A Contaminated Gaze

Building identities is a never-ending process. Anyone risks getting lost in it, passively accepting labels and definitions imposed from the outside. And when identity can’t be simplified or reduced to a single label, things get really tough.

Noemi Abe (Damè. Non si fa, Bompiani, 2025) and Grace Fainelli (Decolonizzare lo sguardo, Eris, 2025) embody this complexity. Their mixed identities – Italian-Japanese for Abe, Italian-Senegalese for Fainelli – make them undesired subjects, both invisible and hyper-visible. Throughout their lives, they’ve had to face unwanted questions, indiscretion, and outright racism.

How to break free from a judgmental gaze? For Abe, it’s a matter of positionality, an understanding that every gaze comes from a certain place and situation, and it’s tied to a politics of bodies and imagination. Imagination becomes a way out, a liberation from externally imposed boundaries.

But it’s also a matter of honesty. Being honest with yourself means recognising the power you hold – the power to dream, to change, to become whatever you want to be. Honesty is exhausting and can be deeply uncomfortable, but that very fatigue is the secret weapon that makes new realities bloom in the cracks of tradition.

Fainelli recalls growing up as “the only black person in the room”: years of loneliness and shame that led her to try and erase her identity, just to “fit in”, to “disappear in the crowd”. What saved her was finding someone who looked like her, someone who could share a different, unconventional gaze, creating new spaces where those complex identities could express themselves. That’s why representation matters.

Contamination is key, suggests Giorgia Sallusti. The three women urge to reclaim the word, to give it a positive and creative meaning. Contaminating identities, languages, spaces, in order to represent the multiplicity of reality. For both writers, speaking their voices is an act of contamination, a way to push back against the persistant uncertainty that haunts those without the words to define themselves. “Don’t speak for us. Let us speak, listen to us” Fainelli insists.

“This book was an act of liberation” says Abe, a declaration of her belonging to the Italian literary space. “I feel Italian because I feel at home in this language, and I love to stay within its borders”.

Writing, then, becomes a way to create new imaginaries, a concrete act that brings to light what the mainstream has kept hidden for far too long. The goal becomes to reverse the gaze. It's not easy, but a new, active, vocal generation is fighting for it, and this might be the moment for real change.