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.

ERMINIA DELL'ORO

Titles By This Author

ABANDONMENT