Brigitte: stories of a life

Life histories are a qualitative research methodology used in the health sciences (occupational therapy, psychology, psychotherapy) and in the social and human sciences (anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics). From a subjective point of view and with the help of the therapist or researcher, the patient or informant prepares an autobiographical story by evoking and ordering memories of his or her life. The Italian writer Melania G. Mazzucco has recently published in Spanish (September 2019) Estoy contigo. The story of Brigitte. The author constructs her story from conversations with the novel's protagonist, Brigitte Zébé, a Congolese refugee in Italy, to whose powerful autobiographical testimony we have access.

Through an implicit agreement of veracity with the author (which is made explicit in the book's post-script) we readers admit that the story we are told has "really" occurred to us (even if we know that the mere act of giving an account of the facts in words always entails an inescapable fiction, inherent in the very use of language). Brigitte Zébé is a 38-year-old widow and mother of four, who has had to flee her country for political reasons, saving her life in extremis after suffering terrible hardships. The story begins with her first days in Rome, wandering wildly around the Termini Station, and tells of the process she goes through in Italy to obtain refugee status and be able to reunite part of her family to continue their lives together. 

The autobiographical stories, which Brigitte tells the author and she in turn tells us, complete the fragments of the past that we ignore, allowing us to gradually establish the essential facts of her life. The portrait of the person who is thus composed is extraordinarily rich and precise, so that, starting from Brigitte Zébé's individual life circumstances, the reader has privileged access to the condition and some of the circumstances of the political refugee in today's Italy.

Likewise, the narrative allows us to know in detail the process that leads to obtaining refugee status, the work of the people involved in it and the role played by religious institutions (particularly the Society of Jesus) and secular organizations. Melania G. Mazzucco's literary narrative is a story of stories, which emphasizes the importance of counting, of giving an account of the facts with words, and which combines aesthetic ambition with a deep knowledge of the social. 

The central story is made up of the testimony of Brigitte herself: the "life story" that she tells Melania so that she can tell it to us. Next to this testimonial document are the oral stories of the refugee applicants, which, as is the case with Brigitte, they must repeat on multiple occasions at different hearings, until they reach the story before the territorial commission that will decide whether the applicants qualify for recognition as refugees. The success of these stories (i.e. their ability to convince the members of the commission) lies above all in their credibility, as the authorities often lack the means to check the truthfulness of the story.

Hence, as we are told at another point in the text, the stories that have worked for their various audiences are adopted in a piecemeal fashion by asylum seekers, in a sort of oral transmission, so that police, lawyers, doctors or social workers end up hearing identical episodes from refugees, who, by incorporating fragments of others' stories into their own, seek to ensure the success of their cause. 

A third group of stories are the written accounts presented by Italian secondary school students in the "Writing Doesn't Go into Exile" competition, which allow the author to learn about the representations that young Italians have of migrants and refugees, often indebted to the ways in which they are presented by the media; from these school writings, Mazzucco is struck by the distance with which young people view migrants, as well as the importance they give to the difficult journey to Italy, in contrast to the little they know about them once they are already in the country. 

The complete re-presentation that this novel gives us of the environment surrounding asylum seekers in Italy compromises, in a certain sense, the effectiveness of the discourses of the "pure" social sciences (the historical, sociological and anthropological), since it is capable of incorporating the best of them into a complex literary construction, with a narrative power that only allows the rhetoric of fiction. Literature to know the social that puts in sight the permeability that exists between the borders of social sciences and literature. 

Luis Guerra, Professor of Spanish Language at the European University of Madrid, is one of the main researchers of the INMIGRA3-CM project, financed by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund