In Italy, an immigrant and locals’ choir tells the story of Venice | Arts and culture

Prince, also known by his recording name Dellyswagz, heard of the choir through a friend who was a member when he moved to Venice in 2017. He was a singer in Nigeria, and his friend told him that it was a good community, that they could help him settle. When he arrived, they gave him clothes, helped him find work and provided him with legal aid to start the process of obtaining a visa.

He is now 38 years old, with a soft voice, but when he sings, he swings with the feeling, and surrounding the lyrics, his strains of voice and almost breaks. He dresses in sunglasses tinged with blue, a black leather journal cap and a complete denim outfit. “Like a king,” he said, smiling.

Shortly after his birth, his parents separated and his main dispenser of care was the father of his mother, of which he was very close. When his grandfather died in 2011, Prince had no links with the suburbs of Lagos where he grew up and in 2015 decided to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in search of a better life.

“Growing up a boy, your mom must really pray a lot for you,” he explains. “Either you become a thug or a mafia.”

He lives in a shared apartment in Padua, 40 km (25 miles) outside Venice, where he moved after losing his job in a factory and expelled because he did not yet have his papers. His room is coupled with his recording studio, where on a cluttered desk with a large instructor, he records and produces AfroBeats songs for his first album.

In Nigeria, he was a professional dance teacher, by most of the accounts, he succeeded, but he considered that there was no future there. Friends and family had already left, of which his father, who lived in the United Kingdom, but he did not plan to leave until his uncle, who lived in Austria, called and suggested to him to travel with his uncle’s wife and the three cousins. Prince gave his speakers, clothes and sneakers to his students. With his family, he saved thousands of dollars. He brought nothing with him and told his parents that he had already decided.

“The trip was deadly,” he said with a serious expression. “My story comes with a lot of pain and loss.”

The first three weeks were passed on a large open back truck filled with dozens of people. They crossed the Sahara and slept on the sand every night. Some had to drink their own urine, he says, because they had not brought enough water, and along the way, he saw bodies left in the sand. “I cannot count how much we have buried,” he said without emotion, referring to the people who died during the trip. “We used sand to cover them. There are no details on a name or family to call. ”

From Libya, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean by boat eight times. The whole trip to Italy took it for two years. Once, they were kidnapped by hackers when they were on a boat and released two months later after paying a ransom. Another time, he was detained in a Libyan prison for four months. At one point, they lacked money and worked as a security guard for seven months in a complex with refugees and migrants.

Then, in October 2016, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean again. They piled up on a wooden boat with more than 200 passengers on board. In the middle of the night, the water began to enter the boat and it started to flow. While capsizing, people fell into the water. Prince jumped to save his cousins. The sea was freezing, and everyone shouted and shouted around him, and he remembers the black water lit by stars. As he locked his 14 year old cousin Sandra, it was too late. She had drowned because she couldn’t swim.

He held his lifeless body floating on his chest with a vest of life supported behind his neck for what he considers was 25 hours before him and other survivors, including the rest of his family, were saved by fishermen and brought back to Libya.

“I didn’t even know that I was rescued because I was so tired,” he said. “My eyes just saw white. I didn’t see because of the sea, salt. I was so tired.” Prince and his family could never bury Sandra because he says that her body was stolen by smugglers from people.

In Libya, a Gambia fisherman taught him to use a compass, and during his last trip, he was the navigator, telling the captain of the boat in which direction to direct. Their boat was intercepted by a rescue boat off the Côte de Lampedusa. “The trip is not something I would like to have my worst enemy,” he said, shaking his head. The rest of his family, who had done before separately, went to different parts of Italy and Austria.

Prince tried to live with his sister-in-law in Austria, but when the authorities threatened to deport him, he was brought back to Italy, where his case was pending. His flight landed in Venice. He doesn’t know why.

Life in Italy has been difficult, he said. His father warned him of living as an immigrant, telling him before leaving: “It is better to be a free man in your own country than slaves abroad.” Prince begins to agree with him. When he was expelled from his apartment, he was homeless for seven months, sleeping on the sofas of friends and in a garage.

For him, there is nothing special in Venice. “All I do is go to work and go home, go to work, go home,” he said. If he could redo everything, he said, he would have stayed in Nigeria.

These days, he has a new job, but it is an exhausting quarter of the night with a long journey that cuts the time he must make music. To save money, he learned to survive one meal a day and ceased to paint, another favorite hobby. The choir is the only time it has fun. “When I sing with them, I still smile,” he says, “because it is the only time I can be myself.”