THE BODY OF MIGRANTS (Il corpo dei migranti)
By Laura Eduati
The first contact is the smell, and the shame for that smell. "Look at my hands, I feel dirty fingernails and discomfort to bring food to the mouth. We do not wash for days, our clothes stink, the beard grows, we have no soap". These are the words of Hamed, a Tunisian landed in Lampedusa, but could be the words of an African collector in Rosarno, or those of any migrant locked up in the centers for identification and expulsion.
The body of migrants is a living body, a young male body that bypasses the fances of the tent city of Manduria and runs at breakneck speed across the field, chased by cops on horseback like a fox during a hunt. Become a migrant is often a return to bestiality, to the makeshift bedding in the crevices of the rocks, to have the lunch delivered in containers for laundry as it happens in detention centers for foreigners in Malta, without forks.
And with the bestiality come back the stench of unwashed body. "The niggers stink," said one day the mayor of the island Bernardino de Rubeis earning a complaint for racial hatred. Yes, they stink. But they do not want to stink. It 's the smell desired by politics and propaganda: smell them, they are like dogs. Look, they do their outdoor needs like monkeys. It doesn’t matter that there are 4 toilets for 4000 people.
More than twenty thousand Tunisians arrived in Italy almost all males in their early twenties. They come with their best clothes, bootleg T-shirts with designer labels, shoes and comfortable baggy, a mobile phone and an account on Facebook. They are healthy, strong. They are young.
"They steal our women," say the militants of the radical right, referring to their sexual energy and the inability to hold feral instincts. Because they are treated like stray dogs, and as well as stray dogs they are feared: they could rape, assault, do violence, bite.
Their body is frightening because it is manly powerful. It's scary because it resists the barbed wire, nets, to the bars. In recent years, Doctors Without Borders and Doctors Around the World have published a dossier which accused the managers of the centers for identification and expulsion – once Cpt - administering overdoses of anti-anxiety drugs to foreign detainees. In the centre of Restinco (Brindisi) 80% of migrants took benzodiazepines and tranquilizers. In the structure of Ponte Galeria is often found that the Valium was mixed with food to keep prisoners quiet at night and by day, and to prevent escapes or riots. One tablet, and those muscles become inert. Why, however, when the body is awake and kicking the protests began, and countless rebellions in the centers for migrants, mattresses on fire, clashes with police.
The body of migrants is often hurt and the wounds are often self-inflicted injuries. Joy, the girl who first reported a rape by a police officer in Milan Cie, one day she tried to drink the detergent. she wanted to die. In Bologna in recent weeks some Tunisians have sewn their mouths with needle and thread. Or swallow razor blades. Or refuse food. In the very early stages of immigration, when everything is alien, the migrants have only their body and use that to communicate discomfort, impatience and anger. Like Noureddine, the Tunisian peddler in Palermo who light himself on fire to protest the harassment from the local police.
Because the body is dumb, too: the flood of twenty thousand people landed, the single voice is silenced and the label "illegal" or "refugee" by itself to define what they are saying, and what they are saying doesn’t make any interest. They say they don’t want to stay in Italy, but they are roaring voices that we do not code. In Lampedusa would have been sufficed a megaphone to communicate in Arabic by the interpreters, times for meal or the most basic information. It was not done because the animals do not understand the language of humans.
Human bodies become the beasts, the migrants are touched with latex gloves, a mask to protect from contamination. The doctors vainly repeat that migrants are not sick when they land, but they get sick in Italy because of living conditions. In Lampedusa many Tunisians who sleep only protected by a jacket a few days after they cough, they have fever, headache, gastrointestinal infections. Hamed had broken a tooth eating stale bread. The root was visible, and the pain did not make him sleep. He was dizzy. He held his hand over his mouth because he was ashamed of those shabby and dirty teeth.
In the hours of leisure on the pier, hundreds rinsed shirts and jeans to dry on the smashed fences that protect the shore. Restless bodies in the sun, at the beginning embarrassed by the presence of woman journalists and volunteers, but then day after day, more brazen and horny eyes, provocations. The sexual abstinence seems a secondary issue, instead it is also the suffering inflicted on the body of migrants when they are forced to remain away from everyday life.
Lampedusa has become an island of men without women, a place for men only, such as prisons and barracks. In one of dozens of boats that landed one day, a young woman, Tunisian, has become in a short time sexual outlet of the confined migrants, until the police put an end to the market. It also happens in the countryside of Foggia, where at the barracks of the tomato pickers arrive the Nigerian prostitutes forced to satisfy their cravings. Pressed on each other, deprived of freedom and a woman, homosexual relations are becoming frequent. "The Cie are places of absolute sexual promiscuity," provides a policeman on duty at Lampedusa at the centers. They mate like animals, even against nature, is the thought omitted. Because of those is starting to bother any of the functions of those bodies identified as illegal: hunger, sleep, the need for a blanket, the smell, the sexual instinct is made even more unbearable by the youth.
We Europeans are protected by clean clothes, washed daily or almost half aged and barren, refreshed and satisfied our basic needs, we live the encounter with migrants animalized as a real shock. It is the human body to ground zero. It's just that degree zero, very little is told in shame. The shame of stinking, smelly and to bring stained jeans, a fire on a hill to cook the fish. The message the media is that of an avalanche of wild bodies, of males by the muscles ready for the violence, huge appetites, voiceless, males on fire would be happy to tight any other body.
We should only restrict the zoom and observe the attempt to re-humanization. At Ponte Mammolo, in Rome, Romanians lived in some real caves carved into the rock. Their huts were very poor, but inside every thing seemed fresh and clean. In Rosarno a Tunisian guy, an engineer, was asleep in a dirty bed but rebuilt to perfection. In Lampedusa, the Tunisians were striking: "We did not come here just to eat. We are not dogs. "
The novelty of these landings is the mobilization of an entire generation of young males, many university graduates and all familiar with the web, who rightly do not accept their body only dusty, sweaty and hungry. So they escape from animalization, from fences that lokk like pens, from the flock that mutes their words. As you move away from Manduria, like any other place of animalization, the bodies of migrants begin to resemble our own. Washed, domesticated, less spontaneous and less energetic. And they make us less afraid.
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