"And Then We Will Be Safe": Alessandra Carati's Powerful Testament

The novel opens on a night in 1992 when a Bosnian girl and her mother flee the war to reach her father in Italy—in Milan, where her brother Ibro will soon be born. Rebuilding a life from scratch is never simple: there are discoveries, achievements, moments of joy, but all of it is engulfed in immense pain. War haunts Alessandra Carati's And Then We Will Be Safe (Mondadori 2021)—the war so close to us and so quickly forgotten—alongside the daily wars that displacement brings, because exile is never only about land. Among these is Ibro's paranoid schizophrenia. Aida and her parents are forced to confront mental illness itself; to endure the abandonment by institutions, the ignorance of medicine, a psychiatrist with no idea how to manage the situation who callously hands the burden back to the family; occasional help comes from neighbors, but it vanishes like a spark in a storm. Aida, now a doctor, flounders. Her breakthrough comes through a cousin. "You can't solve the Big Problem. Haven't you figured that out yet? I'm a doctor, he's a construction worker, but he got there first. Try just being with him and listening—understanding what he feels. (...) You have to find a different way to help him, a way that works for him too, because nothing's worked so far."