Freddie's Corner

FREDDIE'S CORNER

Their lives, my life

The poetry of images (photo by Leni Frau)

03-11-2023 by Freddie del Curatolo

Every morning I look out of the shack and watch their lives.
They are one with the mud, the sheet metal, the wood.
They are broken beams like their bones, but they hold up and can be stronger than any misfortune.
They can raise children, care for the old, support the crippled.
Rotten beams as our thoughts sometimes are, unstable on that infamous soil in which, however, sooner or later, a flower always sprouts, like a liberating smile.
They are hard and sharp stones, crumbled gravel, sand from hinted constructions, bricks stolen who knows where.
They coexist and you often find them together to make house, roof, floor.
Their existences laugh and wonder at nothing because it would be too easy to complain about everything.
They have ears trained to the sirens, the screams of merchants, the cries of infants, the coughs of old men, the squeals of children, the barking of dogs and the squeaking of rats.
They vomit rubbish, spit toxic liquids, shit open sewers.
There are big, wide-open eyes in place of windows, and often it is the heart that serves as their door, creaking and bumpy.
They embrace for a birth and a death, they kill each other for a penny or a beer.
They haggle, barter, get drunk, disappear and return as if nothing had been.
And nothing has been, after sunset.
Nothing will be, if one can wake up again.
Every morning I look out of the shack and watch their lives.
My life.

TAGS: vitaslumfangolamiere

Two screenwriters and a cartoonist tell the extreme life in a Nairobi slum.

READ ALL

We know mud well.
We live in the mud every...

READ THE STORY

An entire village washed away by the fury of muddy waters, huts and rudimentary little...

READ ALL THE REVIEW

It is called Deep Sea, "Deep Sea" and is one of the least considered ...

READ ALL THE ARTICLE

In celebration of Global Recycling Day, which takes place on Friday, March 18, 2022, The Sands at...

READ THE ARTICLE

by redazione

Kibera Goodbye.
At least in the words of Kenyan...

READ ALL THE ARTICLE

Today's Carol, Christmas 2020, is not a song but a poem, perhaps sung in a whisper as ...

READ ALL THE ARTICLE

A three hundred and sixty degree virtual journey through Kenya today, with a series of experts who will...

READ THE ARTICLE

Two huge tusks sticking out of a sea of mud in the middle of the savannah.
A scene seen...

by Freddie del Curatolo

Many friends of Kenya and its coastal paradises have known him once or know him...

READ THE ARTICLE

FREDDIE'S CORNER

Where life is a wall

Endecasyllables from the slum

by Freddie del Curatolo

I wish to make bricks my future
redemption of...

READ THE POETRY

Almost two hundred dead and more than 90 missing. This is the dramatic death toll from...

READ THE ARTICLE

by Paola Viola

Having happily ended the presentations organized with the Italian Cultural Institute and combined with...

READ ALL THE ARTICLE