SURVIVOR CITIZENSHIP
By October 3, 2014, high tourist season in Lampedusa had passed, and some of the shops along the main road were already closed. But every hotel was booked full, and enough bars and restaurants were open to accommodate the throngs of people who had arrived on the island to commemorate the disaster of the year before. There were Eritrean survivors, family members of the victims, members of the European Parliament, representatives of human rights and humanitarian organizations from all over Europe, journalists, academics, artists, and the simply curious. The day was filled with commemorative programs. Some of them overlapped, and it was impossible to participate in everything.
I rented a bicycle and rode from one event to another in the merciless sun of the mostly treeless island. There was a press conference at the airport with the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, and Italian ministers from Rome. The Lampedusan activist collective Askavusa held a protest outside questioning the right of European and Italian leaders to memorialize a disaster that their policies had produced. And at the port, politicians and other invited guests set out on customs (Guardia di Finanza), coast guard (Guardia Costiera), and gendarmerie (Carabinieri) vessels to lower wreaths into the sea at the disaster site. The divers attached a memorial plaque to the sunken wreck, and the local fishermen’s association threw a wreath from their own boat—but as a protest against the Roman establishment, they did it at a different time.
About forty survivors who had returned to the island from their new homes in Northern Europe painted rocks at the harbor with Lampedusan high school students, and a participatory performance for the filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer’s memorial film Asmat (that I discussed in chapter 3) gathered people who entered the sea wrapped in white sheets. Adal Neguse—with whom I would later collaborate in my research—worked on a mural of handprints with Lampedusan students, and late in the afternoon, the church was filled with locals and guests for an interfaith ceremony. From there, a procession to the Porta d’Europa memorial sculpture began.
The survivors could be picked out of the crowds because they all wore identical T-shirts. The shirts had been provided by one of the Italian organizers of the events, the Comitato 3 ottobre, which had also paid for their trips to Lampedusa. “Protect people—Not borders” was printed on the shirts, along with a drawing of a family (man, woman, and a child) sitting in a bottle floating on water. Representatives of organizations such as UNHCR, Save the Children, and Amnesty International wore vests, hats, or shirts marked with their logos. A representative of Frontex wore a blue armband with the circle of yellow EU stars. Italian customs, Fire Brigade (Vigili del Fuogo), and coast guard leaders were dressed in their uniforms. They all seemed like actors, dressed up for the commemorative spectacle.
In this chapter, I ask why Eritrean survivors of the disaster return to sites of memory in Lampedusa and participate in the commemorative rituals—many of which have in fact been created for Italians or Europeans more broadly. Are the survivors in their identical T-shirts a reproduction of their media representation as passive victims to be rescued by the able and caring Europeans? What does memorializing within this context mean for the survivors? What functions does memorializing have for the Eritrean diaspora in Europe, and what kinds of politics does their engagement with the disaster’s memory produce? By discussing different kinds of acts of commemoration—both private and public, and their mediations—I explore how the survivors acted upon the assumed responsibility to remember and how they transformed their public identity from a victim to a survivor. I develop the notion of survivor citizenship to elucidate how, regardless of their legal status, the survivors acted as citizens of Europe and refused to be passive victims to be rescued or inserted into a celebration of European or Italian greatness. This reflects a new kind of Europeanness, one which is simultaneously about both being at home and being transnationally connected. It is not a citizenship that is granted, but one that is acted as responsible members of a society, following Engin Isin’s and Greg Nielsen’s idea of “acts of citizenship” (Isin 2008; Isin and Nielsen 2008).
By examining memorializing from the perspective of the survivors, I move beyond the critique and deconstruction of Europeans’ commemorative performances that have been central in chapters 4, 5, and 6 to a refugee-centered analysis that acknowledges the creative agency, hopes, and politics of refugees. In underlining refugees’ agency, I am not sentimentalizing oppression, suffering, or harm, but instead drawing attention to the ability “of social beings to wave alternative, and sometimes brilliantly creative, forms of coherence across the damages” (Ortner 1995, 186). To recognize agency is to see others as human, to “grant the other the same flawed subjectivity we assume for ourselves,” as Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016, 73) argues in his work on the ethics of memory after war.
The Therapeutic and Instrumental Functions of Memorializing
The first anniversary of the disaster in 2014 was crucial in setting the scene for memorializing the disaster. The commemoration was part of the rolling presidency of the Council of the European Union that Italy held, and which brought notable politicians to the island: the president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, the president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini, and the Italian minister of foreign affairs Federica Mogherini. In chapter 6, I analyzed how the commemoration shaped European and Italian politics, and vice versa. However, also the survivors and the relatives of the victims were present in the commemorative events, and in this chapter, I focus on what the commemorations meant for them and how they created a subjectivity in the communicative sphere that was created for “Italian” and “European” audiences.
At the press conference held at Lampedusa’s airport where Martin Schulz gave a speech (analyzed in chapter 6), the seating arrangements illustrate how European and Italian leaders dominated the event.1 The politicians were seated at the front, behind a row of desks, while the survivors sat in the audience, albeit in the front row. Behind them were journalists, and representatives of humanitarian and religious organizations.
The organizers of the press conference had asked for a representative of the Eritreans affected by the disaster to speak. “I am the brother of a victim,” Adal Neguse began, speaking in English. He stood between the politicians and the audience, off to the side so that he could address both groups. The survivors had decided that he, an Eritrean Swedish health care worker, would “deliver the message,” as the survivors explained to me. Some of the survivors knew Adal personally from when he had come to Lampedusa to search for his brother in the days after the disaster. Adal went on:
The survivors and the families of the victims, we are all here to remember our beloved ones. We are grateful for all the help that we have received so far, that our loved ones have been recovered from the boat and have been given a place to rest. But all this would be meaningless unless the families are given a chance to identify their loved ones and to replace the number with a name on their gravesite.
We feel that the tragedy could have been avoided, but we are not here to blame someone. We ask you to do everything you can to prevent such tragedy from happening again. We now know that the Italian authorities are working hard on rescue after this big disaster. We would like to express our gratitude for that. We would like to ask other European countries and the European Union to be part of this rescue operation. It’s high time we stop this suffering.
By saying “we are all here,” Adal Neguse identified the survivors and the relatives of the victims as a community on whose behalf he was speaking. The speech is directed at a “you” who is not to be blamed but is nevertheless responsible for taking action, as it is capable of “preventing such tragedy from happening again.” At the end of the speech, Adal joins the “we” and the “you” and creates a different “we”—a we that takes collective responsibility: “It’s high time we stop this suffering.” The more or less recent migrants from Eritrea, like the other Europeans in the audience, have the capacity to prevent disaster, Adal seemed to be saying. The survivors and the relatives are not positioned as victims in Adal’s speech, or noncitizens but as actors who have the capacity and the responsibility to take action for justice, irrespective of their formal citizenship status. They too, like the other Europeans, were susceptible to becoming indifferent to injustice.
Adal Neguse’s speech contains four themes that correlate to the two functions of memory that Paul Ricoeur (2004), among others, has identified: therapeutic and instrumental. The personal remembrance of loved ones and the expression of gratitude to those who have helped serve therapeutic functions: they are means for dealing with loss in an ethical way. A therapeutic function does not necessarily produce closure; it can also be a means to live on with the dead—to maintain a relationship with the dead.
Adal also makes claims that are, on the one hand, specific to the Lampedusa disaster (the forensic identification of the dead) and, on the other hand, concern broader refugee rights (the continuation of search and rescue operations at sea). These claims put the disaster in the service of improving the rights both of the relatives and of refugees in general. Such instrumentalization is not, in this case, “co-opting” the memory of the disaster for the benefit of politics that would not have mattered to the victims. The speech opens with a review of past wrongs and good deeds and ends with a reference to future aspirations: the desire to prevent “such tragedy from happening again.” The speech presents a structure that the community of Eritrean survivors and relatives have repeated in their public statements during the four subsequent anniversary commemorations that I refer to in this chapter.
Porta d’Europa: A Site for Countermemorialization
After the first anniversary commemorations in 2014, the memory site for the survivors’ statement was Porta d’Europa, a sculpture created in 2008 to commemorate migrants who had lost their lives at the sea border (Horsti 2016a). Porta d’Europa, like the Garden of Remembrance (discussed in chapter 5), represents what Diana Taylor (2003) has termed archival memory. People who have no intention of memorializing border deaths can encounter these memorials and engage with the issue by thinking about it, finding out more, and taking a position. Porta d’Europa has an expansionist quality in the sense that it makes no reference to the Portopalo migrant disaster of 1996 that inspired its construction. The only narrative it suggests is that of an open gateway. Unlike new commemorative art inspired by relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998; Gibbons 2007), the monument does not encourage interaction (Horsti 2016a). Nevertheless, Porta d’Europa’s open gate is available for multiple meanings. This ambiguity has also contributed to it becoming a significant site for the survivors’ critical agency, which has developed as they have repeatedly returned to commemorate the disaster in Lampedusa.
FIGURE 13. Porta di Lampedusa—Porta d’Europa (Gateway to Europe) memorial in Lampedusa by Mimmo Paladino. © Karina Horsti, 2015. Photo by Karina Horsti.
The messages that the Eritreans—survivors, relatives, and the Italian Eritrean priest Mussie Zerai—have relayed at Porta d’Europa have expressed gratitude to the Lampedusans (for symbolically opening the gate) and simultaneously denying gratitude to the institutional border agents who failed to rescue them (symbolically closing the gate). They have also demanded that European governments secure safe passage for refugees stranded in Libya. The survivors’ engagement with the memorial shows how the memory conveyed by a monument is not static, but rather in constant transformation and dialogue with the people who visit the memorial. The survivors have taken ownership of the memorial and its meaning, just as they have with the Giardino della memoria, albeit so far not as publicly as with Porta d’Europa.
Every October 3, since 2014, ten to forty survivors and relatives of victims, together with high school students from Lampedusa and elsewhere in Italy and Europe, have led a procession to the monument. Up to five hundred other participants have joined them: journalists, humanitarian professionals (recognizable by the logos of their organizations), Catholic nuns and priests, border agents such as coast guard members in their uniforms, more high school students, many of whom have flown in with their teachers from mainland Italy, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, tourists, and a few politicians. The Eritreans sing church hymns in Tigrinya, and some of them, together with students, have carried a banner reading “Proteggere le persone—non i confine” (Protect people—Not borders) produced by the Comitato 3 ottobre, the organizer of the events led by Italian Eritrean Tareke Brhane.
Throngs of students at a memorial ceremony might remind Sicilians of the anniversary commemorations held on May 23 each year in memory of two Mafia terror attacks that took place in 1992 in Capaci (strage di Capaci) and on via D’Amelio in Palermo (strage di via D’Amelio). Since 2002, the commemoration in Palermo has started with the arrival of about 1,500 students and teachers from all around Italy on La Nave della Legalita, the “Ship of Legality.” The incorporation of students from across the country (and in the case of Comitato 3 ottobre, from across the European Union) is informed by the haunting of both the past and the future. As the Falcone Foundation, which organizes the May 23 ceremonies, writes on their website: “For a future without a Mafia.”
For the survivors of the October 3, 2013, disaster, however, the marching and singing are reminiscent of the day in 2013 when the survivors protested at the Lampedusa “reception center” where they had been detained. They had seen news about the official “funeral” in Agrigento, Sicily, and realized that they had not been invited to the ceremony. The survivors forced the guards to open the gates and marched into town to protest. They sang religious songs along the way and divided into two groups. One group picked wildflowers from the rugged landscape and walked to the sea to pray and commemorate. Another group went to the town hall to demand to know why they had not been invited to the funeral service and why the bodies had not been buried on Lampedusa. These two acts reflect the two functions of memory, the therapeutic and the instrumental, which later structured the survivors’ memorializing.
The memories of walking together as a group, singing and stopping traffic, became important to the survivors; many of them later recalled the 2013 protest in conversations with me. Protesting the unjust treatment of the dead in such a powerful embodied performance created a sense of identity and community for the survivors. This sense of responsibility for the dignity of the dead was evoked and strengthened in subsequent years by the march to Porta d’Europa. Such repetition of performance—the movement of bodies in a repeated formation—is intrinsic to commemoration (see, for example, Connerton 1989, 59, 72).
In 2014, the procession to the monument was interrupted by a powerful thunderstorm. The television camera crews retreated to their vans and almost everyone else who had joined the survivors during the walk rushed back to town. When a storm sweeps the island, one realizes that Lampedusa is just a large rock in the middle of the sea. The storm could have easily ended the Porta d’Europa ceremony altogether and prevented the ritual from becoming significant in future anniversaries, but it had the opposite effect. It transformed the public performance into an intimate and nonmediated ceremony, and later, into a memory that remained significant for those who participated in the event. Unperturbed by the storm, the Eritrean survivors continued to sing religious songs in Tigrinya and to pray. They were led by the then Switzerland-based priest Mussie Zerai, a central critical figure in coordinating calls for sea rescue from migrant boats before European activists stepped in. The following year, he would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with refugees.
Lightning lit up the darkness and for a moment made visible the scene: the monumental gate, the stormy waves in the background, and the group of drenched mourners holding flowers in their hands. The performance continued, improvised; its audience was composed only of survivors, the priest, and two or three people who like me stood there watching. One of the survivors present there participated in a focus group research interview in Stockholm a year later and told me that this had been the most memorable experience of the commemorations. As a religious person, he had felt that “God was with them” and that “the heavens were crying for the victims.” It gave him an immense sense of relief, he said, to feel that while he had survived, the victims had been received in heaven by God. The existential experience of commemorating in the storm solidified the survivors’ role as carriers of memory and underlined their responsibility to act politically from that position.
The Performance of Selectively Grateful Refugee
In contrast to the previous year, the weather was perfect for the commemorative procession in Lampedusa in 2015. At noon, seventeen survivors led the march from the mayor’s office at the New Port to Porta d’Europa. The survivors stopped at the monument while Lampedusan students chatted in groups scattered around the area; for anyone outside the inner circle surrounding the survivors, it was impossible to hear the Muslim, Catholic, and Eritrean Orthodox prayers being offered by survivors and religious leaders. Afterward, sixteen of the survivors climbed onto the bunker a few meters away, while the seventeenth, a woman, sat alone on the rocks to the side and gazed toward the sea. They were all wearing identical T-shirts with the Comitato 3 ottobre logo. Standing on the makeshift stage with the survivors was Adal Neguse representing the relatives of the victims, three Lampedusan first responders, Mayor Nicolini, Rosario Crocetta, the leftist president of Sicily, Mussie Zerai, and the Comitato 3 ottobre’s Tareke Brhane, who translated from Tigrinya to Italian. None of the Italian speeches were translated into Tigrinya, and therefore most survivors were unable to understand what was being said. The Comitato’s commemorative script was clearly aimed at an Italian audience.
Television crews and photographers took their positions in front of the makeshift stage. Mussie held a wooden cross and addressed the authorities in Italian. Standing with the survivors, he amplified and mediated their issues and those of the Eritrean refugee community at large. He raised three matters of concern to the survivors: the lack of investigation into the events leading to the disaster, the delays in identifying the victims, and the unwillingness to repatriate the human remains to Eritrea. He said in Italian: “We are here today not only to remember the dead, but also to remember those families who are still waiting for justice. Those families who are still waiting for the bodies of their loved ones” (Zerai 2015). In addition to these issues specific to the disaster, he also raised the broader issue of the thousands of migrants who were continuing to die along the journey to Europe. The solutions he presented reflect his dual roles as a refugee rights activist and opponent of the Eritrean regime:
We need to push, to press. The first commitment must be to solve the root problem in the country of origin of these people who flee. This is the first long-term commitment. The second is to protect these people along the migration path. That is, in neighboring countries, in transit countries, to guarantee decent, safe and protected living conditions. The third commitment is to organize resettlement programs, those humanitarian corridors, those humanitarian visas, visas for family reunification. After his speech, Mussie announced in Italian that the survivors wanted to show their gratitude to the Lampedusan civilian responders on behalf of all 155 survivors and the relatives of the victims. The survivors, who had been standing still during Mussie’s speech, relaxed their postures and wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders. They knew what was coming next; the script that followed was theirs.
FIGURE 14. The bunker next to Porta d’Europa, 3 October 2015. A survivor reads a message of gratitude to the people of Lampedusa and prepares to hand out certificates. Mussie Zerai translates, while Tareke Brhane, Giusi Nicolini, Rosario Crocetta, and three civil responders stand with the survivors and family members. © Karina Horsti, 2015. Photo by Karina Horsti.
The previous day, the survivors had gathered at a restaurant in the evening to discuss what to say as a group to the journalists, politicians, and Lampedusans who would be present at the commemoration ceremony. They all agreed that they wanted to show their gratitude to those who had rescued them. Adal Neguse drew a picture of two hands, one pulling the other from what could be the sea or the ground. The motif was similar to that in the underwater memorial that divers working for the coast guard had attached to the wreck during the 2014 anniversary commemorations. A form of the motif reappeared at the memorial constellation at the Piazza Piave in 2019 on the metal pedestal erected by Gariwo (the Garden for the Righteous) as an acknowledgment of those Lampedusans who “assume responsibility.” The drawing of the two hands became part of what the survivors called “certificates.” They added text to the drawing and had a certificate printed for each Lampedusan rescuer at the local copy shop. The text read in Italian:
Grazie! Questo è per ringraziare voi, che avete fattuno sforzo incredibile il 3 ottobre 2013, salvandoci la vita. Avete un grande posto nel nostro cuore; siamo e vi saremo eternamente grati. Che Dio vi benedica! I sopravissuti e le famiglie delle vittime del 3 ottobre 2013. (Thank you! This is to thank you who did an incredible deed on October 3, 2013, by saving our lives. You have a great place in our hearts; we are and will forever be grateful. God bless you! The survivors and the families of the victims of October 3, 2013.)
The survivors first intended to present the certificates in the morning when the commemorations began outside the mayor’s office. But that scene had been too chaotic—inappropriate for a dignified ceremony. No one could hear what was being said over the chattering of the Lampedusan students eating their breakfasts. Across the street from the mayor’s office, local garbage collectors had piled up hundreds of stinking garbage bags. They had been on strike and were protesting because the municipal authorities had not paid them on time. They thought that the commemoration, with its prestigious guests, was an event being put on by and for the mayor. At the chaotic event, with attendees distracted by the stench of garbage, there was no opportunity for the survivors to shift the crowd’s attention to themselves. In fact, there was no stage that the survivors could have taken over.
Therefore, the survivors decided to look for a more suitable moment at Porta d’Europa to deliver the certificates. Atop the bunker, a survivor who had arrived from his new home in Denmark, spoke about the survivors’ gratitude and read out the names of the awardees. There was one certificate for the people of Lampedusa (received on their behalf by Giusi Nicolini) and one for each of the local civil rescuers. The survivors had agreed not to give any certificates to the Carabinieri, the Guardia Costiera, or the Guardia di Finanza, although these organizations had also been involved in the rescue operation and were present at the commemorative rituals that the Comitato 3 ottobre had organized. By explicitly excluding these rescuers, in their presence, the survivors wanted to convey that they did not owe them any recognition because they had failed to respond adequately.
To a certain extent, the performance of gratitude conformed to the role that the “Italian” audiences expected the survivors to play. For the “Italian” and “European” publics, the islanders at the margins of the Italian nation-state and Europe symbolized a lack of culpability and evoked nostalgic memories of the hospitality extended. Handing out the certificates affirmed not only the benevolence of the rescuers, but also the stereotypical notion of the refugee who is grateful for being rescued and given the gift of a new life, protection, and freedom (Nguyen 2012; Espiritu 2014; Hong 2016). Mimi Thi Nguyen (2012) theorizes the grateful refugee as someone who “lives under enduring consciousness” of debt for “the gift of freedom.” However, this gift “co-exists with violence or because of violence that appears as something else” (Nguyen 2012, 6). Writing about Vietnamese refugees in the United States, Mimi Thi Nguyen unpacks the powers of the “benevolent empire,” such as colonialism, militarization, and imperialism, that produce “the gift of freedom” at the same time as they produce the violence that causes displacement.
This was not the full picture in Lampedusa, however. The survivors refused to offer their gratitude to the institutional rescuing agents who represent the “benevolent empire”—the European border that is simultaneously militarized and humanitarianized. Only named individuals (and the “people of Lampedusa”) had a “great place” in the survivors’ hearts.
When the reading of the recipients’ names began and the survivors were about to hand out the certificates to the civilian rescuers on stage, it became apparent that while three of the recipients were present, at least eight others were missing. This disrupted the script of the ceremony, which the survivors had designed as a surprise to the recipients. The survivors wondered among themselves why the Lampedusans most dear to them, those they had called by name, had not attended the ceremony. They were not aware of the protest against the official commemorations led by the first responder Vito Fiorino and his friends.
After the ceremony, Constantino Baratta, a Lampedusan mason who had rescued twelve people in his seventeen-foot fishing boat and who was present at the Porta d’Europa ceremony, told the other civilian rescuers that the survivors wanted to give them certificates. They organized a meeting and invited an interpreter who worked at the local “reception center” to translate between Tigrinya and Italian. In the evening, the survivors quietly left the interfaith ceremony organized by the Mediterranean Hope project at the Sanctuary of Porto Salvo to attend this informal meeting. The rescuers who had not attended the official commemorative ceremonies explained their protest to the survivors, and both survivors and rescuers realized that they shared a concern that the response to the disaster had not been properly investigated.
For two years, the survivors had been asking questions about the coast guard’s mismanagement of the rescue operation. In the meeting with the civilian rescuers, the survivors again said that they had seen two large vessels close to their boat when its engine stalled, and that they had shone a spotlight onto the stricken vessel. Vito Fiorino told them that he had been asked by the Guardia Costiera to sign a false statement concerning the time of the emergency call and that they had prevented him from transferring survivors from his boat to their larger vessel so that his crew could continue their rescue work (see Askavusa 2018). Unbeknownst to the survivors, Fiorino’s group of rescuers had given media interviews about the lack of an investigation and the inefficiency of the coast guard operation over the course of the previous two years.
The scene at the monument, with its unsuccessful attempt to deliver the certificates as part of the public commemorative program, revealed to the survivors that the remembrance of the disaster was contested in Lampedusa. Learning of their shared critical position made the survivors more confidant and vocal about their concerns, some of which the Comitato 3 ottobre did not prioritize: the return of the dead to Eritrea, and the investigation of the disaster. In addition, the survivors became more critical of the politics of memorialization. After meeting with the rescuers, the survivors began talking about taking more responsibility for how the disaster was remembered in public.
Conflicting Ideas about the Rights of the Dead
In 2016, Tareke Brhane of the Comitato 3 ottobre was ill and therefore unable to coordinate the ceremonies, opening up space for the survivors’ own improvisation. At the bunker at Porta d’Europa, two survivors spoke to the public, their words translated by Mussie Zerai. A survivor from Denmark delivered what he called “a message to the world” in English. He criticized the fact that there were no survivors on the Comitato, and that none had been involved in planning the commemorations. “The Comitato does not reflect our feelings,” he said in English. Another survivor took the microphone and added, also in English: “The people of Lampedusa [are] like our family. [The p]eople of Lampedusa saved us! No rescue team! No military! Only they helped us. And we need to directly communicate with the Lampedusan people.”
These feelings had also been articulated in the procession to the monument. Instead of carrying the Comitato’s banner, survivors and relatives now carried handwritten signs of their own. The signs were written in Tigrinya, Italian, or English, and in all three languages, the survivors communicated their gratitude to the Lampedusans and their demand that the dead be identified and returned to their families. The signs read: “Grazie a tutta la gente di Lampedusa” (Thank you, people of Lampedusa), “Our families are waiting for the souls of their children,” and “Chiediamo che i corpi dei nostri fratelli, delle nostre sorelle e dei nostri bambini vengano riportati a casa” (We ask that the bodies of our brothers, sisters, and children be returned home).
The Comitato 3 ottobre and the participating humanitarian organizations did not publicly engage with the issue of returning the 366 coffins to Eritrea. In my view, their interest was on the border, specifically on the construction of a humanitarian border. In seminars and roundtables, the issue of why even those families who had identified their relatives’ remains and had the means to do so were prevented from burying the dead where they wished was not addressed. To return the dead “home,” to Eritrea, it seemed to me, was absurd from a Eurocentric perspective. European preconceptions about the colonial subject colored the framing of the aspirations of those who had been on the boat: in the Italian imagination, the migrants desired to become one of them (as discussed in the context of journalistic interpretation of the found photographs in chapter 3). A refugee who identifies with his or her country despite having escaped its regime, who seeks human rights, political agency, or political change in their country while in exile, did not fit the humanitarian imaginary that prevailed in the Lampedusa commemorations. These claims did not conform with the European image of a refugee, which has become less and less of a political category in the past two decades (Fassin 2005). My interpretation is that the complexity of the political agendas and emotions of the Eritrean Europeans complicated the frame of a vulnerable and grateful refugee that those involved in organizing the commemorations needed for their agendas.
FIGURE 15. The survivors with their handwritten signs, Lampedusa, October 3, 2016. Still image of a video by Anna Blom. © Anna Blom, 2016.
There were conflicting views also within the broader Eritrean diaspora in Italy and beyond in Europe about the meaning of the disaster and the burials. These conflicts, in my view, would not have helped the Comitato’s position in relation to ministries and humanitarian organizations that funded its activities. Its main aim of educating publics about refugees—instrumentalizing the disaster’s memory in resistance to European border control—a messy and confusing refugee diaspora would have been problematic.
In the first week or two after the disaster, the oppositional political diaspora advocated for the return of the coffins to Eritrea. The Eritrean Swedish human rights activist Meron Estefanos told me in a research interview (Estefanos 2016) that Eritrean exiles who resisted the regime had hoped that the arrival of 366 coffins in Asmara would start a revolution, as it would make visible the fact that so many young people were attempting to flee the country. However, the regime-friendly diasporic Eritrean community in Italy soon reframed the return of the coffins. They claimed that the disaster was a result of Western countries and exiled Eritrean opposition groups luring young Eritreans into making the dangerous journey. Regime-friendly Eritreans had shouted at Meron Estefanos and Mussie Zerai at the “state funeral” in Agrigento in 2013 (which survivors had been prevented from attending) and blamed the two human rights advocates for the disaster.
The regime-friendly Eritrean community in Italy published a declaration before the first anniversary of the disaster that called for commemorative activities across the country to prevent opposition forces from taking “ownership of our tragedy for purposes offensive to the dignity of our dead or hostile to our beloved nation (Eritrean community in Italy 2014).”2 The dead, this declaration claimed, were “the victims of a secret policy of the West” that “deceived youth” and “traded on humans” to “monopolize Eritrean land and resources” (Eritrean community in Italy 2014).
The oppositional Eritrean diasporic publication Awate framed the memory differently:
Eritreans all over the world will observe a day of remembrance for the victims of Lampedusa. . . . [Those fleeing Eritrea] will die and suffer as long as the repressive Eritrean regime is in power; as long as the ruling party enslaves the people and monopolizes the economy; as long as an unelected leader continues his brigandage and runs Eritrea as a military garrison. As long as the youth are kept in endless servitude, and as long as citizens are denied basic freedoms, Eritreans will flee away from their country and face great risks in the process. (Awate 2014)
According to the opposition, the repressive Eritrean regime had forced the youth to flee and risk their lives and was therefore responsible for the disaster. Specific forms of repression were cited, such as the unpaid labor and indefinite national service required by the regime. The term “victims of Lampedusa” that is used in the text (as opposed to “victims of the disaster in Lampedusa”) shows how familiar the disaster is to the Eritrean diaspora. The word “Lampedusa” alone signifies the disaster.
The survivors of the disaster also hold a variety of views regarding the regime in Eritrea. Some identify as part of the opposition, while others are not politically active or are ambivalent about the regime. They might also hold a combination of both critical and understanding views. It can be difficult to distinguish between economic, religious, social, and political reasons for leaving the country because the regime controls all spheres of life.
Most of the survivors do not want to speak publicly against the regime, even if they privately hold critical opinions. Some fear exposing their family in Eritrea or Ethiopia to the risk of persecution or harassment. Others do not want to jeopardize future visits to Eritrea. As long as they pay the required 2 percent “Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Tax” on all income since escaping the country and sign a “Letter of Regret,” visiting Eritrea is technically possible, though there is still danger of reprisal from the military. Remaining silent about politics also makes it easier to navigate the Eritrean diaspora in Europe, which includes different political generations. Many of those who fled Eritrea during the war of independence (1961–1991) formed a nationalist identity at a distance—a group that Tricia Redeker Hepner (2009) calls “generation nationalism.” During the war, they financially supported the liberation forces, and it has been hard for them to believe that the liberators have since turned oppressors. However, like the recent arrivals, the older diaspora is also divided, and dissenting views are common (Proglio 2020, 45; Hirt and Mohammad 2018). In Victoria Bernal’s (2017, 25) terms Eritrean diasporic subjects belong to “a political community under siege, rather than simply sharing cultural affinities or native origins.”
Public Feelings at the Disaster Site
While Porta d’Europa became the memory site where survivors verbally articulated their claims and negotiated their relationships with other agents, such as the coast guard and the Comitato 3 ottobre, the site of the disaster itself became a significant memory site for nonverbal performances of public feelings. For the survivors, going to the disaster site at sea is a strong existential experience. As part of the anniversary commemorations, survivors and relatives board the vessels of the Guardia di Finanza, Guardia Costiera, and Carabinieri to go to the shipwreck site. Paradoxically, the survivors are transported on the boats of the institutions they criticize—the institutions that control the border and, from their perspective, mismanaged the rescue.
In 2015, I joined journalists, academics, and humanitarian workers on a Carabinieri boat. When we reached the site of the shipwreck, the vessels turned down their engines, formed a circle and by doing so, created a symbolic memorial site. Isola dei gonigli, Rabbit Island, seemed so close that I thought I could swim there. From our vessel we had a direct view of the group of survivors on the Guardia di Finanza vessel who threw a wreath of yellow flowers into the sea. I could hear the survivors cry; two men collapsed to their knees.
FIGURE 16. Memorial ceremony at the disaster site. © Karina Horsti, 2017. Photo by Karina Horsti.
Seeing the emotional reactions of the survivors affected me. Being with the embodied witnesses of the disaster in the place where it happened created a particular emotional knowledge of the disaster. Diana Taylor (2011, 272–73) has argued for the use of “presence” as an active verb (as in Spanish, presenciar) as a means to produce understanding of violent events. One can never experience or fully know another person’s experience. However, being with the witness in the place of events, seeing the sites where violence took place and the embodied feelings and reactions of revisiting the place and the memory can produce knowledge through embodied listening, through “presencing.” “I participate not in the events but in his transmission of the affect emanating from the events,” Taylor (2011, 273) writes in the context of “presencing” the testimony of a torture victim in Villa Grimaldi, Chile.
A month after being at the disaster site, I mentioned this episode to a focus group of survivors. Adal Neguse had helped me organize the session. I wanted to know how the survivors felt about the expression of emotions in public, a situation they had all experienced in Lampedusa. In addition to the traditional analysis of media representation, I wanted to develop a method of “refracting the analytical gaze” (Horsti 2020). This methodological practice is predicated on two obligations of the scholar: first, to open a nonjudgmental and receptive space where knowledge can be produced through collaborative conversation; and second to open a space in the moment of coanalysis (Horsti 2020, 148–49).
I showed press photographs taken from the docks of Lampedusa in 2013 when the coffins were transported to Sicily. Among them was a photograph of the grieving woman who had thrown herself on her brother’s coffin (see chapter 2). Adal and three survivors together analyzed these mediated scenes of grief. They told me that they had been aware of being filmed during the ritual at the disaster site. In fact, this was an issue they had discussed extensively, even before the first anniversary in Lampedusa, in their closed Facebook group. Some of the survivors had been concerned that their grief would be politicized and instrumentalized for various Eritrean or European political purposes. One survivor in the focus group said that he had avoided cameras in Lampedusa. But the others wanted to express their feelings in public, in order “to remember our brothers and sisters who left us on that terrible journey,” as one of them put it.
By the time the focus group discussed the scene on the Guardia di Finanza boat in 2015, the survivors had been living in Sweden for almost two years, and they understood why I was curious about their expression of emotions in public and that it seemed different from the more reserved Nordic manner. To make his point about the difference in cultural expressions in general, one of the survivors picked up his phone and searched for an English-language meme that read: “Waiting for a bus like a Swede.” In the picture, six people stand in the snow by the side of a road, with several meters between each of them. This, he said, contrasted with “our culture.” “I am proud of the custom we have in our culture that we come together to mourn the dead and to comfort others. It’s a good thing,” he said, underlining that grief could be proudly displayed in public.
The loud crying on the boat was a result of genuine feeling, not a “fake” expression, each of the survivors assured me. But it was, nevertheless, a conscious performance of emotion. It was directed not only at the “European” public but also, at least by some, at the Eritrean regime and the regime-friendly diasporic public. Some of the survivors were convinced that the deaths had resulted from the actions of both European governments and institutions and the Eritrean regime that abused the human rights of its people. The survivors explained that in Eritrea, they would not have been able to publicly grieve a person who had fled the country. “The regime in Eritrea does not want the world to know of such incidents [as the shipwreck], and therefore they prohibit public commemoration,” one of the survivors said. They told me of two examples they had heard about from relatives in Eritrea. After the disaster, the Eritrean regime had ordered soldiers to guard the Martyrs Cemetery in Asmara to prevent large groups of people from gathering there to mourn the deaths publicly. Police had also removed public death notices for the victims of the October 3 disaster. Another survivor said: “When you look at it from a political point of view, we do these commemorative ceremonies together in exile in the memory of those who died during their escape because we didn’t have the right to do so in Eritrea.” Performing emotions publicly was a freedom the survivors had gained in Europe, and they wanted to show that to the publics that would be witnessing their grief through the media.
Personal and Collective Grief
Solomon Gebrehiwet is a survivor from Sweden whom I first met in Lampedusa in 2015. He is in his twenties and always stylishly dressed. In Eritrea, he had worked as a DJ for a short time while still in school, but then the state had conscripted him in the national service as a mechanic. In Sweden, Solomon drives a bus between two small towns and enjoys occasional weekend getaways, dancing in a nightclub on the overnight ferry that runs between Finland and Sweden. He spoke openly about his reasons to flee the indefinite national service conscription. It was for freedom, he said. “I was not free in my country. I don’t want to live isolated from family and the society. [And w]hen you are oppressed and subjugated, you hate life,” he said in 2016.
For Solomon, the experience of the commemorative ceremony at the disaster site had been different each year because his public role there had varied. His experience reflects the interconnections between the intimate and public spheres of commemoration, and the ways in which he has both performed public emotions and been influenced by the emotions of others. The first time he participated in an anniversary commemoration in Lampedusa was in 2015. Solomon had prepared for the boat journey to the disaster site by writing a poem, which he read aloud aboard the vessel, in Tigrinya. Another survivor filmed the reading at sea, and Solomon showed the video to me later. Although the Guardia Costiera boat had stopped alongside the other boats, the engine was audible in the background of the video. Solomon held the text in his hand and recited in a loud, clear voice:
That time,
It was horrible, the day turned dark.
You tore them from my arms and dumped them, you sea!
You should have known who they were and the problems they had.
You just swallowed them down, young and old.
Even though they came to you, you swallowed them.
You should have known their problems and become a bridge instead.
Grief has become a habit in our family.
Before the mourning ends, it is renewed by other sorrows.
As always, mother has been robbed of her children, those young children who didn’t live long enough.
They were the hope for the future but now they ceased to exist.
Before doomsday’s arrival, have we faced our own doomsday?
I would cry so many tears if I could have you back.
May you live in heaven forever, it is your compensation.
May you live in heaven forever, it is your compensation.
(Excerpt from Solomon Gebrehiwet’s poem, 2015, translated by Adal Neguse)
The poem begins with Solomon’s personal memory, “you tore them from my arms,” referring to the moment when he was no longer able to hold on to a small boy, whom he had held throughout the journey, and to the boy’s mother. Solomon had taken care of the woman and the boy since meeting them on the smuggling route in Sudan, protecting them by pretending to be the woman’s husband. Before boarding the smugglers’ boat, she had taken sleeping pills because she was afraid of the journey. Incapacitated by the medication, she drowned along with her son. In the poem, this memory is implied, but in other instances later Solomon has talked about the woman and her son directly, for example, in the documentary film Remembering Lampedusa (2019) and in Eritrean diasporic media (Tekle 2020). In the middle of the poem, Solomon moves from personal grief to addressing the broader social experience of Eritreans: “Grief has become a habit in our family.” State violence, indefinite national service, recurring war operations, and the young who disappear or die along perilous escape routes are permanent sources of distress for many Eritreans. The “family” and the “mother” in the poem could refer to the Eritrean people collectively. In addition to “grief becoming a habit” because of the present-day suffering in Eritrea and when fleeing Eritrea, the poem can also be understood to refer to the decades of collective Eritrean suffering.
When I discussed the recurring theme in the memorialization of the disaster in Eritrean diasporic media—a mother who loses her children—Hadnet Tesfalom who in 2020 translated some of the materials for me explained how the tragic figure of an Eritrean mother who “sacrificed a son or a daughter for the nation,” ade swue (the mother of a martyr), has been essential in remembering wars among Eritreans. The sacrificial mother evokes sympathy like nothing else, Hadnet said. It is also central in the Orthodox Christianity in the figure of Mary.
The Eritrean War of Independence (1961–1991) and the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (1998–2000) are known for the brutal massacres they entailed. However, those war losses have not been publicly dealt with as individual losses of life. Victoria Bernal (2014, 7, 27–29) has described the aftermath of the wars against Ethiopia as “sacrificial citizenship”: personal losses and horror have been silenced by the nationalist discourse that treats the war dead as “martyrs” or “heroes” (see also Ayalew Mengiste 2017, 48–49). Citizenship is expressed through sacrifice to the nation: Isaias Afwerki, the regime leader, urges mothers to celebrate rather than mourn their children who have been killed in the war, for example (Bernal 2017, 30).
In Solomon’s poem, the personal and broader social experiences of the suffering of the Eritrean people are entangled in a way that is emblematic of the idea of Eritrean collective suffering. The poem articulates personal experiences of loss; however, these personal feelings and memories are intertwined with the collective suffering of the Eritrean people.
Solomon continued with this combination of the private and the collective in a new memorial poem that he published in his public Facebook profile on October 3, 2020. Because of the pandemic he did not go to Lampedusa but commemorated the disaster in the Eritrean diasporic online media sphere. In the second poem, Solomon creates a parallel between the disaster and the Eritrean-Ethiopian border war (1998–2000) by referring to Badme, the border town that was central in the conflict.
Oh mother, how bad is your luck.
Even though you are a mother, you became childless.
Badme and the sea, one at a time.
Before she was comforted enough, the second grief caught up with her.
(Excerpt from Solomon Gebrehiwet’s poem,
2020, translated by Adal Neguse)
In the first poem, written in 2015, Solomon does not explicitly oppose the regime—it is not clear what the “problems they had” are and he blames the sea for the killing. In the second poem, five years after, he has become more outspoken in his criticism of the regime. He criticizes it for an undignified treatment of the dead and their family members because the Eritrean regime has not made the burial of the dead in Eritrea possible. Later in the poem, he writes: “You denied them the dignity of resting in peace in their country.”
Solomon’s public reading of his first poem in Tigrinya onboard the coast guard vessel while the official ceremony was conducted in Italian illustrates how intimate and personal memories as well as collective memories of a minority can find a space within public and spectacular commemorations orchestrated by the majority. Solomon carved out an alternative commemorative space in which he expressed his personal emotions and memories and the conflict inherent in survival, in living on with the memory of the boy slipping from his arms. The poem was for the dead, but also for his fellow survivors, and through the spontaneous filming and mediation of Solomon’s reading, the poem found its way to the Eritrean diasporic public.
The next time Solomon went to the disaster site, in 2017, he represented the survivors’ community in a ceremony in which he threw a wreath into the water with the president of the Italian Senate, Pietro Grasso. Solomon reflected on the experience in an interview:
Yesterday was very hard, particularly when we went to the place of remembrance. The whole experience, from the moment the boats started to move off the docks together to when we reached the destination. . . . To see the whole process, the movement of the boats side by side, and to see so many people attending—it just makes you feel different. Everything comes back; the feeling of the moment of the disaster returns. Placing the flowers with the president [of the Senate Pietro Grasso] was also very hard. I couldn’t control my emotions. And I couldn’t help it—the tears came, my head hurt, and I couldn’t stand anymore. I had to sit on the deck, and I let the sorrow come out.3
The combination of the social and the spectacular in the ritual—the movement of the military police, customs, and the coast guard vessels side by side, the officers in their uniforms and the throngs of people attending—created “a different feeling,” the kind of aura that commemorative rituals are designed to produce. This began to intensify when the boats left the dock and culminated in the moment when Solomon released his emotions in public, after the wreath had been thrown into the sea. Everyone’s attention was on him and the president of the Senate. Knowing that others were witnessing his grief and his experience of “everything returning” was meaningful for Solomon. It amplified his experience and made him conscious of the publicness of the survivors’ expressions of grief. When in the interview he described “letting his sorrow out,” it was not a story of losing control or somehow failing in his responsibility as a representative of those who had lost loved ones or survived. On the contrary, he was very sure about his public feelings.
When I had asked about the meaning of public emotions in the focus group interview in 2015, the survivors had emphasized that the emotions were “real.” But it is critical to understand that they emerge in a specific context: the date, the disaster site, the company of other survivors, the large boats, and the crowds of people help create the aura of commemoration. The emergence of public emotions is social, situated, and contextual. And while the emotions are “real,” the survivors were clearly aware of and very articulate about the fact that public emotions could be utilized, and that they themselves could make use of those emotions. The sharing of emotions by the group of survivors and performing them while being filmed or photographed by the European media or diasporic Eritreans produced additional value. Public emotions produced a sense of community among survivors and mourners that was significant for developing critical politics targeting both the Eritrean regime and the European governments that have created the deadly border. This aspect of public emotions is akin to Sara Ahmed’s (2004) notion of affective economies. She has argued that emotions “do things” by aligning and binding individuals with (though also against) others and that they produce affective capital through circulation and repetition. The two functions of memorializing—the therapeutic and the instrumental—are therefore not separate, but intertwined.
Mediation of Rituals in the Eritrean Diasporic Public Sphere
On October 3, 2018, Solomon Gebrehiwet spoke on behalf of the survivors at Porta d’Europa and in a panel discussion with representatives of humanitarian and religious organizations. As in previous years, the survivors had had a discussion upon arrival in Lampedusa about what their public “message” would be. They had made a collective decision, which they told me was unanimous. Solomon was to create awareness of the suffering of refugees detained in Libya.
On the march to Porta d’Europa, Solomon took up a style of protest common in Eritrean diasporic resistance against the regime. He shouted slogans in Tigrinya, and the others responded, echoing back the same line. “Justice for our brothers in Libya! Justice for our African brothers! Many of them die every day! Remembering is not enough! Journalists, you must report on our brothers suffering in Libya! Italy, it’s not right to turn back those who are coming! You have to help those who suffer!” The protest slogans amplified the collective voice and emotional energy of the Eritrean Europeans. Tareke Brhane translated the slogans for the Italian journalists who accompanied the march. Solomon walked at the head of the procession, and like the other survivors, he held in his hand a postcard featuring the photographs of eighty-four victims. It was the memorial object that the Italian lay Catholic Sant’Egidio community had produced in 2014 and since reprinted (as discussed in chapter 3). By holding the picture of the victims, Solomon and his protest gained strength from their legacy, calling attention to the suffering of living refugees in the names of those who had died.
After the ritual at Porta d’Europa, Solomon shifted his focus to the Eritrean diasporic public. He began livestreaming on Facebook when the boats left the dock to head to the disaster site. The audience that followed him to the disaster site through social media was sizable. I watched the video three hours later, and by then it had had 3,900 viewers and 65 shares; by January 30, 2019, there had been 18,000 views, 141 shares, and 348 comments. The real-time comments and the more than 300 comments posted later below the video on the Facebook page are mostly emojis that communicate grief: crying faces and broken hearts. Some have added messages, such as “R.I.P.” and the common Eritrean condolence in Tigrinya, amlak byemanu yiqebelom (May God receive you in heaven). Almost all of those who reacted to the video have Eritrean or Ethiopian names.
Until the moment the wreath is thrown into the sea, the video runs like report-age, with Solomon Gebrehiwet in the role of reporter. He interviews other survivors and explains the scene to the audience. His mobile phone then changes hands, and we see him participating in the commemorative rituals. He speaks Tigrinya and addresses the audience as Eritreans. First, he asks Adhanom Rezene, “What would you like to say, Adhanom?” Adhanom responds by inviting the Eritrean diaspora, “particularly those in Europe,” to join them in Lampedusa next year. “We should make a memorial, a monument—the survivors and other Eritreans together,” Adhanom announces. Solomon turns the phone’s camera onto himself and repeats that they need Eritreans’ help to build the memorial and commemorate the disaster together. He shows the postcard with the victims’ photos, noting that they do not have pictures of all the victims. “Please send more,” Solomon urges the audience.
When the boats arrive at the disaster site, Adhanom’s voice becomes somber and his words come out slowly: “Look, this is the exact place. The boats are circling the site. It is here.” Solomon recounts that they were in the water for four or five hours and that “366 lives—no, it was 368” lives that were lost, “and not only Eritreans, but also Ethiopians. This is where we capsized. It was here that we lost our beloved ones.” The phone’s camera is focused on the blue sea before moving to show the boats on the other side of the circle. Solomon reports that the Eritreans on the other boat are yehwatna (our brothers and sisters), who had recently arrived from Libya. Unlike in previous years, in 2018, the authorities allowed newly rescued Eritrean refugees to leave the reception center and participate in the commemorations.4
Before they came to this ceremony at sea, Solomon says, the survivors talked to the Italian authorities about the situation of refugees detained in Libya. “It is important to come to Lampedusa to commemorate, but it is even more important to help those refugees who are alive and suffering in Libya. We are doing our best. We are meeting our responsibility,” Solomon says in Tigrinya.
The video continues with an Italian pastor reciting a prayer through a loudspeaker; then eight survivors and relatives of the victims form a V-shape with its point at the railing of the ship. The survivors themselves had planned this choreography. They take their time positioning themselves; the two in the center hold a wreath of orange and white flowers high in their arms, holding the pose for a few minutes. A Syrian man who had lost a son in another disaster (that of October 11, 2013) films the ceremony with his phone. Solomon has given his phone to someone else and joined the others in the formation. He says, in a more solemn voice, that they will now lay the flowers. Then he stops talking, no one talks, the flowers are held in the air, pictures are taken, and sobbing is barely audible in the video. The two survivors throw the flowers into the water, and the rest release the V-formation and lean on the railing to watch and film the wreath as it moves farther from the vessel.
The way in which the survivors choreographed their performance on the vessel, with the intention of being photographed and filmed, demonstrates that their act of commemoration was intended to be public and mediated. The formation of bodies in a specific shape and the holding of the flowers created a commemorative aura and dignified the moment that culminated in the throwing of the wreath. The wreath was held high in the middle, and a roughly equal number of people stood to each side—arranged so that each of them was visible to those who filmed the ritual. In this collective experience of returning to the disaster site and taking group photographs, filming, and being live on Facebook, they reestablished and strengthened the community of mourners. The V-formation included not only survivors, but also victims’ relatives who had not been on the journey themselves. There was no difference between those who were survivors and those who were relatives; as a community of mourners, they were united. In the photographing practice, the survivors and relatives communicated a sense of site-specific presence (we are here in this memory site) and a sense of solidarity (we remember together).
The representatives of the humanitarian and religious organizations and the Guardia Costiera stand separated from the survivors, highlighting the centrality of the Eritrean community experience. By the time the wreath is thrown, the other vessels that had made up the circle of boats have started to return to the port. The mayor of Lampedusa had thrown his wreath of flowers into the water much earlier, and the other fishing boats, like the one I was on, followed the mayor’s boat back to shore. The prayers on the survivors’ boat had taken more time, as had getting all the survivors and relatives into position for the wreath-throwing ritual.
I watched Solomon’s video with Adal in Stockholm a month after the anniversary ceremony. He translated for me what was said in Tigrinya, but he was also interested in observing and commenting on the ritual, which he had participated in himself on three previous occasions. Adal identified a major change in the ceremony: in earlier years, Italian politics had been at the center, he said. But now, the survivors did what they wanted on their own terms. There was no political authority, not even the president of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta, who had been at Giusi Nicolini’s side during the mourning rituals in 2013, as well as at the 2015 commemoration when no political authority from Rome had accepted the invitation to participate. The new mayor of Lampedusa, Salvatore Martello, was a longtime leader of the fishermen’s association and had decided to attend the commemoration at the site of the disaster on a fishing boat instead of on the Guardia Costiera boat. In an interview with me in 2017, Martello said that he had not liked “the elitist feeling” the ceremony had had during Nicolini’s term, when it had centered on the institutional rescuers and high-profile guests from Rome and Brussels. The locals had criticized Nicolini for the national and international visibility she had gained through the topic of migration and for her assumed lack of focus on local issues. Martello did not aspire to politics beyond his constituency. He invited the fishermen and anyone else who wanted to join the commemoration to get on their boats.
In 2018, the change in local politics and the fact that Italy’s national leaders no longer were keen on taking part in the ceremony created an opportunity for the survivors and victims’ relatives to take more control. There were no Italian television crews filming the proceedings, as had been the case in previous years when politicians had been on board. Nevertheless, as the number of Solomon’s Facebook viewers suggests, the ceremony was not without a mediated public. The focus of the ceremony and its mediation was solely on the survivors, the family members, and their diasporic publics.
The interplay between memorial sites and rituals that I have explored throughout this chapter shows how the two kinds of memory that Diana Taylor (2003) has theorized as archive and repertoire intersect: memorials invite performances and rituals. Rituals are often thought to be ephemeral, whereas monuments seem to carry a memory across time. However, the photographs and videos of the memorializations carried out by the survivors and family members have become digital memory objects that circulate in the Eritrean diaspora’s social networks. Solomon Gebrehiwet’s Facebook livestream has reached thousands of viewers who have been able to see and share the choreographed wreath-throwing at the disaster site. Rather than being an archival memory in the sense of a memory held in a specific static place (like an archive in a museum), these digital memory objects continue to circulate in mediated social networks.
Andrew Hoskins (2009) has argued for the term “network memory,” meaning that in the digital age, archival memory has been replaced by a more fluid data that flows through networks. Digital memory objects are therefore shared and stored in a complex transnational network. Who finds what related to the Lampedusa disaster from the digital network memory depends on algorithms and the network structure. Digital memory objects (such as digital photographs of the wreath) are more fluid than physical objects (such as the wreath itself): they cross borders and can be reframed, multiplied, appropriated, and shared more easily. However, the digital world is regulated both by human and automated connectivities. Algorithms, popularity, and social connections determine accessibility to and the compass of the vast material circulating online (Papacharissi 2010, 164; Van Dijck 2013, 13, 26). Mediated rituals, such as the reading of Solomon Gebrehiwet’s poem, the speeches at Porta d’Europa, the throwing of the wreath, and the sharing of digital memory objects create a transnational site for the production of a collective diasporic memory.
Survivor Citizenship
In this chapter, I have explored how survivors have negotiated their role and made their claims visible in performances of memorialization. In 2014, when I observed the first anniversary commemoration, it seemed to me that the survivors’ role was to produce authenticity for the memorial rituals for the benefit of Italian interests. However, when I got to know the survivors and began to listen to them and analyze the rituals and memorials with them, I began to see their agency and sociality. The complexity and ambiguity of the relationships between the survivors and the different European agents taking part in the commemorations also began to surface. Through memorialization, the survivors have played the role of stereotypical grateful refugees, but they have also defied the expectation that they would remain in that role. The survivors have simultaneously accepted and resisted the presence of the coast guard and militarized border agents at the commemorations. They have simultaneously agreed to carry out their commemorations on Guardia Costiera and Guardia di Finanza vessels alongside their uniformed crews at the same time as they have refused to offer them their gratitude. They have interjected their own politics into the commemoration—their personal memories, political manifestations of Eritrean diasporic politics, and disaster-specific claims about the identification and burial of the dead. They have sought justice for the dead and for the families of the dead. They have made claims for the right to flee oppression and seek protection. Some of these claims for rights have aligned with those of European actors in the commemorations, but others have not resonated with European ideas of refugee-ness.
In terms of Engin Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (Isin 2008, 17; 2009; Isin and Nielsen 2008) the survivors act as citizens, they perform “acts of citizenship,” despite their legal citizenship status. “They constitute themselves as those with ‘the right to claim rights’” (Isin 2009, 371). This concept is similar to Étienne Balibar’s notion of “civility” as he argues for a right to access human rights not on the basis of formal citizenship status but on the basis of happening to be “thrown together” by history and economy with other people and groups. Citizenship, for Balibar, means civility: “an active and collective civil process, rather than a simple legal status” (Balibar 2004, 132).
Nevertheless, rather than a linear process, the survivors’ acts of citizenship have been a circuit in which different elements are in constant interaction. Claiming rights entails “responsibilizing” the self (Isin and Nielsen 2008, 1): making oneself responsible for and capable of taking action. There are two crucial interlinked elements in the circuit that forms “survivor citizenship,” a position from which one is capable of taking action: moral responsibility and group identity. These are in constant interaction with one another and with the acts of memorialization—both verbal and nonverbal—that claim rights.
Regardless of their legal status, the survivors of the Lampedusa disaster have acted as cultural citizens of Europe. Importantly, this is a transformative kind of European citizenship. It stretches across various European nation-states that produce the deadly border that they resist—often the same nation-states that have protected them from the oppression of the Eritrean regime. The ambivalent status of Europe, the empire that on the one hand produces disasters and on the other hand protects from suffering, is reflected in the survivors’ ambiguous relationship with the European agents and individuals present at the commemorations in Lampedusa. The figures of the grateful and ungrateful refugee intertwine in their performances.
In the Lampedusa disaster, public memorialization has been a symbolically powerful site and practice through which the survivors have made political and social claims for the rights of refugees, both dead and living. They have done so through two kinds of public acts: First, there have been verbal articulations such as speeches, conversations and interviews, prayers, poems, songs, protest shouts, and self-made signs. Second, they have made claims through nonverbal performances such as walking, praying, and choreographing the rituals at Porta d’Europa and the disaster site in which the display of emotions in public has been central. Survivor citizenship is about both acting politically and finding an existential security about being the one who lives on.
Constituting a subjectivity that I have termed survivor citizenship—responsibilizing oneself as a survivor—started before the border crossing and continued to evolve afterward. Those who left Eritrea did so knowing the risks; they risked their lives in order to survive. The Isaias Afwerki regime had annihilated their social, cultural, and political life in Eritrea, and for many, escaping the country to migrate was a means of survival (see also Perl 2016; Betts 2013, 5). The migrants had acted upon their “right to have rights” (Arendt 1951/1973), and after the disaster, some of those who survived acted as citizens of Europe, despite their lack of formal citizenship status.
Solomon reflected on his decision to act publicly by talking about the disaster:
There are people who blacken my name, and even though everyone doesn’t like what we say, we should not gloss over history. Someone needs to take a stance and talk about the tragedies Eritreans are going through. When I’m talking about my brothers and sisters, when I’m talking to the Eritrean people, I’m doing it because others are not. I should be lucky because I can speak on behalf of others. (Gebrehiwet in Global Yiakl 2020)
Acting upon that responsibility entails a specific relation to power: a person or a group must feel powerful enough to act. Solomon says he is “lucky” to have the capacity to speak. Survivors of the disaster generated the capacity and power for acting out of their sense of responsibility by performing public emotions and embodied movements together.
The sites of the survivors’ acts were also central for creating survivor citizenship, with scenes of memorialization, including the memorials created by “Europeans,” shaping survivors’ memorialization practices. Furthermore, the publics that were present at the rituals helped produce what I have called a commemorative aura. For example, for Solomon, the presence of large military and coast guard vessels, uniformed officers, and throngs of people produced a “different feeling” than at other types of memorializations. In addition, the mediated presence of both “European” publics and the Eritrean diaspora generated a sense of publicness for the performances, which the survivors were aware of and took into consideration. There was also, perhaps, the expectation that one performs the role of responsible survivor.
Survivors’ ambiguous relationship with Europe demonstrates how survivor citizenship not only depends on the willingness and agency of survivors but is also carried out within a certain framework of expectations and limitations. Survivor citizenship is constructed in a relationship, and not only between the survivors and European states, but also with others in the civil sphere, including the Eritrean diaspora. Survivor citizenship opens platforms and space in both the European public sphere and the diasporic public sphere where one can be heard. This form of citizenship, while enabling in one way, is in other ways limiting. First, a diasporic citizenship in which the sacrificial element (Bernal 2014) is central must be negotiated in relation to identification based on survival. This diasporic citizenship can be contradictory to survivor citizenship. Leaving Eritrea “illegally” can be perceived in the diasporic community and in Eritrea as defying expectations regarding sacrifice to the state. Nonetheless, the regime expects sacrifice for the community and the state even after an “illegal exit.” Through its long-arm diaspora governance, Eritrea controls the lives of everyone in its diaspora.
Second, public identification as a survivor-citizen may limit one’s role in the community and political agency as a European. Such identification does not necessarily allow in-betweenness, for subjectification as an “almost survivor” or “not-quite survivor.” In chapter 8, my analysis of survivors’ testimonies will show how survival is ambiguous and a process. The position as a survivor from which one can make public acts of citizenship is not necessarily a certain or permanent condition.
In the context of the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Adriana Petryna (2013, xxv) has developed the notion of biological citizenship, a subjectivity that the survivors of the nuclear disaster had to produce in order to access compensation and medical care. Sickness and citizenship fused together as survivors had to remake themselves as “recognized sufferers of the state.” This biological citizenship has not been available to everyone who suffers physical symptoms, however. On the one hand, biological citizenship is a limited resource. On the other hand, some survivors hide their symptoms and avoid being classified as Chernobyl victims.
In the case of the Lampedusa disaster, public identification and recognition of survivorship has given survivors access to a position in which they are invited to play public roles in commemorations and to speak through words, gestures, and emotions. However, while some Lampedusa survivors have created a subject position of survivor citizenship as a means to continue their life after the disaster, this was not an option for everyone. In the commemorations, there were always some survivors who did not step up on the bunker at Porta d’Europa, who did not wear the identical T-shirts, and who stood instead among the audience. Public identification as a survivor of a disaster at the border is not easy. As Solomon noted, those who become public figures as survivor citizens receive unwanted attention. They are seen as perpetual victims and objects of pity, but they also face hate—they are blamed for not doing enough for those who died or for risking their own lives and escaping Eritrea. These are issues survivors must cope with as they live on after the disaster.
In the next chapter, I continue to discuss survivors’ survival, but change my perspective from public performance and engagement to a more intimate level. Acting out of responsibility can sometimes be the result of a personal feeling of guilt, and public actions, such as those performed in annual commemorations, may function as compensation or atonement. In the commemorations, the survivors as a group did not identify their feelings of guilt with culpability: there was no sense that they were guilty because of what they had done or not done, or that they would absolve their guilt by memorializing. However, feelings of shame and regret did emerge in the personal interviews I examine in the next chapter.