“Introduction” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
Introduction
A large bundle of numbered keys jingle in a man’s hand as he walks briskly from a car parked on the street toward a three-story apartment building. The man has soft, curly hair and a full, black beard. He is in his late twenties or early thirties. It’s hard to say—his appearance is both relaxed and serious, young and old at the same time. The verdant neighborhood has the typical quiet atmosphere of a Scandinavian suburb built in the 1950s. The man wears sandals, the trees are green, and flowers have been planted by the building’s entrance. The man looks like as if he might have roots in Ethiopia or Eritrea, but he doesn’t come across as someone who has recently arrived in Europe. He’s dressed unremarkably in jeans and a light green polo shirt, and he enters the building confidently, as if it’s his territory.
“Hej, Karl! Do you remember me?” the man says in Swedish. “I’m from Aleris Home Care.”
“Yes, yes,” an elderly voice says.
“I was thinking of helping you with lunch.”
“No, no, no.”
“I can help you to warm up your meal.”
“No, no, no, nothing right now. I’m watching the horse races.”
The viewer is not brought inside, instead hearing the conversation with only a view of the building from the outside. Karl, the elderly client, remains unseen, but the man with the keys is already familiar to the viewer. The scene is from a short film about Adhanom Rezene, and before the encounter with the old man, we have already seen Adhanom giving a hug to a woman and picking up a toddler in the hallway of a small apartment before leaving for work. A white crucifix hangs from his neck, and on the wall in the background is a poster of a saint on a white horse. Adhanom seems sympathetic and kind—the kind of person anyone would be happy to let in to help with lunch. The woman comes into the shot only briefly, but it’s obvious she is the little girl’s mother, and Adhanom is the father. The woman is about the same age as Adhanom, and she too seems to have roots in the Horn of Africa. The soft early morning sun makes the couple and their home glow: they are a beautiful, happy family.
Adhanom holds the keys not only to Karl’s, but also to many other elderly people’s homes in Stockholm. The film’s story, however, is not about these visits—it is about Adhanom being forced to leave his home and the family that raised him. In Eritrea, “life had no future,” Adhanom says in the film. His voice is heard over scenes of traveling through Stockholm, taking the pendeltåg—the local train—and driving the care service’s car. He narrates his escape from Eritrea’s compulsory, indefinite military service and from the Isaias Afwerki regime that imprisoned him multiple times. Adhanom describes how he survived a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea while crossing from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa on a smuggler’s boat in 2013. At least 366 of his fellow passengers drowned. A cross and the words “God Help Me” are tattooed on his arm. When the camera focuses on the tattoos, their roughness is evident: they were obviously done in conditions where help was truly needed.
The film Remembering Lampedusa/Love (directed by Anna Blom and Adal Neguse) is being shown on a large television screen inside the crew accommodations of the HSwMS Småland, a destroyer in service of the Swedish military from the 1950s until 1979. Adhanom’s story and the visuals of his life and work in Sweden have a particular resonance here inside the warship. Before entering the cool, dark space, smelling of iron and old motor oil, visitors will have walked along the decks of the 396-foot ship, seen defunct missiles, and scaled steep, narrow stairs up and down. One encounters Adhanom’s story rather unexpectedly in the course of following the arrows and signs indicating the route through the large ship. Adhanom’s memories of crossing borders to seek refuge from a present-day conflict stand both in contrast to and as a continuation of Sweden’s maritime and war history. Småland guarded borders that no longer exist in the Baltic Sea, an association that illuminates the ephemerality of present-day borders. Today, Sweden, alongside the other European Union member states, militarily guards Europe’s external border in the Mediterranean Sea, preventing people from certain countries, people like Adhanom, from crossing it safely. One day, that border too will cease to exist.
The Cold War–era ship is docked at the Maritiman maritime museum in Gothenburg, which advertises Småland as the largest Scandinavian warship preserved in a museum. Below deck, visitors can choose to see the film and hear Adhanom tell his story in Tigrinya, with subtitles in Swedish, English, German, or Italian. Adhanom’s film, screened inside the Swedish destroyer, I argue, illustrates well how memories of the disaster travel beyond Lampedusa and live on, becoming a part of the history of the places they reach. Memories of border deaths are inherently part of the history of Europe, including in places beyond the Mediterranean region. In the film, Adhanom recounts his journey from Eritrea to its disastrous encounter with Europe’s border in the Mediterranean Sea. Adhanom risked his life for the chance to have a future, he explains in the film. He narrates the entire journey: his escape from Eritrea to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, his trip through Sudan and Libya, and finally, the dangerous sea-border crossing on a smuggler’s boat to Italy—or rather, almost to Italy. The boat capsized only a kilometer from the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Into a story otherwise told in Tigrinya, Adhanom inserts a Swedish word, ensam (alone, lonely). He has never experienced such loneliness before coming to Sweden, he says, and it seems he has no word for it in Tigrinya. Adhanom talks about the irony of caring for the elderly in Sweden while his own parents get old in Eritrea. “Money is the only thing you can help them with. But there’s more to being human than just money,” he says and pauses.
The film is part of the exhibition Remembering Lampedusa, which recounts the migrant disaster that Adhanom survived in the early morning of October 3, 2013. An overcrowded fishing boat carrying mainly Eritrean refugees from the shore of Libya was approaching the Italian island of Lampedusa when the Tunisian captain, Khaled Bensalem, turned off the engine. In the dark of the night, they waited to be noticed by other boats and to be rescued. As Adhanom recalls in the film: “A ship came and went around us. It had a big searchlight. We said to one another, ‘Stay calm, they are here to rescue us.’ But once they saw us, they left. Or did they see us? I couldn’t tell because of the bright light. We waited, and another ship came and went.” Water started to seep into the boat, and to attract the attention of the islanders and nearby boats, Bensalem set a blanket on fire. The people on the boat panicked, and the commotion on board caused the boat to list. It sank “like the Titanic, the bow went last,” as another survivor, Solomon Gebrehiwet, recalled elsewhere. 1
Adhanom is one of 155 people who clung to empty water bottles to stay afloat or managed to swim until they were chanced upon by a group of Lampedusans on an overnight fishing trip three hours later. The bodies of 366 people were recovered over the next few days, including those of all sixteen young children and all but six of the women on board.
The Lampedusa disaster put the issue of migrant border deaths on the public agenda in Europe. Human rights activists had been trying to raise awareness of the watery graveyard the Mediterranean had become since Europe began changing its immigration, visa, and border policies after the Schengen Convention of 1990 (UNITED 2022). The disaster was just one of thousands of migrant disasters, similar in many ways to those that happened before and after it. However, it was also a disaster like no other—its corporeality and proximity to the iconic island of Lampedusa resulted in an unprecedented mediatization and secured its prominence in the European imagination. Since the disaster, the Central Mediterranean route through the Strait of Sicily has continued to be the deadliest migration corridor in the world, with almost 19,000 reported deaths in 2014– 2021 (IOM 2022).
This book examines the afterlives of the October 3, 2013, disaster, known in Italy as la strage di Lampedusa, the massacre of Lampedusa. It examines how the disaster continues to reappear in the public sphere through two domains, representation and memorialization. It then analyzes the politics, subjectivities, and relationships that emerge through the disaster’s afterlives. How does the disaster shape not only the lives of individuals, families, and communities, but also the European Union, which created the conditions in which the natural forces of the sea kill certain people?
This book continues the line of research that has been opened by critical migration scholars who argue that borders and practices of bordering are productive: they generate subjects and subjectivities (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Anderson, Sharma and Wright 2011; McNevin 2011). I examine how four types of witnesses engage with the disaster through representations and memorializations: Most people witnessed the disaster from a distance, through the media. Then, there were those who witnessed the corporeal aftermath of the mass death with their own eyes in Lampedusa or in Sicily, where the dead were buried. Some of these eyewitnesses and mediated witnesses refused to remain bystanders and felt a responsibility to act upon what they saw. They refused to live on as if a disaster like the strage di Lampedusa was an unintended yet unavoidable consequence of the bordering of Europe. I also follow survivors who lived through the disaster, who have an embodied experience of it. Finally, I consider the family members of victims, who bear witness to the human consequences of the disaster in their intimate lives and relationships.
Survivors and relatives of victims are specific kinds of witnesses not only because of their intimate relationship with the disaster and the dead but also because of the specific transnational conditions in which the afterlives of the disaster unfold. Families are often dispersed and divided by borders. Survivors and relatives must navigate not only the institutional and social environments of Europe, where they reside or where the dead bodies are managed, but also their diasporic communities and relationships with the state they left behind.
In the analysis of afterlives, I am specifically interested in how victims, survivors, and relatives of victims are represented in mediated images and narratives and what kinds of roles they are given by others in memorials and commemorative rituals. I am also interested in how survivors and relatives interact with representations and memorializations—how they insert their identities, politics, and agency into the scenes of the event’s myriad afterlives. This methodological approach is influenced by critical refugee studies, which emphasize the agency, sociality, and subjectivity of refugees (see, e.g., Nguyen 2012; Espiritu 2014; Hong 2016), and by the autonomy of migration approach, which shifts the focus in migration studies from apparatuses of control to the autonomous ways in which migrants operate in spite of restrictions (see, e.g., Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013; de Genova 2017). Focusing on agency is not an attempt to romanticize survival or trauma, but rather a way to learn how people live on and find their own ways to act politically and critically from the position of survivorship.
The book is based on multisited research, with the commemorations held on the anniversary of the disaster in Lampedusa functioning as an important site. I attended commemorations in Lampedusa in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2021. There I came to know thirteen survivors of the disaster, as well as the families of three victims. Nine of the survivors became involved in my ethnographic research, and I regularly visited six of them in Sweden, where they had settled. The survivors most closely involved in this research are all men, which is in part due to the fact that only six women survived. Two women gave interviews for the research, but they are not among those who have been keen on staying in touch about the project over the years. Two of the survivors knew English well, and I was able to communicate with them directly from early on. The other survivors and I began conversing in Swedish about two years after we first met in 2014. Before that, I had mainly relied on the interpreting skills of Adal Neguse, the brother of one of the victims of the 2013 disaster.
Not having a common language with survivors in the beginning was the most difficult aspect of the study. I also had to rely on translations and interpretations of Italian. Because I am from Finland, I was always an outsider, lacking to some degree in my capacity to understand the languages and cultures at each of the sites—Sweden, Germany, Italy, and online. While this limited my research, I believe it also helped me to create a sympathetic relationship with people I observed. Sometimes, our shared Nordic context created a bond when survivors or relatives of victims and I encountered situations in Italy that were unfamiliar to us in Sweden and Finland.
In this multifaceted research, conversations with Eritrean Europeans have been central in my analysis of mainstream media, social media, diasporic media, art, film, and literature. I have also analyzed different types of official documents, for example, Italian parliamentary debates in 2016 about the establishment of October 3 as a National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration. I searched European Union databases for instances where the October 3, 2013, disaster was mentioned. During my visits to Lampedusa, I met with rescuers and other Lampedusans, including the activists of the Askavusa collective and the island’s political and religious leaders. I conducted interviews with Eritrean human rights activists in Europe and visited cemeteries in Sicily where the dead are buried, talking with locals there about their practices of attending migrant graves. Teddy, a young man in his twenties from Hamburg, invited me to accompany him to a cemetery in Sicily, where he was searching for his older brother’s grave. Some of the people I interviewed wish to be identified in this book by their own names. Others have decided to use pseudonyms.
Adal Neguse and I first met in Lampedusa in October 2014, but it was on our ways home from Italy that we had our first long conversation, while waiting for our connecting flights in Rome. Adal told me he had watched the morning news on October 3, 2013, while getting ready to go to work at his job at a health care services provider in Stockholm. By then, he had been living in Sweden for ten years, after having arrived as a resettlement refugee from a camp in Sudan. The news worried him, particularly because he had woken up around 2 a.m. and been unable to go back to sleep. Adal feared the worst. He had sent money to his younger brother Abraham, who was waiting in Libya to be smuggled to Europe. Adal called the smuggler, who assured him that Abraham had not been on the boat that sank. Adal did not trust the smuggler and decided to fly to Lampedusa immediately to find out if his brother had been on the boat. He showed Abraham’s photo to survivors at the reception center on the island, and one woman nodded her head. Abraham was dead.
My conversation with Adal at the airport, which we carried out in Swedish, made me reflect for the first time on how disasters at Europe’s borders were not so distant from my own lifeworld in Finland. Adal and I stayed in touch, and he became an important coresearcher and a dear friend. I was struck by how little, despite our globalized world, was communicated in the media and academic literature about relatives’ and survivors’ experiences of migrant disasters. They were hardly visible—at least as complete human beings—in depictions of disasters and their aftermath. Survivors of disasters disappeared from the public domain after the initial news reports, where they were usually depicted as objects of care, exhausted, and wrapped in emergency foil blankets. What happened to these people afterward? Who were they? Who did they become? These questions were seldom considered. And yet, Adal’s story demonstrated that survivors and relatives were the people most intimately affected by such disasters.
Adal’s motivation to engage with me had a lot to do with his frustration with his own experiences of being interviewed by the Swedish media. Journalists were rarely interested in disappearances at the border, which nonetheless characterize the everyday life of Eritreans in Sweden. People in Adal’s community regularly search for missing relatives or collect donations to pay ransoms to kidnappers. They struggle with being apart from their loved ones who remain in Eritrea or live as refugees in Ethiopia or Sudan. After gaining residence permits or citizenship, the first thing many Eritreans do is travel to Ethiopia to meet their relatives. Life is simultaneously in Europe and elsewhere.
Adal was also keen on finding out what had happened during the fatal journey and why the rescue had failed; collaborating in the research that led to this book made some of that investigation possible. Adal and I initiated the documentary film project Remembering Lampedusa with Anna Blom, one result of which was the film about Adhanom described above. Adal’s interviews with four survivors for the film project, which he codirected with the filmmaker Anna Blom, comprise the main research material of chapter 8 in this book. Adal characterizes the film project as a work of mourning for his brother. The questions that led to teasing out the meaning of survival for the disaster’s survivors originate from Adal’s curiosity and need to understand the whole picture of the disaster. Throughout my research, Adal has been an invaluable expert as well as a coresearcher and a thinking partner who has patiently kept asking, “How’s the book going?”2
One important decision made in writing this book that emerged from my collaboration with Adal regards the use of names. When referring to Eritreans and Ethiopians, I adhere to the naming traditions of these cultures. There is no tradition of surnames in these countries; the father’s first name is taken as a second name. First names have a particular importance, as the Italian Ethiopian film-maker Dagmawi Yimer (2015) has pointed out: “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” (Yimer 2015, 15). While I often refer to Europeans by surname only, I refer to Eritreans and Ethiopians by first name. The only exception to this is the references, where for consistency and in keeping with academic practice, I use second names.
Lampedusa as a Symbol of the Border
The continuation of life after a rupture—an event that interrupts and calls into question what one perceives to be normal—is always an individual experience and can vary in its level of severity. Surviving a mass disaster in which one’s life was in danger and others lost their lives is not the same as witnessing the disaster from a distance. However, these different types of witnessing need to be discussed in conjunction with one another. Border deaths continue to affect communities beyond the border, particularly the communities where the survivors of a disaster settle—the communities with which they survive. The survivors of the Lampedusa disaster are now residents—and, in some cases, citizens—of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. In many cases, they were in fact en route to meet siblings, cousins, or partners who were citizens of these countries when the disaster occurred. The disaster’s memory thus travels across Europe with the survivors, and with the relatives and friends of the victims.
While locations as peripheric as Lampedusa are arguably convenient for dealing with ethically compromising matters (Mountz 2020), memories and representations travel far beyond them. Lampedusa can also be seen as a traumascape, trauma site, or wounded place, in the terms of Maria Tumarkin (2005), Patrizia Violi (2012), and Karen Till (2008), who by using the vocabulary of trauma studies have highlighted that traces of horrific events continue to live on in the places where the events occurred. However, though such spaces might be used for the externalization of responsibility and of the consequences of border deaths, this does not mean that the event is completely forgotten. On the contrary, Lampedusa can function as a repository where the difficult memory can be discussed from a safe distance. The critical political question, however, remains: How does such a process transform the border and the practice of bordering that has created the wound?
Lampedusa, like other iconic islands situated in global border zones, such as Lesbos in the Aegean Sea and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, has come to symbolize bordering, securitization, and humanitarianism in the global imaginary of migration (Mountz 2020). By the time of the disaster, the island had already become a stage for Europe’s securitized border plays and spectacles (Friese 2010; Cuttitta 2014; Brambilla 2015; Ritaine 2016; Gatta 2018). In 2011, Italy’s nationalist-populist prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, used Lampedusa as the staging site to respond to the so-called humanitarian emergency that arose when thousands of young people left North Africa during the Arab Spring uprisings (BBC 2011). However, the island has also gained symbolic value as a site for healing, hope, resistance, and hospitality (Kushner 2016; Horsti and Neumann 2019; Mazzara 2019; Squire 2020; Scarabicchi 2020). Pope Francis made his first papal visit outside of Rome to the island in July 2013 to say Mass and throw a wreath of flowers into the sea in memory of those who had died during migration journeys (Vatican 2013). The power of Lampedusa’s role in the social imaginary is reflected in its ability to become “an empty signifier” (Friese 2019, 26) that can travel to other locations in Europe, giving meaning to a variety of phenomena. For example, it has brought visibility to less visible bordering in city spaces, as the migrant protests Lampedusa in Berlin and Lampedusa in Hamburg demonstrate (see, e.g., Bak Jørgensen 2019). Lampedusa has even become a reference to the present-day continuation of colonialism (see, e.g., Saucier and Woods 2014).
The bordering of Europe produced the strage di Lampedusa, but the disaster would also transform the border, leading to an intensification of the nexus between the humanitarian and securitizing border regimes in Italy (Albahari 2015, 180; Cuttitta 2015; 2018b, 638; Crawley et al. 2016). By October 3, 2013, this nexus of increasing security technology and the depiction of migration as a security threat, combined with the language and practice of humanitarianism, had gained currency in Europe. For example, in their public communications, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex shifted its framing of migrants as criminals and a threat toward framing them as victims of smugglers (Horsti 2012). This reframing allowed Frontex to cast its border control actions as “saving lives.” Such discursive simulation of the language of humanitarianism aims to neutralize Frontex’s actions, masking political and national interests (Horsti 2012; Pallister-Wilkins 2015; Perkowski 2018).
After Berlusconi, a border policy tending toward humanitarianism prevailed in Italy to varying degrees until 2018, when a right-wing government came to power and criminalized the private, donation-based search and rescue operations that had been collaborating with the Italian military and border guards (Caccia, Heller, and Mezzadra 2020; Cusumano and Villa 2020). A major example of the intensified nexus of securitized-humanitarian border policy took place within a month of the Lampedusa disaster: on October 18, 2013, Italy launched a year-long naval and air operation called Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) “to tackle the humanitarian emergency in the Strait of Sicily” (Marina Militare 2020; see also, e.g., Albahari 2015; Heller and Pezzani 2018, 34). Over the course of the operation, the Italian Navy and other Italian border authorities, in collaboration with Frontex, rescued 150,000 people. For the Italian Navy, which oversaw the operation, Mare Nostrum had the twofold purpose of “safeguarding human life at sea and bringing to justice human traffickers and migrant smugglers” (Marina Militare 2020), illustrating the rationale of the securitized humanitarianism at the border. This humanitarian bordering was an active constructing of the securitized border using the discourse and practices of humanitarianism.
The international mediatization of the disaster also prompted major civil society initiatives, including civil search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea. The founders of the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), a civil search and rescue operation in Malta established in 2014, have repeatedly identified the Lampedusa disaster as their moment of mobilization (see, e.g., Catrambone 2020; MOAS 2014, 10). The first German donation-based search and rescue initiative, Sea-Watch, launched its first mission from Lampedusa in 2015. According to Sea-Watch’s press relations representative, Lampedusa added a symbolic dimension to the organization’s image and mission (Neugebauer 2016). The island and the disaster had gained symbolic value that could be transferred to the launch of civil rescue operations in a competitive and commodified field of solidarity.
Furthermore, the unprecedented corporeality of the disaster revealed to both forensic experts and the public the significant lack of forensic investigation into the identities of dead migrants across the Mediterranean countries of Europe. Italian forensic experts and the Italian government’s Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons launched a pilot project that applied the forensic methods used in criminal investigations and other types of disasters to the victims of the Lampedusa disaster (Olivieri et al. 2018; M’charek and Casartelli 2019, 739; Bertoglio et al. 2020).
Border Deaths and New Subjectivities
Border deaths have gained scholarly attention in recent years. Such scholarship has focused on three themes: the production and contestation of the border, humanitarianism and solidarity, and the experiences of those who risk crossing borders and of their relatives, who struggle with the disappearance or deaths of their loved ones.
Critical border scholars emphasize that the EU’s restrictive migration and visa policies are structures that produce deaths at the border—the sea is made into a weapon that kills (e.g., Albahari 2015; Cuttitta 2015; Squire 2020; Tazzioli 2015; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). The border regime not only produces the killing, but also criminalizes those who make the crossing, producing a category of people who can be exploited and even disposed of (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Border deaths do not happen, but are made in a complex, diffused, and contested context (Weber and Pickering 2011).
Significant scholarly attention has also been paid to European civil society actors who have acted in response to the deaths. Their actions range from countersurveillance operations and civil rescue at sea borders to counting and listing deaths (Stierl 2016; Squire 2020; Neumann 2020). The role of artistic and activist performances that aim to raise public awareness about the deaths and contest the border regime have also been examined (Horsti 2016a; 2019a; 2021; Stierl 2016; Rygiel 2016; Lewicki 2017; Mazzara 2019; Squire 2020). Burials and commemoration of dead strangers by local and activist communities in border zones has been theorized as a form of transgressive politics (e.g., Kobelinsky, Furri, and Noûs 2021; Squire 2020; Rygiel 2014; 2016). These responses to border deaths vary in their critical stance toward the governments that control the border. Some NGOs that carry out SAR operations or arts-based engagements adopt a neutral stance regarding the politics that produce the bordering, in fact depoliticizing bordering by facilitating the border work of agents such as Frontex. At the other end of the spectrum are civil rescue operations and artistic actions that take a more politicized and confrontational approach to border authorities (Cuttitta 2018b; Neumann 2020; Esperti 2020). Critical scholars have also examined how solidarity actions, just like border control actions, are commodified in order to compete for attention and resources with other causes (Andersson 2014; Nikunen 2019).
Ethnographic research has highlighted why people choose to take the risk of crossing borders (Perl 2016; Proglio 2020). For example, many Eritreans are escaping the repressive regime in their home country that aims to control the most intimate spheres of life—family, work, personal finances, and religion—causing an experience of “social death” (Ayalew Mengiste 2018; 2019; Belloni 2019). Many also did not see a future as UNHCR-recognized refugees in Sudan and Ethiopia. However, these decisions to take risks are not just individual decisions but are influenced by peers and relatives (Belloni 2019, 32–33).
The identification of dead migrant bodies—or more accurately, the low success rate of identification efforts—and the uncertainty that the families of those who have disappeared cope with have also recently gained scholarly attention (M’charek and Casartelli 2019; Kobelinsky 2020). A project focusing on the documentation of border deaths found that almost two-thirds of the people found dead at southern EU borders from 1990 to 2013 have not been identified by the local authorities charged with investigating their deaths (Last 2015). In a social sense, their death is not complete, and their families live on in an ambiguous state of uncertainty—in legal, social, and psychological terms (Boss 1999; Robins 2010). Between death and life, there is disappearance (Schindel 2020; Distretti 2020), and through raising the framework of disappearance, scholars have added a transnationalized dimension to deaths at the European border. The term disappearance creates an association with conflicts, protests, and the struggle for justice elsewhere, namely, with desaparecidos in Latin America. It directs attention to the families of the disappeared and, in doing so, helps to reveal how states often treat migrant deaths and disappearances differently than those involving Europeans. This perspective of disappearance illuminates how border deaths, more than a humanitarian issue, are a human rights concern.
This book follows on from the existing rich scholarship on border deaths by paying close attention to what happens to those who witness the disaster either in person or through mediation and to those who survive the death of another. While research on border deaths has proliferated in recent years and the generative force of bordering is highlighted in critical research, there is still little knowledge about the subjectivities that border deaths produce. My point of departure is one disaster and its aftermath, which I examine through two domains of the disaster’s public afterlife: mediated representations and memorializations. My method of focusing on one disaster is explorative. The disaster has produced a kaleidoscope of afterlives, which take on different forms depending on the position of the witness: a variety of pasts and futures intersect in the present moment when people make meanings of the disaster. There is no single afterlife but a variety of afterlives. The variegated nature of the disaster requires an exploratory approach that allows me to identify the multiple practices, relationships, and subjectivities in the afterlives of the disaster. The issues raised in this in-depth exploration nonetheless resonate with the broader phenomenon of border deaths.
Afterlife and Survival
The domains of representation and memorialization constitute what I call an event’s afterlife. In this book, the term refers not to life after death, but to the reappearance, continuation, or reanimation of an event, place, person, idea, or object. The use of the term afterlife to mean reappearance or reanimation can be traced to the 1910s and the art historian Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben, which is translated as “afterlife” or “survival” (Didi-Huberman 2002). Warburg demonstrated how art and culture comprise an appropriation, circulation, and interpretation of earlier figures or themes. For example, he showed how antiquity reappears and lives on in later styles of art. Walter Benjamin (2009) built on Warburg’s work in developing a related term, Fortleben, that has also been translated as “afterlife” in English. He argued that literary works have a life of their own and live on after publication as they transform and appear in different contexts, such as in translation. Benjamin’s use of Fortleben refers to a complete artwork, a literary text. In contrast, a disaster is never complete and does not live on or transform in the same way a complete work might. In the case of the Lampedusa disaster, there is not even a shared understanding of how such a deadly disaster could occur so close to a strategic, militarized island.
In his book Forms of Talk, Erving Goffman presented the idea of a “referential afterlife” (1981, 46). His conceptualization of afterlife emphasizes shared understanding and cultural resonance as important qualifiers for being able to give rise to an afterlife. Further, he adds the aspect of limited temporality, the period in which an event can make sense to those who share the same communicative space. For example, when writing about self-correction, Goffman says:
Once a gaffe of some kind has been made, it can have a referential afterlife of considerable duration; an hour or a day later, when topic and context give some assurance that those present will be able to understand what incident is being referred to, the speaker in passing can gratuitously inject an ironic allusion, showing that chagrin has been sustained, which demonstration reaches back a goodly distance for its referent. (Goffman 1981, 46)
This short quote references both the contextual resonance and the temporality of an afterlife: the referential power of an event has limited duration and can therefore fade away. Nevertheless, the memory of an event may be actively sustained. Diana Taylor (2003) differentiates between two kinds of technologies to sustain cultural memory: the repertoire and the archive (Taylor 2003). Archival memory exists as apparently enduring material, such as texts, photographs, documents, and objects. Repertoire, on the other hand, is embodied memory and knowledge that is enacted through forms such as orality and dance. While archival memory might seem more enduring, it can be destroyed, manipulated, or controlled in more straightforward ways than embodied memory. Rituals such as commemorative ceremonies are part of a repertoire that transmits memory and shapes the afterlife of the event being commemorated.
In response to Goffman’s idea of a referential afterlife, Gary Alan Fine and Terence Mcdonnell (2007) argue that an event may leave traces that can be rediscovered, though the period of shared recollection has passed. They analyze such traces in the domain of law, which Taylor would categorize as archival memory. However, repertoires can also transmit unacknowledged or hidden traces. The origins of a ritual may be investigated after the original referential connection has faded. In both cases, what matters is the motivation to find and interpret those referential connections. In their analysis, Fine and Mcdonnell (2007) argue that for a memory of an event to be rediscovered, the event must be meaningful for the memory entrepreneurs who engage with its traces. The event needs to resonate culturally and be relevant to a group’s collective identity in the present.
My use of the term afterlife takes three important premises from this literature. First, the life in the term afterlife implies that events, objects, places, memories, people, and stories live on: they do not remain the same and are not merely replicated, but continue on as life does, undergoing transformation and change. This is central to surviving the disaster or the death of a loved one, and to the disaster’s memory in the public domain. The disaster’s meaning continues to transform, depending on who engages with its representation and memorialization, and on where and when they do so. There is a certain, finite period when a disaster can function as a referent, Goffman would argue. Nevertheless, the technologies of collective memory—Taylor’s archive and repertoire—can extend referential afterlives or can help people to reconnect after a period of forgetting.
Second, events revive or survive oblivion because engaging with them is meaningful for the people who make sense of them in a new context, temporal or otherwise. This is central to memories’ recovery after their referential afterlife (Fine and Mcdonnell 2007). An agent is involved in this process, such as Benjamin’s translator, whose transformation of a literary work indicates the work’s Fortleben stage, or Warburg’s artist, who is “an organ of social memory” (Warburg 1999, 715). In this transformation, some meaning may be lost while new meaning is added. In an event’s afterlife, select parts or qualities of the event live on, while others may be ignored or forgotten.
The third important insight is that the notion of afterlife references the actuality of a distinct past in the present. In this sense, the concept of afterlife contains an immediate paradox because death at Europe’s borders is an ongoing occur-rence. While this one, singular disaster—the disaster of October 3, 2013—can be conceived of as an event that has afterlives, the phenomenon of border deaths has continued.
The problem of understanding afterlife as something that exists once the precipitating event or condition has definitively concluded is discussed by Susana Draper (2012) in her analysis of the transformation of Latin American cities in the transition from dictatorship to neoliberal freedom. Draper traces how dictatorship continues to speak in places and spaces under neoliberalism; the presence of dictatorship is not completely gone in a “post-dictatorship” society. Similarly, Saidiya Hartman (2007, 6) conceptualizes the continuation of limited life chances in Black communities in the United States as the “afterlife of slavery.” My position, which sees afterlife as the continuation of an event, is similar to Draper’s and Hartman’s uses of the term. Like the memory of dictatorship in Latin America, the Lampedusa disaster can draw forth other pasts, allowing them to emerge in the public domain. I will discuss how Italy’s colonial rule in Eritrea, the history of Italian emigration, and earlier deadly borders of Europe, such as the Berlin Wall, reappear as specters in the representations and memorializations of the Lampedusa disaster.
In addition, other scholars have pointed out that people’s actions can be shaped by the idea that the present may come to haunt the future, as Adam’s (2010) notion of the present as the future’s past suggests. That the present is haunted by past incidents reminds us of the possibility that the disaster could become a “ghostly matter” (Gordon 2008): the social forces that produce the murderous border today may continue to haunt societies in the future. Those who engage with the disaster’s memory may do so for the sake of how their actions will be judged in the future. They imagine the afterlife of la strage di Lampedusa unfolding in front of them and act accordingly.
Analyzing the afterlives of the disaster brings attention to several aspects of survival: how survivors continued their lives, how other people touched by the disaster survived the rupture in their own lives, and how relatives and friends of the victims survived their loved ones. This book develops the concept of survival to rethink border deaths beyond the structures and processes that produce the murderous border and constitute the focus of critical migration studies. It demonstrates how the process of survival transforms people and societies—survival is productive. There is no return to what was before. The participation in a common world of those who survived the disaster at Europe’s border, as well as public awareness of the deaths of its victims, can lead to new subjectivities. The people most intimately affected by the disaster have continued their lives in Europe. As the story of Adhanom in the beginning of this book illustrates, the survivors and relatives of the victims are the neighbors, friends, and coworkers of other Europeans, and their memories of what they went through have spread to the communities in which they live. Survivors have started families, and though their children have been born in Europe, they are affected by what their parents went through.
The perspective of survival therefore adds an important temporal aspect to border deaths—it demonstrates that the present will one day be the future’s past (Adam 2010). This awareness of temporality allows us to imagine possible futures, potentially prompting a vision of a convivial future society: a society shared by both those whose governments created the border and those who managed to cross it. Further, we anticipate that in the future, others may examine and judge the present, just as we currently examine the violent events of the past. The specters haunting the present are not only from the past but also from the future.
The cognizance of the future that the notion of survival entails resonates with theories of haunting. In social theory, haunting is understood as repressed or unresolved inequality, oppression, or social violence coming into view. In Avery Gordon’s (2008) terms, a “ghostly matter” is an issue that was supposed to be over and done with but instead comes alive and requires corrective action. This “something-to-be-done” aspect (Gordon 2008, xvii) of haunting opens a view to the future. Haunting is not only about the past’s reappearance in the present but also a demand to transform the future. Haunting creates an awareness that the present can give rise to ghosts who will reappear to future generations.
Jacques Derrida’s (1994) understanding of haunting is also directed to the future, although his understanding of specters is more ambiguous than Gordon’s. In Derrida’s hauntology, a specter does not return to deliver a message or reveal a secret, as Colin Davis (2007, 88) points out. For Derrida, haunting is a productive opening of meaning: “a structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not-yet formulated possibilities of the future” (Davis 2007, 13).
The analysis of different types of witnesses in this book shows that those who engage with the disaster are haunted by specters of the past or the future. They bear witness, which in addition to seeing something means actively taking responsibility and acting on that basis (Durham Peters 2001; Felman 2000; Tait 2011). Something needs to be done. Certainly, there are people who do not engage with the disaster’s memory for one reason or another, who might have seen but do not bear witness. As my method is to follow the afterlives of the disaster in the public domain of representations and memorializations, these positions are outside the scope of this study.
Civil Imagination and Citizenship
Citizenship studies provides a basis for analyzing and theorizing the identities and subject positions generated by border deaths in the public domain. Researchers on irregular migration have theorized various forms of resistance and contestation through the framework of citizenship—taken not as a status, but as acts and practices of belonging to the communities in which they live, regardless of formal status (McNevin 2011; Hegde 2016, 24–26). Different forms of citizenship emerge through visible “acts of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen 2008), events through which subjects resist their positioning as outsiders and constitute themselves as citizens, as well as more processual practices people use to correct failures in state responsibilities.
Citizenship understood as constitutive acts or practices is citizenship constituted in a relationship: between an individual or a social group and the state, between an individual and a social group or community, or between people. These relationships are interconnected, mutually constitutive, and changing. In the context of border deaths, as this book will demonstrate, different forms of citizenship are constituted at the scales of individuals, communities, states, and the European Union.
Relational citizenship (Pols 2016; Reineke 2022; M’charek and Casartelli 2019) between people is constituted in different forms, often when the state fails in its responsibilities. Following the Lampedusa disaster, different types of witnesses constituted various forms of relational citizenship. Throughout the book, I explore how civic engagement, based on attentiveness to the particularities of the disaster, to the dead as individuals or persons-as-such (Edkins 2011), and to the victims’ living relatives, constituted a relational citizenship of attentiveness. In addition, attentiveness to one’s own self-interest or “capacity to do harm” (Nguyen 2016, 73) emerged in the research as crucial for a citizenship with the transformative potential to move beyond the oppressive structures that produce border deaths.
These relational forms of citizenship develop between living individuals who are mutually engaged in a relationship, but the living can also constitute a civil relationship with the dead, as researchers participating in forensic initiatives to identify dead migrants in Italy (M’charek and Casartelli 2019) and at the US-Mexico border (Reineke 2022) have argued. These forms of citizenship transgress boundaries such as citizen/noncitizen and in-group/out-group (see, e.g., Rygiel 2014; 2016; Stierl 2016), and as I argue in chapters 1 and 4, require a capacity to imagine conviviality in which strangers are part of the same world—a capacity for what Ariella Azoulay (2012) terms “civil imagination.” Some forms of relational citizenship are likely typical in disaster situations. For example, writing of early 1900s disasters in the US-Canada borderlands, Jacob A. C. Remes (2016) theorizes the solidarity between working class survivors of the Salem Fire of 1914 and Halifax Explosion of 1917 as “disaster citizenship.”
All of the forms of citizenship that I analyze in this book are to some extent conditional. Italian prime minister Enrico Letta granted posthumous citizenship to the victims of the Lampedusa disaster (Ansa 2013), but that was merely a symbolic act of benevolence. None of the rights that come with formal citizenship status were granted to the dead (or through them, to their relatives). Quite the opposite, even relatives who had formal citizenship in Sweden, Germany, or other European countries were not treated as full citizens in respect to their rights to decide on the burial of their dead relatives. Some survivors and relatives of the victims contested the ways in which not only European states, but also their country of origin, Eritrea, treated them. For example, in chapter 7, I discuss survivor citizenship, a position from which survivors made political claims against both the Eritrean regime and European states. They contested Eritrea’s refusal to commemorate the victims, and by calling on the memories of the dead, they demanded the rights of refugees on the move. In chapter 9, I discuss forensic citizenship, which opens the possibility of contesting the lack of rights afforded to the dead and the victims’ relatives. These citizenship positions of contestation are nevertheless conditioned by gender norms and expectations of acceptable refugeeness. They are also very much conditioned by the diasporic community and the citizenship developed in relation to the state they left, Eritrea. Diasporic citizenship shapes and conditions the constitution of civil agency in the afterlives of the disaster among survivors and relatives of the victims.
They Left Eritrea, but Eritrea Did Not Leave Them
Almost everyone in the boat sailing for Lampedusa had roots in Eritrea, a multi-ethnic country in the Horn of Africa. This creates a specific context for the disaster and its afterlives. Some of the people had made their journey from Eritrea over the course of a couple of months, but others had spent longer periods, even years, as UNHCR-recognized refugees in Sudan or Ethiopia. Understanding the context of Eritrea—why people leave the country, and the origins of the conflicts that drive mobility—is relevant to understanding the disaster and its afterlives. In addition, it is necessary to know how survivors and relatives of victims in Europe are still conditioned by the state they left and by Eritrean diasporas in Europe, both “old” and “new.” They may have left Eritrea, but Eritrea has not left them. In this section, I provide the necessary background related to Eritreans’ mobility and diasporic condition.
The Eritrean diaspora is considerable in relation to the country’s population of about 3.5 million: at least a third of all Eritreans have migrated to other countries. In Europe, the highest numbers of Eritrean refugees are in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway (UNHCR 2021). However, Europe is often not the first destination from which Eritreans seek protection: 34 percent of those interviewed by UNHCR in Italy in 2017 had sought international protection before arriving in Italy, and 57 percent had stayed in refugee camps in Ethiopia or Sudan. However, these places had not provided sufficient security or prospects for a meaningful life for those who decided to risk their lives on a people smugglers’ route to Libya and across the Central Mediterranean to Italy. Many of those arriving in Italy (in 2017, 64 percent of men and 84 percent of women interviewed by UNHCR) have close family already living in Europe (UNHCR 2019, 26).
In Eritrea, the two main religious groups, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, are equal in number, but among migrants who reach Europe, there are more Christians. In Europe, Eritreans work mainly in the service sector: in health care and elderly care, cleaning, restaurants, and as bus and taxi drivers (Ayalew Mengiste 2018; Mohammad 2021, 41). Diasporic communities are central in people’s everyday lives, and friends and spouses are usually found among Eritreans. While there is a strong nationalism among Eritreans, the diaspora is nonetheless divided. Transnational diasporic online platforms have facilitated the construction of alternative perspectives on Eritrean history, politics, and identity (Bernal 2014, 47; Mohammad 2021). Religion, class, and ethnicity, as well as level of integration in the country of settlement constitute different Eritrean diasporic identities (Redeker Hepner 2009, 193). Political views about the Eritrean regime create major divisions in the Eritrean diaspora. However, people who have critical views about some aspects of the regime might at the same time support other aspects. For example, they might be against the open-endedness of the national service but praise Isaias Afwerki for foreign policy. Another division is between the old diaspora, people who left during the struggle for independence, and the new diaspora, those who left during the post-independence Isaias Afwerki regime. In addition, the Eritrean diaspora is diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, and class. Migrants’ new countries of settlement and attachment to them also shapes diasporic identities. Abdulkader Saleh Mohammad (2021, 44) argues that there has been an increase in ethnic and cultural minority identities among people in Eritrea and the Eritrean diaspora, and that this increase is a subtle protest against the majority ethnic group Tigrinyan’s dominance in the Eritrean regime, secularism, and the lack of integration in host countries in Europe.
Present-day Eritrean refugee mobility has its roots in decades of repression, starting from the creation of the country as a result of Italian colonialization in 1890. Colonialism in Eritrea, first by Italy (1889–1941), then by the British military administration (1941–52), followed by Ethiopia (1952–91), ended with the defeat of the Ethiopian army in 1991 and a declaration of independence in 1993 after a popular referendum (Tronvoll and Mekonnen 2014, 4).
Italy had used its Colonia Eritrea for raw materials and as a source of colonial soldiers (Negash 1987). Nevertheless, Italy also introduced modern infrastructure and urban centers that resulted in a higher level of development in Eritrea compared to Ethiopia, which was not colonized (Bereketeab 2016, 18–19). After the Allied defeat of Mussolini’s fascist Italy in 1941, the British military administration ruled the territory of Eritrea until the United Nations decided to submit to the demands of the Ethiopian Empire and federated Eritrea to Ethiopia in 1952. Ethiopia justified the federation on the basis of cultural, ethnic, historical, and geographical affiliations (Bereketeab 2016, 1–2). However, the UN never secured the establishment of any federal institutions.
Armed resistance to Ethiopia began to form in Eritrea, first as the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) in 1961. In 1962, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea as a province. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), a left-wing nationalist group, split from ELF in 1970 and led the resistance. At this time, the liberation struggle gained force, and intellectuals and students, including those in diaspora, began to support the guerilla war. During the various phases of thirty years of armed resistance in Eritrea, there were internal conflicts among the resistance. EPLF was led by Isaias Afwerki, who became Eritrea’s first president after independence in 1993. EPLF transformed into People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in 1994, and this continues to be the only legal political party in Eritrea.
During the liberation struggle, Eritreans had formed a unified nationalism under the idea of “the common good,” in which individual interests were sacrificed for independence, and despite internal conflicts, ethnic, political, and religious differences were suppressed in what Eritreans perceived as a “just war” against Ethiopian rulers (Kahsay 2022; Plaut 2016). However, the intolerance of diverse views maintained by Eritreans during the war has continued since independence (Bereketeab 2016).
The Eritrean strategy in the liberation struggle was self-reliance, not depending on Cold War superpowers, but Eritrean fighters did make tactical alliances with Ethiopian rebel movements and, at times, with other states in the region, such as Somalia and Sudan (Weldemichael 2013, 287). Neither the United Nations nor the Organization of African Unity (since 2002, the African Union) showed sympathy to the Eritrean cause; the organizations refrained from seeing the situation as colonialism (Reid 2009; Bereketeab 2016, 18–19; Bereketeab 2009, 117). Ethiopia had gained clout on the African continent and in the international arena, particularly as it was the only African country that had not been a European colony. Finally, the weakening and collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been arming Ethiopia, made a referendum for the independence of Eritrea possible (Weldemichael 2013, 191, 287).
Soon after independence, in 1998–2000, Eritrea and Ethiopia fought a border war over disputed territory, including the town of Badme. The conflict continued at a stalemate, and the Isaias regime used the fighting to justify the continuation of the country’s state of exception. Military training is now compulsory for everyone, and after six months most Eritreans between the ages of eighteen and forty-seven (for women) or fifty-four (for men) are obligated to take part in open-ended national service either in the military or in the civil sector (Home Office 2021). This is, according to human rights organizations, forced labor (Human Rights Watch 2021; Kibreab 2009). Mandatory national service is the main reason young people leave Eritrea (Kahsay 2022, 422).
In 2018, Ethiopia’s new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, offered peace to Eritrea, and as a result, the UN Security Council also lifted sanctions against Eritrea. However, Ethiopian forces did not leave Badme until 2021, after the Eritrean armed forces had fought alongside the Ethiopian army against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Despite the 2018 peace agreement, the UN special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in Eritrea concluded in 2022 that there had been no improvement in Eritrea regarding human rights and that the Eritrean army had extended their human rights violations beyond Eritrea’s borders during the fighting in Ethiopia (Kahsay 2022).
In the struggle for Eritrean independence, the diaspora was central in funding and supporting the armed resistance. Sending money to EPLF and raising awareness of the conflict were important activities in the diaspora across the world. When the referendum for independence was held, the liberating forces made sure that the diaspora population was involved and would continue its formal attachment to the new nation. The diaspora politics of common sacrifice that had been formed during the liberation struggle continued as a strategy of the Eritrean state.
Through its embassies, the Eritrean state continues to govern the diaspora—people who are, in fact, often citizens of other countries. Eritreans are expected to and often coerced into paying 2 percent of their income to the Eritrean government as Recovery and Rehabilitation Tax, a general “diaspora tax.” This is calculated on the basis of Eritreans’ tax returns in the countries where they live and earn money. Eritrea does not recognize the renunciation of Eritrean citizenship, and while diasporic Eritreans use their citizenship in their country of residence for all other travel, they can simultaneously hold Eritrean identity cards that permit them to enter the country without a visa. The use of consular and other services, and access to some social events depend on paying the tax, which many Eritreans, nevertheless, refuse to do (DSP 2017.) Some Eritreans in diaspora fear that their relatives in Eritrea can be discriminated against if they do not pay, for instance, by restricting access to remittances (DSP 2017, 13). Sacrificial citizenship, “the social contract between Eritreans and the state in which the citizen’s role is to serve the nation and sacrifice themselves for the survival and well-being of the nation” (Bernal 2014, 33), reflected in the (presently indefinite) national service, extends to financial sacrifice for those living in diaspora.
The discourse of national sacrifice also produces the idea of “traitors”—those who do not participate in the national struggle. People who flee Eritrea and seek asylum in another country are in the eyes of the regime seen as traitors, which shapes refugees’ subjectivities as they build new lives and networks (Tronvoll and Mekonnen 2014, 119; Mohammad 2021, 45). The regime has had a “shoot to kill” policy at the border targeting those who attempt to leave the country without documents (Keetharuth 2013, 9; Kahsay 2022, 422). Nevertheless, those “traitors” who have not been actively involved in oppositional politics abroad can make amends in the eyes of the regime by signing a “letter of regret” and paying the regime 2 percent of the income they have earned since exiting the country (DSP 2017, 13; EASO 2019, 9).
European countries have tried to collaborate with Eritrea, particularly in recent years, to prevent the irregular arrival of refugees in Europe, even at the cost of truly supporting human rights. Martin Plaut (2016, 86–101) documents a number of incidents in which the European Union and individual nation-states have made compromises regarding human rights in Eritrea. Nevertheless, Eritrea’s continuous human rights violations against citizens who desert the national service or engage in oppositional politics prevents the European Union from deporting people to Eritrea. The asylum acceptance rate for Eritreans is among the highest in Europe at about 90 percent (Eurostat 2017; EASO 2021).
Human rights violations against individuals who oppose the regime, desert the national service, or belong to religious minorities have been widely documented and reported by human rights organizations, European Parliament, and the United Nations. The Eritrean regime’s systematic violations of human rights include extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture, and lack of freedom of expression and assembly (United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2019; see also Tronvoll and Mekonnen 2014, 169–78, 109–18; Höfner and Tewolde-Berhan 2017; Human Rights Watch 2018; Amnesty International 2021, 155–56). While multiple oppositional political groups, media outlets, and human rights activists voice alternative views outside Eritrea, large sections of the diaspora do not publicly acknowledge the regime’s human rights violations. Some genuinely support the regime while others are afraid of the long arm of the Eritrean government, which may deny their right to embassy services, block access to Eritrea, or harm their relatives in Eritrea (Plaut 2016, 128–30; Mohammad 2021, 45).
Structure of the Book
I begin my examination of the representation of the events that took place in Lampedusa on October 3, 2013, by building the case for using the term disaster to describe the drowning of hundreds of people. The naming of an event is a central framing device that directs one’s understanding when asking “what is it that is going on here,” as Goffman (1972, 8) would put it. In naming events, certain explanations are made more appealing than others. I discuss how terms such as shipwreck or tragedy produce categorically different political and ethical registers than the Italian word strage (which translates as “massacre”) or the English term disaster. With the use of these terms, certain responses and responsibilities become more likely than others. The way the disaster was framed prompted mediated spectators to engage with the disaster, and as chapter 2 demonstrates, representation and memorialization were the domains in which spectators could perform their compassion as resistance to indifference.
Chapter 2 examines the visual representation of the disaster, focusing on photographs that became iconic. Images of hundreds of coffins, arranged neatly in an airport hangar, appeared a few days after the disaster. These photographs demonstrated the massive number of fatalities and represented the very presence of death. The images created a spectacle out of the harmonious arrangement of coffins, which contradicted the imagery of unorganized masses of dead bodies in the sea that the public might expect. I demonstrate that there is an alternative to this dignified, yet depersonalized, visuality, a different visuality that represents the disaster not as the presence of death but as the absence of life. I trace two routes to this alternative representation: one in which family members and survivors of the Lampedusa disaster insert photographs of the dead into the mainstream media, and another in which journalists imaginatively read existing photographs. These methods visualized what the disaster had made absent: human beings with social lives and relationships. The methods were generated by a capacity for “civil imagination” and call on the public to imagine the world convivially.
I continue to engage with the complexity of representing both the massive scale of the disaster and the absence of individual lives in chapter 3. I contrast the dominant representation of the disaster—the enumeration of victims—with practices that emphasize the individuality and irreplaceability of each person. Representing the victims by listing their names and displaying their photographs is a means of making their number visible and comprehensible. After the Lampedusa disaster, the survivors compiled a list of victims’ names. The list later enabled others to recite and visualize victims’ names in art, rituals, and memorials. The labor of compiling this list of names was the survivors’ first act of survivor citizenship, a concept I develop in chapter 7. This subjectification of the victims, carried out by survivors, was an act of “civic forensics,” a form of civil agency and belonging that asserts the right to identification and nondisappearance. Another critical means to counter the distancing and sanitizing representation produced by enumeration is to select one name to represent the entire group of victims. While 366 are too many to know and remember one by one, it is possible to remember one individual. In the Lampedusa disaster, the name of one young woman, Yohanna, often stands in for all of the victims.
After these three chapters that consider the critical potential of representations and the problematics of generalities and particularities, I turn to analyzing memorialization, both memorializing “others” and memorializing “one’s own.” The next three chapters focus on how “others” are memorialized; the people who initiated the memorials and rituals examined here did not have a personal relationship with the victims, nor were the victims members of their community or citizens of their country. By examining select instances of memorialization at the local, national, and European scale, I ask who memorializes, and how and why. What functions do the different forms of memorialization have for identities, politics, and societies? Survival in this context refers to the experience of living on after an event that disrupts the social and moral order of things. The people I discuss in this section are either eyewitnesses or mediated witnesses of the disaster and its consequences. It is a different kind of a survival than surviving the disaster or the death of a loved one—such experiences connect with memorializing “one’s own” and form the core of the third part of the book.
In chapter 4, I examine how Sicilians responded to the disaster with memorializing and why some of them “adopted” the dead into their community by creating memorials and performing burial rituals. Three hundred sixty-six dead bodies were transported from Lampedusa to be buried in several different cemeteries in Sicily. In some communities, locals cared for the graves and created memorials in their cemeteries. I examine how cemeteries can be seen as communicative spaces where community and identity are performed. In the context of border deaths, they can also function as spaces where a new kind of civil sphere is created through encounters between locals and the relatives of victims who mourn at victims’ graves. This transcultural sphere facilitates the challenging of established certainties, such as the nation-state and borders, and serves as a space in which anticipated distinctions such as citizen/noncitizen, kin/non-kin, and in-group/out-group are transgressed.
In chapter 5, I discuss how Lampedusans memorialized the disaster after the dead were taken away and buried in Sicily. This chapter, like the previous one, focuses on those who eye-witnessed the materiality of the unknown dead bodies, either directly or in their coffins. Lampedusans have created two memorials to remember the disaster’s victims, while also making an intervention into the memory politics of border deaths and migration politics more generally. In doing so, they have further contributed to the public imagery of the island as an iconic representation of Europe’s border.
In chapter 6, I expand my analysis of memorials and commemorations from islands in the Mediterranean Sea to the national scale in Italy and beyond, to the scale of Europe. I examine why the Italian Parliament and Senate established October 3 as the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration in 2016. I also discuss how some members of the European Parliament in Brussels have memorialized the day in order to raise the issue of border deaths as a European concern. In addition, I return to a particular local scale of memorialization, discussing how the disaster’s memory resonates with anti-fascist activists in Dresden, Germany, prompting them to commemorate deaths that happened thousands of miles away. Analysis of memory politics at these more distant scales of the afterlives of the disaster shows how specters from the past and the future shape the meaning of the disaster and responses to it, not only in the border zone but also beyond it. Depending on the context of memorialization, other borders and contestations of borders in the past, such as the Berlin Wall, Italian labor migration, and anti-fascist Italian exiles haunt the present understanding of border deaths.
While the common understanding is that memorializing of border deaths emerges in response to a lack of memorialization—in other words, to the public “ungrievability” (Butler 2009) of the victims—my analysis shows that memorializations are instead often prompted by other memorials and rituals: people often respond to how others remember dead strangers. Memorials attract rituals, and rituals may elicit a need to create longer-lasting memorials. These three chapters also demonstrate that memorializing strangers in public has a purpose and significance for the communities that remember—often more so than for the victims and their families. I show that memorializing the Lampedusa disaster has served two functions: one therapeutic, to help cope with having witnessed mass death and its aftermath (often through mediation); and the other instrumental, to make a political point or to create community.
While rituals and memorials in Lampedusa, Sicily, and beyond were mainly tailored for European publics, they nevertheless increased the capacity of survivors and families of the victims to memorialize in a way that was more public and political than would have otherwise been feasible. Therefore, to conclude my discussion of the public memorialization of border deaths with a criticism of Eurocentric interests would not do justice to what survivors and relatives of the victims have done within the commemorative sphere.
The last three chapters examine a different scale of remembering: that of survivors and victims’ relatives in the context of Eritrean diaspora. By examining memorializing from the perspective of a minority (“Eritrean Europeans”), I move beyond the previous chapters’ focus on the commemorative performances of the majority (“Europeans”) and how they constitute subjectivities in relation to border deaths to a refugee-centered perspective that acknowledges the creative agency, hopes, and politics of refugees. Chapter 7 argues for a survivor citizenship, an identity of survivorship created by making political, moral, and social claims in the context of memorializing. However, the afterlife of the disaster, like life itself, has been complex and sometimes contradictory. Through their actions, survivors both unsettle and affirm the expectations of the majority, and both refute and uphold European attempts to define the public meanings of the disaster. They also negotiate a complex form of diasporic citizenship in both refuting and upholding the expectations of diasporic communities and the Eritrean regime, the long arm of which reaches them even in exile.
Chapter 8 goes deeper into the process of survival through analyzing interviews with those who survived the disaster. I discuss what survival means for the survivors and how some of them draw on the legacy of the victims to actively and ethically participate in the world. These experiences shape survivor citizenship. In addition, I examine mediated experiences of survival in literature and film. For example, when border-crossers return to Lampedusa, the place where their state of survival started, they make visible how survivors have proceeded from the position of victim by actively participating in the world around them.
Relatives of the victims are featured in most chapters, as they have an important critical role in both representations and memorializations. Their relationship with the victims makes the humanity of the dead understandable. Chapter 9, however, centers the victims’ relatives, whose mourning and memorialization practices, though intimate, nevertheless take place in a mediated everyday life. The chapter demonstrates how digitally mediated memorialization blurs the distinctions between private and public, local and global, planned and spontaneous, and formal and vernacular. I examine how digital media practices shape transnational relationships in the specific context of border deaths and disappearances. As the sister of one victim told me, surviving the death of a loved one in these specific circumstances is not the same as surviving a death with a different cause. This chapter shows the distinct ambiguity of border deaths, which can be attributed to two interwoven elements: uncertainties related to the body and death rituals, and uncertainties deriving from the context of migration.
The concluding chapter brings together the main arguments on how the after-lives form and generate survival through an examination of the public life of one survivor, Kebrat, and her engagement with representations and memorializations. The reappearance of various versions of her story in cultural productions—theater, literature, and music—has created a public platform from which she speaks for the cause of refugees and constitutes a survivor citizenship. Her platform is nevertheless conditional: she negotiates how she will insert the issues that are important to her into the public domain.
Taken together, the book’s three parts—representation, memorializing “others,” and memorializing “one’s own”—present a holistic analysis of the afterlife of one of the most mediatized migrant disasters in Europe. The Lampedusa disaster is but one of thousands, and yet the continuation of its memory in the public domain in representations and memorializations makes it specific. The disaster has come to symbolize the present era of the bordering of Europe—a time in which the natural forces of the sea are being used by Europe in its attempts to shield its territory. Letting people die has become a means of creating Europe.
The stories in this book feature people and communities across Europe who have refused to remain bystanders in this constellation of bordering, in which they witness the spectacle of mass death in person or through mediation. The Lampedusa disaster disrupted and disrupts their world and what they consider a normal order of things. They act in response, in order to survive the rupture, in order to live on in a shared world that has revealed its inequality. This book brings their thoughts and actions into conjunction with those most intimately touched by the disaster—those who survived the disaster or the death of a loved one. In considering both of these positions, I underline how the perspective of survival can envision a way forward from the horrific present, which is not sustainable. It illuminates both the temporal and the social dimension in which allowing the death of migrants happens. Those who survive a disaster at Europe’s border, and their children, are or become members of the societies that have so determinedly tried to prevent their cohabitation. They are Europeans, in the very essence of the idea. They have family and friends across the continent and vivid memories of different parts of Europe. They regularly travel from their new homes in Northern Europe to Europe’s external border zone in the South to visit memorial sites and remember those whom Europe’s borders killed, and in doing so, they create and maintain relationships among themselves and with others who refuse to be bystanders. They create a new transcultural civil sphere and constitute new subjectivities as they navigate and sometimes contest expectations from diaspora, Eritrean state, and Europe. This book examines these relationalities and considers their transformative potential. Afterlives of a disaster shape the life of the living—those who continue to make the world.
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