Italy-Brazil-Mexico
Hi,
My name is Ezio and I was born in Trieste, Italy; my parents are Italians but because of my father’s job I grew up outside Italy.
When I was five we went to Brazil where we stayed for 5 and 1/2 years; during the first four years we lived in Rio de Janeiro, while during the last one-and-a-half year we lived in Belo Horizonte which is an inland city unlike Rio that’s on the coast. In both places I went to the Italian school for expatriates, but I made stronger friendships and ties with brazilian peers.
We then briefly returned to Italy for 7 months, where we stayed in a small fishermen town in the North of Italy, where all my relatives live: Marano Lagunare. During that time my parents actually sent me to school in a nearby country-side town called Carlino. They did so because in Carlino the foreign language taught was English, while in Marano it was German: the idea was that since we would soon move again, English was preferable. So everyday (including Saturdays since in Italy they go to school on Saturdays too!) I’d go to Carlino in the morning and back to Marano in the afternoon. I never managed to make strong friendships with Carlino kids, nor with Marano kids.
We then moved to Mexico, specifically Mexico City; I stayed there for about 6 and 1/2 years. During the first two years I attended a Mexican School, while in the last four years I attended a British International School called Greengates School, where I took the IB (anyone else IB?). It was the best time of my life! I made very strong friendships and ties with Mexican peers and with peers from all over the world. As graduation approached, I realised we would never meet again as everybody was either returning to their home country or to other places all over the globe to attend university. Yet the future seemed bright.
So I returned to Italy to study Electronic Engineering at the University Of Trieste. And that’s basically when my life ended… it was a disaster from all points of view. I cannot find just a few sentences to describe and explain it all: there are so many aspects to it, all tied together and linked in so many ways. I can, however, find one word about the feeling that embraces it all: pain. Lot’s of it.
Pain because you sincerely try to join the students and be part of them, but they seem impenetrable and their groups seem formed back at the beginning of time so you just don’t fit in. Pain because whenever you speak with them you don’t undersant the point of the conversations, and when the conversations are over and you say good-bye and you are on your own, you just want to shout and run away from such incomprehensible exchanges of emptiness. Pain because good-meaning people that genuinely want to be helpful, tell you to move on and leave the past to the past; so you do try hard because it seems logic and rational and you trust them… but it just doesn’t work, and you try time and again, and still you think you’ve only got to blame yourself for that. Pain because time and again you try to speak what you think and feel, and invariably it gets misinterpreted with all sort of reactions by the people on the other side; and then you start desperately augmenting your thought and explaining why it is not as they say, but their replies are tightly sealed and they already know everything and they already understand everything and that’s it… and so you go away knowing that their distorted picture of you is totally unrelated to you, and you keep repeating it to yourself but can’t help feeling it’s unfair. And so on…
Sorry folks for writing this last paragraph, but I never believed there would be a person that could understand what was like living during the past years, when I returned to my “home” country. I then found your site and after reading for the past few days some of your posts, I felt I was no longer alone and that maybe you could understand it.
Cheers,
Ezio
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Oh and Maira, I agree with you about keeping some values while getting rid of other so you don’t have to feel obligated to be 100 % mono-national individual (if there is such a word!)
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May 5th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Hi!
Yes, Mairabay, you are very much right in that ‘oh no! they will know my secret identity!’, which I too felt
,together with that fear of somehow making them resent for something I mentioned.
I felt very strange about it. Not that I’ve got something to hide, but at the same time I always had a distinct perception of being in a sort of theater, where everyone was re-hearsing a part. It was so neatly clear, that I gave it a name: I call it the ‘Actor feeling’.
At its worst, it would pop up during those conversations I mentioned where I just wanted to run away from… the exchages of emptiness I wrote about earlier on. Anyway, it has subsided a lot now.
Miyon, I too am happy for you finding a contact point with your friends; those little things do make a difference isn’t it? I never played taboo and I do not know its rules, but from what you write I think it is about double meanings, right? I too was not up to date with local double meanings, so I’d end up coining and using sentences that, once explained, I’d just laugh out loud along with them!
Laughing together is important: it’s like a patch of sun.
The sky above is clouded, but there are patches of sun, right? Generalisation is such an unruly beast. I find myself constantly trying to find general patterns/rules/structures, be it in Nature, in what I study, in what I work, in myself too… but this can go wrong when I feel bad and so I end up over generalising, missing completely those little patches of sun. I find these little good things very precious jewels: they act as delimiter/point-of-reference in an open space.
I hope, MsMerising, you can relate in part to what I wrote or that at least I didn’t push you further away; sure your conundrum is not easy. I was surprised to read about the racial issues in yours and others posts; I’m not naive: I know there is racism out there. But the twist here is that aspects of racism showed up because with your quest for Pan African culture which from what you write is clearly very important to you, an ‘embedded’ structure of society was highlighted (so to speak). Now I _did_ experience the same mechanics although not in the dramatic context of race. I felt Italians were devided into compartments at all levels; I called it ‘Compartmentalisation’: a kind of embedded structures that somehow I’d end up clashing with.
It was such a pain! I could never say anything without ending up into this or that compartment. And the worst is that these compartments come with all sorts of extra traits; so soon thereafter people would start accusing me of all things that couldn’t be further from me. I reacted many times, and vigorously protested my not having any of it; I faced them head on and highlighted their inconsistencies… I learnt what I call the ‘Anti-reflection principle’: no matter how well you show them their incompatible positions, there will always be an exception that spares them whatever compartment they stick you into. I therfore retreated.
Who knows… maybe they are some sort of intellectual vampires and so their positions can’t be mirrored…
In tears I tell you that I think this has been the highest tribute I paid to Italy. Although I still have that drive to talk and share with people as I wrote earlier on, the state of matters is that the very next instant I meet someone, in parallel I always get the idea of sort of holding myself. I don’t like it… I don’t feel free. I’m still trying to make sense of it.
Let me finish by saying that although I don’t have a particular kind of music I listen to, I do have a CD from Jazz (but perhaps you’ll correct me for the right definition) singer Nina Simone. There are four or five songs I like a lot, because the lyrics and the shear stregth and power Nina transmits attracts me so much: Sinnerman and The Palmtree (I could have the titles wrong, though), but the one I like most is Four Names.
Cheers,
Ezio
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May 28th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
First off, you’ve got a really good writing style. Would you like to join me in writing a book?
Next, immagino che parli anche l’italiano no? In case you don’t…
I’m a nomad too, Russia-born, I’ve lived in Italy since 5 for 7 years, then moved onto USA and am now back in Italy.. Though this time in a different city (Genova first, Bologna now), and unlike what i was expecting.. it’s VERY different..
So um yeah, I understand you
To be sincere I only like Sinnerman from Nina Simone (probably because I loved the movie where I first heard it, The Thomas Crown Affair..)
Anyways… cheer up, there’s good people around, although sometimes hard to find..
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