Vocabulary:

Scrape off
Dinghy

Teranga is a TV documentary with a great value: it can surprise you practically from the
very beginning. This does not come from its content, something to be expected given
that its subject refers to a social and polemical issue. On the contrary, it stems from its
structure. The documentary offers several layers or levels to read into. I want to
summarize these. First, we have the portrait of a city, Naples. The people appearing in
the film describe with intensity how they craved for or need to survive to arrive to
Europe, and when they finally stepped on its ground they ended up in Naples.
Obviously, a European city, but with a dynamic, way of living and strength flowing
through its streets that immediately recall an African or Asian community. Naples is so
intense that the documentary describes very well how immigration centres become a
dirty business as lucrative as drug trafficking. It is clearly said that is possible to earn
millions of euros managing these centres, this money, of course, finally would be
diverted to the hands of mobs. Second, we find music as a life-saver. The title of the
documentary has to do with a bar that is something else than a place to rest, chat or
drink. It is, in fact, a moment to escape from the violence of a very racist city, from the
violence of a precarious daily life, a pause or break to dream of a better life, one with
future and social recognition. Paradoxically, Taranga is the place in which the European
dream can be fulfilled, at least in the time of a song, the dream about a normal life. In
this sense, it is worth mentioning how music appears as a real universal language in
which different religions, cultures and people can meet and have a similar feeling
about the world. Third, Taranga is a description about the power of the symbolic. This
is something that we tend to forget in our daily life, how powerful is that dimension in
that an object have the whole meaning of a complete situation. I am talking specifically
about the word “document”. Taranga shows the horrible spectacle of non-European
people struggling to achieve a piece of paper that can change their life completely.
“Documents” means freedom of movement, hospitals, work, education, come out into
the open; in a nutshell, they mean escaping from the dark violence of a hard city and
the entrance to the real Europe. Finally, Taranga is a lesson about what it means to live
in a permanent waiting room, that is about how fragile we become when we inhabit in
that situation. A waiting room can be a hell when time is frozen, and we cannot move
into a more stable definition. It is showed by the film that a waiting room is a bracket
in our definition as human beings, a moment in that we are close to an animal
condition. However, at the end of the day and in spite of all of this, Taranga shows a
glimmer of hope. You do not know how but through the toughness of the city and the
solitude of the waiting room you can see people, here and there, fulfilling their
dreams, improving their lives, receiving aid… and that is something remarkable in the
hard reality of migration. I think this is the main think to remember about Taranga.