Clear out life

It's a Thursday morning when, after yet another invitation from the police to clear out, Mr. Carlo just has to move away with his bed from the small garden that he has established as his home in the last year. His friend Cristiano had made an appeal to the institutions to proceed towards an agreed move and not an indefinite eviction, but without receiving any response. The cellars are cleared out, not the people.

Language provides a first indication of events like this: by making the homeless person a non-person, they can be disposed of as an object. The reason lies in the definition of decorum (from the Latin decor, which is well suited, translatable into Italian with the term dignity) whose violation transforms, as Giulia Fabini writes, people "into real cases of crime". It is not decent to sleep outdoors, leave cardboard and blankets on the street, you have to go to the dormitory. For 30 years, the policy for homeless people has remained stuck in the dormitory-cold emergency combination, a unique measure which, faced with a multidimensional problem, inevitably leaves out all those who have problems for which the dormitory does not represent a solution, but a further problem. One wonders whether it is decent to live in a city like Turin, one of the most polluted in Europe, whether it is decent that in a large city there is no street psychiatry service, whether the closure of social services is part of decorum, libraries, swimming pools, leaving dozens of public spaces abandoned or leaving ruined buildings in plain sight? The fact is, explains a volunteer: "Governments are like machines." In fact, the policeman tells Carlo: «Nothing personal, they are just orders to be followed». An order that relegates Carlo to the minimal stage of naked life which is at the limit of biological survival. He has to move, but he is constantly hunted, he has to live in subzero temperatures with only his body, let the municipal waste company throw away his mattress and blankets, survive the cold with only what he can put on. His life thus becomes an indefinite, stray life that tries to survive death every night and every day. Yet he refuses any type of public intervention that is proposed to him to preserve the body.

he would need invisibility, gray stonyness, and, even better, non-existentialness. Someone who meets, reassures and protects. And together with Carlo they are like gliders that "as they descend, they ascend".

Fabrizio Floris
NP January 2024