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The Red Hammer


“Even when we’ve got the seats and they’re standing up, they’re still taking our places.” With this line the Brazilian poet Ledo Ivo captured our sense of intolerance towards the foreigners that misfortune has thrust among us.

It was Easter in 1997 when the Italian military ship Sibilla rammed its bow into the Albanian vessel Kater i Rades, sinking it and causing more than one hundred to drown. So began the present series of attempts—the most desperate and criminal sort—to discourage and repel immigrants. The concentration camps were begun, the detentions that defined prisoners as “guests,” when the only crime was unauthorized travel. Their imprisonment could last up to eighteen months.

In the meantime, back in Lampedusa, the wrecks of barges done with their duties were piling up. No census will ever be capable of listing the numbers lost. Estimating on the basis of what’s known, the equivalent of at least twenty Titanics are spread across the shallows of the Strait of Sicily. It’s not an abyss they fell into. Nearly twelve percent of the voyages never made it to shore.

On Ellis Island, a small isle at the mouth of the Hudson River, where millions of immigrants got baptized as citizens with a mark of chalk on their coats, the highest number rejected reached only two percent. Today’s migrants picked the wrong century. And the wrong continent. Civilized Europe has been represented by the tiny island of Lampedusa, its narrow main entryway, and more recently by the great island of Iceland, where twelve thousand citizens have signed up as willing to host war refugees in their homes. There have been train stations in Europe refusing travel even to people with train tickets. The station in Belgrade is on the other side: there an enormous welcome center has been prepared. Serbia doesn’t belong to the Union, but it belongs all the more to Europe and has decided to host the crossing, even when its streets are still full of refugees of its own, from Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia.

As a consequence of the wreckage on land and sea Europe has made progress in its vocabulary: when the shipwrecks began they called them “stowaways.” After a great deal of carnage, they started to use the word “migrants,” then “asylum-seekers,” and finally “refugees”—even if refuge is granted in only a few areas. For the drowned, and those who suffocated in truck compartments, these word are gratifying. With their bodies, with their lives sown as fertilizer, they have changed Europe’s vocabulary.

In Lampedusa’s new museum are gathered shoes, baby bottles, and copies of the Qur’an with pages swollen by sea salt. Who other than people of the highest level of civility would include a book in their spartan baggage? Those pages, which did not drown with their readers, are the strongest sort of testimony: not for their right to asylum, but of our duty to grant it.

I returned to Lampedusa last year at the end of September. It was the first anniversary of that colossal shipwreck on calm seas within sight of the coast. I met again the fishermen who, coming back from a night at sea, had found themselves at dawn in the midst of floating corpses, with the living in hypothermia after holding on for hours to the bodies of their drowned companions. The fisherman dove into the sea in order to push up from below those shriveled survivors, and bring them on board. Why did they need to jump into the sea? Because the lost vessel had left the sea slick with oil and the arms of those still living slipped from the hands of those trying to save them.

We returned to the wreck with those fisherman and the first diver who first had to visit the wreckage. Together we made a determined gesture: we scattered handfuls of salt into the sea. Not flowers, salt—because it was a wound, and it wasn’t allowed to heal. We said to the waters, “Blessed be your salt, and blessed be the bottom of your seas.” It took a Pope from the global South to make a visit to Lampedusa the first pilgrimage during his term of office. Europe was keeping its distance.

We who were born on the shores of the Mediterranean consider our brothers all those who have come here to die. I declare myself as a witness for the plaintiffs, for that global South constituting the majority of the planet. I’m not a neutral observer, and I don’t offer diagnoses; instead I’m part of a nervous system that reacts to pain.

These new travelers are paying first-class prices for their one-way tickets and getting the worst maritime transport in the entire history of humanity. Slaves commercially deported by slave drivers traveled better, since that merchandise was paid for on delivery. If the slaves died before arriving, the profit was lost. Today’s deportees pay in advance; it doesn’t matter if they arrive at their destination. The ineffective European prohibition against the transport of people trying to escape has turned the human body into the single most profitable kind of cargo. No need for special packaging—it can be packed into a few square centimeters, thrown into the sea, or left to suffocate in a closed truck compartment in mid-August. They’ve paid for their voyage with everything they possess, including their lives.

They aren’t beggars, they’re not illiterate. They’ve gone to school for years, and they have money, but they are forced to give it to those who exploit their situation. They're looking for a place to rest, not a residence. The executives who deny them asylum are thus executioners.

Faced with the inexorable will of these human masses on the move, one can only wish them welcome. They’ve been hardened by beatings but long fiercely for a smile, for an open hand. Even more than bread or shelter, they need a hug. People who aren’t up to the task, who stay closed up at home, forget it—they should turn off, tune out, and turn away. But they should also get out of the way. So that the pilgrims searching for salvation may find the shelter they see, so that they may knock on the door of a friend, or a relative. So that they may give to their new dwelling their best energy, of gratitude and of leave-taking. Twelve percent of the Italian GNP is produced by the small businesses of foreigners, and they tread across every thorn from the Rose of the Winds. We didn’t invite them, but they’re here, and that’s it. They came to work, that’s it. They want to prosper and to help make the place that welcomes them prosper. That’s how things are, from the times of Abraham the wanderer till now. As it is today, it will be tomorrow.

Europe considers itself a land between, a center of balance between East and West. It isn’t. Today it is an economic expression. At its start it was born in order to prevent the causes of other wars, at the end of  the second World War. It came into the world to counter fascism and racism. Today Europe is a center of nothing. An African proverb says, “There are only two of us, and you want to run in the middle.” Europe believes it’s running in the middle, but instead it stands alone, facing the wars of the Mediterranean. Not deciding to choose the winners, instead it’s waiting for the worst to win, so that it can sign some new contracts. The collateral effect of this opportunistic inertia is the displacement of masses of people in a forced exodus. The word “exodus” is Greek and simply means “exit.” Europe doesn’t want to understand the cause and is alarmed at having become an entryway. Actually, it’s mainly an exit.

After long years enduring the siege of his city, Sarajevo, the poet Izet Sarajlić said that for him Italy was the red hammer, the sort that you find in public transport so that you can break the windows in case of a fire. Italy was the tool that broke the siege for him. Europe today is nothing more and nothing less for the asylum seekers: the red hammer that can widen up a breech inside a burning bus. Instead Europe is striving to be the glass, hoping that it will be shatterproof. But barbed wire, mesh, and fences work for poultry, not for people. Those who go on foot cannot be stopped.

Italy is a natural bridge between three continents. It extends Europe to the southeast, towards Asia and Africa. Geography has decided our history. We are a land of passage for birds, for merchandise, for religions, for invasions and expulsions. We have mixed blood, the result of rapes and epidemics. So we are all the more expert, and our crimes of omission all the more inexcusable.

Europe, you are named and influenced by the Mediterranean: you must look at Italy as your thermometer, stuck into the armpit of the South to check for fever. Look at our useless efforts to turn them back, at our concentration camps for those who seek asylum, and do precisely the opposite. Be the red hammer, not the glass.

As I write this note, Germany and Austria, under public pressure, are opening their borders. Germany has declared the right to asylum without numeric quotas. The Dublin Regulation,  which places the duty to grant asylum on the first country to register the newcomers, has been abruptly suspended. This shouldn’t be an momentary expression of remorse. It’s either the start of a new Europe, or a change of window dressing. 

Translated by Jim Hicks


Among many other works, Erri De Luca is the author of The Crime of a Soldier (Feltrinelli, 2013), The Story of Irene (Feltrinelli, 2015), and A Dissenting Word (Feltrinelli, 2015). The latter is De Luca's answer to the charges, for which a verdict is expected on October 19th, brought against him by the Italian state, following comments made to a reporter for the Italian site of The Huffington Post.  
 


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