Abstract

My focus is the analysis, through literary reportage, of the specific place: the "Little Somalia" in Rome, a Somali community located near Termini train station from 1998 to 2003. The relationships inside Somali Community were very complicated: the clanization of Somalia, the civil war and the role of the colonial past bring to rewrite the history between Italy and Somalia. Through some contemporary narrations of this same place (with the works of Cristina Ubax Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego, Nuruddin Farah, among others) and some personal memories, I tried to rebuild the particularities of Italian Little Somalia. This place was in fact a symbol of diaspora, and a kind of land of precariousness: a lot of Somalis asked at the time to Italy political asylum, but they were rejected and they finally decided to reach another country. With the help of historical archives, novels, and personal memories, I analyzed how Somalia was re-imagined and re-written, and how this rewriting could help us to reflect about relationships between colonized and colonizing people.