In the cloister of Museo Diocesano, Mario Desiati led a moving event with the two authors, Anna Osei and Nadeesha Uyangoda, whose words were powerful and straight to the point. Anna Osei is an author from Mantua who used to write since she was a little girl in order to express her feelings. Her book Sotto lo stesso sole was born from the need to make readers understand that everyone is very different and the only thing in common between all of us is the sun that rises and sets every day of our life. Nadeesha Uyangoda wrote L’unica persona nera nella stanza, a book about people who experience the condition of being the only black person in a room. In her work, she tried to find a solution to this sense of loneliness through the narration and the representation of black Italians in different places.

An unusual feature of this book is that there is not a single point of view, but Nadeesha kept a marginal role in order to look from the outside, like her readers do. The main question of the event was: “what does identity mean?” It is the way we see ourselves and how other people see us, a mixture of traditions, ideas and thoughts all together. But we can’t forget that building our identity is a constant work that must be done every single day of our life. We should learn to acknowledge and love ourselves and, most of all, we must remove the filters we put on ourselves in order to be accepted by society. Just start to be more ourselves.