i have heard that sicillians are part black, perhaps it is cause sicily and africa are so close? if anyone actually knows anything about this or has any links, please post! thx
Well, a lot of people settled Sicily over the years…Phoenicians, North Africans, Greeks, Romans, Normans, the French, Italians, etc. A large number of different nationalities make up the Sicilian gene pool.
Sicilians, on average, don’t have significantly darker skin than other Mediteranian peoples. Is your question, “Do Sicilians have any sub-Saharan African ancestors?”? The answer to that is, almost certainly some do, just like some English, and some French, and some Germans do. Remember though, for the most part, there wasn’t much European/sub-Sarahan African population exchange until the 1400s. This isn’t to say it didn’t happen…just that it wasn’t common.
I guess I’d ask you to define your terms more…what do you mean by “part black”?
If you go far enough back, all our ancestors were African.
“True Romance”, one of Christian Slater’s finest cinema moments right ahead of “Kuffs”.
I think what this guy is asking is whether or not what was said in True Romance is true.
African and “black” are not necessarily the same. I wouldn’t call Colonel Qaddafi black for instance.
This person I know (an Italian American) has a page on the subject (I would admit its seriously flawed, especially in its reliance on ‘celebrities’ to prove points), but it has links to many others on this topic, including DNA studies.
http://www.geocities.com/racial_myths/
From what I have read, the Northern Italians are more likely to have recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, as a number of slaves were imported to the large cities during the 15th and 16th centuries, when they were under Spanish rule. But then again, the Netherlands, England, and Portugal and Spain also absorbed some African populations around this time.
The True Romance line is true only insomuch as the Arabs/Berbers did indeed conquer, occupy, and at least partially Islamify Sicily for a period of time ( starting in 827, completed by 965, began to loose ground in 1060, completely expelled by 1091 ). But as has been pointed out, they probablty weren’t, by and large, noticeably that much darker than the Sicilians already there.
- Tamerlane
Sicilians like to think that they are part black where it counts,
heh heh heh…
Checkerboard Strangler
(Sicilian ancestry)
Tamerlane’s answer is, as usual when it comes to history, the best and most accurate. Except for a very major error in your dates. It is true that Muslim rule in Sicily was ended under the Normans in the late 11th century. However, Arabs continued to reside in Sicily for more than a century after that. Arab scholars and poets participated in the Norman and Hohenstaufen courts. One of them wrote a geography of the world in Arabic dedicated to the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II. The Norman rulers themselves adopted so much Arab culture—everything except for conversion to Islam— they were called the “baptised sultans.” The Arab poets in the Hohenstaufen court influenced the birth of Italian poetry in the 12th-13th centuries. Petrarca and Dante built upon the achievements of the “Sicilian School,” the first appearance of literary poetry in Italian, which arose from Arabic models. It wasn’t until the early 13th century that the French Angevins took Sicily and expelled the Muslim population.
Then there was the Sicilian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci who got Europeans to start using Arabic numerals.
The film True Romance was not the first to introduce the “Sicililans are black” theme. See Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (a much better movie, anyway). There is a scene in which Spike Lee proves to racist Sicilian John Turturro that he is really black but doesn’t want to admit it.
If you read A History of Islamic Sicily by Aziz Ahmad (Edinburgh University Press, 1975), you will note his analysis of the ethnic mix in that period. In addition to Greeks, Arabs, Berbers, and Persians, there were also black sub-Saharan Africans. This reflected the ethnic mix in Tunisia where the Sicilian Muslims came from. Some of the population in North Africa has always included blacks who had migrated there from further south.
My dad is pure Sicilian, and in the summer when he gets the sun on him, he turns darker than many so-called blacks. But my dad is so-called white. What is “black”? What is “white” after all? Where do you draw the line? You cannot draw the line. Because of this I do not believe “race” is real. A figment of the imagination.
Also, please do not ignore the fact that Sicily was a Carthaginian colony until the Punic Wars. Presumably the same ethnic patterns (Semitic/Berber/sub-Saharan) were at work in that earlier transfer of Africans to Sicily.
Sicily is, geologically, African. It is part of the African plate; the plate boundary between the African and European plates runs through the Strait of Messina. This explains all the earthquakes and volcanos around there.
The OP’s guess about the geographical closeness of Sicily to Africa is right on. There has always been a lot of traffic, commerce, and ethnic interchange between Sicily and Africa since ancient times. At present Sicily is home to a population of Tunisian emigrés. There have been books written on the Arabic words used in the Sicilian dialect. If you go to Sicily you will see more Arab-looking faces than any other kind, but there is a rich ethnic mix there; lots of other Sicilians are blond or red-haired and light-skinned because of their Viking ancestors.
There have been several recent “race classification” threads on the SDMB. I am Sicilian and Italian on my mother’s side; I don’t appear even remotely “Black”. I have met many Italians and Sicilians much darker than myself who don’t appear “Black” either, but could easily pass for North African or Arab. My Dad is Slovak and Norwegian, but because of his Italian-sounding name, his dark complexion, and because he lives among many Italians in New York City, everyone thinks he’s Italian. The truth is that, like virtually everything else, race is a continuum. Personally I think there are easily a dozen or so races in the world (which of course blend together where they meet geographically). I regard everyone who lives around the Mediterranean Sea as the same race, and, except for religion (which changes every thousand years or so anyway), more or less the same culture as well.
A Sicilian is more “African” than, say, a Finn, or a Korean, or a Native Australian. Does that make Sicilians “part black”? I guess so, as much as a Berber or an Arab or a Greek could be considered “part black”. I suppose the simple answer to the OP is “Yes”.
The scene in True Romance was one of the greatest dialogues in a movie I’ve ever witnessed.
Walken’s character mentions that there are signs that men and women give when they are not telling the truth. The question is where is your son?
Hopper’s character says that if you know whether I’m lying to you, and that im stating a fact, how could you tell whether i’m lying to you. The whole bit about the Sicilians and the Moors was just insult to injury. Hopper knew he was going to die.
That scene was also almost totally improv on Dennis Hopper’s part. (He was told to “goad him” by the director, and this is what Hopper came up with in rehearsal.)
> This was very informative. And yet, though I’m sure you’ve read that the
> Saracens were out of power after 1091 thanks to the Normans, much later in
> 1223 Frederick II deported those Muslims in Sicily that remained to Lucera
> on mainland Italy. Why the disparity?
>From Aziz Ahmad’s A History of Islamic Sicily, Epilogue, page 106:
“The aim of the Angevin policy, however, was the Christianisation of the
Muslims of Lucera, first through persuasion and some coercion, and
finally compulsion. The Muslims who were converted to Christianity were
given positions of trust, even though they retained to some extent their
Arab identity…Finally the Arab colony of Lucera was destroyed by the
order of Charles II of Anjou between 15 and 24 August 1300. The muslims
of Lucera were forcibly converted to Christianity; and the Islamic
presence in Sicily and Italy ceased to exist completely.”
Thanks for the correction Jomo Mojo, though what I meant by expulsion, was more extinguished as an independent political force. Bad choice of words :).
I would further add to your comments, that a good deal of local autonomy was maintained for awhile by Muslim communities and that some Muslims were able to rise high in the Norman government. Ibn Zubayr who visited the island in 1185 was astonished by the degree of freedom of worship and political standing that some local Muslims possesed. To some extent the reverse had been true during the period of Muslim rule as well - Sicily was known in the Muslim world for being of suspect orthodoxy and one zealous Fatimid visitor towards the end of that period commented, presumably with some disgust, on how the country inhabitants had so frequently intermarried with local Christians, that their culture and language was distinctly compromised.
Still, this tolerance and autonomy was always somewhat unsteady and very uneven ( the lot of Muslim peasants varied widely and was in some areas pretty rotten, with many enserfed ) and seems to have already been on the wane well before the Angevins set foot on the island. Apparently by the 1190’s serious unrest among squeezed Muslim populations was becoming common in the countryside and as you noted it was the Hohenstaufen Frederik II that began the first deportations.
Since I now have to go out and buy the reference you cited, I’ll return the favor :D.
The Norman Kingdom of Sicily by Donald Matthew ( 1992, Cambridge University Press ). A nice, solid synthesis.
- Tamerlane
That’s surprising to me, since it fits almost exactly in the pattern of Tarantino’s other monologues he’s written (take the Madonna rant in Reservoir Dogs).