Shortcuts and open wounds: Knowledge's Autonomy in Ennio Flaiano's Time to Kill

Abstract

Over the last decades, the 1947 novel Tempo di uccidere (“Time to Kill”) by Ennio Flaiano acquired the status of a founding text for the postcolonial discourse in Italy. The novel was incompatible with the neorealist aesthetics that were widespread in the early postwar period, but it is also unique for its complex and multi-layered exposé of the violence perpetrated by Italians during the second Italo-Ethiopian War, beginning with gender violence. Tempo di uccidere ultimately challenges the postwar establishment of a collective and self-absolutory memory of Italian consent to fascism.

With Tempo di uccidere, Flaiano raises crucial questions regarding personal and collective responsibility with fascism’s policies. For the narrator-protagonist – and thus for the early postwar Italian reader – the most difficult step was to fully appreciate the autonomy of colonial victims’ knowledge and gaze, which are irreducible to the colonial discourse. By concentrating on the ambiguity of images such as “scorciatorie” (“shortcuts”) and “piaghe” (“sores”) that return obsessively in the novel, Flaiano stresses how the open wounds of fascism and colonialism would haunt private and public memory despite postwar forgetting. Read along the responses of contemporary commentators, the novel shows how problematic was in (early) postwar Italy to radically reconsider the imperialist practices and exoticist imaginary that connoted modern Italian national culture. Such practices and imaginary would indeed survive the demise of Mussolini’s ultra-nationalist regime.