Growing up as an immigrant child in Italy
How does it feel to grow up in ‘double absence?’
Below is a read-aloud version of the entire article.
Anisa is 32 years old, with long, wood-colored hair and an infectious smile. Today she is a mother, living a quiet life between home, work and family. But when we start talking, a veil of melancholy covers her face, and it is hard not to wonder what lies behind it.
By the time she begins her story, a good hour has already passed. We have taken time to talk about this and that, mixing Italian and Albanian and attracting the attention of the couple sitting at the table next to us, unable to understand the mysterious language we are speaking.
“I was very young when the war started in Prishtina, and the things I remember most vividly are the sounds of planes and bombing,” she says. With each sentence, she pauses for a few seconds to sigh and take a sip of coffee, as if all her power of narration depended on it.
She tells me about vague memories that occasionally resurface, the fear of the bombing, the uncertainty of whether all the family members would still be alive the next day, the lack of electricity and having to eat quietly on the floor with candles lit so as not to attract too much attention.
“Anyone who tells you that they are not afraid when they hear a bombing is probably lying,” she tells me. “It really makes one shudder. We arrived in Italy by boat… I only had one toy and some clothes with me, as we had to travel light. We must have been at sea for at least some days, until the Italian authorities rescued us.”
Anisa’s composure fascinates me. I would like to be strong like that when I talk about when I emigrated to Italy. Instead, my emotions carry me away every time.
She tells me about the curious looks she received from people when she was little, about the questions of her peers — “but did you come on the boat?” — about how the desire to feel at home would lead her to struggle day after day.
“Whether I feel more Albanian or Italian… It’s difficult. I think the craving for labels is the result of a world that does not accept differences and has to categorize. I am Albanian, and I am also Italian,” she said.
She smiles at me; I reciprocate with a grimace. As I drive her home, I ask her what was the most difficult stereotype she had to struggle with. She thinks, silently, for a minute, and then with a slightly anxious look tells me that “probably the stigma of prostitution was the most lacerating and difficult to process.” She continues, recalling that she “once had a boyfriend… he told me ‘my friends warned me about eastern women, they say you only think about money.’”
I felt suffocated. I thought of all the predatory and sexualising looks I had received over the years from men, wondering how many were steeped in racism.
Double absence: not being from there, not being from here
Later that day, I caught up with Ermal, a young Kosovar Roma boy who sells typical Balkan food products at a mobile stall.
“How’s it going?,” I ask in Albanian.
“Good, few people today,” he responds, in a blend of Albanian and Italian.
Most of his customers are us, former immigrants or second generations, who occasionally need the flavors of home.
“For me, it was difficult to integrate… but I suppose it also has to do with the color of my skin,” he says. As we continue talking, the sound of the xhezve lets us know that the coffee is finally ready. Ermal is 27 and was born in Italy, though he comes from a Khorakhane family originally from Kosovo.
With smiling and kind eyes, he looks at me, a little embarrassed as he pours coffee into my cup.
“From an early age I felt I was treated as different, I think it started at school. We foreign children were given different assignments, as if we were… stupid,” he said.
Memory and trauma as a heritage
How is it possible to remember other people’s memories? It’s the pain of others, but somehow it becomes ours, like a testimony of what has happened and should not be forgotten. At least until we find out how to give significance to this heritage.
Comparative literature professor Marianne Hirsch argues that traumatic memories are not limited to just people who lived through traumatic events. Rather, subsequent generations inherit those catastrophic histories through a process mediated by stories, events and items that are passed down in family and cultural lore.
My memory is inextricably linked to Italy, to the great railway stations, to the motorway linking Florence to Bari, where I used to go every summer with my family to catch the ship that would take us back there, to the other side of the Adriatic. I remember clearly the muezzin call to prayer coming from the Et’hem Bey mosque in Tirana, the photo of Enver Hoxha affixed above my grandparents’ bed.
I don’t have anything to remind me of my childhood there; it was stripped from me. All I have left is an old stretched fake passport with a fake name written in it: Anila Dujaka, from Kosovo. It was as if before that passport I had always felt a conflict of identity, a kind of unjustified duality. After seeing myself with a different name, I could not help but realize that this feeling had always been right. In a way, that booklet symbolically represented our mask, the one adopted to cross a border, but at the same time it was a paradigm of the malleable and negotiable identity typical of migrant subjectivities. From that moment on, a part of me never stopped being Anila, a little girl from Kosovo.
For a long time I’ve felt that no one wanted to talk about the suffering, the marginalization, the extreme poverty that so many Albanians in the diaspora endured. It was like a guilt they had to process in silence. I was angry at the silence because I thought that no one had the courage to speak for themselves. It didn’t seem difficult, it just needed someone to start so that others would follow. It was only after a long time that I understood. Silence is sometimes a defense strategy. It plays a historical role. It is a social garment that people wear every day to reconcile the public and private spheres. As I’m writing, I recall an old Arabic proverb: “had speech been made of money, silence would be made of gold.”
Unfortunately, if silence does not find supportive interlocutors capable of capturing it and making it flow into a cultural relevance that can ground processes of collective identification, it remains lost in the void.
Second generations and the healing process
Initially, Anisa’s, Ermal’s and my lives seem different. We went through different studies and life paths. But our paths converged. We grew up in a country that we slowly got used to calling our own. We learned to love its culinary flavors, to appreciate the composure and seriousness of the people, even if we sometimes felt like second-class citizens.
Anisa says, sighing, that her memories of life in Kosovo are vague, fuzzy and often are tied to specific sensations — the smell of jasmine in the park behind her house, the taste of ayran taken for breakfast with byrek. For Ermal, memories are merely the fruit of a deliberate construction, understood as a legacy he received from his parents and which he does not want to undo. One could almost say that memory for the second generation of migrants is constructed in reverse: before the event there is an irrational feeling that takes shape over time and above all thanks to the stories and emotions of those who experienced the traumatic event directly.
“If I think of all that is happening in Italy today, I tell myself that our suffering has been for nothing,” whispers Ermal, and I urge him by saying that this is why we second generations must make ourselves heard, we must tell our stories. Even if Italians don’t want to hear us, even if, more than words, they are screams of sadness and anger.
“Me kismet” — may it be so — he says, and our eyes smile at each other.
About the author:
Paula Tushi is an Albanian-Italian anthropologist and freelance photographer. She holds a BA in anthropology, religions, oriental civilization from University of Bologna and an MA in cultural and social anthropology from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She recently finished a master’s degree in visual journalism at the Irfoss Institute in Padua. She is interested in migration, diaspora and so-called second generations.
