A Cold Breath of Wind: The Storm as Archipelagic Epistemology in the Horn of Africa

Abstract The Horn of Africa, located on the western edge of the Indian Ocean, is a zone of extreme weather. Often figuring within discourses of geopolitical fragmentation and environmental disaster, the Horn is also home to rich literary traditions that bear witness to its long history as a site of cultural exchange and imperial ambition. This article presents a close reading of Igabia Scego's Italian-language novel Adua (2015), arguing that a localized iteration of the Indian Ocean monsoon, the rainstorm, organizes the novel's narrative, structure, and epistemology. This “storm form” embedded in the novel is a mode of archipelagic thinking that indexes situated African environmental epistemes and the climatological and embodied effects of empire while dispelling reductive or romanticized representations. As an alternate mode of organizing spatiotemporal relations and a method of inquiry into them, the storm is a situated Horn of Africa contribution to the theorization of the Indian Ocean as monsoonal archipelago.