Too distant shores: the Strait of Gibraltar and the space of exception

Abstract

Focusing on The Sheep and the Whale (Le mouton et la baleine, 2001) by Moroccan-Canadian playwright Ahmed Ghazali, this essay examines political and ethical issues concerning human migration from Africa to Europe. The play's representation of human rights abuses in the Strait of Gibraltar and the dilemmas facing illegal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers will be situated in relation to current debates about the state of exception and the new forms of neo-liberal governmentality employed under the conditions of globalisation. In one way, Ghazali's drama pays homage to those trying to enter Fortress Europe – and specifically to the nameless young African bodies washed up on the shores of southern Spain. It attempts, in part, to exorcise the unspoken violence of these people's deaths in what has become a vast African cemetery, while prompting us to ask what can be done in order to reduce the death toll in the Gibraltar Strait.

Keywords:

• asylum
• Strait of Gibraltar
• human rights
• state of exception
• Agamben

Notes

1. Salcedo's work is entitled Shibboleth after a Hebrew word that was used to separate the ‘inferior’ Ephraimites from the ‘superior’ Gileadites after the Old Testament's bloodiest massacre. Once 42,000 Ephraimites had been all but slaughtered, the few remaining refugees attempted to cross the river Jordan but were unable to pronounce the ‘sh’ of the password, shibboleth, and so too were slain.

2. The Sheep and the Whale (Le mouton et la baleine, 2001) premiered at the Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal on 15 January 2001. Its English-language premiere at Passe Muraille in Toronto on 13 February 2007 was co-produced by Cahoots Theatre Projects and Modern Times Stage Company and directed by Soheil Parsa. The play was awarded the SACD French-language Playwriting Prize in 2001.

3. A fuller account of these complexities is beyond the scope of my essay; for an excellent collection of articles dealing with the social geography of migration and consequent cultural encounters in the Mediterranean region, see King (2001).

4. In Teatro Nomad's emotive performance, Las Sin Tierra – 7 Attempted Crossings of the Straits of Gibraltar (2004), Africa appears as a fleet of small, never-ending pateras bound north, underscoring the boats’ fragility as well as alluding to representations of Africa on Spanish television. See http://rociosolis.com/teatro/index.php (accessed 17 October 2007).

5. Carling argues for the use of ‘unauthorised’ instead of more popular terms like ‘illegal’, ‘irregular’ and ‘undocumented’. He notes that ‘[u]nauthorized entry is legitimate under the 1951 Geneva Convention when it is done for the purpose of seeking asylum. Migration can therefore be “unauthorized” without being illegal’ (2007, 6).

6. Governments in the USA and Australia have also increasingly turned to interception of potential asylum seekers at sea. On the theatricalisation of this policy in the Australian context, see Gilbert and Lo (2007, chapter 7).

7. Later in the play we find out that one of the drowned is a woman.

8. See, for example, Tawfiq al-Hakim's A Bird from the East (1938), Yahya Haqqi's The Lamp of Umm Hashim (1944), and Tayeb Salih's famous novel, Season of Migration to the North (1969).

9. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Europa is beguiled by Zeus in the guise of a snow-white bull. As Luisa Passerini (1999) demonstrates, the myth itself has a very long history of literary and visual representation.

10. See Modern Times Stage Company website: http://www.moderntimesstage.com/moreinfo/sheep_frame.htm (accessed 30 November 2006).

11. Benhabib notes that according to Directive 109, ‘third-country nationals can acquire “long-term residency” status after five years in their host countries; the directive also recommends that they be entitled to a “bundle of rights and duties” commensurate with those of citizens’ (2007, 462).