[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_61

Sharon and my mother-in-law, Suad Amiry, 2003

I started finding the news interesting around the age of 10 when the Twin Towers were hit. Not that I understood much, I found the experience of staring at the images of terror that were continuously transmitted cathartic. I also enjoyed the bittersweet pleasure of transgression when I did it by going against my parents' prohibitions. It was my way of being brave and feeling like an adult.

This is how I received my first imprint of the Middle East, through the grotesque portrait of Bin Laden. Those were the years in which the Berlusconi government monopolized Italian television, and, for me, they were the years in which my grandfather's authority in the family drew the borders of the world: "TheAmericans saved the Italians." he always told me “Now people are angry with the Americans… but if it wasn't for them, who knows how it would have gone…”. Then he told me how, at the end of the Second World War, the American soldiers had sprayed him and his entire family with a lot of DDT to get rid of the fleas.

He told me that he and the other children all stood in a row with their hands behind their heads as if they were ready to be shot while American soldiers, wearing backpacks of insecticide, pumped poison into them. “Sometimes they even gave you chocolate,” my grandfather told me. “I didn't know what it was.” But this second image was less potent than the first; my imprinting on the Americans had already occurred with DDT, and every time I thought of them, I saw them as a people of pest exterminators.

At school, we studied the history of Italy and Europe, whereas the rest of the world - apart from America, which was "discovered" by Europeans - did not exist. When we spoke of America, we meant only the United States. When we mentioned Africa or the Orient, it was only an unfavorable comparison concerning the enlightened Western democracies.

When I watched the news and saw "Middle Eastern" people being interviewed, they seemed very different from those I knew: they were dressed. Differently, their language was impenetrable, and, above all, they were always crying because of war. There was nothing I had studied in school about their culture that could bring them closer to something familiar; I couldn't even indicate on the map which area of the world they occupied.

For a ten-year-old girl, the Middle East - as a continent without historical value - had just become a big block of misery and terror, devoid of "normality" and where, if the Americans went there, there were undoubtedly also a lot of fleas.

Italians still pay for the damage caused by decades of wrong information and government. Decolonizing our minds is painful and difficult. But books are also helpful for this; they hold our hand when we can't walk alone. Suad Amiry's book takes us inside a war diary but does so kindly, almost jokingly.

She tells us about her relationship with her mother-in-law in such familiar terms that she seems to be describing any stubborn old lady from our neighborhood and not an older woman who lives alone in an area under siege that she doesn't want to leave.

Amiry reminds us that Palestinians also have a daily life in addition to the war, even if no media reports on it. They have relationships, ambitions, and passions. They do not passively accept their fate even if one wants to hear their scream. They have a History, even if someone is rewriting it, along with new borders.

“I am leaning against the Rafat Wall, which prevents me and my colleagues from Riwaq from reaching our architectural conservation projects outside Ramallah.

'No, this stupid wall has nothing to do with Israel's security. Look at it! It does not separate Israel from Palestine. Separate Palestinians from Palestine. This wall, like most of the three hundred and twenty checkpoints, has nothing to do with Israel's security! If Israel wants to protect itself with a separation wall, it must build a wall and checkpoints at the 1967 borders, not on our land. This is the largest attempted land and water grab in Israel's history. Claiming to separate from us, they took 55 percent of our land. And you call it security?' I find myself shouting at Bob Simon, who is interviewing me for 60 Minutes, a CBS program about the impact of the wall on our lives. Bob Simon regretted choosing a middle-aged, menopausal woman to talk about 'separation.'"