Badkhen and the world in motion: "Racism, violence: let's become human again"

Born in the Soviet Union in 1975, Anna Badkhen now lives in Texas. How do you define yourself as Russian or American?

"I'm a writer, and that's it. As a pianist I met in Paris, born in West Africa, explained to me, for an artist, geographical identity doesn't matter. However, let's be clear: Russian Jew and American writer."

'Migrant', she says herself in the book “ Chronicles of a World in Movement ” (Gramma Feltrinelli), on the epochal migration in progress, which she came to present in Milan.

"Yes, of the estimated billion migrants living on the planet today, a quarter have crossed political borders, and some have experienced the miracle of receiving legal support from their new homeland. I, who left Russia in 2004 for the United States, am among those lucky ones."

Meeting with the public of readers here at the Centrale dell'Acqua, one of the oldest plants of the Milanese aqueduct, what does it mean?

"In this place, a symbol of ingenuity and progress and care for the environment, the value of water often considered in the book stands out. Mainly due to the reduction of water resources, an effect of climate change , millions of people are forced to migrate".

For this specific cause, by 2050, 19 million people are expected to leave Northern Africa, equal to 9% of its population, the highest percentage of climate migrants , out of a total of 216 million: between sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and Southern Asia, in decreasing order of size of the phenomenon, data provided by a recent World Bank report.

"But don't look for numbers in the eleven chapters of my book."

In fact, it is poetic and almost photographic and surprises us with the familiarity it establishes with the reader. How does it do it?

"Great photographers teach us that photos are good if taken at conversational distance. As a war correspondent, I have long followed the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Chechnya... reporting what I had gone to see. I have returned to the same itineraries to narrate in a new way, in addition to violence, the consequences of climate change , racism, and large-scale international migration . Trying to bring the protagonists of these upheavals closer to readers, in a sort of shared understanding of our roles and responsibilities".

Of course, in his literary reportages - from the Petite Côte in Senegal to Jericho or the American pronghorn antelope (survivors of the Giraffidae superfamily) - the perspective is different from the so-called Weltlandschaft (bird's eye view of the world) still applied by certain photographers.

"In 2015, Rocco Rorandelli documents human movements from above with photos compared to aerial images of herd migrations. And two years later: “These are not people, they are animals,” Trump says of migrants."

How is it possible to hear this from the President of a great democratic country?

"The United States was built on genocide and slavery. Its democracy is that of the white men of Athens. And Trump is a narcissistic psychopath."

However, we humans are an animal species, the only one so self-destructive.

"Of course, and the only one with the capacity to create beauty. And with the power to rediscover our humanity, as happened during the Covid pandemic. As we were 160,000 years ago, at the beginning of the first great dispersal from our common place of origin in the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia."

You wrote the book before the violence broke out in Palestine, Sudan, Congo... do you remain hopeful?

"My hope is that the line of morality will never be crossed by tolerating or even supporting the genocide in Gaza."