Paternity by Nara B. Milanich

Paternity by Nara B. Milanich

Author:Nara B. Milanich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press


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MEANWHILE, THE CHILDREN of the Allied occupation, including biracial ones, had begun to appear. In Naples, a song called the “Tammurriata Nera” narrated the birth of a black child to a white mother. The tammurriata was a genre of southern folk music played to a special drum, the tammorra. The “black” tammurriata was composed by a songwriter who worked in a local hospital and was inspired by a story he had heard: “Sometimes I don’t understand what’s happening / What we see is not to be believed! Unbelievable! / A black baby is born.” The song was released in 1946, just as the court in Pisa was debating Antonio Cipolli’s paternity.15

Italy had historical experience with biracial people as a result of its colonial exploits in east Africa. First a liberal government and then the Fascist one had promulgated laws and policies regulating interracial sex and the citizenship status of Afro-Italian children.16 But the children of empire were born of relationships between Italian men and African women, and for the most part they remained in distant colonial possessions. Occupation children, in contrast, were born of interracial sex of a variety Italians regarded as far more disturbing, between Italian women and nonwhite soldiers, and they appeared not in faraway Africa but right there in the bombed-out rubble of Italy’s own communities.

As the upheaval and desperation of war and occupation subsided, the children of these unions became a conspicuous reminder of the traumas of wartime and the ambiguous gifts of liberation. No reliable census was ever taken of Italian occupation children generally or biracial ones in particular, and different sources gave wildly diverging figures, ranging from one hundred to 11,000.17 Whatever the actual numbers, the popular, scientific, and political attention they inspired far exceeded their numbers. “These little innocents, the color of caffe-latte” were at once objects of paternalism and symbols of degradation.18 A Constitutional Assembly delegate who was also a left-wing medical doctor lamented that “this Italo-Black color on the cheeks of these children represents the Patria’s sense of abjection; and we all feel … an anguished sense of responsibility for them.” But he went on to note that mixed-race people were constitutionally weak and “don’t better the human type.”19 A diffuse sense of charity easily coexisted with racist beliefs and eugenic sensibilities.

While some biracial occupation children remained with their mothers, the social opprobrium heaped on these women meant that many were unwilling or unable to keep them. It was not just the children’s racial status that was problematic but their natal status as well: their color immediately marked them as illegitimate. Italian society had long stigmatized extramarital sex and the children born of it. In the nineteenth century, a massive system of orphanages received illegitimate children who were systematically and often coercively removed from their mothers. At its height, some 39,000 children a year were entering these institutions.20 Such practices formed the backdrop for policies toward occupation children, many of whom wound up in church-run orphanages.

Institutionalization was also a metaphor for the children’s relationship to the nation.



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