Colonial Tales

Translator’s Note

Translator’s NoteThis middle section of Alessandro Spina’s The Confines of the Shadow: In Lands Overseas, is set in the nervously restless years prior to the outbreak of World War II, a time when the Italian colonists in Libya’s cities of Tripoli and Benghazi felt more confident than ever in their courageous industriousness as they attempted to refashion the inhospitable African land beneath their feet into a replica of their beloved motherland. A few exceptions aside, all the stories in Colonial Tales are set in Benghazi during the 1930s and early 1940s and – unlike in the other instalments of Spina’s eleven-volume epic – all of the characters are Italian. Not a single Libyan makes an appearance here and that is the point: it is part of Spina’s pointed critique at colonial Italy’s refusal to even acknowledge its native subjects. Indeed, the Italians grew so confident in their unchallenged hold over the quarta sponda – or ‘fourth shore,’ squaring the Italian boot’s three other shores – over these years, that they officially annexed the province to Italy in 1939, by which time Italian settlers made up over a third of Libya’s urban population and owned extensive land holdings in the interior of the country. Those familiar with narratives of the British presence during the Raj will recognise the intimately theatrical scenes Spina sets for his readers as he chronicles an episode in Italian history that has been nearly obliterated from the country’s collective memory. Time stands perfectly still in Spina’s Benghazi while the ladies chatter and their husbands talk of war. The city’s wide avenues are dotted with cafés where people gossip and orchestras play, yet Spina’s narrators often take the reader on a tour of the surrounding area’s Greek ruins – the remnants of the once-powerful city-states of the Libyan Pentapolis. Spina’s tableau is vast: his stories feature haughty grande dames, industrialists, aristocrats, politicians, revolutionaries, servants, functionaries, prostitutes, dressmakers, policemen, school teachers, poets, musicians and knaves – whether in uniform or not. Nevertheless, this section of Spina’s epic rightfully retains a militaristic feel: after all, the military was in charge in Italian Libya, and as such, many of the stories are set in the Officers’ Club, where the soldiers sleep with one another’s wives, scheme against one another, stage one-man shows, eat, drink, philosophise and discuss Italy’s chances in the coming war, blissfully unaware that their artificial presence in that conquered land is soon to vanish entirely. As I mentioned in my introduction to Volume One of The Confines of the Shadow, Spina’s officers perfectly typify his concept of the ‘shadow’: their minds are haunted by the maddening darkness – or hollowness – of the colonial enterprise, and yet they are simultaneously unable to extricate themselves from it, bound to serve their masters – in this case the Fascist bureaucracy and its Supreme Leader, Benito Mussolini – until the bitter end. And bitter it was.