Exile Within Italy: Interactions Between Past and Present "Homes" in Texts in Italian by Migrant Writers (Critical Essay‪)‬

Jennifer Burns, in "Exile within Italy: Interactions between Past and Present 'Homes' in Texts in Italian by Migrant Writers," considers representations of exile in recent novels by three italophone migrant writers: Ron Kubati (Albanian), Mohsen Melliti and Salah Methnani (both Tunisian). It analyzes the extent to which economic migration is figured in these texts as a form of exile, and considers the ways in which the relationship between "home" and "exile" is represented and manipulated in these narratives. I will consider in this article figurations and representations of exile in novels by three writers who in the 1990-2000 period published texts in Italian relating to their migration from their countries of birth to Italy. The novels are Immigrato (1990), by Salah Methnani (Tunisian), who co-wrote his novel with Italian writer, Mario Fortunato; Pantanella (1992), by Mohsen Melliti (also Tunisian); and Va e non torna (2000), by Ron Kubati (Albanian). Clearly, I am considering exile in an unconventional way, in a way perhaps contrary to that in which it is considered in other articles in this volume. The peculiarity of the types of exile I am examining can be described in various ways, which will be explored in the course of my discussion, but, as a preliminary step, I will enumerate some of the salient singularities of the notion of exile in texts in Italian by immigrant writers. (1) First is the issue of will: the writers I will concentrate on were none of them banished from their home country to Italy by means of a specific political edict; rather, they chose to emigrate. And yet the level to which this "choice" was suggested, encouraged, or even enforced by political, economic, and cultural circumstances is a complex and particularly interesting one, which I will discuss at greater length shortly. A second singularity in the types of exile I am considering is that Italy is the place to, rather than from, which the individual writer is exiled in these texts. Italy is the place of estrangement and exclusion, and the place which the reader, too, is led to read as strange, foreign, hostile, restrictive. Linked with this singularity, and shifting in the direction of specifically textual issues, is the fact that the Italian language in these texts is also a medium which is not only used to express estrangement, but which also in its very use voices an estrangement, a necessary adoption of an unfamiliar mode of expression. Finally, continuing in the same direction, we can identify these texts as a minority literature within the Italian tradition: a body of writing in part in exile within, or on the edges of, the Italian canon. (2)