“SURVIVING THE DEATH OF ANOTHER” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
SURVIVING THE DEATH OF ANOTHER
In the preceding chapters, I analyzed how and why the Lampedusa disaster survived oblivion in the domains of memorialization and representation. Individuals and communities in Lampedusa, Sicily, and beyond—in Germany and elsewhere in Europe—have acted out of responsibility and engaged with the disaster’s memory. They have created memorials and rituals, and represented the events in plays, poems, journalism, songs, and visual images. In this way, they have continued to live on after the rupture caused by witnessing the mass death. In chapters 7 and 8, I discussed how shaping memorializations and representations has also been important in the process of survival among those who survived the disaster. The effects of the rupture differ in terms of their severity for different communities, producing afterlives of the Lampedusa disaster. They have continued to shape the individuals and communities that witnessed it, whether as flesh witnesses, eyewitnesses, or mediated witnesses. The disaster’s afterlives serve both therapeutic and instrumental functions, and the process of survival has produced identities, relationships, and politics.
Survival figures into the afterlife of the disaster in one additional important way: as surviving the death of another. This book has defined survival as a continuation of life, as living on or beyond a rupture. Surviving a loved one requires surviving the end of a relationship and continuing life in a new constellation of relationships and identities. As the phenomenologist Claude Romano argues, the death of another “has the sense of an event that happens to the survivors; it is a phenomenon that is shared by those who remain” (2009, 115). According to Romano, the death of a person is a fact that becomes an “event” through the experience of the living. The literature scholar Colin Davis (2007, 116–17) reaches a similar argument by examining Emmanuel Levinas’s lectures on death. For Levinas, relationships with others play a constitutive role in one’s own existence; in death, the self is the survivor of the death of the other. “Death is, after all, a relation with the other,” Davis (2007, 116) writes. In this chapter, I focus on this aspect of survival—living beyond the death of a loved one in the specific context of border deaths.
Thinking of death as something that happens to the living and dead as others who continue to “impinge on the world of the living” as Davis (2007, 116) puts it, means that the duration and the intensity of the experience of death of another varies. Death is not a sudden occurrence, but “a transitory state of a certain duration” (Hertz 2018, 31). As Robert Hertz wrote:
The image of the recently deceased is still part of the system of things of this world, and loses itself from them only gradually by a series of internal partings. We cannot bring ourselves to consider the deceased as dead straight away: he is too much part of our substance, we have put too much of ourselves into him, and participation in the same social life creates ties which are not to be severed in one day. (Hertz 2018, 31)
Romano’s examination of bereavement focuses on intimate experiences and the transformation of the self. However, death is also fundamentally a social phenomenon—it transforms relationships and the social fabric that is constituted in those relationships (Hertz 2018; O’Rourke 2007). Sharing the experience of death with others who remain is a crucial element of surviving the death of another. The transformation of relationships that necessarily results from a person’s death requires social markings of transitions—what the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep (2019) termed “rites of passage.”
On the one hand, death as a social and individual phenomenon is a universal experience. Death of a person who was part of our life is always to some extent ambiguous, a question mark, a surprise that haunts the living (Davis 2007, 117). On the other hand, however, it is fundamentally conditioned by the particular facts of the death. Death at Europe’s border is a specific way of dying, and therefore those who survive the border death of a loved one share a certain sense of death as an event that is not shared by those who survive a loss resulting from another kind of death.
During my research at cemeteries in Sicily, in diasporic online spaces, and among Eritrean European families in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany, I encountered vernacular and creative responses to border deaths that revealed the specificity of these deaths for friends and relatives of the deceased. In this chapter, I focus on the interconnected elements of uncertainty that make border deaths specific. First, I examine two cases in which relatives living in Europe were able to definitively identify their loved one. I contrast these cases to the ambiguous loss of disappearance and discuss border deaths in the context of other situations of disappearance and mass death globally. I then follow Teddy (a pseudonym) as he travels from Hamburg to Sicily to search for his brother’s grave to illustrate how he creates and performs death rituals in the crossroads of various uncertainties. Finally, I share Semhar Ghebreselassie’s experience in Eritrea, where families found a way to mourn without bodies after having received news of the deaths. These experiences show how even in the exceptional case of the Lampedusa disaster, in which many, if not all, of the dead were retrieved, families still had to invent death rituals. They relied on their communities and on vernacular knowledge when the institutions and organizations that were meant to secure the rights of the relatives of the dead failed.
“It Is Not the Same”
I spent October 3, 2016, in London with two sisters, Helen and Genet (pseudonyms), whose brother had died in the Lampedusa disaster. Helen was then in her thirties and had two children. Ten years earlier, she had arrived in Italy from Libya in a smuggler’s boat. She had been on her way to the United States with false papers, but ended up staying in the United Kingdom, where she married a fellow Eritrean refugee whom she had first met in Libya. Her sister Genet was in her twenties and had just recently migrated to the United Kingdom after years in Uganda. She was studying to become a health care professional and living with her sister’s family. While we enjoyed the long Eritrean coffee-making ritual, videos, edited pictures, poems, and messages continued to appear in the two women’s social media accounts. They referenced not only the Lampedusa disaster, but deaths and disappearances during migration journeys in general. October 3 had become an unofficial day of remembrance for the Eritrean diaspora.
Helen told me about the days after the disaster in 2013 when they were unsure if their brother had been on the boat. She described how the survivors had told them he had died, and how one of the siblings had done a DNA test and interview to identify the body in Italy. All of this was difficult for the family, particularly because they had given in to his desire to follow them to Europe and paid the smugglers for his trip. They had tried to persuade him to be patient and wait for refugee resettlement, but he would not stay longer in Ethiopia.
Helen dressed in black for two months after the disaster, and in the first weeks, her Eritrean and Ethiopian friends in the United Kingdom came to console her. They brought food and prayed and cried with her, typical Habesha mourning practices that remained important in the diaspora. A bereaved family is never left alone, Helen told me. When someone dies, friends and community participate in mourning and in organizing the funeral. It is not necessary to have known the person you mourn. Linda Lystig Holt (2001), in a study of Christian Eritreans and Ethiopians in the United States, has shown how the rhythm of mourning and the unrestrained expression of grief are important for the community. The emotions that are shared reflect the stages of the mourning process: mourning starts with crying and screaming together, but can end in happiness, giving a sense of closure (Holt 2001, 150).
After the mourning period, Helen wanted to control where and when she mourned, but found this difficult. Migrant disasters seemed to enter her daily life via television and her smartphone at unexpected moments. Helen changed the television channel if migrant disasters were in the news. She held her phone at arm’s length as she demonstrated to me how for months after the disaster, she was afraid she might see a photograph of her brother or something related to the disaster in her social media feed.
At some point, I told Helen about losing my younger brother, who had died of a brain tumor in 2012, just days after his thirty-fifth birthday. Memories of him had kept returning to me in my everyday life, and I was afraid I would suddenly cry when something reminded me of him. Helen was empathetic but said: “It’s not the same.” I had heard this response before. During my research, I had often felt the need to share my own experience of loss when asking other people to tell me about theirs and had often received a similar comment in reply.
It was obvious that the circumstances leading to the early deaths of Helen’s brother and my brother were not the same. But this was not what Helen really meant. Our conversation had not been about the circumstances of the death or why it had happened, but about mourning, death rituals, and managing the emotion of grief. Her point was about living with the loss, about surviving the death of another, a death that was different from other deaths. This specificity continued to perplex me: why did Helen think surviving her brother’s death was unique, different in some way than surviving other deaths?
The Uncertainty of Border Deaths
The complicated specificity of families’ experiences in the context of border deaths directed me to the issue of survival—not of surviving the disaster itself, but of surviving a loss and the disruption of a relationship. Parents, siblings, children, spouses, and friends survive the death of another person. For those who knew the dead, the afterlife of the disaster is about living on without that relationship and losing the part of oneself that existed within that relationship. As Romano says, “if bereavement is . . . an unparalleled event that strikes me in the heart like no other and upends me most intimately, this is because this event is a matter of my selfhood” (2009, 120). Death at the border is not only a physical event, but a social one that affects those connected to the dead person, as any death does. However, it is also a specific death, unlike any other.
Border deaths are a specific kind of death because of two interwoven elements of uncertainty that expand the temporality of the event. First, the context of migration creates various ambiguities. Entering Europe without documents has been criminalized, which can complicate sharing the experience of surviving the death of a relative in the community in which one lives. In the context of Eritreans, the additional criminalization of exiting Eritrea shapes how border deaths are perceived in Eritrea and the diaspora. Sacrificial citizenship (Bernal 2014, 7, 27–29), according to which Eritreans are expected to sacrifice their lives for the nation, complicates how the deaths of those who made an illegal exit are perceived. Furthermore, family members in Europe have often paid for migrants’ journeys and set an example of migration. Those remaining in Eritrea might have hoped the migration of their family member would bring them remittances. The role of peers and family members in Eritreans’ migration decisions has been demonstrated in the literature (Ayalew Mengiste 2018; Belloni 2019).
Second, uncertainties related to death rituals and accessing the dead body also make border deaths a specific kind of death. Often, dead bodies are not retrieved from the sea. If a body is retrieved, identification procedures are rarely successful. The Deaths at the Borders database (Last 2015) shows that almost two-thirds of the people found dead at the southern EU border from 1990 to 2013 have not been identified by the local authorities charged with investigating their deaths. The lack of identification suggests that for European authorities, unknown bodies categorized as “migrant bodies” remain simply victims, without a persona. As I discussed in chapters 1 and 2, the humanitarian framework prevailed in the representation of the disaster. In the words of the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, the disaster was “a massacre of innocents” (Breda 2013). Seeing the migrant bodies as victims alone fits the humanitarian framework, which contents itself with anonymous burials. In another sense, however, even migrant dead bodies are categorized bureaucratically as “missing persons,” meaning that their identities are a puzzle that needs attention.
The Lampedusa disaster became a pilot case in which the Italian state attempted to use the identification procedures that apply in other mass disasters where citizens die or disappear (about these procedures in Italy before 2013 and after, see Grotti and Brightman 2021). DNA samples were taken, physical attributes were recorded, and clothes and other material objects were collected as evidence of identity. These processes and “forensic care work” (M’charek and Casartelli 2019) have not been very successful, however. Only thirty-one of the 366 bodies retrieved after the Lampedusa disaster have been scientifically identified by 2018 (Olivieri et al. 2018, 125). Despite the use of Interpol’s Disaster Victim Identification (Interpol 2021) protocol and attempts to “reinvent forensics anew” (Cattaneo quoted in M’charek and Casartelli 2019, 739), obstacles to identification remain, including the collection of antemortem data that only the living relatives of victims can provide (Piscitelli and Cattaneo 2016; Piscitelli et al. 2016; Romano 2016, 11; Olivieri et al. 2018). Though international organizations, activists, and governments have launched additional projects and committees since 2013, the low success rate of identification remains an issue (e.g., ICMP 2021; Nuovi Desaparecidos 2021).
When a body is not found, or is found but not identified and named, a person disappears (Kobelinsky 2017; Schindel 2020). That this is the most common outcome in the case of border deaths reflects how those who disappear were “already missing, displaced from their established location and without documentation or recognition by the authorities” (Edkins 2016, 369). They are not missing from the polis where they were found, however, and so, in many cases, authorities pay less attention to their identification and systematic burial than they would in the case of their “own” missing persons (Grant 2016, 33–35; Kovras and Robins 2017, 167).
After the disaster in Lampedusa, the survivors compiled a list of the dead for the purpose of informing their families (see chapter 3), sparing them the burden of not knowing if their relative was alive or dead. They also visually identified bodies. In 2020 and 2021, Adhanom began to systematically visit cemeteries in Sicily with other survivors to locate graves so that relatives would be able to find them based on the number assigned to a body. These acts were born of survivors’ sense of responsibility toward the victims’ families and their civic duty. Eritrean transnational families in general have firsthand experience of, or know of someone who suffers from, the disappearance of a loved one. This knowledge informed the survivors; disappearance was the condition they feared most (Kasim 2017).
Some of the survivors and relatives who were able to come to Lampedusa were able to identify the deceased from photographs of the dead bodies: 184 people were identified through such visual methods (Piscitelli and Cattaneo 2016, 44). In these cases, the number assigned to the body is known, and the grave can be located by asking other survivors and family members who have visited the cemeteries. As of 2018, only thirty-one families had received a death certificate based on DNA identification (Olivieri et al. 2018, 125). While many of the dead were related to survivors or had relatives in Europe, they were not necessarily full siblings or biological children or parents. At the time of the disaster, DNA technology was not sensitive enough to identify cousins or half-siblings (Parsons 2019). The numbers—the 366 names of the dead, 184 visual identifications, and 31 scientific identifications—reveal that various degrees of certainty and uncertainty remain, even in this atypical border disaster in which so many bodies were retrieved.
Repatriation of the Dead
The Eritrean Italian priest and human rights activist Father Mussie Zerai (2019) explained to me that for both Orthodox Christian and Muslim Eritreans, the dead body and its dignified treatment are central in death and funeral rituals. Many in the Eritrean diaspora prefer to send remains back to Eritrea for burial, and this was what Mussie and the survivors advocated after the disaster. Nevertheless, bringing the body home, as Eritreans say, is complex in the case of border deaths because the person has usually fled Eritrea.
The wish to repatriate the dead is not unique to Eritrean migrants. Gerhild Perl (2016) has analyzed postmortem repatriations in the context of undocumented crossings between Morocco and Spain, showing how Moroccan families are prepared to endure bureaucratic difficulties and economic costs in order to bring their dead relatives home. Repatriation pacifies the bereaved and reaffirms the deceased person’s belonging to the family and community (Perl 2016, 202). Similarly, Jason De León (2015, 238–64) has documented the significance of the repatriation of remains in South America. While doing ethnographic research in the Sonora Desert at the US-Mexico border, he found the body of a dead woman. He later traveled to Ecuador, where the woman was from and her body had been buried. Although the husband and children of the woman had already confirmed her identity through DNA, the arrival and burial of her human remains made her death more real (De León 2015, 253).
To my knowledge, none of the thirty-one victims of the Lampedusa disaster who have been scientifically identified have been sent back to Eritrea for burial. The Isaias Afwerki regime has been reluctant to receive the bodies of that symbolic disaster. On October 9, 2013, the Eritrean embassy in Rome lowered the flag to half-mast and released an unsigned statement to regime-friendly web-sites claiming that it was collaborating with the Italian government to repatriate the bodies of the disaster victims to Eritrea. This did not happen, however. Two human rights activists I interviewed, Meron Estefanos (2016) in Stockholm and Elsa Chyrum (2016) in London, said the embassy only claimed to be concerned with returning the dead to Eritrea to end a campaign that opposition activists had launched demanding the repatriation of the bodies. The return of so many dead to Eritrea would have had revolutionary potential, Meron said.
In 2017, I met a man in Lampedusa who had come from Germany where he had lived for several years. He had been among the first relatives who identified a victim of the disaster through DNA. This man (who wishes to remain anonymous) told me he had traveled to Sicily a few times, first to give his DNA sample and then to install a headstone on his younger brother’s grave in a small inland village. Each time he visited Sicily in the first years after the disaster, the man tried to organize the repatriation of his brother’s body to Eritrea, without success. The Italian authorities in Agrigento told him to come back in a few months. He came back, but again, nothing happened. Finally, he gave up.
Ambiguous Loss
I sometimes heard from relatives of victims of the Lampedusa disaster that they considered their family lucky because their loved one’s death was certain. Among Eritrean communities, it is common for families to have to deal with disappearance. Father Mussie Zerai (2019) gave me an example of how uncertain deaths continue to affect the diasporic community in Europe: he has remarried widows without official documentation that their previous marriage had ended due to the death of a spouse. In the absence of scientific proof and official documentation, the Eritrean diasporic community has created vernacular mechanisms to obtain a degree of certainty where there are otherwise only probabilities. Eyewitness testimony of death on the journey to Europe is usually the best available evidence for allowing a new marriage to take place.
Uncertainty about death can have severe consequences for the family and friends of the disappeared (Boss 1999, 61; Robins 2010; Crocker, Reineke, and Ramos Tovar 2021). The uncertainty can haunt relatives for years and prevent them from living on, in legal, social, and psychological terms. It creates embodied symptoms that testify to painful social circumstances that are often unevenly distributed depending on class, gender, and nationality as Crocker, Reineke, and Ramos Tovar (2021) show in their study of relatives of those who disappeared in the US-Mexico border. In the context of Tunisian migrants, Simon Robins (2022, 959) argues that this uncertainty is particularly difficult for women whose husbands have disappeared. That their husbands are neither dead nor alive affects the women’s own identities: they are neither wives nor widows. Women existing between these categories challenge social norms.
The psychologist Pauline Boss has coined the term ambiguous loss to theorize the condition in which the families of the disappeared live (Boss 1999; 2004). Ambiguous loss is a condition of uncertainty in which a person is simultaneously “there” and “not there.” Psychologically, it is the most stressful kind of loss (Boss 1999, 6; Boss 2006, xvii). When a death is certain, death rituals can be performed, and the bereaved can resituate themselves in the world and in relationship to others. This allows the surviving family members to refigure identities, status, and relationships. These transitions and markings are not possible with ambiguous loss. Death is an event that at some stage has a conclusion: the dead transition to “not here.” Ambiguous loss is not an event—it persists, and therefore freezes the grieving process (Boss 2006, xvii).
In such circumstances, there is a tendency to continue one’s relationship with the disappeared longer than in confirmed losses. When a person disappears, one’s relationship with them can be maintained as if they were alive but absent. In a study among Tunisian relatives of missing migrants, a significant number of family members believed their missing relative was alive, despite a lack of supporting evidence (Ben Attia et al. 2016; see also Robins 2022). For example, mothers tended to rely on affective and sensory explanations to justify their belief that their sons were alive (Ben Attia et al. 2016).
Ather Zia (2019) has described how the mothers and wives of disappeared Kashmiri men cultivate a continuous relationship with the disappeared. Mourning, for them, is about living on with the disappearance and with the disappeared living on in them. Zia (2019) also shows how the women have transformed their grief into political agency. Protests in city spaces displaying the photographs of the disappeared and the creation of personal archives documenting disappearances are works of private mourning that turn into public performance and political resistance against India’s military control and arbitrary violence.
Tunisian mothers took similar action in 2011, as Federica Sossi (2013) has described. After their sons disappeared during the sea crossing to Italy, the women demanded answers from European governments about their sons’ whereabouts. Their demand was visual: the women were photographed in Tunisia holding photos of their sons. While the women themselves were prevented from crossing the border to search for their sons, the visuality of the women holding the photographs succeeded in traveling across borders to Europe.
In 2021, in Lampedusa, I met a group of eight Tunisian women who were mothers and sisters of other men who had disappeared. They had gained visas to visit Lampedusa and Sicily, where they met with lawyers and gave DNA samples for forensic identification. In Lampedusa, the women posed with photographs of the missing men for journalists who had come to cover the October 3, 2013, memorialization. “Fedi, 17.2.2021, dove sei?” (Fedi, 17.2.2021, where are you?) was written in one photo. For these relatives of men who had disappeared, as for those in Kashmir, resistance through visibility and publicity produced a subjectivity that allows for survival in the condition of ambiguous loss.
In 2019, I again talked to Mussie Zerai about the return of the bodies of the Lampedusa victims to Eritrea. By then, he had given up hope that that would happen. But it was not too late to identify the dead, he emphasized. The identification of the bodies remains an objective in his advocacy—to find “justice for the dead and for the relatives,” as he puts it (Zerai 2019). The term justice in relation to the identification of remains is crucial. Mussie does not refer to identification as a humanitarian act, but as an act of justice. The identification of the dead found at the border is central to overcoming the state of disappearance. It is central to the rights of the families of the victims to know the fate of their loved ones. Iosif Kovras and Simon Robins (2017, 166–67) argue that as long as the deaths of migrants are framed as accidents, their burial is seen as an act of benevolence. Their argument resonates with my analysis of Italian and European political leaders’ commemorative performances in chapters 2 and 5. The humanitarian framework favored by European leaders centers dignified performances by benevolent actors. In contrast, identifying the dead would be an act of solidarity and justice treating the dead and their relatives as persons who have “the right to have rights,” to use Hannah Arendt’s famous term.
Mussie Zerai’s persistence for almost ten years now on the issue of identification as a matter of justice can be compared to what scholars in various contexts have conceptualized as forensic citizenship (Reineke 2022) or civic forensics (Schwartz-Marin and Cruz-Santiago 2016). Where authorities have failed to identify the dead or investigate disappearances, civil society—often led by relatives of the victims—may take responsibility and action, pressure the authorities, and even create new forensic practices and forms of knowledge. For example, organized civic engagement with forensic science, challenging the state, has been examined in different Latin American contexts, from Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo in Argentina to, more recently, the drug war and organized crime in Mexico and Colombia (see Schwartz-Marin and Cruz-Santiago 2016) and migrants who have disappeared at the US-Mexico border (Reineke 2022). The term forensic refers not only to scientific knowledge and techniques but also to their application in law, court proceedings, and the mediated public sphere (Reineke 2022, 28). Thus, forensics has become central for human rights struggles (Gabriel Gatti 2013). The handwritten list of names created by survivors at Lampedusa’s reception center immediately after the disaster and the documentation of graves in Sicily by survivors starting in 2020 are also acts of civic forensics.
The discourse and practice of both civic and expert forensics is related to a broader movement of scholars, human rights activists, and lawyers who have argued for extending existing international agreements on missing persons and enforced disappearances to the context of border deaths (Schindel 2020; Distretti 2020; Nuovi Desaparecidos 2021). In armed conflicts, international human rights law recognizes the “the right of families to know the fate of their relatives” (United Nations 1977). The UN Convention on Enforced Disappearances obliges states to actively investigate the fate of the disappeared even if the state was not itself involved in the disappearance (Schindel 2020, 401). Approaching border deaths through these global frameworks would be a step away from mere benevolence and toward justice.
The use of the term disappeared in the context of border deaths is another important move in this direction. It resonates with the term enforced disappearances, which acknowledges the state as the main entity responsible for the disappearance. It also resonates with the desaparecidos of Latin America, the so-called original disappeared, particularly those disappeared during Argentina’s civil-military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 (Gatti, Irazuzta, and Martínez 2020). While European states do not directly or deliberately enforce disappearances, they do so indirectly. The International Convention on Enforced Disappearances names states as responsible, whether directly or indirectly, by action or by omission, of the crime of enforcing a disappearance (Schindel 2020, 391). In comparison, the category “missing persons” does not necessarily imply a similar state responsibility. “Missing persons” is often used in the context of those missing in action in armed conflicts, for example, in the context of transnational justice in the Balkans, as in the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2019, the International Commission on Missing Persons started to extend their work on identifying human remains to the domain of border deaths in Europe. Despite differences in the implication of responsibility, both terms—disappeared and missing—are transnationalized: they create an association with conflicts, protests, and the struggle for justice elsewhere. These associations and parallels across time and space produce the critical potential to move beyond indifference or the differential treatment of dead migrants and their survivors.
In the context of the Lampedusa disaster, the term disappearance is warranted by two critical observations. First, Italy is responsible for the low number of identified dead, justifying the use of the term enforced disappearance. Only thirty-one of the 366 victims of the Lampedusa disaster have been scientifically identified by 2018, which leaves 335 victims de facto disappeared. Second, disappearance puts emphasis on the experience of the relatives. Disappearance is not the same as death. There are 335 families who continue to live in various degrees of uncertainty. The following two stories illustrate the creativity and resilience of victims’ relatives as they cope with uncertainty.
The Significance of the Number 120
In 2018, I accompanied Teddy, a twenty-four-year-old Eritrean refugee, on his search for his brother’s grave in Sicily. Teddy had crossed the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, and three years later, he had established his life in Germany to the point that he was able to travel to Sicily. He had a job in a factory north of Hamburg, making cables for the shipping industry, and had learned some German. I met him in Lampedusa at the fifth anniversary commemoration of the disaster. He was traveling with a small cross-body bag that had “The City of Hamburg” printed on it. Hamburg had become his new home, not by choice, but by chance. The crew of a Swedish ship had rescued him in the Mediterranean Sea. For him, this was a good sign: Sweden was where his aunt lived, and his intended destination. But the police caught him in Germany, so under EU rules, he had to apply for asylum there. Now he proudly identified with Germany—or actually, with Hamburg.
When I had talked with Teddy in Lampedusa, I had been impressed with his determination to find his older brother’s grave. Once he had received a residence permit in Germany and saved enough money for the trip, he bought a ticket and returned to Sicily, the part of Europe he had been so eager to leave just three years earlier.
In Lampedusa, Teddy had invited me to accompany him to Sicily, where his brother was buried. A day after I arrived in Sicily, I received a WhatsApp message from Teddy: “He is in Cattolico Eraclea. I’ll take a bus there at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. It’s an hour from here.” In the morning, Teddy sent a photo of the road, taken from the bus: “Guten Morgen! I’m on my way.” He had gone to the police headquarters, the questura, in Agrigento, hoping to find out the location of his brother’s grave. All he knew was what the survivors of the disaster had told him: the number assigned to the body, 120. Ilaria Tucci, my research assistant, had already tried to get the locations of the 366 buried bodies from the questura, but had had no success. So I had doubted the police would disclose the details of a grave of a victim who had not been positively identified. But I was wrong. Teddy was able to convince the people at the questura that he was the brother of victim number 120.
The cemetery where Teddy’s brother is buried is located outside the town of Cattolico Eraclea and is similar to other Sicilian cemeteries I have visited. Surrounded by high walls, it is accessible through a gate that is open only during certain hours. The town itself is small, but the cemetery feels as urban as the ones in larger towns. The dead are, for the most part, not buried in the ground, but interred above ground in different kinds of constructions. There are large and elaborate family chapels and tombs holding the dead of multiple generations. Most graves, even the plainer ones, have a small photo of the person buried there. Along the rows, there are also less impressive constructions: multistory concrete vaults, like high-rises for the dead.
When we reached the cemetery, Teddy was already up on a ladder at one of those multistory vaults, decorating a grave. He had bought a bunch of artificial flowers and four funeral candles and placed them on the sill. The number 120 was written with a marker on the white painted surface of the rectangular tomb. To the right of the number, Teddy had glued a photograph of his brother, Temesgen. It had been taken in a studio somewhere along the way, perhaps in Sudan, where Temesgen had stayed after leaving Eritrea. Temesgen had posted it on his Facebook profile, and Teddy had had the picture printed in a photo shop for this express purpose.
Teddy came down from the ladder to greet us. He obviously had the situation under control and had managed to negotiate with the cemetery workers despite the lack of a common language. In my eyes, Teddy seemed different now from when I had come to know him in Lampedusa, where he had attended the commemorations with his uncle, a survivor of the disaster who was now based in Sweden. Teddy’s boyish appearance had transformed to that of an adult. The caretaker told us that Teddy should have presented a document from the questura to prove the identity of the body and his relationship with the dead. However, the caretaker had felt sorry for the young man who had come all the way from Germany and let him glue the photo on the grave. But for a more permanent installation, an engraved marble stone with a photograph, Teddy would have to officially identify the body.
There are twelve victims of the October 3 disaster buried in different four-story concrete constructions in Cattolico Eraclea. Unlike in the cemeteries in Castellamare del Golfo and Agrigento (discussed in chapter 4), the disaster’s victims here are not buried together in one place. Instead, they have been placed among the local dead, in random vacant graves. There is no sign indicating that anonymous migrant dead are buried here, as there is at the cemetery in Castellamare del Golfo. Only one of the victims’ graves is identified with a marble headstone. It bears a name, Weldu (and the second name), an oval-shaped black-and-white photo of Weldu wearing a shirt with a Superman logo, his date of birth, and his date of death, October 3, 2013. Two bunches of artificial flowers and a metal crucifix on the sill are evidence that someone traveled here to mourn his death not long ago. Teddy had noticed the Eritrean name and date of death before we arrived and placed a candle next to the crucifix.
FIGURE 17. Teddy photographing his brother Temesgen’s grave in Sicily. © Karina Horsti, 2018. Photo by Karina Horsti.
We became aware of the ten other graves of Lampedusa victims only when the caretaker pointed them out to us: “naufraghi,” the shipwrecked, he said, as we walked by the unmarked squares among the local Italians’ graves, which had names and photos on them. The unidentified graves had at first seemed like vacant slots, but when we heard that they were the graves of the naufraghi, they began to represent not death but disappearance—the disappearance of a person, or of a body someone would want to bury and memorialize. Most likely, there was a family somewhere whose son or daughter had died, but they did not know for certain, or they did not know that the body was here, in a remote cemetery in Sicily.
According to the cemetery register, body number 120 was unidentified. In the book, under the heading “Nato,” birth, the row for body 120 said “naufragio,” shipwreck; under “Nome,” name, read “120 di Lampedusa.” These entries were written in small handwriting, however, so as to leave space for the name and date of birth to potentially be added in the future. It seemed that from the cemetery officials’ point of view, nonidentification was a temporary condition, as if they were waiting for people like Teddy to one day arrive at their small office by the gate.
Survivors had visually identified Teddy’s brother after the disaster. They were asked to look at photographs of the dead taken before the body bags were closed. Viewing the pictures was voluntary, and those who did had the opportunity to speak with a psychologist, as Adhanom Rezene, one of the survivors, stressed when he told me about the procedure. Survivors and relatives who had seen the photographs told me it was emotionally stressful to look at them and difficult to actually identify a person. Many of the faces were disfigured and swollen. Adal Neguse, for example, said to me that after one hundred photographs, he had to stop looking. His brother was one of the last to be recovered from the hold of the boat, and Adal was unable to go through the photos as far as that number. The images blurred to each other, and even if his brother’s face had appeared on the screen, he would not have been able to be sure that it was him. Adal’s brother Abraham was eventually identified by a matching DNA sample.
Visual methods of identification, through photographs, clothing, and artifacts found on the body, tend to be unreliable. They can be important for relatives, however, as Jason De León (2015, 202–6) argues: visual confirmation might feel more real than a scientific report on matching DNA (see also Jugo 2017). Visual methods can be seen as vernacular forensic care work, like the list of the dead compiled by the survivors. They are an important manifestation of care performed in conditions where the state fails to carry out its duties. Nevertheless, as a method of identification, visual means depend on subjective observation and cognition, which in disaster situations are particularly unstable (Jugo 2017). According to the international standards for disaster victim identification established by Interpol, visual methods are to be used only in conjunction with the scientific methods of DNA and dental medical records analysis (Interpol 2021; Nuzzolese and Di Vella 2007).
Nevertheless, Teddy trusted the word of the survivors, and the number 120 became meaningful for him. It was the clue he had followed from Hamburg all the way to Cattolico Eraclea. When he turned the unidentified grave into a memorial, he did not cover the number that was written on the concrete, but instead arranged the photograph and the flowers so that it remained visible. The number is also an element in the design for a marble headstone that he drafted at the cemetery caretaker’s office before he left. He drew the design on a piece of paper, in case he one day could go through the DNA identification process1 and get an official permit to install a marble headstone similar to what he had seen at Weldu’s grave. Teddy thought that grave was dignified and appropriate.
A Material Sense of Ritual
Materiality was crucial for Teddy’s acts of remembrance. The photograph he attached to the grave was printed expressly for this purpose, and he bought silk flowers and candles to decorate the grave. Anthropologists maintain that a central aspect of rituals is “the sense of ritual” (Bell 2009, 74; Willerslev, Christensen, and Meinert 2013, 6–8). Rituals are sensed as something that happens outside ordinary space and time. The flowers and candles created a funereal atmosphere, the feeling of a sacred ritual. The previously blank concrete spot was transformed into a personalized and dignified memorial.
The material objects put on the grave were not “alive” or “vital” in themselves, to use the terms of new materialists (Bennett 2010). Their aliveness and transformation from mundane things to sacred objects of memorialization necessitated connections between the objects, the place, and the people who saw and made meaning of them. Cemeteries are a place where death and the status, identity, and relationships of those who died are made visible through material objects (Hallam and Hockey 2018, 56). The photograph attached to the grave proved that body number 120 was an individual, a person-as-such, like the local dead. The candles and the flowers—similar to those on the local graves—showed how number 120 was a relational human being, missed and memorialized by someone who knew him. The familiar grave objects and identification via photograph integrated the body of a stranger into the community of the dead.
However, the people for whom the objects on the grave would be most meaningful were not there, except for Teddy. He took photographs with his mobile phone of the memorial arrangement, both on the ladder and from below. He also asked me to take pictures of him on the ladder next to the grave. The photographs would later be shared with relatives. He then asked me to go up and attach the Sant’Egidio postcard depicting eighty-four victims of the October 3 disaster (discussed in chapter 3). Teddy pointed out a face in the middle of the grid of portraits on the card and told me: “That’s my brother.” He took additional pictures of this second arrangement that included the postcard.
The grid of 84 portraits added a broader, public dimension to the memorial. The first arrangement of objects had been a more private form of memorialization. Beyond the number on the grave, the material memorialization as such didn’t reveal to anyone else the story behind the death. The arrangement with the postcard, however, connected the individual to a specific disaster and also to the broader issue of migrant deaths at the border. It revealed to anyone visiting the cemetery or seeing Teddy’s documentation of the grave that the man in the photograph on the grave had died alongside others. His buried body represented those of all 84 faces—or all 366 names written on the other side of the postcard. The function of the grave paralleled that of the naming of one victim, Yohanna (discussed in chapter 3). It would be impossible to know 84 or 366 graves individually, but it was possible to focus on one grave. Thus, the singular grave made the postcard more comprehensible (while the postcard itself had also worked to make the figure 366 more comprehensible). Through the postcard, this particular grave and its signifiers (the number 120 and the person’s photograph) gained an additional meaning: this was a victim of a well-known and globally mediatized disaster that symbolized border deaths and the violence of the border.
Teddy had perhaps become particularly sensitized to the public significance of the disaster by attending the public commemorations in Lampedusa just a couple of days earlier. Perhaps my presence at the cemetery and my questions about the unidentified graves of the victims of the October 3 disaster, as well as our conversations with the cemetery caretakers, had also added a public dimension to his ritual. Though the ritual was initially intimate, it was transformed to address the particular disaster and broader issue of migrant deaths.
Teddy created a sense of ritual not only by situating objects within the physical space of the cemetery, but also by dividing the time spent there into less or more sacred ritual time. When we had spent more than an hour at the grave together, I told Teddy I would go back to the caretakers’ office at the gate to see if they would show me the books where the burials are registered. Teddy stayed at the grave to pray alone, returning to an intimate ritual space.
Media Technology in Transnational Mourning
The material artifacts Teddy left at the grave would indicate to the residents of Cattolico Eraclea that a previously unidentified grave had been turned into a memorial. But this was not Teddy’s main purpose. Documenting the memorialized grave by photographing it with his mobile phone was at least as important as the memorializing itself. Teddy’s mother, siblings, and friends were implicitly present at the ritual he performed. They entered the circle of memorialization through mediation, though at a temporal and spatial distance. Teddy’s ritual at the cemetery became social through the documentation and its mediation.
However, Teddy did not livestream the ritual; there was no mediated copresence of his family, though media technology existed that might have afforded such a presence. Media scholars have demonstrated that a connective presence or copresence, an experience of emotional intimate proximity with persons physically distant, is important in maintaining family and care across distances (see, e.g., Wilding 2006; Witteborn 2014; Madianou 2016; Twigt 2018; Alinejad 2019). In this case, however, at least two conditions prevented a real-time intimate presence. First, mobile phone coverage and Internet connections in Eritrea are unreliable. Second, Teddy had not told his mother about the trip to Lampedusa and his search for the grave. He was not sure what the trip would be like and whether it would be successful. He told her about his journey only after he had completed the trip and was back in Germany. He had similarly protected her from worry when he crossed the sea border between Libya and Italy in 2015, the same crossing where his older brother had died two years earlier. “I told her we would leave a few days later than we actually did. Then I called her from Italy to let her know that I was safe. That was the day she thought I would be crossing the sea,” Teddy told me. He had a reason for sharing these two stories about protecting his mother from worry with me. It was what I liked to hear, of course, as was obvious from my spontaneous affirmative responses. He knew that I have three daughters, the oldest of whom is around the same age as he. I expressed that I was impressed and touched by his sense of family responsibility. My response probably affirmed Teddy’s new position as the eldest son, capable of taking responsibility for others and their well-being.
For Teddy, his mother is a central figure in the community of mourners. It was she to whom he sent the phone he had traveled with to the disaster site in Lampedusa and the cemetery in Sicily, the phone that contained the documentation of his momentous journey. Teddy sent the phone with someone who was able to travel from Germany back to Eritrea. When he told me about this, I was surprised. Why send photographs on a phone rather than in a Dropbox folder, via WhatsApp messages, or even by printing them and making an album?
Perhaps the phone itself had acquired meaning during Teddy’s travels to the memory sites. I find it particularly significant that in his inability to send the physical body to his mother in Eritrea, Teddy chose to send the physical phone with images of the memorialized grave and the disaster site in Lampedusa. Or perhaps his mother had other uses for the phone. It was a new smartphone, after all. She could perhaps use the phone’s editing tools to modify the photographs of the grave, as Teddy had. He had added stars along the edges of some of the photos. Teddy’s response to my surprise was that he had simply thought the phone functions well as a photo album. It is good for viewing both photos and videos: one can enlarge the images and examine details, for example. And yes, his mother now uses the phone in her daily life. It was a good gift, he said. The phone is an album and much more. The expensive phone also demonstrates that Teddy is successful in his new life and that his mother does not need to worry about him.
The contents of the phone are significant, too. The album it contains was curated from photos of Teddy’s journey to the two significant memory sites related to the death of his brother, Lampedusa and Cattolico Eraclea. The images are evidence that Teddy has become a responsible eldest son and successfully performed death rituals on a foreign continent. Sending these digitized photographs and videos on a mobile phone to Eritrea underlines the significance and value of these particular visuals.
Teddy also sent the visuals to friends and other family members via Facebook Messenger and other social media platforms. In Eritrean funeral customs, including in the diaspora, family members are expected to travel long distances to attend a funeral, and it is considered shameful if a relative does not make that effort. The size of a funeral gathering demonstrates the importance of the deceased and their remaining family (Holt 2001). Teddy’s experience demonstrates how media technology enables some sense of sociality for a transnational family divided by borders, in a situation where a physical funeral and mourning together are impossible.
In my research, I heard about and saw evidence of many situations similar to Teddy’s, in which people could not attend a funeral or perform other death rituals because of border restrictions and long distances. Relatives and friends of the victims of the Lampedusa disaster shared photographs and videos of graves and commemorative rituals performed at cemeteries in Facebook and Viber groups. Others participated by sharing memories and condolences in the comments. I sometimes noted that people who I knew had visited a grave in Sicily had not posted about it on their public Facebook or Instagram accounts. They might have shared the ritual in a more intimate network, but they had not made it public. Weddings, births, and first birthdays are often mediated publicly, but the social mediation of deaths—both border deaths and otherwise—is selective.
This selectiveness in creating a mediated community around intimate events concerns not only refugees or transnational families, but families more broadly. For example, Anna Haverinen (2015), in her research on memorializing death on Facebook in the United States and Finland, shows how people can have opposing views about digitized mourning. She argues that while social media can create a feeling of togetherness that helps the bereaved in their mourning process, it can also create grievances and feel inauthentic. Raelene Wilding (2006), in a study of transnational families and care, shows how already in the early years of the 2000s, email and inexpensive telephone calls produced an imagined proximity that felt like a miracle for her research participants. However, she found that the sense of togetherness was easier to achieve when life was going well: these were “sunny-day” technologies (Wilding 2006, 134). At times of illness or death, a phone call did not provide sufficient care.
Teddy’s use of media technology was carefully controlled. He curated and edited his documentation of the grave and of the rituals he performed in Lampedusa and Cattolico Eraclea, and he shared his documentation selectively. At the cemetery, he chose not to use technology that would have afforded copresence. While a group video call might have been possible with family members in the diaspora, the most central person in the community of mourners, his mother, was in Eritrea, where Internet connections are unreliable. More important than the simultaneity of the ritual was its careful representation, the curated documentation of the ritual he performed, which added a layer of respect and dignity to the mediated memorialization.
Nevertheless, the pictures could be shared digitally among family and friends, and a community of mourners could be formed across distances. People could access the digital memory objects at any time and in any place, allowing them to manage their own rhythm of memorialization. While he was memorializing the grave, Teddy was mindful of those who could not be present in person. His family and friends were implicitly present through his imagination, and that presence made mourning possible. Mourning, after all, is a social practice, and particularly so among Eritreans, as Helen had emphasized.
Materiality was central in Teddy’s memorialization, but so too was the mediation of materiality. Teddy made death visible not only through material objects, into which he invested emotional and social meaning, but also through digitized images of the arranged objects. The pictures Teddy took are visual assemblages that can be edited and shared easily across distances through digital means: they are what I have called digital objects of memorialization (Horsti 2019b). The circuit of transformation between digital and material elements is crucial for digital objects of memorialization. The digital images can be modified with editing tools, allowing one to add a personal touch before sharing the memorial object with others. Digital images can also be printed and attached to physical memorials (which can again be photographed). Creative appropriation and the circulation of both digital and physical materialities bring certainty to the otherwise uncertain experience of surviving the death of another. Both death and mourning become visible in and through mediation, allowing families to avoid the complicated emotions that are typical in situations where a death is uncertain.
Freudian theory emphasizes that mourning is a necessary phase in finding closure after the death of a loved one. Mourning is a phase that is supposed to come to an end, and if not, Sigmund Freud (1964) argued, one is left in a psychologically damaging state of melancholia. However, in the case of border deaths, where varying stages of uncertainty prevail, such clear-cut closure is unlikely. Jacques Derrida (1986) offers another model of mourning, departing from the Freudian search for emotional closure. Derrida sees mourning as an ongoing engagement with the dead. Those who are no longer “with us” can be “in us,” and mourning is about living on by keeping our relationship with the dead alive (Derrida 1986; see also Kirkby 2006).
Finding the grave, praying there, memorializing it, and documenting these acts were of utmost importance to Teddy. Through the photographs, his family was able to reach a level of certainty regarding the death of his brother that they were then able to share socially. In 2022, Teddy was able to complete the official scientific identification by giving a DNA sample and an interview for the University of Milan’s Laboratorio di Antropologia e Odontologia Forense (LABANOF) scientists who were present in Lampedusa during the October 3 commemorations. Until then, the family relied on vernacular knowledge of the number 120 and the spontaneous ritual that Teddy performed, documented, and shared through photographs. The mediated ritual, and finally, the DNA identification completed a process that had begun with the sad news the survivors had delivered. The family knew that Temesgen had died, but that knowledge had not been complete. He had not made the transition from “here” to “there.” Being able to experience this distinction is what makes rituals important for human social life; it is through them that life can evolve after moments of transformation and disruption. Without such transitions, living with loss becomes difficult.
Six Beds in Rural Eritrea
In Eritrea, the mourning and memorializing that are such social processes were difficult after the disaster. The regime did not acknowledge that the victims were mainly from Eritrea, and the authorities restricted rituals, particularly in Asmara, the capital.
When the disaster happened, Semhar Ghebreselassie was twenty-five years old and living in Asmara. She was in hiding after having deserted her conscripted job as a high school teacher the year before. While clandestinely working at an Internet café, she became involved in the underground resistance and the diasporic political opposition. She has since become a human rights activist in Sweden, where she is involved in Eritrean opposition politics and is a reporter for the diasporic media outlet Global Yiakl.
I spoke with Semhar in 2020, in a Zoom meeting she attended from Stockholm. Ten days earlier, on October 3, she had convened a memorial livestream discussion on the Facebook page of Global Yiakl about the disaster. She told me her memories from Asmara around the time of the Lampedusa disaster: “In Asmara, we have walls where we remember the dead [by posting death notices]. At the time, there were pictures of those who had died in Lampedusa. I remember the streets were full of people looking at the photographs of all those young people who had died,” she recalled.
Semhar asked me if I had seen the clip from the state-owned Eri-TV news broadcast where the anchor reports on the Lampedusa shipwreck, saying “almost 400 illegal Africans died.” I had. Helen had shown it to me in London, and since then, I had seen it being shared among survivors and other Eritrean Europeans every year on the October 3 anniversary. It was framed as proof that the Eritrean government had avoided recognizing the dead as their own people. Remembering the injury this nonrecognition had caused the survivors and relatives of the victims was part of memorializing the disaster for some diasporic Eritreans. The news item had been broadcast in the international news segment, not with the domestic news, which Semhar pointed out as further proof of the regime’s denial. The death notices posted by relatives on the walls of Asmara nevertheless informed the public in Eritrea’s capital city about who had died in the disaster. The families had received the news through the survivors and the list of the dead they had compiled.
The families in Eritrea had wanted to organize funeral rituals, even without the bodies. Secondary burials had become common in cases when someone died abroad and their body was not repatriated or did not arrive in time for a scheduled ritual. The government prohibited these substitute rituals at Asmara’s cemeteries, however, and families had to mourn in private. Nevertheless, a public memorial for the victims of the disaster was planned to take place at Asmara’s Martyrs’ Cemetery in November 2013. Rumors circulated across the Eritrean diaspora that the government had deployed soldiers to guard the cemetery and prevent any memorial services (Asmarino 2013). On the opposition website Asmarino, an anonymous eyewitness reported from the capital that “Asmara is caught between the people trying to assert their wish and the government trying to maintain control” (Asmarino 2013). In rural communities, however, public mourning was less strictly controlled. Semhar’s cousin who died in the disaster was from a rural village, and there, people were able to organize a secondary funeral.
Semhar’s experience of the memorial was twofold: on the one hand, it was a private family matter in which the lack of bodies was circumvented by the six beds; on the other hand, her cousin’s death was a public matter. The regime’s denial of responsibility, its unwillingness to let families repatriate the dead, and its attempts to prevent secondary death rituals increased the painfulness of the event. Both levels of surviving the death of another, the private and the public, strengthened her resistance to the regime.
The six beds carried out for the funeral represented the bodies that could and should have been there. However, the absence of the bodies in itself was not the main cause of the mourners’ additional pain. The diasporic condition had become the norm in Eritrea, and communities had developed a dignified tradition of dealing with death rituals for absent bodies. The pain, for Semhar, was that the six beds outside represented the regime’s continued oppression, even after death.
Listening to the experiences of Helen, Teddy, and Semhar revealed to me how border deaths are different than other deaths. Most importantly, surviving a migrant death involves living with various uncertainties. Not knowing the whereabouts of relatives is common among the Eritrean refugee community, and the memorialization of known deaths takes place in this context. The survivors of the Lampedusa disaster engaged in civic forensics when they compiled the list of the dead and visually identified bodies. Later they started to document the graves in Sicily. The opportunity to mourn and memorialize—in one way or another—is uniquely precious in a context in which many families never hear any news of their missing loved ones. The fear of total disappearance is a socially shared concern, and even though visual identification and the listing of names cannot give full certainty, as a scientific identification would, they are meaningful. Importantly, they are a sign of care for the rights of the dead and their relatives. Although the Lampedusa disaster attracted special attention from the community of forensic experts, most of the Lampedusa victims remain not fully included in the common world. Instead, these victims continue to be relegated to the spheres of uncertainty and ambiguity: the categories of “the missing” and “the disappeared.” The civic forensic acts of citizenship that Mussie Zerai and survivors continue to practice bring the injustice of disappearance into the public agenda. Their acts allow the burial of border dead to be seen through the lens of forensics and the rights of the dead and their relatives, rather than as acts of humanitarian benevolence.
In this chapter, I have detailed some of the ways in which families have shaped their survival, whether through uncertainties or with the certainty of having lost a loved one in the specific circumstances of border deaths. When the cultural practices of burial and visiting graves are interrupted by the failed responsibilities of the authorities, alternative rituals may repair some of the damage. These new rituals and practices are nevertheless rooted in existing and traditional practices. For example, participating in a funeral is central, and these social responsibilities are fulfilled to the extent possible, even if there is no body or access to a grave. Material artifacts at cemeteries, photographs of these artifacts turned into digital objects of memorialization, and the six empty beds in an Eritrean village make death real. This visualization of death allows relatives to share in the process of mourning and to continue to live with their loss together. The creativity of memorializations among the relatives of the Lampedusa victims demonstrates how death is fundamentally a social phenomenon and how death rituals are important for the social network the deceased person is a part of.
The intimate mourning and memorializing by individuals and families that I have examined in this chapter also have a significant public dimension. In chapters 2 and 3, I argue for the critical potential of representing the dead as persons-as-such (Edkins 2011), which makes apparent their relationality with the living. This focus on the individuality of the dead contributes to broader demands for investigation of the disaster, for the rights of the dead and their relatives, and for political change that would make such disasters less likely to happen again.
Helen, Teddy, and Semhar cultivate their own survival of the loss of another. They produce their subjectivity in relation to their loss and to other family members, the community, the state, and the world. As survivors, they are constituted by the dead and by uncertainties related to the dead bodies and death rituals, and to the particular conditions of migration. Helen survives by reenacting Eritrean mourning rituals in diaspora, supported by her friends and community in London. Teddy’s memorializing is affected by his mother in Eritrea as he takes on the role of the responsible eldest son. Semhar’s oppositional and human rights activism is shaped by the experience of having mourned her cousin without a body. By sharing the stories of these survivors, I do not want to romanticize the creativity of transnational refugees. Rather, I hope to acknowledge the capacity of individuals and communities for critical action—critical in the sense that they survive their specific, complicated loss with the resources available. In doing so, they refuse to become paralyzed as they experience the violence of the border in their intimate and social lives.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.