The privilege of being able to return home

It means knowing every time we leave that the passport we’re holding is a political object that represents rights and privileges together, that a return ticket isn’t just a piece of our logistical organization, but – as we were saying before – what’s missing for migrant people in how they manage their idea of time, that is, the promise that a decision we’re making is reversible, that we can change our mind, that we can go back, that we can break a continuity, that we can leave a place we don’t like.

We never stop to think, precisely because we can do it, that every time we cross a distance we can do it in both directions.

It’s a bit like that David Foster Wallace story, you remember the fish and the water and they ask the fish what water is and we don’t know what it is, the fish don’t know what water is because they live inside it and we don’t know what it is not to be able to go back because for us a trip whether it’s a work trip a trip to go to war a trip a vacation a trip to go see our grandparents in Australia is never an irreversible trip is never a trip that can be irreversible and so leaving for places I can return from, and others can’t, always makes me wonder how, for example, you make this part of the story, for me it’s one of the more delicate subjects for example tied to our work and so to the presence of people who not only help us but are essential to the success of our work, the local fixers, often colleagues but not necessarily colleagues, journalists, activists, the people who drive the car with us, who share the effort with us, sometimes but not always the danger, but anyway nights, days, meals, boredom, adrenaline.

For them often, not always, that idea of reversibility doesn’t exist and for example in our work this would make it, will make it, very complicated to stay in a place for a person who works with us and doesn’t have the possibility of reversibility in the direction of the trip the way we do.

And this is something, I think, that’s useful for readers to know, not because the job is made of compromises, I’m not talking about compromises, I’m talking precisely about how you manage human relationships between those who have the privilege of being able to go back and those who don’t.

Francesca Mannocchi is a magnificent Italian journalist, working almost always in war zones. She gave an interview in podcast form, on Globo ¹ with Eugenio Cau. They were talking about returns, and this is one of the passages that hit me like a punch right between the eyes and the nose. Right in the middle.

In a few days I’ll leave for Brussels with my family. I’m European and I’ll be traveling in Europe. I’ll leave to come back.

How privileged I’m. How lucky I am. I must always remember this.