Cassandra in Mogadishu

Igiaba Scego tells the vicissitudes of her family, which interweave with the history of two countries: Italy and Somalia. In her memoirs, the author writes a letter to her granddaughter Soraya, narrating her life from the early 1990s, in Rome, where she was born and raised, the daughter of two Somali refugees arrived in Italy after fleeing a country marked by a complex colonial past and, later on, by the dictatorship of Siad Barre. The book takes the form of a multi-voiced intergenerational dialogue, interweaving the voice of Scego, who writes and narrates, with that of her granddaughter who lives in Canada, and that of her parents and the sacrifices they made to change their life. Three generations united by the memory of a collective trauma, the Isaaq Genocide. Each chapter starts with a Somali and an Italian word, and narrates the author's personal memories, trying to recreate the mosaic of this collective story. The first chapter begins with the term “Jirro”, which in Somali means ‘illness’ and that the author uses in the book to indicate a state of mind, a continued sense of loss and eradication, from which is not easy to free oneself and that is passed on to children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  

Cassandra a Mogadiscio (Cassandra in Mogadishu)
Igiaba Scego
Bompiani, 2023