Coming back to Milan, Italy where I was born and raised, is always quite traumatic at first. Don’t get me wrong, I love my city with all of its contradictions, but I’ve lived in London for now over 6 years and ‘ethnically’ speaking I’m Sinhalese, so I’v
e never felt fully at ease in Milan. Also, to be honest, there’s always something that reminds me of my ‘Otherness’ whenever I come back. It might be certain news on the TV, or even a comment heard while in the supermarket or a joke.
As it happened the last time I came back to Milan a friend invited me to her place for dinner (one of the very few remaining friends in my hometown). We were joined by a friend of hers who I had seen once before. All in all, I thought she was delightful: for over 2 hours we talked about relationships, friendships, family, gossiped a bit and bonded quite quickly. As it was getting late, we began cleaning up the table and my friend asked me if I had finally succeeded in finding a room to stay during the following 5 months of research in Milan (you can find more about my research here). As we talked about a hypothetical house which I really liked in Isola-Maciachini (an up and coming area in the Northern part of the city) but was not available anymore, the other girl replied: “It’s better off this way. Maciachini is a brutta zona (bad area). It’s full of extracomunitar!”.
Now.. Extracomunitari technically means immigrants in Italy who originally come from outside the EU, but it’s widely used as a derogatory term that groups all the ‘shady’ immigrants.
The ‘infamous’ Maciachini station
With that in mind, in that moment, I first looked at myself wondering if my primary extracomunitaria marker, a.k.a. my skin, had magically changed colour, which fortunately it hadn’t! I then looked at her wondering if her remark was due to the fact that she wanted to console me for not getting the house or for the fact that to her eyes I am no foreigner/extracomunitaria. I was indeed born and raised in Italy, also I think I speak fluent Italian, but I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t technically considered Italian for 18 years, as the law in the country requires. This has led to several identity crises and even now I don’t feel particularly comfortable saying that I’m Italian. So when someone mocks/insults or misuses the word extracomunitario/a I tend to take it quite personally.
Again that girl was well-learned, university educated, seems really smart and I’m sure she isn’t completely racist, but in that tiny moment she actually fell into that category just by following the general normative belief/view associated with the word extracomunitari. And the ironic thing is, I bet she has never talked with the extracomunitari living in Maciachini.
Yes, Maciachini is known to be dangerous (honestly what place isn’t? ) but the fact that she stressed that the presence of extracomunitari was the primary cause for the areas unsafeness, implicitely implying that they are all criminals, is all in all quite worrying. It signals to a bigger issue in Italy, as well as many other places in the world.
An ‘extracomunitari shop’
The worst part was that I didn’t react to her remark and instead fell silent while I was boiling inside. It’s such a given in Italy to use extracomunitari to justify all the wrong things going on in the country, as it happens in most places around the world. Instances like this take place every time I come back to Milan (I’m not exaggerating) and sadly the ‘offenders’ are often friends. And I feel that it has become so common to hear this type of discrimination that I myself seem to brush it off when it happens to me. Also because most times some Italians discriminate ‘good-humouredly’, or at least they think so.
Kossi Komla Ebri calls them ‘Imbarazzismi’ (word pun which plays with the equivalent Italian words Imbarazzanti Razzismi, embarrassing racisms), which he explains are a type of racist insults masked as jokes, bad ones it should be stressed, funny slurs used to solely render the interlocutor in the conversation a ‘pacioccone spiritoso’ one would say in Italian, a humorous easy-going person. It should be stressed that, yes of course, this happens in other countries as well, however in Italy this seems to be the norm and it’s largely unquestioned and uncensored even on TV.
Because of my dual culture, nationalities and overall transnational life all of this has always been quite tricky to handle throughout the years and especially now as I’m studying and researching on these issues.
Although I believe my identities to be more balanced now, it’s a constant struggle. I’ve been called a ‘coconut’ at least four times this year only, for being brown on the outside and white in the inside. I wish it were this simple! Although I find this idiom interesting and quite funny, I don’t feel it fully represents me. Also, as my Indian PhD colleague says: “Aren’t we all a bit ‘white’ inside anyways?”.
For this reason, I’ve decided to write this blog, primarily to share how I feel about my own experience as a transnational child. So this blog will include stories from my own personal life, peculiar past events, or reflections for the days/years to come and will be a platform to let out my thoughts in a non-academic way. I’ll try to apply my knowledge around issues of diversity, transnationalism, globalisation, diaspora, living (especially living in this complicated world).
My story is one of diasporas: from Sri Lanka to Italy and Italy to London. I hope you will enjoy reading this blog in the months to come as I unveil this complicated yet wonderful transnational journey.
A Transnational Child 