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Abstract
Legal, literary and visual archives are replete with absent pirates. It is remarkable how often the pirate is only partly delineated or seen from a distance, is ghostly, or plotted off-stage. These figurations variously nerve and unnerve imperial discourses and narratives of justice. This paper addresses some recent, fictional non-representations of ‘the Somali pirate’. I propose that this absenting of the pirate is critical to the texts’ various approaches or reproaches to justice. I further suggest that these fictions are concerned with an ethics of proximity – of physical space and geographical affect – that exceeds the primacy and virtue of ‘justice’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I have in mind books like The Bahrain Conspiracy (2010) by Bentley Gates, Fair Game (2011) by Stephen Leather, The Pirate Hunters (2010) by Mack Maloney, The Pirates of Aden by Daniel Rasic (2011), The Delta Solution (2012) by Patrick Robinson, as well as titles by more well-known authors: Elmore Leonard's Djibouti (2010), Stella Rimington's Rip Tide (2012) and Wilbur Smith's Those in Peril (2012).
2. This formulation appears across case law traditions, and shadows current international law and national legislative definitions. Generally see Alfred P. Rubin's The Law of Piracy (1998).
3. Classically, universal jurisdiction allows any state to claim jurisdiction over an accused, regardless of their nationality or the territory in which the alleged crime occurred. It was, arguably, brought into being by piracy, although it now – again, arguably – arises in other situations. See Luc Reydams Universal Jurisdiction: International and Municipal Legal Perspectives (2004). Whether the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) simply allows or actively requires a state to exercise universal jurisdiction over pirates is a moot point, and one that absorbed the Kenyan courts and government in relation to the case of In Re Mohamud Mohamed Dashi and eight Others (2009) eKLR.
4. The phrase hostis humani generis marks not just the limits of the law, but the boundary between the political and the legal. One of the less exploited ironies in the recent and intensive turn of legal philosophers to the work of Carl Schmitt is to be found in his obscure 1937 essay on submarines and the law of piracy. Here, the lawyer of the Reich argues that the proposed characterisation of the U-boat as piratical by the allied powers involves an unacceptably political expansion and consolidation of the meaning of ‘all humanity', exceeding given international legal principles. See Heller-Roazen and Schmitt, “The Concept of Piracy”.
5. Standard marine insurance contracts characterise piracy as a ‘peril of the sea', equating it with natural forces. See Passman, “Interpreting Sea Piracy Clauses in Marine Insurance Contracts”.
6. Piracy off the coast of Somalia rose in 2005, peaking in 2009–2011. It is now (dramatically) on the wane. Somali piracy is now being formally reported as a kind of ‘past’ or ‘period’: a subject of history. See https://www.unitar.org/unosat/piracy. Accessed January 24, 2015.
7. Steel, Masefield, paragraph 62.
8. Ibid., 64.
9. Ibid., 30.
10. Rix LJ, Moore-Bick LJ and Patten LJ, Masefield.
11. The UK's Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 explicitly makes it illegal to pay ransom to terrorists, and for insurers to reimburse such payments. It does not make it illegal to pay ransom to pirates or for insurers to reimburse those payments, maintaining the position of the court in the Amlin decisions.
12. Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum [The Free Seas] (1609) is widely recognised as the foundational document of modern natural law.
13. Rawls, A Theory, 3.
14. Dimock, Residues, 4.
15. Ibid., 6–7.
16. I heard Farah speak at the Southbank Centre on 2 July 2012. http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/literature-spoken-word/tickets/nuruddin-farah-66018. Accessed January 24, 2015.
17. Farah, Crossbones, 102–6.
18. Ibid., 300–5.
19. Soja, Seeking, 1.
20. Harvey, Justice, Nature.
21. Farah, Crossbones, 300–5.
22. Reference online interview with Lindholm, time of the moment he says reality rules.
23. Cicero, De Officiis, 141.
24. Interviews in which Greengrass discusses Captain Phillips in these terms:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/interview-tom-hanks-paul-greengrass-captain-phillips-the-raw-acting-ability-of-barkhad-abdi-20140109, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y21OSip431U, http://castroller.com/podcasts/MarkKermodeAnd/3771928. Accessed January 24, 2015.
25. US v Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse [United States District Court, Southern District of New York] 19 May 2009. http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/piracy/usmuse51909ind.html. Accessed January 24, 2015.
26. The film is adamantly not a sequel to Greengrass's United 93 (2006). Although while Captain Phillips does not compromise his portrait of piracy by playing upon the proximity – both literal and juridical – of terrorism, there are ways of reading the film's anxieties as ‘post-9/11'; and definitely interesting ways of thinking about it as ‘post-Black Hawk Down'.
27. There is a growing bibliography of work on or relating to boats as embodied practice, mostly emerging from disciplines of ethnography, anthropology, maritime archaeology, and cultural and historical geography. I have an ambition to bring this work into conversation with literary and legal pirate narratives. The kind of work I have in mind here includes:
Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
Dening, “Voyaging the Past, Present, and Future”.
Hasty and Peters, “The Ship in Geography”.
Ingold, Being Alive.
King and Robinson, At Home on the Waves.
King, “Bad Habits and Prosthetic Performances”.
Pálsson, “Enskilment at Sea”.
Salmond, “Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different”.
28. In interview, the composer Henry Jackman speaks in discomforting ways of using East African musical tropes to create a sinister atmosphere: http://www.fastcocreate.com/3020229/composer-henry-jackman-on-scoring-the-morally-complex-story-of-captain-phillips. Accessed January 24, 2015.
29. The internet is full of rumour and speculation. See for example: <http://bigstory.ap.org/article/30000-went-missing-amid-rescue-capt-phillipshttp://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11210047.htm. Accessed January 24, 2015.
30. I am thinking here of Chapter 6 of Lauren Benton's A Search for Sovereignty. Here she warns against too quickly deploying Giorgio Agamben's thesis on ‘states of exception' to characterise situations in past colonial and current postcolonial geographies. She does not just point to Agamben's disinterest in non-European geographies. She suggests that what might at first appear as a state of exception – and so as more evidence of Schmitt's defining thesis that the modern state is defined by its capacity to suspend the rule of law – may rather be a state of multiple or obscure or overlapping jurisdictions. An understanding of the histories and ambiguities of universal jurisdiction would seem to have salutary potential in the terms outlined by Benton.
31. The film may be read as instantiating Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's famous thesis on ‘The Smooth and the Striated' in Chapter 14 of A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Here they articulate maritime space as the ultimate smooth space because it is so vulnerable to striation – that is, to being marked, threaded, made bumpy by money, markets, hegemonies and nodes of distance. But it is also the ultimate smooth space because once it has been striated, it is peculiarly vulnerable to being retroactively smoothed: that is, to being re-smoothed in a way that is not a return to a pre-striated, pre-modern, pure, primordial smoothness, but which surreptitiously embeds and pursues the inexorable striations of modernity and capitalism under cover of smoothness.
32. Steinberg, “Of other,” 158.
33. Ibid., 162.
34. Ibid., 157.