Ennio Flaiano’s Story on How ‘To Kill Time’
Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill) was originally published in 1947, and takes place during the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36. In a 1972 interview with Aldo Rosselli, Flaiano characterizes the novel as a drama that lacks a ‘fixed reality’. Instead, the play of the author’s «personal adventure» unfolds against the ‘scenery’ of Africa:
I had written what I considered to be my own personal testimony, using the dreamlike setting of this Africa to stage an experience; exactly like Shakespeare who would set his stories and romantic comedies in Italy, because they were outside of his territory. For Shakespeare Italy was a kind of wallpaper on which sweet heraldic scenes took place, and which did not require the responsibility of a realistic representation. He would set his stories in England but love would only take place in Messina, Padua, Venice; that is, in places he did not know at all. Instead, I had been to Africa and saw it as a backdrop to one of my personal adventures. That this personal experience also coincided with a war in which I took part, and loathed, and that led me at 24 years to repudiate Fascism, wishing that it would end, brutally, in defeat – was for me something incredibly important. For I had seen just how oppressed and frightened these people were by our arrival – the very people were going to liberate. Our real purpose was only to serve a base goal of colonial prestige, coming much too late.[1]
Flaiano makes explicit the stage-like status of Africa at the beginning of his novel when he notes that: «the trees in these woods were of papier mâché, the real shoddy products of the universe. Only an unscrupolous theatrical outfitter can have stuck them in these out of the way places».[2]
In conjunction with the irreality of the constructed setting of the novel with its plants of ‘papier mâché,’ this article shows that in Flaiano’s drama, numerous aspects of reality oscillate from a given perception to its opposite, in line or out of line with Fascist ideology, with much blurring in between, particularly in terms of the identity of the colonizer and the colonized. Such wavering perceptions will also be seen to include the (leprous) physical manifestation of the ‘disease’ of murderous colonization, whose understanding and ‘cure’ is ultimately given a metaphysical explanation. Flaiano’s fluctuating perceptions of the disease of colonization as well as that of the identity of the participants in the colonial relationship are also a vivid illustration of the shifting and slippage inherent in the constructs of colonialism, as analyzed by Homi Bhabha and Gil Hochberg in their discussion of mimicry and Levantinism respectively.
Finally, the lack of fixity in the novel is also reflective of the fluctuating opinions on Fascism occurring back in Italy at the time of the writing of the novel. Tempo di uccidere comes out shortly after the end of Second World War and during a period in which Resistance and antifascist literature reach their peak in popularity. Works such as Pratolini’s Cronaca di poveri amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers, 1947), Pavese’s Il compagno (The Comrade, 1947) and Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to Spider’s Nests, 1947) brought forth the traumatic memories of the war.[3] While Fascism was harshly criticized by postwar literature contemporary with Tempo di uccidere, the same cannot be said of Mussolini’s colonial enterprise, for the latter remained a myth in Italian collective imagination. Following its defeat in World War Two, Italy could not claim rights to its colonies, and therefore any politically driven literary movements within intellectual groups of the former Italian colonies never took place. In contrast to other European countries that came to terms with their colonial past, Italy dismissed uneasy discussions on colonialism gradually silencing the crimes committed in Africa. In Angelo del Boca’s words:
The Postwar Italian governments not only eluded their obligations to clarify but actively impeded the emergence of the truth. It should suffice to mention the colossal and almost incredible effort of mystification promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the publication, in fifty volumes, of L’Italia in Africa (1952) […] a coarsely and falsified account that aimed to exalt Italian colonialism […].[4]
In relation to the artificial setting of the novel, it seems clear that also the postwar staging of Fascist colonialism was itself made up of equally flimsy materials, propped up by papier mâché artifices, sundry walk-on characters, and a changed script regarding the role of the Italian colonizer as opposed to the image of the Fascist blackshirt that was negatively portrayed in 1947 Resistance literature.
Among other authors, Palumbo and Schneider have pointed out that Flaiano breaks away from the literary tradition that had arisen in postwar years for the novel overlooks «social concerns and historical recollection».[5] Nevertheless, what places Tempo di uccidere at the forefront of the same politically driven literature is its effort to let the personal drama of the protagonist come to function as something of a shimmering mirror for the face of the Italian colonizer (and the audience back home). Flaiano’s writing provides few facts, little plot. Instead it focuses on the internal state of mind of the character because what ultimately determines the story’s direction is not the objectivity of the account, what really happened, but the personal fluctuating opinions of the ills and justifications surrounding the Italian colonization. The centrality of the psychological dimension, I argue, aims at triggering a process of self analysis in the reader which ultimately comments upon the shrewd efforts of postwar Italian governments to construct the colonial myth of the good-hearted Italians (‘italiani brava gente’).[6]
The early elements of the novel plot are the sexual exploitation of an Ethiopian woman, who is arbitrarily named Mariam by the protagonist, and her accidental wounding by an unnamed Italian lieutenant’s misdirected bullet as the two spend the night together. While his decision to deliberately fire a second, fatal shot at the woman rather than to seek help takes into consideration the slim chances of her surviving a serious abdominal gunshot wound, as well as the desire to spare her a slow death, the decision nevertheless rests upon the lieutenant’s desire not to be discovered with the local woman. Surrounding this bare plot are the protagonist’s ever-shifting views on numerous elements underpinning the colonial enterprise.
Following Mariam’s murder, the lieutenant’s guilt manifests itself in the leprosy that he falsely believes himself to have contracted. He begins wandering in search of a doctor for his sores while also seeking a way back to Italy before being denounced. Away from the military camp his mental state is further shaken after spending time with Johannes, a retired askari[7] and Mariam’s father. By now he is convinced that Johannes knows the truth. But eventually the lieutenant joins his battalion and embarks for Italy with the entire experience left behind.
While Africa serves as mere backdrop, the lieutenant’s fellow Italian colonizers serve as supporting cast. The protagonist underlines his own centrality in the cast:
I often thought of that youth (he must by nature have been an attentive waiter), but I would like to dispel any doubt as to the importance of his presence in this story. He was only a workman who wanted to do me a service and to show me a good short cut. Heaven forbid that I should arouse the suspicion that he is more than a simple walker-on, and that what happened to me later owes anything to his intervention.[8]
As for native Ethiopians, they appear to be granted the status of mere scenery. Even the woman he had eventually exploited and killed does not rise above that assumption, as lucidly formulated in the lines he imagines telling her after her death:
“I admit” I went on, “that your life had some value if in return you offered me what I never asked from you – hospitality. Yet it does not seem to me that the life of a person whom one meets accidentally – yes, accidentally – the life of a person who seemed more than a tree and something less than a woman is worth so much. Don’t let us forget that you were naked and formed part of the landscape. In fact you were there to give it proportion”.[9]
Prior to the question of the native woman’s function within the drama is the question regarding her very existence. After secretly observing the woman for some time, the lieutenant’s gaze is returned, but in such a minimal way that his conclusion is that she must not actually exist:
When she caught sight of me through the trees she went on washing without bothering about me and perhaps really not caring. I almost felt like laughing, and thought that one of us could be a mirage, but that I myself could not be.[10]
Such a conclusion that one of them is a mirage, and ‘that one’ must be the woman («I myself could not be») is a calculation based on principles of the returned look, the gaze, of the colonized causing anxiety to the colonizer. Homi Bhabha discusses in his The Location of Culture how colonial power sought to legitimize itself by emphasizing a supposed inferiority of the colonized. It stereotyped the colonized population through racist and stigmatizing forms of representation, and believed itself capable of stabilizing the relationship between its superiority and the inferiority of the colonized. Yet, Bhabha notes, there are moments when the colonizer is tormented by his own design. Through the stereotype, the colonizer believes he has fixed the Other (the colonized) in a precise location and has made him easily recognizable, but he fails to consider that the Other «will always look back», threatening the colonizer’s image of himself.[11] The Other’s returned gaze upsets the imaginary identity the colonizer has given himself, forcing the latter to acknowledge the precariousness of the reasons behind his dominant position.[12] In this vein, the meager notice that the woman takes of the protagonist could in theory call into question his identity, but in order to cancel such a possibility, the protagonist simply blurs the black female gazer’s identity.
Having mentioned the role of Africa in reflecting the colonizer’s own face back to him, it is notable that this perception of his own image also wavers. For example, during a visit to the home of some local women with a corrupt and aging major, the protagonist recalls his own thoughts upon arrival in Africa: «Africa is the sink of iniquities».[13] At the major’s drunken attempt to possess one of the women, this thought is resurrected in the protagonist, who sees with disgust his own face in that of this colonial major:
I went up to the major and said: “Stop it!” He was not surprised and then I added: “Africa is the sink of iniquities, eh?” He burst out laughing and his hands went rapidly round the waist of the girl sitting beside him. I began to insult him, but then he went on laughing and his sociable mirth, instead of calming, increased the uneasiness that tormented me. Was I this inflamed man? Did I keep letters, photographs, did I think myself better than all the others? There, the major’s face presented itself like a long waited target. I was certainly someone’s face, but at that moment were not the wrinkles that marked it words written by an old pencil demanding only the effort of translation? “If I killed this man,” I thought, “I would also bury the worst part of myself.”[14]
However, in light of the acts that the lieutenant has himself just committed, it becomes difficult to continue apprehending the monstrosity of himself in the major:
“Go on, enjoy yourself, old fellow,” I said and became sincerely moved when he embraced the girl again. “His hands merely wanted to do homage to the long boredom of exile,” I concluded.[15]
Similarly, when discussing his entire narrative to the second lieutenant in the final chapter entitled Punti oscuri (Some Obscure Points), the protagonist’s reflection comes in and out of focus, as it blends with colonial justifications. The following passage begins with the words of the protagonist’s interlocutor, followed by a flash of the colonizer’s self-recognition:
“How can we draw a moral from it? Here you are, having become a wise man instead of the superficial young man you were, and only by virtue of some act of murder you have committed without attaching the least importance to it. I congratulate you.”We were silent. The killing of Mariam now seemed to me an inevitable crime, but not for reasons that had led me to commit it. More than a crime, in fact, it appeared to me like a crisis, an illness, which would protect me forever by revealing me to myself. I now loved my victim and could not fear that she might leave me.[16]
This flash of clear vision gained at the expense of Mariam – that the colonizer suffers from the disease of colonization – abruptly blurs, as his perception once again leans to justifying Mariam’s degradation. In the dialogue below the protagonist picks up an ‘evidence’ for Mariam as mentally deficient, based on her having worn a turban while washing herself in the river, in contradiction with his acquired understanding that only lepers wear a turban:
“Let’s try,” I said, “to find a parallel. We go into one of our own houses and there is no one there to receive us. We go along the corridors and by mistake – yes, by mistake – go into the bathroom. There we surprise the mistress of the house, naked, busy washing herself. A very common sight. It is her form of narcissism, her way of passing time. And on her head the lady in the bath has a priest’s hat.”“That’s it,” I said. But in what house will you see such an uncommon spectacle?”
The second lieutenant said in a low voice: “In an asylum.” And I could not refrain from laughing. So Mariam was mad! It seemed to me useless to refute his hypothesis and I said: “Lets’ go on”.[17]
Such a conclusion is in keeping with the ‘analysis’ of any number of racist Fascist scholars, among whom Lidio Cipriani, whose work sought to legitimize the Ethiopian War by asserting a mental deficiency in the black peoples of the colonies. On this question of Mariam’s very humanity, the protagonist had in fact twice earlier summed her up in the following terms: «a person who seemed more than a tree and something less than a woman».[18]
Just as the reflection of the colonizer wavers, so too his relationship with the colonized fluctuates. The discussion in this section focuses on clear instances of mimicry, Levantinism, and counter-mimicry, to illustrate the tenuous and ever-changing linkage of the participants in the colonial relationship. Before analyzing two examples that illustrate linguistic mimicry, it is useful to discuss Bhabha’s concise characterization of mimicry in general.[19] According to the scholar, what the colonizer most desires is to maintain control over the situation, and thus over the colonized, and therefore believes imitation to be an efficient form of surveillance. Mimicry is both the tendency of the subjugated to imitate its subjugator in the hope of gaining some of its power, as well as the desire of the colonizer to establish himself as a model to be copied and admired by the colonized.
Mimicry, as discussed by Bhabha, protects against an absolute equivalence between colonizer and colonized, since the superiority of the former ultimately depends on its difference from the latter. The colonized must remain a bad copy of the colonizer. Thus, mimicry is an exaggerated copy of the colonizer’s language, culture and behavior. Such exaggeration is proof that imitation is not perfect but rather contains some difference. This ‘form of mockery’ draws a line between colonized and colonizer, preventing the former from becoming like the original. Unfortunately for the colonizer, mimicry produces undesired effects as well. It’s a double-edged sword, a form of control as well as a subversive instrument that mocks and undermines the «ongoing pretensions of colonialism and empire».[20] The following description of Johannes’ speech overheard by the lieutenant perfectly illustrates the mockery made of the colonizer’s language:
At times, with unexpected coquery, he spoke my language; he did not say anything important, for the most part limiting himself to describing what he was doing at the moment. For example he would say: “Johannes is now taking the water and putting it on the fire,” or else: “Now I will begin to cut the poles,” and so on.[21]
The ability to mimic means that the identity of the colonized itself is not fixed, nor is the colonizer’s identity distinctly stable, if an imitation by the ‘other side’ can gain so much traction in approaching the subjugator’s identity, including even the creation of an intermediate category like the askari. This instance of linguistic mimicry therefore points to the lack of fixity in the identity of colonial participants in general, and also in the particular case of the retired askari Johannes.
Levantinism in the context of the Italian colony in Ethiopia (or indeed any colonial setting) and in the meaning Gil Hochberg gives to it, refers to the condition of hybridism in which individuals live at the propitious meeting of diverse peoples and cultures.[22] Levantinism is both the unintentional imitation of Western manners by the colonized and the non-deliberate tendency of the colonizer to exhibit aspects of Eastern culture. In line with this interpretation, the Egyptian-Israeli writer Jacqueline Kahanoff points out that Levantinism underlines the fact that, if anyone can imitate Western or Eastern manners, culture is only a set of actions that one learns to perform. In the end it is only a matter of deciding «who the better performer is», who can deceitfully pass for the authentic possessor of a specific culture.[23] Levantinism is the absence of a stable and clearly defined identity.
Back to the novel, earlier in the plot, the lieutenant had been accused of Levantinism:
When I came up to him he invited me in and for an instant we stood in silence, he searching for the phrases for his stupid reprimand, I for excuses. At last he made up his mind. He ought to report me, but he knew it would be no use. Yet he asked himself what pleasure I got from lowering myself like that. Unshaven I haunted the native houses, ate sitting on the ground like a gipsy. He asked me what my idea was in going native.[24]
The lieutenant had denied having ‘gone native,’ rationalizing each ‘offense.’ Later, however, within the space of Johannes’ village, the lieutenant finds himself in a border-zone, of the type that Hochberg describes as productive of cultural identities beyond colonizer and colonized, self and Other, to non-oppositional positions ‘between’ I and You. The result is ‘blended identities’ and partial identifications and intersections, which are discussed under the heading of Levantinism. Within this border-zone, away from the military camp and also away from other Ethiopian villagers, there is originally a single representative of the identity ‘colonizer,’ the lieutenant, and a single representative of the identity ‘colonized,’ Johannes. Through the meeting of these identities, however, new identities, shifting and transitory, are produced.
Levantinism is demonstrated in the contrast between the following two passages. First, the Ethiopian bread is made of a dough that is ‘repugnant and soggy’:
“He was mixing it without haste adding water from an old tin; and when he had made a repugnant soft dough he threw it in an oval stone he had been heating in the fire and wrapped it up.”[25]
Later, however, it is transformed in the lieutenant’s mind into a staple produced by himself and worth stowing in quantity in his backpack:
I also decided to lighten the pack of everything superfluous- but there was very little to throw away. Since the provisions had long been finished, I was left with a few underclothes, the blanket, the packet of letters, the Bible, toilet necessities and the money. I put a large piece of bread in as well – I could make it myself now, and Johannes had sold me part of his flour- and tied the straps.[26]
Part of this change in the protagonist’s perception of the bread is surely born of necessity, since the lieutenant lives in Johannes’ village and is dependent on him. However, the dramatic nature of the change with respect to the bread demonstrates a fluctuation in the protagonist himself. It amounts to not only performance of the bread-baking, but also performance of the culture.
A second, and distinct, example of imitation by the colonizer constitutes ‘counter-mimicry’[27] on the lieutenant’s part. It is illustrated when he hides his nausea and tears that Johannes’ spicy food provokes. Even before eating the dish, it had repulsed the lieutenant: «the rank smell of the chopped mess constricted my throat».[28] By his mimicry of calm tolerance and even appreciation, however, the lieutenant beats Johannes at his own game, out-mimicking the mimic:
I forced myself to eat calmly and to hide the nausea, and still more the tears, which the burning taste of the spice produced. I saw that I had won, because Johannes forgot to eat and spent his time watching me, to see the effect of the pepper in my face. I put all my pride into that task. And for the first time the eyes of Johannes betrayed curiosity, the curiosity of the dynamiter who is quite sure he has lit the fuse and would like to know why on earth the bomb does not explode. It was my first victory and I managed to exploit it by eating in silence. Johannes could not contain himself, and with a visible effort asked me if I liked the food. I replied that it was good, briefly, without adding anything further. Johannes began to eat again; I read disappointment on his face, and a little later gave in. “Isn’t it very highly spiced?” he asked hesitatingly.“Spiced?” I looked at him with surprise, trying to see what he was referring to and then concluded: “It is exactly right.” I can say that from that moment Johannes began to respect me, indeed to fear me, and I no longer had to go around him in circles beating my boots and talking at the top of my voice. When I looked at him he now confined himself to pretending not to see me, but he was no longer insolent, even if he deliberately avoided addressing me, perhaps in order not to be forced to call me by my rank.[29]
Such subversive counter-mimicry is complex. On the one hand, the lieutenant gains the upper hand, as he no longer feels the need to assert his authority by beating his boots and verbally abusing Johannes. On the other hand, however, the mimicry implies that an element of power initially resided with Johannes, since the maneuver is needed in order to wrest this power from him.
Put another way, the lieutenant has defused the ‘dynamite’ in Johannes’ possession through such counter-mimicry and on one level he seems to render absolute and non-negotiable the ‘proper’ colonial relationship, but in the process having been forced to acknowledge that Johannes was in possession of a type of ‘dynamite’ in the first place. Furthermore, at this point Johannes spares the lieutenant a reproaching gaze – in a later circumstance the lieutenant comments of Johannes: «he threw me glances filled with such deep hatred»[30] – but neither does Johannes enter into exchanges of language. The askari avoids verbal kowtowing in the form of pronoun choice or rank titles. Thus, although the lieutenant refers to the ‘victory’ that he has ‘won,’ it is actually quite a limited victory. Furthermore, it is temporary, and constitutes just one stage in the dynamic production of identities and relations between the two participants.
A final event played out in the border-zone of Johannes’ village bears mentioning, as it highlights the fragility of the underpinnings of colonialism. This fragility is ultimately the cause of the ever-fluctuating identities in any such cultural situation. The incident occurs after the lieutenant has been entertaining the following fear: «he would forget the respect due to me, the speech and the example of his venerated officers, and would cut my throat, perhaps with my head turned towards the East, on the village tomb».[31] Instead, what actually happens is that Johannes approaches, and in a voice that is «almost affectionate»,[32] inquires where the lieutenant has been. The following interaction takes place: «Anger brimmed in my eyes. “Johannes,” I said trembling, “do not forget who I am.” Then he rose slowly and sketched a quick military salute».[33]
Quoting Bhabha, Huddard describes the anxiety born of the intimacy within a border-zone. On the one hand, the go-between or in-between class, such as the educated Indian, or in Tempo di uccidere, the well-trained askari, becomes «too close to home», bringing to mind the unjustifiability of dominating a people so similar to one’s own.[34] The other fearful aspect involved is the limitlessness of the colonizer’s manufacture of stereotypes in an attempt to pin down the colonized, whose very ability for mimicry points to an unfixed, amorphous identity: «This means that in a way the colonizer ‘spooks himself’: he fantasizes endless monstrous stereotypes that can only lead to anxiety rather than the desired certainty.».[35]
Clearly, the lieutenant is «spooking himself» in this scene, as indicated by his sudden interjection of a demand for recognition of his colonial authority in an attempt to quell his fear, along with the correspondingly ‘empty’ response made by Johannes. Such a demand for recognition is in fact paradoxical, as Bhabha explains:
The recognition of authority, however, requires a validation of its source that must be immediately, even intuitively, apparent – “You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master” – and held in common (rules of recognition). What is left unacknowledged is the paradox of such a demand for proof and the resulting ambivalence for positions of authority.[36]
Furthermore, the response of Johannes is not immediate («slowly rose»). Bhabha asks: «Can the ‘signs’ or ‘marks’ of authority be anything more than ‘empty’ presences of strategic devices?».[37] Johannes for one seems not to think so, since after rising slowly, he does not even feign sincerity in his salute («sketched a quick military salute»). In terms of this colonialist ‘script,’ the need for which is indeed paradoxical, we see the fragility of the roles of the colonizer/colonized, as well as the artifice, the unreal nature of this flimsy colonial ‘stage’ that Flaiano points out in his interview with Rosselli as well as in the novel itself.
Finally, the false manifestation of leprosy is dependent on the lieutenant’s guilt for killing Mariam, rather than on the belief of having contracted the disease from her infected body. Indeed, the fact that Mariam’s father Johannes has cured what appeared to be a textbook case of leprosy remains mysterious:
The second obscure point was the sores…
The second lieutenant thought a long time before speaking, then said that he did not consider a native capable of curing sores caused by blood poisoning. “Leprosy sores, yes,” he added. “Here we are in the realm of metaphysics, and Johannes accepts metaphysics. But other kinds of sores, no. He lets the ‘signori’ cure them; and this, fortunately, is the mark of their superiority.
“Well then?” I said
“Well then, the sores cannot be discussed, they must be accepted.” And because I smiled the second lieutenant said that we could even try a rational explanation, but in ten years’ time.
“No,” I said quickly, “let’s accept them without discussion.” We laughed.[38]
Clearly, the disease comes and goes in a manner parallel to the various other perceptions of the colonizer, whose awareness of the symptoms of the disease called colonization comes in and out of focus. Additionally, the suggestion to revisit the ‘sores’ «in ten years’ time» – precisely the time of the writing of Flaiano’s novel – is rejected, indicating that a rational explanation for the disease of Italian colonization in Africa is still lacking at the time the novel is written.
In reviewing Flaiano’s stylistic devices one gathers that the psychological dimension is the mainspring of his narrative, which lacks major war events and has a main character that only seems ‘to kill time’. The lieutenant’s behavior places him in antithesis to the model Italian man proposed by Fascist propaganda. Continually fleeing from responsibility he is neither a devoted soldier nor does he clearly stand out as the superior colonizer in comparison to Johannes. Yet, the political charge of the novel lays not so much in its undermining the Fascist ideology, as in the way it blurs the line between truth and fiction in regards to Italian colonialism, thus replicating political practices in Italy at the time the novel is written. Returning to Flaiano’s mention of the Shakespearean use of Italy as a «wallpaper» for sweet dramas of love, we cannot but note its resemblance to the use postwar Italy made of Africa as the exotic elsewhere in which the colonial crimes of Fascism were suppressed and where the myth of the good-hearted Italians was given free reign. Ultimately, the narrative strategies I have outlined in these pages aim at interrupting the mechanism with which readers would accept and recognize themselves within the false identities imposed on them by both the Fascist regime and post war Italian governments.
[1] See A. Rosselli, Opere/Ennio Flaiano, 1990, p.1210. My translation.
[2] E. Flaiano, A Time to Kill, 1992, p. 12.
[3] For a comparison between Resistance works published in 1947 and Flaiano’s A Time to Kill, see P. Palumbo’s article National Integrity and African Malaise, 2002, pp. 53-68, and M. Scheneider’s study Allegory and Antihistory in Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di Uccidere, 1984, pp. 107-121.
[4] A. del Boca, The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism, 2003, p.18.
[5] The quote belongs to P. Palumbo, National Integrity and African Malaise, p. 58.
[6] A. del Boca, The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism, p.18.
[7] During the various African campaigns, Italian soldiers were placed alongside indigenous soldiers, usually Eritrean and Somali, called Askari (from the Arabic askarî, meaning ‘soldier’).
[8] E. Flaiano, A Time to Kill, p. 11.
[9] ivi, 231.
[10]ivi, 21.
[11] H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994, p. 127.
[12] Ibidem.
[13] E. Flaiano, A Time to Kill, p. 77.
[14] Ibidem, emphasis added.
[15] ivi, p. 71.
[16] ivi, p. 262, emphasis added.
[17] ivi, pp. 263-264.
[18] ivi, pp. 231.
[19] This summary of Bhabha’s discussion of mimicry is drawn out of The Location of Culture, Chapter 4, pp. 121-132.
[20] This is a quote from David Huddard, Homi Bhabha, 2006, p. 57.
[21] E. Flaiano, A Time to Kill, p. 223.
[22] Summarized here is Chapter 1 of G. Hochberg’s The Dispossession of (Cultural) Authenticity. Readings in Contemporary Levantine Literature, 2002, pp. 1-44.
[23] J. Kahanoff, From East the Sun. 1978, pp. 17-48.
[24] E. Flaiano, A Time to Kill, p. 73.
[25] ivi, p. 193.
[26] ivi, p. 218, emphasis added.
[27] I use the term counter-mimicry to distinguish the lieutenant’s deliberate strategy from the more general use of Levantinism, with its sense of non-deliberate cultural mingling.
[28] E. Flaiano, A Time to Kill, p. 200.
[29] ivi p. 201.
[30] ivi p. 217.
[31] ivi p. 234.
[32] ivi, p. 235.
[33] Ibidem.
[34] D. Huddard, Homi Bhabha, pp. 57-76.
[35] ivi p. 61.
[36] H. Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders, 2004, p. 1175.
[37] Ibidem.
[38] E. Flaiano,, A Time to Kill p. 264.
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———, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, in The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge, 1994, 121-132.
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