The Stares

Talking about skin colour and her experience as an Afro-descendant in Italy, the Italo-Eritrean filmmaker Medhin remembers above all “the constant, not necessarily negative, gaze that follows you everywhere.” Even while she was doing ordinary things like buying milk or drinking a glass of wine with friends: “Because non-white Italians are still seen as a foreign body.”

Among the episodes of her childhood are particularly fixed in her mind the times when, in the eighties, she went to summer camps for children organised by the Eritrean community. Those summer camps lasted a few weeks and took children to typical holiday resorts in Italy, like the seaside or the mountains. The Eritrean children visited the same places as the Italian Caucasian children. Medhin remembers how tourists, who were there on holiday, were surprised to see so many Black children altogether and stopped to take pictures of them.

Moreover, she remembers a couple of times when, during primary school, university students who were writing a thesis on migration went to her school, located in a neighbourhood with a high presence of foreigners, and asked the children of migrants if they identified themselves more as Italians or as foreigners.

The same questions Medhin has been asked again and again while growing up. “There is always a request for justification. The question that has not been asked but that I hear is: ‘Why are you here?’ Medhin explains, underlining that in fact, it is the immigration of non-white people that is always under scrutiny.

“When the white-skinned immigrant can speak Italian well and cannot be recognised from the outside, they will be left alone. I could stay in Italy for another five generations; the children of my children’s children will visibly always be something else. Until there is more inclusive cultural advancement, Black people will always be seen as other.”

That gaze that has always followed her, now that she is grown up, has sometimes become an “exoticising” gaze. In Italy, there is a cliché that Somali, Eritrean, and Ethiopian women are “the most beautiful in Africa.” “Whenever I have heard that about myself or other people, it has always turned my stomach. I can never accept this as a compliment because I recognise its colonial origins, and a cruel story for the Eritrean population, which is why I was born in Italy,” says Medhin.

“The Italian colonial past is denied. For example, Italian colonialists used Nervine gas, which exterminated entire villages”, explains Ainom. Today, these practices are denied by Italians and missing in schoolbooks. Ainom believes that there has been a removal of history, so colonial fascism is relived almost with nostalgia.

Although she recognises that Italians modernised Asmara, she explains: “They [Italians] made plans, and this enables them to forget everything else… As if they had come there [Eritrea] to civilise a wild people and to build [the country]. But it was our grandparents, made slaves, who built it!”