixed, relational, and itinerant sense of belonging.”Footnote ²⁸ Agnant’s Haitian-Canadian immigrants, Emma and Flore, are born into this exilic turbulence inherited from the historical trauma that characterizes both the islands and the sea itself. Although the sea is not explicitly taken up here as a frame by Munro, it is certainly evoked by the aquacentric language used to describe the particular “sense of belonging” that characterizes the Caribbean.

As a topographical metaphor, the sea also features in French anthropologist Marc Augé’s dialectic “memory and oblivion.” Reflecting on what is forgotten from childhood, he writes “ce qui reste—souvenirs ou traces, nous allons y revenir—ce qui reste est le produit d’une érosion par l’oubli. Les souvenirs sont façonnés par l’oubli comme les contours du rivage par la mer.”Footnote ²⁹ In his argument for complicity between the passive (land, memory) and the active (sea, oblivion), Augé draws on a metaphor that is both destructive and constructive in its formation of the shoreline. This metaphor is poetic and imperfect. By positioning the sea as the force (and source) of forgetting, he forecloses the possibility of oblivion as a strategy of oppression and does not hold the state accountable, disregarding the phenomenon coined by Ernest Renan, a “willed remembering to forget,” which characterizes canonical cultural memory.Footnote ³⁰ In this same passage, however, Augé establishes the sea as both eternally in flux and as a repository for that which is forgotten. Erosion is paired with preservation (of what is no longer visible) and creation (of shorelines). This reading is salient on the literal and the figurative level. Reading the sea itself as a creative frame—and not as a body of water framed by land—more closely reflects the spirit of mobility that characterizes the earliest frame narratives and the works of Agnant and Ghermandi.Footnote ³¹ The latter’s novel, although principally concerned with the Mediterranean Sea of the twentieth century, also acknowledges the historical legacy of migration and colonization in the region, dating from the Neolithic era.Footnote ³² The two texts cannot be compared on the basis of a temporal and geographic overlap; however, the sea figures predominantly in both as a source of both oppression and resistance. The same sea that brings colonial violence and exploitation is the sea that carries the storyteller to the source of the archive so that she might dismantle it with the stories she has collected and translated.

The Thresholds of Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma

In light of contemporary discussions of the sea, Agnant’s novel provides a framework through which the sea functions as both a reminder of black women’s inheritance of trauma and a means of working through it. In a lecture given at Berkeley in April 2008 entitled “On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture,” Homi Bhabha reminds us that “trauma is not simply something that howls from a distance, but it’s something that is to be reconstituted and dealt with, and models of repression and working through are not entirely adequate.”Footnote ³³ Addressing the response her novel received upon publication, Agnant expressed her belief that slavery does not appear (or is repressed) in Haitian novels because the subject is taboo.Footnote ³⁴ Instead, themes of Haitian literature tend to focus on the everyday and on contemporary politics, topics that are perceived to be immediately relevant to the nation.Footnote ³⁵ Le livre d’Emma engages with what is lost, or hidden, or unspoken because the taboo may also be also “une manière de mesurer les dégâts de l’aliénation.”Footnote ³⁶ This alienation (by Agnant’s assessment unacknowledged by the Haitian literati who wish to distance themselves from an inherited trauma) also goes unacknowledged in the French national archives and canonical cultural memory which alternate between nostalgia for and repression of the colonial past.Footnote ³⁷

Because Agnant rejects the models of repression presented by metropolitan France and contemporary Haitian literature, Le livre d’Emma represents a mode of working through that is not based on any established model. The author’s approach to this legacy is, as she says, not to cultivate the memory of trauma per se but to make use of the clarity it brings to the relationship between past and present.Footnote ³⁸ One of the prominent foci in trauma studies is this very inadequacy that Bhabha cites, particularly in the context of testimony—that is, the inadequacy of language, either written or spoken, to fully transmit the traumatic experience. It is the interplay between what can and cannot be expressed, whether silence is chosen or enforced, that underlies Agnant’s novel. It is also committed to “understanding Emma’s present from her past” while simultaneously resignifying the past in the present via the transmission of counter-memory.Footnote ³⁹ Temporality becomes fluid in this text, and it is space, rather than time, that figures most prominently in the organization of the narrative. This can be hinted at in the ambiguity of the novel’s title. The question of whether Emma is the subject of a narrative or the author-agent of that narrative is dependent on where she is in relation to the frame. Agnant’s use of this layered construction allows us to read a novel that is both written and in the process of being written.

Le livre d’Emma opens with the narrator’s recollection of meeting the titular character: “Pendant longtemps, elle n’avait eu de mots que pour décrire le bleu intense qui enserre en permanence un lambeau de terre abandonnée au milieu de l’océan, là où ses yeux s’étaient ouverts sur le monde.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In both the French original and the translation, spatial and temporal distance is established between Emma and the island of her birth. The only constant is this “intense blue,” which—in the present tense—surrounds the island. And the island itself is described as a “lambeau de terre,” lambeau being a hyperonym for several words in English: scrap, tatter, shred (translated as “strip” by Ellis). There is a violence implied in the word lambeau: the island has been used up, torn apart, and abandoned (by French slave traders and colonizers, we later discover). And we understand through this description that Emma was born into trauma; her eyes first opened on the world in this place that has been exploited by those who are gone. L’exil which, as Ching Selao notes in a 2010 review of Agnant’s novels for Canadian Literature, in French is a homophone for both exile and for the prefix ex-ile (ex-island) is introduced in the first paragraph of the novel, with Emma’s fixation on the sea mediated through the narrator.Footnote ⁴¹

The narrator is Flore, a Haitian-Canadian woman enlisted by Dr. Ian Macleod to act as an interpreter for Emma who, although fluent in French, refuses to communicate in a language that is not her mother tongue. Arrested for infanticide and facing trial, Emma is remanded to a psychiatric facility in Montreal for evaluation; a close relationship develops between Flore and Emma over the course of their sessions in which Emma confesses to Flore: “Mais avant toute chose, je voudrais te parler de quelques femmes. Après elles, tous les bruits se tairont. Dans ma gorge, dans ma tête, dans mon sang, ce sera le silence absolu.”Footnote ⁴² These women belong to Emma’s lineage, and it is her own ancestry that she feels compelled to share with Flore. The first story Emma recounts is that of her own fraught relationship with her maternal aunt and mother, both of whom rejected her for being too dark-skinned. Through her grandmother’s cousin, Emma traces the lines of her family to her Bantu ancestor, Kilima, abducted and enslaved as a child on the island of Saint-Domingue. It is significant that Emma selects Flore to be the recipient and curator of her family’s stories because this satisfies her compulsion to speak of these experiences without the risk of passing on the blood-borne curse that she believes afflicts all residents of Grand-Lagon.

Emma emphasizes the importance of screaming “pour toutes celles à qui on refuse le droit de se faire entendre,” of whom she is one.Footnote ⁴³ She reveals that she has studied in France, a country “avec lequel je ne ressentais aucun lien particulier sauf que l’Histoire avait voulu que je m’instruise dans sa langue. Au fond de moi, cependant, mon projet prenait forme : explorer les routes qu’avaient jadis suivies les grands navires.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Her thesis on slavery, which she describes as taking form deep inside of her not unlike the early stages of gestation, is rejected by her committee, first in France and then in Montreal, for what her professors called a lack of coherence. Emma, in turn, suggests that it was not her argument that they found intolerable, but rather the fact that “une femme à la peau bleue, à la peau sans une once de lumière” would challnenge the dominant narrative of slavery and aspire to write history.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the French text, history is written as “l’histoire,” which, although not capitalized is modified by the definite singular article l’ (la/le). This, coupled with Emma’s assertion that her committee members opposed her counter-narrative, evokes the same division between History/histories described in Eloge de la creolité. The very notion of pluralizing the history of slavery is rejected as incoherent, as disjointed, because the inclusion of marginalized voices no longer resembles the dominant narrative.

Emma’s decision to relocate to France and to Canada complicates her identity as an exile. One might be inclined to consider her an expatriate, one who voluntarily lives in an alien country, but in Saidian terms, “exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it or it happens to you.”Footnote ⁴⁶ I would argue that Emma occupies both categories and is twice exiled. Within the frame narrative, as a woman institutionalized in an asylum, she is subject to exile from society. She is also born into exile. Slavery and its traumatic legacy constitute an “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,”Footnote ⁴⁷ such that Emma refers to the island of Grand-Lagon as a cursed land: “cette eau qui la baigne depuis le jour de sa naissance, cette eau, sons son bleu si bleu, cache des siècles de sang vomi des cales des négriers, sang de tous ces nègres que l’on jetait pardessus bord. C’est ainsi que la malédiction est entrée. Elle s’est infiltrée dans l’eau des rivières, dans celle que nous buvons, elle s’est mêlée à notre sang, l’a corrompu.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Emma repeatedly associates herself with the water, describing her skin as so dark it appears to be blue, not unlike the depths of the sea untouched by sunlight. And in this passage, her blood and the blood of all residents of Grand-Lagon is mixed with cursed seawater. She emphasizes the aquacentric nature of the human body, and whether the implication is deliberate or not, “science explains that we emerged from the sea—our blood a tide of oceanic ions. The chemical formula for blood is very like the formula for seawater.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Here, this scientific fact is compounded with the continual change and recycling of water, the dissolution and recombination of molecules ad infinitum. The water Emma was born into retains traces of the same water that brought the slave ships to Grand-Lagon. The anxiety of having inherited this exile is part of what drives Emma to violence. Following the second rejection of her thesis—the denial of her voice and the voices of those who have died—Emma becomes convinced that the curse in her blood has been passed on to her child and, seeing no way to cure it, commits infanticide.

To revisit Emma’s confession to Flore, the impetus for her storytelling is the desire for silence. Once she has passed these stories on, “tous les bruits se tairont. Dans ma gorge, dans ma tête, dans mon sang, ce sera le silence absolu.”Footnote ⁵⁰ What is most significant about this silence is that it is not forced on her; it is not the result of neglect or denied identity. This silence signifies Emma’s reclamation of her body, which will no longer serve as a conduit for others. Flore describes Emma’s physicality as she talks, remarking that “son corps se vidait de ces images surgies du fond d’une mémoire ancienne, paroles extraites d’archives enfouies dans ses entrailles.”Footnote ⁵¹ What she describes is the essence of Emma’s thesis, what she could not publish. There are two archives: the first, which constitutes the dominant narrative on slavery would be History collected by the French, and the second is inscribed on Emma’s body. The only way to relieve oneself of that burden is to share it with someone who can read the archive, recognizing that black women’s bodies carry these histories of trauma and loss from generation to generation. The silence comes once the stories, the voices, the memories, the archive itself has been passed on to another not only recipient but curator; this silence may be interpreted as a kind of peace, relief from the seemingly inescapable curse and the condition of exile itself, unsettled, decentered, and disruptive. Through the relationship between Emma and Flore, Agnant suggests that there is a power in orality, in storytelling, in collective memory, and in female community that not only resists History but also relieves the burden of this inheritance of trauma. Exiles are those who have been cut off from, in the Saidian definition of the term, their roots, their land, and their past.Footnote ⁵² To recover this connection, even though a return to uncontaminated roots and land (which exist only in the precolonial past) may not be possible, Emma and Flore collaborate to translate, transcribe, interpret, and articulate histories of both roots and routes.

Ghermandi’s Coralità and Italo-Ethiopian History

In Le livre d’Emma, ancestral histories are mediated through Emma as the conduit and last surviving member of her family. Flore receives these transgenerational histories through the relationship she cultivates with Emma, framing the bond between one speaker and her listener/translator. In contrast to Agnant’s novel, Ghermandi’s Mahlet speaks to several former partisans and elders of her community whose voices are preserved as she transcribes what she has heard from each of them. Orality and collaboration, although crucial components of the (re)construction of histories for both storytellers, are approached in different ways. Ghermandi places a heavy emphasis on stylistic polyphony, because even though Mahlet is our mediator, she has access to sources that Emma does not. Emma is institutionalized in Montreal, and her doubled exile has severed all ties to the world outside of the hospital. Mahlet is free to move between Italy and Ethiopia, and the estrangement she experiences abroad and upon returning to her village after the death of a beloved elder is distinct from Emma’s. The two women have very different relationships to mobility (and the extent to which it is limited or not), which in turn informs their accessibility to various spatial constructs.

In a 2008 interview with Federica Sossi, Ghermandi discusses the tension between Storia, History as recorded in books with “significant” dates and names, and le storie, defined as personal histories.Footnote ⁵³ This distinction between History and histories in the context of postcolonial studies is a symptom of what Spivak defines as the epistemic violence of imperialism.Footnote ⁵⁴ History is “an explanation and narrative of reality . . . established as the normative one,” presented as objective and unbiased in contrast to the inherently subjective histories of individuals.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is the former that constitutes the colonial archive, strictly maintained and cultivated to exclude and to silence the latter. It is not the Storia/storie division itself that sets Ghermandi’s work apart from other postcolonial writers, but rather her authorial approach: “Ecco a me piace fare emergere la coralità delle storie che possono dare una dimensione globale, locale, singola et plurale al contempo.”Footnote ⁵⁶ She describes the capacity of historical polyphony to create a dimension simultaneously global, local, singular, and plural. Intersections of time, space, the individual, and the communal contrast the multi-dimensional inclusivity of Ghermandi’s novel to Italy’s national narrative. Further contrasts can be read within the title itself. Mahlet, both recipient and storyteller, is positioned as an African queen, a subversion of the exoticized and eroticized colonialist motif that is elaborated upon in the work of Clarissa Clò. As the titular queen, she becomes the cultural bearer and the vessel of her people’s memories, rendered metaphorically as flowers and pearls.Footnote ⁵⁷ The author’s choice of metaphor is striking in two ways. The pairing of the flowers and the pearls invites comparisons of land and sea, of the ephemeral and the long-lasting. These are themes that carry through the novel, emphasizing the spatio-temporal preoccupations of the text. As a vessel, Mahlet becomes the one who carries the flowers and wears the pearls of her people, both preserving and publicly displaying their struggles.

Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (Queen of Flowers and Pearls) juxtaposes two narrative modes: the frame narrative is structured as a bildungsroman centered on the coming of age of an Ethiopian girl, Mahlet, in the present-day. However, the stories Mahlet collects from the members of her village about Italian occupation of Ethiopia during the Fascist era (1935–1941) evoke an oral literary tradition; this tradition “used to describe the ‘self’ of each individual storyteller has its ideological basis in a communal identity, and this adds another narrative layer to the book: this represents a drawing on a traditional African storytelling mode.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Mahlet chooses the path of the expatriate when she applies for—and receives—a scholarship to study economics in Italy. This decision is encouraged by the elders of her village; in the early pages of the novel, Mahlet recounts her favorite elder Yacob’s words: “Tienila stretta quella curiosità e raccogli tutte le storie che puoi. Un giorno sarai la nostra voce che racconta. Attraverserai il mare che hanno attraversato Pietro e Paolo e porterai le nostre storie nella terra degli italiani. Sarai la voce della nostra storia che non vuole essere dimenticata.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Mahlet’s crossing of the Mediterranean Sea is coded as both a trial and a mission. This specific reference evokes two historical and symbolic associations that draw Ghermandi’s Ethiopia into a discussion of the Mediterranean Sea. Following the unification of most of Italy by 1861, mid-nineteenth-century Italian nationalism sought to claim the Mediterranean Sea as mare nostrum.Footnote ⁶⁰ The term mare nostrum, used by the Romans to refer to the Mediterranean “comprehended as an internal lake of an empire stretching along all its shores,” later undergirded Mussolini’s fascist propaganda capitalizing on nostalgia for the Roman Empire to justify Italy’s colonial project in Africa.Footnote ⁶¹ Italian imperialism conceptualized Ethiopia in relation to the Mediterranean Sea, despite its proximity to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Ghermandi’s awareness of the mythologized mare nostrum in Italian historical and political discourse can be seen through Yacob’s invocation of that sea as the route Mahlet will take to reach Italy.

In a subversion of the fascist claim to mare nostrum, Yacob cites the Mediterranean Sea in the context of biblical figures Peter and Paul. In Acts 27: 27–28.5 of the New Testament, Paul is shipwrecked on the island of Malta en route to Rome, where he is to face charges before the emperor.Footnote ⁶² And according to church tradition, Peter also crossed the sea and was martyred in Rome. Yacob compares Mahlet’s journey to that of fledgling Christian apostles persecuted for their evangelism in what is now Italy, signaling a tradition of the Mediterranean Sea as a means by which the marginalized gain access and speak back to power, the very antithesis of the Mediterranean as mare nostrum. Footnote ⁶³ This specific Christian reference is useful as an analogy for Mahlet not only for the historical and geographical echoes of the journey she is expected to undertake in crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach Italy, but also for her identity as a Christian. Following the death of Yacob, Mahlet obeys his dying wish and visits the Church of St. George in Addis Ababa, where she meets elders in the courtyard who confide their stories to her, in the forms of fables and autobiographical accounts of the Italian occupation. Her faith is present throughout the grieving process and serves as the backdrop for her role as collector of stories.

Mahlet is compelled by a communal, not an individual, desire to acquire the colonizer’s language and to use that language to stage an intervention, to give voice to those stories that have been lost or neglected by the “institutional denial of the historical realities” of colonialism.Footnote ⁶⁴ Sossi notes during her interview with Ghermandi a tension in the novel between the plurality of histories from Ethiopia and what she refers to as “un vuoto di storia” (an absence of history) in Italy, a canonical cultural forgetting of the atrocities committed in Africa.Footnote ⁶⁵ This archival void stems in part from “the collapse of Italian colonialism in the context of wider military and political defeat” during World War II and a desire to distance the nation from the ignominy of this defeat.Footnote ⁶⁶ When colonialism is acknowledged, the acknowledgment is steeped in nostalgia and revisionism. Consider, for example, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s defense of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship as benevolent, stating in 2013 that “il fatto delle leggi razziali è stata la peggiore colpa di un leader, Mussolini, che per tanti altri versi invece aveva fatto bene.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The anti-Semitic and discriminatory racial laws to which Berlusconi refers were instituted in both Italy and the colonies from 1938 to 1943, restricting the rights of Italian Jews and prohibiting sexual relations and marriage between “un cittadino italiano di razza ariana con persona appartenente ad altra razza.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In disregarding, among Mussolini’s crimes, the dictator’s instituted censorship and use of propaganda to justify the violence perpetrated against Italian Jews and the atrocities committed in Ethiopia, Berlusconi’s remarks reflect the canonical cultural memory of Italy, which sees itself as both a passive participant in World War II and as a benign presence in Africa. The latter may also read through Berlusconi’s laudation of Mussolini’s legacy as generally positive, which implicitly enfolds Italian colonialism into his successes as a leader.

This historical revisionism is, in part, facilitated by two forms of marginalization. As scholars Jacqueline Andall, Derek Duncan, and Charles Burdett note in their introduction to volume 8 of Modern Italy, “not only has colonialism been marginalized within Italian social, historical and political discourse but Italian colonialism also inhabits a marginal position within wider comparative studies of European colonialism” due to its geographical and temporal restrictions.Footnote ⁶⁹ This twofold marginalization does not diminish the traumatic experience of Italy’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, which, in Regina di fiori e di perle, affects three living generations: Mahlet’s elders, Mahlet’s parents, and Mahlet herself. Ghermandi explicitly addresses Italian revisionism of colonial history through her storyteller. Returning to Ethiopia following the death of her favorite elder, Mahlet confesses to her father: “In Italia sono convinti di essere passati di qui in gita turistica e di aver abbellito e ammodernato il nostro paese pidocchioso con strade, case, scuole. Non sai quante volte me lo sono sentito dire . . . Non ho mai risposto perché non sapevo come obiettare.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Mahlet also expresses resentment toward being perceived as foreign, first in Italy and subsequently in Ethiopia, as her style of dress and her behavior mark her as different from her fellow villagers. Disconnected from both languages, cultures, and countries, Mahlet regains a sense of belonging through her actions as compiler and dispenser of familial and regional histories of Ethiopia, which she listens to and then transcribes in writing. As recipient of the stories of her elders, Mahlet finds her voice, conceding that although she did not have the words in Italy, she has since taken ownership of those memories belonging to her community. She states: “Ma oggi so cosa direi. Tutto ciò che hanno costruito lo abbiamo pagato. Anzi, abbiamo pagato anche le costruzioni dei prossimi tre secoli. Con tutti quelli che hanno ammazzato, ne avrebbero di danni da pagare! . . . è passato, ma non tanto da non riparlarne. Bisognerebbe dargli la nostra versione dei fatti.”Footnote ⁷¹ In order to give this story to the Italians, there must be a conversion from oral to written, from individual to communal, and “from there to a communal history.”Footnote ⁷²

Mahlet is not born into exile in the Saidian sense; she does not experience the same inherent displacement as Agnant’s Emma from the moment of birth, nor do the stories she collects span a comparable geographical or temporal scope. I would, however, argue that storytelling is as integral to Mahlet’s understanding of exile as it is Emma’s. Mahlet is an expatriate who struggles with the “solitude and estrangement of exile” while living in Italy.Footnote ⁷³ She does not recognize the full extent of Ethiopia’s cultural transformation until she participates in collaborative storytelling upon her return; through these exchanges with the elders in her village—who seek her out in part out of a compulsion, a need to know “that their personal identities will [be] heard, understood, and remembered”Footnote ⁷⁴ —she comes to realize the extent of the trauma perpetrated by Italian colonizers. This is the moment in which she experiences a separation from her homeland and from “the self that has been formed in the time preceding the exile.”Footnote ⁷⁵ There are certain aspects—details—of her ancestors’ cultural practices that she does not have access to and cannot be articulated because there is no one left to speak of them. That is not to say that Italian colonialism erased the memory of a precolonial way of life for Mahlet’s elders, but rather that such memories cannot be divorced from the Italian invasion and its impact on her family. The sense of loss that she expresses to her father, the collective “we,” Ethiopians who are still living and those who have died, is the exile from a traditional homeland that the postcolonial subject experiences. It has also separated Mahlet from the person she was prior to recognizing the extent of this loss. Although the imperial project is over, Mahlet states, “è passato, ma non tanto da non riparlarne.”Footnote ⁷⁶ It is through storytelling that Mahlet comes to recognize her own experience in exile—not only in Italy but in Ethiopia as well—and it is through recognition of this loss that she reconnects with her homeland.

Ghermandi, Agnant, and the Framework of the Sea

Mahlet’s return to Ethiopia is not the moment she physically arrives in the country after her time abroad, but rather once she embraces her status as the storyteller and her own compulsion to not only document what she has heard but ensure that these histories are passed on. Emma’s return occurs at the end of the novel as she drowns herself in a river outside of the hospital shortly after sharing the story of her enslaved ancestor, Kilima. This suicide is described by Flore as a beginning, not an end, as she informs the hospital staff that Emma’s soul has joined the river, which is described in terms of its relation to the Atlantic Ocean. Now that the voices, the histories, of her ancestors have been passed on to Flore, Emma is able to “entreprendre le voyage de retour . . . Emma me disait souvent qu’elle reprendrait un jour la route des grands bateaux pour rejoindre les autres.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In this way, both novels conclude by invoking the currents and tides of the sea and of what a “return journey” implies, that is, circularity, continuation, progression. In Le livre d’Emma, death is structured as a threshold, not an ending, as seen through Flore’s posthumous vision of Emma in the concluding pages of the novel. She acknowledges this vision, confirming that Emma “n’était pas morte, elle avait rejoint les autres, là-bas.”Footnote ⁷⁸ And in the closing lines of Ghermandi’s novel, Mahlet states that she has fulfilled a promise to her elder, Yacob, in telling his story “che poi è anche la mia. ma pure la vostra.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In Italian, the “you” is the plural (both formal and informal) “voi” (“ma pure la vostra”), a gesture that both distances Mahlet from and is inclusive toward her Italian readership. Flore and Mahlet develop from listeners to mediators to storytellers, preserving a continuity through their changing relationship to the stories they receive. Both novels emphasize mobility as integral to the storytelling tradition, to the circulation of histories within and beyond the linguistic communities from which they originate, to orality as a form of transmission, and to the transregional spaces of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.

Emma physically and spiritually returns to the sea while Mahlet fulfills her promise to Yacob in her direct address to an Italian readership, not only inviting Italian participation in dismantling the national myth of benign colonialism but insisting upon it through the declaration that these stories belong to the reader (and therefore will not be forgotten). In this way the endings are also beginnings that emphasize the circularity of the authors’ projects and of the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas, which serves as frames. The passing on of this anthology of voices is one way these women work through both the detachment of exile and the sense of disjointedness that manifests in the alienation and discomfort Emma and Mahlet experience when confronted with the discontinuity of colonial History as it is taught and perpetuated in Europe and North America. The act of interpellating the reader (us) or the listener (Flore) as both storytellers and recipients of these cross-generational histories passed down through family and community members is itself an act of resistance; if the national archive is one that excludes, then the maritime alternative is one that includes. It is this inclusive communal memory that preserves the past in the present and future.

Both Le livre d’Emma and Regina di fiori e di perle may be considered examples of transnational literature: decentering the nationalist paradigms of French and Italian literary studies, reconfiguring the temporal and locative boundaries of the novel, and “focus[ing] our attention on forms of cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In recent years, the growth of literary transnationalism beyond American studies where it originated has often been discussed in conjunction with globalization.Footnote ⁸¹ To consider these novels at the intersection of transnationalism is equally productive, and this comparative study invites a maritime practice of reading that redefines what constitutes a real border. In contrast to the arbitrary delineation of geographical space and “projection of a series of sociopolitical dimensions” on that space that is characteristic of, for example, the colonial encounter,Footnote ⁸² a terrestrial framework might argue that it is the earth’s topography that determines the real border between spaces. A maritime framework, however, makes no such definitive claim of “realness” because the border between land and sea is always changing, evolving, and circulating. Even the use of terms such as border or shoreline fails to reflect the intrinsic fluidity of the spaces where land and sea visibly and repeatedly meet. The continuous process of space (re)making that characterizes the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas is also at stake for the storytellers in Le livre d’Emma and Regina di fiori e di perle. Centering the novels of Agnant and Ghermandi as the foci of an aquacentric perspective allows us to ground a study of “comparative seas” in literature as these authors model rhetorical and thematic practices that can illuminate other texts situated at maritime margins.