When I arrived there, I knew almost anything neither of his history
nor of his present. However there I had started as young
and inexperienced psychiatrist.
My first impression
was that of a place contained on him self, wrapped around an invisible,
monastic and claustrophobic secret.
The insufficient
afternoon light and the first autumnal dense fog imposed
this feeling on the conscience, and they worried it.
The first impact, the first vision reported from the persons who worked there already and
which would share with me this professional experience,
was that there wouldn't be much work: few the patients,
common the histories.
Everything would have been covered, during the winter,
with a layer of snow, initially light and thin, after
hard like white concrete.
The city seemed to have anything to say to one coming
from the external world. While fleeting signs announced
clearly that I had crossed an invisible border, but
certain, between what remains outside and what, in this
territory silent lay, contained by invisibles restrains.
Later, much more lately,
a collective, merciless and firm work of deletion would
come in evidence. But
what everybody tries so hard, to delete?
Later, much more lately,
I fortuitously learned, by
reading a historical article of commemoration of the
tragedy of Mattmark, that seven victims came
from this territory. (In August of 1965, a glacier
of the Swiss Alps is reversed on the building sites
prepared for the construction of the dam Mattmark, making
a massacre of men.)
Involved with emotion
in its tragic destiny all the country took part in the
anguish which didn't spared nobody.
The authorities, the families, the clergy and the politicians
activated a bridge for the mourning and the solidarity,
in front of the most important tragedy of the emigration
in foreign country, until this moment, that this community
had to face.
In the time when I worked,
wrote and marked research there (1982-1990) nobody
referred me about this event, whereas all knew
my specific interest for the migratory events.
I was maintained
at side of all this. Even after years of permanence
in the territory, after having known hundreds of cases
and emergent events of the historical background of
the emigration of mass.
Immediately I justified
such a behaviour believing to recognize a manner of
excluding me, because external member of this intimate
sphere, which crystallizes inside a community struck
by a collective tragedy.
Then I reached the conviction
that this radical strategy
of isolation and repression of the drama was mostly addressed to the members belonging of right
to the community.
The intolerance of the
event, therefore, wasn't to go up on the surface of
the collective consciousness, because it still didn't
know how to file the problem of the emigration like
choice of survival.
Besides, at a distance
of time, it couldn't be proposed to the attention of
the younger generations the history of this event, still
dissuasive and threatening, able to involve in the feeling
of bad luck, not only the destiny of an individual or
a family, but that of a whole population.
Salvatore INGLESE: doctor,
psychiatrist and psychotherapist. He achieved
his own vocational training spending periods of study
and research in Italy and in the foreign country. Since
years he studies the psychic illness of the populations
of migrants in Italy, France, Switzerland and Canada,
lend particular attention to the existing relations
between psychopathology and cultures of origin of the
patients (ethno psychiatry). On these topics he collaborates
with "Societa Italiana di Antropologia Medica", " Organizzazione
Interdisciplinare Sviluppo e Salute " and the laboratory
of history Dedalus. Author of many scientific publications
in Italian, French and English, affiliated at eminent
national and international scientific companies, he
makes part of the Council of the Secretariat of the
Calabrian section of the Italian society of Psychiatry.
Currently he works near the service of the mental health
of Catanzaro.
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