BILAL: travel, work, die as a migrant. It is impressive but it is so read some books can be a life experience, a kind of tipping point, from which our ideas are changing irreversibly, they feed not only new information but, above all, new codes of traumatic emotions and concepts: in short, a gap between a before and after.
Bilal is one of those books. The author Fabrizio Gatti, Espresso journalist, though, to define a journalist, these days, in which editors are full of press and stretch carpet, it seems very simplistic, if not offensive. Cats
to tell and describe reality with reality itself and not resort to the pages of Google or Wikipedia it, much less the method of cutting and pasting. Cats in this book deals with the biggest and most tragic human adventure of the third millennium: the exodus, the mass abandonment of the "misery" to the 'wealth'. It deals with the human condition mainly generated by these epic migrations, ie the condition of secrecy. From the Sub Sahara to southern Europe roam the invisible illegal immigrants. Humans pure state, without the frills, the protections and guarantees the rule of law and the services and care of the welfare state. They go step by step, in search of daily rations and their strange fate, always leads them there, where they are useful, for prosperity and wealth of those who pretend not to see them. It is impressive and awe understand in a detailed and documented that a human being with nothing but his human condition, it is an object of trade, exploitation, violence, arbitrary absolute. Man as such is worth nothing. Millions of people from the sub Sahara to Europe, whose power, in all its branches, may have as it wants, without either the interested parties or other institutions to say something. In the third millennium is so, from Niger to Libya to Italy and then beyond.
Cats decided to go through the immigration routes that lead from West Africa to Italy, passing through Libya and hell for the piece of sea that leads to the Sicilian coast .. Go to Senegal and from there, describes in detail this modern odyssey, step by step, humiliation for humiliation, harassment for harassment. From a clear picture of the amount of interest involved, the many gangs that act on poverty and the desire for emancipation, civil and military bureaucracies over the years have turned into a kind of paradise, and no man's land, all the areas crossed by routes despair. The 500 pages of Bilal not give respite to the reader, let it pass by a checkpoint, a camp of Al Qaeda, to be an oasis in the desert to a place where you can buy and sell women and men, their eyes the desperate stradded (street children, fled from their countries, with nothing waiting time to leave: a moment that can be a life long) to the faces of the pompous bureaucrats of the regime, which are villas with free labor and with blackmail perennial on desperate people waiting for their moment. The pages most disturbing concern, that great black hole and 'Libya few years ago a former interior minister had said that in Libya, there were two million immigrants ready as soon as possible, to leave for Italy. Cats try to explain, how they live and how they treated these foreigners in Libya, and the criminal use instrumental that makes the regime. Cannon fodder and that 'as an element used to regulate relations with its neighbors, including Italy: people to be exploited for the' local economy and also to make up for indolence of a people, made so by years of ideological indoctrination and torpor social and cultural mirror of repeated delusions of its leader over the years and that 'increased from pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism to, until curious forms of pseudo-based on the work of foreigners, for the consumption of the premises. Cats' very effective and clear in explaining why it is much more convenient, for this scheme, maintain a situation like this that, in fact, gives them a considerable bargaining power, to manage their own business and the resulting international relations: a system that endorses the periodic pogroms against foreigners and all kinds of violence, both in the legal form of the concentration camps built with Italian soldiers, who impunity mass against perpetrators of actual lynchings.
pages most disturbing concern, but the Italian chapter. Gatti, giving up and assuming his identity to be that of Bilal from time to time, Kurdish, Bosnian, and later for a bit ', even South African, runs through the places that are dark pages, the dark face of our legal culture: Lampedusa and fields of tomato harvesting in Puglia. Beyond the Mediterranean and nothing changes, in some ways, certain mechanisms are improved, the overall design is completed and makes it more clear. If the local bosses African or Arab, the chalet was done with the work of despair, the Italian boss is marching the economy of Salento. It 's a trivial consideration, perhaps, a little' simplistic, but this teaches the cat's head. From the empirical evidence from direct perception, motivated by identification with the victim and the real knowledge, leading to a gradual understanding of things, without letting go easy to sociologists, the theoretical interpretations but very cold and often marred by an ideological way. And cats, and 'here its effectiveness, but maintains an ideal direct contact with those who are human rights, enshrined in the Enlightenment and which should stand up all relations and the human condition; records from time to time and accurately and pressing, all the episodes and situations, which are an insult, a violation of the sense of justice and human rights.
Cats who disguises himself as an immigrant, from despair, from Bilal, Bilal slowly becomes to the point of feeling like strangers and out of place, all those values \u200b\u200band principles on which he, democratic and civilized man, has grown and is formed.
PS: read the text of cats and, as ever, today, following an agreement between Libya and Italy.
The historical setting of compensation due to Libya for the years of colonialism, in fact conceals the nobility and made another treaty on the skin of immigrants. Especially the last chapters of the book documenting the tragic humanitarian consequences of all previously signed agreements between the two countries. LUIGI
FINOTTO
