Ivie’s battle with the system’s light

I grew up in a house on the edge of the Castel Fusano pine forest in Ostia, a place where children learn to ride their bikes, elderly people walk their dogs, people go for a run, and teenagers play the guitar. Beneath those same pine trees and a little further down the Litoranea, sex workers—mainly Nigerian women and victims of human trafficking—stand by the roadside. They are women, sometimes sold by their own families, enslaved through ‘juju’, a voodoo ritual that traffickers use to instil terror, depriving them of a part of their body. In La luce del Sistema. In La luce del Sistema. The Story of Ivie and Her Daughters (Solferino), Maria Grazia Calandrone tells the story of one of them, Ivie: a mother who has been fighting for over ten years to get her daughters, Grace and Mercy, back, after they were taken from her by the Italian state on 19 June 2014, aged two and a half and twenty days respectively.

It is a book full of grace about the cruel breakdown of a procedural system that, out of laziness and prejudice, refuses to recognise cultural otherness. When Mercy is taken away for a medical check-up, Ivie reacts to the separation – which she finds incomprehensible – with the emotionality encoded in her own culture. The institution, lacking mediators who might lend dignity to her anguish, with a trivial gesture, causes the family to ‘plunge into the irreparable’. It is a book about the heartbreak that ignorance can cause, and about the attempt to heal it with a mother’s boundless love.

Ivie had arrived in Rome from Benin City with the aim of becoming a hairdresser and lifting her family out of poverty, but she was tricked into prostitution to pay off the debt she had incurred with her madam. She survived years of violence by dissociating herself, disconnecting from her own body, but found the strength to escape and report the abuse. She is granted refugee status, takes part in a reintegration programme, even falls in love, and gives birth to two little girls, who are soon taken from her and placed with two different families. Grace and Mercy do not know what has happened; they feel only abandonment. Initially they believe their mother is dead, while she fights to regain custody and continues to set aside gifts for every birthday and Christmas, even after her daughters decide, in order to survive, not to see her.

Calandrone’s sensitivity brings to life a narrative in which she weaves together news reports, court documents, Ivie’s voice, and the testimonies of psychologists and social workers. With the wisdom of a poet, she brings the full and empty spaces of the page to life: the urgency is such that at times a headline takes centre stage and becomes the opening line of a chapter; the language conveys Ivie’s overflowing vitality, never extinguished by a system that claims to uphold universal justice. Ivie senses this, and tells them so, to no avail: “Why are you treating me like a criminal? Why don’t you teach me to be a mother your way?”

The family will never get those lost years back, but Ivie’s battle has set a legal precedent for the all-too-common yet largely overlooked cases of mothers who are victims of trafficking. In 2019, the Court of Cassation recognised the need to integrate the family of origin into the adoptive family; in 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the Italian State, which should have worked towards family reunification and resorted to removal only as a last resort. It is a transformative ruling: the mother’s social vulnerability is no longer grounds for blame – Ivie was labelled ‘the prostitute’ by the experts – but grounds for mandatory protection.

The book’s title alludes to the merciless spotlight of the system that judges and frames Ivie, but it is Calandrone, in telling this story, who sheds light on a system tainted by prejudice and inadequate safeguards. The next hearing in the trial will be on 16 September.