As members of the jury for the Writing Does Not Go Into Exile competition for high schools, we discovered that among the 32 finalist stories, three featured disability within migration as their central theme: I Love Life by Carlotta Bandini (Rome), I Am Rayan by Carlotta Greppi (Milan), and the remarkable The Smell of Earth by Damiano Chiarello (Tricase, Lecce) reveal an attention to people and stories often overlooked in discussions of desperate flight toward Europe.
I Love My Life - Carlotta Bandini
Ukerewe, the largest of all African lakes, is an island in Lake Victoria that has become known as the island of albinos. It is home to the world's highest concentration of people with this genetic condition—people who, in various parts of the African continent, are persecuted, raped, killed, and dismembered in a hunt fueled by superstition. I Love Life is Carlotta Bandini's story (a student in class 2L at the Tito Lucrezio Caro high school in Rome). It gives voice to Youssef Farah, one of these children who has taken refuge on Ukerewe. Beyond its merit in drawing attention to a grave form of discrimination still widespread today, Bandini's story excels in its constant interplay of light and shadow. The village of origin is not only bleak and inhospitable; it is also the place where the child discovers that solitude can be broken. The family is not limited to one parent's cowardice but also holds another's courage. The forced journey for survival is not only terror, because it can be transformed by play. And if the island of the "future paradise" allows the boy to live the peaceful daily life he has always dreamed of, it also feeds on the memory of what has been lost. Because migration, in the end, is this: gaining much, but also losing something.
I Am Rayan - Carlotta Greppi
In I Am Rayan, Carlotta Greppi (a student in class IIIH at the Vittorio Veneto science high school in Milan) tells the story of a twelve-year-old Eritrean boy forced to abandon his home with his mother. Their journey lasts two years and takes them across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Libya before they climb into a rubber boat. For the woman and the boy narrating the story—forced to confront violence, thirst, hunger, death, and "the fear and desire to arrive"—the road is even steeper because Rayan ("he who has quenched his thirst") is in a wheelchair.
The Smell of Earth - Damiano Chiarello
The Smell of Earth is truly beautiful. Rayla, eleven years old, tells her tragedy directly from the makeshift boat she has managed to board (crowded "like when you're trying to close a suitcase that holds more things than it can possibly fit") "to go toward I don't know quite where and what." Fleeing Syria, completely alone, she is going mad from the thousand smells she feels because of her highly developed sense of smell. Because the girl—as we learn only halfway through the story—is deaf-blind. And in his story, Damiano Chiarello (a student in class IB at the Stampacchia high school in Tricase, Lecce) has truly managed to describe the difficulty of migration by putting himself in the shoes of a disabled child. Rayla's disability is not an added detail, not an extra adjective: it is one aspect—among others—of her personality. An aspect that makes her experience the trauma of migration, and the worries about the future that loom before her, with a unique perspective.