GENERATION 1 (ENG)

I'm italian . I'm black (yes you can say this it is not an insult)

I think it's understood by all at thispoint, I'm a woman.

The Trinity that defines me is quite characteristic!

Today I live, work and have started a family in France, and often people give me compassionate eyes when I reveal my country of birth "Oh, Italians are so racist!" - so talk the champions of chauvinism - and strut about their avant-garde society, Queen of Welcoming and Integration (yuck), home of Human Rights, Nobel Prize for diversity.

Of course all this is told to me after they awkwardly try to hide the surprise about my nationality.

That goes for polite people, otherwise there are all those morons who look at me in consternation, insist on asking me where I really come from, or give me a sarcastic smile "yeah, right ..." .

I don't want to defend racism or justify it, but I had the need to analyze and understand it so that I could endure it (before), attack and dismantle everyday (now that I am so mature and wise ).

Italy is late. 

African immigration - especially from sub-Saharan Africa- is an extremely recent phenomenon and reduced compared to other European countries.

Italy does not have the experience of the great colonial empires (I wouldn't say ex-colonial, no. Colonialism in my opinion is not over, it just got a facelift, maybe changed methods , but that's another subject).

Until a little over 50 years ago Italians were the immigrants, the ones nobody wanted and who were mistreated by everyone.

It was a time when discrimination was not only accepted but socially encouraged: the infamous “No Irish, no Jewish, no Italians” signs in Belgium, the derogatory "rital" in France, the prejudices that referred to Italians as Mafia, certainly dishonest, arrived to steal work, rape women, corrupt local customs, impose their food by infesting entire neighborhoods with their Mediterranean flavors and scents.

Does that remind you of anything?

We are perhaps all a little too careless, historical memory didn't want to keep this trauma and so here it is, everything is repeating itself, the mistreated are now mistreating in a perverse generational vendetta.

My father often told me about the surprised, curious, sometimes frightened looks he received from people when he had just arrived in Italy.

He has even been stopped in the street by fascinated or terrified children; they picked his arm, touched his hair, scratched his skin - horror! - overwhelmed by its color so unusual, that in the collective imagination of a small provincial italian town of the '70s could only be located in the lost jungle of Africa, in exotic Indian megalopolis or even worse, referred at the idea of dirt, something almost animal.

With such a violent and disrespectful gesture they expected to have black on their hands as if beneath all the darkness there was a white man who was desperately waiting to be washed and brought back to civility.

I grew up with a mantra imposed by the rather aggressive pedagogy of my parents; it repeated over and over every day in a corner of my brain:

“During your life you will always experience more obstacles than others as you are a woman, a black woman in a world where being woman and black is a problem”.

How encouraging.

For years, I saw the world as a series of walls to be climbed, obstacles to be crossed, full of people who would judge me on sight, without taking a minute to think about the person behind the skin.

In an often contradictory speech my parents repeated to me that I had to be proud of my body while being ashamed, my appearance was to be curated but also to hide; I had to strut about my origins while remaining discreet.

I want to be clear: I know that being a parent is not easy.

Mine did the best they could with what they had - certainly the psychological and physical violence could easily have been avoided - strong of a historical trauma that I believe to be obvious to everyone (colonization, Slavery. ..) they were brought up in suspicion of the Unknown, the French, the American, the White Man.

They were educated in the light of Allah, the blind and solemn love of the Ancestors, the unconditional respect of the Parents.

They cultivated self-sacrifice for the well-being of the Family.

They couldn't know what it meant to have children in a country, a continent, a culture, a language, a color, a religion, a people, a unit, different from what they had always known.

Our parents live in a country that constantly reminds them that they do not belong and that they are not at home. It does not matter the decades that have passed since their arrival, the efforts made to learn a new language, their participation to the economy and cultural enrichment.

Unfortunately, they often spend a lifetime feeling like they are in the wrong place.

By wanting to protect us, in their education this feeling was transmitted: even being born here, we are also not at home and never will be.

I am one of those who many - too much in my personal opinion - call the first generation of immigrants. A category that should not exist since this terminology is violent and carries with it exclusion for us and negation for others.

I am not an immigrant in Italy. 

It's my home.

The color of my skin, the shape of my eyes, the structure of my hair don't make me a stranger.

I was born here.

I grew up here. 

It’s normal for me to speak the language perfectly, to know the culture, the gastronomy, the history, the dialects, the music.

What's not normal is that I constantly have to justify my being Italian with my compatriots and white foreigners, all day long.

I'm italian. I'm black.

Get over it.