Aside from Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s, I wasn't much aware of Italian colonial presence in Africa. What I remembered from the African history class I took in college was that Italy tried and failed to colonize Ethiopia in the nineteenth century – putting Ethiopia among the only two countries on the continent not to be colonized during the European division of Africa. What I had only faintly remembered was that Italy did have other colonies in East Africa, so I was surprised when reading
Sweet & Sour Milk to find signs of a lingering Italian influence in Somalia. In the book, which takes place decades after the end of the Italian control, the central characters were educated in Italy; another is half Italian, half Somali; Italian restaurants populate Mogadishu (which is spelled the Italian way in the book: Mogadiscio).
Sweet & Sour Milk is the first book in a trilogy called Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. It centers on Loyaan, whose twin brother Soyaan has been murdered; poisoned, he suspects, by the government. Soyaan worked for the dictatorship, but wrote memoranda critical of the General in charge. And yet, on his death, the government claims him as its own and celebrates him as a hero, a martyr who died serving his country. This, it turns out, is the most effective way of neutralizing and undermining everything Soyaan worked for. Loyaan risks his own life and others' to bring out the truth about his brother, how he died and who he really was. He doesn't know whom to trust, while Soyaan's former allies don't know whether their friend in fact betrayed them. This is a beautifully written and heartrending book.
I found
The Great Believers in a Little Free Library by my apartment. I knew it had received much acclaim when it came out a couple years ago, but I didn't know anything else about it. I took it with me on a recent trip, thinking I might be in the mood for something different than
Sweet & Sour Milk. As I always seem to do when traveling, I carried both books with me and barely touched either. I did start
The Great Believers on the flight home and I finished it three days later. (It is, as the cover promises, a page-turner.) The book alternates between events in 1985 in Chicago's gay community just as AIDS is taking root and beginning to kill people off, and Paris in 2015 where the younger sister of one of the young men killed by AIDS back then has come to reconnect with her daughter and finds herself retreading some of her past. This book came out in 2018, but it was interesting to read it with post-pandemic eyes. Now and then during the current pandemic I would come across comparisons to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and reading this book crystalized some of the parallels I hadn't seen clearly before.
