Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
station, the public gardens and the squares. I gathered my interviews in a<br />
public garden in the city’s centre, and in one of the disgraceful campo<br />
nomadi (camps for Gypsies) 1 that exist outside the town.<br />
In the public garden, I, as interviewer, sat with the interviewees on a wooden<br />
double park bench, which had a table separating both sides. All around<br />
us children played, women chatted, men slept, and others, couples, groups,<br />
and individuals who had mostly arrived from outside Italy, congregated. I<br />
had not spent this much time in a public garden since my childhood. These<br />
little clearings of the city are often small, full of concrete, boast very little<br />
grass and only a few trees, and are usually stuck in the middle of a square,<br />
surrounded by cars, streets and traffic. This experience made me begin to<br />
see these places differently: I realized that because of the immigrants who<br />
use them, these spaces have come into a new phase in their existence, and<br />
they are needed. Some reasons for this are cultural responses to the terrible<br />
economic situation in which most of the immigrants live. Not having a<br />
decent home, people meet, eat and socialize in public gardens. They<br />
express the plurality of their cultures and of their daily problems in public<br />
places, and yet they remain “invisible”, like ghosts who materialize only<br />
when associated with “delinquency” and the Italians’ “fears of invasion”.<br />
On one occasion, I was holding an interview in a public garden, and discussing,<br />
with my subject, the war in Kosovo, the forced Diaspora and the<br />
request that he and others like him had made for a house in Florence. There<br />
was a woman in her late sixties sitting nearby, one of the homeless who are<br />
usually seen in public gardens, and she asked if she could ask a question.<br />
“Isn’t it a problem that all these people are coming here asking for support<br />
and there isn’t even enough for us?” she asked. From this point, we<br />
engaged in a serious discussion that left all of us with a lot to think about.<br />
There is no romanticism in this story: public gardens are uncomfortable<br />
places that cannot be frequented in winter, and to have to interrupt an interview<br />
because of the rain is difficult and disappointing. Yet this place in the<br />
city, along with its visitors, can be seen as a metaphor for the “peripheries”<br />
that lie within cities. They bear witness to the existence of people who are<br />
visible, but not seen. These immigrants tell us something about themselves,<br />
the several selves that wander our cities, but also something about<br />
ourselves and our ability to listen, to recognize ourselves in them, and our<br />
willingness to share, for their survival, some of our collective economic<br />
wealth.<br />
Language was fundamental to the encounters in which the narratives were<br />
shaped. None of the interviewers shared a common mother tongue with<br />
any of the interviewees. Some interviews took place in Italian, the language<br />
the interviewee had to learn as part of his/her immigration process,<br />
149