Getting rid of frustration

Why did you decide to leave your community and a situation that was quite well known to you, even if it was also difficult and dramatic? What did you expect and what did you actually find ?

Maybe that is precisely the point. A situation can be known to such an extent that there are no aspects to be changed, there is no will to change your life or even to keep on living. Life is continuously threatened and you can be killed from one moment to the next. But it was not always like that. The threat of being killed has been hanging over all Algerians, not only me, for the last few years, since the Nineties. Before reaching this situation where your life is threatened, it was already dangerous. When I was at university I was involved in a union, I was an extreme leftwing activist. When the terrorism started, therefore, politically active people were its main targets, I realized that I had to become clandestine in order to act because I couldn’t do it openly any longer. As long as the risk was that of being physically attacked, both me and my friends and relatives, I could carry on. But when death came to threaten the whole family, including the children on their way to school, the only solution for me was to leave the country. To leave doesn’t mean to surrender and go, no way. There existed a kind of fork: on the one hand the Algerian secret services, on the other the terrorists. At the time I was working for an Algerian public company, the only telecommunications company in the country. We received letters inviting us to stop working for the State. But if you stopped work the police would come to your house claiming you were a terrorist; so if you escaped from the terrorists, you had to face the police. I was disposed to risk physical aggression for that before, but when the concrete risk of being killed came I had only one choice: to enlist against the terrorists or become a terrorist myself. I was not interested in either of these options as it was not my struggle. The situation was forcing people to take a position for one side or the other. The price was not only having your house burnt or losing your job but also risking your life and that of your relatives. This is the main reason that pushed me to leave the country. Economic reasons are also involved in such choice of course, but in my case I had a well paid job that allowed me to survive. After the fundamentalist parties took power, however, and religion became politics and society was subjected to moral rules, freedom was no longer possible. The simple fact of going out with your girlfriend carried the certitude that you would be assaulted. A girl is not allowed to go around wearing the clothes she likes and she is compelled to cover herself with a veil. It is precisely personal freedom of choice that is totally threatened. It is a social problem because all aggressions remain unpunished. For example, gangs of fundamentalist students patrol the campuses and if they see a couple they will certainly beat them up.

Who can resist and risk every single day?

Economic concerns were not relevant for me as I earned one million dinari in Algeria, 100 euros more or less, you can live on this, as prices are not so high there. Over the last few years, however, owing to terrorism, economic reforms, sabotage of factories (they say perpetrated by terrorists, but the Algerian State is clearly involved as it can sell off factories for a dime), life has become much harder from the economic point of view, and buying power is diminishing at a hectic pace even if you have average wages. Prices have gone up 10%, 20% with the excuse of terrorism. Once upon a time the State gave its support and covered the price of basic needs (flour, bread, milk, etc) up to 80% so that people were actually paying only 20%. All this ended with the advent of terrorism. Deep economic reforms were introduced so that my salary was no longer enough to lead a dignified life. Besides this there stands a dream, a dream of Europe where you can live in freedom, and I’ve always had this dream.

You have often mentioned terrorism. Can you explain what you mean with this word? What is the situation in your country?

The terrorism I am talking about is that of certain students’ or local organisations. The leader is the Imam of the mosque and his aim is to impose moral rules on society: women cannot wear miniskirts or drive a car; men cannot let them go out alone, and if they do both of them will be punished; it is absolutely forbidden to drink wine to a such a point that fundamentalists went around smashing coffee-shops in the towns. The police, who controlled this movement, left them to do their job. When the latter won the elections in Algeria the military stopped the elections and jailed the leaders of the fundamentalist parties. The reaction of the most hardcore militants was to take up arms and carry out massacres.
Once upon a time you could fight them with ideas, make propaganda against them and resist their threats. Now they don’t limit themselves to burning your house or throwing acid on women, they also kill you and put bombs on buses. For example, when I worked we had to go out of the building at least five times a day as they claimed there was a bomb on the second floor, and all of us ran off. They sowed terror: 200,000 people died in Algeria between 1992 and 2002. They were harmless people, people who couldn’t escape abroad or take up arms against terrorists or defend themselves against the Algerian secret services. Algerian security agents and the military infiltrate the terrorist movement and have no intention of defending citizens against massacres, on the contrary. If you stay there you have to kill, as you have no hope of surviving or fighting back. I don’t want to kill anybody; I don’t want to be a terrorist. There was a massacre one night in Algiers, I was working there at the time, 400 hundred people were killed in one night, shot or butchered. The people who managed to escape from the village went to the nearest military barracks, not police headquarters, you know, when you are in danger you think that the authorities will help you, well, the military shot these people and killed them. This is terrorism. Terrorists have killed common people, poor people who couldn’t react, they have killed farmers. Many farmers have been killed in isolated spots over recent years with the complicity of the State. This didn’t happen by chance: there is no private land in Algeria as all the land is cultivated by communities and by people from the villages and it doesn’t belong to anybody. Now the land is being sold thanks to a process of privatisation that is bringing a lot of money to the State and the army. But there are farmers who don’t want to leave, and it is exactly there that people are being killed, from the eldest down to five months old. Businessmen coming from abroad also want to buy in Algeria. I say terrorism because it is not known who kills who, any of us can die but we don’t know why, we don’t know who is going to kill us, we don’t know what is going to happen next. If there is any sacrifice to be made for a cause, that’s ok. But here the cause is incomprehensible and uncontrollable and it is pointless to be killed under these conditions.

So you tried to emigrate...

I expected to find freedom here, individual and collective freedom. I was completely wrong as concerns individual freedom, as for collective freedom I realized that it is not so simple: as we ignore reality, we are seduced by the western media that give us a false image of it. And then emigrants coming back on holidays don’t talk about the real situation. As I said before, it is a moral question: in a society where nobody tells others their problems, emigrants who live a very hard life abroad say that they are ok in the foreign country, that they can do this and that. On the contrary for me it was different.
The first place I arrived at was a little village in the north of Italy, where a friend of mine had come one year earlier. I used to talk to him on the phone and it seemed that it was ok for him; he never talked about his problems even if I can imagine what they were like. I used to say to myself: no matter what problems I find in Italy they will never be like the ones I face here... mind you, there are Algerians who emigrate to Nigeria! As life is at risk in Algeria people also experience social frustration: there is no freedom of expression because of both the morals of society and the rigidity of the political system. You cannot fail to be terrorised when you see the head of a friend or a relative of yours hanging on a village signpost. And when you are terrorised and you agree neither with the military or the fundamentalists you have no choice but to leave the village.
When I arrived in Italy, I found this friend of mine who was an agricultural worker and lived alone. He tried to get a job for me too. In fact, as soon as you arrive you need to survive. I started working in a vineyard and there I experienced everything I would never do to others. What do I mean? I mean that I worked from 7am till sunset or even 10pm and got 6,000 liras per hour. At first I was happy with that, the important thing was not to starve. I kept on working hard and I experienced things that I would never have imagined. I didn’t know that such things existed; they don’t exist even in Algeria. At the vineyard everybody cut bunches of grapes whereas my friend and I had to carry baskets along the line, very hard work indeed. I remember it was very hot and I told the woman boss that I needed to rest and asked to cut bunches instead. She didn’t accept, as she wanted us to do the hardest job. Then we were paid half what the others were, who were all Italian. I found disgusting discrimination, which shouldn’t be possible in Europe, the land of human rights. We were not even allowed to stop and have a cigarette. I was very angry and thought of looking for another job, but the village was small, I knew only one Algerian and didn’t find anything else. So I kept that job, as I had to pay the rent.
Before finding a house to rent, we lived in an abandoned uninhabitable house with an unsafe roof, which was given to us by another boss. We lived there for two months, and then we rented a house in the village. I kept on working there: it was ok to endure physical suffering, even if it was not easy to adapt myself, but I could keep my dignity and pay the rent. Physical suffering can be overcome, I repeated to myself, this is just a passing moment. When the grape harvest finished and also the job I felt alone. I didn’t know anybody and the people of the village were scared and didn’t trust us. Not only ignorant people but also leftwing militants were unwilling to open up to us. People considered me inferior because I was from an ‘underdeveloped’ country. So I said to myself: I must absolutely leave this place now.
Meantime another friend arrived and in three we rented quite a big house in the village that was not so expensive. We stayed fifteen days in the house thinking about what could be done, and we decided to get out of the village and see what there was outside. We decided that it was not what we wanted and maybe it wasn’t the same everywhere. So we decided to go to a bigger town and approach some organisation, certainly not the Northern League. We looked for the premises of the communist party, we went there and talked about ourselves and said that we were Algerians and wanted to meet local leftwing militants. Even if our Italian was quite bad, we managed to make ourselves understood. They sent us to the CGIL union as they said there was a member of the communist party who spoke French and maybe he could help us. We talked to him for hours, and then came back home. What for? Clearly that the man was not in the least touched by our problems, frustrations and the message we wanted to communicate. We needed to find someone who could understand us and do something, but we didn’t find anyone.
It was quite disappointing to find out what the western political world was like. Political parties and the so ‘enviable’ western democracy are not any different from the corruption and the tricks that characterize power in Algeria: the same way of ruling and the same structure of government, parties and unions. I can even say that they are complementary because one cannot exist without the other.
We stayed in the village a little longer. The last friend to arrive in Italy got a 6-month student visa and requested a stay permit. A couple of months later he went to take his permit but was given a deportation order instead. He had to leave the country within 15 days. At that point his situation was worse than mine as he had a deportation order, so we remained in the village. Problems soon arose between us. We were always stuck at home and didn’t go out because there was nobody around. Maybe people peeped at us from their windows to check that we were not stealing anything. Moreover we were afraid we might meet some Carabinieri, who would certainly arrest us in those conditions if they found us alone in the street. Once a car of the finance police stopped us. We spoke in our language even if we could speak a little Italian, but it was better to pretend we didn’t understand. They told us we had to go to the police headquarters to get stay permits but we knew that we would be given expulsion orders. For this reason we didn’t go out and it wasn’t easy to get on together. My friend who was here before I arrived had regular documents and he wanted to leave the house, which of course was rented in his name. The situation was very difficult: I couldn’t go back to Algeria or sleep rough. I didn’t want to accept the fact of having to sleep rough; it was something I had never considered in my life. I mean sleeping outside not because you don’t have any money but because you don’t exist, don’t have documents and can’t go to a hotel. Nobody would say: you can sleep at my place tonight. I didn’t want to accept this situation. So I decided to call a friend of mine who is now in America but used to live in Italy. I told him I wasn’t ok and he gave me the number of a friend who spoke French. I called him and found out that he was Indian, married to an Italian woman and had children. I told him I was living with a friend who had to leave and that I didn’t have documents. He invited me to go and stay with him in his house. When I spoke to him, there was a female friend of his there. Even if I spoke poor Italian, I understood that she was telling him he would be fined or risked going to jail if he gave me hospitality. But he said he would risk going to prison to help me. So I moved into his home and lived there for two months. He even tried to find a job for me in another town but he didn’t find anything.
Then the work season in the village started again and I didn’t want to disturb them further. I was living with a family and sometimes there were arguments between them, which is normal, but I felt uncomfortable even if my friend kept on saying there was no problem. I found another boss who could give me accommodation and I came back to work in the countryside, especially as I didn’t have any perspectives there, I could only wait. But for what? I had to move.
I made an agreement with my new boss: I would be paid one million liras per month and he wouldn’t declare I was a worker. Of course nobody in the village, including him, knew that I was clandestine...it would be trouble! He told me he wouldn’t declare I was his worker in order to avoid paying a lot of tax and I accepted because I had no other choice. I knew that my wage was a misery when compared with the working hours and in addition I had no insurance. So we decided I wouldn’t work every day and would stay at home when there was not much to do. I worked for him for 6 months sometimes from 5am till midnight, and then I decided to take 5-day holiday to go and see my Indian friend. But the boss was not happy and called me to ask me to come back to work. I came back, talked with him and defended the agreement we had made. Everything seemed to be ok; I worked for another two months without stopping and then resolved to have a rest. This time he threatened he would sack me if I didn’t turn up. That would be a tragedy for me but I didn’t intend to accept his threat. I wanted him to pay me 10,000 liras per hour because I was angry about his threats. He was scared that I would denounce him and vice-versa. In the end he paid me not exactly the amount I had asked but neither the misery he wanted to give me. So I went away. I did a few days work here and there and sometimes I stayed at home. Then the end of the season arrived and so did a very bad time. Meantime my friend who had come with a student’s permit got a stay permit for legal reasons. He left the village and I was left alone with the other friend whom I had argued with. There was nothing to do from October until March, just snow outside and us quarrelling inside. Once again he said that he wanted to leave the house and I was left with no choice but to get in touch with my Indian friend. He gave me hospitality for another three months and tried to help me find a job and a house, but it was useless. He had to go to India for 2 months and I didn’t want to stay in his house with his wife and children. I had nothing to do, which was terrible and really destroyed me. I’ve got a sister who lives in France, where she is regularly married. My friend offered to take me to her and a female friend of his agreed to come with us. We left one night and tried to pass the border, which was not at all easy owing to the controls. We tried to find a mountain pass but it was December, a real disaster. We had to turn back but my friend was determined to go through customs. He was always dressed smart, with suit and tie, and was convinced we’d make it. On the contrary I was about to give up and told him I wanted to go back to Algeria. In the end we tried. It was terribly cold, it was 1am and there was nobody on guard. As the friend who was driving saw that there was nobody there, she accelerated and soon the guards appeared. She didn’t know she had to slow down and wait for them to call; they already saw us as people on the run. They stopped and questioned us. I gave them the details of a friend of mine who had got a stay permit and the guards had confirmation from the police headquarters. Then they accused my friend of being involved in smuggling illegal immigrants. He was offended and said he wanted to be formally denounced so that he could denounce the guards. In the end they let us go. The French customs was one hundred metres further on. My friend decided to get out of the car and talk to the guards. He said we were very late and that we had already been controlled by the Italian guards, and everything was all right. So we arrived in France, we slept in a hotel and the morning after I went to my sister’s.
In France I found far more problems than I had experienced in Italy. Even if I knew I was able to maintain myself I could do nothing, which made me suffer once again. To want to do something but not be able to is a condition that leads you to madness.

From a situation of solitude or even of troubled relations with the people you worked with, you arrived at a place where you would certainly find more people of your country and also your relatives. What was this experience like, which in a sense reminded you of your country?

Relations with relatives are quite obvious. My sister knew I was clandestine and she didn’t mind. The problem was in myself. In the morning my sister woke up, got her children dressed and went to work. Her husband did the same whereas I stayed there doing nothing. This was not good at all. My relationship with the people of my country was quite particular because there was a big problem: I absolutely didn’t want my parents to know about my conditions. I couldn’t cope with the idea that they knew how I lived. So I obviously never told anyone how things were going and that I was compelled to call on someone and ask for a place to sleep. The other Algerians didn’t tell me about their problems either, so our relationship was quite superficial. We met, had a chat and a drink together and then everyone went back home.
I also made many friends there who were clandestine and had exactly the same problems as me. They were immigrants who, like me, had emigrated during the second wave of migration, in the Nineties, to escape terrorism. A special decree was issued by the French government for all these Algerians, who were thousands. French intellectuals and a certain political class pushed the government into adopting this solution, which is a kind of asylum similar to political asylum. It allows you to stay in the country and wait but you don’t have the right to work, actually you don’t have any rights, you just have to wait. I still know people who have been waiting for 4 years.
In the end 8 months passed in France, whereas I had planned to sort out my situation in two months. Then the Napolitano decree was issued in Italy, a kind of amnesty. My Indian friend called me one day and offered to help me regulate my situation. I was very happy because I had wanted to stop living as a clandestine for many years. There was still the border to be crossed but I was able to make it thanks to him. As soon as I was back in Italy I applied for documents and had to wait ages. You need a job and accommodation in order to get a stay permit. How can a person without documents get a tenancy agreement? That’s absurd!
Thanks to my Indian friend, an Egyptian sorted my accommodation problem out. As for the work contract, my friend employed me as a member of the household staff. In the end he managed to put together the dossier that would allow me to make a request for a stay permit. I had come back from France in September but I was not given anything until May. I just got a document stating that I was waiting for a stay permit. At least I couldn’t be arrested, so I started moving around looking for something to do. I went to a big town, which was a great change for me, as I could finally get out of the village! I found a job giving out fliers, but I still had the problem of where to sleep. I was paid 30,000 liras a day and had to travel in order to reach the town where I worked. The most important thing, however, was that I could move, and even if my wages were nothing I had the chance to know the town, its people and places, not the monuments of course. The documents, however, didn’t arrive and at a certain point I felt I was a burden on the family that gave me hospitality, and I said to myself that I had to get the thing sorted out as soon as possible. I had already caused a quarrel between husband and wife as I was still in her house along with their children. And if I got a stay permit, what would change? I realized that my situation was related not only to a stay permit but also to the dreams I wanted to realise.
For example, I had the chance to attend a welcome centre, which was something I’d never imagined encountering in Europe or anywhere else in my life. I couldn’t imagine that there were people compelled to experience the situation I was enduring day after day.
To go there and ask for hospitality involved a total lack of dignity for me, as I’m in good health and, most importantly, my father spent money to allow me to study. I found it unacceptable to be in a situation like that. So I went into the centre run by the church in the town suburbs, where I slept with people of other communities, Albanians, Tunisians, Moroccans...but my stay permit still didn’t arrive and there was also a time limit for staying at the centre, you can’t stay there for long and need to find another one after a while.

What kind of document did you have to be able to move around while waiting for the stay permit ?

I had a receipt while waiting for an answer to my request. So I stayed in the centre that’s run by the church and kept on working giving out fliers. But I didn’t have enough money as I got 30,000 liras per day and sometimes I only worked one to three days a week. So I decided to work in agriculture again. I called someone in the village where I had already worked, he told me there was a vacancy and I started working in the village again while still sleeping at the centre. It meant that I had to travel (the village was 60 kilometres from the town), work all the day long and come back at 11pm. I felt it was something I had to do especially as I couldn’t do that before... I mean, I was afraid to buy a ticket and travel before.
Finally I got a stay permit, a year after I applied for it, and the first thing I did was to buy a ticket to Algeria. Of course I didn’t have the money, in fact it was my Indian friend who paid.
I acted this way because I had another big problem: my girlfriend was in my country, which might seem nothing, but it wasn’t because she wasn’t doing so well in Algeria either. The main difficulty was that her parents knew about our engagement, which was unusual in that country, it’s not like here where you can invite your fiancee home. It was like a word of honour... and I couldn’t ignore it on any account because my father and a series of social factors were also involved. We have been together for ten years and during the three years I spent here I didn’t see her at all, which was another cause of suffering, for both me and mostly her. So I bought that ticket and a week later I was in Algeria. I saw her and my friends again and stayed there for a month and a half. On my way back to Italy I wondered where I would go, given that I couldn’t go back to that centre. Once again it was my Indian friend to invite me to his house as he had to go to India and said I could stay with his wife and children. I went there until I said to myself: ‘Stop it now, I’ve got a stay permit, I went to Algeria and saw my girlfriend and friends, what am I doing still in this house?’. My Indian friend suggested I take my time as it was not at all easy but I couldn’t keep going on like that.
I enrolled in a council centre and got a room with another six people. It was a terrible experience that deepened my disappointment in my search for freedom. For example I had never imagined having to experience things such as concealing drinking some wine. To drink wine is a risk in Algeria too, but why was not I allowed to drink wine in Italy, a European democratic country? In that centre drinking wine was forbidden and I had also to leave the place at 7am. Anyone who goes to a place like that is forced to do so because they have no money for rent or cannot rent for other reasons. At 7am, therefore, even in winter when it is 10 C below zero, a woman who works inside as a guard tells the people to get out. At 9.30pm all the lights are off and you have to sleep. A terrible disappointment to me, heavy treatment: wine cannot be drunk because ‘Moroccans make trouble’ and discipline must be respected. A real disaster! At the age of 30 I have to be told what to do because they want me to be the way they like: what rage, what frustration...
Then although I had a stay permit I had to work in agriculture again. Actually the stay permit didn’t change my economic situation much. I also did temporary work, for example in factories, where I was even injured. As I said before, I had never imagined this kind of situation. I still hoped to get a job in Italy where I could use my diploma. I was really confident in my skills and that I would be able to do this job in Italy or elsewhere, especially as some friends of mine who had studied telecommunications, like me, had found jobs in the field. The hope of finding this kind of job kept me going. I did hard work in the hope of finding something else later and so I also did temporary jobs for 15 days while staying at the welcome centre. Unfortunately the time limit for staying in the centre arrived and I didn’t know what to do. It was out of the question to go back to my Indian friend. So a friend of mine who had also finished his time in the centre, and I, decided to rent a house. Actually we had no other choice.
It took days and nights... If we answered some advert directly we were denied everything and if we asked some Italian friend to make the telephone call for us, when we arrived on the spot we were told things like: ‘My daughter has rented the house to her boyfriend’, ‘My husband has already rented the house’, all excuses not to rent a house to us. The last week before expulsion from the centre a female Moroccan friend found a house and she knew I was looking for one too. The landlord told her that he could rent the house for 3 million liras because he had done some work on it and he would also leave a washing machine. My friend said she would decide with her husband. She was not my wife and this was only an expedient for getting the house. They thought we were married. When we went to see the administrators of the building, my friend wore a veil and I said she couldn’t speak Italian. We wanted to avoid falling into contradiction if they asked us any questions. It might seem easy, like a game, but the situation was actually very serious as we risked ending up in the street. My other friend and I agreed to pay 3 million liras per month but obviously we didn’t have the money. A friend working in another town, however, sent us some money, so we gave the landlord 1,700,000 liras plus the money for the rent and settled in the attic. One week later my friend found a job with his diploma and his situation improved considerably. Fifteen days later I found a job in a big telecommunications company. We would therefore apply for a loan, which we would repay with our work.
Now I had to keep my word with my girlfriend’s father and marry her. As they say in my country, if you make a promise it is like a gunshot that goes out and cannot be taken back. It was also a question of dignity concerning my family and hers. So I went there and got married.
When I was in Algeria I got the money that we had borrowed from the friend who had already helped us to pay the landlord: four million liras, which is quite a large amount in Algeria if you consider that you cannot earn more than 200,000 liras per month there.
As I came back to Italy after getting married, the struggle to bring my wife to Italy began and with it new frustrations arrived. In fact, neither my stay permit nor the job with my diploma could make me feel free. I didn’t feel as if I had found what I was looking for. The problems had simply changed.

What are the actual differences and perspectives in passing from illegal to legal immigration status ?

As you wait for the stay permit you have the illusion that your situation will change, but when you get it new problems and frustrations come as well. At least you have hope when you are waiting for the stay permit.
In the end it is worse owing to the new problems that you have to face. For example, when you have a baby in Italy you can get money for it from the council. But when my daughter was born we were not given anything because we were foreigners.
That is not a minor problem compared with the ones I had had to face before: my daughter has been discriminated against since birth, as she is considered inferior. I’m disgusted by the fact that she also has to face problems that once only concerned me. And I can’t do anything because it doesn’t depend on me. It is exactly the same as when I was clandestine, that’s why I said that the frustration is the same. When I was clandestine I couldn’t decide for myself but had to wait for others to decide and give me documents. Even if I knew I had the physical and intellectual skills to improve my situation, I couldn’t do anything about it.
I’m experiencing the same problems concerning my daughter even although in a different way.
Another problem is the illusion that you can improve your economic situation. It is true that in Algeria I couldn’t even afford to buy a shirt and that made me angry... I woke up at 7am, came back home at 7pm and I got a wage that didn’t allow me to afford anything. I felt the same anger when my wife was pregnant and we asked the administrators for permission to use a lift in a part of the building that was close to our flat. We preferred to pay in order for her to use the lift but this was denied us, in spite of the fact that we regularly made written requests. How funny: when I said that if my wife had any problems they would have a weight on their conscience they answered: ‘We can’t have weights on our conscience because we are catholic’. The fact that my wife had to go up five floors when she could have used a lift made me so angry, especially because I couldn’t afford a house with a lift. The problems had changed but they didn’t let me sleep at night all the same.
If once I was scared I might be discovered as a clandestine and face deportation, my fears doubled after I had papers. As a clandestine I had to repress myself because I couldn’t have a public life or react to the abuse inflicted on me owing to the lack of papers. Actually I am even more controlled now that I have papers, both in my public and private life. I am surrounded by terrible fears. Nobody is pointing a gun at my head, but there is this closure, this invisible encirclement that is the fear of going back to the beginning or even of being deported to Algeria after enduring so much sacrifice. In fact the stay permit is nothing; it is just a way for the authorities to control you. I feel the same fear I had when I lived as a clandestine. I also realize that I was safer when I didn’t have any documents because Algeria doesn’t accept people without documents. On the contrary they can deport me more easily now because they have my passport and I am more exposed to deportation. I don’t need to kill someone to risk this, being sacked is enough. There is also still frustration at the economic level. Of course my daily life has changed for the better because in Algeria an attic like this, where you can live peacefully with your family, is incredibly expensive. Here I’ve got the attic but the fact of not being able to use a lift produces the same frustration. If I said such things to someone living in Algeria he would say that I’m crazy, but when you face problems like these directly they acquire a new dimension. Compared with living as a clandestine it is still a question of surviving. You are not safe with the stay permit, as you can’t get involved in any political projects with others. If I take part in a demonstration, be there clashes or not, I risk double because I’m an immigrant. And what is the result? Well, I can’t go on a demo even if I’d like to. It is such a waste of energy not to be able to take part in any actions, be it a demo or anything else. I want to do something but I can’t because I’m an immigrant, not because I killed someone or robbed a bank, but due to the mere fact that I’m an immigrant. This is the biggest disappointment for those who are looking for freedom and hope to improve their conditions and those of their family.
Living in clandestinity was a passage in the conditions you had to face, whereas being an immigrant, with all that you left behind in the search for freedom and the fulfilment of your aspirations, is something that never ends and which you can’t escape from. It is a status that pushes you into overcoming all difficulties and going ahead to find some improvement that can cancel the immediate frustration. Although you know that you might face more frustration when you find yourself faced with whatever problem. It seemed to me that your condition as an immigrant, more than that of clandestinity, affects your life day after day and the perspectives ahead of you. Being an immigrant affects every aspect of your life, especially as you don’t choose to emigrate but you are compelled to. When you have to emigrate you always have the hope that you will improve your situation, but you really just change your problems and frustration. If you are frustrated because you can’t live your sentimental life or because you don’t even have water to drink you can’t calculate the level of your frustration and say that this problem frustrates you more than the other. It is exactly the same thing.
You live as a clandestine in the hope that it will come to an end and you face this condition without going crazy because you have the hope that it will change. When you are no longer clandestine you realize that your problems are still there.
Maybe the only way out as concerns being clandestine is not to get identity papers, which you think will help you, but simply really be yourself and follow your aspirations without the frustration that has always accompanied you.

From INCOGNITO - Experiences that defy identification

Original title: In incognito. Esperienze che sfidano l’identificazione
Translated by Barbara Stefanelli
Guido Mantelli / Cuneo / 2003
Elephant Editions / London / 2007

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