Back to Book
The novel is also dedicated “to the people of a free Eritrea” in—as it turns out—anticipation of Eritrea’s formal independence two years after its publication. The Italian regime lasted some 70 years, until the British took over during the colonial campaigns of the second world war, following which Eritrea was forcibly federated with Ethiopia by a U.N. resolution that endured until 1993. Although the novel technically spans the period of British control as well as the Italian period, it is the Italian history that it most closely observes. When Marianna’s mother swears repeatedly never to serve white people, she refers to Italians—for whom she is ultimately reduced to working as a domestic, so entrenched are they in Asmara’s upper classes. And when Marianna is able to claim belonging in Europe, it is by way of her Italian parentage (although not directly by way of her missing father). Abandonment is a work of witnessing, and a complicated representation of the intimate entanglements of colonial histories.
Erica Johnson is a Professor of English at Pace University in New York City. She is the author of several books. Her research focuses on intersections of postcolonial literature and cultural memory studies, and she is an enthusiast of languages, running, and cats.
The novel’s original subtitle, una storia eritrea [an Eritrean story] might also have been “a true story,” rooted as it in the experiences of Liliana, on whom the character of Marianna is based. Abandonment is also a true story in that it recounts a universal if overlooked tale of empire: a young European man travels to the colonies in order to find opportunity and while there, falls in love and has children with a local woman whom he later abandons.Dell’Oro conveys the emotional turmoil wrought by this relationship along with the poetics of the landscape and a child’s eye view of pain and wonder. In addition to the importance of these timeless tropes, the novel’s biographical underpinnings are relevant to a literary movement in the 1980s and 1990s in Italy whereby a number of books were co-written by an Italian and an African author around the topics of African and immigrant experiences. As scholar Christopher Hogarth notes, this first of two evident waves of African-Italian literature can be characterized as “la letteratura della migrazione,” or literature of migration, while the second wave is defined by the burgeoning body of work written by Italians of African descent. Abandonment does not fit neatly into either of these waves but it is included in scholarly discussions of both because of the way that Dell’Oro traces the personal and social impact of migration not only from Africa to Italy, but in both directions.
Abandonment: Recovering Abandoned Histories
By Erica L Johnson
Erminia Dell’Oro’s first novel Asmara Addio (1988) draws on the author’s experience of having been born and raised in an Italian family in what was at the time Italian colonial Eritrea. The novel found a warm reception in Italy, a country that in comparison to other European colonial powers like England and France, had found it relatively easy to forget its colonial past in Africa. Dell’Oro’s novel broke through the cultural and historical silences around Italian colonialism and her second novel, Abandonment (L’Abbandono: Una storia eritrea, 1991) expanded postcolonial literature in important ways. Postcolonial studies originally emerged from scholarship on British, French, and Spanish empires, and overlooked until recently the bitter nuances of such less prominent colonial regimes as Denmark, Germany, and Italy. Abandonment brought attention to Italian colonial history in its unflinching portrayal of how the Italian colonial presence in Eritrea upended family and identity for many Eritreans. The story behind Abandonment, and how Dell’Oro came to write from an Eritrean point of view, is key to understanding its place in postcolonial Italian literature. At a book-signing in Milan in 1989, the author was approached by an Eritrean-Italian woman named Liliana who, like Dell’Oro, had grown up in Asmara and who actually remembered seeing her around the city.