“ENUMERATION, NAMING, PHOTOS” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
ENUMERATION, NAMING, PHOTOS
Counting and naming are the two most common forms of acknowledging the victims of any disaster. When the victims’ names are known, the media and the mourners also bring forward photographs of the dead as a means of knowing who they were. In the case of the Lampedusa disaster, there is a relative lack of interest in the European public domain in the exact death toll and the names of the dead. This reveals that the victims of this disaster—or of this kind of disaster—were not treated the same way as the victims of other kinds of disasters in the European public sphere. This is an example of what Judith Butler (2009, 1) terms the ungrievability of certain bodies, meaning that within particular epistemological frameworks, some lives are not conceived as livable lives at all, and therefore, cannot be lost. Ungrievability is a notion that many scholars of border deaths have used in arguing that there is a differentiated public response to migrant deaths in comparison to other deaths (see Stierl 2016; Rygiel 2016; Stümer 2018). They argue that public performances of mourning can be a means to resist ungrievability and produce a critical politics to confront fatal bordering.
Similarly, in the words of Pope Francis (2013b), differential treatment of border deaths is an example of “globalized indifference” to the suffering of certain people: “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” This chapter examines how the victims of the Lampedusa disaster were represented by numbers, names, and photographs, and how those representations were assembled. I am specifically interested in the potentialities and limitations of these modes of representation. How do they shape the afterlife and memorialization of the disaster? How does the memory of the disaster survive oblivion in the public domain through these modes of representation?
Quantifying the Dead
No matter how the disaster is named—whether it is a tragedy, a massacre (strage), or a shipwreck—the dominant representation is a number, a count of the victims. No one definitive figure represents the Lampedusa disaster, however. Instead, several different numbers have been cited: 366, 367, 368, 369, 373. When the Guardian published what it called “the List,” a fifty-two-page list of refugee deaths, on June 20, 2018, in a supplement marking World Refugee Day, the Lampedusa disaster took up just one line: “03/10/13, 373, N.N., Africa, drowned after boat on way from Libya to Italy caught fire and sank in the Mediterranean Sea; 155 rescued.” The more commonly used figures start from 366, the official number of deaths (DDA 2014). Three hundred sixty-six refers to the number of bodies that were discovered on the boat and nearby. The 367th was a baby that divers discovered still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord, Lampedusans told me.
It is common in cases of mass deaths, such as in wars, for the precise number of missing persons or deaths to be a subject of controversy, with the number itself becoming a matter of contestation. In the case of the Lampedusa victims, however, the differing figures appear to be uncontested, and it seems that the exactness of the number is inconsequential to the agents who have engaged with the disaster in the public sphere: the difference between 367 and 368 or between 367 and 369 is not important to them. The number stands for a category—the victims of the October 3 shipwreck—and the individual, one increment in that sum, loses its significance. The essence of the figure, like the figure representing border deaths in general (the 34,361 in the Guardian’s “List,” for example) is not the number’s exactness, but its greatness—the many.
That the numbers are indeterminate is common knowledge among those who engage with border deaths. Nevertheless, NGOs, academics, journalists, governments, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) continue to attempt to count border deaths and to represent them with numbers, which when used, seem exact and appear to be facts. In 1993, United for Intercultural Action (UNITED) became the first civil society actor to attempt to count border deaths, doing so with the goal of directing critical attention to the deaths. The Italian journalist Gabriele del Grande started counting deaths in 2006 for the Fortress Europe blog, and the University of Amsterdam started to compile the database Border Deaths in 2012. The Turkish artist Banu Cennetoğlu (2018), who has engaged with UNITED’s “List of Deaths” through art, explains the justification for counting deaths: “The governments don’t keep these records for the public; they don’t want the public to see these records because it exposes their policies. So, you have NGOs trying to put the data together, and that data is incomplete and fragile, but then again someone has to do it.” The motivation of civil society organization for counting the dead was to seek accountability.
Border activists and artists have used the “List of Deaths” to make border deaths visible in multiple ways, helping to visualize “the many.” Cennetoğlu printed the list in the style of a train schedule and displayed it at the Basel central railway station in 2011. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the list was spread out on the walls of a gallery. And at least two newspapers—Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and the Guardian in the United Kingdom—have published the list as a supplement for their readers. Such materiality makes the number concrete: “the many” feels heavy in the form of a thick newspaper supplement, and it cannot be passed by with a single glance when the pages are spread across several yards of wall. However, as with the figure representing the victims of the Lampedusa disaster, the exactness of the number of dead on the “List of Deaths” does not seem to be the main concern for those compiling the list or engaging with it. It is unimportant even in a material sense, as is clear from the lines in the list. The Lampedusa disaster, with 373 dead, occupies only one row, whereas some other disasters are spread over multiple rows, with each N.N. or name being given its own row.
Nathaniel White, a documentary photographer, has taken a closer look at the “List of Deaths” in his 2017 project Routes, in which he traces the exact locations where people have died or gone missing. Aerial photographs—again, a great number of them—contrast the everydayness of the landscape (a motorway, the sea, a field, a building) and violent death. By attending to one detail, the location of death, his intention is to focus on the singularity of each death. “The number thirty thousand and something dead doesn’t tell me anything, doesn’t touch me,” White (2018) told me.
The work of critical border activists to document and expose the massive scale of border deaths, which, as Cennetoğlu explained, was a response to governments not revealing the extent of death, was relevant throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. The situation changed, however, after the Lampedusa disaster. One outcome of the disaster was that in 2014, the year after the Lampedusa disaster, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) started compiling lists and providing figures on a regular basis. Quantification became the dominant way of representing border deaths across the field, from activists to governmental agencies.1
The Lampedusa disaster was a key moment in this respect: it suddenly seemed that governments in Europe were no longer avoiding the issue of border deaths, but rather highlighting their magnitude. The IOM made the monthly count a recurring news item (IOM 2022). Media could regularly report the figures and whether they had increased or decreased, like they did on stock markets. To the public, it began to look like European policies could manage and control migration, and a critical tool in creating this impression were the numbers. Previously, the main indicator for monitoring migration and policy had been statistics on asylum applications; now, fatality metrics were also operationalized as an optic for viewing migration and bordering. It was paradoxical that the IOM, which was part of the technology of border management and which represented the governments that had produced the fatal conditions, had become so interested in counting deaths.
While the IOM has adopted a practice invented by civil society actors, the rationale behind its counting and the politics that it produces are different. First, the IOM argues that deaths are attributable to greedy people smugglers, omitting any reference to the responsibility borne by European migration policies and border controls. Second, the IOM only counts deaths that occur during crossings of Europe’s external border and omit counting deaths resulting from bordering inside Europe, to avoid assigning any direct responsibility to European states. UNITED, on the contrary, also counts deaths in detention centers and suicides resulting from the threat of deportation. In an analysis of the transfer of tools from “civil society counterstatistics to intergovernmental recuperation” of border death metrics, Charles Heller and Antoine Pécoud (2020) argue that the IOM neutralizes the critical politics of counting, and in fact, uses statistics on border deaths to reinforce the very structures and practices that produce them.
While activists’ counterstatistics have critical power in their demands for accountability, as they show the murderous effects of bordering, statistics are tricky. They are central to the logic of governmentality. Power and resistance to power are mutually constitutive, as Heller and Pécoud’s (2020, 484) Foucauldian discussion underlines.
In other contexts, scholars have brought critical attention to the knowledge acquired through fatality metrics and the power of metrics, for example, in waging war and in human rights activism. Yến Lê Espiritu (2014, 2, 178) exposes a schizophrenic fascination with counting the confirmed Vietnamese “kills” to chart the United States progress in the Vietnam war while simultaneously weaving a “fabric of erasure” and an “organized blankness” of these deaths. The dead were numbers but not people with “faces and names, family and friends, personal histories and beliefs.” They were people “whose lives do not count” (Espiritu 2014, 178). Jennifer Hyndman (2007), who examines fatality metrics in relation to the Iraq War, argues that metrics are incapable of accounting for the destruction of life and livelihood. They risk being “a disem-bodied, abstract process, the methodology of which has been as contentious as the deaths themselves” (Hyndman 2007, 36). Such a distant and sanitized gaze on death can dehumanize the consequences of war. Martina Tazzioli (2015) argues that counting deaths at EU borders reinforces a governmental gaze on the border by creating the sense that the border and its fatality are issues of management. In contrast to the removed and distanced spatiality produced by metrics, Hyndman searches for an alternative, feminist perspective. She argues for “more accountable, embodied ways of seeing and understanding the intersection of power and space. Instead of mapping and quantifying, the understanding of the fatal border requires knowledge of the human consequences: the destruction of life” (Hyndman 2007, 36).
Jenny Edkins (2011, 7) presents a similar critique to quantifying when she writes about missing persons. Figures count groups of people, alive or dead, not for who they are, but for what they are, she argues. The bodies are counted in order to produce an object suitable for some purpose: administration, remembering, or documenting. The number serves simply as a reference to a category, such as migrant victims of the October 3 shipwreck. It answers the question, what happened. Three hundred sixty-six, or 367, or 368, or 369 people categorized as migrants drowned. But this performance of knowledge, of an exact-sounding figure, doesn’t generate the question, who died. If that were asked, we would have to know who the 369th person was. What was her name?
Knowing One Name
One counterhegemonic strategy to the distant knowledge provided by fatality metrics is to ask who died. Hannah Arendt (1998, 97) wrote in The Human Condition that the chief characteristic of human life, as opposed to animal life, is that it can be told as a story. This distinguishes bios, the mortal individual life, from the merely biological zoe. Every life story, every biography, starts with a name. Knowing a person starts with knowing their name.
After the Lampedusa disaster, the need for names was obvious to the Eritrean diasporic community and to those in Eritrea who were searching for someone. But that was a matter of practicality, not representation. There were also others who were not looking for a specific name among the dead, but nevertheless asked this question in search of an ethical representation of the disaster. In the few representations of the Lampedusa disaster that actually named an individual victim, Yohanna was the most frequent choice. She was chosen not because she was representative of typical migrant victims, but because her story was like no other. She became known as the woman who gave birth in a sinking boat. Giving birth is an experience to which many can relate: in giving birth she is similar to me, because I know what it feels like to be in labor. But in giving birth to a baby while her boat was sinking, knowing of a certain death, she is like no one else.
The Italian divers who brought the bodies to the surface told the media stories of what they had seen. One diver recounted that he had found the body of a newborn boy, still connected to his mother by the umbilical cord. The story was repeated across the international media as a horrific detail of the disaster. Though the story circulated globally, it was Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean human rights activist and journalist in Stockholm, who first set out to discover the woman’s name. She traveled to Lampedusa to find out who the woman was and reported the full story on her radio program Voices of Eritrean Refugees, which aired on the Tigrinya-language station Radio Erena, based in Paris.
I met Meron Estefanos in her home in Stockholm where she told me she had felt compelled to find out the name and the story of the “woman who drowned while giving birth,” as she was known in the media (Estefanos 2016). In Lampedusa, Meron found out from survivors that the woman had been called Yohanna and that she had been eight months pregnant. She also found the woman’s fiancé, who had survived the disaster. By telling the story of Yohanna and interviewing her fiancé, Mehbratom, Meron wanted to produce one story that could stand for many others. She explained: “Three hundred sixty-eight died, they say. It is just a number. It doesn’t add up. But by telling an individual’s story, I am able to reach the pain that they went through. Rather than giving figures, I want to touch people’s hearts. It could have been you if the circumstances were different.”
Once Meron had made Yohanna’s name public to the Eritrean diaspora, the story of Yohanna inspired more writing and performance. Poetry provided a form where the disaster’s memory could be processed and transmitted among Eritreans in Eritrea and in diaspora. Traditionally, oral poems are recited to tell stories and to remember the deceased. A type of oral poetry, aulò, can convey critical judgment about issues and provide information, in addition to emotional expression (Brioni 2014). One widely circulated poem after the disaster is Ribka Sibhatu’s (2016) Italian language poem “In Lampedusa,” in which the name of Yohanna is central. The poem tells how Yohanna gave birth to a son, and Mehbratom cried “among the floating corpses”: Yohanna! Yohanna! Yohanna!.
The horror of the baby being born and dying in the same instant, and of Yohanna suffering the pain of labor and drowning simultaneously becomes the narrative that speaks for all of the victims, who are represented by a figure. “A woman died while giving birth! / 368 people died!” Ribka’s poem exclaims. Yohanna’s pain symbolizes the pain of the 368.
Another Eritrean diasporic writer, Selam Kidane, also underlines the nonacknowledgment of the new life as she draws on the story of Yohanna in her poem “Ode to Yohanna’s Baby”:
On
The vast dark sea
His mother feebly fighting to stay afloat
A baby boy was born
No one saw his eyes
Open briefly
Then shut
(Kidane 2014, excerpt of the English-
language poem “Ode to Yohanna’s Baby”)
Except for Meron Estefanos’s interview with Mehbratom, the uses of the name of Yohanna do not trigger any retelling of her life beyond the experience of giving birth and dying simultaneously. The poems are not based on Yohanna’s life, but on the story of discovery told by the divers. Yohanna’s name and the story of her death inspired authors to produce representations of more general themes, such as the vulnerability of life—“No one saw his eyes/Open briefly/Then shut.”
Yohanna’s name later caught the attention of Western writers who returned to the disaster after the initial news cycle. Mattathias Schwartz (2014) mentioned Yohanna in his story about the Eritrean priest Mussie Zerai in the New Yorker (April 21, 2014). The piece is about the shipwreck from Mussie’s point of view, and within the story, Schwartz briefly witnesses Meron Estefanos’s interview of Mehbratom. Frances Stonor Saunders (2016) picked up Yohanna’s name from Schwartz’s story for her essay in the London Review of Books about crossing borders and identification. She too, like Meron, had been haunted by the story of the woman who gave birth while drowning. As someone who had witnessed the disaster only at a distance, through the media, she seems distracted by the horrific detail. Saunders couldn’t forget the disaster, not because she knew anyone who was on the boat, but precisely because she didn’t know anyone, not even one name. She knew one story, or rather, one detail of one story: a woman had died while giving birth. But not knowing the full story, not knowing the woman’s name, produced a disturbing relationship with the disaster. Saunders (2016) writes: “All I know is that a woman who believed in the future drowned while giving birth, and we have no idea who she was. And it’s this, her lack of known identity, which places us, who are fat with it, in direct if hopelessly unequal relationship to her.”
In witnessing the disaster through the media, Saunders is caught in a relationship that is defined by a gap—a gap between dying here in “our” European society and yet as a stranger to us. The female victim does not exist as a person for European institutions or the European public. In her search for a way out of this uncomfortable position as a European who looks—witnesses through the media—but is unable to see or know, after two years of thinking about the woman who drowned, she finally comes across Mattathias Schwartz’s article in the New Yorker and finds the woman’s name: Yohanna. Saunders (2016) ends her essay by repeating a detail from Schwartz’s story: “Her name, this man said, was Yohanna. In Eritrean, it means ‘congratulations.’”
Interestingly, it was not the story of the woman who gave birth while drowning that touched Saunders’s heart, to use Meron’s phrase, but the fact that she didn’t know who the woman was and that she lived in a society where not knowing was not an issue. She was unsettled by the institutionalized blankness and the social indifference that was revealed to her by the lack of a name. Therefore, it was perhaps not so much finding out Yohanna’s name that relieved Saunders’s anxiety, but rather finding out about the attentiveness of others to her identity and story: the efforts of Meron, the act of recalling Yohanna’s memory by her partner, Mehbratom, the activist engagement of Mussie, and the investigative reporting of Schwartz.
However, it is necessary to ask, what is the meaning of knowing one name for the publics that witness the disaster through media. Does knowing the name of Yohanna enable us to find an emotional relationship to the 368? Does it fill the uncomfortable gap and generate action that would not treat the dead as strangers? By attending to one name, Meron sought the means to create an emotional relationship to the disaster and emotional knowledge about it. While an individual’s emotional response to the disaster does not change depending on whether the number of victims is 366 or 367, knowing one victim by name can trigger an emotional flow. An emotional relationship to Yohanna was also a means of keeping the memory of the disaster alive. The name and the story of one individual victim—that is, knowledge that “touches the heart”—would haunt the public much longer than a number, Meron believed. The referential afterlife of a disaster depends on its capacity to produce emotional responses, and in this process, knowing one victim by name may extend the echo.
While 368 (or 366, 377, 369, or 373) are too many to know and to remember one by one, Yohanna can be remembered. She can become a symbol for the 368 dead, and the presence of her name across platforms and in poems reminds the public that the other 367 have names and stories, too. Her name can invoke the understanding that individual lives were destroyed, in contrast to a focus on the presence of dead bodies. Alan Kurdi, the little boy whose body was found on the shores of Turkey in 2015, became an icon of the deaths of the many refugees and migrants who lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea during the European refugee reception crisis—one of 3,777 dead, as counted by the IOM in 2015.
Similarly, Anne Frank is remembered as one of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. Primo Levi (1988, 56) writes in The Drowned and the Saved : “There is no proposition between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”
Nevertheless, an icon of mass death, one name that immediately refers to a certain event or era, may prompt the public to imagine the manifold individual cases of suffering. However, she might also remain the only individual who is remembered. Saunders recognizes the danger that knowing Yohanna by name can lead to her being cast as a “sentimental artifact,” an object or a symbol created by others for their own emotional purposes: a sentimental artifact that relieves the concerned European spectator’s pain of not knowing and her discomfort at realizing she is living in a fundamentally unequal society.
In the context of humanitarian intervention, the Nigerian American author Teju Cole (2016, 349) writes in a similar vein about “the White Savior Industrial Complex” as “a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system developed on pillage.” Cole writes that American sentimentality allows one to emotionally engage with “isolated ‘disasters’” without connecting the dots or seeing the pattern of power behind them. “All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need” (Cole 2016, 344). Sentimentality does not require acknowledgment of the multiple forces that in conjuncture produce a disaster.
The List of Names
Immediately after the disaster, three survivors developed the idea of collecting the names of the victims while they were confined in the refugee accommodation center in Lampedusa. Mohamed Kasim, who now lives near Copenhagen, was one of them. He explained to me in an interview that he and the others felt obliged to notify the families of the victims. They all knew how painful it is to remain in the liminal state of not knowing if a person is dead or alive. Every Eritrean has struggled with the uncertainty of disappeared persons. As survivors of the disaster, Mohamed explained, it was their responsibility to account for the dead and let their family members know. They did not rely on the Italian authorities or the Red Cross, as they thought that Eritrean diasporic networks would be more efficient in disseminating the information. The Lampedusa disaster would become a pilot case for migrant disaster victim identification procedures as I explain in chapter 9, but in the immediate aftermath survivors took the task to account who the dead were. It was important, Mohamed stressed, that the families be able mourn their losses. For the survivors, accounting for the disaster by listing the names was an act of respect for those who remained alive, for those who were missing someone. This was the first act of survivor citizenship after the disaster, an identity that I discuss further in chapter 7. Regardless of their legal status, the survivors acted as citizens of Europe by undertaking social duties and claiming rights and justice. Compiling the list of dead emerged from the feeling of responsibility toward those who died and their families.
The journey and its fatal end connected the survivors to the victims in a profound way. While the list of names that Mohamed and his two fellow passengers started to compile made visible the absence of the people who had died and separated the dead from the living, the act of collecting the names re-created a community that comprised both the living and the dead: those who had traveled together on this specific journey. Some had been together since departing from the same village in Eritrea. They had survived the first dangerous crossing together—the prohibited escape from Eritrea. Some had met later on in the journey, in the collection and waiting points governed by smugglers. Some had experienced or witnessed violence together: a few had been kidnapped in Libya, and their relatives had paid $3,500 in ransom for their release. Then there were the families: a brother who lost a sister, a man who lost a cousin, and a husband who lost his wife. But there were also those who had become friends on the boat.
The three survivors re-created the network of relationships by asking the other survivors for information about those they had known on the boat. Who was sitting next to you? What details about those people do you remember? Many others joined the effort and collected information. Using pen and paper, the survivors organized these answers into a table that stretched to nine pages. According to Mohamed there were several versions of the list. The three of them made revisions as the information became more accurate. At first, there were several duplicates in the list of names: two or more people had remembered a name that later turned out to refer to the same person. Although a number preceded each name on the list, establishing the total number of victims was not the goal.
The list that I have seen is the one that was later published on the Eritrean opposition website Assenna.com. It is titled tselim mezgeb 365 gdayat meqzefti Lampedusa (The Black List of 365 Victims of the Tragedy of Lampedusa). This list has 367 names, written in neat Tigrinya script and organized alphabetically in straight rows. Two names are crossed out. Only twenty-six names on the list are missing the second name. After each name, the survivors have recorded the victim’s gender, nationality, clan, and address. The list includes seven people from Ethiopia; the rest are from Eritrea. Some of the media coverage of the disaster had reported that there were Somalis among the travelers, so I wondered why no Somalis were on the list. When I mentioned this contradiction in reported nationalities to Mohamed, he was puzzled. To his knowledge, there were only Eritreans and a few Ethiopians on the boat. He was sure that the survivors would have remembered and listed every person, no matter their nationality. Their intention was to list everyone—that was why there was a column for nationality.
Finally, the list had a column for additional details. Its initial function was to prevent repeat entries. However, the additional details became a testimony of how the survivors remembered those who did not survive. Through these memories, the dead appear as persons and personalities. One person was a bar owner, another a priest. There was a teacher, remembered for his afro hair style. Although names are important markers of identity and individuality, this list is not only about names. The details that the survivors remembered—professions, clans, the streets or towns where people lived—are evidence of belonging to a community, and as a document, the list also communicates this. In addition, the list of names makes some of their relationships visible. Each name has a number that can be cross-referenced: according to the notes in the “additional details” column, entry no. 367 referred to the child of the person named in entry 274. Number 142 is the mother of numbers 62, 80, and 89. These details recorded on the handwritten document reveal that the person who died mattered to another person who also died.
The list accentuates the dignity of the dead by naming them and by making their relationships visible. The list highlights three kinds of relationships: First, by compiling the list, the survivors made their relationship to the dead visible. They re-created the relational network that existed on the boat before it capsized. Second, the survivors acknowledged that the dead had relationships and by making the list they informed the family members who otherwise might never hear about the fate of their loved ones. Third, they made the relationships between the dead visible by indicating them in the handwritten document. The relationships continued to matter even in death. Each individual existed in relation to other people, dead or alive. Such representation of relationality and interdependence is central to dignity and humanity.
Judith Butler (2004) bases her work on “grievable life” on the relationality of being human, arguing that relationality makes every human vulnerable. Death is the ultimate loss and transforms survivors, as well. We are hurt not only by violence or pain that is directed at us personally, but also by violence toward someone else we have a connection with. Butler says: “On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related” (Butler 2004, 22). At this intimate level, the loss of “the tie” concerns everyone equally, and Butler argues that recognizing this vulnerability, which all human beings share, is a key to justice. However, in public life, she points out, societies recognize and even amplify some deaths, whereas other losses become unthinkable and ungrievable. Public grief is selective, and therefore the act of mourning deaths that are ignored in public life has radical political potential.
The main purpose of listing the names was to help those who were looking for missing relatives. In other words, the survivors of the Lampedusa disaster who compiled the list took moral responsibility as survivors, a position that also constituted their own identities and a sense of a community. It is this awareness of the vulnerability and relationality of being human that makes the creation of the list of names such a powerful moral and political act. The survivors compiled their list of names as an act of forensic civics in the face of public institutions indifferent to the identities of the dead. They did what the Italian authorities and the humanitarian organizations (namely, the Red Cross) would have done in so-called normal circumstances—in disasters where citizens die or where citizens of countries that matter to Italy die. An Eritrean Italian who interpreted for the Italian investigators of the disaster told me in a telephone interview in 2020 that he later typed the list of the dead in the Latin alphabet and handed it over to Italian authorities.
The Circulation of the Names
The list of the dead that was compiled by the survivors did not remain simply a reference used for contacting family members but was soon photographed and digitized and began to spread more widely. It remains unclear to me who initially digitized the handwritten list and started spreading it but there was a demand to know the names in various activist and religious communities. The names were read out on Eritrean radio programs such as Radio Asenna and in religious memorial services held by the Eritrean diaspora. They were also recited in religious ceremonies in Italy and in human rights protests in various European cities.
The three survivors who had collected the names were troubled that the list had been spread in various directions. Their intention had been to document the victims only for the people who survived them. They were aware of the relatives’ possible wishes of anonymity. Three years later, in 2016, Mohamed Kasim was still concerned about the unethical aspects to spreading the list. Later, he learned that publicizing the names had caused further harm to some of the victims’ families. One issue that Mohamed and others mentioned was that some people had heard about the death of a loved one through the radio or social media, breaking the traditional convention of delivering news of a death in person. The second concern, not articulated by survivors themselves but by Eritrean human rights activists I interviewed was the fear of reprisal. Illegal exit, draft evasion, and desertion from the national service are not treated in the judicial system; but punishments are inconsistently imposed by military officials and security forces (EASO 2019, 21). Arbitrariness of punishments may also place family members remaining in Eritrea in danger. Issues of data justice and privacy of the victims and their families are crucial aspects in thinking of representation and memorialization by naming. While anonymity risks sanitizing a disaster and hiding its human consequences, naming the victims can also be problematic.
Two different groups had a specific interest in the names of the victims and their value for activism. First, there were the European-led humanitarian groups, migrant activists, and religious actors who had been raising awareness about deaths in the border zones for several years. Mourning and creative rituals had become a part of their activism, underlining the fatal consequences of the European border regime. Second, Eritrean human rights activists and oppositional political actors in the diaspora also highlighted the deaths, but their activism emphasized the oppressive political situation in Eritrea. For them, the disaster became a symbol of the suffering produced by the Eritrean regime. These two types of activists treated the list of names as documentation of individuals who had lost their lives as a consequence of direct or structural violence and the denial of human rights. Reciting the names and making the names known was crucial for their practice—political or religious.
For the Community of Sant’Egidio,2 obtaining the list of names of the Lampedusa disaster was a continuation of their ongoing practice. Reciting the names of dead migrants had been an important part of the organization’s prayer service Morire di speranza (Dying of Hope), which they had been holding in Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome on World Refugee Day since at least 2011 (Sant’Egidio 2011). Each year, some of the names of those who have died at the border are recited, and a candle is lit in their memory. The Dying of Hope prayer vigil is specifically meant for “thinking of each of them”—each of those who died at Europe’s border, as Sant’Egidio frames it in their public communications. In order to think of “them” individually, a list of names is read aloud. This practice is intended to remind members of the community to take responsibility and “to look directly at the reality of migration by putting the lives of each person and full respect for human rights in the foreground” (Sant’Egidio 2011).
In Lampedusa, Stefano Nastasi, the parish priest, received the list of names from the Community of Sant’Egidio and read them out in some of the services the parish organized. One took place inside the airport hangar, where some 110 coffins, each adorned with flowers, were organized in straight rows in the arrangement that I discussed in chapter 2. Four years later, Father Nastasi (2017) explained how saying the names of the victims was an important part of this ceremony: it was about “bringing back the presence of the person.” The reading of the names counteracted the generic nature of the arrangement by representing the disaster as the absence of individual lives. Asmat—Names, a film directed by Dagmawi Yimer (Asmat 2015) includes a recitation of all names. He underlines that reciting names brings forward the subjectivity and relationality of those who died. In a public lecture he explained the focus on names in Asmat : “Naming our children is a way of telling the world about our hopes, our dreams, our beliefs, or about the people and things we respect. We choose meaningful names for our children, just as our parents did for us” (Yimer 2015, 15). He also argues that saying the names of the victims reveals the political agency of the victims: “These names have defied man-made boundaries and laws, have disturbed and challenged African and European governments” (Yimer 2015, 15).
For several decades, listing the names of those who have died in wars or disasters has been a form of remembering victims. War memorials, sites of terrorist attacks, and memorials of disasters—like the memorial in Stockholm’s Galärvarvskyrkogården (Galley Shipyard Cemetery) commemorating the sinking of the Estonia in 1994—often list the names of those who lost their lives. After the Christchurch terrorist attack on March 15, 2019, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern rendered the terrorist “nameless” and refused to mention his name. Instead, in her first speech to parliament after the attack, she urged the public to speak the victims’ names (Wahlquist 2019). Naming victims is also a common practice in the antiracist Black Lives Matter movement as hashtags #SayTheirNames and #SayHerName indicate (Khaleeli 2016).
Publicly identifying war victims, including civilians, in memorials has become a common practice since the aftermath of World War I. In Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 men and boys were murdered in 1995 during the Bosnian War, the names of victims are read aloud each year at the annual ceremony where recently identified human remains are reburied. Reading thousands of names is also a ritual in the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust.
Reading the names of victims who have suffered an unjust death is a public performance of commemoration, which as Klaus Neumann (2000, 136–39) argues, reminds those attending the ritual that the number of victims is a multiplier. Names invite the participant to think of the group of victims as “one individual plus one individual plus one individual plus . . .” In reciting the names in the list compiled by the survivors of the Lampedusa disaster (the one published in Asenna), the figure 365 becomes 365 times one name. Still, 365 names are probably too many for anyone to remember individually. Unless one is waiting for a particular name to be said, it is perhaps even difficult to hear each individual name. Or if the list of names is written or carved in a memorial wall, as is sometimes done, the multiplicity of names turns into a graphic visual element composed of the letters of the alphabet. This transformation of names into a visual element is especially evident for me when I look at the list of names from Lampedusa, which is in Tigrinya: the names are in a script that I cannot read.
Moreover, while the monotonous reading of names, as in Dagmawi’s film Asmat and on Eritrean radio programs, does communicate that there are many names—a long list—it does not necessarily allow the listener to pause to reflect on any one of them. In addition, there is repetition in the list, as it is alphabetically ordered and many of the victims had the same first name. The narrator in Asmat recites the names as a meditative mantra: “Berahat, Berahat, Berahat, Berahat, Berahat, Berahat.” Before moving on to the next name, the English translation is spoken: “Blessing.” The translation divides the repetitions of one name from the next. This break allows the listener a moment of reflection: there were six victims by the name of Berahat. Similarly, the hundreds or thousands of names engraved on memorials often appear ornamental when seen from afar, but when one approaches a memorial, there is the opportunity to pause and focus on one name, or on one name at a time.
Arguably, reciting the names of victims aloud is a means of making a number visible, audible, and comprehensible. While the public may understand the figure as a multiplier, it nevertheless reveals nothing of the victims’ character. Their differences flatten out, making it difficult to understand the individuals beyond the category of “victims.” We don’t see their politics, reasons for fleeing, personalities, interests, or hopes. However, we can begin to imagine them. This is crucial for imagining the migrants as being part of the shared world and as having a social life.
Portraits of the Victims
In addition to the names, the survivors began collecting photographs of the victims. Aregai Mehari, one of the survivors of the Lampedusa disaster, set up a Facebook group for the survivors on November 19, 2013; more than one hundred people joined. His intention was to create an online platform where people who had shared the horrific experience could stay in touch after parting ways in Lampedusa. In 2016, Aregai and I met in Sweden and analyzed the photographs that had been posted to the Facebook page. Aregai had learned English in high school and been assigned as a teacher in the national service. He speaks English very well and was the first survivor with whom I could have a conversation directly. He worked as a translator at an asylum-seeker accommodation center in Sweden after his arrival there. Later, Aregai became a bus driver in one of Sweden’s larger cities.
When we looked at posts in the Facebook group, I noticed that the first photographs to be shared were of the survivors in Lampedusa soon after the disaster. In the first photograph, a young man stands on the rocks by the sea, looking at the waves. Then, there are photographs of groups of survivors, or of groups consisting of both survivors and Lampedusans. In one photograph, fifty or sixty survivors pose with rows of red funeral candles in front of them. There are two members of the Italian military at one end of the formation. Some survivors posted photographs captured from online news sites: the image of the sunken ship provided to the media by the Italian fire and rescue service and an image of the rows of coffins in the airport hangar (discussed in chapter 2) both appeared in the Facebook group.
The visual flow in the Facebook group changed a month later, when Aregai suggested to the group that survivors post old photographs of the victims. Almost all of the survivors knew someone who had lost their life in the disaster and either had photographs of them or were able to contact their families to get a photograph. Some survivors shared victims’ photos in their original form; others edited the pictures, adding the date 3/10/2013, “Lampedusa disaster,” “R.I.P.,” and the name of the victim. Almost all of the photographs were studio portraits similar to the found photographs discussed in chapter 2, with the subject consciously posing and looking at the camera. Some of the photographs have digital backgrounds, featuring stars, geometric shapes, images of waterfalls, or mountains. Some include studio backdrops and props—one person sits on a fancy chair with draped curtains in the background. Aregai told me that having a portrait taken in a studio is a common practice in Eritrea. While graduations, weddings, or birthdays are some common reasons to have a professional photograph taken, a special occasion is not necessarily required.
The flow of portraits on the survivors’ Facebook group represented the victims both as individuals and as a large group of people who had died in the same disaster, similar to how the list of names functioned. The pictures underlined the victims’ individuality and personality in two ways: First, because they are portraits, attention is centered on the subject and the subject is aware of and partly in control of the photographic moment. Second, those who posted the photographs also attached names to them, with information about the person’s relationships and personality appearing in the comments.
Each posted photograph was greeted by comments from other group members in Tigrinya, Arabic, or English. Aregai and Adal translated Tigrinyan and Arabic comments to me in English, and for the sake of privacy, I do not post direct quotations except for the common phrases. The responses ranged from generic condolences to more personalized messages:
In loving memory of.
Erefti selam ygberelom. (Rest in peace, R.I.P.)
Amen.
God bless you.
Yehwatna; Amlak byemanu yiqebelom.
(Brothers and sisters; may God receive you in Heaven.)
You were too young to die and are already missed dearly by your loved ones.
There are no words. We couldn’t do anything. He is not here anymore but he is living in our souls. Every single minute.
The sea took our beloved ones, I comfort the mothers of the victims.
You prayed during the whole journey, may God receive you in Heaven.
Like the act of compiling a list of names, the sharing of photographs by the group of survivors re-produced the community of those who were on the fatal journey together. Some of them were now dead while others lived. The comments on the photographs often addressed the deceased directly as “you,” as if they would still be able to hear the memories: “You prayed during the whole journey.” One photograph is of two young women, looking directly at the camera. Their heads meet over a small table. The names of the women are mentioned in the post and someone has commented: “You were friends until death.”
Through this memorial engagement, the survivors produced a community—one that shared not only the experience of staying alive, but also of mourning. However, not everyone in the group agreed that sharing photos was the best way to remember the dead. One person commented in Tigrinya, “Since they are in our hearts, please don’t post the pictures,” and another, “This is not so ethical in our culture, let us keep them in our hearts and connect with them in our souls.” Another criticism emerged when the photographs posted in the Facebook group began to appear in Eritrean diasporic media and elsewhere in social media. Like the spreading of the names, the spreading of the photographs potentially violated the privacy of the victims and their families. Like the list of names, the photographs shared in the Facebook group were intended for a specific community and specific purpose, not for other communities or the wider public. Like Mohamed, Aregai did not know how the digitized photographs began to spread.
Whereas the purpose of creating a list of names was identification, so that family members could know the fate of their loved ones, the photographs were collected for memorial purposes. While the list of names was also used for memorializing, the memorializing has been done by others, such as the Community of Sant’Egidio, Lampedusans, and Dagmawi Yimer, the documentary filmmaker. In the case of the photos on Facebook, however, the collection of images and practices of visual appropriation had a memorializing function for the survivors themselves from the beginning. The images were used not only as part of the commemorative ritual that emerged in the online space where photographs, memories, and consolation were shared, but Aregai also appropriated the photographs into collages, for which he cropped the portraits to round shapes and softened them on the edges. He placed six of these images around a picture of candle flames and posted the collages back to the group. In his practice, he was interested in collecting the photographs “so that the victims would not be forgotten,” as he later put it in our conversation in Sweden.
Pictures originally intended as a memory token of something else—graduation, friendship, kinship—were transformed into an object of grief and mourning. This appropriation of a digitized photo of a printed photograph is similar to the practice of recontextualizing a photograph at home by placing a candle in front of a framed picture. What is different, though, is that these digital objects of memorialization are transnationally spreadable in the contexts where refugees are on the move and families are dispersed on different continents. The practice of sharing and commenting on the photographs among the more than one hundred survivors in the Facebook group produced a mourning community in a situation where the survivors didn’t have a home or a community to mourn with. They were either still being detained in Lampedusa or on the road toward Germany, Sweden, or Norway. The Facebook group provided a space where they could come together and mourn.
Some of the same portraits of the victims appeared in the ceremony held in the cathedral in Lampedusa to mark the first anniversary of the disaster. A large poster featuring a grid of portraits stood on the altar: eighty-four photos of individuals and three of mothers with their children. On the right corner of the poster was the date of the disaster in Italian, 3 ottobre, and per non dimenticare (not to forget) in Italian and Tigrinya. After the ceremony members of the Community of Sant’Egidio handed out postcards that had the same grid of portraits printed on them. The back of the card is filled with 360 names, Beyene-Gebreamlak-Tewelde-Hadeghe-Iyasu-Mihreteab. . . , and a quote in Italian from Pope Francis’s sermon during his visit to Lampedusa in July 2013, three months before the disaster:
Has any one of us wept because of this situation and others like it? Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families? We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion—“suffering with” others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep! (Pope Francis 2013b).
FIGURE 6. Postcard of photos of the victims, distributed in Lampedusa by Comunità Sant’Egidio, October 3, 2014, and the names of victims on the back of a card distributed in 2018. © Karina Horsti, 2022. Photo by Karina Horsti.
Similar to the Community of Sant’Egidio’s practice of reading out the names of dead migrants in their Dying of Hope prayer service, the photographs and names printed on the postcard are a means to resist indifference to the suffering of others. Sant’Egidio remediates the call for weeping for “these persons who were on the boat.” The word person is the key. People are not visible in a number, but when seeing faces and reading or hearing names one can imagine an individual, a person. From the pews of the church in Lampedusa, it could be seen that there were many faces on the poster on the alter. But to see each face, one had to get closer to the poster or pick up the postcard. As in the reading of the list of names, this was a visualization of the many and a commemoration of a collective, the victims of the Lampedusa disaster. But it was simultaneously an opportunity to pause and consider a single individual. The grid of portraits, like the list of names, was a way of knowing who died and representing the absence of life, in contrast to representing the victims by a number.
Tadese, the survivor who collected photographs for the postcard, envisioned the purpose of the card as a method to understand the singularity of each victim. He was twenty-eight years old at the time of the disaster and because he was hospitalized after the disaster Tadese is the only survivor who remained in Italy. He became an active member of Community of Sant’Egidio that helped him to settle in Rome. In his speech at the ecumenical commemoration at the Sanctuary of Madonna di Porto Salvo in Lampedusa on October 3, 2018, Tadese said that he wanted to reconstitute the names and the faces of the “naufragati,” the shipwrecked, so that they would not be forgotten. “Because such tragedy must not happen again,” he said. The way in which he justified his presence at the ecumenical service reveals how he sees the connection between one person (face, name, testimony) and the broader issue. “I feel a responsibility to testify how important it is to save a life, una vita,” he said. Tadese was there alive in front of us who listened to him at the Sanctuary. His presence was a testimony of “una vita,” a life that was saved. However, he also represented those lives that were not saved. His presence animated the eighty-seven adult faces on the card or the total number of the disaster. They too could have been there alive; and if he had not been rescued by the Lampedusan mason Constantino Baratta, he too would be a face on the card.
The postcard would become an important memorial object for the survivors and family members of the victims. As far as I know, privacy of the victims and their families has not been an issue raised among survivors and relatives. One survivor installed it on the memorial sculpture Le radici nel cielo (The Sky’s Roots, discussed in chapter 4) in Lampedusa in 2014 and shared a photograph of it on Facebook. In October 2018, when Sant’Egidio members disseminated the postcards again in the anniversary commemoration in Lampedusa I noticed how survivors held the cards in their hands when they marched in a procession to Porta d’Europa, a sculpture created in memory of migrants who had died in the Mediterranean. In chapter 8, I discuss how the brother of a victim glued the postcard on a grave as part of a memorialization ritual.
The public interest in the faces and names of the October 3 victims—or even in their exact number—is distinctly different from the interest in the victims of other disasters where the dead “mattered,” such as the collapse of the bridge in Genoa in 2018 or the crash of Germanwings flight 9525 in Southern France in 2015. In both cases, the media and the authorities were quick to identify the victims, providing names and photographs to the public (see, e.g., Associated Press 2018). The difference in practices is also related to the mode of death. Border deaths are perceived as unfortunate but nonetheless unavoidable, and they are to some extent an expected feature of the European border, whereas a bridge collapse or plane crash is unexpected and avoidable. Death at Europe’s border is normalized, as it doesn’t concern “me.” Following Judith Butler’s notion of ungrievability, the lives lost at the border are not conceived as livable lives at all, and therefore, ontologically, cannot be lost.
While these analyses of indifference and ungrievability are powerful, describing well the general response to border deaths, this chapter has taken up the challenge of examining representations that are attentive to the individuality and humanity of the victims. Both grievability and respect necessitate attention to the victims as human beings, persons.
Nevertheless, the transformative potential of the focus on individualizing victims, representing them as persons-as-such (Edkins 2011), instead of generalities is not without its pitfalls. As scholars such as Luc Boltanski (1999) have argued, individualizing—or “localizing”—the suffering of others risks depoliticizing it (Boltanski 1999, 6–7). Humanitarianism, for example, often produces ideal victims, individuals or specific categories (like women and children) worthy of our compassion (Ticktin 2011; Fassin 2012; Chouliaraki 2013). Not everyone qualifies as a person-as-such that the spectators in the European public sphere, narrowly defined, can relate to. However, this chapter demonstrates that in the case of deaths at the border, a problem that is highly mediatized but dominantly represented in ways that distance European publics from those who suffer and from the mechanisms that produce the suffering, the focus on particularities has critical potential (see also Kobelinsky 2020; Lewicki 2017).
In this chapter, I have discussed three alternative ways of representing the dead: through photographs, by naming one victim as a symbol of the many, and by listing the names of the victims. These representations reveal three important aspects of the afterlife of a disaster and what makes the memory of the disaster evade oblivion in the public domain. First, an afterlife is not a single mediation or reappearance of a disaster. Rather, it forms over multiple mediations, or in fact, re-mediations, each taking shape and energy from the mediations that came before. The disaster has multiple afterlives. In this respect, the list of names compiled by the survivors was the first mediation, the first form of reappearance. As such, the list was initially made for practical purposes, an act of civic forensics. However, it was more than simply a list of names—it was an object that revealed the individuality and relationality of the people listed. Moreover, the list had afterlives of its own—subsequent re-mediations particularly in the domain of memorialization. It reappeared as a representation of the victims in radio programs, commemorative ceremonies, art, and on the back of the Sant’Egidio postcard. The list of names became a memory object that would be significant in the shaping of afterlives through other re-mediations. The name Yohanna also had multiple reappearances and sequences as it traveled across Eritrean diasporic and global media platforms. Similarly, the collection of photographs in the survivors’ Facebook group had a second, third, and fourth life through re-mediations across different media spaces.
Second, this chapter has demonstrated that afterlives are transnational. In digitized societies, representations increasingly move through mediated networks and cross geographic borders. Interestingly, after relatives and friends of the victims digitized printed studio photographs in order to share them as digitized objects of memorialization on Facebook, the images were converted back to material objects—a postcard and a poster. Digitization afforded the photographs plasticity, so that they could be appropriated into the grid of portraits at the church or the round shapes in Aregai’s collage. It also ensured the spreadability of the photographs across different platforms and forms of materiality. The combination of mobile people and digital networks produced transnational afterlives that followed the disaster and its representations and re-representations.
Third, all these re-mediations required agents—people who were driven by a sense of responsibility to engage with the disaster or with the names and photographs serving as representations of the disaster. The survivors, journalists, family members, artists, and religious communities, among many others, felt responsible as direct witnesses or because they had witnessed the disaster through the media. Engagement with the names and the photographs was a response to fundamentally unequal relationships—a relationship produced by death in the case of the survivors, or by indifference and not-knowing in the cases of Frances Stonor Saunders, the writer for the London Review of Books, and the religious members of the Community of Sant’Egidio.
While names and faces offer a powerful critique of the distanced and sanitized representation of the victims as a number, they can also result in an object that has a more nuanced and imaginative afterlife. The “List of Deaths” created by the activists of United for Intercultural Action is a case in point. It does not claim to offer accurate numbers, although the total figure (34,361 as in the Guardian supplement) appears as a precise fact. Most of the rows have very little information: name unknown, origin unknown. Only the columns reporting the cause of death and source of information are filled in. Nevertheless, this lack of information and focus on counting has prompted several artistic and activist engagements. With its breakdown of the indefinite number, in fact serving more as documentation of not-knowing than of knowing, the list is an object that has prompted meaningful and critical engagement, triggering the curiosity or responsibility to know more about who each individual was.
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