‘Marocchin’ and Goumiers: War, Settler Colonialism, and Taken-for-Granteds in Central Italy
Abstract Code: 12151

Abstract

In central Italy’s Ciociara region stands a French military cemetery, holding remains of WW II fallen. It is split in half, between French native soldiers and North African ones (goumiers). Isolated as it is, this cemetery is pristine. But vandalism did shut down another cemetery holding North African soldiers’ remains, near Naples, because Marocchini (as North African men are typically called) are taken-for-granted as mass rapists due to wartime events. Non-North African and North Africans alike perpetrated these atrocities in the Ciociaria mountains, but the image that persists is of Marocchini as roving, barbarian rapists.

Author Alberto Moravia’s novel La ciociara (1957) played a part in this. Made into a film (Two Women, starring Sophia Loren, 1960), it immortalized a national trauma, the losing nation being feminized and violated by foreign armies, and permanently embodied the perpetrators as North African.

Taking a local approach, I juxtapose this cemetery site (and its unsettled history) with a concurrent use of Marocchin[i] as a blanket term, in the area just west of these mountains: the Pontine plain. In the 1930s the fascist regime moved 30,000 settlers here, from the northeast. The settler-colonists found themselves in (to them) alien territory, as underscored by their use of ‘Marocchin’ to denote their neighbors, who were themselves displaced by this internal-colonial project. Using interview materials, long-term local fieldwork, and literary materials, I examine these narratives that never seem to converge and yet interpellate each other in terms of both racialization and not-concluded pasts in Italy.