SURVIVAL
In Tigrinya, those who were rescued from the October 3 disaster call themselves wutsae meat, “survivors of a catastrophe.” The Tigrinya term for “survivor” needs a qualifier. One must be a survivor of something: a shipwreck, a tragedy, “Lampedusa.” For Eritreans in the diaspora and in Eritrea, “Lampedusa” refers more to the disaster than to the specific place, the island. In this context, the event itself is a crucial definer of survival: those who survived lived on, beyond and after “Lampedusa.” The prefixes in s urvivre in French, sorvivere in Italian, and överleva in Swedish, like survive and the archaic overlive in English, emphasize the meaning of living over or beyond something. (In Tigrinya, wutsae does not have the root related to living.) Rescue is the moment from which the continuation of their life begins.
In this chapter, I examine how those who were rescued from the sea experience survival. What does survival mean for the survivors? Though authorities were able to report soon after the disaster that 155 people “survived,” not all of those who stayed alive necessarily survived—not immediately, anyway. How were they affected by the disaster and how do they continue living on in a meaningful way? Others died, and they too could have died, but instead they somehow stayed alive. Then, I examine the role of others in the experience and meaning of survival. How does recognition of those who were rescued as persons in the common world shape their survival? This perspective to the disaster’s afterlife allows me to further develop what Didier Fassin has discussed as “the anthropological consequences of the concept of survival” (Fassin 2010, 83) that is, to scrutinize what human beings make of their lives, and how their lives question what it is to be human.
In philosophical inquiries into what it is to be human and live a human life, the aspect of survival is central. Life is survival, Jacques Derrida observed in his last interview: “I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]” (Derrida and Birnbaum 2007, 26). Survival is living on, continuing to live. Derrida’s understanding of survival is informed by his reading of Walter Benjamin’s (2009) work on translation in which Benjamin defines survival first as überleben, living beyond a death, like a child who survives the death of his parents, and second as fortleben, continuing to live on (Derrida and Birnbaum 2007, 26). These two definitions of survival are not separate as the analysis of the aspect of living beyond losing a loved one in a specific type of death, death at the border, will be illustrated in chapter 9. The second meaning of Benjamin’s definition of survival, the continuing to live on (fortleben), is also relevant in understanding survival of death of another.
There are two ideas in Walter Benjamin’s (2009) theorization that are pertinent in understanding survival of a migrant disaster. First, for Benjamin the active verb, living, is central to survival. This is the insight that Derrida emphasizes in his interview when he underlines that “life is survival.” Both of these theorists maintain that survival is not about staying alive physically, nor is it a continuation of the same life. What survives, lives on, but it continues to transform in the manner of any living organism: it does not remain the same.
Benjamin does not conceive of life as merely a physical or material condition. In reference to works of art, he writes: “organic corporeality was not the only thing to which life could be attributed” (2009, 31). Life is more than the physical existence of something, more than an “element of the animal” (Benjamin 2009, 31). It is only on the basis of history “that the sphere of life must ultimately be defined,” Benjamin maintains. Life, therefore, needs to be understood in the wider sphere of history. Survival is the continuation of life in its social, cultural, and political form rather than its mere physical existence.
In the theoretical work on survival as life, the Holocaust has been a defining event. In her influential discussion of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains how before the physical killing in the death camps, the Nazis destroyed much of the social, political, and cultural lives of those they perceived as not worthy of human life. Though some stayed alive physically, their lives as participants in the common world were ended. They did not survive.
Humans are capable of a life that has meaning in a cultural and political sense. Hannah Arendt’s work in this respect is perhaps the most influential. The Human Condition discusses her central idea of the human condition, that of pluralism: each person is distinct and unique, and each human life is made of particular events. Humans are capable of new beginnings, of taking an initiative and setting something unique in motion (1998, 177). Each person has a “biography,” and therefore, this part of human life, bios, can be distinguished from mere biological life zoe (Arendt 1998, 79).
Giorgio Agamben (1999, 132–33), following the work of Hannah Arendt, defines survival in the concentration camps in Remnants of Auschwitz in two ways. He distinguishes a biological form of life as the first form of survival. In reference to a Muselmann (a slang term used in Nazi concentration camps to refer to a prisoner who was still biologically alive but no longer had any personhood), Agamben argues that survival means “the inhuman capacity to survive the human” (Agamben 1999, 133). The prisoner has passively let go of the will to live a human life while remaining biologically alive. This is the first sense of survival. In the second sense, a person actively becomes a survivor by fighting not only biological but also social death—that is, the inhumanity into which a Muselmann has fallen. In doing so, a survivor maintains his or her personhood. Agamben’s distinction is based on concentration camp testimonies. The destruction of a social, cultural, and political life took time, and therefore falling into the state of a Muselmann took time.
While the condition of the camps has often (including in the work of Agamben) been paralleled with present-day asylum “reception centers” (including the one in Lampedusa; for a discussion, see Neumann 2019, 17), survival of a disaster at sea is a different matter. One of the key differences is that the perpetrators and structures of violence that are visible in the camps are invisible at the sea border: the natural force of the sea is the apparent killer. Thus, survival in a camp is not entirely analogous to surviving mass death at the sea border. The first sense of survival—staying alive physically while one’s social and cultural life is annihilated—does not directly apply to the survival of a disaster at sea. Nevertheless, Agamben’s idea of the second sense of survival offers an important opening to understanding the survival of a migrant disaster. This meaning of survival underlines an active and processual resistance against the death of a social, cultural, and political life.
If human survival is living on, as Derrida (Derrida and Birnbaum 2007, 26) argues, what kind of experience is it? I examine this question by analyzing witness testimonies, interviews, and my field notes of time spent with survivors. The core of the material is four survivor testimonies that resulted from interviews conducted by Adal Neguse in 2017 for the documentary film project Remembering Lampedusa (2019). Each interview was conducted in Tigrinya at a survivor’s home, filmed by Anna Blom and Ditte Uljas, and transcribed and translated into English. Each interview lasted one to two hours. I was present at Solomon Gebrehiwet’s interview and earlier at the first meeting of the four survivors, Adal Neguse and Anna Blom, where we spent the day at a survivor’s home to discuss and plan the documentary project.
Analysis of the material reveals that there are three important facets of survival that support Derrida’s key insight that survival is life. First, survival is about creating a new self and a new life. Second, the capacity to feel shame and to come to terms with unsettling ethical situations is crucial in this process of survival. Third, interaction with others and the awareness of others to whom a survivor is responsible for bearing witness of the disaster are central to survival. Survival is life; it is a transformative, social process.
Survival as a New Life
In interviews, Vito Fiorino and Constantino Baratta, the two Lampedusans who have spoken most prominently about their role as civic rescuers on October 3, 2013, always mention that the rescued call them “father.” Vito and Constantino also refer to the rescued in familial terms—as “sons,” “daughters,” “ragazzi” (boys and girls) or by their first names, such as Adhanom, Marawi, Luam, or Solomon. Rosa Maria, Constantino’s wife, speaks of them as “i miei figli,” my children. Once when traveling back from Lampedusa with Amanuel and Ambasager, who live near Stockholm, I asked them why they call Vito father. Amanuel responded that by rescuing him, Vito gave him a new life. “He is a father to me. Abona. I have two fathers,” Amanuel said. Ambasager’s oldest daughter’s birthday is October 3, and he told me: “She turned ten when I started from year zero.” They both used the phrase that they were reborn that day, and Vito, as the captain of Gamar, became their father.
Describing Vito and Constantino as “fathers” and the disaster as “year zero” suggest that the survivors perceive the disaster as a new beginning, which demands a new identity. Yet despite the survivors’ “rebirth,” the disaster is nevertheless not a moment that erases the past and resets the clock. Amanuel has not forgotten his first father, nor has Ambasager forgotten his ten-year-old daughter. “Year zero” is a rupture in the survivors’ lives rather than the beginning of a completely new life. There is a before and after, an old life and a new life, but both parts—the old and the new—belong to the same life. When the survivors speak of their rescue as having been born again, they are referring to receiving a second chance to live a physical life. In the new life, they received a new relationship—Amanuel becomes the son of an Italian ice cream maker. This extension of family suggests that there is more to survival than just not dying.
The disaster and living beyond it restarts the lives of the survivors in a new form. The issue of how this new life differs from the old, the new self from the old self, surfaces strongly in the testimonies of four survivors that Adal Neguse, the brother of a victim, elicited in Sweden in 2017 as part of the research for this book and the Remembering Lampedusa documentary film project he worked on with the filmmaker Anna Blom. Toward the end of survivor Bisrat’s retelling of the disaster, Adal asks her: “Did this change your attitude toward life?” She responds: “Yes. It is very hard to witness so many lives wiped out right in front of your eyes. As long as you live, you have to go on with love and sympathy in everything you do. I escaped death and created a second life. There is nothing worse than what I have already seen.” Similarly, Adal asks Solomon Gebrehiwet: “Did this change you as a person?” Solomon replies: “Compared to someone who comes here directly from Eritrea, I, who have come through many problems, and him—we are not the same. We are different like the earth and the sky. He could know about the problems only through [hearing] a story, but not like me who has gone through it. I have gotten a lesson out of it: patience. I have become more patient.”
The self-recognition of personal transformation—that neither Bisrat nor Solomon is the same person four years after the disaster—is an obvious characteristic of the process of survival. Their experience of the disaster shapes their lives and gives their lives a particular meaning. Bisrat describes her experience of witnessing mass death by saying “there is nothing worse.” This experience has created meaning for her life—she has the incentive to live with love and sympathy in everything she does. Solomon underlines that having endured many problems defines who he is now. “Many problems” can mean the disaster and what he experienced during his journey, but also, perhaps, the time afterward. His survival is also something to go through, and this process has evidently made him a different kind of Eritrean in Sweden compared to those who have come “directly.” The journey he took without papers and the disaster he survived are detours that fundamentally changed him as a person. While becoming a refugee in Sweden can always be said to be the beginning of a new life, Solomon insists on a difference between himself, who experienced the disaster, and those who didn’t. Like Ambasager and Amanuel, Solomon does not think that his life started from zero, that his old life and old self were erased. His new self, shaped by the experience of the disaster and by survival, can still be compared with that of Eritreans who come directly. It is not the same, but it is comparable.
Interestingly, when Solomon tells Adal about his experience of the disaster and his survival, he points out that those who have not gone through these experiences can only learn about them “through a story.” Solomon’s capacity for witnessing (seeing the disaster) and bearing witness (telling about it) is different from those who were not there, who were not in the water struggling with those who died. Solomon’s understanding of knowledge is similar to Yuval Noah Harari’s (2009) notion of “flesh witnessing”—that only by experiencing, by understanding via one’s own flesh, can certain knowledge can be gained. It follows that this sensible, experiential knowledge can never be fully communicated to anyone because only by being there and experiencing the disaster can one fully understand it. Solomon acknowledges that another could gain knowledge, though “only” through listening to a story, resulting in knowledge that is less than his own, incomplete. Complete knowledge, Solomon seems to suggest, is available only to the flesh witness. Thus, survival of a flesh witness must also be specific.
The remaking of oneself that both Bisrat and Solomon describe in their interviews is familiar from other narratives of surviving various types of traumatic experiences. Susan Brison (2002, 39) discusses how narratives of trauma frequently return to the issue of no longer being able to find the self one once was. She quotes trauma literature to illustrate this point, giving examples such as: “I died in Vietnam” or “One can be alive after Sobibor without having survived Sobibor” (Brison 2002, 39). Near-death experiences and witnessing the death of others undoes the self. Survival, then, requires an active remaking of the self and envisioning one’s world and future anew.
A survivor is a haunted subject—haunted by the disaster and the dead, but also by the future and the remade self. In Haunted Subjects, the literature scholar Colin Davis (2007, 117–18) writes, in reference to Emmanuel Levinas’s lectures on surviving the death of another person, that the dead “constitute me as survivor of their death” (Davis 2007, 118). Thus, while the dead cannot directly speak to the living, and there is no actual dialogue between the living and the dead, the dead do “signify”—produce signs—“since the survivor continues to be the uncomprehending addressee of signs which cannot be attributed to any living subject” (Davis 2007, 117).
Memorializing disaster is one crucial means of attending to such “signs,” and therefore also central in the process of survival. In chapter 7, I explained how survivors who return to Lampedusa for the annual commemoration of the disaster act upon their responsibility as survivors and for the benefit of other refugees, making claims for the rights of refugees more broadly. Bisrat describes it as doing something in the name of the dead. Memorializing the dead in a public or more private way is one important aspect of survival. Through acts of memorializing, survivors not only create relationships among the living—among themselves, the relatives of victims, the Lampedusan civil rescuers, and others present at the rituals—they also create a relationship with the dead. They act upon the world in the name of the dead, which also helps the memory of the dead survive. The memory of the deceased continues to live on through acts of commemoration. Bisrat told Adal: “When I meet the people who were rescued with me, I feel joy. We meet not to forget, but to carry on with our relationship. We also want to do something. As long as we live in this world, we want to do something in their [the deads’] name.” In chapter 7, I examined survivors’ acts of memorialization and argued that commemorating together and presenting themselves as a group was important. Here, Bisrat talks about that same power of peer support. Meeting other survivors and doing something in the name of the dead are instrumental in the process of living on in her new life. Survival, for her, is a collective, relational process. She survives together and in interaction with others, particularly those who were rescued with her and are in the same position as witnesses. They share an embodied knowledge that no one else can know in the same way.
Nevertheless, as much as remembering the disaster is central to survival, so is forgetting. Survival comes across in the interviews as a continuous balancing act between remembering and forgetting. Later in the interview with Adal, Solomon reflects that his memories of the disaster cause him stress if they enter his mind in his daily life, such as while he is at work driving a bus: “You need to live a new life. The bad and dirty things, you need to leave them behind. You have to decide what your new life should look like. If everything keeps coming back, you are in danger.” To survive—that is, to “live a new life” in Solomon’s words—one also needs to forget, or to be able to manage one’s emotions when “everything comes back.” If Solomon remembers the disaster at the wrong time, he is unable to live his new life. While survival involves the collective and relational work of remembering, it also involves the solitary management of those memories and being able to forget.
Survivors articulation of the rescue as “being born again” or having “a second life” underlines that survival is about a new beginning—this is an aspect that is fundamental to human condition, and to a full human life. Both remembering and forgetting are action and speech, and both are necessary for a new beginning. Deliberate silence or forgetting—the leaving behind of bad and dirty things—is an act, just as speaking or doing something in the name of the dead are acts of remembering. Life is survival, as Derrida said, and survival is a beginning, life set in motion.
The Ethical Complexity of Survival
The need to forget is related to the ethical complexity of the disaster and to the difficult and ambiguous emotions, such as shame, guilt, and regret, that emerged afterward. What conduct was right and what was wrong? The answer was not obvious to the survivors. Adhanom Rezene, who also narrated his testimony to Adal in Stockholm, speaks about the ethical uncertainty of his own and others’ actions during the disaster. Humanity and inhumanity, compassion and ignorance are entangled in his memories of his time in the water. Though he does not try to forget these difficult scenes, his choice of words suggests that he nevertheless creates a certain distance between himself and the events:
While we struggled to survive, others died. You move away from people. In the darkness, if you hear someone nearby, you swim in the other direction. You flee from death. . . . When you are swimming and someone comes next to you and asks for help, you flee, change your route. . . . Then you might see your close friend—you can’t leave him. . . . Those who had some strength said to others: “Keep moving, we are very close, the rescue team is coming.” I didn’t have the strength to speak, I was vomiting. . . . But some people gave hope to others.
Adhanom’s description of the event remains vague: someone came next to someone else, “you” (not “I”) fled from those who called for help. Certainty and detail seem to be unspeakable; the “rules” of interaction in the disordered disaster scene are described in a distanced manner. However, after describing the scene generally, Adhanom does speak about himself directly, acknowledging that he was unable to even “give hope to others.” Nevertheless, while talking about action and nonaction, Adhanom does not suggest that he or any of the other passengers on the migrant boat are guilty. Ethical judgment is suspended, it is impossible.
Similar memories of existing at the limits of humanity and ethics also appear in the other three survivor testimonies. Yusef (a pseudonym), who was the youngest of the survivors, thirteen years old at the time of the disaster, recalled how he and a friend stayed alive in the water. This memory also included uncertainty about ethical action. When the sun rose over the migrants struggling in the sea, Yusef recognized a boy in the water nearby, a friend from his village in Eritrea. He swam toward the boy, though it was not how one was supposed to behave at the scene of the disaster. “I approached only him. Otherwise, you don’t do that,” he says, referring to swimming toward another person. Like Adhanom, Yusef speaks of swimming away from people who might hold on to “you” (in a general sense) and pull you under when describing the disaster scene. It was the order of the disaster, at least in the narratives of those who remained alive to give an account of the disaster. The ethical order of those who died we cannot know. Yusef doesn’t directly identify any particular person whom he or someone else left behind. But the fact that he swam toward the friend and not away from him, and that the other boy allowed Yusef to swim toward him and did not flee, reveals a special relationship between the two boys. They were friends and trusted one another.
Yusef had found a plastic bottle floating in the sea that he was using to help stay afloat. He and his friend started to swim together. They talked and “encouraged each other,” Yusef says.
He asked me to share the plastic bottle with him. But the bottle was very small—you couldn’t share it. I told him he could have it—our hope must come from God, not plastic—but he refused to take it. His idea was that we could both hold on to it from opposite ends. My idea was that he could take it for a while and then give it back to me. But he didn’t take it. We were both rescued and arrived safely. He is now in Germany, and we stay in touch.
Adal, the interviewer, wants to know more about how the two boys survived together and asks: “Were you swimming together? Could you see each other [the whole time]?” Yusef starts to become uncertain about the moral of his story, which to this point has been about mutual encouragement, trust, friendship, and willingness to share, to endanger one’s own safety for a friend.
YUSEF: Yes, but because I had the plastic bottle, I couldn’t swim very fast. I was moving more slowly. He was swimming faster. That’s why he didn’t want the plastic bottle. He wanted to swim, and no one can swim [fast] holding a plastic bottle. Or you have to swim like this. You stay where you are unless the wind takes you elsewhere. So, he went further, far further than me.
ADAL: But weren’t you rescued together?
YUSEF: Yes, after I was pulled from the sea, I found him on the same ship.
Yusef’s and Adhanom’s memories reveal that actions and inaction create a sense of ethical ambiguity. Adhanom, for example, acknowledges that he was not able to provide hope to others. Their distanced manner of speaking suggests that both Adhanom and Yusef feel uncomfortable about, and perhaps even ashamed of, having seen and been part of ethically ambiguous situations in which right and wrong were not clear choices. Should one swim toward someone who calls for help and perhaps be pulled under? Which one of the boys was right about the bottle? Do they feel shame because they might have compromised morally? To stay alive, did they momentarily give up their capacity for social and cultural action? In Agamben’s terms, did the inhuman (biological life) survive the human (political, cultural, and social life)? Such a trajectory is not clear in Adhanom’s and Yusef’s testimonies, but it is definite that no personal action of compromise is necessary for a survivor to feel shame. Simply seeing and being at the scene of a disaster creates a sense of shame when one examines oneself while describing the scene to a listener, when one imagines being seen by others. Witnessing and bearing witness both contribute to the emotion of shame.
Survival as a Capacity to Feel Shame
The sense of being seen by others as having stayed alive while others died is apparent in Bisrat’s and Solomon’s interviews when they describe the days after the disaster. The most difficult emotions emerged when they became aware of their need to bear witness. In her interview, Bisrat recalls her decision to leave Eritrea and pursue the dangerous journey to Europe. When she set out, she thought she would either arrive safely or vanish at sea: “You were not crossing legally, either you would make it or perish.” She had escaped Eritrea where her future was compromised. Conscription in the national service was indefinite and family life was suspended. In order to live a full human life, she had to risk also her biological life. “You would make it or perish.” But she had not thought of the possibility of surviving a disaster and having to bear witness to mass death. Bisrat recalls how she pushed dead bodies away as she tried to swim toward the light of the Lampedusa lighthouse. She was nearly unconscious when the coast guard rescued her, and only later did she realize that none of her family or friends had survived. She said to Adal: “When I regained consciousness, I could not find those who were with me. I had lost them all. Then, I regretted that I was rescued. I mean that at that time it was very hard for me to be the only one [from my group] who was rescued. They were my friends, my family, people from my neighborhood.” She regretted that she was rescued when she became aware that no one else in her group made it. It meant she would have to relay the news of death to the relatives of the others.
In her testimony, Bisrat tells Adal how the survivors were given phone cards at the reception center in Lampedusa so they could call family. This was meant to be a joyful event—to call family and tell them you have made it to Europe. But Bisrat did not call, and many other survivors also put off making the calls. Bisrat mentions twice that her throat was “clogged” from swallowing sea water and fuel that had leaked from the boat into the sea. Her physical inability to speak is given as one explanation for not calling her family: “I had not gotten my voice back. I mean my throat was not okay.” However, she also says: “Even if you wanted to speak, you couldn’t. There was no strength.” The physical condition of having lost her voice is entangled with the emotional difficulty of calling relatives to let them know she had survived. The phone call upon arrival, which for migrants is often the high point of the journey to Europe, was now a situation that required great effort, and as Bisrat suggests, her circumstances were, in fact, unspeakable. In her conversation with Adal, it is obvious how difficult it is for Bisrat to find words to describe why she didn’t make the call. The unspeakability of one’s survival remains unspeakable even afterward.
BISRAT: We were feeling so bad that we weren’t able to make those calls.
ADAL: Do you mean that you did not want to call?
BISRAT: Yes. It was very hard. You feel for [the victims’] families.
ADAL: What was the reason you didn’t want to call?
BISRAT: My family would ask about the others, and I had nothing but bad news.
Bisrat’s use of “we” rather than “I” at first when talking about the phone cards suggests that she hesitates to take sole responsibility for not calling. It was not just her, but others too, she indicates. Adal pushes further on this issue and asks Bisrat to clarify whether she and the others couldn’t call or didn’t want to call. Solomon speaks about the same situation and the emotional difficulty of calling family:
Wasn’t the disaster on Thursday? I didn’t call on Thursday. It was Friday evening when I called. They gave us a phone card so we could call our relatives. But, you know, I felt ashamed that I had survived, to say that I have survived. I didn’t call. I kept quiet. I didn’t tell my family, anyone. But my brother had heard somehow that I was on that ship and people had already started to console him. He thought I was dead. Some others had already called [their families] on Thursday. Then I called [on Friday] and said “Hello Mulie.” My brother said “Selie” and fainted. He was gone.
Bisrat talks about her regret over staying alive and says that “feeling bad” prevented her from calling. Solomon names his uncomfortable feeling “shame.” For many on the boat, calling family to let them know they were alive meant also having to bear witness to the death of others. Most survivors had been traveling in a group of cousins, friends, or neighbors, so there was no avoiding having to communicate that someone else had died. Bisrat did not find the strength to call, and four years later it is still difficult for her to relate the memory of staying silent in her narrative about the disaster.
Neither Bisrat nor Solomon talks about regret or shame in the sense of feeling guilt about one’s own actions or inaction during the disaster. Their feelings are not about the guilt of culpability. Shame is a self-conscious feeling as well as a social emotion (Shapiro 2003, 1134). Both Solomon and Bisrat describe their difficult feelings in the context of becoming aware of themselves and their condition in relation to others. Bisrat regrets her survival when she becomes aware that her friends and family have died. Solomon postpones calling when he imagines the moment he would need to report who died. Shame emerges particularly at the moment of the phone call, and the memory of this difficult moment continues to haunt them four years later. The emotion of shame requires exposure and visibility, appearing before another and before oneself. To feel ashamed is to be a spectator of oneself. One imagines and evaluates oneself and one’s humanity. Shame is not about the fear of being found guilty for one’s actions.
It is not surprising that regret, shame, and memories of ethically complex situations appear in the testimonies of all four of the interviewed Lampedusa survivors. In fact, difficult emotions such as shame and guilt are also central in Holocaust survival testimonies and in the literature on surviving the concentration camps. “Guilt is a locus classicus of literature on the camps,” Giorgio Agamben (1999, 89) argues in Remnants of Auschwitz. For Buchenwald survivor Bruno Bettelheim, survival does not mean merely staying alive but transforming as a person through “the ability to feel guilty” (1976, 34). In his New Yorker essay “Surviving,” Bettelheim argues that guilt is “a most significant aspect of survivorship” (1976, 45) and states that “one cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished, many of them in front of one’s eyes” (1976, 45). Bettelheim also refers to scholarship on the survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, suggesting that Bettelheim believes that guilt at having survived is a common condition among survivors of an event resulting in mass death.
Primo Levi also identifies the emotions of guilt and shame as central for survival. Like other concentration camp survivors, Levi speaks of guilt and shame rather interchangeably. Discussion as to the difference between these two emotions in concentration camp experiences appears only later in academic literature examining survivor testimonies (see Agamben 1999; Shapiro 2003; Leys 2007). Primo Levi (1988, 72–73) maintains that it is “absurd” and “paradoxical” that shame was so common among the survivors of the camps because rationally, those who felt it knew that they had not caused the cruelty. In pointing out this absurdity, Levi recognizes that the feeling of shame does not require wrongful action.
In the context of the violent border of Europe, the perpetrators of violence are external to the scene. But even if they had been on the scene, capable of taking action to stop the cruelty or choosing not to do anything, the feeling of shame would nonetheless be unavailable to them. Shame is an emotion shared by those who witness events but are not directly implicated in them. David Shapiro argues that subjugation, the inability to resist, and feelings of helplessness are reasons for shame in the context of experiencing or witnessing violence. Those who were rescued in Lampedusa feel ashamed of their survival because they witnessed mass death from a position in which there was very little they could do for others.
To some extent, the same can be said about those who witnessed the disaster through mediation. Pope Francis’s “vergogna” and its echoes in the headlines of European newspapers and across the global media (discussed in chapter 1) were not the confessions of people who identified as perpetrators or felt culpable of mass death. Shame in the context of mediated witnessing can mean two things. First, shame can be understood as “shame on you,” a shaming of those responsible for Europe’s migration policy and for producing the violent border. Second, the mediated witnesses may be announcing their own feeling of shame, which triggers a response inspired by a sense of responsibility toward what is taking place in the Mediterranean. Attentiveness to one’s own self-interest in the structures and practices that produce violent bordering is connected to this type of shame. In chapter 6, I discussed the shocking feeling of shame felt by Dresden activists when they realized how easy it was to ignore news about border deaths. The emotion of shame demands that one act upon the wrong, despite a lack of direct or personal involvement. Thus, shame is intrinsic to attentive citizenship. Through mediation, one has entered the scene, become aware of the violent border, and understands that one is implicated through being a citizen of Europe.
In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi says that the emotion of liberation from the camps was shame, not joy (Levi 1988, 70–72). Levi devotes an entire essay in his book to the topic of shame, expounding on a scene in which Russian soldiers arrive to liberate the prisoners in Auschwitz. This perspective reveals that shame is primarily an emotion felt while witnessing violence that is being done or has been done by others.
It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to witness or undergo an outrage: the shame that the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense. (Levi 1988, 72–73)
There are four important aspects of the shame of survival in this memory that help us to think about survival in Lampedusa. First, the feeling of shame that was familiar to the camp survivors due to their position as witnesses during prisoner selections arose again at liberation. Though the survivors in Lampedusa saw other people drown, it was only after their rescue that they felt shame. The emotion emerged when they became aware of who had died and had to start making phone calls.
Second, in Levi’s memory, shame is related to the inability to act upon wrong-doing. The prisoners could not prevent the selections and liberating soldiers who arrived in the camps could not immediately remove the harm that had been done to the prisoners. In Lampedusa, the inability to help others—for example, to share the water bottle or even to give hope, as Adhanom recalled—created complicated emotions, including shame.
Third, Levi describes what “the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another.” He refers to the prisoners who were capable of feeling shame as “just men.” They had not done anything to cause the crime whose consequences they were witnessing. This aspect differs from the scene in Lampedusa, as I have discussed earlier. In Lampedusa, the perpetrators were invisible and unidentifiable. The sea was the apparent killer. There were no identifiable unjust actors at the scene of the disaster, no actors whose conscious cruelty one could witness and feel ashamed about. Agency is far removed from the scene of violence in Lampedusa. The European policy makers and the Italian authorities, the coast guard that arrived too late, and any other actors who might have done something to prevent the disaster are external to how the scene of the disaster is perceived. Khaled Bensalem, the Tunisian “captain” of the boat who was sentenced to eighteen years in prison in Sicily, is the only individual that the Italian authorities identified as a perpetrator. It was only due to human rights lawyers and activists who took the crew of a Sicilian fishing vessel Aristeus to the court in a civil case, that resulted in seven fishermen receiving sentences of five to eight years in prison for failing to provide assistance or notify authorities about a boat in distress (Tribunale di Agrigento 2020, 3–4). All others implicated in the disaster seem more like “just men.”
Fourth, Levi argues that shame is social and connected to exposure. One sees the horror and one’s seeing is seen by others. One is aware of oneself as a spectator. Through seeing, the horror of the crimes committed by another joins the “existing things” of one’s world. This insight expressed in the famous quote above is also central in the context of survival after Lampedusa. The scene of mass death in Lampedusa introduced something previously inconceivable to the “world of existing things” among many of the survivors. Life and the world as the survivors knew them were ruptured. Afterward, they needed to create a new self and a new form of belonging in the world.
Seeing death with one’s own eyes is one thing, but having to tell about it is another, as Bisrat’s and Solomon’s difficulty with the phone calls demonstrates. Survivors became a particular type of witness in Lampedusa. Their sense of responsibility for bearing witness, to tell what happened and who died, was far-ranging. As I described in chapter 3, immediately after the disaster, the survivors began collecting the names of the dead. They remembered the dead in a Facebook group, they collected photographs of the dead to produce a postcard and a poster (for the memorial in Piazza Piave), and they demanded rights for the dead in commemorative rituals in Lampedusa.
Arguably, this sense of survival can be extended to other categories of witnessing as well, beyond the immediate category of flesh witnesses. Lampedusans who chanced upon the disaster scene, the locals who managed the dead bodies, and the Sicilians who buried the dead were eyewitnesses of the corporeality of the disaster (as discussed in chapters 4 and 5). Mediated witnesses across Italy, Europe, and beyond encountered the disaster from a distance through television, photographs, and reading the news. Many felt shame that prompted them to respond. Memorialization and the alternative forms of representation that I’ve examined throughout this book are examples of responses that grew out of a sense of shame and responsibility that were felt after facing the mediated representation of the disaster.
Survival as a Shared Process: Awareness and Recognition
The testimonies gathered by Adal Neguse reveal a transformation from victim not yet in a position to bear witness, to survivor with the capacity and responsibility to bear witness. So far, I have focused on the experience and meaning of survival, which is clearly a process. Is there something between the state of being a victim, alive but naked in the water, not sure whether one will stay alive, and the state of being a survivor who has reestablished one’s self and one’s full human life? Adhanom reflects on the shift from victim to a liminal state of not-yet-survivor in his memory of being rescued by a coast guard search and rescue ship:
They placed us on the deck, and we saw the dead bodies floating everywhere. They covered us with foil blankets, and it felt good. It was good to see other people being rescued, too. But when we saw the dead in the sea, we started to cry. Everyone was crying, yelling. Some called for their loved ones. You felt like diving back into the sea to join those you lost, but you had no strength to do that. Thank God so many were rescued.
Adhanom’s emotions during the rescue were ambiguous: the moment he knew he had stayed alive and saw others being rescued felt good. Simultaneously, however, he and the others who had been rescued started to cry. He would have gone back into the sea with the dead, if only he had had the strength. Adhanom had not yet fully survived. He felt the urge to join the dead, not yet to do something in the name of the dead, as Bisrat described the sense of her survivorship.
On the coast guard vessel’s deck, Adhanom was still at the boundary between life and death, although now more on the side of life. In the water, the boundary had been less obvious: “I wasn’t sure I would make it.” On the deck, he was alive physically, but not yet socially or politically; he was not yet participating in the common world. Survival was not guaranteed. He was still partly a victim, naked, covered in foil, unable to participate in the activity around him or even to jump into the water. For Adhanom, four years after the disaster, seeing the scene from these two positions creates a complex memory. There is, on the one hand, the promise of a future where he can live on, bear witness, and act responsibly in respect to what he has experienced and seen. On the other hand, he is still a victim, not yet a survivor, who wishes to join the dead.
Transformation from victim to almost-survivor is central to Adhanom’s narration of survival. He underlines the blurriness and ambiguity of survival, describing a process between death and life. The position of witnessing is important: from the deck, wrapped in foil and having reached physical safety, Adhanom and a few others are able to see the disaster in the water. Nevertheless, being on deck is not yet a position he can feel completely good about. I have seen no images of half-naked survivors wrapped in foil on the crowded deck of the coast guard vessel among those circulated by the survivors. News photographs of the coffins arranged at the hangar, mobile phone photos of commemorative rituals and posed groups of survivors, and images of Lampedusan rescuers are the themes most commonly shared and posted as Facebook profile pictures. These pictures represent survivorship. Representations of the state of almost-survivorship are not publicly disseminated. It seems not to be a state that survivors want to publicly identify with.
I was therefore a bit puzzled when I noticed in Lampedusa in 2018 that a couple of survivors and Vito Fiorino and some other Lampedusan civil rescuers were wearing identical black T-shirts with a photo of Vito’s boat, Gamar, approaching Lampedusa’s harbor. Below the photo was a text that read “LAMPEDUSA 3/10/2013.” In the photo, the Gamar was overfilled with people, the forty-seven rescued and the eight rescuers. A member of the crew stands on the roof, wearing only shorts or swimming trunks. Ambasager told me that he and Amanuel printed the shirts to honor Vito’s first visit to Stockholm earlier that year. When they arrived in Lampedusa later that year, they gave similar shirts to the other seven rescuers who had been on the boat. Ambasager and Amanuel chose the image from a USB stick Fiorino had given them during an earlier visit to Lampedusa. The stick had a collection of hundreds of photographs of the disaster and its aftermath that Fiorino had received from press photographers.
If Adhanom’s experience on the coast guard vessel was so unsettling, why were Ambasager and Amanuel eager to display a photograph of a similar situation on their T-shirts? One explanation is that Adhanom has not had a chance to know the coast guard men in the way that Ambasager and Amanuel have created a familiar relationship with Fiorino and his friends. The matching T-shirts symbolized and reinforced the unity between the rescuers and the rescued. In the photograph, they arrive at the port together. They are not two completely separate groups of people. The rescued are not covered in foil, making them appear otherworldly as those on the coast guard ship were. They wear swimsuits or have towels wrapped around them; some have shirts that the rescuers have given them to wear. Similarly, the rescuers are also only partially clothed. Their relationship is already at that moment of arrival less distant than the one between the coast guard and the rescued.
The two different groups of actors in the scene of arrival to the port depicted on the T-shirts are united through a shared experience of their world being shattered by a previously inconceivable horror. The shame of having seen mass death connects the rescuers and the rescued. While they are different types of witnesses—the Lampedusans’ lives were not threatened—they share the position of primary witnesses of a scene of mass death. The matching T-shirts signify this shared experience and the familial relationships that developed after the rescue—those who wear the T-shirts are a family. The gesture of giving the T-shirts five years after the disaster demonstrates how survival is a shared process, not only among the rescued, but also between the rescued and the civil rescuers. The image in the shirt and the fact that both rescuers and rescued wore the shirts for the commemoration represents mutual recognition.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (2017), Hannah Arendt wrote about the centrality of recognition to survival: it is not only up to an individual to acquire the capacity to participate in the common world when others have the capacity to prevent one from participating. Arendt’s perspective was the political life, and she demonstrated how participation in it is not necessarily accessible to every human being. Practices of differentiation render some people into the abstract nakedness of being human in the sense of being alive physically but not otherwise: “They begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species” (Arendt 2017, 395). Stateless people and the prisoners in the extermination camps exemplified for Arendt the great danger of being nothing but human. Only through citizenship, granted by a sovereign nation-state, could one become a political subject with rights. And only through others’ recognition of one’s profession, opinions, identity, and unique individuality could they become significant as persons in society and recognized as part of “the common world” (Arendt 2017, 395).
While Arendt’s perspective is on a larger scale, recognition at the level of individual encounter was significant in the process of transforming from a victim to a survivor. The story about the T-shirt illustrates this. For Amanuel, giving the T-shirt to Fiorino had a personal significance as well. When I first met Amanuel at a restaurant in Lampedusa in 2017, he was looking forward to meeting Fiorino and wondered if he would remember him. “Does he remember how he took off his shirt and gave it to me when I was naked?” Amanuel said. He shared this memory with me and wanted to recall it again when he met Fiorino. It was a gesture of humanity and a moment of recognition as an individual, a person, that was meaningful for him. In Fiorino’s eyes, Amanuel was a man with dignity in need of clothing, not an anonymous, naked victim. Fiorino recognized him as a person, as a participant in the common world. Fiorino had written a message on the back of the shirt, “something like a wish for a good life,” Amanuel told me. He kept the shirt but later lost it when he left the reception center in Sicily to continue his journey to Sweden. Fiorino and Amanuel recalled the story of the shirt again when I had dinner with them later in 2018 in a Greek restaurant in a suburb of Stockholm. Fiorino touched Amanuel’s cheek and said, “But you have had a good life!”
The Return as a Reflection of Survival
When I read the translations of Adal’s interviews with Adhanom, Bisrat, Solomon, and Yusef I was dazed how I had not read or heard much about the experience of surviving disasters at Europe’s borders. I had analyzed mediated representations of the phenomenon, also before the October 3, 2013, disaster. During my research on the Lampedusa disaster, I had collected a catalogue of more than fifty cultural productions—films, plays, literature, artworks, journalism—that connected with the disaster. The experience of the survivors’ process of survival was largely missing. The three dimensions of the process of survival that emerged in Adal’s interviews and during my conversations with the survivors—survival as a new life, survival as a capacity to feel shame, and survival as a mutual recognition—were not topics that interested those who told stories about the disaster.
From journalistic productions to works of film, literature, and theater that touch on the October 3 disaster, the dominating theme of mediated representations is the experience of the Lampedusans. European cultural producers are fascinated by what is seen as the archaic morality of the people of Lampedusa, who live in a place imagined to be at the periphery of Europe, still innocent and pure. One explanation for the lack of attention to the process of survival may be that most European artists created their cultural productions soon after the disaster. Because the experience of survival beyond staying alive takes time, it had not yet become relevant at the time when most of the cultural representations were made. In addition, while memorialization opens a space for the public performance of survivor citizenship, such rituals do not center on the experience of survival. Rather, they focus on the rights of other potential victims.
I found three instances in the literature and film on migration and Lampedusa in which reflection on a survivor’s sense of self appears in some interesting form. The island of Lampedusa as a site of self-reflection is a central theme in Zakaria Mohamed Ali’s short film To Whom It May Concern (2013). Zakaria, a Somalian Italian journalist, arrived in Europe via Lampedusa in 2008, and in returning to Lampedusa he demonstrates that though he was once treated as a nonperson at the border, he is now able to return as a “free man,” as Zakaria puts it. In the film, he returns to the gate of the Lampedusa reception center and questions those working for the border regime. “Do you know where they threw my friend’s wedding photo?” he demands. The guards’ complete ignorance and nonunderstanding of his questions reveal to the viewer how irrelevant asylum seekers’ social and cultural lives are to the border system and how they are treated as mere physical beings. Wedding photographs or school certificates that Zakaria asks for mean nothing at the border. To return to Lampedusa as a “free man” is to demonstrate one’s transformation from a passive and anonymous victim to a survivor with a remade self.
In 2015, I met Zakaria in Rome to discuss his film. Lampedusa is not just a border that he crossed, he told me. It is also a place where he transformed. It was a moral test to return to the island and think about what he has become. Zakaria explained, “Lampedusa is the place where you finally feel free. It’s the place where you call your family. You start your life. You think about what you were, what you will become, what you will become after Lampedusa.” It is a place to be haunted by one’s future ghost.
Italian author Davide Enia’s (2017) book Notes on a Shipwreck has a strong focus on the October 3 disaster as Enia arrives in Lampedusa with the disaster on his mind and on the minds of the locals he interviews. His book centers on the experience of Lampedusans as they witness and respond to the October 3 disaster, one of many migrant disasters they have witnessed. While he does not meet any survivors of the October 3 disaster, Enia writes briefly about an encounter with an Eritrean refugee named Bemnet at a beach in Lampedusa. Bemnet has returned to Lampedusa twice since he was rescued by the Italian coast guard in 2009. Enia retells Bemnet’s horror at witnessing his fellow travelers’ deaths at sea and how while on the migrant boat that was floating for days, seeing the others die one by one, he tried to memorize the names of the dead. Enia frames Bemnet’s horror as the result of the ignorance of the European authorities. Bemnet testifies that while at sea they encountered Maltese coastguardsmen, who instead of rescuing them steered them into Italian waters and left them there. The scene ends with what Lampedusa means to Bemnet.
“I touched dry land on August 20. That day became my second birthday. I was reborn here.” Twenty-one days of shipwreck.
Eighty of them set out.
Seventy-five of them died.
“I don’t know why I survived. I’m one of the last five who saw these people alive and yet, if I went back to my village, I really wouldn’t know how to tell the story of their death. I was only seventeen years old.”
Bemnet pointed to the sea.
“All my friends are out there.”
He said nothing more.
(Excerpt from Davide Enia’s Notes on a Shipwreck,
2017, 158, translated by Antony Shugaar1)
Through Bemnet’s story, Enia shows Lampedusa to be not only the place where Bemnet was reborn, but also the place to which he returns to remember the dead so he can continue to live on in his new life. The “return” depicted in both Davide Enia’s book and Zakaria Mohamed Ali’s film forges a contrast between the temporal ground zero of the disaster and the new present. Returning to Lampedusa, where the sea is visible from almost everywhere, survivors are moved to reflect on who they have become in their new lives.
The third example is related to the interviews Adal did with Bisrat, Adhanom, Solomon, and Yusef that I have examined in this chapter. The ethical complexity of survival and the remaking of the self that these four testimonies bring to the surface are themes represented in the documentary film series Remembering Lampedusa that Adal Neguse and Anna Blom directed and edited on the basis of these survivor testimonies. Central in the film project is the role of Adal as the listener to whom the survivors tell their stories. Each of the survivors became friends with Adal during anniversary commemorations of the disaster in Lampedusa. The return to Lampedusa and the space of reflection it provides has been important in cultivating trust and closeness with Adal. His motivation to know about the disaster is personal: his younger brother died in the disaster, and in listening to the four different stories, he proceeds in his own process of surviving his brother. The return to Lampedusa is also a point of personal reflection for Adal. In chapter 9, I discuss in more detail the meaning of survival for the relatives of victims. The testimonies in Remembering Lampedusa are shaped in part by the fact that Adal wanted to know about the event for his own survival of the loss. The disaster had a singular meaning for Adal—it was not merely a symbol of thousands more deaths at the border, or of the phenomenon of border death in the Mediterranean. For him, listening was a means of living on with the loss of his younger brother Abraham, and this connected him intimately with the survivors.
Literature on testimony, such as the work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, emphasizes the role of the listener (Felman and Laub 1992, 70; Felman 1991; see also Brison 2002, 46). Adal and his follow-up questions are pivotal in teasing out memories of difficult and paradoxical emotions as is evident in the quotes of the interviews in this chapter. The ambiguous and complex figure of a survivor that appears through these testimonies and in the documentary films is not visible in European news representations of the disaster (which are discussed in chapters 1, 2, and 3). It is also not visible in public memorializations, where the political subject—the survivor-citizen—is prominent (as discussed in chapter 7). The ambiguous figure of a survivor who holds contradictory memories of shame and self-respect, care and indifference, is a figure that is challenging to listen to. The framing of a hero that can be celebrated or a victim that can be protected is easier for different publics—such as “European” or Eritrean diasporic—to relate to.
The essential elements of the interview setting that made the survivor testimonies possible were the survivors’ willingness to speak and the testimonies’ “joint, participatory context that assured both confidence and empathic listening,” as Triulzi (2013, 215–17) described similar work undertaken by the Archive of Migrant Memories in Rome (see also Gatta 2019). Adal had created relationships with the four survivors both while in Lampedusa for commemorations and in Sweden, where he assisted many of the survivors in their new lives. In addition, Solomon remembered Adal from the days following the disaster, when Adal had traveled to Lampedusa to search for his brother, who had been traveling alone. None of the survivors had had contact information for Abraham’s relatives, so they had been unable to call.
The memory of seeing Adal searching for his brother among the survivors appears in Solomon’s testimony, demonstrating how bearing witness is a process that includes the listener. After describing his difficulty calling his brother to tell him he had survived, Solomon is reminded of Adal searching for his brother with a photograph in his hand: “And then, soon after, you came with your brother’s photo. I felt your emotion so strongly, and I saw my brother in you. We should forget, but honestly, this is what I always remember. When I remember my brother, I remember you and your brother.” Solomon returns to the issue of forgetting: survival is both remembering and forgetting. The pain of loss that was so evident in the figure of Adal, holding his brother’s photograph, is what Solomon wants to forget in order to survive in his new life. And yet the image is simultaneously what he needs to remember.
In this chapter, I have examined how survivors describe their experience of staying alive when most of the other passengers on the boat died. As one outcome of the collaborative work of testimony undertaken by the survivors and Adal, I have presented three important insights about survival. First, survival is a process that develops in stages and involves a remaking of oneself and life. Second, the capacity to reflect on ethically unstable events and deal with difficult emotions, namely shame, is crucial in the process of survival. Third, the process of survival is social: relationships and mutual recognition among the survivors and with different other types of witnesses are important.
Staying alive is merely the first stage in the process of survival in the fullest sense of the term. Survival does not mean simply remaining physically alive, although that is of course necessary for the making of a politically and socially meaningful life. The process of surviving a disaster at the border begins from the state of victim at the borderline between physical life and death, not sure if one can make it.
At the point when Adal and I talked with the survivors about their experiences, they were in a position from which they could reflect on the disaster and their survival. They had achieved a legal status and established their lives in Sweden and organized trips to Lampedusa to commemorate. They had jobs and children who had been born since the disaster. They had learned Swedish and created a foundation for their new lives and new selves. They were part of the world in which they lived. They had achieved survival through acting upon the world. However, as their narratives demonstrate, survival is not a condition that can be taken for granted once one has achieved it. Solomon mentions twice that he needs to continuously work on both remembering and forgetting. Living with love and sympathy is crucial for Bisrat’s survival and is a continuous practice in her daily life. Survival is living, constantly becoming a participant in the world. However, this transition from victim to survivor is not an immediate shift. Before full survival, before being capable of participating in the common world, there is the liminal state of almost-survivor, in which one is alive but not yet capable of acting upon the world.
These insights on survival required listening and being present with those who survived the disaster, in the full meaning of the term survived. The empathic listening context that was created over four years of regular meetings in Lampedusa and Stockholm was central to being able to hear the survivors’ memories and reflections. Bisrat, Adhanom, Solomon, and Yusef, who narrated their memories in Tigrinya-language conversations with Adal, as well as Ambasager and Amanuel, with whom I conversed in Swedish and English multiple times during this research, were all motivated to discuss, to recall, and to think through what the disaster has meant in the course of their lives since. This perspective illuminates how the consequences of disasters haunt all of us in Europe, including those of us who have witnessed the disasters only through mediation. Survivors continue their lives in our common society in Europe. Their memories of the disaster and experiences of survival live on with them, and because they are Europeans, these processes are the concern of everyone in Europe.
I have argued in this chapter that shame is not necessarily a passivizing emotion. Shame can generate a new self and prompt a new kind of action on the world. The acts of citizenship prompted by shame can also involve other emotions, such as anger, that are more clearly channeled toward demanding rights and calls for taking responsibility. Love and care, in contrast, connect different actors as participants in the same world and generate a form of relational citizenship based on attentiveness to others, both dead and alive. When visible, the emotion of shame felt by the survivors can make those more distant from the scene of the disaster reflect on their own emotions as well. Mediated witnesses can also feel shame, and shame can connect different kinds of witnesses in action to prevent similar events from happening again.
The survivors of the October 3 disaster with whom I have collaborated in this research are not victims: they have proceeded from that position by actively participating in the world around them. They are also not heroes to be celebrated. Both of these representations reduce a person to a singular aspect. This analysis of survival has demonstrated a nonreductive understanding of those who have lived on and made their new lives in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, or Sweden. Attention to their survival ensures they can be recognized in Europe as participants in the common world—as humans, in all of our complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Understanding survival through the lens of attentiveness is therefore central in the critical process of transforming the violent border of Europe. It is central in the thinking and actions that aim to ensure that such disasters are no longer created. Achieving the capacity to participate in the world is not only the responsibility of those on the path to survival—it is the responsibility of everyone.