Kinship

In 2005 Brown University anthropologist Lina Fruzzetti unexpectedly hears from two unknown Italian women, her cousins. Shortly thereafter she interviews her visiting mother. Lina’s father, an Italian official in colonial Eritrea, died when Lina was three. Previously he had a wife and daughter in Carrara, Italy, since deceased. Although Lina goes to Italy to meet her relatives, the film is not an exercise in “finding your roots” but rather is a “life history document”---Lina seeks to understand Italian-Eritrean colonialism. Footage goes back and forth. In Providence, Lina’s mother explains that, widowed, she went to Sudan to work and prosper, placing Lina to board in a Catholic school. Lina finds more relatives, including a nephew and his wife in faraway Barcelona. Experts explain how her father’s Carrara, once an epicenter of Anarchism, supported fascist military adventures. “Repatriated” mixed-race Eritreans discuss Italy and racism. In Eritrea she interviews her mother at home, then maternal kin. She tours Asmara, the Italian colonial capital, hearing reminiscences of Italian rule. The film’s denouement is Lina’s mother’s spectacular funeral. All of Lina’s interviewees are ambivalent. They neither condemn nor exonerate Italy’s Eritrean imperialist adventures.  Although Lina’s Catholic schooling enabled her spectacular path to respected US academic, she interviews no nuns or priests. This reviewer posits that since 476 AD Rome has had no empire, but the papacy revived an ecclesiastical empire. The Ethiopian College inside the Vatican figures in a recent study of homosexuality in the Vatican. Its author concludes that while hardliners fulminate against homosexuality, the rank and file tolerate it, as long as no masks are publicly removed. These conclusions mirror Lina’s about the Eritrean colonial adventure. Finally, contemplating kinship rituals of pilgrimage and reunions, we conclude that Lina’s mother’s grave constitutes a shrine that may spiritually enrich future pilgrims from her bloodline, while their reunions with Italian kin may resemble a Protestant model: the pilgrim’s journey to meet Italian kin validates solid status already achieved as a member of the educated international elite.