Thinking in Tongues

Audio: Tranquil of Pain

LOOKING QUITE CLOSELY

“Many years ago, whilst collecting material in Ethiopia for a novel, I met an Italian septuagenarian in the Eritrean port of Assab. Tio, “Uncle”, as everybody lovingly called him, declared himself an insabbiati. The term refers to people “caught in the sand”, like fish, and was coined for those Italians who, having participated in Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, chose to stay on after Italy’s defeat at the end of the Second World War.

Although he barely eked out a living – at the time of our meeting, he was working as a receptionist in what was then Assab’s only tourist hotel – Tio relished his deracination. He had been captivated by Ethiopia’s rich culture and the beauty of her many peoples, particularly the women.

Tio and I spent many euphoric days and nights in the company of his captivating entourage. During sober moments, he showed me his stamp collection and recounted how he had managed to procure, despite his impecunious situation, some very rare specimens, and how, at his death, being childless, he would bequeath the entire collection to a children’s charity. (Months later, in London, a prominent philatelist to whom I had brought a gift from Tio, informed me that Tio’s collection of Ethiopian stamps was incontestably unique and worth a fortune.)

Most of the time, Tio and I talked about the caste – surely the largest in the world – to which we both belonged: the caste of “the other”: of exiles, refugees, immigrants, displaced people, outsiders, outcasts, strangers, untouchables – and, of course, artists and writers.

Tio kept offering the image of the insabbiati, those “caught in the sand”, as the perfect representation of this caste. He said we were creatures facing death with a much greater awareness of the frailty of life and thus with an enhanced compulsion to survive; creatures that could not – or did not get the chance to – live in their native matrix and, consequently, desperately sought to make a new life in unknown lands and under harsh conditions; creatures that often became fodder for the people in power in their new environments, thus providing the hosts with good nourishment.

Since then, the image of the insabbiati has helped me to struggle against the depression of the exilic condition, the harsh realities of exclusion, the longings for my native land, and the free-floating angst of feeling worthless because of the difficulties of integration and acceptance. “

Moris Farhi
All History is the History of Migration
Index on Censorship
2/006

Technorati: think, thinking, thought, reflect, self-inquiry, inquiry, speaking in tongues, exile, refugee, immigrant, displaced, outcast, outsider, stranger, artist, writer, solitude, creativity, exclusion

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