“Notes” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. This account is based on accounts of those who survived the disaster and were on the deck when the boat capsized. The boat itself was not on fire, contrary to what has often been reported in mediated accounts (Gebrehiwet 2020). The boat rests on the seabed at the disaster site, and footage taken by the firefighters who retrieved corpses from the boat is available online (Vigili del Fuogo 2013).
2. Adal received compensation for his translation work from the Academy of Finland project funds, and a scholarship from Kone Foundation for the Remembering Lampedusa documentary film project.
CHAPTER 1. WORDS
1. Chapter epigraph: the audio was communicated only later in media reporting, for example, in La neve, la prima volta, Dossier, TG2, April 6, 2014, and I giorni della tragedia, 03 ottobre 2013 Lampedusa, Libera Espressione, October 3, 2016, directed by Antonio Maggiore.
2. In this widely photographed moment, however, Brandt is on both knees.
3. I thank advocate Gaetano Mario Pasqualino for updates on the case.
CHAPTER 2. IMAGES
1. Italy’s minister of the interior, Angelino Alfano, and the president of the Region of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta, were also present but are left out of the frame. An unnamed woman stands beside Barroso.
2. “Famiglie delle vittime” (Malmström) and “famiglie delle persone che hanno perso la vita nella tragedia della settimana scorsa e ai loro cari” (Barroso).
3. Hadnet Tesfom translated the Global Yiakl live discussion programme for me from the Tigrinya to the English.
4. Other examples of alternative visual structures include the Guardian’s short clip of Reuters footage of the scene that included the mechanical sound of the cranes transferring the coffins and two Eritrean women crying and throwing themselves on coffins. https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/oct/14/lampedusa-ceremony-burial-dead-migrants-video.
5. His experience in the disaster’s immediate aftermath transformed Adal Neguse and he became an outspoken public activist for refugees in Sweden.
6. There are a handful of examples in the European mediascape of instances in which journalists have done extensive investigative work to report on the victims of migrant disasters with the same kind of detailed and individualized attention as is paid to other disasters. These investigative reports generally appear somewhat later in the media cycle. For example, on November 14, 2013, the front page of the weekly magazine L’Espresso displayed forty-five photographs of those who died in a disaster in the Mediterranean on October 11, 2013.
7. Two survivors, one of them a woman, were flown immediately to Palermo for medical care and were not photographed.
8. The Italian journalist associations Association of Carta di Roma and the Federazione Nationale Stampa Italiana sent a public notice to the professional community on October 7, 2013, indicating that the media should not publish the names or identifiable photographs of the Eritrean survivors. They noted that the people on the boat had escaped a regime that might seek to punish their relatives remaining in Eritrea (Rossi and Suber 2013).
CHAPTER 3. ENUMERATION, NAMING, PHOTOS
1. For example, United for Intercultural Action’s “List of Deaths,” since 1993 (UNITED 2022); the Deaths at the Borders Database compiled at VU University Amsterdam (Last 2015); and the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project database, since 2014 (IOM 2022).
2. The Community of Sant’Egidio (Comunità di Sant’Egidio) is an ecumenical Christian lay association founded in Italy, which has since expanded across the world. Their fundamental aim is to pray, help people in need, and promote peace. Advocacy for migrants is an important part of their work, and the organization has sponsored the resettlement of refugees in Italy since 2016.
CHAPTER 4. ADOPTING THE DEAD
1. The actual prize that year was given to the mayor of the Italian town of Riace, Domenico Lucano, who was celebrated for the town’s refugee and migrant integration projects.
2. In addition to the twenty-nine headstones of those who died in Lampedusa or Canal of Sicily, the arrangement also includes the grave of Moussa Toukara, born in Mali, who died in Palermo in 2014.
3. Other key members of Circolo Metropolis are Paolo Arena, Rossella Barbara, Antonella Fontana, Maria Rita Navarra, and Adriana La Porta.
CHAPTER 5. MEMORIAL INTERVENTIONS
1. Some of the observations and analysis of Giardino della memoria were presented in an article I coauthored with Klaus Neumann. We compared the Giardino with the SIEV X memorial in Canberra, Australia (Horsti and Neumann 2019).
2. She builds this argument with reference to Michael Taussig’s collection of essays, The Nervous System (1992).
3. Barbara Adam (2010) builds the distinction between present future and future present on the work of Reinhart Koselleck (2017) and Niklas Luhmann (1982, 281) who “suggested that the present future is rooted in a utopian approach which allows for prediction while the future present is technologically constituted and as such enables us to transform future presents into present presents” (Adam 2010, 375).
4. Italian human rights organizations Gandhi, Comitato verità e giustizia peri nuovi desaparecidos, and Progetto Diritti were involved in taking the crew of Aristeus, a fishing vessel from Mazzara del Vallo to court.
5. The monument was designed by Gaia Rossi in collaboration with Vito Fiorino.
6. In Italian, the sign reads “Ho voluto dare un nome a questi esseri umani.”
7. The memorials in Piazza Piave received additional support from the European Union, Amnesty International, Unser Herz schlägt auf Lampedusa, Consorzio Communità Brianza, Associazione Senza Confini, Federazione delle chiese evangeliche in Italia (including Mediterranean Hope), Archivio Storico Lampedusa, Parrochia San Gerlando Lampedusa, and LapisBio6.
CHAPTER 6. MEMORY POLITICS
1. The initial group was made up of Italian journalists who had long covered migration, Vittorio Alessandro, a former coast guard spokesperson, and Tareke Brhane, an Eritrean Italian activist who had worked for humanitarian organizations in Lampedusa. Mayor Giusi Nicolini was an honorary member. Within the first two years, all but Valerio Cataldi, a journalist from Rome, and Tareke Brhane had left the group. Cataldi and Nicolini left the Comitato when Nicolini was not elected for a second term in 2017. They instead became active in Museo Migranti, an organization that utilizes the memory of the October 3 disaster by exhibiting objects from the disaster site in temporary exhibitions. As of writing, Cataldi is involved together with Mussie Zerai and Adal Neguse (who also continue to collaborate with the Comitato) in creating a memorial museum in Palermo for the memory of October 3, 2013, disaster. As of 2018, Tareke Brhane was the only original member remaining on the Comitato, which has subsequently shifted to a nonprofit organization focused on educational programs “aimed at raising awareness on integration and reception of migrants” as the Comitato’s website noted in 2020 (Comitato 3 ottobre, n.d.).
2. It was signed by 30,256 people.
3. In addition to Triulzi, Gianluca Gatta (2018, 47–48) and Gaia Giuliani (2018, 70) have also resisted cultural amnesia and articulated the connections between the colonial subjects of the past and present migration.
4. Such parties won 22.7 percent of seats in the European Parliament. These groups include ECR (9.3 percent), EFDD (6.4 percent) and NI (7.0 percent) (European Parliament 2014).
CHAPTER 7. SURVIVOR CITIZENSHIP
1. The politicians included Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament; Laura Boldrini, the president of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies; Maria da Assunção Esteves, the president of the Assembly of the Republic of Portugal; Rosario Crocetta, the president of Sicily; and Italy’s foreign minister, Federica Mogherini.
2. The letter is titled “Commemoration of Lampedusa boat victims” and signed “Eritrean community in Italy, September 26, 2014.”
3. This interview was given in Tigrinya and filmed by Anna Blom, a Finnish Swedish filmmaker, and Adal Neguse on October 4, 2017, for their documentary film project Remembering Lampedusa.
4. In fact, they were free to leave the island and continue their journey north because they refused to give fingerprints to the Italian authorities in order to avoid being sent back to Italy under the European Union’s Dublin Regulation. A couple of days later, the recently arrived refugees were at the Agrigento train station in Sicily, where they were waiting for their relatives to send money for onward travel.
CHAPTER 8. SURVIVAL
1. Copyright © 2017 Sellerio editore, via Enzo ed Elvira Sellerio 50 Palermo. Originally published in Italian as Appunti per un naufragio in 2017 by Sellerio Editore, Palermo, Italy. English translation copyright © 2019 Antony Shugaar. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.
CHAPTER 9. SURVIVING THE DEATH OF ANOTHER
1. I contacted the Red Cross in Hamburg to ask if they could help with the DNA identification. A case worker responded that they could only help fill out a Personal Description Document and send it to the Italian authorities through the Red Cross office in Italy. Teddy would still have to travel to the University of Milan’s Laboratorio di Antropologia e Odontologia Forense (LABANOF) to give the sample. Finally, in 2022 he was able to do that in Lampedusa where the scientists of LABANOF came. The Red Cross’s activity was mainly limited to facilitating the restoration of family ties through an online platform where migrants could post photographs of their disappeared relatives.
EPILOGUE: KEBRAT’S STORY
1. Antonio Umberto Riccò’s play is translated by Thomas Borgard, Lisa Palm, and Jessica Riccò and titled That Morning on Lampedusa, 2014.
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