Igiaba Scego discusses her award winning novel The Color Line!
About The Color Line:
It was the middle of the 19th century when Lafanu Brown had the audacity to be an artist. In the wake of the Civil War, life was especially fraught for black women, but she did not let that deter her. Daughter of a Chippewa woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opportunity to study, travel and follow her dreams but not without facing intolerance and violence. Now, she is ready to tell her fiancé about her difficult life, which started in a poor family forty years earlier and brought her to become one of the most established painters first in Florence and then in Rome, where her studio became a required stop on the Grand Tour.
Italy, 2019. A young Italian art curator of Somali origins is desperately trying to bring to Europe her younger cousin, who is only sixteen and already tried to reach Italy in a long desperate journey, where she had to face unbelievable violence. While organizing an art exhibition that will bring together the paintings of Lafanu Brown with the artworks of young migrants, she becomes more and more obsessed with the life and secrets of the 19th-century painter.
The voices of these two artists whose fates are somehow bound-up in one-another across space and time, build a choral novel, illuminating further what it means to be a woman, a black woman in a foreign country, yesterday as today. Prime for readers of Jhumpa Lahiri, Laila Lalami, Brit Bennett, Chibundu Onuzo, Yaa Gyasi, and Tola Rotimi Abraham, this novel of immigration and emigration spans across time and place, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, from Africa to the US to Italy, and offers an opportunity to travel alongside both indelible protagonists, fully immersed in each setting and the journeys between them.
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Igiaba Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to a family of Somali ancestry. She holds a PhD in education on postcolonial subjects and has done extensive academic work in Italy and around the world. Her memoir La mia casa è dove sono won Italy’s prestigious Mondello Prize. She is a frequent contributor to the magazine Internazionale and to Il Venerdì di Repubblica, a supplement to La Repubblica.
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