Amani El Nasif: ‘Italian citizenship is an incredible passport to freedom’

The new memoir is also born from the comparison with her daughter, who has started high school, and from the numerous meetings with girls and boys she has had in the last thirteen years. “I took back what Amani was before I was 16,” he explained. A way to put the teenager he was in dialogue with the one he observes in schools today. “I believe that the tools have changed, but not the needs of the kids.” The difficulty of speaking, the need to feel welcomed, the weight of words, the dynamics between peers and the relationship with teachers remain, according to the author, central issues. The context has changed profoundly, but the questions of adolescence continue to be recognisable. “I see the same problems I had as a teenager in my daughter too,” he said. Hence the importance, for El Nasif, of listening. In schools he tries to speak to students directly, starting from his own history and without assuming a judgmental role. “Five minutes are enough for a student to feel listened to. It really makes a difference”, he argued. It is not enough to ask a class in a general way how their holidays went: we need to create a space in which a child can talk about what he or she experiences. The title of the new book is aimed directly at teenagers: “You have more strength than you think.” A strength which, the author observed, often emerges when one finds oneself faced with situations that force one to put one’s resources to the test. In his work in schools, El Nasif sees a generation under new pressures. “What’s around them today is weighing them down a lot,” he said. The speed of changes, the amount of stimuli and situations that adolescents have to deal with can become a burden. But the author rejects the idea of ​​a generation without hope. “I trust them,” he said.

Her own story is that of a girl who, at 16, is taken to Syria with the promise of resolving a bureaucratic issue and who instead finds herself living in segregation for 399 days in a context in which her family has arranged an arranged marriage for her. “Having lived my first 16 years in Italy, in Bassano del Grappa, I knew well what it meant to be a girl, a free teenager,” she recalled.

The escape, organized with the help of a cousin of the father’s, takes place at night. After a first attempt blocked by a passport problem, El Nasif hid in a hotel and managed to catch a flight to Milan two days later. An experience recounted in the first book, “Siria mon amour” (Piemme, 2013), written together with the journalist Cristina Obber, which was followed by “Sulla nostra pelle” (Piemme, 2022), dedicated to violence against women and the stories of girls who have had a similar fate.

“After returning to Italy I wondered how many stories like mine there were here and weren’t talked about,” she explained. Her journey as a writer was born from that question. A path that arrived almost out of necessity, rather than by design: El Nasif had interrupted her studies when she was taken to Syria and, once she returned, she had to start working. “I had a lot to tell,” he said. As a teenager he kept diaries and notes; then he thought that those experiences could also be useful to others. In the new book the gaze therefore shifts to adolescence, without nostalgia and without simply contrasting the past and the present. The comparison serves rather to recognize what different generations have in common. “What you feel makes sense” is, from this perspective, the message addressed to young people.

El Nasif does not deny his Syrian roots. “Syrian blood flows inside me,” he said, recalling daily episodes that still reactivate his memory today. But it distinguishes one’s identity from the experience of pain experienced during those 399 days. “Unfortunately, Syria did not give me what Italy gave me”, he underlined, returning to the meaning attributed to Italian citizenship. Syria, however, remains in his imagination and in his affections. She hasn’t been back since 2016, also because of the war, but she says she still has the desire to do so. “Syria is not what did to me and caused me so much pain,” he said. And he recalled the desire to see his aunts again and those “incredible starry skies” that he keeps in his memory. (by Paolo Martini)