Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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