Abstract
The essay analyzes Laura Pariani's narrative by focusing on her first voyage to Argentina in the mid 1960s, when she was a young girl. The encounter with her grandfather, who had gone to America to escape Fascism in the twenties and never returned to Italy, was both traumatic and enlightening, because it contributed to raise the young author’s awareness about the consequences of modern colonialism and mass migration. The figure of the grandfather becomes the “matrix” for several of Pariani's works examined in the essay, and undergoes numerous metamorphoses: from the idealistic, revolutionary figure who fights for the rights of the oppressed native American people to the tyrannical individual depicted in the first chapter of the novel Quando Dio ballava il tango (2002). I argue that the author managed to overcome the initial trauma caused by her forced “displacement” (spaesamento) through her creative writing, which led her to investigate the complex interactions between Italy and Argentina from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her literary production constantly goes back and forth between the two continents and offers numerous insights into both cultures. She illustrates the often-ignored peasants’ miserable conditions in the Northern Italian countryside, which led many to migrate to Latin America, where they became instrumental for the colonization of the interior and the extermination of the natives. Pariani's narrative, like Nuto Revelli's oral history, focuses on those who have been “vanquished” by capitalist expansion and modernization, both in Europe and America, and gives a voice to their hopes, passions and disillusionments.
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