Book, Adua[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. “Tell the stories you have, in the best way you can” is the phrase that the title character randomly reads in a book displayed in a supermarket in Rome. In this novel with great sensorial appeal, the writer Igiaba Scego, daughter of the Somali diaspora generated by fascist colonialism in East Africa, expanded this “advice” on several levels. Adua, named after the first African victory against European imperialism, is one of several Somali girls who dream of the glamorous world of movie stars. To fulfill her naive dream of becoming an actress, Adua ends up looking for Italians who do all kinds of drug trafficking in the 1970s in her hometown, Magalo. On several narrative planes, both spatial and temporal, the infamy to which Adua is subjected is interspersed with the story of her father, a multilingual interpreter who went to work at a very young age for the fascist military in Rome in the 1930s. The absent and oppressive figure of the father is one of the main axes of this book which exposes, in a scathing and self-ironic way, terrible pains such as that of genital mutilation in Somali women. However, even in the face of so much brutality, we finish reading enraptured by the smell of cinnamon from Mogadishu, by the sound of the hiss of Roman rainbow skirts, by the symbolic beauty of a blue turban. For, borrowing a beautiful expression from Adua's grandfather, the soothsayer Hagi Safar, this novel has an immensity as infinite as the portion of heaven contained in the eyes of an angel.