happynew year frommotherrome and the beauty of immigration/ diversity

[corporatewhore]

Dear Friends
Happy New Year!
I want to tell you all about the place where I am living here in Italy. My
daughter Amelia is living here with me now while she is convalescing. It may
sound like I am complaining at first but don’t be discouraged. I’m just setting
the stage. A couple of years ago I bought this small apartment next door to my
youngest daughter, Emma, the one who is doing film making. They were two
sides of a large relatively inexpensive apartment in the part of Rome called
Piazza Vittorio. I thought while I wasn’t here I’d rent it to tourists but in
fact I have been here almost all of 2003. The apartment was inexpensive because
a big indoor market was moving in just below our windows. In fact it moved in
just before we did. The market is very noisy and messy and at night huge noisy
trucks come by to pick up the garbage and clean the streets. Then at 4:30
a.m. more noisy trucks come to begin to deliver the meat and produce. There is
traffic all day and much of the night with lots of yelling and honking, car
alarms going off etc. The Rome train station is on the other side of the market.
Fortunately there are a couple of big trees still remaining between me and
the station, which I can see from my wndow, and lots of sky. As somebody who
loves nature I feel pretty out of place in this urban landscape
Immigrants from everywhere have moved in here and have basically taken
over this part of Rome. Below our apartment are several shops where people can
make telephone calls to their home countries cheap, so people from everywhere
come here. There are also grocery shops run by Middle Easterners and Pakistanis,
and lots of clothes shops run by Chinese. There are a couple of Indian
restaurants and Indian video stores with their drammatic romantic posters on
display. Add to this mix lots of immigrants from Eastern Europe, quite a few from
Africa and some from South America and the Philippines. Very few Italian shops
remain around here. The market is mostly Italian though there are some Muslim
butchers, and booths with spices and canned food coming from everywhere, as
well as of course marvellous Italian fresh vegetables and fruit and fish. There
are usually crowds of mostly Middle Eastern men standing around on the
sidewalks in front of the telephone-call stores, passionately discussing something
in Arabic or just hanging out. There are rarely any women among them. It is a
little scary to try to get through the crowd of men yet they usually politely
let me pass when they see I am an older woman.
The street is dirty with paper, cigarettes, broken bottles and all kinds
of waste. Sometimes there are drug traffickers and sellers of stolen goods
among the crowd. Fortunately these men are mostly Muslim so they don’t drink
alcohol as the situation would be made much worse if they were drinking. There are
a few Italian alcoholic street people though who sit on the sidewalk and
talk to themselves or beg or curse the passersby. People from many other places
too hang out on the sidewalk near the phone stores or go shopping in the
market.
One day I was walking past a bar - they sell coffee and sandwiches as
well as alcohol - just here under my house. Its called the Alpha and Omega Bar
and is run by an Asian family. I heard a commotion and saw about 20 men pulling
at one of the Italian drunk homeless men who was sitting on the floor of the
bar. I went in and said “Don’t hurt him. He’s just a poor old man.” They let
him go and he started cursing. They stood around in a circle laughing at him.”
And don’t laugh either” I said. He got up I said to him (unrealistically)in
Italian. “Go away , go home”. He said “Lady the only home I have now is
paradise” He started beating on a car. “Stop, stop’ I said. They were trying to
make him stop too. “We are not going to hurt him, don’t worry” one of the men
said to me. I finally realized they were trying to solve the problem of him
sitting on the floor of the bar the best they could. It just looked violent
because there were so many men and he was so ‘defenseless’. It reminded me of a
group of young men in a village dealing with something.
The situation is definitely chaotic in lots of ways but there is also a
high sense of internationalism and civility (even a kind of deep politeness -
doesn't 'polite'come from the same root as 'polis' and 'politics'?), a
different world forming, more of a melting pot I think than ever there was in the US
and more democratic. So many languages and cultures are coming together here in
a way which is actually working. Every once in a while there are fights among
the immigrants but they do not end in disaster as far as I can tell. There is
some racism in Italy and now there is a fascist premier, Berlusconi, but
Rome at its best is actually a city of live and let live, the great Mother who
has accepted people from everywhere for centuries.
I think this place may be actually kind of a cutting edge, the top of a
mountain, a place where a new world is being born, a new Rome that is not an
empire. All these different languages yet everyone can speak to everyone else
in Italian that they have had to learn to live in their new country.
Here’s just a little everyday glimpse from yesterday afternoon.
While I was out walking I happened to go into a small grocery store where I
hadn’t been before, attracted by the name, Green Market. As I went in I saw it
was another Italian store that was now owned or at least operated by
immigrants. There was a middle aged African man behind the counter talking to four
large male friends in I guess an African language, with a few words interspersed
in English. I couldn’t see them too well as I was walking around looking at
what there was for sale. After they left a couple of young South American women
came in and in English asked the owner to come to a party they were having. “I
don’t know if I will be able to” he said “But thank you for asking me. Even
if I can’t come its just as if I were there.” The young women left and I went
up to pay for the few things I was buying. I always speak Italian so as not to
have to appear too much a foreigner myself. “Tanti Auguri, Signora” he said
to me, wishing me happy New Year with a Roman accent and in a Roman way. As I
walked home I tried to notice all the different nationalities of people I saw
but there were too many. A few I noticed among the crowd were a sort of
ferocious looking Asian man; he looked like a movie pirate; an African man with a
suitcase, perhaps just arriving; a darling little Chinese girl laughing with a
friend in front of a store, her hair in doggy tails sticking straight out on
either side. As I came back into our apartment building a woman who lives
here, I think she’s from Somalia, was walking down the stairs. She’s heavy set,
with a long dress, a veil over her hair, and a beautiful cheerful smiling
face. “Buona sera, Signora”,we said to each other, “Buona sera, Signora”.
I realize now that I am so lucky and so blessed to be living in such a
place, and I am learning a lot. I was just thinking about it. How did I make
the decision to come here? We knew it would be chaotic. Emma and I were
thinking about it and I said "why don't you go there at nght and see what its like"?
The next day I asked her what she saw and she told me she and her boyfriend
had gone around midnight had seen a bus that had gotten stuck. All the
passengers had gotten off- they were mostly 'extracommunitari' - people from outside
the European community- and moved the bus. I thought that augured well, so I
said "ok"..
There is the idea that is fairly commonly used now as a metaphor to
describe social change, that the caterpillar disintegrates within the cocoon and
that then new spots of organization of the new body of the butterfly arise in
what used to be the caterpillar. Maybe this is one of those spots where the old
society has disintegrated and the new is beginning to organize itself. Maybe I
would say it is gifts that arise around the market, in spite of its bad
aspects, a new positive level, the creation of the better world right here in this
complex place and you can already see it happening in spite of everything.
(Don’t worry, I’m not saying I think exchange is good, but that gifts arise
anyway)
So I am wishing you all a Happy New Year. I am staying at home as usual.
The Italians have a saying though - what you do on New Year’s you will be
doing all year long. So for that reason and because i would like to see you I’ll
imagine all of you with me and say like the man in the store : “even if we
can’t be together it will be just as if you were here.”
Tanti Auguri for 2004,
Love
Gen