On a busy Wednesday morning, I found myself in an unoccupied office in the Wellesley College History department.  While the room was somewhat bare of furniture, it was filled with the energy of the woman sitting across from me. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali-Italian writer whose work explores the experiences of Somalis living in the diaspora.  She was born in Italy and grew up in the Somali capital Moghadishu before returning to Italy after the outbreak of civil war in Somalia.  Since her return to Europe, Ali Farah has published two novels and a number of short stories and poems.  I talked to her about her work, why she writes the stories she does and some of the challenges she encountered.

Dual identity is at the center of Ali Farah’s work.  Her Italian mother and Somali father met while he was studying in Italy.  Ali Farah grew up in Somalia but was educated in Italian and later moved back to Italy.  Somalia essentially functioned as an Italian colony from the end of the nineteenth century up until the early sixties.  Every facet of her books, written primarily in Italian, emphasizes the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized. She explains that while she learned about the history and literature of Italy while in school in Moghadishu, she learned little about Somalia.  Somalia was also absent from the Italian history books.  She tells me that “Italy has a big problem with the colonial memory, people don’t usually know what happened in Somalia, that Somalia is connected with Italy.”  As a result, she hopes that her work will help pioneer an expansion of post-colonial literature in Italy. She tells me that because she does not have an accent when speaking Italian, people often forget that she is Somali, that she “has another story.”   By writing in Italian, she is able to integrate the stories of Somalis living in the diaspora and of Somali-Italians like herself into Italian post-colonial discourse.

While she feels that she has a responsibility to tell these stories, Ali Farah explains that it is not always easy, both because of the personal nature of the narratives and difficulty of their content. I asked her why she chooses to write fiction rather than memoir because her stories, especially her first novel Madre Piccola (Little Mother), are so close to her own experience.  She explains that “fiction is a better mediation of the violence because you can distance yourself” and that “if you write a memoir, I think that people can feel that is just something that has to do with you, you represent yourself more as a victim or as a testimony.” Because she writes fiction, Ali Farah is able to incorporate experiences other than her own.    When writing both of her novels, she did many interviews with Somalis and, in the case of her second novel, Africans of the diaspora living in Italy.  She tells me that some people thought she had collected too many stories to really incorporate into a novel.  She tells me that the purpose these interviews was not just to help her write her book, that it was a way of creating space for people to tell their stories.  In fact, “it was a way of healing themselves and also to try to reconnect themselves, to make a sense of what had happened before, of our collective stories.”  In this way her writing both amplifies the experiences of others and helps them to move through those experiences.

Ali Farah’s first novel, Madre Piccola follows the stories of three Somalis who escape to Rome after the outbreak of the civil war.  The ongoing Somali civil war began in 1991 when armed rebel groups toppled the existing government.  The violence that ensued resulted in the displacement of over one million people within Somalia and caused almost as many to flee the country.  In Madre Piccola, Ali Farah explores the experience of those who chose to leave Somalia.  She tries to answer the question of “how you can redefine yourself, how you can feel out your identity, how can you feel comfortable in a new place when you have lost all your points of reference, your family, your friends, and so on.  And for me the answer was through relationships.  And so you try to root down yourself in a new country in a new place, telling your story to others, trying to make other people understand what is your point of view what is your story.”  However, as she found in her own experience, getting others to understand your experience is not always straight forward.  She tells me that when talking to others who are not Somali (including myself), “I need to mediate my story, to make a compromise to make it understandable to you.” To achieve this, Ali Farah uses not only content, but also structure.  According to her, Madre Piccola uses “interlocking voices” to show “how the diaspora works, how memory works, and how it’s not always in a chronological order, in a coherent way.”   In her second novel, Il comandante del fiume (Commander of the River), she explores how the diaspora is experienced by second generation Somali-Italians. She says that with this book “the question I was asking myself was about what we translate to the second generation about the trauma we lived.”  With this latest story, she is thinking about the experience that her children are living, growing up in the diaspora.  This book is another example of how Ali Farah is able to mediate both her own experience and the experiences of others so that they can be understood by a wider audience.

It is clear to me after our conversation that Ali Farah’s work serves a dual purpose. It both helps those with a shared experience to process their trauma and helps others to better understand these experiences.  After thanking her and parting ways, I reflected on our discussion.  Having outlined the challenges of telling one’s story to people of different backgrounds, it was clear to me from our conversation that Ali Farah was a master at exactly this.