In her most recent novel, La Linea del Colore, Igiaba Scego offers a rich journey through the intersectionality of race, gender, migration, and transnational cultures in the shadow of the colonization of Africa. Colore follows the parallel stories of nineteenth-century artist and Haitian Native American Lafanu Brown, and that of Leila, a modern day Somali Italian researcher who (re)discovers Lafanu and, in doing so, helps save her own cousin from a violence-induced depressive state.
Bookended by a prologue and epilogue, the story of Lafanu Brown begins when she tries to share her own story with the man who has just proposed to her, Ulisse Barbieri. Likening herself to Minerva going into battle, revealing the details of her life is not an easy task but something she must do so her betrothed “saprà come amarmi” (31). The source of her anguish is clear from the opening line of the first...
