Cassandra a Mogadiscio

In Rome, on 31 December 1990, a sixteen-year-old girl is getting ready for her first New Year’s Eve party: she is wearing a jumper she got from Caritas and has clumsily applied make-up to her dark skin, but she is a proud girl and imagines the new year will be full of promise. She does not know that on that very evening, the fate that weighs heavily on her entire family will be fulfilled: while the television reports on the civil war that has broken out in Somalia, Jirro slips into her soul, never to leave it again. Jirro is one of the many Somali words we encounter in this book: it is the disease of trauma, of uprooting, an evil that inhabits all those who live in diaspora. Born in Italy to parents who fled during the dictatorship of Siad Barre, Igiaba Scego mixes the Italian language with the sounds of Somali to weave these pages, which are at once a letter to a young niece, a historical account, a family genealogy, and an alchemical laboratory in which suffering is transformed into hope thanks to the power of words. Words that, like a thread, stubbornly unite what history would like to separate, in a story whose recursive and enveloping rhythm reveals how distant events can affect us intimately: the author’s paternal grandfather, interpreter for General Graziani during the infamous years of Italian occupation; her father, a shining figure of diplomacy and culture; her mother, who grew up in a nomadic clan and was then swallowed up by civil war; the humiliations of immigrant life in 1990s Rome; the lack of a common language for a large family scattered across continents; an illness that day after day takes the light from her eyes. Like a modern Cassandra, Igiaba Scego sets aside her bitterness for the injustices perpetrated and the cries of pain that went unheard, choosing instead to turn her clouded vision into a benevolent lens on the world, writing a great book about our past and our present that celebrates brotherhood, the possibility of forgiveness, care and peace.