Page - 73 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 73 passenger, they had left Eritrea, fleeing the military dictatorship and forced conscription. Fanus had paid smugglers to get her over the border and on through the Sahara to Libya’. The Medi- terranean crossing was thus just ‘the final leg of a dangerous, expensive journey in search of asylum in Europe’. Her narrative focuses on this and her other failed attempts to escape Eritrea and how ‘My parents sold everything they had to raise the money’ – in all it cost over £2000.58 In Stockholm some six months after her traumatic arrival in Lampedusa, Fanus (her real name was withheld to protect her family), reflected with horror on how she got there from Africa: ‘I don’t want to look back and remember my journey, nobody should have to go through what we did. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’ 59 But even this truncated account of her life story, with the focus on the Lampedusa disaster and her life as an ‘illegal’ immigrant after it, is exceptional. Fanus burnt her fingertips so as to avoid police recognition. The wider aim was to avoid return to Italy as place of first arrival under the Dublin Treaty in processing asylum seekers. Others avoided telling the authorities of their journey to Lampedusa for the same rea- son. Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean activist who has supported those who survived the October 2013 disaster, relates that ‘They are afraid if they tell their story, there is a risk they will be sent back to Italy so for that reason people choose not to mention they survived the boat tragedy. They pretend they came a different route’. In speaking out, having reached Sweden ‘illegally’, Fanus ‘decided to take her chances. “If they want to send us back to Italy, we’ll tell them Italy did not treat us right, We just have to be honest.’ 60 But it is not only this aspect of their life stories that such migrants have performed differently from reality – their places of origin and reasons for leaving have also often been constructed to reflect the reality of European asylum procedures. From the moment immigration controls were systematically introduced in the late nine- teenth century, migrants have shaped both their testimony and their paperwork to improve their chances of gaining entry. The latest manifestation of this ‘game’ (one that can mean life or death) is migrants performing what they hope will be right narrative for those whose job it is to keep borders as restrictive as possible. As Caroline Moorehead noted in 2005, when covering the life of asylum seekers in the north east of England: Refugee life is rife with rumour. Among those who wait to be interviewed for refugee sta- tus, word circulates about how some nationalities are more likely to get asylum than others, about how some stories are more powerful than others, and some more likely to touch the hearts of the interviewers. She adds that the ‘buying and selling of “good” stories, stories to win asylum, has become com- mon practice in refugee circles, among people terrified that their own real story is not powerful’. She concludes ‘How easy, then, how natural, to shape the past in such a way that it provides more hope for a better future’.61 In the ten years since she published Human Cargo, the level of control and culture of disbelief has grown and, alongside it, the self-construction of migrant narratives to resist such tendencies. 58 Nelson, ‘A long way home’. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Moorehead, Human Cargo, 136.