Interweaving memories of Italian colonialism: Multidirectional memory and co-implication in Igiaba Scego's Adua and Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King

Igiaba Scego's Adua (2015) and Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King (2019) foreground the Italian colonial presence in East Africa and its legacy of trauma. Drawing on Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper's notion of cosmological trauma, Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory, and Jennifer Noji's implicated reader, this study considers the novels’ representation of interconnectedness on three levels as a response to the legacies of transgenerational colonial trauma. Both novels articulate the intersubjective nature of memory, creating links between the Jewish Italian experience of the Holocaust and the experiences of the ex-colonised. In addition, they blur the boundaries between the living and the dead, showing how the unresolved phantoms of the past haunt the present. Finally, through specific narrative techniques, the novels ultimately dissolve the boundaries between readers and the diegetic worlds of the texts, inviting readers to recognise the ways they may be implicated in these oft-misremembered atrocities.