The Painful Trauma of Female Migration. Italy Syndrome Narrated by Tiziana Francesca Vaccaro and Elena Mistrello

Abstract

Some types of real-life comics, such as graphic journalism books and investigative graphic novels, have thematized the problems of immigration. The graphic novel Sindrome Italia. Storia delle nostre badanti (Italy Syndrome. Our caretakers’ stories, 2021) by Tiziana Francesca Vaccaro and Elena Mistrello tells the story of Vasilica, who, like many other Eastern European women, abandoned her children and relatives and came to Italy to work as a family assistant. The “Italy Syndrome”, from which Vasilica suffers, is a real mental disorder that involves depression, insomnia, anxiety, hallucinations, up to a tendency to suicide. This psychological distress, which is a socio-medical phenomenon rather than a disease, occurs in Eastern European women when they return to their own countries, where the signs of trauma become more acute. The graphic novel by Vaccaro and Mistrello has the great merit of telling the Italian reader a phenomenon that is almost unknown in Italy. Drawing from theories and methodologies of Trauma Studies, in this contribution, we intend to carry out an analysis of the graphic novel Sindrome Italia, focusing on the ways in which comics as a medium manages to represent the painful trauma of migration and its psychological consequences.