by Carla Cornette
Kkeywa: Storia di una bimba meticcia (2011) and La nemesi della rossa (2012) constitute the sequential memoirs of Carla Macoggi, Ethiopian-Italian author and attorney. They recount the case of an adoption of a meticcia/mixed-race Ethiopian-Italian child by a white Italian businesswoman in the 1970s in Addis Abeba and their subsequent migration to Italy. This analysis situates race and gender at the intersection of Critical Adoption Studies and Postcolonial Theory to reveal the persistence of the colonial practices of madamato marital arrangements and the disenfranchisement of the meticci children of Italian men and indigenous women in the former colonies which culminates in the transracial, transnational adoption of the child protagonist by her mother’s employer: the Ethiopian mother’s socio-economic and political vulnerability, rooted in racial, gender-based, economic, and geographical inequalities, is determinate in the fragile parental rights of the woman, rendering her daughter “adoptable” and “transferable” (John McLeod). Moreover, the adoptive mother-daughter relationship reproduces an anachronistic colonial power dynamic—white master-black slave—which permits the Italian woman to exploit, abuse, and abandon the child and escape both legal and social sanctions. In a consideration of literary genre, Macoggi’s memoirs are framed as “semi-autobiography” (Michelle Wright) given their emblematic treatment of entrenched and enduring colonial hierarchies which manifest in the diminished human rights of certain vulnerable mothers and children and can result in the reconfiguration of families, a generative line of inquiry to be explored in other works of Italian postcolonial literature.