Confinement and borders

In these days reading a review of the latest novel by the Italian-Somali writer, Igiaba Scego , The color line , I wondered about the meaning of living a "confinement in a foreign land ", a land that has welcomed you for many years but that does not grant you a real citizenship, as if to permanently remind you that" you come from elsewhere ": you are a foreigner and you must remain a foreigner. But being "foreigners" does not mean being "strangers", not living the destinies of the people with whom you have been sharing your daily life with participation.

This condition, however , goes hand in hand with the constant reminder of your roots, which is accentuated in the weeks in which you have followed, with apprehension and from a distance, the fate of your family members, in turn "confined" in a country that is experiencing much more severely the pandemic crisis that affects your host country in a different way. In recent weeks, in reference to the management of the Coronavirus emergency, many analysts have pointed out that the imposition of the so-called "physical distancing" has favored the production of new forms of sociality that have occurred in the most disparate mechanisms and, above all , between people who did not have strong ties to each other (the clearest demonstration that physical distancing can become but is not necessarily a "social distancing"). Therefore, it is precisely the weak ties, at the outset, that seem to find a new community clot.

What is the meaning of these new forms of sociality , which are being structured from below, for those who are foreigners, culturally as well as administratively? When political scientists explain the meaning of "confinement" to a specific political-geographical entity, they inevitably refer to an economist vision of existence. This determines processes of "construction of borders", a political act necessary to establish a clear separation between internal and external space, but also processes of spatial distribution of rights within legal-administrative entities and to "laterization" dynamics. The latter term refers to those relational processes that support the definition and maintenance over time of identity, distinction, difference and separation between human groups and which are, at the same time, a precondition and consequence of the existence of each entity.

But the pandemic has dramatically undermined the economist vision that governs our societies , for example by highlighting the inadequacy of a private healthcare system, based on profitability, which proved to be totally inadequate, after the dismantling of local healthcare . The latter, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek reminds us, responds to the principle that, only by assisting all those who need it, unconditionally without looking the costs in the face, can the safety of the largest number of citizens be preserved. A rational and very utilitarian way of realizing that we are interdependent but also that there is a deep need for relationship in us. Faced with this need, there is no "foreignness" that becomes "irremediable foreignness".

In recent weeks I have discovered it, in the dessert offered by the Turkish family that celebrates the breaking of the Ramadan fast and that, masks to the mouth, shares this joy on the landing with those who are simply next to them. I discovered it, with an accentuated attention to supporting the elderly who cannot leave the house, in his essential purchases or, again, in giving up certain times of the day, to use a small private garden, to invite the young Turkish or African family to make your children run around a bit, put to the test by the interminable physical confinement within the four walls of the house.

It is healthy to note that the human being has always been inhabited by a desire to overcome borders , intended as a limit, but not only for a desire to be superior to others and to impose one's supremacy, but to share his joys and develop a freedom that can only be protected by protecting that of others!


Claudio Monge
NP June / July 2020