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sonia
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« on: March 30, 2007, 09:54:19 AM » |
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Hi to all of my friends of my beloved community of Dahab.
Following our "reading evenings" at the Lighthouse, when I was there, I started to translate in English some of my recent articles to have the possibility to exchange... with some stuff of mine, finally. So here it is (below), nothing that claims to condamn my own culture (as I would not condamn any culture), just its mistakes and its derailments... (the translation is mine so not perfect, and of course in Italian it was and it sounded much better... :-) ).
I wish you a pleasant reading, and send you my sincere hug,
--
Sonia
The colours die - Sonia Serravalli
Dedicated to Ahmed Ali
The area is that of Milan's train station. Just come back from the "Middle East", I observe the dozens of faces with their different colours and their different tones of fear that we all gather under the name of "extracomunitari".
I still have the breath of Sinai on me and the dark eyes of the strong Arabian personalities on my forehead. But here I do not see strength. In this innumerable silent population, that here only learnt not to become familiar with anybody, I see the dejection of emigration and exile, and the lost expression of the one who lost confidence. Something that, in a jarring way, brings a veil of paleness, of opalescent white, on the one who was born with a dark face and obsidian eyes - of which I guess the lost vigour.
I have always been in favour of ethnic and cultural crossings, in whatever field they might take place. But the landscapes I go through today in the streets of Milan (under a sky that, so as our men, seems to lose its true colour in step with the "progress"), I only taste the bitter flavour of our world that unaware went off the road.
It has been only some days since I said goodbye to my friends in Egypt. Their human warmth, their hospitality, that particular way of them to make a family out of a street, to make a home out of any place where somebody needs a help, will not fade from my memory. The jarring between the welcoming and generous attitude they showed me and taught me in their land and the skeptical and evasive looks of the people with their same features here in Milan, produces a sense of cloudy all around me, a fog that limits colours and breath. Paleness, it is paleness what I glimpsed in their looks, even if they are dark and deep-set inside a familiar face of leather. The only recurrent element that sews today's pieces together, popping out of my mind repeatedly in this journey, is the sentence "the colours die".
Walking among them, with the smell of their deserts still in my nostrils, – still feeling more part of them than of my people, even if they cannot imagine it – I observe unarmed, with no chance of cheating myself, the grafting of our worst defects on their heads, the importation of our grossest mistakes inside their arms. It is late - I think.
Of their fierce identities and of those looks, that on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea spring fire and magnetisms, here is left only the spark of surviving and the elemental strength of the stronger against the weaker. I see them idle on a pavement, as if they were trying to remember a name they have lost, or working like slaves, in the 3 x 3 square meters boxes that they have swapped with their coral beaches, in order to chase a number and some paper, in a city with the sky in coma. I wonder if the level of stupidity of the human being does not by chance become deeper in a directly proportional way to that of its technological and scientific development. My look crosses the sad one of an Indian in the middle of the cars and I feel like closing my eyes and catch hold of the images of an island that I, maybe so as he, left behind. I think of the fresh fish, of hotels of wood and lamps of paper, of a world that allows itself to fly away without any worries if the Monsoon blows. But in the meantime, Milan besieges me: in the stores I am under observation because I travel with a heavy rucksack and I might hide the intention of stealing. While on the street I have to stay wary at every step, for the tendency to the bag-snatching for which these streets are popular and for the trams and cars that threatens me from all sides. Above, the sky seems to pant like a fish thrown on the floor and forgotten.
When the Arabian dealer does not welcome me as if I was his sister, I almost feel disappointed. My thought runs to Maghreb, to Egypt, and in the mistrustful and furtive attitude that Arabs have taken on among these streets I almost lose the sense of direction. And it is not over: however much I may take care of myself and preserve the colours of my thoughts out of this gray and agonizing world, I cannot hide to myself the awareness that this is the only image that the non-traveler Italian has of the immigrants. This clot of paleness generated by fear, dismay, homesickness and uprooting mixed with the dream of a Europe that betrays, in its distortion, when - at the cost of everything - you finally get to touch it. And here you have the Arab, the Pakistani, the Bengali, the South American, the Easter European. So as the Italian claims to know him. The same Italian who believes he is living in one of the most advanced societies, and does not even realize that they have taken him the sky away and that even water is no longer drinkable. The capacity of human mind to only see what it wants to see and of telling itself fairy-tales is terrifying. I think back to how many friends of mine on the Red Sea dream about Italy and have been trying for years all ways to reach it, with no success. I would like to stop the world, I would like to tell them: "Stop yourself and look at what you have around, because we broke it...". The one who follows the derailed train, and plus with that dash and eagerness, he himself will derail... But now I would only like to close my eyes and, when I re-open them, find myself again between a Bedouin bar and a fishing-rod in the sea, spinning armlets with the children on the street, in order to give a small contribution to the modesty and simplicity of the world, under a sky of real, true blue.
Sonia Serravalli (Ferrara, Italy / Dahab)
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