Il mio nome è casa mia [My home is my name]
Interview with writer and activist Espérance Kakuzwimana Ripanti about returning with her own words
Thank you for being here! The second edition of the Atlas newsletter brings you inside “The Design of Return” podcast second episode, where I interview the Italian writer and activist of African descent Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti. This episode is recorded in Italian. Someday, with your support, we will work on seeking professional translators to make all Italian episodes available in English and all English episodes available in Italian. Subscribe below to help us get there. In the meantime, here are some key highlights from our conversation.
Welcome back. I am so happy you are here.
Anna
In this episode, I interview the writer and activist Espérance Hakuwzimana Ripanti about her journey of finding a place she can call home.
Born in Rwanda in 1991, she came to Italy when she was three years old, escaping the 1994 genocide with forty-one other children. She was adopted by a family in Brescia, in the Italian north.
We talk about losing her first home; being adopted internationally and interracially in the north of Italy; writing her vivid and personal experience while making waves in the national cultural conversation with her first book E poi basta; why she never returned to Rwanda and the three things that helped her build a habitat for herself.
It took me a long time to sit down, digest her story in Italian and write this newsletter.
I kept asking myself how I could share such a powerful story while serving the bilingual and the monolingual communities alike.
Translating a message is a very intimate experience, and I was afraid I could betray her voice by transforming it into someone else’s. This is why here you are going to find highlights from our interview but not a translation of her writing.
Also, as you may have noticed, our first episode - “Two languages, one mind”, opened up with a personal story of mine to kick off the theme and start questioning, to then explore that topic with our guests.
But this time, we decided not to.
My story cannot serve as a framework or an entry point to Espérance’s and we don’t want to draw a false equivalence between our experiences.
At the same time, Espérance is keen on making writing her story something that can serve more than one community:
“Writing is important to be able to perceive other people's feelings even if they didn’t live your life.”
With her story, she calls the readers to empathize with her experience even if it didn’t happen to them personally.
People who carry many places, identities, and different worlds within them, experience exclusion sooner than later from the world that asks them to fit in. They are usually left alone or, worse, attacked at their most vulnerable times, left with the feeling of not belonging.
In her book, Espérance creates a personification to talk about her experience of un-belonging as an Italian of African descent.
Her name is Anna.
At the beginning of our episode, she reads a passage about her, and it seems like Anna might be one of her schoolmates, but we understand pretty soon she is rather an entity, what she calls “the story I had in my head that kept me angry against everyone that made me feel like I didn’t belong”.
Anna is the anchor of the episode.
For Espérance it is important to have an Anna if you are alone, if you have yet to find your voice fighting against a force that challenges your sense of home because it keeps you alert, it helps you defend yourself from “who looks at you for what you look like and doesn’t see you for who you are.” But she also learned that Anna is what disappears the moment you start connecting with a community, learning you are not alone and using your voice.
Anna was what didn’t allow her to listen to herself fully until “on a Monday morning, like all uncomfortable things,” Espérance said goodbye to her; she took up a megaphone, gathered fifteen people in a square, opened a live camera on Facebook, and began her journey as an activist and a writer. It was around February 3, 2018. The day an Italian extremist took a gun out and attacked six people in Macerata under the motto “Italy to Italians” because they were black. The day Esperance considers “that time that comes when you have to be present and cannot stay silent anymore.”
In our interview, we talk about Espérance’s journey to find a place to call home from the time when Anna was there to the day Anna disappeared.
Here below are some key highlights of our conversation. This is not the transcript of our interview (link here to the full transcript in Italian). Instead, I am providing a summary of our exchange with the main points.
My effort was to bring you into the story beyond language barriers. If you feel like you have any suggestions on how to make this more compelling and relevant to you, please answer to this newsletter, comment, or reach out to thedesignofreturn@gmail.com.
If I close my eyes, home is inside me
Donatella Caggiano: What does the word “home” mean to you?
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: I recently started writing by hand again after a long time. And writing down the word “home” is something that gives me back a lot of emotions. Home for me has nothing to do with an object or walls. Instead, it is the combination of fragments of experiences, gestures, and people I store somewhere deep in my heart and bring with me everywhere. My first home was taken in a war, the second was an orphanage, and the third was my adoptive family’s. The fourth, the fifth, and so on are homes I changed by myself. I am now at my thirteenth, and the most difficult part has been to realize my idea of home was different from the one of others. I had to get rid of the idea that a home is just a safe place you come back to where nothing ever changes. Cause I never had that.
For most of my childhood, home was very connected to the idea of time. In particular, to the idea that I could not possibly waste any time. I used to crawl into the closets in the house, which were large and full of clothes, to seek refuge there. And I remember my adoptive mother telling me I could not spend the day lost in my fantasy. But all I wanted to do was to imagine things and travel back in memory to the stories that made me feel safe. I remember the long car trips we would take down to Ancona on the East Coast in the summer where my adoptive father was from, and that we would be in a car for eight hours with nowhere to go. This idea that while in the car, my father, my mother, and my sister could not flee somewhere else is the closest I have got to an idea of home.
I hope that one day I will build my own home. But if I close my eyes, home is something I have inside of me. It’s very personal and very freeing to think that I can mould it as I want and bring it wherever I go.
Adoption is a migration that lasts a lifetime
Donatella Caggiano: I remember you telling me, whenever you entered your adoptive family home you would ask for permission. ( *to ask “permesso” is a customary formal greeting in Italy used when you enter a house that is not your own)
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: Yes. And that is a compass I often use to understand how I feel about certain situations even today. I never felt at home where I was adopted. I carry with me the fact that, no matter what, I will be an adopted person all my life. I always say adoption lasts a lifetime. In particular, in the case of international and interracial adoption, parents too often have the desire to adopt but forget there is a person who is adopted on the other side of the equation.
The hardest thing to realize for parents is that all the love in the world is not enough, that they are unprepared, with not enough resources at their disposal to accompany them in this journey. For example, in Italy, social services support families with counseling for the first three years only. The most terrible practice is called “restitution,” which allows parents to give back adopted “problematic” kids, as they call them. It happens only in a small percentage of cases, but it mostly happens around their teenage years, at a difficult age.
What is hard to realise for parents who decide to adopt is that they are not adopting a kid with a clean slate, but a human being with his or her own history. As adopted children, we live immersed in that duality: trying to be who we are, and at the same time not disappoint our parents' expectations because we are constantly secretly scared to be “returned” back to where we came from.
The search for a home when you are adopted will never just be about looking for your roots. It will always be about looking for a place where we can enter without asking for permission and what does it mean to feel that way.
That, to me, never happened.
One of the biggest violations is and will always be not to know which questions to ask in order to fully become owners of our own story. The fact that there isn’t and there probably will never be a clear explanation for all the missing parts of our lives.
I wish I could have had more support in my experience, which was not a positive one. So, the least I can do now is write about it, to help both children in the same situation and parents find literacy about it.
My name is my home
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: When people ask me, “where are you from?” they expect me to tell them I am from Rwanda, I escaped a genocide, and I was adopted. While all I can think of is the last time I went to the theatre, I think of Matteo, a dear friend of mine, and our last conversation, I think about the last book I read.
I have accepted the answers I have will always be stronger than the questions I get. And that I will always be somehow protected, shielded, as long as I think that way.
This helps me a lot because it is a feeling connected to my own history, the history of my name.
My birth mother named me Hakuzwimana, which means “accompanied in the journey.” She died of AIDS, and soon after, my father gave me up for adoption. I am always in awe of that brief moment of honest, lucid, and sincere love she had for me, even if we didn’t get to spend a lot of time together.
I used to feel ashamed of my name when I was a kid, especially growing up in Italy in the late 90s. Just like me, other people coming from India, or Africa, have seen their names being simplified, shortened, cut by Italian bureaucracy, then by teachers, then by other kids. Most of us, especially the children of second generations as they call them, have witnessed their parents losing their names — which carried the entire history of their families and their dignity — to become Italians.
I return home only to what I can call home myself
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: When people ask, “when will you go back home to Rwanda?” I get angry. My first answer to them is: which home? Who decided that is my home? Home is something I know, and I don’t know that place. And also: why should I feel like I have to go back?
When I was a kid, I felt like I had to please people and tell them that I couldn’t wait to go back. Now, I answer that I’ll go when and If I’ll be ready to. That is something that you cannot pencil on a calendar; this is not a summer trip to the lake. This will not be a trip back home. It will be about me discovering something else about who I am.
Donatella Caggiano: In this sense, it sounds like you have already come back home.
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: Yes, indeed. I believe so.
The risk of seeing the story, before the writer
Donatella Caggiano: Speaking of you as a writer, when you talk about Rwanda you say you remember just the sounds. I wanted to ask you, when did you realize you had lost a language?
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: When I started writing, I realised everything I was doing now (excavating, analysing, and absorbing all the feelings of my experience in Italian), I once did in another language, the Kinyarwanda, which I now lost. That gave me real sadness. It is difficult to constantly miss something you don't even remember having. And I know that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to conjure what it was like absorbing my culture in my language at six, eight, or nine years old.
The closest I ever got to the sounds of the lullabies I used to hear from my mother was to learn how to speak French, which was Rwanda’s official language before English.
The Rwandan community in Italy is very small. One way or another, I found myself becoming part of this big whatsapp group where everybody speaks the native language, but I don’t. Sometimes I talk to African mothers, who get very upset at me cause at twenty-nine years old I still don’t have kids, and they don’t see me as part of their world because I was raised by white people. It is also hard with my second-generation friends because they have been raised in a culture where I missed certain things (how to care for my hair and skin, for instance). Also, they are well versed in living an African life in their neighbourhood and an Italian life when outside of it, going back and forth, being in between cultures.
Donatella Caggiano: You created a real raw and honest narration of your experience in your book E poi basta, which is almost like an intimate reportage of your life as an Italian of African descent. What brought you to writing this book?
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: I wrote this book for me, for people like me, and for anybody else who I hope will be able to perceive other people's feelings even if they didn’t live my life.
But I also wrote it because I was tired of answering the same questions. The title of this book E poi basta [Enough with that!] is the answer I will give from now on to anybody who asks me to write about racism and nothing else.
Even when I applied for writing college at Holden school, the best writing school in Italy, I thought I had finally gotten to a place where people would finally see me as the writer I could be. But even there, the most recurrent expectation was that I would write something great about coming from Africa. And that’s it.
I wrote this book as a liberation. To move on to a real career as a writer who can use her imagination and write science fiction if she wants. From now on, I only want to write stories.
No matter how much I can put this behind me though, I am greatly aware a threat is potentially always around the corner for me. Not so long ago, I was on national television (RAI) promoting my book and as I was getting ready to go on stage, the hair & make-up person called me negretta in front of the crew. Five minutes later, I would have been on camera presenting a book about racism.
These are the people that brought me to write this book.
It is always around the corner.
Only now, I do have the courage to call them out.
One thing that can still happen
Donatella Caggiano: What are the three things that helped you create your habitat, in this confusing world of missing truths, things you will never know, and your own journey to belonging?
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: I would say books, books, books. Books could almost encapsulate all three things. Sometimes, especially in times of burnout, books are my safe refuge. They are what gave me a family and an education. When I had to learn how to be more present in real life by moving to the other side of the barricade as a storyteller, I sacrificed part of my reading time to be active, which was challenging but necessary. In second place, I would put my friends. And I would put all my friends into one person, my friend Margherita. She is the true symbol of unconditional love, tangible, ever-present, a love that does not expire. I would leave the third place open to that thing that I still have to find or that has yet to find me, that will allow me to say: how did I do all of this without it?
Donatella Caggiano: I have one last question. You told us you were asking for permission to enter your home when you were a kid. Do you still ask for permission now?
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: Always, because I had a very strict education, so I am extremely polite even when I shouldn’t be. But now I know why I ask for it. I know now there are places where it’s safe not to — for example, Margherita’s home. When I enter, her seven-year-old daughter Iris doesn’t allow me to ask for it. It’s beautiful that there are people who love me so much now that they forbid me from asking for it.
Donatella Caggiano: I find the call to action you put at the end of your book very moving. You say “This fight is for us, for those who have a name but also the fear of being sent back”.
Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti: Yes. I wrote that as a hymn, a call to arms almost but also a spark of hope. It is a fear, a terror that transforms with time and experience. The more you meet people, the more you learn they are not all bad; the more you become aware love comes in many different forms, the more you will meet people who inherently know how to respect you without being asked to.
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