Women’s Writing Between the Border and the Non-Place: The Emerging Female Discourses in Italian Migrant Literature / A escrita feminina entre a fronteira e o não lugar: discursos femininos em ascensão na Literatura Italiana de Migração

In the midst of the Soviet Perestroika process, Yuri Lotman wrote his reflections on the concept of boundary. Having witnessed massive migrations, forced expulsions and unprecedented ethno-geographical reconfigurations, he knew how much a border can be loaded with a cultural meaning that transcends its spatial dimensions. To be aware of this was all the more urgent at a historic time of transition, rebuilding and opening, when linguistic-cultural policies could be a means of promoting integration and accepting the “foreigner.” This contribution takes this historical and conceptual framework as its starting point and aims to analyze a cultural phenomenon of great current interest in contemporary Italian literature: the increasingly “intrusive” presence of women writers from the former colonies who choose to produce their works in a “foreign” language (Italian), using writing as a field of experimentation, cultural hybridization, and generation of a public discursive space, bearer of the female migrant gaze.


Women's Writing Between the Border and the Non-Place: The Emerging Female Discourses in Italian Migrant Literature / A escrita feminina entre a fronteira e o não lugar: discursos femininos em ascensão na Literatura Italiana de Migração
ABSTRACT In the midst of the Soviet Perestroika process, Yuri Lotman wrote his reflections on the concept of boundary. Having witnessed massive migrations, forced expulsions and unprecedented ethno-geographical reconfigurations, he knew how much a border can be loaded with a cultural meaning that transcends its spatial dimensions. To be aware of this was all the more urgent at a historic time of transition, rebuilding and opening, when linguistic-cultural policies could be a means of promoting integration and accepting the "foreigner." This contribution takes this historical and conceptual framework as its starting point and aims to analyze a cultural phenomenon of great current interest in contemporary Italian literature: the increasingly "intrusive" presence of women writers from the former colonies who choose to produce their works in a "foreign" language (Italian), using writing as a field of experimentation, cultural hybridization, and generation of a public discursive space, bearer of the female migrant gaze. KEYWORDS

Introduction
To introduce the topic of emerging female discourses in two specific cases of Italian post-colonial literature, specifically the works of Albanian Elvira Dones (*Durrës, 1960) and Italian-Somali Igiaba Scego (*Rome, 1974), I would like to begin with some reflections offered by Yuri Lotman, the Russian scholar known for his contributions to literary theory, semiotic science and cultural studies.
I will start with a concept that Lotman developed in a 1982 essay, in collaboration with his colleague Boris Uspensky, about izgoinichestvo (LOTMAN; USPENSKY, 2002USPENSKY, [1982): a difficult concept to translate but could be expressed as "marginalization" or "downgrading." This is an existential condition which, in the old Russia, was attributed to people (izgoi) who fell upon misfortune and were considered unworthy of being part of the community (ruined merchants, the mentally ill, beggars), 1 but also included individuals who chose to break with "legitimate" society (such as bandits, outlaws, vagabonds, insubordinates, and rebels). Lotman clearly explains this last acceptation of the term izgoi in 1989 when talking about the relation between culture and intellectuality (intelligentnost'), namely the capacity to distinguish what indifferent eyes are unable to perceive: [To] allow such a phenomenon as intellectuality to arise, people needed a certain degree of independence, and at different historical moments society was provided with such self-determining groups. Often these were people who had been thrown out of the social order or had cut ties with it themselves, namely restless individuals who were not able to get comfortable in a given social environment. They cannot yet be called intellectuals, but this is the soil, the environment from which they will grow. [...] For example, in medieval Rus', a particular group called izgoi came to light. They were somehow not welcomed by society and everywhere they felt alien, ill-at-ease and 1 The so-called izgoi-as the historian and specialist in Ukrainian Studies Paul R. Magocsi underlines-was "a heterogeneous body of people, including princes without territory, sons of priests who could neither read or write, merchants who had gone bankrupt, and slaves who had bought their freedom. In short, the izgoi were people whose social status had changed and who therefore did not fit into the existing social order" (MAGOCSI, 2010, p.94). These different and rather free people-outlaws (vol'nitsa) and wandering people-were the soil where a "new humanity" with a broader mind and a more acute conscience started to emerge: in Lotman's vision, marginality (by choice or force of circumstance), freedom and intellectuality are considered a complete whole.
Returning to Lotman and Uspensky's essay, although they focus mainly on the figure of the izgoi until the 16th-17th century, 3 this term is still used to define all those social situations in which the individual is on the margins of the human community, in a condition of incommunicability and isolation. It is no coincidence that the famous film starring Tom Hanks, Cast Away, has been translated into Russian with the word izgoi.

Where do Foreigners Come From?
People who are thrown out of the social structure or who, for any other reason, are outside of it are perceived as a social anomaly, and at the same time represent a social necessity (LOTMAN; USPENSKY, 2002USPENSKY, [1982, p.231; original emphasis). 4 The izgoinichestvo condition, according to the two exponents of the so-called Semiotic School of Tartu-Moscow, 5 is strongly spatial in nature because outcasts are those who live far from the borders of order and organization or, in other words, far from the culture. mark the, so to speak, legitimate space from the abusive one or, simply, the one without any identity. 6 The izgoi, as the two authors write, is that person who lives outside: outside the house, staggering along the streets and spending the night under fences or in taverns (in modern times, these are the stations, which are unlivable places), wandering along the roads, living in forests or cemeteries or settling on the outskirts of an urban boundary. It is significant that when many people of this type come together, from their internal point of view they form a type of community (soobschestvo), but from the viewpoint of a given society's classification system, they do not form any community but remain an amorphous mass of individual, "rogue" people (LOTMAN; USPENSKY, 2002USPENSKY, [1982, p.227; original emphasis). 7 We can see situations where this condition existed but do not necessarily refer to ancient Rus' as, for example, the lepers in medieval Europe, who were destined to live in the non-place of the leprosarium, isolated and cursed. It also recalls the phenomenon of the witch-hunts in medieval and early modern Europe when women were publicly burnt at the stake for being poor and alone (widows or unmarried). They lived on the margins of village society and were considered strange and, to a certain extent, rebels. 8 Nowadays, the so-called sotsial'nyi izgoi, in its most extreme and dramatic form, is a kind of social leper, a person who lives in an intermediate, "suspended" position, on the fringes of any social group, or one who establishes relatively few interpersonal relationships with others.
I would like to emphasize the fact that the subtitle of the 1982 essay is The 'Own' and the 'Alien' in the History of Russian Culture. In other words, the condition of marginalization, with all its possible negative associations (being expelled, rejected, Having witnessed the massive migrations, forced evictions and unprecedented ethno-geographical reconfigurations created ad hoc by the Stalinist regime, Lotman was aware of how much a border can carry a cultural meaning that transcends its spatial dimensions. In fact, we must interpret the 1982 essay and other writings that follow it as a courageous attempt to denounce, through the figure of izgoi, the linguistic-cultural policies of the Soviet Union, which, as it is known, was essentially a Russia-centric state, even though a multiethnic federation was proclaimed. From his youth, Lotman had personally experienced the condition of izgoinichestvo after being exiled to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic for his Jewish roots. It is no coincidence that in the context of an "outlying" country, he elaborates its cultural semiotics through the cardinal categories of "centre" and "periphery," which, it must be said, are not exclusively the fruit of his theoretical genius, but were already part of the geopolitical and ethnic imagery of Stalinist times. From the heart of Moscow, the Kremlin radiated its Russianness over all of its non-Russian peripheral territories, turning the union into an empire through a campaign of exaltation of Mother Russia and the repression of minorities. 12 Bakhtiniana, São Paulo, 14 (2): 7-24, April/June 2019. The ancient Greeks regarded as barbarians the Persians and Egyptians, who surpassed them by the richness of their cultural traditions; the 11 See Saunders & Strukov (2010). 12 For an in-depth exploration of the organization of the Stalinist regime, see Lewin (2016). 13 See Simon (1991).
Romans considered the Carthaginians and Greeks barbarians. 14 The Indo-Aryans, who had conquered the Indian subcontinent, described the original populations of the Indus valley through the Sanskrit word mleccha-which has some shades of the Greek βάρβαρος-thus creating an absolutely false situation. In other words, since they themselves were barbarians, they accused the heirs of previous civilizations of barbarism. This list of "despicable strangers" would later include the Arabs, Turks, and the Chinese.
In the same way, the Arabs [...] used the word adjami, which had the same meaning as "barbarian," to define the Persians, heirs of the ancient and high culture against which they had fought for influence on the Muslim world (LOTMAN, 1985(LOTMAN, [1984, p.141). 15 Barbarians are such, according to the adopted perspective, as it happens with minorities (the non-culture), that sometimes they are even numerically superior to the majority but, in the self-perception of the latter, they are considered a limited group. It is the case of the women in medieval and early modern European culture: a minority considered "a perfidious 'Satanic army' punishable by annihilation" (LOTMAN, 1985(LOTMAN, [1984, p.142). 16 Since culture is a closed concept, it necessarily presupposes a nonculture as its antipodes, which lies outside its border. [. . . ] Each culture creates its own type of "barbarian." [The "being outside" of the stranger and the barbarian] often favors a spatial interpretation. Usually, according to the ideas of the given culture, alien forces are located outside its territorial boundaries. Being part of another culture is often interpreted as an absence of culture (LOTMAN, 1985(LOTMAN, [1984, pp.138-139). 17 14 It should be highlighted that although the Romans did not have much regard for contemporary Greeks (called Graeculi, which is despicable, insignificant, little Greeks), they felt the full force of the ancient Hellenic civilization-militarily inferior but culturally grand-and for this they felt profound admiration. 15 Original text in Italian: "Gli antichi Greci consideravano barbari i persiani e gli egiziani, che li superavano per la ricchezza della loro tradizione culturale, i romani consideravano barbari i cartaginesi e i greci. Le stirpi ariane, che avevano conquistato l'India, chiamavano col termine sanscrito mleccha, che ha alcune sfumature del greco βάρβαρος, le popolazioni originarie della valle del fiume Indo, creando così una situazione assolutamente falsa. Essendo cioè essi stessi dei barbari, essi accusavano di barbarie gli eredi delle civiltà precedenti. In seguito, in questo elenco di "spregevoli stranieri", essi inserirono gli arabi, i turchi e i cinesi. Allo stesso modo gli arabi [...] utilizzarono la parola adjami, che aveva lo stesso significato di "barbaro", per definire i persiani, eredi di quella antica e alta cultura contro la quale essi avevano lottato per l'influenza sul mondo musulmano." 16 Original text in Italian: "un 'esercito satanico' perfido e passibile di annientamento." 17 Original text in Italian: "Poiché la cultura è un concetto chiuso, essa presuppone necessariamente una non cultura ai suoi antipodi, che si colloca all'esterno del suo confine. [...] Ogni cultura si crea il suo tipo di "barbaro". [il "trovarsi fuori" dell'estraneo e del barbaro] favorisce spesso un'interpretazione spaziale. Di solito, secondo le idee della cultura data, le forze extraculturali si trovano fuori dei suoi confini territoriali. L'appartenenza ad un'altra cultura è così interpretata spesso come assenza di cultura.". and will be tomorrow at the center of cultural activity, which has undergone changes" (LOTMAN, 1985(LOTMAN, [1984, p.140). 18 The author offers these reflections at a time of historical transition and opening of the Soviet Union, when linguistic-cultural policies could be a means to promote the integration and acceptance of the "alien." Russian-centrism had to give way to the variety of people that for a long time had been treated as subcultures and for decades had tried to defend their traditions and language.
It is not a surprise that, according to Lotman and Uspensky, the strengthening of the identity of the "foreigner" in the heart of a culture passes through language and, precisely, through the creation of sub-languages, which are incomprehensible to the centre: The situation of izgoinichestvo stimulates the creation of argot. This is especially evident in cases when marginalization takes shape in community forms. The difference between social jargon and social dialect is that the former is not assimilated originally, but is acquired after entering into a certain social environment, where the verbal behavior (rechevoe povedenie) acts as a distinctive feature of the group (sоtsium). Since an outcast sees himself as a foreigner, his sociolinguistic position is characterized by speaking in a "foreign" language (LOTMAN; USPENSKY, 2002USPENSKY, [1982 This originality has made them subjects that are hardly classifiable within the classical Italian literary canon, which is often presented, in Lotmanian terms, as a "centre," a closed, normative space where it is difficult for women to find a place. It is worth remembering that the now internationally established Italian writer, Elsa Morante, preferred to be called "the poet" (not poetess), using the pen name Antonio or Lorenzo, and Natalia Ginzburg commented regarding her writings from her youth: "at the time I wanted terribly to write like a man and I had a horror of anyone realizing from what I wrote that I was a woman" (GINZBURG, 1985, p.61). This is even more certain if the writer is a foreigner.

Elvira Dones and Igiaba Scego: Two Women Writers of the Border
An exile is a half a creature. Roots were torn off, life was mutilated, hope was gutted, the origin was removed, the identity was stripped. There seems to be nothing left (SCEGO, 2017, p.60). 20 The historical and conceptual framework that I have just presented opens the door to a phenomenon that runs across contemporary Italian literature, placing The novel tells the story of Hana, forced by life's circumstances to become "the head of the family," even if her dream was to study philology and become "a poet" (DONES, 2015, p.122).
Her uncle had hardly been able to breathe. There wasn't a blade of grass for the animals to eat, and she, at nineteen, had Walt Whitman's poems in her unopened suitcase. She wanted to get back to that book, but her uncle was there in front of her, more dead than alive. She was the only girl in the village enrolled in college. She hadn't wanted children, all she had wanted was books. But in the mountains you couldn't say these things if you were born a girl (DONES, 2015, p.44 Culture, by incorporating her into its codes and discourses, transforms her into a pariah, a babbling creature, an amorphous being, alien to herself. At the end of the slow path that leads her to leave "Mark," a path marked by the plea "please, there's no rush," Hana breaks the sworn virgin oath and discovers her body again, breaking the nucleus of death, apathy and ugliness that had taken hold of her during seventeen years of captivity: Hana tries to bring her attention back to her body. The man that she thought would still be tenaciously inhabiting her is no longer there. inflicted on Albanian women in the 1990s and to which very little voice has been given. It is no coincidence that the body is one of her privileged subjects, where the deposit of the physical and psychological scars with which the violence of prostitution and war (the systematic war violations in Yugoslavia and Kosovo as an instrument of ethnic cleansing) has marked women. 28 She, as with other women writers, tries to claim a public discursive space in which a migrant woman is presented with her load of traumas that most likely cannot be healed (often due to lack of the adequate care in the new host country). In Perfect Little War the atrocious description of the violence experienced by a little Kosovar girl is "counterbalanced" by public opinion: Meanwhile, Europe is terrified: it fears that at the end of the war, instead of returning to their burned houses, the homeless of Kosovo end up flooding it as the Albanians did after the collapse of the communist regime (DONES, 2011, p.155). 29 27 Original text in Italian: "Hana cerca di riportare l'attenzione sul proprio corpo. L'uomo che temeva potesse tenacemente resistere in lei non c'è più. Quell'uomo era solo crosta di superficie, [la cugina] Lila aveva ragione, Mark Doda era vissuto solo nei gesti maschili che Hana si era sforzata di imitare, nella pelle rovinata dal cibo cattivo e dalla mancanza di attenzioni. Mark Doda era stato il prodotto della sua ferrea volontà." 28 For an in-depth look at Elvira Dones's bibliography, see Livezeanu et al. (2007). 29 Original text in Italian: "Intanto l'Europa è terrorizzata: teme che a Guerra conclusa, invece di fare ritorno alle loro case bruciate, i senzatetto del Kosovo finiscano per inondarla come hanno fatto gli albanesi dopo il tracollo del regime comunista." This does not mean that Italians were worse than other colonizing people. However, they were like the others. The Italians raped, killed, mocked, polluted, plundered, and humiliated the populations with whom they came into contact. They did like the English, French, Belgian, German, American, Spanish, and Portuguese colonialists. Yet, in many of these countries, after the end of the Second World War, there was a discussion, people came to blows, and the exchanges of views were harsh and impetuous; the question about imperialism and its crimes had been raised; many studies were published and the debate influenced literary, non-fiction, film and music production. Instead, Italy ruled the silence, as if nothing had happened (SCEGO, 2017, p.20). 34 The Italian-African writer wants to give a voice to the neglected people (especially women) who are a product of migrations and who are hidden in the cracks of the borders, 35 making them feel exiled without a centre, like an amorphous mass accumulated in the non-places of the cities. This voice in search of dialogue and recognition is even stronger today in light of a highly problematic migration situation in Italy-in which, for example, the stereotype of the (parasitic) low-skilled migrant is very widespread-, a crescent populism, and a tendency to ghettoize different people especially through a non-inclusive manipulation of the urban fabric.
In fact, it is in the station, the unlivable place-using the words of Lotman andUspensky (2002 [1982], p.227)-, where the Scego girl discovers that in her home town, Rome, an avalanche of Somali immigrants is rotting in the melancholy of the lost world, in the buufis. 36 34 Original text in Italian: "l'Italia si era dimenticata del suo passato coloniale. Aveva dimenticato di aver fatto subire l'inferno a somali, eritrei, libici ed etiopi. Aveva cancellato quella storia con un facile colpo di spugna. Questo non significa che gli italiani siano stati peggio di altri popoli colonizzatori. Ma erano come gli altri. Gli italiani hanno stuprato, ucciso, sbeffeggiato, inquinato, depredato, umiliato i popoli con cui sono venuti a contatto. Hanno fatto come gli inglesi, i francesi, i belgi, i tedeschi, gli americani, gli spagnoli, i portoghesi. Ma in molti di questi paesi dopo la fine della Seconda guerra mondiale c'è stata una discussione, ci si è accapigliati, gli scambi di vedute sono stati aspri e impetuosi; ci si è interrogati sull'imperialismo e i suoi crimini; sono stati pubblicati studi; il dibattito ha influenzato la produzione letteraria, saggistica, filmica, musicale. In Italia invece silenzio. Come se nulla fosse stato." 35 See also Scego (2008) and Scego (2015). 36 See Horst (2006) and Jinnah (2017 It is impossible not to think of what Henri Lefebvre wrote about the organizing function of the space currently operated by the European states. The look of the old continent today no longer extends outwards-in search of others' lands-but inwards, and one of its main activities is to reconstruct space, regularize flows, and control networks (LEFEBVRE, 1991, p.383), thus expanding its ability to influence and surveil the space occupied by migrants.
What moves those who undertake a journey towards an alien land is the search for a specific place that is anything but the "organized" space that actually awaits them.
It is the search for the house, that meaningful place, suspended in time and space, where, Scego writes, the fragrance of ginger coffee, the intense taste of a beer iyo muufo or a bariis iskukaris or the sound of the mother's song (Sheeko sheeko sheeko xariir, which means Once upon a time) is enough for the outcasts to find a faded image of their roots. 38

Conclusions
Many of those who worked closely with Lotman have witnessed how scientific thinking in him was never an exercise of the mind as an end in itself, but an existential activity put at the service of his people. 39 The barbarian who "appears today on the 37 Original text in Italian: "Per anni mi sono sentita minacciata dal carico di dolore e speranza che [la stazione] Termini si portava addosso. Volevo essere altro da lei. La percepivo come un ostacolo alla mia formazione. Non sapevo ancora che una vita serena non poteva prescindere da lei. Perché lì c'era il mio principio. Perché lì era seppellito il mio cordone ombelicale. In Messico una leggenda dice che la casa è il luogo in cui seppelliscono il cordone ombelicale da cui hai tratto il nutrimento prima di nascere. Allora forse la mia casa era la stazione Termini. Il principio che non dovevo dimenticare." 38 As in Dones, we find the body, which in African culture is a builder of the community space, a space impregnated with the sensations, smells, sounds, tastes, and shared colors that are part of one's personal and cultural identity. 39 See Kiseliëva (2005).
All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 BR periphery of culture and tomorrow will be at the centre of cultural activity" (LOTMAN, 1985(LOTMAN, [1984, p.140) 40 is an enunciation that brings in itself the experience of a lifetime.
From the condition of silence and vigilance in which he wrote in the sixties, Lotman comes to give, in the period from 1986 to 1991, a series of educational television lectures to "sow the reasonable, the good, the eternal" (LOTMAN, 1995, p.49) 41 among the disoriented people in the face of the progressive disintegration of the Soviet Union and the consequent and unprecedented scenarios of geopolitical, economic, social and cultural-linguistic reconstruction.
On the trail of the reflections of the Russian semiotician, we have seen how Elvira Dones and Igiaba Scego tried to give space to the voices of those at the bottom, and in particular to those of women, demanding literature to act like an urgent call to all the situations of izgoinichestvo that mark the contemporary era. If exile is half a creature, border literature can become a medium to repair fractures, heal wounds and recover the sense of origin and integrityor the principle of unity, as the Italian-African author calls itthat constitutes the inner self of each person from birth.