Tangerinn—an excerpt

Set in a coastal Mediterranean town shaped as much by the sea as by the people who pass through it, Tangerinn is a tender and unsparing meditation on migration, belonging, and the quiet violence of assimilation. Following the death of her Moroccan-born father, Mina returns from London to the Calabrian coast, where her father ran a bar called Tangerinn. There, she is confronted with her fractured sense of identity. In this excerpt, Mina reflects on her father’s bar, which her sister Aisha struggles to keep alive. A haven for migrants and misfits, the bar is a place of warmth, shared memory, and cultural continuity, but also where Mina first absorbs the shame and hierarchies that will shape her sense of self. What emerges is a portrait of a Mediterranean community held together by shared exile, where food, memory, and language become acts of preservation, even as the pressure to belong threatens to erode them. — Saleem Haddad, Fiction Editor

The bar was called Tangerinn. It was a few blocks from home and opened out onto the beach. From what I recall, it has always been noisy, crowded, and full of smells that were always new. It was frequented by all the immigrants in the area—and only as I got older did I grasp that if a place is frequented by immigrants it is not frequented by anyone else. I wonder if this ever bothered you, but you certainly didn’t make a big deal out of it. It allowed you to recreate the atmosphere of the home that you’d lost, you tried to reproduce its smells. In the mornings you served msemmen with cheese and honey, at lunchtime koftas, tagine with chicken, lemon and olives, and on Fridays you made cous-cous. You were cooking all day and all night, handing down secrets. Mint thrived in our garden, meaning you could always have a pot of tea on the go.

 To be and to belong at the same time is a privilege.

At the beginning, the bar was my favorite place, purely because the people there didn’t look like Berta, like my teachers, or like my classmates. They looked more like us, like you and me who had inherited your skin. But as I grew up, I understood that you and I and those like us were wrong. Your friends seemed dirty, and I felt dirty too. So I washed obsessively. I didn’t understand why Aisha and Berta were lighter and you and I were darker, but I knew that, whatever the reason, it was bad. Your friends wore old, threadbare clothes and smelled of the market, of fish. But they were always laughing and when I came to the bar they embraced me like I was the daughter of all of them. I was scared that their smell was also mine. They taught me to play chess and rummy. They loved me and I loved them too. But they were different, and I didn’t want to be different. I didn’t want to be like them, like you. I wanted to be normal. 

In the eyes of the people from the town, immigrants were all the same. But being different from the whites didn’t mean they were all the same. The people who came to the bar had lived a huge variety of lives, spoke languages that were nothing like one another, sometimes as distant as Italian from Finnish—yet they were all bundled into the same box. The members of a minority don’t have the luxury of being themselves: in the face of power, they become only difference. To contain multitudes is a privilege, to be incoherent is a privilege, to be unique and unrepeatable is a privilege. To be and to belong at the same time is a privilege.

When Aisha and I were little, you were an “extracomunitario.” That’s what people from outside the EU were called then. At that time “extracomunitari” immigrants were mostly Albanian or Moroccan, by which I mean that anyone who came from the former Yugoslavia was Albanian and anyone from North Africa was Moroccan. The women who came from Eastern Europe looked after everybody’s grandparents, because they were white but cost little. The Arab women struggled to find work because the rich people in town didn’t want them in their houses: they said they wasted too much time praying and refused to do the dishes or clean their bar carts. At best they found work cleaning the stairwells of apartment buildings. The Moroccans sold tissues at traffic lights or, if they were lucky, had a stall on the market. Some were passing through—heading north—but most stayed because they recognized, in the ambiguities of the sea, a place in which they could live, suffer, and die in peace. Interactions between immigrants and locals happened only at the market, and nowhere else. People who lived by the sea were welcoming, but only to those who feared their own God: they were suspicious of all the others. The fact that their God was the same God as the God of those other people they didn’t even want to hear.

We didn’t know what was going on—fish don’t know they’re in water.

After all, they had their own problems, what with the trash in the streets and the illegal building sites and the pizzo to pay and the shops randomly blowing up. The people who got shot at random, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then the trials, always unjust, they said, always making an example of someone, even if he had nothing to do with it: acquaintances, neighbors, good people, small fish. Businessmen can’t do anything without ending up inside, people would say. A mere signature could fuck you over. Then everything would return to usual. Every so often a film or TV show would come out. Middle-class people would talk about it indignantly: we’re not bad people, they’re always bad-mouthing us, this is why tourism isn’t coming down here, there’s beauty here too. The pride of the community seemed to be awakened only when it was criticized, never to defend itself from itself.

It sometimes happened that some immigrants ended up embroiled in these things, because easy money is appealing to anyone. Then a Moroccan disappeared, and nobody asked questions. 

We didn’t know what was going on—fish don’t know they’re in water. You were no different. You believed in survival at all costs. I never asked you about the compromises you had made, because I didn’t want to sully my conscience with the truth. And you never talked about it. You never talked about anything.