Cristiano Berti - Black Torino
I remember a photograph of a Nigerian girl, seen in the early nineties. Posed in front of a shelf in a supermarket in Turin, proud of being seen in the midst of so much wealth: a picture taken for relatives at home, to reassure them that the adventure had turned out well. This was the way people condemned themselves to a future of pressure and interference from the family, by showing a scene of well-being and fostering the illusion of being part of it. Later on, accelerated communication and the circulation of images reduced the dimension of this pipe dream, that here the girls were fine, and that if they didn’t send any money home it was only due to selfishness. But only a little, because, as the saying goes, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.
The Nigerian girls arrived in Turin in 1987, perhaps the first place in Italy to see them, their arrival possibly preceded by a few months in the Caserta area. Understanding where the girls first arrived, and why, could explain many things, but no one has ever asked this question seriously. From the very beginning, this was clear: that the girls were all driven into prostitution, that they all said they had contracted a debt, that they were all exploited by an older woman called madàm and were psychologically dominated and believed to be bound to obedience by juju rituals to which they were subjected, and that, in addition to their debt, they all had to pay the same woman for food, housing and the right to occupy a piece of sidewalk (the "joint"). Almost all were from Benin City in the Edo State much more than from any other cities; a big city but not as big as Lagos or Ibadan, and a sort of unofficial twin city of Turin from the nineties. Until 1990 they lived in boarding houses or small hotels close to the Porta Nuova train station or the market of Porta Palazzo, working in Turin, or in the surrounding areas and neighbouring regions, travelling hundreds of miles by train to reach their place of work. Then, suddenly, they moved into lodgings found by Italian clients and friends. Little by little they scattered throughout the city, also gradually settling in other Italian towns as well.
The Nigerian community gave life to a series of informal activities, in addition to sex work. In the nineties it was easy to find Nigerian women who went from house to house, or stood at the edge of local markets, selling foods and drugs from their country. They would buy shoes in Naples, and sell them in Benin City, buy dry fish and skin-lightening creams in Benin City, and sell them in Turin and other Italian cities. The first words in pidgin Italian appeared: papagiro for an Italian man, often elderly (papa - father) who would give them a free ride in his car (giro - ride), bigliettoprego, an onomatopoeic word for the train ticket controller, centrò, for the most popular good-looking Nigerian guy. And more complex expressions like "She dey sale", which literally stands for "She rises!" and means "a girl very much in demand." This can be said of a friend who receives one phone call after another, but it derives from street language: "sale" is Italian and means "getting into a car," and thus "She dey sale!" stands for "she has many customers (today)."
The presence of Nigerian women has dramatically changed the city where I was born and where I lived for a long time. Turin was a decidedly provincial town until the eighties and the arrival of the first migrants from distant countries. Within the motley world of immigrants who settled in the city, this fragment of the large Nigerian Diaspora distinguished itself by the impact it had on the direct experience and collective consciousness of Turin’s inhabitants. This question should be further investigated and there will be other opportunities to do so.
My work Iye Omoge tells the story of a particular place where Nigerian women and the city of Turin met, on the pavement of a road called Corso Regina Margherita which runs alongside Pellerina park. All through the nineties this was the stage for Nigerian prostitution, the most famous in Italy. Every night, more than two hundred women and girls would crowd on its eight hundred metres of pavement. Sexual intercourse took place outdoors in secluded areas of the park, or nearby in a car with a client.
When I carried out this work, between 2005 and 2006, there were no more Nigerians in the area. The decision of the municipal administration to close the road at night, and the first fines given to clients, had the effect of dispersing the women to neighbouring areas, or even much further away. It is likely that this decision was taken in view of the 2006 Winter Olympics, as Corso Regina Margherita is one of the main traffic arteries and a port of entry into the city, just off the ring road.
Photographing Corso Regina in early 2006 was not accidental. I wanted to do something delicate and rarefied for my last show in the gallery of Guido Carbone, who at the time was very ill and who died shortly afterwards. We opened the exhibition during the Turin Olympics, preparing it quickly and taking the last photograph, a wide shot from the platform of a cherry picker, at the very last minute (you can just glimpse the banners of the event). Turning back to the Nigerian ghosts of Corso Regina was my personal antidote to the postcard rhetoric of the period. I wanted to dredge up a fascinating and oddly shaped stone from the pond of oblivion, a part of the history of Turin hidden from most of its inhabitants. To speak about the time when the Nigerians had divided the pavement into three zones: first, second and third class, depending on the age and beauty of the girls. In the first class stood the most beautiful ones, half-naked, tall also thanks to their incredibly high heels. They were the ones you first came across if you took the side lane in the direction of the traffic flow. Immediately after, and with no apparent division (but the Nigerians knew very well where the border was: a kiosk selling drinks and sandwiches) came the second class. The girls were still beautiful, but perhaps more young than beautiful. Less haughty, equally naked. The customer who would have continued driving in the direction of the traffic flow wouldn’t have found, a short distance further on, any women on the pavement. Crossing the bridge over the Dora river, with the park on the right, however, was the third class. Here the women were a bit more dressed, not so young, and not so expensive. They stood back from the road, in the dark, but were just as resolute. Most of them were already mothers, their children in Africa with their grandmother, but they were rarely older than 35. This was the third class, also known as "Iye Omoge" ("mother beautiful" in Edo language). This African name had been given by the girls at the top of the avenue, meaning that those older women could be their mothers (the "mother" of a "beautiful girl") or that they wanted to appear more beautiful and younger than they actually were (the "mother" who acts like a "beautiful girl", who poses as a "beautiful girl").
I was told all this some years before, by a woman who had worked in Corso Regina when I was an HIV/AIDS prevention outreach worker. I managed to find this woman again and asked her to tell me the story once more. By making it the starting point for Iye Omoge I gave this tale a permanent home, small and incomplete, but nevertheless one I'm proud of. Until recently I thought that no one else had heard or spoken about these three classes. This fact sometimes made me doubt the truth of what I had been told. Is this not one of the most hateful aspects of oblivion, coming to the point of doubting reality? But last year, a friend told me about a novel by Tony Alum, Images From a Broken Mirror (2008), which contains a brief description of the three classes of Corso Regina. Since then, the pleasure of telling this story has only grown greater.
© Cristiano Berti, 2015
from: Smuggling Anthologies Reader, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, 2015, 257-259
(ISBN 978-953-6501-93-9)
