Friday, 14 November 2014

ITALIAN WRITER ON GLOCALISATION PLATFORM



ITALIAN WRITER ON GLOCALISATION PLATFORM

                                                                                                                         BY PETER OUMA 


By no prejudice induced, most of the literature works (that I have engaged) by European writers during and in the post-colonization era, and Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, is an example, the black characters have always been silenced, abused, imagined, formed and constructed.  Conrad has presented the black characters as those who do not have voices. They lack agency, marginalized, subliminal, and insulted and any other high voltage word fitting the same diction.

Surprisingly, an Italian writer, who unbelievably is a prosecutor, has been the first of his kind to bridge this gap of literary misconception. Gianrico Carofiglio in his novel, Timone inconsapevole, translated as Involuntary Witness, has made his negritude character, Abadou Thiam, a Senegalese, accused of abducting and killing an Italian kid, Francesco Rubino and is locked behind the bars, to regain his voice on a legal perspective.  Gianrico gives Abadou agency. He is presented wholly; his weaknesses, strength, innocence and resilience. Instead of highlighting the colour consciousness, Gianrico presents human consciousness.


When the fourth year Literature students from The University of Nairobi got a chance to engage this Italian prosecutor author at the Embassy on 15th October 2014, we got to learn that his novel has been translated to over fifteen languages, but again the more surprising one is the latest translation done by Graziella Acquaviva, Bi. Fatuma and Abedi  Tandika to Kiswahili language, with the title Shahidi Asiyekusudiwa. Guanrico is raising the speakers of Kiswahili language to the global level. The oppressed blacks are raised to the global platform. I thumb up this prosecutor author on his imagination of a world that is free from racism and regionalization.

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