I had never heard anyone hiss like that, and an emotion shone in their eyes that, as an adult, I would have defined as pure contempt.
From my mother’s reply I understood that those words had to do with the color of our skin. We hadn’t done anything wrong and every time we used public transportation my parents made sure to tell me to keep my hands in place and clearly visible, far from the purses of old ladies, or else who knows what they might think or say.
We hadn’t touched them or bumped against them, and yet they were there staring at us with that ugly sneer, strengthened by a silent solidarity from the other passengers.
I believe that our only fault was that we existed.
I had seen myself in the mirror many times but only that day, at six years old, did I truly understand what it meant to be a Black person in the eyes of some people. Not that I didn’t know that I was Black, but before then I had never imagined that this could represent a problem.
Moreover, at the playground and at preschool nobody had ever played the race card in order not to play with me, and on some afternoons, when I went with my mom to run errands, well-perfumed and well-dressed ladies would bend down to caress my thick, curly hair and tell me, “what a beautiful little girl.”
In those years I often felt wrong because those unknown hands on me provoked annoyance, but I was a good little girl—as I had been raised—and I would smile and thank them.
And yet, suddenly, that gaze.
Several weeks later, at school, during recess, a group from my class was playing spin the bottle. The bottle had just finished spinning and it was pointing at Daniele. I got closer to them, curious, and sat down on the ground, but not too close so that I wouldn’t bother them. Suddenly, Giulia and Nausicaa, the most beautiful girls in the class, asked Daniele, “truth or dare?” He chose dare. It wasn’t the first time that they played truth or dare, but I had never been invited to take part in it, so I usually limited myself to observing from afar.
The two girls, after a brief consultation with lots of elbowing and laughing, told Daniele: “Kiss her, if you’re brave enough,” pointing towards me with their chins.
I didn’t have enough time to realize what was about to happen, but Daniele moved away from the group by just a few centimeters, didn’t even stand up, and when he was sufficiently close he rapidly grazed my lips. His relaxed gaze and his usual way of doing things as if he didn’t care at all. A half second later, he had already returned to his spot.
Around us, a general shock as shown by suddenly horrified faces.
I knew that they would make him pay for this for weeks and that he would become the subject of mean jokes for having dared to do the unthinkable. I wasn’t wrong.
For weeks, we were welcomed by taunting giggles and unrepeatable words that associated my color to being an ugly little girl; I was tormented in the school bathrooms for months, and those walls remained soaked with my tears and with that rhyme they would sing: “Daniele kissed the negretta, lalalalala.”
Years later, this is still the best and worst memory of my childhood.
Despite everything, in elementary school I tried daily to fill that void of the desire of normality with kindness and sweetness, but it was never enough. I desperately wanted to feel like all the other little girls; I dreamed of having their straight hair, their clear skin tone, and their gracious marching that made them visible, but equal to everyone else. Without being strange, basically.
And that was how they felt and how I saw them when they sat at their desks in the corner of the class and played with Polly Pocket, laughing as they threw back their heads, making their oh-so-perfect hairdos vibrate, bright and soft.
Instead, I had uncountable curly hairs, dark skin, an enthusiastic stride, but I was also full of questions and fears. I always occupied a greater space than what I wished. I was visible to them, but not as a girl their own age, more like a spatter in their straight lines.
With this awareness, one afternoon as I was doing my homework at my desk, I had an idea that I thought would finally resolve the problem of my non querida presencia. So I climbed onto a chair and, in a precarious balance on the tip of my toes, I grabbed the Italian language dictionary that my parents had recently bought. I had got it in my head that if I was able to memorize all the words there, then my color would no longer represent an obstacle to my integration and to my playing in their games, and finally I would also be able to have friends.
The first term that was extremely difficult for me to pronounce was asseverazione: “certification, as imposed by the law, of the truth of an event, of a document, of a declaration or of the conformity of the original text to a translation.” It took several weeks of practicing in front of the mirror, trying to avoid pronouncing the z as if it were an s, before I was able to pronounce it with fluency and ease.
On my first report card that year, which has survived all the different moves of my life, the teachers wrote: “The child at times expresses herself with terms that are difficult even for us.” Actually, in hindsight, my strange language had succeeded in making me receive more attention, and, if possible, this made the daily teasing even worse.
First generation, born in Rome to foreign parents, I realized only as an adult that I had grown up with the idea of a presumed superiority of the white race. After all, the words that my Portuguese great-great-grandfather pronounced one hundred years ago were chiseled in me in clear letters: “You are a race mixed with shit.”
And so it is.
And if as a little girl the problem was my almost total exclusion from social activities, from games and most birthday parties, growing up things didn’t get any better.
My life as a teenager, and then as an adult, always got more complex, just like the wounds in my soul. All those judging gazes on me, ready to express their opinions on my social status and on how I was supposed to feel in certain situations expanded the wound, which had now become a vortex, causing me to lose the true perception of myself and a privacy that I thought I was rightly due.
And yet my body was never really mine for many years: hands were always ready to touch my kabelu brabu; voices ready to talk about my sexuality: “Tell the truth, you like it when I take you like this, yeah? In bed, you Africans are like animals.” Voices ready to talk about my upbringing: “Your parents raised you like an Italian, good job!”
And then Mom, your caresses and words to protect me, how I hated them for a long time: “My love, listen to me, always behave and study. Show them that even if you’re Black, you’re smart like them.”
How much did we suffer, you and I, when that postal worker screamed at you about how to open a bank account because she was convinced that you didn’t speak the Italian language? I never forgot my hands tight around your coat and the fear that that monster could hurt you.
The tears that I furiously fought back down, on those steps in Piazza Bologna, surprised me about fifteen years later, as I told the story to a friend. There, I understood that the wound was still open.
And then when I loved someone for the first time and one afternoon dared to get angry, to raise my voice, unearthing that voice that I had been asked to hide and that had remained buried within me for a long time. For the first time, I finally felt free to be; but that freedom only lasted a moment.
“You’re a savage, get civilized!” he yelled at me.
I was twenty-six years old and was immediately led back into the cage.
*
It took a lot for me to recognize and put each one of these aggressions into words, especially for me since I belong to a generation that learns from other incredibly young, new Italians the words to describe that uneasiness that we internalize for a long time.
I talked about identity conflict for the first time a few years ago. Admitting, in a place that wasn’t my small room, that I didn’t feel truly Italian nor Cape Verdean, and that I lived in a perennial sense of loss and confusion was unnatural, profoundly painful, but necessary. Because it was true.
During my summer travels to Cape Verde, I was subjected to creole tests to ascertain my Cape Verdeness, but also to questions that proved that I wasn’t too westernized.
And in Italy? Well, for a long time I had to yell loudly inside of myself how much I felt Italian, maybe in an attempt to convince myself of this fact, despite the fact that I had to renew my residence permit for eighteen years, and on that piece of paper it was written that I was “born in Rome.”
And so, what am I?
I am a social fact.
I say Black and you read stereotype.
Your know-it-all and filthy white gaze is posed on me, it judges me, it weighs me and evaluates me based on my color.
Those like me can’t make mistakes or they would be silenced as “the famous resources that Boldrini loves to welcome into her home.” And presumed migration is only good to you when we are good, honest, great workers, and docile.
But have you ever asked yourself who the “immigrant” is? Who are they, what is their face like, what job do they do, what do they like? Nobody knows; the immigrant is not a person, nor an animal, but just a big toolbox where we can place all those things that we don’t know where to put.
I’ve been put in that toolbox many times in my life and a few times have left a trace in my memory more than others.
At the café, one morning, on my way to university:
“Hey, beautiful chocolate girl, do you speak African?”
“No.”
At Tiburtina Station, with a driver who was clearly in the wrong:
“What the fuck are you looking at, you fucking negra?”
“I’ll turn around, sorry.”
At the end of class, a student with a brilliant diplomatic career ahead of her:
“But were you born here, here?” (using her finger to point to the floor underneath her feet).
“Yes.”
“But how is that possible?”
“Oh, I don’t know, on the day of my birth my mom pushed so hard that from Cape Verde I landed at the San Camillo Hospital in Rome.”
A guy I met at an electronic music concert:
“For being African, you sure do have taste that’s a little too European.”
“You think so?”
A woman with whom I had shared forty-five minutes of waiting for the 163 in Piazzale del Verano, just to take it three stops.
“There are too many of you on this bus.”
“Who?”
“You all. Don’t you see how many Black faces there are and how many white faces?”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t notice.”
“Anyways, I didn’t mean you. You speak Italian well.”
A middle-aged woman, who I had just met at a friend’s party.
“Did you really graduate from university?”
“No. I said it just because, to seem cool.”
A friend, in a restaurant, a few birthdays ago:
“I voted for Salvini in the last election.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, I’m sick of all these foreigners that I see around me. They’ve multiplied.”
“But you’re also foreign.”
“Yeah but I meant Africans. Should we order?”
“No.”
“Are you upset?”
“Yes. My mom is Black, or African, as you say. When I hear the representatives of the right speak, I’m struck with the fear that one day someone could hurt her because of her color. So yes, I am upset and I’m not able to not take it personally.”
“What does that have to do with anything? Your mom has lived here for a while, she’s Italian at this point. And so are you, and you’re my friend.”
“I don’t think that we can share any more meals together.”
It’s not easy living as a racialized person and trying to explain it to someone who minimizes what you feel and says that they were joking.
Many times I asked myself if the pain, that emptiness in my stomach, had the right to be taken seriously just for a little joke. But that suffering remained there and instead of passing with time, it insinuated itself into my brain, into my flesh, my limbs, “that person is racist . . . racist . . . racist!”
There, I said it. Racist. A racist gaze. Racist thoughts. Racist gestures.
How do I feel? Better? Hardly.
In order to feel better I would need to see a change and have the certainty that these types of interactions are decreasing as the years go on. But that’s not the case. And so you begin to wonder if the problem isn’t really just the people, but the fabric of this country. My country.
And still you wonder if there will ever be a solution and if I will ever feel at home. And if my children, if I ever have them, will be able to feel at home here.
But I’m not very hopeful.
I’m not very hopeful when I open a newspaper and I read headlines that start like this: “African delinquent…,” as if violence has an ethnic component.
I’m not very hopeful when I turn on the TV and I can’t find an Italian show where the Black character doesn’t say “Me no speak Idaleean, sir” or where a Black actress doesn’t play the role of someone who in the morning is a nurse for the elderly and at night is a prostitute in order to support herself and her family.
In these stories, there is never a foreign person or someone with a foreign background who has a university education or who doesn’t work in humble jobs, but always present is the figure of somebody who saves them, helps them and puts an end to a sure life of hardship.
I’m not very hopeful when I hear the ISTAT data that says that circa 1.5 million Italians don’t have citizenship. About half of these are part of the famous “brain drain” which in the public’s imagination is made up of solely white children forced to leave their homeland.
The majority of the second generations, despite having a degree, are condemned to the same jobs as their parents and to remain in the most marginal social class.
Thirty-five percent of Black women declare that they have been victims of sexual harassment at work.
Foreigners in Italy represent about ten percent of the workforce. Despite this, they are employed in jobs where exploitation is something that happens everyday and risks to their health are very high.
In 2022 there were 1,379 aggressions with a racial motive. One Black woman out of five is a rape survivor.
Discrimination and identity depersonalization don’t only concern racialized people, but society as a whole.
Next time, pay attention to it.
