At a Loss at the Loss at Sea: Families of the Missing Migrants of the Mediterranean and the (Bermuda) Triangle of Space, Articulation, and Justice

Abstract

Over the past decade, thousands have been recorded dead or missing after attempting to cross the sea from north Africa to southern Europe. In contrast to the governmental apathy to this plight, behind these missing people are those who steadfastly remain in search, demanding answers and seeking closure. Drawing on an intimate engagement with Tunisian families involved in activism, this article highlights the tripartite lacuna within which they find themselves: The slipping of their sons into the black box of intercontinental “illegal” immigration betrays the contingency of their narratives and the illusiveness of closure. We attend to these families’ responses to finding themselves in search of loved ones effectively, if not actually, lost at sea. By thinking with and through their efforts, we decenter the locus of Mediterranean-borne stories from statist and Eurocentric anxieties to a particular set of subaltern experiences. Linking these intimate geographies to the political landscapes in which they are imbricated serves to show how (inter)subjectivity at the familial scale is not detached from (geo)political imagination. By triangulating between space, stories, and sapience in these families’ experiences, we recognize in their yearning and striving amidst a spatially conditioned injustice an articulation of a familial mythos underpinning a situated geopolitical intervention from below. Still, the families live the day-to-day, their hearts yearning for a reunion here and now, their eyes fixed on the northern (event) horizon. May their eyes find coolness.

据记载, 在过去十年里, 数千人在试图从北非渡海到南欧后死亡或失踪。与政府对这一惨状的冷漠态度形成对比的是: 在这些失踪人员的背后, 一些人坚定地继续寻找、要求回复并寻求结果。我们密切接触了采取激进主义方式的突尼斯家庭, 强调了这些家庭所处的三方空白: 他们的儿子在洲际“非法”移民暗箱的陷落, 违背了家庭叙事的偶然性和结果的虚幻性。我们关注这些家庭在寻找亲人时(如果他们并未在海上失踪)的自我反应。通过思考这些家庭的努力及其结果, 我们将地中海故事的中心, 从对中央集权主义和欧洲中心主义的焦虑, 转移到底层民众的经历。将密切地理与有关政治景观相联系起来, 可以表明家庭层面的(相互)主体性并非与(地缘)政治假想无关。通过对家庭经历的空间、故事和智慧的三角互证, 我们在空间不公正背景下的家庭渴望和奋斗中, 发现了一种表述, 它支撑了来自底层的地缘政治干预的家庭神话。这些家庭继续生活, 他们渴望此时此地的团聚, 他们的眼睛注视着北方的(事件)地平线。愿他们平安。

Durante la pasada década se registran miles de muertos o desaparecidos, tras su vano intento por cruzar el mar desde el norte de África al sur de Europa. En contraste con la apatía gubernamental frente a tan penosa situación, detrás de estos desaparecidos hay quienes se mantienen firmes en su búsqueda, exigiendo respuestas y buscando un cierre al episodio. A partir de un íntimo compromiso con familias tunecinas comprometidas en activismo, este artículo destaca la laguna tripartita en la que se encuentran: El involucramiento de sus propios hijos dentro de la caja negra de la migración intercontinental de carácter “ilegal”, traiciona la contingencia de sus narrativas y lo ilusorio del cierre de su indagación. Centramos nuestra atención en las respuestas de estas familias cuando se enfrentan a la búsqueda efectiva, aunque infructuosa, de sus seres queridos perdidos en el mar. Al pensar solidariamente en sus esfuerzos, descentramos la focalización de las historias surgidas en el Mediterráneo, de las ansiedades estatistas y eurocéntricas hacia un conjunto particularizado de experiencias subalternas. Vincular estas geografías de la intimidad con los paisajes políticos dentro de los cuales se imbrican ayuda a precisar cómo la (inter)subjetividad a escala familiar no puede separarse de la imaginación (geo)política. Por medio de la triangulación entre espacio, historias y sapiencia en las experiencias de estas familias, reconocemos en sus anhelos y esfuerzos, en medio de una injusticia espacialmente condicionada, la articulación de un mito familiar que soporta desde abajo una intervención geopolítica situada. Con todo, las familias viven su cotidianidad, con sus corazones anhelantes por un reencuentro que ocurra aquí y ahora, mientras afinan sus ojos en el horizonte (evento) septentrional. Ojalá sus ojos puedan atisbar la frescura de un desenlace.

Key Words:

• ambiguous loss
• familial rupture and continuity
• intimate geopolitics
• irregular maritime migration
• thalassocentric imaginaries and actants

关键词:

• 模糊失踪
• 家庭破裂和延续
• 密切地缘政治
• 非常规海上移民
• 地中海假想和行为。

Palabras clave:

• geopolítica íntima
• imaginarios y actuantes
• talasocéntricos
• migración marítima irregular
• pérdida ambigua
• ruptura y continuidad familiar

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s site at: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2023.2209141. This contains the seven family stories collected by Antonio Siciliano in 2019. These accounts served as the primary basis of our analysis in this article, particularly the section titled “Articulation.”

Acknowledgments

We owe a debt of gratitude to the families who graciously shared their time, narratives, and sentiments with us. May their stories and those of their sons be told and shared widely. We are grateful to Imed Soltani, who welcomed us as academic partners in his advocacy efforts, and to Marwen Saidi and Gemma Baccini for their invaluable friendship and support. We thank Rebecca Chung, a wonderful interlocutor whose comments helped us polish a late draft of our initial manuscript, as well as Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo and Kamal Gasimov for their heartening enthusiasm for our scholarly approach. We also express our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and substantive engagement with our work, and to Kendra Strauss, whose editorial hand helped us improve this article. Finally, we thank the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity, its International Institute, and many others at the University and beyond for supporting our project.

Notes

1 Epigraphs and excerpts marked by an asterisk are Bader AlBader’s translations from Arabic originals. In this article, all translations of published Arabic texts are AlBader’s, and all translations of family stories are Antonio Siciliano’s.

2 Al-Omary (2000) supplied a textual variant of this epistle, though the lexical differences do not alter its general meaning: “I saw a large being mounted by small beings. If it settles, it pierces hearts, and if it moves, it disorients minds. On it, certainty increases in diminutude and doubt in magnitude. On it, they are as worms on a straw which drowns if it tilts and treks if it persists”* (325).

3 This article may be read as an attempt on our part to practice what Kosmatopoulos (2019) called “terraqueous solidarity.”

4 Visit missingmigrants.org to learn more about the families and their missing sons, as well as the larger interdisciplinary engaged scholarship initiative out of which this article emerges.

5 For more details about the families’ and their accounts, see the Supplemental Material.

6 La Terre Pour Tous was founded and is led by Soltani, who was impelled to activism after confronting the governmental indifference to the disappearance of his migrant nephews. For more on this organization, see Souiah (2019).

7 In his analysis of more than a hundred fairy tales, Propp ([1928] 1968) arrived at a common underlying tale structure. He identified thirty-one types of action (he called these “functions”) through which a tale’s characters propel the narrative forward. These functions constitute the tale’s structure, occurring in sequence within it—although not all of them need to occur—and culminating with a “happy ending.” Unlike wondertales, the missing migrant stories come with no ending, let alone a happy one; their narrative unveiling stops at the point when the “hero” discovers the loss and decides to compensate for it, thus turning the tale to the hero’s exploits. To highlight the structural similarity between the fairy and family tales, it suffices for us to focus on the first eight functions that precede this turning point:

1. Absentation: Someone goes missing (and the hero is introduced)

2. Interdiction: Hero is warned (e.g., “don’t go here,” “don’t do this”)

3. Violation of interdiction (with negative consequences and the villain is introduced)

4. Reconnaissance: Villain seeks out information

5. Delivery: Villain gains information

6. Trickery: Villain attempts to deceive a victim (to take possession of him or his belongings)

7. Complicity: Victim unwittingly helps the enemy (i.e., submits to the deception)

8. Lack: A need or object of desire is identified (often as a result of the villain's harm)

• The remaining functions involve the hero resolving to remedy the situation, setting out on his or her quest, overcoming trials and tribulations, confronting and vanquishing the villain, returning home, and ultimately attaining social justification.

8 For an analysis of filmic depictions of such push and pull factors, as part of a broader sketch of Tunisian-centric “emotional geographies” vis-à-vis irregular migration, see Rivera-Escartin and Johansson-Nogués (2022).

9 De Leon (2015) provides an intimate ethnographic account of the (necro)political delegation of border enforcement to a desert, rather than a sea, and its harrowing effects on both migrants and their families.

10 Broader still, to “see through the sea” as Binboga (2020) contends—particularly through a Mediterranean stricken by “crisis”—is to discern the contours of a new human subjectivity.

11 One difficult question with which we are confronted and continue to grapple as scholars in solidarity with these families is whether our reluctance to speak for them entails, in most cases, an abstention from speaking tout court when not speaking with them.

12 In contrast to endemic state callousness, many private actors on both sides of the Mediterranean have endeavored to shed light on the plight of migrants and their families, pursuing both short- and long-term remedies to it. Okeowo (2023) empathically recounted the experiences of such families as well as those in Italy who are trying to remedy their plight.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bader AlBader

BADER ALBADER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, Kuwait University, Kuwait City, Kuwait. E-mail: [email protected]. His research examines spaces and institutions of higher education, particularly in the Arab world; he is also interested in issues of multilingualism, transregionalism, and translation, especially as they relate to scholarly production.

Odessa Gonzalez Benson

ODESSA GONZALEZ BENSON is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research on refugee resettlement and state–civil society relations centers participatory and grassroots approaches to urban governance and social services.

Vadim Besprozvany

VADIM BESPROZVANY is a Lecturer and Research Investigator in the School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: [email protected]. His primary research areas are visual rhetoric and communication theory; he is also interested in expanding intellectual collisions and collaborative practices driven by the arts, design, and engineering.

Antonio Siciliano

ANTONIO SICILIANO is a licensed clinical social worker in East Lansing, MI 48823, where he owns and runs his private practice. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include clinical implications of systemic injustice, culturally humble therapeutic practices, and the effects of autonomy, coping, and self-advocacy on trauma and loss responses.

Elena Godin

ELENA GODIN is a Lecturer in the School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: [email protected]. In addition to visual theory, she is interested in design as a form of thinking and praxis, as well as a critical tool for social change.