Listening that becomes care to try to heal the deep wounds of those who entrust their lives and those of their loved ones to unlikely sea vessels on terrible journeys of hope towards the coasts of Europe. “Only fish have a name. Lampedusa: lives in suspense” (Leima editions) arrives in Syracuse, the first work by the Messina journalist Enzo Raffaele who between the mid-eighties and nineties led the Syracuse editorial team of the Gazzetta del Sud. The book will be presented on Monday 5 October at 6.30 pm in the LiBer Salotto Letterario space in Ortigia (via dell’Amalfitania). Teresella Celesti will introduce the conversation while the journalist Aldo Mantineo will dialogue with the author. The book unfolds through the story of the psychiatrist Enza Malatino who, sent on a mission for a short period to Lampedusa, will instead remain on the island for twenty years “inventing”, not without difficulty, moments and places of dialogue and connection between Lampedusans and migrants.
The author, a doyen of journalism, with 43 years of professional experience, tells how «a dottaressa nossra, un’nciuria», which is a medal for valor, has promoted an approach based on hospitality, empathy and listening groups, transforming mental care into an instrument of dignity for those who have lost everything on an island like Lampedusa, a landing place for nameless desperate people. The evocative title, Only fish have a name, is an indictment: after the tragedy of October 3, 2013, the Strait of Sicily became a cemetery without tombstones in which the victims also lost the right to identity, something that does not happen with the fish that are catalogued. The men and women, on the other hand, become just black bags lying on the Favaloro pier.
Enzo Raffaele forces a double and profound reflection on those who cross the sea and risk being reduced in number, but also on the psychological traumas, abuse and mental illness that geographical isolation has amplified in Lampedusa. Here, the inbreeding of the ten strains native to the island doubles the incidence of schizophrenia, making the community particularly vulnerable to the development of serious mental disorders. The care offered by Malatino to migrants and residents did not only consist in the use of drugs but rather in help, solidarity and collective participation, in one word, humanity. The lives of the patients remain imprinted on the reader. There is Joe, the man-child who “will always be eleven”; why his time froze in fifth grade; the Miss from the North, prisoner of a paranoia that populates her house with invisible wasp nests; Peppino, terrified of boys who insult him but who exist only in his head and there is also the Liberian who saw the boat sink after “seven suns and seven moons”, and the Sudanese who drank his own urine in the “great sea of sand”; of the desert, where traffickers sell organs and dignity for a few dollars.