Search the Site

Gathering


Genoa, July 1, 2016,

Address to the National Meeting of the Italian NGO Emergency

In a letter to his brother, the French painter Eugène Delacroix writes: “I’m working on a modern subject, the barricade. His reference is to the famous painting, Liberty Leading the People, a commemoration of the 1830 insurrection.
            What would be the modern subject for a painter today, I wonder?

Banksy has drawn a soldier, his face to the wall and his hands raised, while a young girl searches him for weapons. This is an image of modern war turned on its head—for today’s war, the novelty consists in its destruction of civilian lives, rather than those of combatants. This subject is relatively new; its urgency dates back to the Spanish Civil War, during the thirties of the last century.
            For me the modern subject is a small boat, drifting. Like a barricade, a raft is packed with the same anonymous faces, the same shared goal, taken up at the risk of one’s very life.
            A life raft is a barricade.

The artist who has taken on this subject isn’t a painter, but member of another visionary guild, the art of photography. From the height of a helicopter, Massimo Sestini has caught the overloaded weight of a small boat, all its faces turned upwards. Towards a flying machine, not the omnipotent heavens, although the same question is raised.
           In this image two things are apparent, the thinness of the bodies and the absence of baggage.
           Both depend on a thorough selection during imbarcation, given that they will take up the most costly centimeters of travel in any form of human transport. And yet many of these travelers carry with them sacred scripture—the Qur’an in Arabic, a Bible in translation. As a reader I can only admire this choice, given precedence even over food.
            Books do not drown, they come to shore in a net or land on a beach. Someone will gather them up. And at last, here is a verb that comes before all others in these migratory waves: before receiving or welcoming, there is the verb “to gather.”
            In one war, I saw the wounded gathered up from a shattered square or an apartment hit by a shell. I saw this same practice in Lampedusa, where fishermen gathered up the shipwrecked, snatching them from the sea, violating a law that would condemn them for complicity in illegal immigration. For me, the politicians who passed that law are unfit for any sort of public service, ruined by depravity beyond repair.
             “To gather” is my modern verb of action. A gathering of lives we did not sow, attach, or educate. Without spending a cent of our own, these lives arrive to us: sown, dispatched, educated.
           With good intentions, some among us at times refer to them as resources. I don’t want to be associated with that usage: resources are too often paired with the vocabulary of exploitation. Resources get exploited. These are lives ready for any degree of sacrifice, simply in order to stay here awhile. These lives are forcibly lowered to a level where we must use the verb “to gather” just to describe them.

Emergency is now doing this work at sea, on its MOAS ship (its Migrant Offshore Aid Station). After it gathered up on land as many of the wounded as possible, it has pushed its efforts further, into the sea, because the Mediterranean today is the field where seed is scattered.
            “Cast your bread upon the waters,” says a verse of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes. This has been done: the Mediterranean is full of our daily bread, cast upon the faces of its waters.
            “For you will find it after many days,” says the second half of this verse. And so it is, after many days we will find again, returned to us and multipled, this bread we have gathered.
            Emergency makes this gesture, its arms extended out; it goes forth to glean lives from the shipwrecks. Gathering lives in order to save the harvest.

Translated by Jim Hicks


Erri De Luca is one of Italy's best-known novelists, poets, essayists, and translators. An excerpt from his The Day Before Happiness was published in the MR Casualty issue and his poem "Being Medit" was included in the MR Mediterraneans issue.

 

 

 


 

 

 


Join the email list for our latest news