The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I Read online

  English translation copyright © 2018 by André Naffis-Sahely

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Print ISBN: 978-1-6287-2835-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-6287-2838-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Introduction by André Naffis-Sahely

  Author’s Note

  The Young Maronite

  The Marriage of Omar

  The Nocturnal Visitor

  Translator’s Note

  Glossary

  About the Author and Translator

  Introduction

  by André Naffis-Sahely

  Although variously described by the literary press as the ‘Italian Joseph Conrad’ and ‘a twentieth-century Balzac,’ Alessandro Spina’s books had almost entirely fallen out of print by the early 1990s, leading one critic to refer to him as a ‘ghostly presence’ in modern Italian literature. Three months after Spina’s death in July 2013, his editor Ilario Bertoletti published a memoir describing his first encounter with the notoriously reclusive writer: ‘It was June 1993. The bell rang in the late afternoon. Moments later, a colleague entered my office: “A gentleman dropped by. He looked like an Arab prince, tall and handsome. He left a history of the Maronites for you.”’ Bertoletti made inquiries and discovered Spina had quietly published a number of novels and short stories from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, which together constituted one of modern European fiction’s most ambitious epics: a sequence that charted the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the sleepy Ottoman province of Trablusgarb, all the way through to 1964, when the independent Kingdom of Libya under Idris I discovered it was sitting on one of the world’s largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Although Spina had retained his title as one of the ‘lions of the literary world,’ his books were almost impossible to find, and few seemed to realise the extent of his project’s scope. Determined to correct the situation, Bertoletti spent several years persuading Spina to allow him to reissue his books, and in 2006, Bertoletti’s imprint, Morcelliana, assembled Spina’s seven novels and four short story collections into a 1,280-page omnibus edition entitled I confini dell’ombra: In terra d’oltremare (The Confines of the Shadow: In Lands Overseas).

  The following year, The Confines of the Shadow was awarded the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s highest literary accolade. It was an impressive achievement, especially for an author who’d insisted on publishing limited editions of his books with tiny presses. However, the Bagutta nod caused only a few ripples: a single radio interview, a handful of glowing reviews and a conference in Spina’s honour (which he didn’t attend). Without a recognisable persona to market – the back flap doesn’t even feature an author photograph – the book receded into obscurity, and although Spina remains little known even in Italy, where he spent the last thirty years of his life, The Confines of the Shadow belongs alongside panoptic masterpieces like Buddenbrooks, The Man Without Qualities and The Cairo Trilogy. Spina died two weeks before I concluded an agreement with Ghassan Fergiani of Darf Press to translate the entirety of The Confines of the Shadow. Denied the privilege of meeting him, I was faced with a conundrum: the translation of such a monumental opus in the immediate wake of Spina’s death meant that any introduction I produced would have to deal with his life, of which I knew next to nothing, save that ‘Alessandro Spina’ was a nom de plume adopted in 1955 when Alberto Moravia published his first story, ‘L’ufficiale’ (The Officer), in Nuovi Argomenti. Sporting an English reticence and safely ensconced behind his pseudonym, Spina had spent half a century eluding the limelight, refusing invitations to make public appearances or give interviews. Consequently, I realised that any clues to his life story would have to be culled from the work itself. I therefore retreated to the books, sleuthing through The Confines of the Shadow and a 300-page Diary that Spina kept while composing his epic. And thanks to quasi-involuntary slips on Spina’s part, I slowly began to assemble a narrative.1

  Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi on October 8, 1927, into a family of Maronites from Aleppo. His father, a wealthy textile magnate, had left his native Syria at seventeen to make his fortune and arrived in Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica – then a quiet city of 20,000 Turks and Arabs ringed by Bedouin encampments – a few weeks after Italy and the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Ouchy. Ratified in October 1912, the treaty brought 360 years of Turkish rule and thirteen months of war to a close, and formalised Italy’s possession of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. A latecomer to the scramble for Africa, acquiring Eritrea and Somalia in the late 1880s, barely a couple of decades after they had been cobbled together out of squabbling fiefdoms, Italy had long sought to lay its hands on the quarta sponda, or fourth shore. After all, the Libyan coast – the last remaining African territory of the Ottoman Empire, which, as Baron Eversley put it, had grown used to having provinces ‘torn from it periodically, like leaves from an artichoke’ – lay only three hundred miles south of Sicily. With trouble brewing in the Balkans, and sensing that the ‘sick man of Europe’ was on his knees, the Italians seized their chance. Knowing they would merely have to contend with a crippled navy and a handful of ill-equipped battalions, they delivered an ultimatum in September 1911, their soldiers disembarked in October, and by November the Italian tricolour could be seen flying from every major city on the Libyan littoral.

  Nevertheless, what was expected to be an easy conquest instead turned into a twenty-year insurgency that was quelled only when the Fascists took power in Rome and Mussolini, in a quest to solve Italy’s emigration problem, dispatched one of his most ruthless generals, the hated Rodolfo Graziani (1882–1955), to bring the quarta sponda to heel and ‘make room’ for colonists. Genocide ensued: a third of Libya’s population was killed; tens of thousands were interned in concentration camps; a 300-kilometre barbed-wire fence was erected on the Egyptian border to block rebels from receiving supplies and reinforcements; and the leader of the resistance, a venerable Koranic teacher named Omar Mukhtar (1858–1931), was hunted down and summarily hanged – a chilling story that is elegantly depicted in Lion of the Desert (1981), in which Oliver Reed and Anthony Quinn play Graziani and Mukhtar, respectively, and which was banned from Italian screens for several years. These events – one of the bloodiest chapters in modern North African history – were also witnessed first-hand by the intrepid Danish traveller Knud Holmboe (1902–1931), whose The Burning Desert will be reissued next year in a new translation and who was murdered by Italian intelligence officers upon publication of his best-selling book. In 1939, when Spina was twelve, Italy officially annexed Libya, by which time Italian settlers constituted 13 per cent of the pop
ulation and over a third of the inhabitants of Tripoli and Benghazi, the epicentres of Italian power. At the outbreak of World War II, Spina’s father dispatched his son to Italy, where he would remain until 1954. Initially leading a peripatetic existence that saw him alternate between Busto Arsizio and the spa town of Salsomaggiore, Spina – accompanied by his mother – eventually settled in Milan. There, he became a devotee of opera: as luck would have it, the hotel where they lodged, the Marino on Piazza della Scala, was directly opposite the Teatro.

  While in Milan, Spina – by then fluent in Arabic, English, French and Italian – studied under Mario Marcazzan; penned a thesis on Moravia; and began drafting his first stories, lush tapestries of history, fiction and autobiography that featured a cosmopolitan array of characters: Italian officers, Senussi rebels, Ottoman bureaucrats, chirpy grande dames, Maltese fishermen, aristocrats, servants and slaves. Spina nevertheless described each caste with the same finesse, empathy and intimacy, partly thanks to his immaculate fusion of Eastern narrative quaintness and the passion for encapsulating an entire way of life that informs much nineteenth-century European fiction, thereby distinguishing sentiment from sentimentality. There is perhaps no better example of this balancing act than ‘Il forte di Régima’ (The Fort at Régima), an early story set in the mid-1930s, in which an Italian officer, one Captain Valentini, is ordered south of Benghazi to take command of a garrison stationed in an old Ottoman fortress that ‘recalled the castles built in Greece by knights who had joined the Fourth Crusade.’ Valentini is glad to leave the city and its tiresome peacetime parades behind, but as he’s driven to his new posting, his mind is suddenly flooded with the names of famous crusaders who had ‘conquered Constantinople, made and unmade emperors, carved the vast empire into fiefs, and run to and fro vainly fighting to ensure the survival of a system, which owing to its lack of roots in the country, was never destined to survive.’ Employing only several hundred words, Spina slices across seven hundred years, showing the inanity of the concept of conquest as well as the existential vacuum it inevitably leaves in its wake: ‘As he weltered about in his armoured vehicle, it seemed cruel for the captain to be forced to undergo the same rigmarole after so many centuries had passed.’ Our technological genius may be growing, Spina implies, but so is our historical ignorance. It is no coincidence that Spina collected these sketches under the title Officers’ Tales. His men-at-arms perfectly typify his concept of the ‘shadow’: their minds are haunted by the maddening darkness of the colonial enterprise, which still overshadows our own supposedly post-colonial times. More than a metaphor intertwined throughout his novels, Spina’s shadow can be interpreted as an allegory of how the Italian presence in Libya was both visible by dint of its brutality and yet incorporeal because it sought only to rule, never to integrate. Ultimately, the shadow is also life itself: amorphous and mysterious, because history has seen us repeatedly fail to envision what lies beyond what we can see, past the horizon of our ephemeral lives and experiences.

  At the end of World War II, Italy relinquished its claim to Libya, which was then administered by the British until 1951, when the country became independent under King Idris I. In August 1953, Spina –now twenty-six, and with the ink still fresh on his degree – returned to Benghazi to help run his ageing father’s factory. Although typically working twelve-hour days, he somehow found time to write, and would lock himself in his father’s office, whose windows looked out onto the fourteenth-century fondouk (caravanserai). Throughout his life, Spina firmly believed that he’d acquired his discipline not despite being an industrialist but because of it, in the same way that Tolstoy refused to leave Yasnaya Polyana so as to stay among his people, and the chief source of his inspiration. In his spare time, Spina would pick up the copy of Proust’s Le Temps Retrouvé that he always kept by his side, or send letters to friends, which often featured pearls encapsulating the transformations that his country was traversing. In a letter dated 26 July 1963, to Cristina Campo (the pen name of Vittoria Guerrini), he wrote:

  A young scion of the royal family – ‘of the highest pedigree,’ as Hofmannsthal might have said – the grandson of the old King who’d been deposed by the current monarch, has died in a car accident. Having come to convey his condolences, one of the King’s cousins also suffered a crash on his way home to his desert encampment, an accident that took the lives of his mother, wife and son (he remains in intensive care at the hospital). I went to convey my own condolences. The Prince is very handsome, around sixty years old. He’s extremely tall, his skin’s a milky white and he sports a little aristocratic goatee. Eventually, the talk turned to the accident. The old man (his medieval view of the world still unmarred) remarked: ‘Are automobiles meant as vehicles for this world or the next?’

  During the first decade of Libyan independence, Spina completed his first collection of stories; published Tempo e Corruzione (Time and Decay), a novel based on his days in Milan; and worked on a translation of Storia della città di Rame (The City of Brass), a tale excerpted from The Thousand and One Nights. However, it was only in 1964 that he truly hit his stride and began writing the first volumes of The Confines of the Shadow. From 1964 to 1975, arguably his most productive decade, Spina produced Il giovane maronita (The Young Maronite), Le nozze di Omar (Omar’s Wedding), Il visitatore notturno (The Nocturnal Visitor) and Ingresso a Babele (Entry Into Babylon), which while occasionally featuring diverse locales such as Milan, Paris and Cairo, are chiefly set in Benghazi. The Young Maronite, the first act of the Cyrenaican saga, begins in November 1912. The new Italian conquistadors have barricaded themselves inside Benghazi and nervously look on as the Libyans muster their strength in the desert and begin their gallant guerilla war against the usurpers. Meanwhile Émile Chébas, a savvy young merchant from Aleppo, arrives in town with a meagre cargo. Émile nonetheless lands on his feet, thanks to a chance encounter with Hajji Semereth Effendi, one of the city’s wealthiest men and a former Ottoman grandee, who takes Émile under his wing and helps set him up, even lending him one of his servants, Abdelkarim. Although Émile is technically the book’s protagonist, it isn’t until later that he emerges from Semereth’s shadow. Spina’s portrait of Semereth is immediately ensnaring:

  In Istanbul, the Hajji had occupied several public positions that prophesied a stellar career, but after a plot had been uncovered, the shadow of conspiracy had settled on him and triggered his fall. He had then withdrawn to that obscure provincial backwater and been quickly forgotten. Regardless of whether he had in fact been guilty or the victim of calumny, he was out of the game. Salvation had come at the cost of silence and renunciation. […] He was very tall, and his face was frightening. A gunpowder charge had exploded close to him during a military campaign and he had been left disfigured. His hair had been reduced to a few tow-coloured clumps. A foul smell emanated from the wrinkles on his skull. He exuded an air of seriousness and authority that made anyone who talked to him instantly bashful and hesitant. It was like a spell that separated him from everyone else, but he was a victim of it, rather than its conscious master, as others tended to assume.

  The first section deals with Semereth’s unrequited love for Zulfa, the youngest of his four wives, who later betrays him with Ferdinando, an orphan raised in his household. Unbeknownst to Semereth, his family tragedy is being quietly observed by two Italian officers who, adrift in a violently hostile land – and having arrived assuming they would be welcomed as liberators – grasp hold of what they can to try to make sense of their new surroundings. Of all the book’s characters, it is once again the officers who attempt a systemic understanding of the alien world around them, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the results are never positive. Here is Captain Romanino’s take on Italy’s African venture during a soirée in Milan, where he is on leave:

  Just as a language is only useful in the area in which it is spoken, and is pointless outside of it, so it goes with Europe’s liberal moral values, which don’t extend anywhere south of the Mediterranean. As soo
n as one reaches the other coastline, one is ordered to do the exact opposite prescribed by God’s commandments: kill, steal, blaspheme … Once the Turkish garrison was defeated and a few key locations on the coast were occupied, we found a vast, obscure country stretching out before us, into which we were afraid to venture. Thus, we cloistered ourselves in the cities while waiting for daylight. Instead, the night is getting deeper, darker, deadlier and teeming with demons.

  Although the initial instalments of The Confines of the Shadow attracted some notice in the mid-1970s, with several of them, including The Young Maronite, making the shortlists for the highly prestigious Strega and Campiello prizes, Spina’s existence in Libya became increasingly tenuous, especially once his father’s factory was nationalised in 1978. The years following Qaddafi’s coup had seen the despot eliminating foreign influences in Libya, a process he began in 1970 with the expulsion of thousands of Jewish and Italian colonists. Thus, at age fifty, Spina witnessed the Italo-Arab-Ottoman universe he’d been born into vanish completely. One can’t help but wonder how Spina kept track of all those momentous changes: the street he lived on in Benghazi had been known as Shara’ el-Garbi (‘Street of the West’) during the Turkish era, had been renamed Corso Sicilia by the Italians, and finally re-baptised Shara’ Omar Mukhtar in the 1950s. While being caught in the maelstrom of these metamorphoses didn’t impair his work, it certainly impacted its publication. Although Spina had penned The Nocturnal Visitor over the course of a few months in early 1972, he delayed its publication until 1979 to avoid scrutiny during the turbulent early years of Qaddafi’s rule, when dissidents – including a number of Spina’s friends – were routinely rounded up and imprisoned. Between his novels, Spina had also composed The Fall of the Monarchy, a history in the style of Tocqueville that analyses the events leading up to Qaddafi’s coup, which, per Spina’s wishes, will only appear posthumously. Circulated in samizdat among a select group of acquaintances, the book attracted the attention of the security services, and when Spina left Libya for good in 1980, he was forced to smuggle the manuscript out in the French consul’s briefcase. Safely removed from the reach of Qaddafi’s men, Spina sojourned in Paris and finally retired to a seventeenth-century villa in Padergnone, in the heart of Lombard wine country. He consecrated his buen retiro to completing The Confines of the Shadow – as well as various volumes of essays, the penultimate of which, L’ospitalità intellettuale (Intellectual Hospitality), a title inspired by Louis Massignon’s dictum that ‘one shouldn’t annex the other, but rather become his guest,’ featured essays on Synesius of Cyrene, al-Ghazali, Fontaine, Flaubert, Thomas Mann and Lawrence of Arabia. Published only eighteen months prior to his death, it displayed an intellect that was arguably at the peak of its powers.