‘Io che ho visto’. L’orrore delle foibe tra testimonianza e racconto

Abstract

The essay focuses on some characters of the narrative of testimony, a deliberately generic term, which embraces a very wide and varied range of textual forms (from autobiographical stories to novels to interviews, to real testimonies, up to stories of any life), and is distinguished by a constant hybridization of scripts and genres. It is a very widespread narrative in the contemporary panorama of self writings, which represents a specific declination of the autobiographical form. These are testimonial texts in various ways, which tend to shift the individual experience against the background of a wider reality, which is generally the highly traumatic memory of a conflict. Within these terms, the essay proposes to the attention two examples of testimonial narrative: these are two posthumous testimonies that tell the horror of the sinkholes, staying halfway between testimony and story.