“ADOPTING THE DEAD” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
ADOPTING THE DEAD
When migrants die at sea borders, the bodies often disappear into the waves. Survivors of shipwrecks and drifting boats have reported drownings of their fellow passengers. Locals have found unknown dead bodies on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and fishermen in their nets. The presence of so many dead bodies and survivors who knew the identities of the victims was therefore exceptional in the October 3, 2013, disaster in Lampedusa. The coffins containing the dead were at the center of public attention (as discussed in chapter 2), but also the burials in Sicily became a public issue in an unprecedented way. The province of Agrigento (to which Lampedusa belongs) asked its municipalities to bury as many victims as they could. Municipalities announced how many vacant slots they were able to provide. When the coffins arrived in Agrigento by a military ship from Lampedusa, to be interred in Sicily’s cemeteries, people responded by arranging ceremonies for dignified burials and adopting the dead into their family graves.
In this chapter, I examine how and why Sicilians responded to the disaster by memorializing. This chapter opens the section of the book that focuses on how “others” are memorialized; the people who initiated these memorials and rituals did not have a personal relationship with the victims, nor were the victims members of their community or citizens of their country.
The Failed State Funeral
Italian prime minister Enrico Letta had promised a state funeral for the victims when he visited Lampedusa after the disaster (Kington 2013b). The state funeral was part of the symbolic posthumous citizenship he announced the day after the disaster: “The hundreds who lost their lives off Lampedusa yesterday are Italian citizens as of today” (Ansa 2013). The memorial service at the San Leone tourist harbor in Agrigento on October 21, 2013, was nevertheless not a funeral, much less what would be expected of a state funeral. It turned into what Agrigento mayor Marco Zambuto called “a farce” (Deutsche Welle 2013). The Italian authorities had invited Eritrea’s ambassador to Italy to the memorial ceremony, and the Eritrean regime’s secret service—according to the Eritrean Swedish human rights activist Meron Estefanos (2016)—photographed the relatives and activists who protested at the event. Fabrizio Gatti (2013) reported in L’Espresso that what “opened in front of the few family members who had come was a catwalk of mayors wearing the tricolor band, of emblems, of government representatives, including minister of the interior Angelino Alfano.” In addition, the survivors, many of whom were relatives of the victims, were confined in the “reception center” in Lampedusa, suspected of having violated Italian law by crossing the border “illegally,” and unable to attend the event.
Some Eritrean human rights activists, including Mussie Zerai and Meron Estefanos, were present and protested with banners saying: “La presenza del regime eritreo offende i defunti emette in pericolo i sopravvissuti” (The presence of the Eritrean regime offends the deceased and endangers the survivors), “Survivors deserve to attend this commemoration,” (in English) and “Vittime delle vostre leggi” (Victims of your laws). The official ceremony became a site of conflict between diasporic Eritreans protesting how the ceremony had been organized and the delegation of regime supporters. Meron Estefanos (2016) told me that some Eritreans participating in the ceremony accused her and Mussie Zerai of enticing Eritrean youths to undertake the dangerous journey to Europe. The presence of the ambassador, in particular, was an insult to the victims, she said; the ambassador and his delegation represented the regime that many of the victims had fled.
Nations and communities organize such public memorial services after disasters to overcome a traumatic rupture. These services are a form of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) that are used to govern death, in this case the deaths of noncitizens, and the meaning of deaths in relation to the state. According to Durkheimian theory on ritual, such a ritualization seeks to reassert social bonds and moral unity. In Gatti’s interpretation, the essence of the ceremony were not the dead (who had already been buried in different cemeteries) nor the survivors or the relatives of the victims but the government of Italy, performing benevolence through necropolitics. The social bond that the ritual presumably was intended to reassert was one among “Italians,” and between Italy and the regime of its former colony, Eritrea. Those who were most intimately touched by the disaster were excluded from the moral unity of the nation.
The Lampedusa disaster caused a rupture in the Italian society—otherwise, Letta would not have announced a “state funeral.” Following Victor Turner’s (1980) theory of social drama, it seems that Italy attempted to solve a crisis by performing the public memorial service in Agrigento. This performance was a follow-up to Letta’s kneeling in front of the arrangement of the coffins in Lampedusa (discussed in chapter 2). While unity might be a desired function of a ritual, it can also become a site for contestation. A ritual can also bring dissent and simmering social conflicts to the fore (see, e.g., Bell 1992, 33–35; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). Unity after the disaster was difficult to assert—both among Italians and Eritrean Europeans. Existing political conflicts in the Eritrean diaspora came to the fore in the aftermath of the disaster, as Meron Estefanos (2016) explained to me. Eritrean European human rights advocates also criticized Europe and Italy for their migration policies. In addition, a lack of consensus among Sicilians and Lampedusans on how the dead should be treated and where they should be buried created tension. Many Italians opposed the state’s right to mourn in such a performative manner altogether (as I discuss in chapters 5 and 6). The national memorial service became a performance of dissensus, which revealed that the state had not recognized multiple conflicting communities that were touched by the disaster.
Adoption of a Dead Body
Agrigento Notizie, a local online news site, announced the burial of five victims in the small village of Raffadali on the afternoon of October 16, 2013, so that the public could attend. At the ecumenic burial, Imam Yusuf Spoto, Catholic Vicar Giuseppe Livatino, and representatives of the municipality prayed together with local residents. Giuseppe Livatino said that the ceremony was to seek forgiveness for the “social sin” (peccato sociale) (Di Benedetto 2013). The cause of the “social sin,” according to him, was paradoxically “unforgivable indifference” (Di Benedetto 2013). By using the term “indifference,” Livatino connected the burial ceremony to Pope Francis’s speech delivered in Lampedusa earlier that year. The pope had then used the phrase “globalization of indifference” in his address on border deaths (Pope Francis 2013b). The care of the dead and the ritual that asked forgiveness, symbolically, aimed to correct the social sin committed by indifference to migrants’ distress.
In Agrigento, Amalia Vullo, a woman in her early sixties who worked for the municipality in the department responsible for cemeteries requested that the local administration allow her husband Giuseppe Gelardi and her to bury a victim’s body in the Gelardis’ family grave. Vullo was shocked by news images showing the cranes in Lampedusa’s dock that moved the victims’ coffins to the military ship for transport to Agrigento. In 2018, she recalled: “Everything started when we saw images of that saddest day, October 3, five years ago. . . . That was a horrible scene. Already seeing the [images of] coffins was sad and then those cranes, it was horrible seeing them taken by cranes” (Vullo 2018).
Vullo witnessed the scene through the news media, and like the Eritrean Europeans whose response to the scene I discuss in chapter 3, she too thought the treatment of the dead had been undignified. In her view, the state failed to care for noncitizens, and she felt responsible and perhaps even obliged to correct what she could of the injustice. Because of her position in the department that was responsible for cemeteries, she came up with the idea of burying one of the 366 dead bodies with dignity into their family tomb.
The Vullo-Gelardis did not choose the victim they would bury, Vullo explained. However, the coffin that was given to them was like no other: it was one of the few coffins that had been personalized by survivors and relatives in Lampedusa’s dock before being loaded onto the ship. The coffin had four large images taped onto it. On top was a large printout representing Jesus Christ. Below that, a full body studio photograph of the woman when she had been alive. Then, number 47, and an enlarged passport photograph of her, and her name, Wegahta (and her father’s name) printed on the photo. Another print of the same full body photograph was taped in the space that remained. When the coffin had arrived in Sicily, it had obviously attracted the attention of those who were tasked with managing the dead. This and two other decorated coffins appeared in a photograph published in the local Agrigento Notizie newspaper.
In the photo published in Agrigento Notizie, three personalized coffins are displayed on a red carpet; bouquets of fresh flowers have been laid around them. The coffins depict not only the individuality of the dead but also the grief of family or friends who knew them. When I look at the photograph of the coffins it reveals to me that Wegahta had been young and Christian, and that she was missed by someone who had decorated the coffin. The grief and the care are visible. In other words, these coffins and the photograph of them produce a visual politics of interdependency—a subversive relationship between the viewer and the people depicted (or symbolized) in a visual image or arrangement (discussed in chapter 2). The viewer is invited to see the dead in relation to the living, bringing the humanity of the disaster to the fore. The coffins and the image of them evoke civil imagination (Azoulay 2012)—a capacity for imagining a connection to those who mourn the dead, and to the dead themselves. The relationship between the viewer and those represented in the image, both the dead and the mourners, can constitute a transgressive citizenship (Rygiel 2014; 2016; Stierl 2016), a relation whereby those excluded from full citizenship are treated as part of a common world.
The Vullo-Gelardis ordered a small stone with a reprint of the passport-style photograph that was attached to the coffin and placed it on top of the tomb. They placed that next to a similar stone remembering their family member. Under the woman’s picture was her name and a number, 47. Wegahta had been the forty-seventh recovered body. Though Amalia Vullo did not seek publicity about the burial, journalists soon started covering the story. Through a journalist, she and her husband were able to contact the woman’s two brothers. One had settled in Norway, and the other brother had survived the October 3 disaster.
The brothers have visited the grave in Agrigento and met the Vullo-Gelardi family. Both parties have posted photographs of the two families’ encounter on their Facebook profiles. Vullo said that they are in touch regularly through WhatsApp. These brothers are now close to the Vullo-Gelardi family through their deceased sister: “We can say she has become part of our family because she is together with our deceased family members,” Vullo told me. The relationship between the dead created a familial tie between the Vullo-Gelardis and Wegahta’s surviving family members. By “adopting” a dead body as a means of correcting the state’s unjust treatment of the dead, the Vullo-Gelardis constituted a transgressive civil relation to Wegahta’s living relatives though a transgressive posthumous relation between their own dead and a dead woman they did not know. These two types of relational citizenships, in my view, are outcomes of civil imagination.
The relationship between Wegahta’s family and the Vullo-Gelardis seems like one of serendipity, but deliberate actions preceded the connection. First, by decorating and naming the coffin, Wegahta’s brother knowingly or unknowingly sent out an invitation to care for his sister’s body. Second, those who managed the arrival of the coffins in Agrigento selected the coffin most likely because it was personified (the two decorated coffins in the Agrigento Notizie photograph were also “adopted” by another Sicilian family). Third, Amalia Vullo reacted to the news images of the coffins in Lampedusa with sadness, an emotion that spurred her into action.
Their new kinship, “becoming part of our family,” as Vullo said, was not based on any particular articulated tie, such as ethnicity, locality, marginality, or sexuality, as is often the case in nonbiological kinships in Euro-American societies (Carsten 2000). Feminist and queer scholars, in particular, have written about such bonds as families of choice (Weston 1997). Such relatedness, founded on a common marginalized position, can either confirm existing social structures or radically challenge them (e.g., Weston 1997; Berlant 2008a; Duggan 2012). In the context of adoption and fosterage, another type of nonbiological kinship, research has shown that a strong sense of kinship can be created through nurturing and care, a conscious process of kinning (Howell 2006). In the case of the Vullo-Gelardis, an intimate relatedness is imagined between the dead—Wegahta and the dead Gelardis—and practiced reciprocally between the living families. Similar to adoption, Amalia Vullo had a choice to “adopt” some body, but she was not able to choose the body.
On February 12, 2017, Amalia Vullo was awarded a special prize given alongside the Dresden Peace Prize in Germany for her “humanitarian action” and “compassion” (Dresdner Preis 2017).1 The public attention to Vullo’s care for the dead woman and her relationship with the living relatives show how European publics have been inspired by the story of care beyond boundaries. In one sense, it is a story of conviviality—caring for the unknown others as participants of a shared world. In another, however, the elevated instance risks to hide what it seems to reveal. Instead of forcing the state to care for the noncitizen dead, the public story of one woman potentially pacifies criticism. In the public domain, the story of the adopted dead and Wegahta’s grave risks becoming “sentimental artifacts,” similar to the repeated story of Yohanna that I discuss in chapter 3. It risks becoming a symbol created by others for the purpose of relieving the concerned European spectator’s discomfort while they realize the fundamental inequality of their society.
Memorials and Their Absence at Cemeteries
When I visited cemeteries in Sicily in 2018, many of the graves of the October 3, 2013, victims seemed untended. I found 116 graves in four cemeteries, and most of them I was able to locate only with the help of cemetery caretakers. In the small inland village of Cattolico Eraclea, there were twelve graves, just one of them marked with a name: Weldu (and the second name). The dates of his birth and death and a photograph on the marble stone indicated that his relatives had positively identified the body and visited the gravesite. The others were unmarked, nor was there any general memorial or signage informing visitors that victims of the Lampedusa disaster had been buried there. It was October 6 when I visited, and there were no candles or flowers that might have indicated that locals or relatives had visited the graves on the fifth anniversary of the disaster.
Later, a woman who was working at a restaurant in the village refuted my conclusion that local residents had failed to tend to the migrant graves. She said that the villagers know where the graves of the October 3, 2013, naufraghi—the shipwrecked—are, and that they pray at their graves when they visit their own dead. The locals did not leave a material record of their visits to the cemetery.
FIGURE 7. Unidentified graves of the Lampedusa disaster victims in Piano Gatta cemetery, Agrigento, Sicily, October 7, 2018. © Karina Horsti, 2018. Photo by Karina Horsti.
FIGURE 8. Unidentified graves of the Lampedusa disaster victims in Piano Gatta cemetery, Agrigento, Sicily, October 7, 2018. © Karina Horsti, 2018. Photo by Karina Horsti.
Thus, they did not feel obliged to encourage others to follow their example, nor did they wish to communicate their actions to others who visit the cemetery. Such spiritual practice for the dead one does not know is practiced also elsewhere in Sicily, and people may even refer to the dead migrants by terms normally used for relatives: sangumeo and ciato di lu me cori, meaning “my blood” or “breath of my heart” (Mirto et al. 2020, 108). Through the ritual of prayer, the locals adopt the unknown dead within their own community of deceased.
In Castellamare del Golfo, a seaside town west of Palermo, the public response to the victims of the October 3 disaster was completely different from Cattolico Eraclea. There, I met Nicola Coppola, who had been the town’s mayor in October 2013. When we met, he had just recently lost his position and had time to show me the cemetery and introduce me to other locals who were active in engaging with the memory of the migrant dead. Coppola (2018) told me how he had responded to the call that went out from Agrigento for burial sites. Castellamare del Golfo is a town living off fishing and tourism in Trapani province. By Sicilian standards, it’s barely a midsize town with about 15,000 inhabitants. Thus, it is quite interesting that instead of accepting “one or two” coffins from another province, Coppola wanted a significant number of dead. It was important “to make it a sign of accoglienza”—of hospitality, he said. Hospitality was also how Coppola described the welcome of newly arrived asylum seekers in the local reception center. Many inhabitants regularly organized social activities such as communal dinners with them. If the living were welcomed with hospitality, so were the dead.
Coppola was sent nineteen victims of the October 3 disaster and ten victims from another disaster (the date on the graves is October 12, 2013, and the place “Canale di Sicilia”). These were the first unknown migrant dead to be buried by the municipality. Unlike the seaside towns on the southern side of Sicily that face Africa, no dead bodies had washed on the shores of Castellamare del Golfo, which faces the north. Nevertheless, since the victims of the two October 2013 disasters, the town has received more unidentified migrant dead. They are buried in another section of the cemetery than those received in 2013. They are buried in the same manner: individual graves with individual headstones in a specific area of the cemetery reserved only for the migrant dead.
This individualized burial practice is not the case in all Sicilian cemeteries. In Catania’s main cemetery, Cimitero Monumentale di Catania, the municipality created a memorial for migrant dead, titled La speranza naufragata, Wrecked Hope, on March 10, 2015. There are seventeen individual unidentified graves as part of the memorial (Horsti 2019c; Kobelinsky, Furri, and Noûs 2021). However, far from the memorial, at the edge of the cemetery, I found a row of burial mounds that are marked only by coded signs that indicate that three bodies are buried under each mound of earth. There was no sign explaining the site, and so, it was only through talking with a local couple who were taking care of their daughter’s grave nearby that I learned that this was the burial ground for clandestini “the illegals,” as they called them (Horsti 2019c, 195–96). This section of the cemetery is opposite to the part of the cemetery where the dead are known but whose burial expenses are not privately paid.
When the cemetery caretakers in Castellamare del Golfo first buried the dead of the two disasters of October 2013, temporary wooden markers were put on each grave. The municipality organized a ceremony in which verses from the Quran in Italian translation were read out and a Catholic priest recited prayers. They did not know who the dead were and what their religion or customs were, so they invented a “cerimonia di accoglienza,” (ceremony of hospitality), Coppola explained. When this was done, Coppola felt that it hadn’t been enough. The high number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean is comparable to the number of war victims, Coppola said. He did not explain further, but at the cemetery the next day, I realized that he had implied that deaths at the border deserve public recognition comparable to that given those who have died fighting for their country.
FIGURE 9. Castellamare del Golfo cemetery, October 6, 2018. In addition to the victims of the two disasters near Lampedusa in 2013, an identified migrant body was sent from Palermo in 2014 to be buried in this memorial cemetery. © Karina Horsti, 2018. Photo by Karina Horsti.
When I saw the new markers that had been placed on the migrant graves in the Castellamare del Golfo cemetery, the first thing that came to mind was the Catania War Cemetery in Sicily and other American or Commonwealth war cemeteries in Italy. The shape of headstones in Castellamare del Golfo is very similar to the cemetery in Catania. Nevertheless, the thirty identical marble tombstones, arranged in straight rows on a green lawn, is an unusual sight in a Sicilian cemetery, where there is otherwise a great variety in the style and decoration of the tombs. Each Sicilian family personalizes its tomb, and no grave is identical to another.
Immediately next to the memorial arrangement of graves in Castellamare del Golfo stands a sculpture made and donated by a British artist, Mike Power, who has lived part-time near the town regularly since the 1970s. It depicts a human figure, curled up so as to protect itself from something terrible or perhaps bent under the weight of the large pot standing on the figure’s back and neck. A mirror in the mouth of the pot stands as an invitation for self-reflection.
The cemetery caretaker explained to me that flowers were not planted on the graves because the burial customs of the victims were unknown. While the locals felt comfortable in combining Muslim and Catholic traditions in the ceremony of inauguration, they were unsure about more permanent material symbols, such as planted flowers. While the arrangement of multiple graves could be addressed in the more generalizing terms of “cerimonia di accoglienza,” the single graves were treated as belonging to unknown individual dead and their relatives. The markers state the date and place of the victim’s death, either Lampedusa or “Canale di Sicilia.” Twenty-six of the thirty headstones identify the dead only by the number given to the body. Four graves list also the deceased’s name and date of birth.2 Three named graves display a photograph of the victim, similarly to many Sicilian graves. In front of the rows of graves, an inscription in both Italian and English is carved into a larger stone:
Dal tempestoso mare della vita al quieto mare dell’eternità in un infinito abbraccio. La città di Castellamare del Golfo. In memoria delle vittime dei naufraghi. From the stormy sea of life to the quiet sea of eternity. An endless embrace in memory of shipwreck victims. 1 November 2014.
The memorial stone was installed on Ognissanti, All Saints’ Day. It is a day when Italians not only visit the graves of their loved ones, but also bring flowers to forgotten graves. An official inauguration service followed in February 2015, when Sergio Mattarella, who had just been elected Italian president, visited the cemetery; his wife and brother are buried there. The mayor took advantage of the opportunity to have him inaugurate the memorial.
The graves and headstones in Castellamare del Golfo are visible as a memorial, particularly with the addition of the sculpture and the marble marker at the head of the arrangement. Nicola Coppola spoke fondly about the memorial and noted that many locals are proud of how well it is maintained. The lawn, in particular, symbolizes dignity and care. It needs constant watering and maintenance in the Sicilian climate, and to have such a green lawn in a publicly maintained cemetery is rare, Coppola pointed out.
When I asked what motivated him to create the memorial, Coppola explained that he felt personally responsible for the proper burial of the migrants:
We are a country of emigration. My father went to work in America. I am happy that he was welcomed there. He found a job and made a living for us children. And if all this has taught us something, it is clear that we must do something for others. Being the mayor, I was able to do things. (Coppola 2018)
Coppola’s actions resonated with the values of the community. There was no open opposition to the memorial. A heritage of emigration is central to the identity of Sicilians, and it often emerges in conversations about present-day migration (see also Casati 2018). Castellamare del Golfo, much like the rest of Sicily is marked by decades of emigration not only to Northern Italy but also to the United States, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, and France. Most likely, mass emigration of the 1950s and 1960s evoked Nicola Coppola’s memory. However, in this context, Castellamare del Golfo is best known for being the birthplace of some of Italy’s most notorious emigrants—the La Cosa Nostra mafiosos in New York in the 1920s and 1930s.
While similarities in the migration experience have the capacity to create solidarity, the relationship between past and present is not to be taken for granted, as Noemi Casati (2018) reminds us. In her research on a reception center in a small Sicilian village, Casati (2018, 802–3) found that a structural malfunction in the migration system led to instrumentalizing similarities in history—not for solidarity with migrants but for mistrust and division. Past emigration, in that case, was told as a mythical narrative against which the present-day migrants were depicted as incompetent, dishonest, and lazy (Casati 2018). However, in the case of Castellamare del Golfo, Coppola’s parallel with the past and the present created solidarity with migrants. Similarities in history, in this case, evoked an ethical obligation to care for the dignity of present-day migrants, both dead and alive.
The text on the memorial stone in the Castellamare del Golfo cemetery reveals only that the dead memorialized there were victims of shipwrecks. The only community that is identified is that which has created the memorial, the municipality of Castellamare del Golfo. The stone communicates to visitors that the municipality cared about and has commemorated the victims of shipwrecks; the constant watering of the lawn indicates that they continue to do so. This reflects public and social aspects of memorialization. However, the memorial has not been constructed for the local community alone, as the English inscription demonstrates. The creators of the memorial took into account that relatives of the victims might some day visit the site and not speak Italian. Thanks to that consideration, the memorial reaches out to create a transnational and transcultural public memory.
The headstones, some of which were already marked with names by the time the memorial was created in 2014, represent the disaster in a more individualized way. Among the dead lies Amanuel (and the second name), who was twenty-nine years old when he died. He had been born in the small village of Halib Mentel in central Eritrea, and he was a Christian. The text carved on the stone—“You will always be in our hearts. We will never forget you.”—is written in English. In the framed oval studio photograph mounted on the marker between the number 189 and a carved cross, the young man smiles. He has a fresh haircut and wears a smart black suit with a white shirt and a red bowtie.
I have to push a large bunch of yellow chrysanthemums aside so that I can read the inscriptions on the tombstone. It is October 6, 2018, and someone clearly visited the grave a couple of days earlier. The chrysanthemums imply that Amanuel, along with two other victims whose graves are adorned with fresh flowers, must have relatives living in Europe. Later, Mariangela Galante (2018), a high school teacher from Castellamare del Golfo, tells me that two women, one from Oslo, Norway, and another from Düsseldorf, Germany, one a sister and the other the widow of a victim, have been visiting the cemetery on October 3 for the past few years.
The anonymity of the other twenty-six graves is emphasized all the more by the few personalized graves in the memorial arrangement. The only distinctive feature among the unnamed headstones is the number that signifies the order in which the bodies were retrieved from the sea in each of the two disasters. These nameless graves are not completely unattended, though—not like the ones in Cattolica Eraclea. At each grave is a red memorial candle, fresh red roses and carnations, and boats folded out of colorful paper. A floral arrangement with a tricolor ribbon placed at the large memorial stone was an indication that the mayor and the administration of Castellamare del Golfo had paid their respects at the memorial on October 3, 2018.
Civil Imagination on October 3
The flowers, candles, and paper boats on the graves in Castellamare del Golfo were laid by local students who had participated in the commemorative ceremony at the cemetery on October 3, 2018. Since 2015, on every October 3, junior high school students, their teachers, representatives of the municipality, and people from the local association Circolo Metropolis had remembered the victims by reading poems and texts related to migration at the cemetery.3 Mariangela Galante, an active member of Circolo Metropolis, explained to me that this was the third time the school had memorialized the deaths at the cemetery. The law establishing the October 3 as the National Day of Remembrance in 2016 supported the commemorative action that has become a tradition. The Day of Remembrance created a legal obligation to memorialize “victims of migration” in publicly funded state institutions such as schools. These institutions are required to organize ceremonies or initiatives that “raise awareness and educate young people on immigration and reception issues” (Senato della Repubblica 2016).
Memorialization in Castellamare del Golfo served a pedagogical function in addition to its function in local identity politics reproducing the sense of being a community of accoglienza and of emigrants, as Coppola (2018) had explained. In 2018, however, another crucial motivation for memorialization had emerged, which Galante (2018) said made memorializing the migrant dead even more significant than it had been in previous years. After the Italian general elections in March, the far-right Lega party took power together with the populist Five Star movement (the government lasted until August 2019). The leader of Lega, Matteo Salvini, minister of the interior and de facto leader of the government, became infamous for his cruel policies targeting humanitarian sea rescue, asylum seekers, and refugees (e.g., Geddes and Pettrachin 2020). The government closed the ports to rescued migrants and began criminalizing rescue operations at sea. For many people, including the about twenty members of the Circolo Metropolis, the duty to remember the migrant dead became more clearly connected to countering the cruel border politics returning in Italy. Resistance to the deadly border was a continuation of their anti-Mafia action and environmental protection. Originally, the group had been created to resist Mafia after the Capaci bombing in 1992 that assassinated Giovanni Falcone, a judge and prosecuting magistrate in Palermo who worked against the Mafia (Galante 2021).
The form of the ceremony the students carried out at the cemetery in 2018 was shaped by how the locals interested in commemorating experienced the memorial. One feature of the memorial in particular, the numbers and lack of names, produced unease in the locals, which they then processed in the ritual. For example, the numbers had disturbed the members of the Circolo Metropolis over the years. Mariangela Galante told me: “You can treat numbers in any way you like. In concentration camps, they marked people with numbers. When you’re a number, you’re nothing” (Galante 2018). The presence of the unknown dead bodies of noncitizens complicated the local community’s determination to know its population. As Thomas W. Laqueur (2015, 314–17) has argued in his cultural history of death, since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the condition of a society could be judged by how it cared for the poor and their decent burial.
During the memorial ceremony at the cemetery, a student read aloud an Italian translation of the English-language poem “Number 92,” by the London-based Eritrean writer Selam Kidane.
Number 92
I wonder what she called you, little one?
Your precious Mama . . .
Maybe she called you Berhan? . . . my light
Or did she call you Haben? . . . my pride
She may have called you Qisanet . . . after rest she yearned
Or were you Awet? . . . victory . . .
Tell me little one did she name you after her hope?
Or her aspirations . . . her dream?
Did she call you Amen as end to her prayers?
Did she name you after the saints your Grandma prayed to?
Or were you named after the brother she lost in prison?
Maybe after her father long gone?
Did she name you . . . Sina . . . after the desert she crossed?
Or Eritrea . . . the land she reluctantly left . . .?
Perhaps she named you for the land you were to inherit?
Tell me little one what did your precious Mama call you? . . .
For I can’t bear you being called number 92 . . .
Number 92 is not buried in Castellamare del Golfo, but two days later, at Piano Gatta cemetery in Agrigento, I noticed the number in one of the five tombe that hold eighty-six victims of the October 3 disaster. A small black-and-white cardboard label reveals that number 92 is a little boy named Esrom (and the second name), who died with his two sisters, Delia and Milen, and his mother, Helen.
As Selam had, the students also imagined what the dead might have been called and wrote conjectured names on the paper boats they placed on the graves: this was “adoption by naming,” as Galante (2018) put it. This imaginative work continued over the winter with a creative writing workshop organized by a literary festival Contaminazioni and led by author Fabio Stassi. The students wrote short texts imagining who the dead were, what their pasts and dreams were, and what they might say now, were they able to speak. The stories are all written in the first-person singular, and the name of each fictional person has two parts, one foreign and one Italian: Akil Vincenzo, Dahak Elena, Wara Adriana. In the ten stories Galante sent me after the workshop, relationships emerge as a recurring theme. The fictional narrators remember brothers and sisters, the care of their mothers and fathers, and what they did with friends. For the students, death seems most importantly to mean the loss of a friend, parent, or child—the end of social life.
Zara Elisabetta
Hi, I’m Zara and now I’m in the middle of nowhere. My eyes are closed and I imagine myself on a stage—me, alone, singing my songs. My music will enter everyone’s mind and no one will forget me. My voice will sing out under the sea and under the earth. I imagine my mother, too, singing. She is my greatest strength. Because she has patience like no other woman has. I remember when my brothers and I were small, and we threw stones at windows. She scolded us, but she did it calmly. I remember the love she put into telling our family stories. Tonight, I’m staring at the sky full of stars. And I think my mom is here, and she keeps me safe and protects me. I perceive the boat moving and people screaming, but I am calm because I have closed my eyes and see my mother. Bye, I’m Zara. And in this moment, I’m in the middle of nowhere
(Students of Castellamare del Golfo).
With their acts of naming and through creative writing, the students imagined themselves as the dead, which facilitated their imagining of the unknown dead as persons-as-such (Edkins 2011). In previous chapters, I have argued that, from management of the dead to the representations of them in the media, treating the dead as persons who had social lives is necessary for justice and for the recognition of the rights of the dead and of living relatives. While naming the dead carries critical potential, it does not automatically translate into transformative politics, as I discussed in chapter 3. Sometimes, as Jenny Edkins (2016, 362) has argued, naming is not about recognizing the person and her politics so much as it functions to dampen the disturbance that an unknown body creates. In analyzing the 9/11 National Memorial in New York, Edkins argues that the listing of names in the memorial “portrays the victims as ordinary, apolitical” (Edkins 2016, 368) and that the function of naming is to integrate the dead into the body of the nation-state (Edkins 2016, 362).
However, in Castellamare del Golfo, imagined names and biographies function differently. A new student cohort next year might imagine other names and other biographies. Instead of closure, imaginative naming may function as a critical opening in at least two ways. First, fictional names and stories make visible the dissonance created by the bodies being buried in “our” ground and not knowing who the people were and why their bodies are “here.” The use of imagination resists indifference to or acceptance of the deadly border and the injustice of bordering. It is the same uneasiness, wrought by the recognition of an unequal relationship, that I examined in chapter 3 in relation to Frances Stonor Saunders’s essay. The recognition of the unequal relationship drove Saunders to write an essay after she discovered the name of the woman who died in the Lampedusa disaster while giving birth.
Second, the aesthetic approach of working with the imagination opens an alternative communicative space akin to Ariella Azoulay’s (2012, 2) notion of the “civil” in her writing on “civil imagination” and “civil discourse.” Similarly to Azoulay (2012), I do not limit the term aesthetic to mean judgment of taste, nor do I contrast the aesthetic with the political. Her definition of “civil” is a position from which to move beyond such opposition. Writing in the context of Israel’s violence against Palestinians, Azoulay maintains that civil discourse refuses to align with governmental power and to accept uniform categories of people (e.g., “refugees”) as separate from “us” and as the Other. In a civil position, one refuses to align with the regimes that “make disasters” (Azoulay 2012, 2). Instead, Azoulay makes way for “the domain of relations between citizens on the one hand, and the subject denied citizenship by a given regime on the other, on the basis of their partnership in a world that they share as women and men who are ruled” (Azoulay 2012, 3). Imagining the victims as persons—particularly through their imagined relationships, as the students did—is not fiction. The students made way for the potentiality of civil encounter with subjects who crossed the deadly border (or died while crossing) and their relatives.
While the motivation for memorializing might be centered on “us” at the scale of the community of Castellamare del Golfo, the memorial and the rituals and imaginative creative writing that engagement with the memorial generated are not exclusively centered on the self. The form of the memorial is not fixed, but instead recognizes the potentiality of its transnational meaning and of civil connections with the victims’ relatives: the texts are written in English, and the headstones can be personalized. While the memorial commemorates the local response to the mass deaths—its accoglienza—it is also oriented toward the future and open for transformation.
Similarly, the “adoption by naming” undertaken by the students does not mean that the community has incorporated the Other into itself or that it is not open to transformation. In the stories of the students, the dead are not replicas of Italian teenagers, nor are they imagined as people who want to become “us,” as was the case in the writings of Italian journalists when they interpreted the studio photographs found at the disaster site (as discussed in chapter 2). The students’ writing project included research on Eritrea, and their stories include references to contemporary lives outside Italy. They refer to military conscription in Eritrea and to the krar, a musical instrument common in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The students also spoke with migrants from the nearby asylum seekers’ reception centers many of whom also have a visible presence in town. They had been invited to the ritual at the ceremony and to the writing workshop.
Transformative Relationships
My analysis of the engagement with migrant dead in Castellamare del Golfo as a form of civility and recognition resonates with recently expanded research about memorialization and migration activism (at Europe’s borders see, e.g., Rygiel 2016; Stierl 2016; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018; Squire 2020; at the US-Mexico border, see, e.g., De León 2015; Alonso and Nienass 2016a). Activist memorialization is seen as a practice that defies the states and authorities’ perceived lack of dignified recognition of the dead. Vicki Squire (2020), in her analysis of grave dressing at Lampedusa’s cemetery, identifies a responsible “politics of empathy” in cemetery activism that aims to resist states’ indifference toward the dead. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2018) interprets activists’ mourning of dead strangers as an inclusive practice, a form of “inclusive friendship” based on the recognition of interdependency between people of different communities. Kim Rygiel (2014; 2016) defines such encounters as “transgressive citizenship”—an alternative relationship from below that contravenes boundaries that nation-states try to impose between people. Engaging with dead strangers, activists can generate a transformative politics, and “a community beyond borders” (Stierl 2016, 173).
The acts of Amalia Vullo and the people in Castellamare del Golfo, like the activism of Mussie Zerai and Meron Estefanos discussed in this chapter, can be interpreted as acts of transgressive citizenship (following Kim Rygiel’s terms). The “acts of citizenship” perspective, developed by Engin Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (Isin 2008, 17; 2009; Isin and Nielsen 2008) defines citizenship not as a membership to be awarded or given, but a position claimed through acting as a citizen. These acts and articulations of claims-making create sites for struggle and identification different from traditional sites of citizenship like military service or voting. While acts of citizenship can be performed in a place, they stretch across boundaries and involve multiple scales of contestation (Isin 2009, 371).
The dignified relationship that people form toward the migrant dead and the engagements’ potential for resistance and contestation of the murderous border policies are central in the analysis of Rygiel, Squire, Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Stierl. They show how in multiple instances activists resist bordering by correcting what the authorities fail to do and how they make the state’s undignified incompetence and ignorance visible. Acts of citizenship that refuse to obey boundaries evidently are central to afterlives of disasters at global borders. Instances discussed in this chapter could be added as evidence to this body of scholarship.
However, the stories in this chapter, in my view, highlight that the care for the dead importantly shapes relationships between the living. While care for the dead can be acts of citizenship that defy the state that fails in its responsibilities, their transgressive politics becomes stronger when a relationship with the living relatives is created. Nevertheless, as the story of Castellamare del Golfo manifested, an awareness—or a capacity for civil imagination in Ariella Azoulay’s terms—of the potentiality of such a relationship is the key.
Gerhild Perl (2018) examines the emergence of a relationship between people in two towns connected by a shipwreck where twelve young men from Hansala, Morocco, died near Rota, Spain, in 2003. What started as the Spanish delivering condolences to the villagers developed into amicable bonds, repatriation of the dead bodies, and economic cooperation. Perl shows how “death is a potentially vital moment that politically and morally animates people to forge a different future by creating unknown and unexpected political, economic and amicable bonds” (Perl 2018, 96). Perl tells a story of ordinary people who develop an unusual relationship. Over time the relationship develops to collaboration, a form of translocal solidarity.
In the activist context, Maurice Stierl (2016, 178, 180, 181, 187) touches on the relationship between living relatives of those who died or disappeared at the border and discusses an instance of “failing empathy.” He examines a case in which activists imposed their political agenda on a memorializing event and did not pay attention to the different politics and feelings of relatives of the dead. Thus, a countermemorial action divided those it meant to unite. Stierl (2016), similar to Perl (2018), emphasizes that transformative politics emerges from continuous engagement and self-reflection of power dynamics among those involved in memorializing.
In Castellamare del Golfo, the physical memorial, the students’ ceremony at the cemetery, and residents’ acts of imagination opened up a communicative space where the relationship between locals and the relatives of the victims can develop. The site’s transformative potential is the possibility for a civil connection beyond borders to develop between the living who have ties to either the dead as individuals or the cemetery where they are buried. Galante told me that her connection with the women from Düsseldorf and Oslo who visit the cemetery has been growing only gradually because of the language barrier. Recently, she has been able to have a conversation with the woman from Düsseldorf in German, which Galante has studied and the Eritrean woman has become more fluent in. They stay in touch between the anniversaries of the disaster, and in 2020, when international travel was restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the woman in Germany asked Galante to buy a bunch of flowers to leave on the grave. Galante did so and sent the woman photos of the cared-for grave (Galante 2021).
The Essential Unknowingness
The locals in Castellamare del Golfo have invented practices of receiving and memorializing the dead and of communicating with the relatives. Having “strangers” buried in their soil was out of the ordinary, but the ethical model they could refer to from the past was the memory of their relatives having been migrants themselves. The presence of dead strangers evoked the memory of the emigrant, and that allowed them to see the “specter” of the migrant that was buried in their community.
Jacques Derrida’s (1994) theory of hauntology offers a useful perspective for understanding the search for proper responses to the disaster and practices for dealing with its memory in Castellamare del Golfo. Why were the people of the town not indifferent? Derrida describes specters as guides that disorder the common state of things, that wake us up to seek answers beyond normal boundaries and familiar narratives. Here, a hauntological reading means to understand how people like Mariangela Galante and Nicola Coppola were compelled to engage in the new situation. Coppola referred to his biography of being a son of a labor migrant and Galante to the rise of cruel anti-migrant politics personified in Lega Nord leader Matteo Salvini. The ethics that Galante and Coppola followed when they faced the essential unknowingness of what to do was the cultivation of attentiveness to the dead as persons-as-such. They acted upon questions of who the dead were and what would happen if someone in the future arrived in town to look for the dead. Being attentive and open to the specters of the past and the future constituted a position that is the opposite of being indifferent to the dead strangers.
In his essay on responses to migrant deaths at various borders in Australia and Europe, Klaus Neumann (2013) argues that the opposite of indifference is not compassion, which entails a hierarchical relation between the one who has the power to feel compassion and the one who suffers, but that of attentiveness. Referring to Pope Francis’s mass in Lampedusa in July 2013, in which the pope condemned “la globalizzazione dell’indifferenza” (the globalization of indifference), Neumann defines attentiveness as being “attentive to the world we inhabit.” He identifies two directions from which attentiveness can be cultivated: first, by paying attention to a particular person and experience, and second, by paying attention to one’s own self-interest—to “what we, living in the affluent West, think and do” (Neumann 2013). Thus, being attentive to the dead as relational figures is to understand them as “inhabiting” the same world we do—or in Ariella Azoulay’s (2012, 3) terms, as being partners in the world we share.
These kinds of relationships that have emerged in Castellamare del Golfo between locals and the relatives who mourn at the victims’ graves create a new kind of civil sphere, one that is not bound by the nation-state, language, or ethnicity, but that emerges despite these boundaries that are so often taken for granted. In future, connections with the victims’ relatives may transform the memorial and commemorative practices in Castellamare del Golfo. The meaning of the memorial is not fixed, the individuals buried there continue to be imagined, and some of them may yet have their names carved on the headstones, as more relatives find their way to the graves.
In this chapter, I have explored how people and communities in Sicily cared for dead strangers who arrived in the hundreds. They succeeded where the state failed. The official memorial ceremony that turned into a farce failed to unite those who witnessed the disaster through mediation with those who lived through its consequences in their intimate relationships. Unlike the state, the people I met in Sicily recognize the dead strangers as relational persons and as part of the shared world. While engaging with the dead they reproduced identities and communities. They constituted a citizenship based on attentiveness.
The stories I heard in Sicily show how transnational friendships, and even new types of kinship, such as the “family” of the Vullo-Gelardis and the brothers of Wegahta, can develop in this alternative communicative space. Memorials and rituals were central in creating the space and imagining relationships. I’ve addressed the care for the dead migrants in Sicily in reference to the notion of adoption. Through prayer or imagining names and narratives, communities adopted the dead strangers into the community of their own dead. However, the relationality between the living that the adoption generates strengthens the transformative potential. The burial of Wegahta in the Gelardi family tomb resulted in a process of kinning between her brothers in Norway and the Vullo-Gelardis in Sicily.
Uncertainty and the uncomfortable feeling that something was not right defined the instances of memorialization in which attentiveness toward the victims and one’s own responsibility emerged. The specters of the past and the future, as Derrida would see them, cause established certainties such as the nation-state, borders, and the assumed differences between “us” and “them” become irrelevant. The people in Sicily faced an uncertain reality, but instead of being indifferent, they started to find ways of articulating that reality. In the afterlives of a disaster, being attentive to specters—not only those of past figures, such as the Italian emigrants, but also those of the victims’ and survivors’ descendants—is important in the practice of inquiry itself. In Castellamare del Golfo and Agrigento, the world elsewhere became visible both in the form of dead strangers but more profoundly, in the form of living relatives who returned to mourn the dead. The transformative potential of the attentiveness to the dead as persons importantly connects those who live on.
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