I mali del dis-abitare. Etnografia ed Etnopsichiatria a confronto tra sgomberi e sopravvivenza del popolo rom

Home is the dwelling place of our cultural geographies. But what happens when we are forced to live in a place without being able to “wear” the places of everyday life? Why is for someone marginal dwelling the only possible dwelling? Yet, in the history of human migrations, the different ways of dwelling and using space have always co-produced the plural city. Given the degraded condition in which they are often obliged to live, the dwelling issue is tightly linked to Romani and Sinti citizens. Space is a language. The spatial language imposed on this family (and on many others in Italy) only reveals ghettoizing housing policies, gates, fences, walls and barriers to protect from the gypsy enemies. The camps’ country. The sick space which sickens the body. In this emptiness, in this kind of non-space, there nest sickness, uneasiness, the attempt to rescue one’s own belonging in a space which doesn’t recognize them and refuses them. Space closes around Roma and Sinti as a cage. The sickness that becomes a way to “be free again”, to reconcile with memory, to feel “Romani”. In Italy there are more and more often manifestations of psychic sickness among Romani and Sinti citizens obliged to live in camps. The sense of loss and segregation seems to constitute the unexpressed background of Romani and Sinti condition, both of those who get sick and of those who don’t. Some cases exist of apparent adaptation to the situation of living marginality into which they are forced, cases of attempts to deny their own belongings in order to assimilate to the gadje world. An illness that arises from the unheard desire to stitch up their origins, to find back a memory of the space that has been lost. Therefore illness becomes a kind of resistance to a space diaspora and a way to make unsaid emotions resurface through suffering and to tell stories of themselves... Diagnoses that western medicine defines as: severe migraines, depressive symptoms, hallucinations, anxiety states, panic attack. Diagnoses that often tell something else. Illness becomes the attempt to reconcile with the ancestors, with lands left far away and maybe forever lost, with the suffered marginality. Giving way to individual narratives means letting every person’s story’s uniqueness have voice and space. This is why I chose to present here the transcript of a case, one among many of those unheard stories.