Asmarina (2015), by Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos, explores the multiplicity of Eritrean migratory experiences and tells the many stories of Milan’s Habesha community. The film’s title takes its name from a song celebrating the Eritrean capital Asmara, which personifies the nation as woman and mother. The song originated in the 1950s and became a touchstone for the Eritrean/Ethiopian diaspora living in Italy. Known also as Habesha, these diaspora communities began forming during World War II when refugees fled the British invasion of ‘Italian Eritrea’. Italian colonial settlements had been in existence since the 1880s. Though the occupation ended in 1947, this colonial legacy precipitated a violent process of decolonisation. It culminated in the formation of an authoritarian single-party state in 1993. Successive generations of Eritreans have attempted to seek safety in Italy and today the majority of unaccompanied child refugees in Europe are Eritrean boys fleeing mandatory conscription.
Asmarina takes as its starting point a series of photographs of the Habesha diaspora living in Milan, published in L’Espresso magazine in the 1980s. The photo essay is one of the first and only records of Habesha life published in mainstream Italian media – Asmarina may well be the second. The documentary begins with Maglio and Paolos returning these photographs to their subjects, asking them to enliven these images of the past with their memories of Milan in the 1980s. The film takes on the ambitious challenge of representing a broad community and the filmmakers gather documents and stories of a distinctly varied set of diasporic experiences – from second or third generation Eritreans, refugees who have just arrived, to white and multiracial Eritreans now living in Milan. Without identifying anyone by name, we meander in and out of at least 15 different stories that include three generations of a Habesha family who had been photographed for L’Espresso, several blues musicians, and activists trying to provide critical healthcare services for undocumented refugees and migrants arriving in the city. “I was aware of the kind of story I wanted to be a part of,” explains Medhin Paolos, “I wanted for the film to show storytelling as story-listening.” A photographer, musician, and civil rights activist in Milan’s Habesha community, Asmarina is Paolos’s first film. Together, she and Alan Maglio explore a collective memory that challenges the invisibility of Italy’s colonial legacy in the Horn of Africa.
Dispensing with grand, colonial narratives, the film is formed entirely out of the voices and images of Milan’s Habesha community, who have been part of the city’s social and cultural fabric since the 1940s and 50s. Today, the history of Italy’s colonial conquests remains relatively obscure and is entirely absent from school curricula. On the rare occasions that it is discussed, Italy’s own colonial campaigns are buried in broad narratives of the so-called European ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the 1890s. Even less attention has been paid to the impact of Italian colonisation on the cultural and ethnic identities of Italians, be they descendants of white colonialists or multiracial and Black members of the Habesha diaspora – and several people in Asmarina comment on the absence of Eritrean-Italian history in the collective consciousness. As an Eritrean café owner explains, “If we have something in common between Italy, Ethiopia and Eritrea, it’s a habit of not talking about the past.” She’s referencing not only Italy’s colonial past but the longstanding conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the violent road to post-colonial independence. After a five-year military occupation of Ethiopia by Italian imperialists after World War II, in 1952 the UN decided to place Eritrea and Ethiopia in a loose federation, with the Ethiopian government controlling Eritrea’s trade and foreign affairs. In 1962, Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s then emperor, attempted to annex Eritrea precipitating a 30-year conflict. Eritrea eventually declared independence in 1991 but a devastating war between 1998 and 2000 militarised the shared border, ending centuries of migration, marriage and trade. It wasn’t until July this year that relations were abruptly restored – friends and family were able to phone one another across the border and Ethiopians boarded the first flight to Eritrea in 20 years.
Even as Habesha celebrate this new and unfamiliar peace, it may be a long time before Italy, Ethiopia, and Eritrea begin to acknowledge their shared trauma: the café owner’s comment underlines the ambition of the documentary makers to fill this void and create a new kind of history. Asmarina creates an archive led entirely by personal anecdotes and recollections. Forgoing the use of voiceovers, the documentary relies solely on participant conversations to create a sense of historical and political context for viewers. This mode of storytelling is antithetical to the expansive, obfuscating European narratives which disregard the lived experience of colonial and post-colonial subjects.
At times this narrative structure can seem bewildering and rootless, but it allows for a documentary built entirely from the voices of the subjects, story-listening rather than story-telling. This is emphasised by the use of imagery drawn from the personal archives of participants: we watch as they show us photographs from their wedding days or grainy pictures from family albums. The subjects of Asmarina are never named or identified for the viewer and they shape their own experiences as they walk into and out of shot. Occasionally, we also see the filmmakers screening unedited footage for the interviewees – bringing the subjects of the documentary into a conversation with one another via the medium of the screen. The effect is to make us feel we are seeing a story being formed as we watch, giving the film both a curious unevenness and nascent energy.
In Asmarina we see that the silencing of Italy’s colonial past is the silencing of diasporic experience. The only moment of traditional narration comes at the very beginning and it comes screaming with omissions. The film opens in the offices of the National Association of African Veterans where the association’s (white, male) president provides a brief narrative of Italy’s colonial campaigns. He focuses on Italian conquests in the Horn of Africa in the late 19th century, listing the occupied cities in Northern Ethiopia and the territory later renamed as ‘Italian Eritrea’. As the president continues his narrative, the camera lingers on a colonial map which labels Ethiopia with the explanation: “Ethiopia: this country is wholly unknown to the Europeans”. The irony is not lost on the audience – Europeans have never allowed Ethiopians to write their own history. Cut to an Eritrean woman in her parent’s home. She flicks through images of herself, her siblings, and friends photographed as children in the 1980s in L’Espresso magazine and is moved to tears. It’s a quiet moment of pathos that attests to the sheer power of simply being represented. Asmarina captures the pain of being unrepresented and invisible as a diaspora, showing the need for a different kind of history. “I think a bit of historical knowledge is necessary,” she urges, “because a colony is always a possession it always causes grief… It was not good, it was a war.” The official version of history omits any reference to violence, trauma or displacement – or, in fact, that Italian Eritrea was the first system of apartheid to appear in Africa.
Historically, the Habesha are a population living in the Horn of Africa concentrated in modern-day Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia, but the term has become controversial as it is sometimes used to refer to anyone with Eritrean and/or Ethiopian heritage. Ethiopia’s longstanding claims to sovereignty over Eritrea, however, gives additional political charge to the collective terminology of Habesha. Asmarina repeatedly returns to the question of what it means to be Habesha or, indeed, part of a diaspora. We see a mother and daughter debating whether or not migrants from modern-day Ethiopia can be considered Habesha. Elsewhere, we see Habesha of mixed descent who have experienced apartheid as Black Eritreans but pass as white in Italy, or white Eritreans of Italian descent who are entirely discounted as part of the diaspora. In one interview, we see a white woman born in Asmara, the granddaughter of an Italian who migrated to Eritrea in 1886. Recounting her first trip to Italy aged 20, she remembers being interrogated about her accent on a train. Met by baffled Italian men who didn’t know where Eritrea is and can’t understand why she speaks Italian, they eventually ask her, “How come you’re white?” Laughing at her story, a Black Eritrean woman listening to her story exclaims, “You’re a reverse second generation! In Eritrea, you’re a G2.” Language fails to describe the full range of diasporic experience – the joke tacitly acknowledges the complexity of identifying the descendants of Italian colonialists as part of an Italian diaspora in Eritrea: the peculiarity of defining a white woman in the terms exclusively used to describe Black diasporas can elicit only laughter.
Buried in this failure is the pernicious assumption that only Black bodies count as migrants. In Asmarina, identity and nationality are precariously staked on the body’s performance. While Black bodies are constantly challenged and contested, white bodies move through the world with ease. As a Black Eritrean woman describes, white Eritreans of Italian descent move comfortably within both nationalities – free to claim either identity. However, whether second or third generation, Black Eritreans in Italy are always on probation. Throughout the documentary, Asmarina patiently leads us back and forth between the past and present: we see the changing identities of diaspora communities over time as they encounter the suspicion and racism in new political climates. As one of interviewees, originally photographed as a child for L’Espresso, comments “There’s nothing to glorify [about Italy’s colonial past]… We’re still living in limbo of distrust, of contrast, of difference.” Most powerfully, Asmarina collapses the aggressive binaries imposed on descriptions of diasporic experiences which lie at the heart of this distrust and difference – Italian/Eritrean, immigrant/Italian, host/guest.
The film creates a new kind of language that allows Habesha expression and experiences to displace and correct postcolonial silence. Moving between scales beautifully, we are able to see the titanic journeys across continents and oceans which are present in the granular patterning of ordinary life – of music, dancing, photographs, cooking, eating, laughing, chatting. Asmarina does more than open up a space for this kind of historical knowledge: it offers an alternate mode of history-making. The film layers old and new ways of seeing: physical photographs, slides, images on laptops, and touchscreen phones are gathered together on screen. Through this, Maglio and Paolos create a film that is a conversation about the process of history, giving voice to colonial grief. Story-listening, rather than storytelling, becomes an open-ended endeavour. “It’s very deep, interesting stories told as if they were nothing. These great adventures told as they were simple every day life things,” explains Paolos. She describes this process as seeking a new kind of language, “it comes with being a part of a diaspora. It’s a very specific mix of those two lenses… maybe it’s a language that many diasporae share. It’s certainly an informal language, and it’s a language that is shown to you if somehow you prove to be trustworthy.” And although representing the trauma inflicted by erasure, Asmarina still manages to evoke warmth and intimacy. We are invited into peoples’ homes and restaurants, into churches, and community halls, and to makeshift dance parties on the street. We are shown the multiplicity of Habesha and diaspora experiences – one that laughs as well as weeps. As Paolos describes, the film captures “the familiar atmosphere of an Eritrean bar, full of love, even if you are by yourself.”
Rebecca Choong Wilkins is a writer living in New York by way of London and Beijing. Her work focuses on diaspora, migration, and foreign policy in East Asia. She is a former Frank Knox fellow at Harvard and current contributing editor at the LA Review of Books.
This piece first appeared in Another Gaze 02. You can subscribe or purchase the issue here.
