Reaching out to the Other? 'Bora' and the wind of forgiveness

At the end of WWII, the former Italian areas of Istria and Dalmatia were handed over to the then Yugoslavia. After the 1947 Paris peace treaty, approximately 350,000 ethnic Italians left these regions. The massive wave of migration which followed in the years after the treaty has been later referred to as the Istro-Dalmatian exodus. The exodus led to the creation of an aftermath society: the one of the Istrian Italians. But such a community suffered as a result of a further internal division, having been split into the andati (gone), the 350,000 who left after the Paris treaty; and the rimasti (stayed), the few who decided to stay in their hometowns. Through the analysis of Bora, an epistolary novel co-authored by two women belonging to the two communities, this paper examines various aspects of the question of identity presented by this case of border shift. Anna Maria Mori and Nelida Milani challenge the barriers separating the two parties which for decades rejected each other, moved by a mutual sense of betrayal. These letters are the effort at reaching out to the Other, dismantling the high wall erected between the ones who left Istria and Dalmatia and the ones who stayed behind. However, in this arduous process of re-union of the subject, the two writers acknowledge the existence of another, common to both parties, Other: the Other who took their home country away. Mori and Milani face here a long neglected, and until then, still open question. Despite the different processes of becoming undergone by the two writers, Mori and Milani prove that co-existence is achievable through forgiveness. In doing so, they also implicitly open the path towards a wider form of reconciliation: the one still needed among all the inhabitants of a very troubled little piece of land.