“To not give them the chance to forget”: Postcolonial narratives of Italian-Ethiopian writers

Within the so-called “Italian literature of migration‟, a conspicuous corpus of texts is represented by autobiographies/memoirs/novels written by women-writers coming from the Horn of Africa. This literary wave, which emerged in the early Nineties is usually labelled as “Italian postcolonial literature” and includes many works of Ethiopian authors. The essay focuses on the thematic and linguistic aspects of this production and refers particularly to the texts published by Gabriella Ghermandi, Martha Nasibù, Carla Macoggi and Maria Abbebù Viarengo. The last section of the present study suggests a comparison between these writings and the Ethiopian diasporic literature in English produced by Nega Mezlekia, Maaza Mengiste and Dinaw Mengestu