His first novel, published in 2007, written in Italian and quickly translated into English, finally arrives in France. We often ignore it, but Italian literature, featured at the Paris Book Festival, also counts with Somalia, which was colonized as part of the Horn of Africa by Italy. It was after independence that Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s Somali father left to study in Italy, where he met his mother.

“I was born in Verona in 1973, says the writer, but I left at the age of two and a half to Mogadishu where I lived until the age of 18. Until 1991… When the civil war ravaged the country, she fled with her baby, taking, like thousands of Somalis, the road to exile.

This story and those told by the voices of this diaspora are intertwined in his first novel, Madre Piccola, built on the alternating stories of three characters: two women, Barni and Domenica Abaho, who grew up together in Mogadishu and will meet in Rome, and a man, Taguere, also a former comrade, all far from their Somalia, all trying to rebuild themselves.

Like Ubah Cristina, the character of Domenica Abaho is an “iska dhal” (“a mixed-born”) with dual origins, and is arguably the voice closest to the author of both first names. Arrived in Somalia, Cristina will indeed receive from her maternal grandmother that of Ubah, “the flower” in Somali. And, curiously, the child will be the translator of Somali for her mother who never learned her husband’s native language: “Anyway, no one understands me and then I have a very bad pronunciation”, she will justify herself.

This coming and going between languages ??can be felt throughout Madre Piccola and has marked the itinerary of its author. A refugee in her mother’s country during her literary studies, she, who learned Italian in Somalia, devoted her thesis to Somali theater in Italy!

And here she is, from her life in Rome, back in the memories of her childhood with her cousin, Domenica Abaho… This one, who tells her about her life – they have not been seen for twenty years -, continues a documentary work on the diaspora Somalian… Film, book, everything is reflected and even further.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah indeed often quotes his great eldest, the Somalian – English-speaking – Nuruddin Farah, who has been awarded the Nobel Prize several times, and who himself has investigated his compatriots in the world (Yesterday, tomorrow. Voices and testimonies of the Somali diaspora, The Feathered Serpent, 2001).

Playwright, poetess, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah has lived, since 1991, the wandering of her characters: she has lived in Hungary, Italy, and is now settled in Belgium. Invited in 2021 to the Rencontres internationales de Saint-Nazaire, when her first translation into French, the collection of short stories A sambouk crosses the sea, had just been published by the editions of the Meet (House of foreign writers and translators), she recalled this genre of dialogue she was so often confronted with in Italy:

– “How well you speak Italian”

– “I speak it since I was born, my mother is Italian. »

– “And how come you are that color?” »

– “I am also a Somali. »

– “But no one knows where Somalia is, which was an Italian colony”, summed up the writer.

Her third novel The Phases of the Moon (untranslated), published in 2021 in Italy, moves away from her contemporaries to whom she has so far given voice, to dig into the history of Somalia, in the 1950s, from of his research in the archives.

In the meantime, reading Madre Piccola means taking the time and sometimes having the patience – which the characters themselves require – to let flow, digress, return to the floods of confidences of its three narrators, who carry along others lives than theirs…

This novel from cover to cover certainly vindicates Taguere’s exclamation: “Women are truly amazing. All Madre Piccola, an expression inspired by “habaryar”, or maternal aunt in Somali, which means “this way of taking care of others through relationships”. Including through literature.