When Vivian Lamarque, the writer who won the Strega Poetry Award in 2023, arrives at the headquarters of the Community of Sant’Egidio in via Lanzone in Milan, immediately receives a bunch of flowers just caught in the lawn: thus begins an afternoon in which he speaks for a long time of poetry, emotions and hope with the children who attend the school of peace and who are accompanied by the volunteers of the “young young people for peace”.
Fibi, who attends the school of peace in the Corvetto district, is 12 years old and starts this dialogue: «We have read the book you wrote (History with sea, sky and fear, Salani, 2024) and we liked it very much. They moved many things about that story but in particular, we liked the phrase “Smiles are like doctors”: even in our friendship it happened like this. There are some of us who have had to leave their country because of the war, but here they found new friends ». “The stories reveal who we are”, replies the elderly writer, lady with sweet and kind ways, and tells because she wanted to write the story of a navigation girl, in the face of the dramatic experiences of migrants who faced the dangers of the Mediterranean crossings to reach Europe. “I also wrote cheerful stories – he tells children who listen to her admired – but this is so!”.
Many questions that follow, gushing into a simple and spontaneous dialogue. When a child asks: «Why does the protagonist don’t have a name? How is it possible? “And again:” What is your real name? “Vivian Lamarque confesses his difficulty in giving names to the characters with great sympathy and tells his story as a child born from an illegitimate union and given by adoption when he was nine months old.
“With all the children present – says Lisa Pozzan of Sant’Egidio – we have read Vivian Lamarque’s book in our afternoon centers, the schools of peace. Most of the children we follow belong to families with migration stories, some are refugees or escaped from wars. The story told in the book is tragic, but written in a slight and poetic way and this has allowed us to deal with deep and delicate themes such as the loss of parents, the trauma of abandonment, the difficulty of not understanding the language of the place where you arrive, the shame of feeling different from the others. Reading also taught children new words to give a name to emotions never told before. The children felt the need to talk about their fears and hopes ».
A long series of designs and works inspired by the book are then shown to Vivian Lamarque who looks at them one by one, in turn by doing many questions to children, intrigued by their way of interpreting and representing the details of the story.
Among the children present is Sergej who is nine years old and ran away from Odessa after the invasion of Ukraine three years ago. However, his dad had to stay to fight. Sergej’s design depicts two red starfish in the blue water: «The parents (of alberella) were not in the top of the sky, they were on the bottom of the sea. They had become two star stars after the boat on which they were sank. Very few had saved themselves, for example Alberella », he had read in the Lamarque book. Identifying himself with the pain of the protagonist who arrives in a country in peace but without the parents more, he managed to express, for the first time at the School of Peace, his nightmares and his dreams for the future.
