Contesting the Black Flâneur: The rhetoric of disruption and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's urban literature

Introduction

Geography is always fundamental to think about the Black diasporic literatures. Yet this does not signify that it holds a controlling place or has become an inexorable direction, but rather underlines the danger of ignoring the ‘fundamental power of territory’ (Gilroy, 2000: 200) in the process of meaning-production in diasporic writings. It seems to have become a commonplace for criticism that such narratives repudiate the existing attachment of geography to physicality and stasis, destabilizing human belongings to a certain country, a city, or even a building. The arrival at a certain ‘third space’ or ‘in-betweenness’ that straddles metropolises and ex-colonies suggests that any effort of essentializing space in the era of postcoloniality and global diaspora would be in vain. If we accept that the built environment in Europe's metropolitan centers is likely subject to alteration by postcolonial diasporic subjects, then what would be the mediums through which such spatial transmogrifications are made possible? What, in other words, can be the examples that outline the ways in which explorations with postcolonial subjectivities are interlaced with the efforts of carving out a meaningful way of approaching space?

One of the many struggles involves the continuous experimentation with corporality, and in most cases inevitably, with embodied experiences through buildings and monuments. Yet in the Italian context, always staying on the other side of Italy's urban imaginary, the Black body is not simply denied plausible access to public spaces or marginalized as an ahistorical category, but represents a complete vacuum of social existence, both physical and epistemological. All of the above, on the other hand, can be said to mobilize an open ground where any kind of aesthetic intervention can spearhead a special mode of seeing, knowing, and understanding Afro-Italianness. Having recently witnessed the rapid formation of a Black community, multiple Italian cities reveal, rather than conceal, as a no-less-hostile place than their European neighbors. Italy's metropolitan areas and Black bodies—often viewed by political discourses as intruding or dangerous—are mutually exclusive, so that their fundamental rights of kinetic movements, such as walking or wandering, becomes a contesting site of social recognition and existence.

The publication of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's second novel, Il comandante del fiume (2014), came at a critical time when both the Sub-Saharan African migrants in Italy and the literary productions of Afro-Italian writers were on the rise. Ali Farah seems to believe in the potentiality of diasporic writings in terms of envisioning divergent sets of geographical arrangements. The novel's protagonist, Yabar, a young Black Somali immigrant in Rome, is born to an irresponsible father who abandoned the family to lead Somalia's civil war. His somewhat modern mother, however, rejects the clannishness of Somalia's traditional society, and at the same time, urges her child not to carry on her painful memories. Yabar escaped from Somalia right before the outburst of its civil war, and himself faces multiple obstacles in orienting his sense of belonging, whether it is racial, familial, generational, communal, or spatial. In the novel, all of this is filtered through a complicated recoding of time and space by Yabar, who suffers serious bodily disfigurement which remains mysteriously vague to the readers. Exploring new paradigms of postcolonial diasporic storytelling in Italy, the novel—its title already predicates the narrative centrality of place and metaphorizes how geographical sites gesture toward power and authority—evolves around fragmented flashbacks to resignify the configuration of the Afro-Italian urban identity. The book simultaneously enriches and reevaluates the structure of postcolonial writings as Ali Farah mobilizes a standard set of spatial oppositions—center/margins, Italy/Somalia, here/there—to depict a fragmented Bildungsroman deeply embedded in Rome's urban fabric. Articulating the novel into a frame story (Yabar's surgical care in the hospital) and an inner narration (fractured plots of memories), Ali Farah further links personal anecdotes and historical events—in particular the Italian colonialism and Somalia's civil war in the 1990s—to converge, marking Yabar's episodes of growth. A secondary plotline in the novel is Yabar's search for the truth about his father being an assassin in Somalia. Ali Farah, by having Yabar observe, experience, and imagine Rome's urban physicality, sets an existentialist stage to investigate Black Italians also as ‘geographic subjects’ (McKittrick, 2006: x), not simply aligned with traditional depictions of Black ghettoization and their exclusion from Italy's urban imaginaries. The novel provides clues on how racialized bodies in contemporary Italy can be contested, and chafes against the common mode of perceiving Italy's colonial-postcolonial as a temporal continuation about which the rhetoric of disruption often bears a negative or counter-productive undertone. Read through transmogrifications in both Black bodies and Rome's urban materiality, Il comandante del fiume constitutes a refreshed indicator of Rome's increasing role as mediating between Italy and Africa, its colonial history and the postcolonial Black diaspora.

This article attempts to investigate the spatial poetics of disruption in Ali Farah's urban literature and its potential role in recoding the geographical hierarchy created by Italian colonialism. Specifically, it reads the kinetic movements of Black bodies through urbanscapes as a counter-narrative that demystifies the city as a carrier of ideologies of imperialism and power. ‘When crushed into its racial dimension,’ as Roberto Esposito (2015: 13) reminds us, ‘the body has been the object of an exclusion taken to the extreme of annihilation: in its collective form it can become the agent of political restructuring within a people and among peoples.’ While limiting the analysis itself to Il comandante del fiume, this study, in addition to the newly coined term ‘Afro-Italian urban literature,’ can also be applied to Ali Farah's other two novels: Madre piccola (2007) and Le stazioni della luna (2021). While in these two novels Rome does not function as the primary urban setting—Madre piccola charts a transnational network of Somali diaspora and Le stazioni della luna is set in the 1950s’ Somalia under the Amministrazione Fiduciara Italiana­—urban geography always occupies a primary position in orienting the author's works on diasporic subjectivities and identities. Amid the tendency to recalibrate the multilayered connections between Italy's colonial past and the postcolonial present, Ali Farah here rekindles the rhetorical dynamics of Afro-Italian literature with the conjuring of places, bodies, temporalities, and memories. But, on the other hand, she does not essentialize space and spatiality, nor give particular weight to dramatizing how to seek the essential—quite the opposite. The author, I argue, appears to suggest a non-essentialist way of articulating spatial knowledge, encouraging the readers to think of a Black Italian spatiotemporal frame that veers off from any explicitly singular, rooted or linear trajectory. The problematization of the conditions of existing and living as Black via the ongoing debates over race, diaspora, and Italianità provide a wide range of fictional instantiations. Such narratives of impegno serve as correctives to the mutual exclusiveness between Black corporality and public space in an epoch in which Italy's metropolitan centers, such as Rome, Milan, or Palermo, undergo unprecedented transformations due to the arrival of Black migrants, especially those coming from its former colonies in East Africa.

Mapping the urban ghostscape

Il comandante del fiume opens with a grotesque scene, immediately following Yabar's unknown physical and ocular trauma. The bloody and unhinged Yabar stumbles along the streets and riverbanks in Rome's Trastevere district at midnight, turning the city's most iconic center into a ghostly spectacle. The opening episode introduces an irresistible feeling of horror, where Yabar's body and Rome's warped landscape, characterized by its monumental stability, antiquity, and wholeness, unanticipatedly enter into a dystopic apocalyptic landscape:

È notte, saranno le due passate. La luna rischiara l’isola e mi fa da lume, risplende come una nave incantata d’oro. Sembra risalire il fiume e lui la abbraccia con le sue acque brillanti e buie. I semafori non funzionano, o forse mi sbaglio, non riesco a vedere bene.

In the ghostlike cityscape of late-night Rome, the young Somali migrant struggles to make sense of the urban dynamic of which he seems to bear no knowledge and experience. The reduced corporality of his moving body and his abrupt loss of vision are almost as spectral as the city itself. The opening is perfectly modulated by Ali Farah's inclusion of the mysterious appearance of natural as well as non-human elements. Yabar is not merely flustered with the operation of Rome's infrastructure, but also deliriously fantasizes the plants as they ‘lungo il fiume, a centinaia, mi si stringono intorno, come fantasmi fumosi, spuntando a ogni passo’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 9). Yet, the natural elements in this scene are presented with such horror and monstrosity that Yabar cannot build any agentic connections. Instead, he helplessly wishes a rain shower could wash off his blood that is already ‘ovunque, in faccia, sulla maglietta, una goccia a ogni passo’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 10). The fact that Yabar's eyes become blind one after the other calls into question his visual descriptions, and the very issue of reality. This, at first, seems to be a bold interpretation since even the most realistic novel is also an imaginary one. However, we should pay more attention to how the real elements of our world and fantastic inventions can cross-reference in a productive way to inform the way we approach the real. This real/unreal hybridity in Ali Farah's storytelling spreads throughout the novel, opening up possibilities for considering and embodying Rome's cityscape as imaginatively porous, transformable, and as a poetic landscape in which non-linear and fragmented histories can coexist and claim their own meanings. The figurative destruction of Yabar's body might denote less the Afro-pessimistic social negation of Black existence than a radically generative force that resists the assumptive predictability of spatial arrangement that is ‘naturalized by repetitively spatializing “difference”’ (McKittrick, 2006: xv). Put differently, being physically disfigured implies a kind of regeneration, paradoxically allowing Yabar to both blend in and keep distance from his surroundings simultaneously. The author's employment of multiple sensorial devices and the narrative mode of favola/fiaba, which distances everyday urban realities from the habitual gaze, forcefully drives the reader to ponder the hidden fragments that also make up the city's rhythm of operation. This opening episode of an intimate, but deranged, Rome is crucial in that it sets the general tone for disrupting the common linkage between spaces, bodies, and subjectivities in postcolonial Rome. The transfiguration of reality prompts a reckoning with the question of existence as a consequence of the post-traumatic crisis. Such series of amalgamation—the human and the non-human, the real and the fantasized, the bodily and the material—emphasizes the necessity to probe the shifting meanings of a Black corporeal and psychic landscape in relation to the contemporary imaginary of Rome and of Italy. Being at the same time a Black migrant, and a heavily traumatized postcolonial subject, Yabar represents an ontological challenge to the city's romanticization and historical solidity, soliciting a new meditation that belies homogeneous and race-blind beliefs about urban-corporeal landscapes.

The novel's storytelling begins with Yabar's hospitalization in the Fatebenefratelli, an actual hospital located on the Isola Tiburtina in the middle of Rome's Tiber River—‘a pulsing vein providing a [providing] vital lymph to everyday life’ (Romeo, 2015: 108). While slowly recovering from his fits of delirium, Yabar begins to suffer post-traumatic nightmares and becomes an amnesiac. His inability to recall what actually happened that ghostly night in part results in the doctors being unable to diagnose his condition. It is only with the appearance of Zia Rosa in the hospital room towards the conclusion of the first chapter that the young Yabar manages to rehabilitate his memory and reveal to us what the prospect of existing and living as a Black inhabitant in Rome would be. After this the spatial focus quickly moves from the interior of the hospital to its outside—the riverside along which Zia Rosa and her daughter Sissi run for exercise almost every day. It is in this very place that Yabar's embodied experience influences his urban identity, and the way he approaches the surroundings. In the beautiful seasons, for Yabar, the Tiber is such a crucial location that his contact with it becomes a formational encounter, directing him to view the world based on selected values, such as multiplicity, wholeness, and community, rather than isolation: ‘ci si riversa il mondo intero: corridori della domenica, poliziotti a cavallo, ciclisti, bambini con i pattini a rotelle, vecchietti e signorine a passeggio con il cane’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 21). This foreign city not only constitutes a material place subject to Yabar's observation, rather it acts as a living counterpart offering him a way to make meaningful connections, and symbolically mobilize the places where racial dynamics are also spatialized. His passage into inhabiting Rome's public places, however, does not occur as a direct or smooth process. Although Yabar only follows Sissi and Zia Rosa by riding his bicycle at a distance and shows unwillingness to join them, these two female characters should be considered as playing a pivotal role in Yabar's coming-of-age trajectory and as framing the urban context where he grows up. The simultaneous alienation from his mother and closeness with Zia Rosa, a matriarchal figure who for him has the qualities of ‘una seconda mamma’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 39), valorizes the communal rather than blood ties in the process of forging an Afro-Italian diasporic urban lifestyle and the sense of a Black community. This is indeed an ‘elective’ community, which is ‘created by female relationships capable of opposing inherited patriarchal violence’ (Lori, 2022; 125). Agility, powerfulness, determination, and indefatigability are also the characteristics of the equally young Sissi, which seems to signal a generational continuation that is suspended in Yabar's own family. Born into an interracial family (a white father and a Black mother), Sissi becomes another focal figure that Yabar is able to gain compassion for and a clearer understanding of the issues of skin color and racial difference. This connection and disconnection between them is made explicit in a moment when Yabar complains about Sissi's lack of consideration of race as a serious problem: ‘non vuole credere che siamo diversi: è sempre stata convinta che, siccome siamo cresciuti insieme, gli altri ci considerano uguali. […] nessuno guarda me e Sissi allo stesso modo, gli occhi della gente vedono le differenze […] io sono nero, da due genitori neri, mentre Sissi è bianca, ha i ricci dorati e gli occhi grigioverdi’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 36–37). Differences in physical appearance (hair, skin, eyes) in modern history has played a central role in triggering the discourses of, or on, everyday racial discrimination that marked Italy in transition. Yabar is clearly aware of that and the heartfelt repudiation of the role of everyday cohabiting and fraternal affinity in bridging the exterior gap between Sissi and himself suggests an identitarian confrontation between personal experience and societal alienation. Walking one day in heavy rain along the Tiber River, experiencing this awareness, Yabar's self-restrained grievance, born out of simple comparisons, quickly escalates to an open outrage calling into question the very issue of Black existence in Rome:

[…] che non basta l’amore fraterno per fare un colore, perché il colore è quello che vedono gli altri, non è quello che vedi, che senti tu, e nessuna favola, nessuna canzone, nessuna amicizia può cambiare il colore che vedono gli altri. È per questo che io posso dire <heil!> mentre Sissi non può neppure pronunciarlo. Per me <heil!> non è un tabù, perché sono io stesso il tabù, ed è il mio colore, qui, in questa città, luogo il fiume, a essere un tabù (Ali Farah, 2014: 37).

What Yabar expresses here displays an ironic affirmation of the structural and systematic racism that has deep roots and a firm foundation in contemporary Italian society. It also points towards the contradiction of the city and Blackness that he identifies as offensive or dangerous to Rome's urban imaginary. As urban narratives develop as a popular genre for postcolonial Italian literature, these complicated interactions between bodies, places, and cities are becoming an impending terrain for critical and theoretical interventions. Similar to Ali Farah's first novel, Madre Piccola (2007), as also seen in the works of other Rome-focused Black Italian writers, the city of Rome acts not just as the narrative backdrop, but rather as an integral protagonist, an authentic material storyteller that encompasses its urban inhabitants. Historic monuments (Piazza dei Cinquecento), multi-ethnic neighborhoods (Piazza Vittorio), and Rome's Termini station all materialize in the Afro-Italian postcolonial writings of Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego. However, rather than attempting to articulate Black places by ‘discovering’ them in literary representations that serve to revert colonial ideology and disrupt notions of colonial domination, Il comandante del fiume suggests embracing a new way of practicing and inhabiting places, one that by illustrating recurring positionalities, the issues of spatial authenticity and ownership are radically contested and inverted.

Equally as substantial as the role of urbanscape in Ali Farah's urban writings, is her extensive experimentation on the Black body, and more specifically, its mutilation, reduction, and reproduction, and its intricate interrelations with race and diaspora. In her Madre piccola, one of the protagonists, Domenica Axad's self-inscription becomes ‘a means of inscribing and achieving mastery of her relations with her parents and of her dual heritage identity’ (Bond, 2018: 52): while in Le stazioni della luna the connection between the two protagonists—Clara (a girl born to white Italian parents) and Ebla (a Black Somali wet nurse)—is wholly dramatized through breastfeeding experiences (Liu, 2022: 163). In a similar fashion, Yabar's existential crisis gestures toward a kind of Black phenomenology on bodily experiences. In this context, however, the phenomenological existences as a racially-embodied framework, rather than Merleau-Ponty's system of perception, create a distinct constellation of urban instantiations, where the embodied sense of racial existence is constantly reexamined and rehearsed. ‘By considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their basic significance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of established situations’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 117). When we cast this statement into a Black diasporic dimension, what Merleau-Ponty defines as the most granted and intrinsic essence to bodily movement, becomes the enigma to be deciphered. If the imperialist origin of geography is not unwavering, Yabar's destructive embodiment redraws a literary ground in Italy such that racialized bodies as modes of meaning-production, require renegotiation. What I refer to as unsettling is that these antagonistic conceptions, recurrent in analyzing Black diaspora in Italy and Europe, do not point towards another instantiation of a postcolonial interstice or in-betweenness, since such a conceptual lens involves the risk of falling into another kind of fixed identification. As the prefixes, either inter or in, imply a spot or an area within a certain spectrum, a space, or an ontological framework established by two logical structures. This also echoes what theorists such as Homi Bhabha (2004) called a ‘passage’, or Edward Soja's (1996) widely adopted notion of ‘third-space.’ What this analysis proposes, instead, is that as an emerging literary genre, Afro-Italian urban narratives uneasily challenge postcolonial epistemological patterns in which the post- has dominated as a temporal and spatial imaginary. This recoding as a process of discontinuity, a fracture that moves not so much between, but beyond spatiotemporal binarism, generates an effect that does not easily follow existing rules or knowledge of cartographic arrangements modeled through other spatial-historical contexts. This tendency epitomized by Il comandante del fiume is, obviously, still undertheorized. Ali Farah's novel no longer accommodates the traditional model of calling into question what is the ‘real’ or ‘forgotten’ portrait of the city of Rome, while underscoring the unreadability of the urbanscape concerning Italy's fascist and colonial past. What the author suggests is precisely the philosophical urgency to see in a new light the perception of Blackness mediated through the corporeal landscape in the Italian and European contexts, and to illuminate a productive way of decentering the haunting predominance of the Black Atlantic and the metaphor of the ocean in criticizing Black diasporas.

Beyond the in-between

To interrogate the rhetoric of disruption radically negotiated through Ali Farah's Yabar and the city of Rome, it is essential to look back to the imperialist origin of geography and how its intrinsic linkage with whiteness has dominated hierarchical spatialization against racial minorities. This process, as McKittrick notes, ‘is, in part, bolstered by the ideological weight of transparent space, the idea that space ‘just is,’ and the illusion that the external world is readily knowable and not in need of evaluation, and that what we see is true. If who we see is tied up with where we see through truthful, commonsensical narratives, then the placement of subaltern bodies deceptively hardens spatial binaries’ (McKittrick 2006: xi). A different spatialized politics always registers as something unimaginable, as McKittrick (2006: 8) poignantly continues, ‘because we assume they [Black geographies] do not really have any valuable material referents, that they are words rather than places, or that their materiality is always already fraught with discourses of dispossession.’ Her pro-Marxist critique redeems the acts of Black beings of ‘producing’ space, resisting the conventional discourses that people of color, especially those of Black people, are deemed as ‘ungeographic’ and ‘philosophically undeveloped’ (McKittrick 2006: xiii). ‘Production’ suffuses McKittrick's discourses, and the dynamic of a Black spatialization embedded within the logic of racial antagonism reinforces its dialectical nature in its economic origin, as something born from nothing. This mode of analysis valorizes alternative ways of expression and the possibility they hold for places and spaces to speak for themselves. It is philosophically from this Lefebvrian standpoint that Black geographers underline the practice of space-making as meaning-making, and emphasize that Black experiences also pertain to the epistemological, if not automatically the social production of space. This perspective enables a restored direction in probing Italy's struggles in grappling with its historical relationship with its former colonies in East Africa, and its socio-political relativities with its recent immigrants. What Karen Pinkus (2003) refers to as a ‘nonevent’ in Italy—that the Italian peninsula did not witness mass immigration from its African colonies, nor did the Italian population concern itself with the African question after the demise of its colonizing enterprises—should also be recalibrated as a geographical question. The lack of a comprehensive reevaluation of the country's colonial past sadly signifies the fact that the spatial hierarchy between metropole and colony, and Italy and Africa has rarely been seriously investigated. However, space, in comparison to time, often fails to justify its function as a coordinate in orienting postcolonial critique. The term postcolonialism tends to be misconceived only as a temporal concept, even though it does not imply the cessation of colonial ideology or power systems. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo's edited volume, Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (2009), is the first scholarship that expansively foregrounds major new directions in conceptualizing Italy in a postcolonial frame, by involving contributions that discuss ‘the processes of racialization, gendering, and cultural transformations engendered within contemporary Italy by the legacy of colonialism, emigration, and global migrations’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2009: 2). Although both editors explicate two structural axes—one temporal and one spatial—the volume in question again enters into a temporalization of space privileging the historical while undermining the spatial (Cole, 2020: 812–813). The spatial problem, in fact, is un-dimensionalized. Such a discursive particularization of Italy's postcolonial risks blurs the spatial hierarchies radicalized from imperialist ideologies. Space and geography here again are relegated to a supporting role as the background against which other questions, concretized by the impulse of recreating historical realities calling for actions transforming the social environments in Italy, are always brought to the front.

Il comandante del fiume thus offers a series of decisive cases that calls for interrogation of the deep meaning of ‘Black spaces’ within the Italian context. Narratives of re-spatialization come to reframe what has signaled ‘profoundly racialized symbolic and material sites, how these are embodied, and fundamentally how they are negated from plain sight because they are located in what Saidya V. Hartman refers to as the “position of the unthought”’ (Merrill, 2018: 3). While acknowledging the systematic production of Blackness in Italy as socio-historical erasure, this paper tends to emphasize that space itself is not static, exclusive, or a determinate of historical ideology. Social-spatial racialization based on the historical production of European hegemony of whiteness necessitates a timely reevaluation at the current juncture saturated with discourses on postcolonial and post-national identities. My proposal does not try to illuminate what has been buried or misunderstood in the historical-geographical origins of the Black (non-)space in Italy, but rather attempts to reapproach space as a theoretical paradigm to explore how current epistemological bases of power, authority and hierarchy are contested. My perspective accentuates the changing connotations of race and Blackness, not simply through their realist projections, but looks at how the junction of the real and the imagined transforms the way we know, understand, and analyze geographical issues. That is to confirm that while race is structural, it is also slippery (Gilmore, 2022: 113). The mutual constitution of race and space through ‘multiscalar hierarchies’ also renders the latter a shifting category so that the acts of producing counterdefinitions of bodies and places illustrate peculiar modes of re-spatialization as resistance. As Gilmore reminds us, ‘whether radically revolutionary or minimally reformist, anti-racism is fought from many different kinds of positions, rather than between two teams faced off on a flat, featureless plain’ (Gilmore, 2022: 115). Bodies, places, and matters in Il comandante del fiume become real characters that all live a re-spatialization, infusing Rome's urbanscape with stories, emotions, and fantasies serving to condition the perceptual ranges of Black subjectivity in postcolonial Italy. The ‘Black spaces’ that the novel proposes therefore, do not refer to a fatalistic reality gestured from the dominant white society, nor will it ever become the material or figurative spaces of Black Italians, but rather indicates a contested epistemological ground where bodies and places bear ongoing alteration of power-difference couplings. Yabar's enigmatically destructive body epitomizes what Derrida refers to as a ‘spectrality effect,’ a co-present status of both being and non-being, and his enforced imagination of apocalypses brings about the question of wandering and urban embodiment at the very center of the author's reinvention of spaces. The racialized bodies bleed into Rome's urban imaginaries, expanding spaces of resistance in a continuity of places and bodies—in an embodied landscape.

In Il comandante del fiume, the author's subjective demands of epistemology and the phenomenology of self finally find a hospitable medium. No matter how realistic or surrealistic, the novel solicits a grounded inquiry for manifold forms of Black Italian social existence, while also leaving room to speculate the spatiotemporal ambiance the multiple characters inhabit. Rather than simply presenting a chronicle of events, the novel's focus on interlacing realistic, imaginative and fantastic scenes, problematizes the bodily urbanscape by disrupting the linkage between place and selfhood. What the author suggests here is the possibility of opening up a multilayered, rather than a simple author-narrator, commentary, linking Ali Farah, Yabar, Zia Rosa, as well as other minor characters, such as Sissi or Ghiorghis. A glimpse of the life trajectories of Ali Farah herself—born in Verona in 1973 to an Italian mother and a Somali father, growing up in Mogadishu until the outbreak of Somalia's Civil War in 1991—reminds the reader that the novel ultimately can be thought of as a platform by which the author is retelling herself to bear witness to the social, cultural, and urban realities of the recent past. All these characters, in this sense, represent a partially fictionalized form of Ali Farah, and a resuscitated precursor of the social, spatial and identitarian struggles of the Somali-Italian community.

One of Rome's most touristic landmarks—the Tiber River—ceases to act as simply a decorative setting, becoming instead the pulsing material narrator and, at the same time, a concrete but also fantastic place, repeatedly produced via unfamiliar records, figures, and materials. Yabar is not merely a figure within Rome, he is also ‘the producer of a city, one that is related to, but distinct from the city of asphalt, brick, and stone, one that results from the interconnection of body, mind, and space, one that reveals the interplay of self/city identity’ (Parsons, 2000: 1). Any familiar tool of charts, maps, or official figures is suspended and thus decolonized by a politics of voice commonly labeled as ‘uncharted.’ Staying conterminously with Edouard Glissant, McKittrick (2006: xxii) states that ‘expressive arts’ for Blacks are ‘also a process of self-assertation and humanization.’ Thus, the novel's influential range ineluctably extends its fictional horizon much beyond the narrative itself, and invites its reader to reflect on the way narratives mirror or distort societal realities. The Tiber that Yabar inhabits incorporates a complicated space that reinforces its microcosmic metaphority, ironically alluding to Italy's inertia and reluctance in coming to terms with itself as a multiethnic country. A touristic, colorful, and bohemian riverside suddenly disappears, superseded by the congregation of ‘i veri abitanti del fiume’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 22), which includes the homeless, the poor, and people of different colors and races:

Sono persone the che non hanno niente in comune tra loro, se non il fatto di essere sole e molto povere. Un signore africano sempre intento a sfogliare vecchie riviste, una ragazza zingara con i suoi due bambini, un’anziana dai capelli bianchi lunghissimi, una coppia di fidanzati bengalesi mano nella mano. Si riforniscono d’acqua alla fontana di Ripa Grande e camminano in fila indiana con i secchi caricati sulla testa. Certe volte senti le loro voci tra le frasche e, se capiti da quelle parti quando è buio, vedi accendersi tanti lumini sparsi. (Ali Farah, 2014: 22)

Contrary to Pasolini's inquiry of Rome's cityscape typically focusing on the sub-proletarian communities at its geographic margins, Ali Farah portrays a vertical and three-dimensional scenery in Rome's city center in a way that appears to evoke exotic and phantasmagoric imaginations. Such a ‘darker’ space deterritorializes the Tiber and its surroundings, transforming them into a heterotopic space where coexisting sites are incompatible and thus foreign to each other (Foucault, 1984: 6). This spatial reformulation enables a redefinition of what stays inside and/or outside of certain spatial limits. Rereading James Baldwin's observation in his well-known essay ‘Stranger in the Village,’ Michelle Wright (2004) highlights the echoes in contemporary Black European literatures where the Black seems no longer a (original emphasis) stranger, but rather the city itself is what becomes strange. That Ali Farah's portrait of the city of Rome has much more to do with non-human subjects—birds, seagulls, swallows, ducks, pullets—seems to further spectacularize the fluidity between nature and the city so that this can be considered as an alternative mode of interrogating Rome's image as a modern and global city. Unlike Paris and London, which historically served as metropoles for their global empires and unequivocally took on identities as multicultural and postcolonial megacities, Rome has been examined ‘predominantly as a historical monument, focusing on the marvelous art and urban architecture,’ and has thus commonly escaped such scrutiny at the global stage (Marinaro and Thomassen, 2014: 2). With the arrival of a large number of Black migrants in the last decades, Rome has rapidly transformed itself into a global hub for tourism, global diplomacy, and religious pilgrimage. The novel, in this way, explores this fast-changing urban reality and pertains to mobilizing the branders that Rome has long taken advantage of. Il comandante del fiume reveals a fragmented or even contradictory view of Rome's urban center, leaving readers disorientated in locating the author's position.

The novel's disruption with spatial closure, certainty, and supremacy is radically deepened through both the daily kinetic movements of the Black bodies of Yabar, as well as those of other female characters—Zia Rosa and Sissi—and its mystification through a local Somali legend, a character from which ‘the commander of the river,’ is a great swimmer nominated to govern the lives of crocodiles and the Somali people. This reconstructed poetics of urban geographies, then, comprises real-and-imagined possibilities through variegated stories serving as ‘real responses to real spatial inequalities’ (McKittrick, 2006, xxiii). Ali Farah validates the protagonists’ cartographic observations, expressions, and knowledge, a process which locates consolidations by clear discourses of possession over voices, memories, and spatial positionalities. Claiming Black ownership in Western geographies suggests a radical force to undermine the totalizing narratives against the legacies of center-periphery and colonizer-colonized dualisms bolstered by racial hierarchies. In an earlier moment, Yabar remembers the after-school time together with Sissi and a small group of friends, walking back home along the riverside enjoying an appealing view and the colorful flowers. In the springtime, for Yabar here ‘un giardiniere misterioso ci pianta persino le primule’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 32). His privatization of the public common and sense of ownership culminates in the novel's conclusion, where he celebrates that ‘Roma è la nostra città’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 204). For both Ali Farah and Yabar, Rome represents a complex identity that is constructed upon more than one culture. Yabar's Rome is not readily legible, even when he himself becomes a real, if not exclusive, commander of Rome's historical center.

The novel's multilayered rendering of ‘Blackness’ articulates a local-global and a native-diasporic network of the transnational Somali-Italian diaspora. Yabar's obsession with the notable African American actor Will Smith offers a case to call into question the possibility of building an ‘imagined community’ as for him, the American celebrity is ‘non solo sveglio e simpatico ma con la pelle nera come la mia’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 85). The fact that a Will Smith doll becomes an essential component of Yabar's everyday life, always clenched in his hands, secreted in his pocket, and never lets himself be separated from it, metaphorizes the characteristics of Somalia's diasporic community that interweaves a transnational past, present, and future. Bond (2022: 282–283) also perfectly points out that ‘the feelings of attachment to the miniature model engendered by this transnationalizing bricolage allow Yabar to achieve a sense of mastery through active play, as well as to experience positive aesthetic emotion.’ However, all of these assertions may sound disturbing, since Ali Farah offers a corrective, that holds symbolic value, highlighting the fact that speaking of an Afro-Italian community cannot be considered a misnomer. Yabar's recall inscribes the experiencing of spaces and territories within acts of memory, relocating his national origin within larger familial networks in Britain, Kenya, and possibly also other places around the world. Kin relationships, on the contrary, seem to pull apart and further complicate Yabar's urban belonging. This struggle is made explicit when Yabar is sent temporarily to London to stay with his extended family. There as a witness of a ghettoized Somali British community and its attachment to Somalia's folkways and everyday customs, Yabar himself becomes a strange outsider. These feelings, Caterina Romeo (2015: 108) suggests, ‘have the effect of producing in Yabar a reinforcement of his sense of belonging to the Roman urban environment.’ A closer reading, however, would again reveal a kind of split, fragmented, or even schizoid relationship with Rome, where urban space embedded with local Black communities on occasion acquires the form of continuous confrontations that generate a sense of struggle and loss. Ghiorghis, Yabar's elder Ethiopian-Italian comrade, in this sense plays a crucial role in mobilizing the problematic dialecticity of Yabar's awareness toward selfhood and communal alliance. A developing degree of empathy towards the socially marginalized people in Rome overlaps with the reluctance to come to terms with a universalist Black urban community. The first time Ghiorghis meets Yabar, the former persists in addressing him as ‘fratello’ or ‘fratellino’ just for having the same skin color, despite the fact that Yabar expresses his discomfort and demurs that ‘perché mi chiami fratello se manco mi conosci?’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 112). Yabar's suspicious stance at the beginning symbolizes another example of the novel's underlying rhetoric of division and non-linearity, suggesting that in a foreign European land, forging a unified pan-Africanist idea of community may not be easy.

Wandering as a Black flâneur

All of the above adds evidence to the previous argument that Yabar presents as an elusive, fugitive, and mentally unstable figure. With the disjunctive shifts of spatial-temporal coordinates, the novel reorganizes the narrative fragments by portraying the protagonist as a postcolonial Black flâneur. When thinking of and through Black flâneur, what ought to be emphasized is that even the very basic act of walking and observing, and that of meditating what he perceives in relation to his urban experiences become a precondition that encourages us to rethink the unlikely linkage between Blackness, freedom, and urban territory. Approaching Yabar in this way denotes two layers of implications: on one side, Yabar, as a Black urban observer, visions Rome in an untraditional way bringing to life less visible elements by ‘walking, as if alone, in its streets’ (Williams, 1973: 231). On the other side, this Bildungsroman harmonizes various juxtapositions of stories, events, moments, and places into a striking thematic composition that mirrors the indispensable and dramatic transformation of Rome's urban dynamic. The seemingly boring everydayness in fact offers the most engaged spatial platform through which Yabar walks, observes, and shows how the stereotypical image of Rome has glossed over multiple minor and deviant representations. In a summer night, prior to attending Sissi's first-time concert in a social center in the Tiber district, Yabar decides to take a walk around it and stops in front of a kiosk, selling his favorite grattachecca, a local ice dessert in Rome. Not willing to wait in line, Yabar then goes to rest on ‘una seggiola lì vicino per vedere se la gente diminuiva’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 105). His deep concentration on observing how the vendor makes the dessert, and calculates the number of people waiting in line, presents an interruption for Yabar to keeping a measure with time and space. It is only when suddenly catching sight of the luminous numbers on the phone of the person sitting beside him, that Yabar reconnects with the surrounding world. In a variety of passages in the novel, Yabar meanders among Rome's streets and places without ‘una vera e propria destinazione’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 198). At times he can even get lost and find it difficult to spatially orient himself in Rome's most recognizable urban center. After finally discovering the secret that his father is a military assassin in Somalia, Yabar undergoes an existential crisis and experiences waves of mental disturbance while walking aimlessly:

Non avevo dormito per tre notti e mi risuonavano in testa tante filastrocche in lingue diverse, una moltitudine di suoni incoerenti. Il problema è che dentro la testa è impossibile abbassare il volume. […] Non avevo idea di dove andare e me la sono presa comoda. C’è un bar che fa angolo con via del Corso, aperto a tutte le ore. Ho ordinato l’ennesima birra e sono rimasto per un po’ impalato in mezzo alla piazza a piangermi addosso: mio padre era un assassino, io un impotente, tutte le persone che amavo mi avevano piantato in asso, cos’altro mi potevo aspettare dalla vita? (Ali Farah, 2014: 199)

Meandering in the city, Yabar becomes a displaced character intensified by both physiological and cognitive forces. This is a symbolic moment that conflates personal loss and spatial disorientation. Unlike the cumulative process of spatial production marked by subaltern writings as progressive texts resisting authority, Yabar embodies a complex spatiotemporal order orienting a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places. Or rather, here he exemplifies ‘different forces and effects of a city’ (Tally, 2012: 96). What fortifies this sense of disruption is Ali Farah's depiction of the young protagonist, as one excellent neither in conduct nor in school. He is, in a way, a shiftless, egotistical, and troublesome teenager always on the edge of explosion, and isolation from his own Black communities, exemplified by Yabar's later childish squabbles with and estrangement from Sissi. His frequent indulgence in drinking alcohol and smoking creates an anachronistic aura that disrupts time's linearity and the future's singularity presumed in Italy's postcolonial time—the past is constantly evoked to valorize the present while there is no predictable chance for a Black future. Yabar, rather personifies a conflation of past, present, and future. In the same night when hurrying back to Sissi's concert, Yabar remembers that ‘allora ho cominciato a correre e, siccome avevo appena finito l’ennesima sigaretta, ho preso a tossire come un vecchio’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 105). Here, though probably not intending to dramatize an explicit temporal framework, Ali Farah invites the reader to speculate the possibility of heterotemporalities that deviates from the standard of Italy's postcolonial time that absolutizes the historical. In this vein, the pluralization of time represented by Yabar's moving body is also an urgent call to acknowledge the temporalities inhabited by individuals who are not commonly included in the imaginaries either of Italy's postcolonial or urban time.

The Baudelairian character of the flâneur acts as a crucial mediator between the individual, the crowd, and urban spaces. Inspired by the French artist Constantin Guys, Baudelaire considers Guys a philosopher wandering along the Parisian streets appreciating (my emphasis) the modern urban rhythm. The simultaneous distance from the interior, and a solitary feeling of being immersed in the urban anonymity—‘the Baudelairian crowd’—is the prerequisite for inspiration. It is in part with the paradigm of flâneur that Walter Benjamin, for equivocal pleasure, attempts an urban demystification in drafting his arcades project. Yet, the constitutive elements of flâneur as both a socio-historical and metaphorical figure, calls into question the very effort of pursuing a transhistorical rereading. Staying closer to Deborah Parson (2000: 4), this analysis also deems the flâneur as elusive, not in a figurative sense, but conceptually implying ‘a variety of “wanderings,” in terms of ambulation, nationality, gender, race, class, and sexuality.’ A Black flâneur, differing from the feminist debates around the private-public spatial praxis, (and in fact the systematic negation of flâneuse), consists primarily in a societal stage of existence informed by ontological significance. To inquire more from a racial perspective: what does wandering among Rome's urbanscape imply for rearticulating the position of Black migrants in postcolonial Italy? If we contextualize Yabar through the lens of flâneur both for historical as well as symbolic ramifications, it allows likening him to the Baudelairian ‘kaleidoscope’ that can rechannel the (post)colonial linearity into a multiplicity of urban images, inviting readers to be mindfully connected with Italy's historical legacies with Somalia, and the Somali immigrants’ urban identifications. In short, the Black flâneur is not so much about being able to offer a totally new knowledge of the city itself, but to approach Rome's urban reality from a particular perspective, to experience and see it differently. To reframe the Black flâneur is also to recognize a distinct but less dominant existence, a mode of moving away from looking at ‘walking idly’ as a scopic metaphor, rather to demystify the cities’ labyrinths of architextuality and to emphasize a whole range of possibilities for spatial expressions of racialized minors. The gaze of Yabar, as it falls on the city of Rome, still seems to be the gaze of an alienated allegorist among the changing urban dynamics (Benjamin, 2002: 10). ‘Benjamin's geography of the city’, as Parsons suggests, ‘is indeed marked by an obsessive attempt to know the city in its entirety, a surrealist desire to penetrate the fantasies of its phantasmagoria, and a determined project of reacquisition of its fragments’ (Parsons, 2000, 7). The iron construction and the department store to which the 19th-century flâneur associated his existential crisis, indeed can find a thematical counterpart in Yabar's vision of a distorted reality and personality embedded within Rome's urbanscape. Though against a backdrop distinct from Benjamin's bourgeois urbanity, Yabar as a Black observer continues the Benjaminian conception of reading a city's fragmentary, uncertain, and chaotic patterns. We can say that all the characters in the novel—Yabar, Zia Rosa, and Sissi—are autonomous observers, rather than objects of observation, from the Fatebenefratelli Hospital to the call center where Yabar accompanies Libaan, (a Somali-Italian he had just encountered) becoming the latter's translator when Libaan calls his mother in Somalia. Libaan had migrated to Italy at a young age, but he was then abandoned by his father, meaning he struggled to speak Somali, as shown in this particular telephone call. It is this moment—when he linguistically switches between Somali and Italian—that contributes to breaking Yabar's psychic barrier with his own country of origin. The call center, frequented by Black residents, immigrants and refugees in Rome, becomes simultaneously a hyper-localized and hyper-transnational space, thus enabling Yabar and his fellows to feel simultaneously both detached and connected with a Black urban community.

The critical deployment of Black laneur is also a strategic one to accentuate the modus operandi of processing and evaluating the overwhelming experiences of contemporary Rome as an increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan city. However, Yabar problematizes the observing gaze, deviating from the Parisian one that fetishizes the urban ‘outsiders’ in a hidden process of reification and colonialism. In a way, he not only symbolizes the observation from a different standpoint but is inextricably tied up with a non-conventional spatial rearrangement that decolonizes the established meanings. This analysis grounds the postcolonial roots in the novel not as any concrete material or historical circumstances, but as a loose re-definition referring to a diasporic subject who is aware of the colonial ideologies in creating subjectivities and perceptions of Westernized urban landscape. As Yabar's coming-of-age story unfolds, he is gradually allowed access to the complexities of the historical moments (of parents and family), and to interrogate the interrelated stories of violence, inequality, and diasporic cultures. The contrapuntal ‘wandering’ here provides another force of resistance against a totalization of views ‘looking down like a god’ (de Certeau, 1984: 92).

In the novel, the combination of the stories on everyday anti-racist gatherings with urban space further emphasizes its impossible stasis and neutrality, which, on the other hand, serves as a powerful literary corrective to the generalized racial discourse that Black subjects in contemporary Italy, if anything, are only granted spatial accessibility or passive interlocutors filling the spots. In this sense, Ghiorghis plays a crucial role in turning Rome's piazzale Flaminio—a real place between Villa Borghese and the Tiber River—into a place for revolutionary gatherings. To help dissolve the hesitation Yabar shows in joining their small group, Ghiorghis points out how ‘the production of space is bound up with racial ideologies and experiences’ (McKittrick, 2006: 8):

Quando avevo più o meno la tua età frequentavo già da qualche anno il mitico Big Burger di piazzale Flaminio. È lì che si riuniva la mia comitiva, anzi, lì si riunivano quasi tutti i giovani stranieri di Roma. Quel piazzale era l’unico luogo che sentivamo nostro, eravamo liberi di dire quello che volevamo, non eravamo costretti a recitare nessuna parte. Smettevamo di essere come ci vedevano gli altri e non eravamo più ‘il bisognoso’, ‘il drogato’, ‘lo sfigato’, ‘il superdotato’, ‘l’atletico’, ‘il ballerino’, non eravamo più neri, eravamo semplicemente noi stessi. (Ali Farah, 2014: 114–115)

The way in which Ghiorghis recalls the past—juxtaposing stereotypical Italian society against Blacks with the heterotopic piazzale Flaminio where real arrangements are overturned—reminds us, in particular, of how race, space, identity, and power can be condensed, immediately producing a paradoxical feeling of both pride and depression. Space does not sit passively within the confines of social processes, but actively participates in shaping them. Such differential imaginaries of places provide us with a literary representation of what George Lipsitz (2007: 12) once articulated: ‘the lived experience of race has a spatial dimension, and the lived experience has a racial dimension.’ This contradictory overlapping of racial exclusion and freedom, of heterotopia and dystopia, can be thought of as a micro race—spatial prism through which Ghiorghis also comes to conceive the city of Rome itself. Ghiorghis bitterly confides to Yabar that ‘Roma ci stava stretta e molti di noi desideravano andarsene verso uno di quei luoghi dove la gente è più mescolata. […] anche per me è arrivato il momento di partire’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 115). Upon returning, Rome, however, has already come to represent home, and Ghiorghis feels nostalgic for the city, as for him ‘è bastato un attimo per capire che ero tornato a casa, bagnato dalla luce di questa città’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 116). By highlighting personal musings and sensibilities, Ali Farah recognizes the metaphor Ghiorghis can embody of the real social tensions encountered by Black Italians between lived urban experiences and a long-standing, systematic, and institutional rejection of connecting Italianness and Blackness as an acceptable way of belonging and identification. This is then dramatically performed when Yabar returns back to Rome from London, and Italy's airport officials only reluctantly accept his Italian citizenship even when he holds an Italian passport. In this way, Ghiorghis and Yabar come to symbolize a shared experience in destabilizing how Italian identity is defined by descent, and illuminate a meaningful alternative to an idealized multiracial co-presence, a physical, emotional, and imagined spatial perception of affiliation in Rome's urban cartographies.

As the novel concludes, Ali Farah further illustrates the tension that is created between the bounded Black community in Rome, and transnational connections of the Somali diaspora, a tension through/by which Yabar finally learns to prioritize the local present over a historical past. He contrasts the effort of reappropriating his father's mythification through oblivion, and self-asserts his subjectivities in what is probably the highest emotional point in the whole book: ‘Non tradisce la fiducia del popolo, non abbandona la sua famiglia, non uccide gli innocenti. […] Non è mio padre, sono io, Yabar, il comandante del fiume’ (Ali Farah, 2014: 204). Yabar's repressed past has a way of powerfully resurfacing his personal experiences as intimately anchored in Rome's urban spaces. Both Ali Farah and Yabar in the novel situate a palimpsestic negotiation for personalized reconceptualization of selfness, and counterpoint the redefinition of Italy's capital, enabling the reader to experience a novel and vibrant perspective of Rome's emergence as a global and postcolonial city.