The Mirror of Nostalgia

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
(T.S. Eliot)

Sultana and her husband in the sari shop. Torpignattara. Rome, 29 May 2021

 

Recently, during a photo walk, I happened to hear a dear friend of mine, a lady from Bangladesh who has been running one of the historic sari shops in Torpignattara for twenty years, talking with the class participants.

I asked her to talk about the many people who had left Rome to move to live abroad, especially in London.

She also tried to live in London for a couple of years but, in the end, she returned to Rome. Her relatives who live in America understand her well, they know the merits of our country, the food, the good weather. Nothing to do with the English way of life.

“And then the people! I get along really well with all the Italian friends who live here. There are no better people,” she says.

This thing made me think a little, and I also talked about it with the teacher Stefano, while we were driving home.

Nothing so shocking, for heaven's sake, but it's not bad – every now and then – to feel valued.

Given that I have never had strong nationalist inspirations, the national anthem or my flag does not arouse particular emotions in me; perhaps because I have been living with the migrant communities of Rome for fifteen years now, and I am perfectly at home in Jakarta as well as in Kuala Lumpur.

 

The point is another. Sultana's words were like a mirror in which we can observe ourselves and give ourselves a value.

It was she who, a few years ago, wrote to me (and I still have those annotated words) about many years of my photographs of her community, “Stefano, you are our mirror of nostalgia.” With a somewhat ambiguous Italian but, for this reason, even more suggestive.

I was thinking about it these days when, finally with vaccines on the rise, the idea of returning to travel begins to come close, which I believe is missing from each of us.

 

The mirror is one of the fundamental elements in cognitive and developmental psychology. Lacan made it a fundamental stage of the evolutionary state of the human being: only when the child recognizes himself as other than himself, in the mirror, does the real phase of psychological evolution begin. If we remain anchored to our “room”, to our culture and identity, we will never be able to appreciate its many nuances. We need a mirror.

This I think is the secret of my visceral love for other cultures and peoples, as I have written many times. Not only. But what is fundamental, for me, is to live the dimension of strangeness, in the phenomenological sense of Albert Camus' étranger.

It is too easy to live an entire existence sitting comfortably in your armchair without ever leaving the door. And in that room feel superior, like the Shakespearian King master of the universe inside the nutshell.

I don't think I have had a richer and more constructive – even destructive at the same time – experience of travel.

After years and years spent in dialogue with the “foreigner”, stranger, a term that is indissolubly linked in many languages with the etymology of strange-ness, it is an important exercise to yield oneself to the other gaze, which is the majority.

Traveling and spending a long time in distant lands teaches us what it means to be a “foreigner”. And how much of our culture or identity we carry around are like sticky filaments.

In my opinion, there is no other way to fully appreciate our existence than to offer it on a tray to a multitude of gazes who see us as the stranger, the different. The minority.

 

I still remember the anger I felt when, the first years I went to Indonesia, the children called me “bulè”, the white one.

You almost want to rip your own skin with your nails to deny that evidence. It's not easy to overshadow, in those who look at us, one's external appearance.

It's like the nightmare of dark skin color in many women of Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

Only when you are in those distant places do you start making a list of what you bring with you, such as Roman, Italian, European, Western…

 

You realize how you are seen, not only as a single being but as a culture and country of origin, even if it is often all a molasses of clichés or references to European cities miles away from their own city – like many Italians who call “Arabs” any Muslim women, who may be Asian, just because they are wearing a veil.

And there's only you down there. Every system of value is overturned. But that is precisely the only way, in my opinion, to give value to our identity and that of others. It's the power of the mirror.

 

And a mirror mechanism is the inner heart of the camera. A lens that chisels the identity of those in front of us with each shot, and ours.

Curious coincidence that my Bangladeshi friend used the term nostalgia, referring to the mirror of my photographs because nostalgia has its etymological root in the return.

It's the pain of returning.

Just like the emotional pain of the child who discovers in the mirror a being separated from the world (and from the mother).

 

But that's the moment that allows us to grow.

 

So, let's get back to traveling as soon as possible. Let's mix, lose and find ourselves. Once and a thousand times.

We all become strangers, everywhere, which is the only way to fight the pain of distance.

Italian version