Mahmood And How I Became a Stranger In My Country.
On February 9, 2019, something shook the foundations of Italian conservatism: Mahmood won the 69th annual Sanremo Music Festival.
At the same time, I was working as a waitress in my hometown, Perugia, and I was totally unaware of how much this event would have affected my entire life.
But let’s start from the beginning.
The myth of the melting pot.
Back in the old days, when nobody was worried yet about pandemics or nuclear wars, in Italy, boredom took us to reconsider an insignificant political party of racists and misogynists as an actual valid option to rule the country. It’s the case of the far-rightwing League party, which you may recall for the recent loss of the face of its leader, Matteo Salvini, in Poland.
Anyway, three years ago, our country was split by the immigration issue. Old topics like race purity were back in fashion, even though Italy is the last country who can talk about such a thing. After all, it has always been the first landing place for hundreds of cultures throughout European history. The melting pot is such a deep-rooted concept it doesn’t even make sense to find an Italian definition. And you know what other country can boast the same quality? Brazil.
Now, it happens my mother is Brazilian. I grew up not knowing really what a country was because of having parents coming from different states. I couldn’t even distinguish one language from another! When I was little, I had this feeling Portuguese was like an Italian dialect. Indeed my bilingualism gave me a boost in learning languages, but I experienced a kind of alienation in my childhood.
The alienation of being a multicultural baby.
When I started to go to school, the difference between the other children and me became evident. And not only with children but with teachers as well. I can clearly remember two specific episodes from my youth.
The first one: a teacher correctied my Christmas homework. She wanted us to write “Merry Christmas” in every language we knew, and when she saw I had written “Feliz Natal” in Portuguese, she told me it was “Feliz Navidad” instead, which is Spanish. Even though I tried to tell her my mother was from Brazil, she just presumed she was right because she mistakenly knew that Spanish was the official Brazilian language.
That was my first life lesson: not everybody knows some topic as much as you do, but sometimes their position can annihilate yours anyway. The worst part was my teacher believing she was actually teaching me something while I was only feeling robbed of my family identity.
The second one: my classmates laughed at me because I was a friend of Roy. Who was Roy? He was a black boy I used to be in class with, when I was in second grade. That was the moment I put up a barrier between the others and me, one that, in the future, I would not have been able to break down so easily.
But I did not find this wall an impediment to my socialization. On the contrary, I put myself early on the internet. I was looking for somebody I could talk to. Soon I learned how vast and marvelous was the world we live in. Unfortunately, the more I learned about the world, the more I felt different from my context.
It takes all sorts to make a world.
Somehow during high school, I made up the world’s variety I used to know through my family or the internet could also be found in my hometown. It cheered me up profoundly. I became again thirsty for experiences and humanities. I started volunteering and traveling around Italy, Europe, and Brazil, knowing more and more about this beautiful planet launched toward unity and fair civil rights, despite the politics of the conservative parties trying to restrain this social progress.
Life was challenging but also a playground full of opportunities. At least until Mahmood won the Sanremo Music Festival.
It’s embarrassing to even write it down. But after Mahmood’s victory, Italy’s experienced a renewed wave of racism. The social media were on fire about his Egyptian father. Racists begged to throw him back to his homeland, not knowing he was an Italian citizen anyway. Rightwing politicians said they were saddened knowing Sanremo lent itself to sweetening the immigration pill. It was a political victory. It seemed nobody believed Mahmood was simply the best option.
Reality is often disappointing.
And so, during one of my lunch shifts, reality slapped me and reminded me I was not 100% made in Italy, just like Mahmood.
I was serving this table of three white half-aged men, talking about politics and business. Two of them always looked me in the eyes while talking and behaved kindly and gently, but the third one never even thanked me once throughout the lunch course. I was invisible, inexistent.
And then, when I served the espresso, something happened. The man looked me straight in the eyes and rudely asked me “Miss, before coming to Italy, what was your ethnicity?”
As you can tell, this question doesn’t even make any sense. As if it were possible for me to wake up as Asian, caucasian, or African whenever I want to. So I answered the only thing I could answer: “Pardon?”
He snorted at me and said slowly, like I couldn’t understand Italian: “Yeah, well. Where are you born?”
Since I was born in Italy, I candidly answered “Marsciano”, which is a small town not so far from Perugia. With eyes wide open, he dramatically changed his behavior toward me. He suddenly became kind and gentle and apologized for his manners. He even complimented my exotic facial features.
My colleagues laughed hard when they knew it, as they usually treated me as the Brazilian one on the team. But then I understood the implications of that treatment someone dared to reserve me. What if I weren’t born in Italy? I would have been the umpteenth proof of the speech that migrants are invading us and stealing our jobs. For the man, I would have deserved that treatment. He wouldn’t have been wrong for treating me like that. I was horrified by that thought, and I still am.
So I became Mahmood. Class ’92 as I am. With one foreign parent as I have. Judged by the slightest skin shade as I was.
For years I’ve never felt like a stranger in my country. But since Mahmood won Sanremo Music Festival, I almost restarted recreating that social barrier that divides me from the others.
I am so thankful for this feeling. I could remember how is urgent the need for equity and equality and how much we don’t have to underrate racism in all its forms.
It seems we have a long way ahead before tearing down discrimination of all sorts. Even in a humanitarian crisis like the Ukrainian war, we are seeing unspeakable cases of racism. I invite you to read the article “Ukraine refugee crisis exposes racism and contradictions in the definition of human” written by Jo Adetunji for The Conversation UK.
We don’t have to be afraid to look at the elephant in the room. We should fight against the little everyday things such as a simple rude question in a restaurant. So that, in the future, things like leaving apart African refugees while running away from a bombing could never happen again.
And I can only hope that what Mahmood said about our generation is true, and could be one day a turning point.
- It seems that you do not perceive the differences that according to the common feeling your appearance should communicate.
- It is my generation that does not perceive them, for years it has been the reality of our neighborhoods: in the classroom with me in elementary school there were many Chinese and Russian children, many of all races and backgrounds. Perhaps it is the generations before ours who feel the diversity as they grew up in a world where immigrants or the child of mixed couples was an exception.
