Stories and News

This morning I received a new phone call by Valentina Furlanetto of Radio 24 , which once again whished to interview me as an afro Italian writer, or migrant, second-generation and, just this morning, coloured author. This time the journalist asked me if, in my view, Italian “black” children and adolescents may have some benefit by the Obama’s election, finally having a positive myth in which recognize... I already imagine the enthusiastic comments: "Cool, finally a black super hero!" Firstly: but what can I do to say that I refuse these racist labels?! Second, I want to write it here: children and adolescents, all of us in this country can have a benefit only if we start to stop giving so much attention to skin colour. Our “estimated” Berlusconi, with his proverbial elegance, was the only leader in the world to point out Obama’s colour (calling him “abbronzato”, suntanned) and, perhaps, it is not a coincidence. For this reason, I say especially to the so-called “...

A corollary to my Decalogue: The three languages of the writer of stories. The writer of stories has three languages: the “told language”, the “spoken language” and “the written language”. The “told language” is the head language. It’s the language which obligates the writer to keep in mind the script, respecting the author. The language which has the responsibility to remember the words, because they are always important, even if they are false, but also has the duty to consider where you are using it. The “spoken language” is the heart language, which has to take care of people who are listening, of their feelings and their ears. The last but not the least is the “written language”, the belly language, direct voice, without filters, which has the sacred privilege to help the others to communicate; consequently facilitating the head to speak with the heart and vice versa. In my modest opinion, a writer of stories can not live without all three, of course, especially the last.

One thing I learnt working in a drug addiction therapeutic community is that when something serious happens (for example a person who carries drugs inside the house) the most important thing is not this fact, but what the others do, how they react to the event. This explains us how the community works. In other words, the way each person responds to the behaviour of a one, tells us something about everybody. Now, let’s use our imagination: the world is a full-size drug addiction therapeutic community. As in the normal one, even in our community there are a lot of drugs: the trash television, the gratuitous violence, the pursuit of success at any cost, the privileges that we have thanks to our lucky born and so on. Like every respectful drug addict, we perfectly know that these things are awful, however we hardly renounce to them and we invent thousands of justifications for continuing to do with it. It’s useless to tell you what is the serious fact, today: The chiefs of a ver...