Page - 82 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

82 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis space for their life stories and aspirations to be considered. In contrast, my scholarly approach has been as a micro-historian and especially in exploring particular places and how different levels of their past compete for attention – or, in the words of the late historical geographer, Doreen Massey, ‘The identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant’.95 Rather than parochial, as Massey crucially adds, ‘the local is always a product in part of “global” forces’.96 So why choose to focus on Lampedusa? When the island started to gain prominence in discussion about migration it immediately had resonance through my doctoral research carried out in the 1980s. This was through the Yiddish play The King of Lampedusa referred to early in this article. Perhaps through its unusual name and uncertain geography, in this play the ‘natives’ of Lampedusa are imagined somehow as ‘uncivilised’ black Africans, owing more to the nightmare world of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness rather than the reality of a small Italian military base in the middle of the Mediterranean.97 Whilst my interest in The King of Lampe- dusa was why Jews and others in Britain were so emotionally engaged in it, I was at least aware that it was a real place with some strategic military importance during the Second World War. With the major migrant tragedies of the early twenty first century and especially those of 2011 and 2013 linked to the island, my interest intensified and were strengthened further when introduced to Alessandro Triulzi, as noted, instrumental in creating an archive of the recent migrants, many of whom passed through Lampedusa. I was determined to visit, but the que- stions remained of how and when. With its fishing industry in relative decline, tourism has become the main source of income for Lampedusa with its beautiful beaches and opportunities to snorkel in search of exotic fish, and to observe the turtles which visit the island each year to lay their eggs on the beach. Yet even with a new EU funded airport, and a ferry service, it is not a straightforward place to visit – there are only occasional flights from either Sicily or Rome and the ferry journey is a long one. In short, it takes a little more effort to visit than other migrant points of arrival in Europe. Patrick Kingsley is the Guardian’s ‘inaugural migrant correspondent’ and was named in Britain ‘Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year’ in 2015. In The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, Kingsley notes that ‘Lesvos, the island most affected [in 2015], has become the Greek Lampedusa’.98 From Britain, it would have been much easier for me to ‘be there’ in Les- vos, Kos or any of the other Aegean islands where the hundreds of thousands of migrants had landed than in Lampedusa – or, even closer to home, the refugee camps at Calais and Dunkirk. There were reasons I decided against the Greek islands or northern France. Whilst I have wor- ked with refugees and asylum seekers, I possess no medical, linguistic or logistic skills which would have made my presence beneficial for the thousands upon thousands of migrants who had just arrived, often in a state of physical and mental distress and confusion. And – rightly or wrongly – whilst aware of the importance of bearing witness to one of the largest man made disasters since the Second World War, I was anxious to avoid any form of voyeurism. 95 Doreen Massey, ‘Places and Their Past’, History Workshop Journal 39 (spring 1995), 186. 96 Ibid, 183. 97 Valencia (ed.), The King of Lampedusa. 98 Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis (London: Guardian/Faber & Faber, 2016), 177.