Let’s go back in time. It’s 1997 when Bill Clinton begins his second presidential term, Dolly the sheep is the first mammal to be cloned, the United Kingdom returns Hong Kong's sovereignty to China, Lady Diana dies under the Alma bridge, the agreements of Schengen come into force also for Italy, Dario Fo is awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and I, on a cold snowy day, cross the Italian borders for the first time.
1997 is undoubtedly a year of changes and for me it coincides with what, to quote Kerouac, is the beginning of my life on the road. Since then, cars, buses, trains and airplanes have led me to discover distant cultures, languages and parallel realities divided only by time and geography.
From the moment I discovered “the other”, “the beyond”, my life has been outlined by three cornerstones: Departures, Wanderings, Returns. Before the trip to Austria I was only Massimiliano, the son of Angela and Gianni, then I’ve become the Finn, the Irishman, the drifter, "le rital", I’ve become Max, Massi, Mass, MassimoMilano (because I come from Italy and Milano is in Italy) and all the imaginable distortions of my name. I’ve become the people I’ve met, the languages I speak, the places I’ve visited, the dishes I’ve eaten. Today, I like to consider myself as a displaced individual, as the ordinary product of this chaos which is the only space in which I can live.
In Ancient Greece, the metics (métoikos) were foreign residents of city-states who didn’t have citizen rights. They occupied an intermediate position between visiting foreigners and citizens. The majority of them migrated from nearby cities looking for better economic opportunities or to escape persecution.
Several centuries later, In France, the word “metic”, in French "métèque", was recovered as a pejorative term to designate immigrants. Nonetheless, the Greek-French singer Georges Moustaki wrote the song Le Métèque to define himself:
“Avec ma gueule de métèque. De juif errant. De pâtre grec”
Moustaki reverses the meaning of the word “métèque”, he removes every negative connotation and talks about himself with the terms used by xenophobic people to label immigrants.
I’d like to keep polishing the term “metic” and use it in a neutral way to talk about the foreigners, the wanderers, the migrants, those who are far from home, me.
Nowadays, voluntary or unavoidable migration flows involve every social stratum, displacing an increasing number of people for indefinite periods of time. This pilgrimage turns the individual consciousness into a pendulum that swings between feelings of belonging and separation, between states of freedom and dependence, making wayfarers Metics in this world.