HEMIN

A beautiful mind

“They took me away from an asylum seeker centre in Dover, not even the time to get dressed. In pyjamas and flip-flops, they put me on an airliner handcuffed, squeezed between two policemen, amidst ordinary travellers watching me. Like I was a terrorist.” 

This is where Hemin, who fled Iranian Kurdistan at age 20, breaks down. And he curses that idea of leaving that had been growing in his head since adolescence, which led him to descend one by one all the circles of hell. The journey on foot to the Turkish border, the barge with 80 desperate people like him, stopped for days in the middle of the Aegean, “drinking seawater and eating nothing.” And then the beatings, the risk of drowning “no one knew how to swim, I thought I would die there.”

He escapes from the reception centre in Brindisi because “I wanted to go to England.” Then the Calais-Dover passage under a truck. And more beatings, violence, nights on the street without being able to wash. “Always because of that f…. desire to be free.”

The asylum interview, in Rome, a year later, fails. “The mediator, an anti-Kurdish bitch, mistranslates.”

(The) Game over?

But this is where, like in a Shakespearean tragedy, a key character enters the scene, a minor but decisive figure. “I called my grandmother, I was broken” “Hang in there.” “I appealed and after two years I was granted political asylum.”

He now works at a ‘pizza al taglio’ in the Colosseum. “[in Roman slang] After all this history one thing is for sure, I can tell right away where the good is and where the bad is. By now, I’ve got a good head on my shoulders.”