Out in two parts: Friday 14 October with 7 and Saturday 15 with Io Donna. A teenager in the world of bullies and the crossing of an African peer to Europe
C’ the sea of destiny between us and them. We who look at their landings, their shipwrecks, their desperation. And, sometimes, we despise them. We who were born on the right side of the earth, where fundamental rights are not an option: drinking water, abundant food, education. Everything at your fingertips, without having to entrust our lives to a makeshift boat at the mercy of the Mediterranean.
The bitter line of this fate drawn by Simona Sparaco in her new novel Life in your pocket, the tragic story of two distant existences that will burn in the same night. They are the stories of two children, Mattia – Italian, frail teenager and victim of bullies – and Malik, his age, first in his class, left Ghana for Europe with his brilliant report card sewn into his pocket, the only passport for a future different from what he would expect in his village. Sparaco’s novel it comes out in two preview episodes on newsstands with Corriere per l’Unicef. In fact, there are two issues: the first volume on Friday 14 (accompanying the weekly Sette); the second Saturday 15 (with me Donna), both at the symbolic cost of one euro, in addition to the price of the newspaper. By purchasing the book, Unicef will help provide school materials to children living in emergency situations.
Sparaco weaves together two distant stories, in geography and in the social context, united by the common beat that moves the dreams of two young boys. United by different roots of suffering. Mattia lives with his mother Luisa, a pathologist; their father left them for some time and remained entangled in Mattia’s memories as a sort of hero. Her mother finds it hard to put the pieces of that life together: a former indifference, a job she loves about her but takes away time for her family, an adolescent son whom she no longer recognizes as her. Because since Mattia entered into the good graces of Jonathan, the leader of the bullies, his social life is taking off. Before he was laughed at by his classmates but now that he has a new friend he feels that the world will finally accept him. Except that Jonathan and those like him are very dangerous subjects, who bend their peers considered weaker to their despicable interests. So Mattia begins to get lost, he who already has some academic difficulties (dyslexic and dyscalculic), now he risks letting his interest in the firm sink.
On the other side of the world, in a small village in Ghana, Malik seems to be Mattia’s counterpart: a little genius with numbers, passionate about mathematics, who fills his report card with 10. A report card that the pride of the mother Fara – Malik also lives alone with the woman – who has been thinking about it for some time: her son should not stay there. He should join his uncle Zuri in Nice, arrive in Europe where with the report card he will be able to continue studying and then, one day, find work. And so Fara will convince him to leave for that beautiful continent, full of water, plants and food. He will not be able to imagine the monstrous journey of the son, a journey where people lose their humanity, and of those few who will touch the ground there will remain only bodies at the limit of life.
The lives of Mattia and Malik will reach the climax of their dreams in the same, painful, night when the tale will become a story of life and death. Despite the tragic events, Sparaco’s story delicately touches difficult themes – adolescence, human trafficking, nostalgia, loneliness, family ties – reaching tiptoe to the reader’s belly.
In thanks, Sparaco explains that this story freely inspired by that of the boy with the report card, an episode that hit the news in 2019. it was the anatomopathologist Cristina Cattaneo who made it known, recounting it in her book Faceless castaways (Raffaello Cortina). The story of a young 14-year-old male who arrived from Mali across the Mediterranean and was then found lifeless at sea, probably following the shipwreck of April 18, 2015, where it is estimated that about a thousand people lost their lives. The boy had with him only a report card sewn into the pocket of his clothes, which reported grades in Arabic and French. Perhaps the last act of love of a mother, who delivered that child to a better future (Yours – writes Sparaco in his novel – a gesture that makes you universal, you know? A gesture full of hope, and even of trust in against those who should have welcomed your baby and did not. The passing of the baton of a maternity that no one has collected).
This novel dedicated to all the boys and girls to whom UNICEF guarantees the right to education by opening the doors to the future. Thus the author introduces the story of her, born for a charitable purpose in collaboration with Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. In the most recent data (September 2022) that UNICEF has collected on education in emergencies, it emerges that children living in countries affected by wars, epidemics or natural disasters due to climate change, in addition to their families, homes, drinking water, food and health care, they also lose access to education, that is, they lose their future. Girls, who are almost 2.5 times more likely not to go to school, pay the most for it in countries affected by conflicts compared to peers living elsewhere. And the numbers of school poverty are merciless: for example, in Ukraine less than 60% of the schools are accessible; the floods in Pakistan they destroyed over 17 thousand schools and, for theAfghanistan, keeping girls out of secondary classrooms costs the country 2.5% of its annual GDP. A dark tomorrow for the children of this world.
The release in support of Unicef
Simona Sparaco’s novel, Life in your pocket
it comes out in two preview episodes with Corriere della Sera for Unicef. In fact, there are two issues: the first volume will be on newsstands on Friday 14 October (with Sette); the second Saturday 15 (with Io Donna), both on sale at the symbolic cost of one euro, in addition to the usual price of the newspaper. Simona Sparaco (Rome, 1978) writer and screenwriter; in 2013 she was a finalist at the Premio Strega with Nobody knows about us (Joints). His novels are translated in several countries, including France, Spain, England, Russia and Japan. With the purchase of the book, it is possible to help Unicef provide school materials to children who are in emergency situations or who are affected by humanitarian crises so that they are guaranteed the right to uninterrupted study, thanks also to safe learning spaces equipped with water. and sanitation and teacher training. Among the countries involved in the project are Ukraine, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
October 11, 2022 (change October 11, 2022 | 21:24)
© Time.News