Satnam Singh
Had his name been Mario or Arturo, had he been a lawyer, or even an employee of an underwear shop, we would have paid more attention. Instead he was an Indian laborer and so he “fits in”.
The only photo we have of him is blurry. He doesn’t even look straight into the room, he doesn’t even crack a smile. Unthinkable, if he had been called Tommaso, or Edoardo.
The detached arm weighs more if you are Italian. Everyone notices when an arm comes off, if you have white skin and a watch on your wrist. Indignation is easier. The arms of foreign workers, however, have a lower specific weight. They come off and you don’t even notice, or almost.
All the stories of slaves in the countryside, in the fields to collect fresh seasonal fruit and vegetables, the one with the national stamp, are similar, not like imported vegetables, which you never know who collects them. But here we know it very well: it is collected by slaves without contracts, who sometimes leave an arm in it, or forget that their lives are saved at the end of the shift.
Some tip over under the tractor, some stumble, some get cut. The stories are all similar, and at the beginning they were all united by a lot of hope, which then remained one day under a clod or stranded on the branch of a fruit tree.
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Satnam Singh didn’t work in a bookstore, on TV or in a bank. He was just a labourer, and you expect a foreign laborer to survive, but not always, in fact this time he died, with a severed arm, after the owner of the company dumped him in the middle of a road, and the severed arm placed in a box. Detached from his body, his arm weighed as much as twenty tomatoes or twelve courgettes.
The unbearable lightness of being a laborer.
If an Indian laborer on your son’s farm gets hurt, with your son accused of hit-and-run and manslaughter for dumping him in the middle of the road, you may also find it normal to give an interview in which you say “it was a carelessness of ‘worker, cost everyone dearly’, even if the hay cutting machine – where the arm was severed – is yours. The conscience is lighter if the dead person has an unpronounceable name for those born in Latina.
This is nothing new: the echo depends on the social position of the dead person. Our pain looks like us. Three days ago, 26 children ended up in the sea trying to reach Italy with their parents, some relatives or in some cases without anyone. They all ended up at the bottom of the sea. If 26 children had died on the rides, in any neighborhood of any Italian city, it would have been different. If 26 children had died at school, the country would have been talking about it for weeks. Instead these 26 didn’t play at the carousels or study at school, they were just trying to reach Italy. Too little to make a country indignant. The specific weight of 26 children is subdued, resembling that of an Indian worker’s arm.
In Italy from January to April 2024 there were 268 victims of failure to comply with workplace safety standards, but courgettes are good and we can’t pay an arm and a leg for them. We need to keep prices low, let’s continue to pay her the arm of an Indian worker.
I am a journalist and video reporter. I create short-form reportages and documentaries, in Italy and abroad. I write books, when it happens. The most recent is “Be rebellious. Practice kindness“. I married Fanpage.it, and it is a happy marriage. I tell stories of various humanity, I like to cross human frailties, without pity and overturning the tables of stereotypes. To do so I use words and images. I feed on videos and breath. Everyone you can find my videos on my personal Youmedia channel.
