AGAINST FORCED EXILE: Youth resistance in Sicily!

By Spine nel Fianco

Spine nel Fianco, our youth organization here in Catania, was born in 2021. We are young people who have began to organize and fight around the theme of liberation from patriarchy, for an alternative to school or university education. We choose to organize ourselves as young people and not just as students because we think it is necessary to look at ourselves not only in the role and compartments in which the system places us, but to rebuild an identity that is ours, transversal to society.

This comic strip was made by a friend, Santo, who immediately offered to do it when we discussed how to reveal the problems faced by our generation, but the thought behind it is collective.

To choose the points on which to focus, we sat in a circle and started talking about the main difficulties that young people face in our land, starting from everyone’s experience. Different themes emerged from the discussion, such as isolation, exploitation, militarization, control and oppression of the family and so on. In the end we thought that speaking about forced emigration was the best thing because it is one of the dimensions that touches all aspects of a person’s life. The emigration of young people is a large-scale phenomenon in Sicily and has lasted for centuries. The economy that was built in Sicily by the State and capitalists, which keeps the population poor and poisons the territory, and the mentality that was taught in schools, these two factors combine to push hundreds of students and workers to go to Northern Italy or Northern Europe.

For us, organizing against injustice, relearning our history and building communities is the main alternative to forced emigration.

Some, when they started organizing with us, were disillusioned with the place where they lived. They wanted to leave their land and go away. We began to pose as collective themes the issues that created individual intolerance, such as economic blackmail, housing difficulties, family pressure. Sometimes we found solutions together, other times it was enough to talk about it to find the strength to overturn a situation that you can no longer accept.

We have not yet found the perfect way to organize ourselves when we can no longer afford to live without dedicating our time to work. We know that to change the context in which we live it is necessary for the struggle to acquire a mass dimension. But already facing together, time by time, case by case, the material and relational impediments to the conquest of a free and shared life means for us to building an alternative.

This is a fundamental purpose of our practice and of the thought that we wanted to give with this contribution to this issue of Lêgerîn.