“Epilogue” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
Epilogue
KEBRAT’S STORY
This book project was set in motion by my curiosity about how the October 3, 2013, disaster lives on and evades oblivion through two domains of afterlife, representation, and memorialization. My study showed that the disaster’s memory haunts Europe, and as it circulates in these two domains, it does things: the after-lives of the disaster are productive. Politics and identities are produced in response to the disaster’s memory at multiple scales: the Eritrean diaspora, local communities, national governments, and Europe.
Analyzing how and why the disaster remained in the public domain prompted me to ask further questions about survival. The book has therefore also examined how people continue their lives after a rupture; memorialization and representation played a role in their processes of survival after witnessing the disaster and its aftermath. Survival emerged in my research in four different contexts: the survival of those who witnessed the disaster as eyewitnesses or through mediation; the survival of “flesh witnesses” (Harari 2009)—that is, those who “went through” the disaster, to use the words of Solomon Gebrehiwet; and the survival of relatives and friends who survived the death of another. The nature of these experiences of witnessing varied—they ranged from a distant mediated witnessing to an intimate experience of survival, from Martin Schulz’s shock at the shattering of European “dignity” and the distress of students in Castellamare del Golfo at not knowing who the dead in their local cemetery were, to Teddy’s struggle to find certainty about his brother’s death and Bisrat’s and Solomon’s emotional difficulty in calling the victims’ families.
This book has centered on the idea of survival, with survival being defined as the continuation of life—living on or beyond a rupture. This understanding of survival as the continuation of life derived from the works of Walter Benjamin (2009), who theorized survival in the context of artistic work, and Jacques Derrida, who, just before his death, said “life is survival” (Derrida and Birnbaum 2007). The works of Hannah Arendt (2017) and Giorgio Agamben (1999) added important insights into how human life—and human survival—is more than just a biological state. One can be alive and yet not part of the common world in a cultural, social, and political sense. The notion of haunting added insights to theorizing survival: that a survivor constitutes him- or herself in relation to the dead (Davis 2007, 117–18) and that specters haunting the present can be from the past or the future (Davis 2007; Gordon 1997). The not-yet realized future and the demand that something be done are aspects of haunting that drive the process of survival.
The ruptures that people and communities affected by the Lampedusa disaster survived are dissimilar in their effects and unequal in their severity. It is important, however, to acknowledge the full range of ruptures and responses, as they make visible how the consequences of border deaths cannot be externalized to migrants’ countries of origin nor confined to the islands in the border zone where the dead disappear or are buried. Rather, these ruptures affect communities in countries of origin and of transit, across Europe and beyond, wherever survivors and the relatives of victims live, and wherever people witnessed the disaster in and through the media. The consequences of border deaths continue to live on. In the future, they may reappear to haunt Europeans—both those of us who survived a disaster or the death of a loved one, and those of us whose governments killed by allowing people to die.
This book has taken a holistic approach to examining the afterlives of the disaster of October 3, 2013, drawing on the experiences of different types of witnesses and their various engagements with the memory of what happened. The disaster’s afterlives produced different forms of citizenship, which I understand as acts or practices constituted in relationships between different constellations of individuals, social groups, communities, and states. These forms of citizenship constitute subjectivities that are significant in the processes of bearing witness and survival. My analysis of the research materials and scientific literature led me to identify forms of citizenship that contest indifference toward border deaths.
First, forensic citizenship is constituted of acts of civic forensics, such as the survivors’ acts of listing the names of the dead, documenting cemeteries, visually identifying the dead, and calling the relatives of the dead. The Italian Eritrean priest Mussie Zerai’s activism, which has kept the rights of the dead and their relatives on the public agenda and demanded justice through forensic investigation of the disaster and of the identities of the dead, has been critically important. Other forms of forensic citizenship have included the civil investigations into the events leading to the mass death that cultural producers and activists, such as the Lampedusan Askavusa have conducted. Forensic experts, such as those at LABANOF in Milan and at the International Committee on Missing Persons in The Hague, practically and symbolically raise the issue of forensics in the context of border deaths. All these acts and practices of forensic citizenship contribute to the understanding of border deaths in terms of international law and as an issue of justice (Reineke 2022; Schwartz-Marin and Cruz-Santiago 2016; Schindel 2020; Distretti 2020). Forensics as a concept and practice goes beyond treating life as a biological form of being or a form of biological citizenship (Petryna 2013). Investigation into what happened and to whom brings the question of responsibility and the disaster’s human consequences to the fore.
Second, I have discussed attentiveness as a form of citizenship that encourages transgression of assumed boundaries between citizens/noncitizens and in-group/out-group (see also findings in Rygiel 2016; Stierl 2016; Perl 2018; Kobelinsky 2017; Squire 2020). The capacity for “civil imagination” (Azoulay 2012) foregrounds attentive engagements with the dead, the living, and the memory of the disaster. The visibility of such acts in the public domain on the one hand supports or invites civil imagination in others, but on the other hand, risks turning attention to those who act attentively as opposed to the victims themselves. In the public domain, figures such as the Lampedusan rescuers and the Sicilians who care for the unknown dead are celebrated and turned into heroes, which relieves the pain and consciences of European spectators.
Therefore, an attentiveness to one’s own “capacity to harm” (Nguyen 2016, 73) and self-interest (Neumann 2013) in the structures that produce violence at the border is crucial for attentiveness to be transformative. Some journalists, authors, and activists, such as Frances Stonor Saunders, Meron Estefanos, and the Askavusa collective articulate such attentiveness as they engage with the memory of the disaster. Amalia Vullo in Sicily and the people in Castellamare del Golfo care for the dead with an attentiveness to the relatives who come or may yet come to remember their own. I also discussed attentiveness to one’s own capacity to harm in the context of Dresden’s anti-fascist activists and some LIBE Committee members of the European Parliament. Through civic forensics, new kinships, and mutual support in the process of survival, forms of attentive citizenship emerge that transgress boundaries and inspire civil imagination.
Third, I have examined a survivor citizenship, a subjectivity that stems from the responsibility of having survived the disaster when others died. This new kind of Europeanness is not based on citizenship granted by a state, but rather on taking action as a responsible member of society. Witnessing and surviving a disaster at the border makes one responsible for and capable of taking action. Through acts of survivor citizenship, survivors’ process of survival, of living a full human life in the cultural, social, and political sense, has continued. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this position is not available to everyone, and it can be politically or socially confining. Survivor citizenship can be compatible with diasporic citizenship or in conflict with it. The Eritrean diasporic community is divided in their understanding of citizenship and the Eritrean state’s long-arm governance over the diaspora. Sacrificial citizenship (Bernal 2014, 33) has been part of Eritrean diasporic citizenship, but is evolving. The human rights violations of the Eritrean regime, ethnic, religious, and class relations, and citizenship in countries of settlement shape Eritreans’ understanding of sacrifice and Eritreanness. Survivor citizenship is navigation through and negotiation of the various expectations of European and Eritrean actors, such as the grateful refugee or sacrificial citizen.
The survivors’ continuation of life after the disaster, in particular, offers new perspectives to the study of border deaths and the conceptualization of survival. Thus, in this concluding chapter, I would like to return to the story of Kebrat, one of the six women who survived the disaster. Kebrat first appeared in the public domain when Romina Marceca, a journalist working for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, interviewed Kebrat at a hospital in Palermo immediately after the disaster. Kebrat’s interview provided one the first public voices of survival. Almost all of the other survivors were confined in the “reception center” in Lampedusa and were beyond the reach of journalists. Marceca’s (2013) story is written in question-and-answer format, a style that produces a sense of a directness for Kebrat’s voice.
Kebrat was flown to Palermo by helicopter after being resuscitated at the clinic in Lampedusa. In her story, Marceca wrote that Kebrat answered her questions through an oxygen mask, her lungs having been injured by inhaling a mix of gasoline and seawater. In the interview, Kebrat describes the scene of the disaster. She remembers seeing dead bodies in the water and hearing screams. She was afraid of death and swam with all her might. She told Marceca she was happy to be alive, and that she hoped to “make it.” Kebrat was alive but had not yet survived. She was not yet aware who else was alive and who had died, and she did not yet know how she would continue her life after the disaster. However, she was able to articulate that she had risked her life in hopes of survival: “I have lived for years in fear. We are all looking toward the future in a world without war, where there is peace. I fled my land for this, even left my family.”
Kebrat’s description of the disaster scene and explanation for leaving Eritrea were among the few available quotes from survivors and circulated in the international news media. Her interview was quoted, for example, in the British Guardian (Kington 2013a), the Australian Sydney Morning Herald (Squires 2013), and the German tabloid Bild (Bild 2013). Her impressions continue to reappear in the public domain as part of Antonio Riccò’s 2014 play Ein Morgen vor Lampedusa, which has been performed almost four hundred times in readings at schools, churches, and elsewhere in Germany and Italy (Riccò 2014; Horsti 2021). By reading aloud the experiences of those who lived through the disaster, communities that perform the play enter the scene of the disaster—or better, they bring the scene of the disaster into their own familiar spaces. In the play, the character named Kebrat says: “First the flames and then nothing but darkness. When I was in the water, I swam with all my strength. Next to me, I saw many die. I can only remember a little. The screams, yes, I remember them. Then I passed out.”1
In the play and in journalistic texts based on Marceca’s interview, Kebrat appears as a subject with a voice. Accompanying the story in Bild is an Associated Press photograph taken at the hospital, possibly at the time of the interview. Kebrat lies on a stretcher, wearing an oxygen mask, surrounded by two nurses and a woman who is talking to her—the woman is not identified, but could be Romina Marceca or perhaps a translator. In the picture, Kebrat is looking at and listening to the woman who is speaking. The visual structure reproduced in the image creates a hierarchy between refugee and caring Europeans. Kebrat’s agency, which is apparent in the text of Marceca’s article, is not visible in this image.
Kebrat appeared again in the public domain when Lampedusan doctor Pietro Bartolo started to tell the story of her rescue and the significant role he played in her survival. Bartolo became an internationally acclaimed public figure after he appeared as one of the lead characters in Gianfranco Rosi’s film Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. That same year, Bartolo published a memoir, Lacrime di sale, which was translated into English, German, Spanish, Catalan, and French within a year. Three years later, he was elected to the European Parliament.
In Bartolo’s story, Kebrat is the woman he saved from death. Her eyewitness account or views on Eritrea do not feature in his telling of the events. Her function in the public domain thus shifted from a witness with a voice to an unconscious victim in someone else’s story. Kebrat was pulled from the sea by Domenico Colapinto and the crew of his fishing boat Angela. They thought she was dead. In his memoir, Bartolo recalls Kebrat lying on the boat’s fishing nets alongside three dead bodies: “Rigor mortis had not yet set in, which could mean that she had died very recently. Then I felt a pulse. . . . That was definitely a heartbeat—it was almost imperceptible, but I had felt it. Then another one. She was not dead” (Bartolo and Tilotta 2017, 190). The story of her return from near-death continued to be told in the media, but its details changed. In some later versions, Kebrat was said to have been already in a body bag when Bartolo discovered her alive. This was the version told on Bartolo’s elected-official Face-book account on February 17, 2020, in a post that included a picture of Bartolo and Kebrat embracing in the European Parliament, where she had gone to meet Bartolo with Tareke Brhane of Comitato 3 ottobre:
Many of you know this story well because it stayed in my heart and I never stopped telling it. It’s the story of Kebrat, a girl who arrived on the pier of Lampedusa without a pulse, no heartbeat, after the shipwreck on October 3, 2013. She looked dead, she was already in a bag, with the zipper closed. All I had to do was pronounce her death. And yet, I felt something, I listened better. It was a race against time, clinic, first aid, helicopter transport to the nearest CPR. It wasn’t over for Kebrat.
Lying among the dead on Colapinto’s fishing vessel—or on the pier—Kebrat was not dead, but she was not yet alive, either. The story of her miraculous rescue that emerged as part of Bartolo’s heroic narrative depicted her as a victim and grateful recipient of Europeans’ benevolence and care. Bartolo’s Facebook post received an outpouring of admiration and gratitude from his followers. In his new role as a member of European Parliament, however, Bartolo channels his celebrity humanitarian status into a political force opposing the violent bordering of Europe. Refugee rights are at the center of his political work, for example, in his role as vice-chair of the parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs. In the parliament’s plenary debate on May 18, 2021, Bartolo said today’s politicians would one day be judged for border deaths: “Every new tragedy in the Mediterranean is followed by this ridiculous rite of pain. There will be a new Nuremberg but, unlike in the past, today we know everything” (Bartolo 2021).
Bartolo’s memoir, like Marceca’s interview, prompted re-representations of Kebrat in the cultural sphere. Neapolitan singer-songwriter Nando Misuraca released a song named “Kebrat” in March 2020, saying that it was inspired by Bartolo’s book. The song is about the hope of surviving and can be interpreted to convey both a Christian meaning of salvation and a civic meaning of convivial belonging. “There will be something better beyond this falsehood / Beyond all the words that are said / There will be a home, a bit of peace / The hope of a tomorrow that leads us to the future,” Misuraca sings. While “falsehood” could be interpreted as a critique of the divisions of the world and “all the words” to refer to the hypocritical legitimation of bordering, the song nevertheless ends with the figure of a grateful refugee. A verse by Senegalese Italian rapper Assane Babou embedded in the song offers the Italian listener a position of benevolence: “I say thank you, and thank you very much / Sicily, Lampedusa, and all of Italy / Thank you so much.”
Nevertheless, Kebrat has not always remained in the role of victim or grateful refugee that has been assigned her, but instead has spoken publicly about issues important to her, including issues that do not necessarily fit her perceived refugeeness. After her time in Palermo, she sought refuge in Sweden. Like many other survivors, she has returned to Lampedusa and demonstrated the capacity to speak and act for justice. By inserting her views and politics into memorializations and representations, she has constituted survivor citizenship.
Kebrat returned to Lampedusa for anniversary commemorations of the disaster in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021. Her presence in Lampedusa, near the place she was almost killed but stayed alive, makes visible both survival and the loss of life. Her presence demonstrates how the victims, too, could have been there and continued their lives.
In 2020 and 2021, Kebrat traveled to Lampedusa with her husband and two young sons. Returning to Lampedusa with her family not only demonstrated her continuation of life, but strengthened the new kinships that have developed between survivors and Lampedusan rescuers. In my view, Kebrat was like a daughter who had returned to visit her parents. Public narratives describing these familial encounters—which transcend linguistic and other boundaries—expand the ideas of friendship and kinship, and in doing so, produce a civil imagination of a convivial future for Europe. Kebrat’s public appearance with her sons in Lampedusa also exemplifies that survival is a transnational and future-oriented process; memories of disasters at borders cannot be confined to one location or one generation. The visuality of her holding the hands of her Swedish-born sons while walking the docks of Lampedusa demonstrates how survival is about the continuation of life. Her children are Swedes of Eritrean descent who carry the memory of their mother’s survival in the Mediterranean Sea.
In her public speech in 2020 Lampedusa commemorations, Kebrat said that survivors of the deadly border live a specific kind of life. Like Solomon, Kebrat distinguished between those who have experienced a disaster and those who have not. Survival means continuing to live a life that is connected to the memory of those who died: “Even though we are among you and seem to live a normal life, there is an unforgettable scar in our hearts. When a person is treated correctly and nicely as a human being, it is good, but [nevertheless], we have a severe injury. Those who were with us are always in our thoughts.” The survival process involves a remaking of one’s self and one’s life. However, this life, which might outwardly seem normal, requires the capacity to reflect on difficult emotions and to live with “an unforgettable scar in our hearts.” No one can survive alone, Kebrat seems to say, and so, it is everyone’s responsibility to treat others with respect. This responsibility includes understanding that experiencing border violence has serious consequences. There is no “normal life” to return to; life must be remade and transformed. The transformations in Kebrat’s life have included taking it upon herself to speak publicly for the rights of the dead and their relatives, as well as for those of the refugees attempting border crossings today.
On October 3, 2017, Kebrat told me how the year before, during her first trip back to Lampedusa in 2016, she had become aware of her position as a survivor whom others listened to. At the commemoration in 2016, she had participated in the protest against Comitato 3 ottobre, who had organized the anniversary events. She held a sign that read, in English: “Our families are waiting for the souls of their children.” Her mission then was to seek justice for the dead and for their families, who wanted forensic identification and the bodies to be repatriated to Eritrea. But in 2017, when she served as the survivors’ designated spokes-person, she focused instead on what was then the most pressing human rights issue related to European bordering: the suffering of refugees on their way to Europe, particularly in Libya. Like other survivors, Kebrat had received numerous horrific calls for help through Facebook and Viber. Kidnappers in Libya had invented a new practice: they took photographs of tortured refugees and shared them digitally with the victims’ families, demanding payment for the refugees’ release through social media.
Though their discourse was humanitarian, Italy and other European countries were all the while facilitating the kidnappers’ cruel business model (Amnesty International 2017; Pusterla 2021). Italy and Europe were vigorously enforcing the securitization of the border, a process that foreshadowed the nationalist-populist turn that would culminate in Italy’s parliamentary elections the following year. This was the issue Kebrat and the other survivors decided to raise in the public space they carved out in the Lampedusa commemorations in 2017. They had discussed what their joint message should be and decided to focus on the future rather than the past. “The Europeans should know about the consequences of their collaboration with the Libyans,” Kebrat told me. Her intention was to talk about the violence of bordering and to make its human consequences known to Europeans, who had externalized border controls to Libya, a former colony of Italy.
The horrific stories and images circulating on social media had prompted the survivors of the Lampedusa disaster to recall their own experiences in Sudan and Libya. Many of those on the boat had also been kidnapped and held for ransom. When I asked Kebrat why she had decided to shift attention from the specifics of the Lampedusa disaster to the broader issue of refugees stranded in Libya, she replied: “The dead are already dead.” While she deemed the issues of identification, burial, and neglected responsibilities important, she felt obliged to speak out on behalf of today’s refugees. She had put aside her criticism of the Comitato.
These changes reflect how Kebrat, along with the other survivors who returned to Lampedusa, negotiated the relevance of their political claims and adjusted their alliances with the other actors taking part in the commemorations. Being a survivor, particularly one with an unusually mediated story, as well as being a woman, afforded Kebrat a certain status in commemorative performances, and she used that status to advocate for those whose lives could still be saved.
As a woman, and later as a mother, Kebrat is a figure that fits European uses of the disaster’s memory. In the Eritrean context, however, I observed a more contested and complicated terrain. In my research, I became aware of gender expectations among Eritreans: women were often expected to take a less prominent role in the public domain compared to men. Interestingly, however, many Eritrean human rights activists in Europe are women. Regardless of gender, survivors who speak publicly about the disaster, and particularly those who voice critical views of the Eritrean regime, can expect to receive also negative responses from Eritreans in diaspora. Kebrat’s negotiations with publicity and acts of survivor citizenship reflect these conditions, within which she must constitute her survivorship. In my view, she sometimes played the role of the grateful refugee or the submissive Eritrean woman, but at other times, she resisted being cast in those roles. At memory sites originally constructed for European visitors, Kebrat and the other survivors used memorialization to produce and transform public knowledge of border deaths and the afterlife of the October 3 disaster within the spheres that were negotiable.
Creating a subjectivity of survivor citizenship—responsibilizing oneself as a survivor—started before the border crossing and continued afterward. Those who left Eritrea did so knowing the risks; they risked their lives for the chance to survive. The Isaias Afwerki regime had annihilated their social, cultural, and political lives in Eritrea, and escape was their means of survival. They acted upon their “right to have rights” (Arendt 2017), and after the disaster, some of those who stayed alive acted as citizens of Europe, regardless of their formal citizenship status. In fact, survival of the murderous border responsibilized Kebrat and others; their process of survival grew out of their capability for acting as citizens. First, they resisted the Isaias regime that had prohibited the memorialization of border deaths, therefore acting as responsible diasporic Eritreans by using their freedom to memorialize the disaster. Second, survivors created a civil relationship with Europe and Europeans. As survivors of the murderous border produced by Europe, they felt responsible for speaking in the name of those whom Europe had killed and on behalf of the refugees stranded in Libya, those whom Europe was allowing to suffer and potentially ready to kill by allowing to drown. By staying alive and transforming themselves from victims to survivors who returned to the site of violence to speak out in words, gestures, and emotions, they demonstrated they were capable of transforming both Eritrea and Europe.
While survivors’ acts of citizenship are directed toward Eritrea, Italy, and the European Union, they have also created civil relationships between people, citizens and noncitizens alike. Importantly, they have been attentive to the rights of the dead and the relatives, and through civic forensic practices they have constituted their survivor citizenship. They imagine themselves part of Europe and part of a common world, and their actions invite others to respond convivially. For example, in readings of the play Ein Morgen vor Lampedusa, participants, who have been spectators of a distant event, become, if only for a moment, protagonists, while both re-mediating and becoming witnesses of the retelling of the disaster.
Similarly, the anniversary memorializations of the disaster point to an interconnected and convivial future for Europe. Survivors return to Lampedusa from all across Europe; they return as Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Dutchmen. Disasters do not fall into oblivion, nor can they be contained in a liminal peripheric sphere such as “Lampedusa”—an island perceived as not-quite Europe. Disasters return to haunt us in the present and future Europe where we live interdependently.
This book has shown that while the dead may be central in representations and memorializations related to the disaster, the transformative potential of its afterlife is dependent on the living. The dead have certain rights, but those rights are given and claimed by the living. The transformative power of representations and memorializations of border deaths is manifest in the lives and actions of survivors.
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