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After seeing this tweet I've spent the past couple of hours trying to find out what happened to his sister Isabella Marincola and mother, and god its bleak. https://twitter.com/apjama/status/1259075173585739776?s=19
Isabella was not only separated from her mother, but her brother who was sent to be raised by Giuessepe Marincolas brother and wife who had no children. Isabella was raised by her father and stepmother who resented her as an embodiment of her husbands colonial infidelity
It's interesting the mental gymnastics Giuessepe practices to justify his cruelties
Eventually Isabella ran away from home and became a well known actress and model in Italy. Although a lot of the modelling was colonial fetish, she starred in this celebrated film 'Bitter Rice' in 1949
To be a mixed race Italian in the 40s was to be a desired 'trained monkey'
Whilst modelling she met one Italy's most respected journalists, Indro Montenelli, who likened her to a monkey. Mind you he is a celebrated anti-fascist.
I tried to find more on Montanelli and see a lot of parallels between him and Giuseppe, Isabellas father. He too was a colonial officer who sexually exploited East African women. He 'bought' an Eritrean girl of 12 to sexually abuse for 500 lira.
Interestingly, his obituary in the Guardian makes no mention that he was a child rapist? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jul/24/guardianobituaries1
Eventually, having married twice in Italy, she married a Somali man and moved back to Somalia where she was reunited with her mother. She learned more about the nature of her parents relationship.
She lived in Mogadishu from 1956 and she had a son Antar Mohamed in 1967. She was on the last Italian evacuation flight out of Xamar in May 1991 back 'home'
Her son is now a prominent academic and writer, who has written extensively on Italian colonialism and his mother's life, including a novel co-written with Isabella 'Timira Romanzo Meticcio' of her life. His blog discusses what his mother and grandmother represent
Here she is with her son Antar
She died in Bologna, refugee in the country she was raised in, March 30th 2010 - 'a living contradiction'
