The privilege of being heard

There are a lot of people in this world that love to sell hate. You love to feel that electric rush in your veins that comes from being very angry and being able to let it out. That block of responsibility that you carry right on your shoulders and that makes it so hard for you to breathe all of a sudden evaporates in a dark, dense cloud of rage, and it feels good because you don’t feel that weight anymore. You might also feel lonely. Nobody understands your situation, especially not those politicians who wear their nice elegant suits, who use big words and big concepts to tell you what to do or to take what you have… Finally, someone comes your way. They speak like you do and you understand clearly what they say and it resonates with the life you lead. These people are like you and you feel like you can trust them because they know what your weight feels like and how to make that weight lighter. All of a sudden you do not feel that lonely anymore. All of a sudden, you feel like you actually share that weight with someone, and it feels good. These people will point their fingers to someone and tell you that it is their fault you have that weight on your shoulders. They will tell you that you matter, and that the group they are pointing with their finger is taking your right to matter away. You listen to them, because it is nice to have some point of certainty when it feels like there isn’t one. You start pointing your finger as well because it feels right to do it, because the people that you trust do it as well. Maybe you were told that it was the immigrants' fault if there is criminality, so you get scared of immigrants. You might have a family and you might be scared that they will get hurt, because these immigrants might hurt, because those people that you trust, those people who are taking weight off your shoulders might have told you immigrants are animals, ferocious shadows moving in the dark, ready to steal your wallet or worse. However, these people- these immigrants- are like you. They have a story. They carry a weight on their shoulders. They feel unheard, and they are because in whatever country they go to they do not have the right to be politically represented as they cannot vote until they have a citizenship. Their weight, just like yours, is heavy. They might have a family, forgotten somewhere else in the world, trying to survive with a few euros a day, or less, trying to protect themselves from that type of violence that we, as global Northerners, do not need to protect ourselves from anymore. They might be battling that type of hunger- the one that comes from some sort of inherent drive to stay alive- that we have forgotten to even consider as a potential reality. Maybe their currency gets devalued and reduced to be worth nothing for whatever the reason may be, and from one year to the other they realize that they are just very poor. Maybe they are just people coming from a decent family, just like you, who were even able to educate themselves but cannot make that education flourish in a fulfilling job, where they come from. I know a guy like that. He came from a decent family, neither rich nor poor. He studied medicine and had a family with a wife and a couple kids. His name is Mohamed Gamal and he tried to work his way out of Egypt to try to go to the UK to pursue his medical studies. Around 2007, the Royal College in the UK was investing in other countries’ brain-drains and was offering scholarships to foreign students. Mohamed got halfway through the process of getting that scholarship only to discover that the Royal College’s policies had changed and that he did not meet the requirements to receive the scholarship anymore. However, Ahmed Mabrouk, Mohamed’s friend and mentor, suggested to him that there were scholarships available in Italy as well. Mohamed did not speak one word of Italian, but nonetheless decided to try. In 2007, after applying for the scholarship at the Italian embassy in Cairo, he succeeded and started packing up to move to the Italian city of Bologna. Mohamed had no idea yet, but two worlds were ahead of him- the hospital, where he would conduct his specialization, with people like Nicola Rizzo and Gianluigi Pilu (two leading lights of prenatal medicine) ready to support his growth, and a second, the strange and intricate world of Italian bureaucracy.

In 2007, when Mohamed arrived in Italy, he started to do the documents to get his residence permit. The whole process took him a year and quite ironically, when he received his permit, it had already expired. For a year, he had to live having as his only valid document a receipt from the post office where he had requested the appointment to get his residence permit. However, with that receipt he could only fly between Italy and Egypt and, more precisely, he could only take direct flights as in any other country, even within the European Union, he would have been legally regarded as a clandestine. Also, as I mentioned earlier, Mohamed had a family and they were still in Egypt. At the time, in Italy, to request a family reconciliation as an immigrant, you would have had to be a resident. However, residency is different from having a permit of residence. To request for residency, as an immigrant, you needed to have a permit of residence. As soon as Mohamed received it, he requested to renew it. However, after the request he had to wait 3 more months to have it renewed, during which he still had to live with the post office receipt that I mentioned earlier. The alternation between receipts and real documents carried on for about 5 years. Once in possession of his renewed long-awaited residence permit, he was able to request residency, and once obtained, he was finally able to request family reunification. It took him two years to have his wife, his first kid, and his second kid (which his wife had the time to give birth to in the meantime) to join him. However, it was not patience that allowed Mohamed to have his family with him. One day, Mohamed was working at the hospital and an important political person came in. This person talked to Mohamed and appreciated his work so much that after a few days Mohamed received a call and after years, all the documents for the family reunification were ready. On this point, Mohamed, on a bit of a bitter note, told me something that I think is worth mentioning: “coming from Egypt, where these dynamics are common, I thought that in Europe the rule was to stick to the rules, but I was wrong”.

However, the barrier that Mohamed encountered in Italy was not just a tall pile of papers getting in the way of his family to join him, but also years of closed doors behind which people were not willing to be human enough to recognize that this guy had his life in their hands, and they were too busy keeping them warm in their pockets. Let me give you here a bit of a description of what it might feel like to be there. When, as an immigrant, you request an appointment to get your residence permit, you have to go to the Immigration Office of the Police Headquarters in Bologna, where at that time nobody spoke English. You have been in the country for only so long, without your loved-one and without your kid(s). You do not yet speak the local language. You took an appointment and waited for months for it. The day of your appointment, you wait for hours to have your name called, and you keep on waiting but nobody calls your name. You look around yourself looking for someone to whom you can ask a question and all you can find is a security guard that does not speak a word of English and even if he did, would not have any information to help you. Behind the doors you see around you, there are the people that do have useful information, but these people are not getting out and when they do, it is to quickly cross a corridor and they are in too much of a hurry to be polite or to answer any of your questions. They might tell you to write an email and in the course of the years you might even write thirty of them, fifty of them, hundreds of them, but nobody is going to reply. Just like you feel unheard, Mohamed did as well. It took him almost twenty years to have the right to be heard. In order to have that right, it is necessary to have citizenship and in order to request it, it is necessary to spend ten uninterrupted years in Italy as a legal resident. Mohamed arrived in Italy in 2007 and only in 2020 he was finally allowed to request citizenship. He became an official Italian citizen only in 2023. That means it took him 3 years to get a residence permit and residency, ten years to wait for being allowed to request citizenship, and 3 more years to finally receive it. That makes a total of 16 years to become an Italian citizen, all while being a doctor and paying taxes. His daughter got citizenship as she was underage and resident with Mohamed when he received the citizenship. As an underage person those two conditions allow to get citizenship, cutting down on the bulk of the process. On the other hand, their son Karim requested it a year ago, and to this day he is still waiting as he was already over 18 years of age when his father became an official Italian citizen. To this day he is still waiting.

I decided to write Mohamed’s story because being heard is a privilege which not everybody gets to enjoy and even if Mohamed does have that right now, his story might still be very representative for many others. I would like to end this text with something that Mohamed told me about privilege which I think is precious.

“Privilege is often invisible to the privileged and as a privileged person, you have the duty to use your privilege to the benefit of those that are not”.

Everybody carries some sort of weight. You do. I do. Mohamed did and still does. It is a hard task to carry that weight, whatever weight it might be. Finding someone to blame for that weight we have to carry, for that stone we feel like we have to push everyday, might make it feel lighter, but it does not necessarily mean that it will be lighter. By blaming someone for our weight we just reduce the number of people that may help us carry it. Some politicians try to make us point fingers, but there lies a lonely ocean of suspicion between a pointed finger and a helping hand, and in that ocean the only wind filling up our sails are loud words trying to convince us that we are moving, even though we remain stuck.

The privilege of being heard.

Giovanni Giucciardi