Open Journal of Humanities (Aug 2021)
Self-Representation and Otherness in Istria. The case of Anna Maria Mori
Abstract
Addressing the underrepresentation of works by Italian Istrian writers within Italian literary tradition, the present article investigates the representation of identity and otherness as a result of exile in the rich and sophisticated memoirs of Anna Maria Mori (Pola, Italy – now Pula, Croatia, 1936). Her complex experience as an Istrian exile caused in her what writer Enzo Bettiza calls ‘exeità’, the condition of an ‘ex’ with a total loss of identity caused by the lack of a stable geographical community centre to identify with. Indeed, exile significantly altered Mori’s perception of her identity, which, together with the experience of war, triggered a sense of restlessness and the search for belonging that accompanied her throughout her life. What emerges is that although Mori’s outlook is strongly Italian, her ‘Italianness’ is supranational in the sense that it is mediated not by romanità, as it is the case for the majority of Italians, but rather by a nostalgic sense of venezianità, originating from a long tradition of Venetian rule in Istria. Her identity is further forged by slavness, derived from the Istrian rural hinterland inhabited mainly by Slovenians and Croatians who had an influence on the Italian communities living along the coast; and by the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian empire that ruled in Istria after the demise of la Serenissima. Mori’s memoirs, therefore, are the site of a reflexivity that sheds light on the complex feelings of an author caught between the simultaneous dimensions of an Italo-Slavic and Austro-Hungarian consciousness. Her nostalgic works give voice not only to her own story and feelings, but also to the stories and feelings of hundreds of thousands of Italian exiles, whose hardships are lost in the official narratives. Mori does for Istria what James Joyce did for Dublin. She offers a kaleidoscopic portrait which recreates, with painful precision, the sights, sounds, and smells of a lost world, where readers are constantly confronted by enduring issues related to the representation of the self and the other, marginality, and vulnerability.
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