Milli mála - 01.01.2013, Síða 160
160
mentally lacks: that is, emigration as an act of will and rebellion
rather than of mere fatalism. A Venetian peasant says to the narrator
– partially in dialect – at a certain point in the crossing:
In my opinion, if I may, landowners make a mistake. They spread a lot of
lies about America, they say everybody is starving there, everybody comes
back home more desperate than before, they say plague is everywhere
there, governments are all tyrannical and disloyal, and so on. What hap-
pens then? What happens is that when a letter comes from there and the
writer says he’s doing well and making money then people don’t believe
a word of what the landowners say, although what they say could be true.
People don’t believe them at all, people think the landowners are trying
to bend the truth. So thousands of people leave their homes and go to
America, for the truth is completely the opposite.30
Again, the author does not hesitate to denounce the deceit behind
the dominant discourse on emigration, in this case that of the land-
owners trying to discourage peasants from abandoning their lands.
4.2 Anti-emigrant literature and the silence of other literary
movements
In 1880, Antonio Marazzi (1845–1931), who in previous years had
been consul in Buenos Aires, published his most relevant work,
Emigrati (Emigrants)31. It is a long novel in three volumes recount-
ing the adventures and misadventures of Silvestro Piantelli and
Agostino Codazzi, two northern Italian farmers who emigrate to
South America. Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay provide the setting
in which the two young men move deftly among military chiefs,
ranchers, cowboys, Indians and settlers in the Pampas. After separa-
tions and reunions, fights, struggles, weddings, economic achieve-
30 Ibid.: 177–178. “Per conto mio de mi, mi scusi, un torto che hanno i signori è di sparpagnar tante
fandonie sull’America, e che muovo tutti di fame, e che tornan più disparai di prima, e che c’è la
peste, e che i governi di là son tutti spotici traditori, e cussì via. Cosa succede allora? Succede che
quando poi arriva una lettera d’uno di laggiù che fa saper che sta bene e che el fa bessi allora non
si crede più niente di quello che i siori dicono, neanche quello che è vero, e sospettano che sia tutto
un inganno, e che anzi sia vero tutto il contrario, e i parte a mile a la volta.”
31 This is the first Italian novel whose title explicitly refers to the question of emigration.
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN FATHERLAND