California Italian Studies

This essay examines historically varied tales of transnational migration through the lens of a topos that links nineteenth-century Italian migrations to Egypt, with the representation of an Italian infiltration of “Little Cairo” in Amara Lakhous’s 2010 novel Divorzio all’islamica in Viale Marconi: the topos of European Christians who pose or pass as Muslim. This essay proposes a contrapuntal reading between two historical moments and two directions of Italian migrations. It first takes up the case of Giovanni Finati, Ferrarese, who converted to Islam and passed as Albanian in Muhammed Ali’s para-colonial Egypt, as recounted in his 1830 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati. This essay then shows how Lakhous reprises Orientalism’s practice of representation by updating the powerful nineteenth- century metaphor of the Orient as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe” (in Edward Said’s fortunate phrase). Among the particularly rich repertoire of plays upon that stage was the practice of passing and posing as Muslim in order to enter the sacred space of Mecca, prohibited to Christians upon threat of death. In its nineteenth-century version, such passing was the sign of the extraordinary man, alone at Mecca among a sea of authentic, and supposedly “transparent” believers. Lakhous, instead, takes up the topos in order to generalize it as the condition of post-colonial Italian identities, whether “migrant” or “italiano doc,” as the novel calls them: “un italiano al cento percento, un italianissimo” The theme and possibility of conversion to Islam links the two historical moments in an embrace that conjures with Islamophobia, the historical malleability of a weak national identity in the Mediterranean, and the frisson of entry into a forbidden space in a disguise that is in equal measure linguistic and semiotic.