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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Shirin Ramzanali Fazel

Fazel Photo S(1).jpg
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel (courtesy of the author)

Shirin Ramzanali Fazel is a novelist and poet. She was born in Mogadishu to a Somali mother and Pakistani father in 1953, when Somalia was still under Italian administration (AFIS – Amministrazione fiduciaria italiana della Somalia – a Trust Territory) as declared by the United Nations after the end of World War II. In this context, Fazel attended schools run by the Italian Ministry of Education (middle and high school), studying aspects of Italian culture and history, as she emphasised in her first book Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994; Far from Mogadishu, 2016).

Fazel and her husband moved to Novara, Italy, in 1971. Here are her first impressions of Italy: ‘My arrival in Italy was a disaster. It was late autumn. I had never seen fog before. I only knew the clear blue sky of Mogadishu. The oppressive, leaden Novara, lost in the paddy field was for me an unknown Italy, far from the idea I had in my mind.’ (Far from Mogadishu, 26). Nonetheless, Italy became their base in the following years when the family went on to live in several different countries such as Zambia, the United States, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia.

Lontano da Mogadiscio [Far from Mogadishu, 2016] was published in 1994 by Datanews. This autobiographical account traces Fazel’s life across different countries, combining personal memories and anecdotes, socio-historical reflections, and poetry. As one of the first postcolonial texts in Italian, Lontano da Mogadiscio sheds light not only on Italy’s colonial past, but also on the life of migrants in Italy. Simone Brioni pointed out in the afterword to the English version: ‘Far from Mogadishu played a fundamental role in decolonizing the Italian imaginary, and in finally coming to terms with a history which research begun in the seventies showed to be full of atrocious crimes. […] Shirin’s text is the testimony of a black person’s life story in Northern Italy […] in a period which precedes more widespread African immigration to these areas’ (Far from Mogadishu, 151). The relevance of Fazel’s first book is also proven by the fact that it was reprinted twice by Datanews (1997–1999), in an extended bilingual (Italian and English) digital version by Laurana Reloaded (2013), and in an English paper version in 2016. In both formats, the text was translated or, better, re-written, by the author herself. Lontano da Mogadiscio is mentioned in Nuruddin Farah’s novel Links (2003), the story of a Somali man who returns to Mogadishu after an absence of twenty years.

Since the publication of Lontano da Mogadiscio, Fazel has written several short stories, many of which have appeared in the online magazine El-Ghibli. Rivista online di letteratura della migrazione. In 2010, the year in which she and her family moved to Birmingham, UK, Fazel published her second novel, Nuvole sull’equatore. Gli italiani dimenticati. Una storia. The novel tells the story of Giulia, a girl with a Somali mother and an Italian father, focusing on issues of race, meticciato, and identity in the aftermath of Italian colonialism. An extended version in English, translated by Fazel, was published in 2017 entitled Clouds over the Equator. The Forgotten Italians. In Birmingham, Fazel joined the group Writers without Borders) and started writing in English. She also sat on the advisory board of the project Transationalizing Modern Languages funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, collaborating with different universities and participating in community events.

Fazel’s first book in English appeared in 2017, a collection of poems entitled Wings. The poems in Wings are divided into three thematic areas: ‘Diaspora’, with a particular focus on Mogadishu; ‘Caught in the middle’, with writings that interrogate the idea of home by evoking memories of life and people in her country of origin, as well as experiences in the current location; and ‘Migrants’, with poetic reflections on the migrant condition. In a reverse process to her previous works, Wings was translated into Italian by Fazel and was published as Ali spezzate [2018], maintaining the structure of the original English version.

Fazel has taken part in the documentary Memories of Mogadishu (2018) directed by Somali-Canadian journalist and documentarist Asha Siad. This short documentary collates the stories and personal memories of members of the Somali diaspora around the world, providing a personal and fascinating reconstruction of Somalia and its capital city Mogadishu.

In 2018, the French translation of Fazel’s poem ‘Mare Nostrum’, initially released on the webpage of the migrant-led organisation Migrant Voice in 2016, inspired a composition for flute by French composer Elizabeth Bossero entitled Silentium Nostrum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnwxrLchsqc).

The volume Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora, written in collaboration with Simone Brioni, came out digitally in 2020. This volume critically questions what it means to be Muslim (and more specifically a Muslim woman) in Italy and in the UK, combining personal experiences with sociological reflections. The English translation was published in 2023 under the title Islam and Me: Narrating a Diaspora. A new collection of poetry, I Suckled Sweetness – Poems, came out in August 2020. Some of her latest poems have appeared in bilingual anthologies in 2022 (see Bibliography).

Fazel has recently contributed essays to publications focusing on belonging and language. She has been an invited speaker at the first Festival of Italian and Irish Literature in Ireland, taking part in a round-table discussion together with Italian-Indian author Gabriella Kuruvilla and Irish journalist Sally Hayden (September 2023), and at the CCWW symposium ‘Women and Islam: Agency in Francophone and Italophone Autobiography’ (October 2023). 

Among the first voices of so-called ‘migration literature’ in Italy, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel writes in different languages and across different genres, gracefully narrating the benefits and challenges of our transnational reality.

Compiled by Chiara Giuliani (Cork)