I have what many people call “all the possible flaws”: I am a woman, Arab, Muslim and African, but these are the things I am most proud of. And today I am also proud to be Italian.
Originally from Morocco but in Italy, in Turin, since 1999, she now feels she has a dual Moroccan and Italian identity. Faiza speaks English, Arabic, French and Italian.
After graduating with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in particle physics from Morocco, she arrived in Italy through a collaboration between the University of Oujda in Morocco and the University of Turin, Italy, to do a doctoral thesis in medical physics at the Department of Physics.
She was initially scheduled to stay in Morocco, working remotely with the Turin research group, “but the project I was working on was very much related to the field design of a new oncology hadrontherapy centre”, Faiza tells us, “and so I came to Turin for two months, which turned into 23 years”.
During her PhD, she had the opportunity to meet Ugo Amaldi, the founding father of oncology hadrontherapy, who offered her a job at the TERA Foundation, by which she was later hired. After eight years of research, Faiza founded her company I-SEE-COMPUTING in 2010, thanks to the support of the incubator of the University of Turin.
Faiza feels she has gone through two journeys: the first to another country and the second to another dimension (the transition from research to “doing business”). “I started from a business simulation company where I took note about how to manage a company and this gave me a new perspective on the outcome of my research”.
At first, Faiza often considered returning to Morocco, but “difficulties teach, especially when you go through them alone”. She stayed to see what fate would have in store for her, even though each time when the residency permit renewal came she felt “like a yoghurt that is about to expire. You think ‘that’s it, I’m coming back,’ but the new bonds that are made, the new friends…makes you say ‘I’m staying here’ “.
Faiza also tells us about her being Muslim: “I have what many people call ‘every possible flaw’: I am a woman, Arab, Muslim, and African, but these are the things I am most proud of. And today I am also proud to be Italian”. Faiza wears the veil; for her, it is not an imposition. “In Morocco you are free: if you want to wear the veil you do it otherwise not, it is a personal choice like doing or not doing sports, like wearing a hat that protects us from the sun”.
She has always been surprised at the astonishment people in Italy feel at seeing her wearing a headscarf. But for her to integrate is not to become someone else, “true integration is loving the country you are in and defending it without denaturing yourself. If I deny my identity, I am no longer me and I am not even useful to the society in which I live”.
She feels both Moroccan and Italian, in fact “neither, you become a third thing, more beautiful in my opinion, for me it is an asset because you better understand another dimension, another culture”.
She returns to Morocco often; she needs it to recharge her batteries. She is proud of her home country, the gateway to Africa, with its mix of ethnicities, and landscapes. Does he miss Africa? “Yes, Africa has an essence of life that is beautiful, it has a strength in everything, a strength that no other continent gives you”. And you can feel it.
