The essay by Heidrun Friese entitled “Limits of hospitality. The refugees of Lampedusa and the European question”, published by goWare and translated from the German by Tiziano Tanzini, who has lived in Germany for over thirty years. The German scholar knows Italy very well, where she has lived for over twenty years while continuing her academic and publicist activity in Germany and throughout Europe.
The issues addressed in this book are issues on which Friese has been working for more than three decades (the first fieldwork in Lampedusa dates back to 1986) and which she has had the opportunity to deepen, on several occasions, through collaboration with universities and institutions scattered throughout Europe of which the author provides a long and detailed list.
It is thoughtful and original work with a breadth and factual knowledge that is heartening in dealing with the current depressing European political debate on immigration, hospitality and mobility.
Below we offer a large excerpt which constitutes the very beginning of the book where the author recounts her first contacts with Lampedusa, with the harragas and with the phenomenon of clandestine landings.
Arrival in Lampedusa
1986 Lampedusa. I first arrived on this tiny island - dispersed between Sicily and Tunisia and, at that time, unknown to most - about twenty years ago. I lived in Lampedusa for a year because I wanted to reconstruct the history of the human settlements that had followed one another.
But Lampedusa had reached the front pages of the newspapers much earlier, in April 1986 following the (alleged) launch by Mu'ammar al-Gaddafi of two Scud missiles that would have been aimed at the American LORAN base stationed on the island . No one had been harmed. But the population of the island was united in protest because the President of the United States, Reagan, had Tripoli and Benghazi bombed in retaliation for the attack on the La Belle disco in Berlin.
The stories of the "peripheries" of Europe are linked to places and geopolitical interests, nested elsewhere and heterogeneous, as well as to world history. And yet their destinies are also intertwined with the global media reports that spread the images of Lampedusa around the world (following which Northern Italians discovered the island as a tourist destination, some municipal land began to be sold to private individuals to build houses Some people earned it: even a lot).
Then, starting from the 90s, Lampedusa became an obligatory stop for those who, coming from the countries of the Maghreb, from the sub-Saharan states or from the Horn of Africa, were on their way to Europe: right there, in fact, they meet routes that still connect various former colonial territories and the Mediterranean Sea, to the desert and to other regions of the world.
Although most of the "undocumented" arrive in Italy with normal, and not very spectacular, tourist visas and then slip into illegality and become "invisible" (in the true sense of the word, precisely because they are clandestine*, as soon as the visas expire ) - the dramatic images of exhausted people who, more dead than alive, manage to reach Lampedusa aboard precarious boats packed to capacity, reinforce in the social and political imagination the idea of clandestine mobility which, assuming forms of catastrophe humanitarian or threatening assault on a European well-being, which is said to be running out, however it claims not only drastic measures against the "merchants of men" but also demands a permanent state of emergency.
Back in 2007
I returned to the island in 2007 to investigate one of the frontiers of European hospitality and observe the changes that have taken place locally in recent years. The reception of the employees, and not only in the administrative offices of the Municipality, was now mixed with sighs of endurance: for some time, in fact, the office would have to be shared again with the eager German, in the name of science, to throw curious glances at every type of document and for weeks of copying dusty registers and, perhaps who knows, even official secrets, (to then perhaps reciprocate the hospitality with statistics and three-dimensional tables on the changes in the social structure or on the arrivals of passengers by aerial).
Much had remained unchanged: the technical office continued to be an important center of power and also the political fabric continued to be the same as always. And yet, something had changed: families no longer lived mainly from fishing and fish processing, but from tourism which, in the summer months, managed to bring up to 50.000 vacationers to the island.
Vegetable gardens and gardens had been enriched with summer apartments; numerous villas had sprung up in the barren landscape. The population had officially risen to 6.000. Lampedusa had become "multicultural", it had welcomed families from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Morocco, Tunisia, Romania and Bulgaria, families who earned their means to live by providing services and assisting the elderly. "They're not prostitutes" the then mayor immediately assured, and added "Anyone who wants to work is welcome here", combining hospitality with work in order to dispel possible accusations of racism.
In the meantime, a reception center (Centro di Soccorso e Prima Accoglienza, CSPA) had also been set up on the island for undocumented new arrivals, which by then employed around 150 employees. New economic interests had also coalesced around this structure, congenial to the activation of new and old clientelistic networks.
The Hospitality Industry
Lampedusa has become the crossroads between desired and unwanted forms of mobility, and now lives on mobile people and the "Hospitality Industry". According to the Italian Interior Ministry, between 2000 and 2009, approximately 111.000 undocumented people landed on Lampedusa. In 2016, 181.436 people, in 2017, 119.369 and up to 19 February 2018, 4.864 people had reached the Italian coasts.
Most of them came from the Maghreb or already had long journeys from sub-Saharan countries or the Horn of Africa behind them. Italian politics has tried, also through the friendship agreement with the Libyan dictator in 2008, to interrupt these flows and to close the sea route. The number of those who, as a result of this, managed to cross the Italian maritime border has dramatically decreased.
Politics had succeeded - at least for some time - in changing the routes, my field of investigation had shifted and I had the impression of losing sight of the original problem and instead working on a sort of "historical anthropology ” of the island (Friese, 1996).
Those who knew me now welcomed me by pointing out that "at the bar in the port there is a scholar who knows your book". Who didn't know me, he inquired asking me: "Are you a journalist?", Implying: "Do you want to plant trouble?". Scientific discourse and media discourse had wedged themselves into human relationships and self-image: Lampedusa had become one of the symbols of European border management, that is, the one that also dictates the boundaries of hospitality.
Tunis
2009, Tunis. I wanted to know the places in Tunisia from which the boats departed. I met Tariq and his friends in the summer of 2009 - at the time of dictator Zine elAbidine Ben Ali - in a bar in Tunis. Women, really, would have been out of place in those male territories. A Sicilian friend (who remembered me and my first field research in the 80s in a Sicilian village, even though he was only a child at the time) had meanwhile found a job in Tunis, knew every bar and every spy of the regime, he introduced me as his aunt, allowing me to pass the strictest checks unscathed.
His masculine presence and my age guaranteed some immunity. I offered cigarettes and beer, we talked sometimes in the back room between crates of drinks.
When one bar closed, we moved to another and so, little by little, we began to get to know each other through our stories. How many of Tariq's peers and friends were unemployed and survived the day! “We're in the shit” he almost always exclaimed at the end of his arguments. Tariq lived at his family's house. His father worked in a small factory and "squanders all his money on other women" added Tariq disrespectfully, perhaps also alluding to the loss of authority of a generation that had very different ideas about what an existence worthy of the name was.
Although very close to his mother and twelve-year-old brother, he spent his time waiting for the right opportunity to escape that life badly lived; even though he was there, he was at the same time already quite elsewhere. Tariq's older brother hadn't wanted to wait. He had drowned in the sea the year before in an attempt to flee towards Lampedusa, towards Europe.
With help from people from the Coast Guard, he was sure he could make it. Instead, he hadn't made it and the sea had thrown his body back on the beach. How many times has Tariq shown me the tattoo “TO MY BROTHER” and his forearms marked by the cuts of self-harm, both an expression of suffering and mourning for the loss of his brother. Every time he told this story, his eyes filled with tears, unable to articulate words. Each time, I felt helpless. By chance I have a European passport; by chance, I was born on the privileged side of the Mediterranean; by the way, I don't need visas to enter Tunisia.
The harragas
Precisely because of the political pressure exerted on the countries of the former European colonies in the Mediterranean, expatriation without a visa from the Maghreb states is now a crime and is prosecuted in Morocco (since 2003), in Algeria (since 2008) and in Tunisia (since 2004). XNUMX). What Europeans now feel as a matter of course, i.e. free movement, is prevented by others by the Schengen agreement and visa regulations, forcing multitudes of people to risk their lives on the crossing.
Despite his mourning and awareness of the mortal risks, Tariq and his friends (as well as many of their peers in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) wanted to take advantage of the first opportunity to escape to Europe. Harga: this ardent desire is called in the Maghreb. Harga means "to burn, to burn" and the harragas are those who burn their documents, who trample on the rules and who, like real men, take their destiny into their own hands and pursue their right to dignity and freedom.
Virtually none of them had an "emigration project" in any way planned or even a precise idea of how things would go on once they arrived in Europe. Harga is a dynamic space of imagination and action of young men, which cannot be reduced to purely economic reasons. Tariq and his friends relied on dreams and visions of an Elsewhere, imaginary but "that penetrated deeply", and lived in two different worlds at the same time.
Manned by social conditions that allow so little to even make departure probable, this present is continuously nourished by the images and projections of a different life. Mobility starts in the imagination: “Indeed, from the moment that the departure is imagined and the desire enunciated, the subject is transformed into someone that is always ready elsewhere” (Alaoui 2009:7). The hopes of changing living conditions have become, for Tariq and his friends, a situation of "waiting without end and without prospects" (Boltanski 2011: 121), a state of suspension between a here and a there, a blocked presence and frozen. Waiting is not limited only to underlining the "dependence on the decisions and approval of others", who have the power to decide "on access to a minimum of acceptable living conditions" (2011:60): it also generates a particular structure of time because the future happens in the imagination, in another place.
The hope of Europe
Europe becomes a sign of hope even if this future in Europe will also be characterized by unemployment, marginalization and exclusion. Once in Italy, Tariq and his friends from harragas will become clandestine, a designation which underlines the political and juridical practices of illegality and which already shows what will be a specific aspect of future daily life: that is, the fact of becoming "invisible", of not conspicuous.
“I would never have toiled for pennies, like my father,” Tariq repeated to the approval of his friends. In the bleak daily wait, each of them had different expectations from those of the others but all were absolutely certain that they would make it in Europe, that they would live up to their aspiration for dignity, that they would get their share of well-being and proved to be men: a good job, a car, a DVD player and a plasma screen.
No one could have ever imagined the exhaustion that would have taken hold of them, laborers without any rights, in the countryside of Sicily, Calabria, Puglia for a couple of euros an hour, or the need, like sanspapiers in France, to evade every day the police. They had promised to copy me a CD by the rapper RimK and the raï musician Reda Taliani in which Partir loin was recorded, the anthem of the Maghreb harragas, a hymn clicked millions of times on YouTube.
The yearning for a different life will no longer be spread only by European broadcasters, which broadcast images of rich, free, transgressive societies, nor will it be influenced by those who return for Ramadan dragging the concrete testimonies of a successful migration project. Sites, blogs, the dedicated spaces of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, to name a few, have carved out an important role for themselves not only in political mobilization.
The culture of escape
The feeling of living in precarious conditions and without prospects and the desire for a different life have in the meantime become the ingredients of a transnational youth culture, of which they are the symbols and semantics, creatively reworked also in raï and rap popular music, spaces — by now — of daily understanding on the contingent situation, capable of mobilizing the imagination. I don't know exactly how Tariq and his friends understood my interest in their stories, "illegal" affairs and music: I could have been their grandmother, I didn't fit any normal female cliché and I wasn't even interested in amour (about the rich European lady, behind whom a luxurious life in fabulous abundance is possible, the most fantastic stories run after each other).
“Illegality', harga and attitudes of breaking with conventions have always been around in our conversations. Hopes of individual freedom, of freedom from family shackles and from the rules of public morality, police harassment and last but not least, group pressure (often friends or neighbors from a village get together for common initiatives) feed the imagination and empty the bars and cafes where a different life is expected. “Better to die than stay here”: a real culture of escape has established itself.
Tunis 2012. In the context of what is now called "multisite field research", I went to Tunis again. I also participated in the demonstrations there on January 14 to celebrate the first anniversary of the revolution. “Tunisia is free” (Tounis hurra), “The people want [...]” (al'sha'b yureed) were slogans and graffiti that expressed what we call, in a somewhat aseptic way, the public sphere. The fishermen, who, during the turbulent days of the revolution, had protected ports and boats from possible "external subversives", now cheered the deposition of "ZABA" (Ben Ali) and the "hairdresser", as his wife was contemptuously called .
And, as always, many harragas continued to wait for the first good opportunity to escape from that state of affairs and to look for a way to reach Europe… for a 1.000 euro “visa fee”.
The author
Heidrun Friese is professor of Intercultural Communication and Theory of Culture at the University (TU) of Chemnitz. He has taught and directed research projects at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), European University Institute, IUE (Florence), University of Warwick, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at the University of California (Berkeley), at the HyperWerk Institute (Basel). His studies extend from social and cultural theories to postcolonial perspectives, mobility (flight, migration, and transnational practices) and include issues of (cultural) identity with particular reference to the Mediterranean area. He has conducted multi-year field research, among other places, in Racalmuto and Lampedusa.
