Roma Termini

Author's name: Najwa Bin Shatwan

Anyone who follows the novelist Najwa Bin Shatwan's experience is amazed by her persistence in experimentation, not only at the level of narrative and its various elements, but she also digs deeply until she presents us with a subject - despite its importance and clarity - that we almost touch as new, rich, and even secret. After her two novels (Horses' Hair) and (Slave Pens), she takes us to Italy in (Roma Termini) to meet the immigrant (Natasha) who works in a home for three elderly Italian women, who live in the wealth of capitalism, which has granted them a seemingly comfortable life, through which they tyrannize the rest of the peoples of the earth, but their children have received nothing from it, as if the children were in a parallel internal migration. In an interview, Natasha asks, "What do I need stars for? All I need is money. I left my country for it, and for it I will work under any sky." One of the three old women replies, "Italy has no power over you, the immigrants. You invade it from everywhere and close off job opportunities to our youth." It is a novel about contemporary diaspora life, about the concessions that immigrants are forced to make now, about the victim who is always blamed not for a crime she committed but for her identity and who she is, about this present world with its ever-changing and fluid human map, not the geography with its fixed colors. Migration is an uninterrupted act that truly begins the moment one arrives at the destination, whether it be a country or just an idea.