Seite - 74 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 2/2016

74 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis Perhaps the most desperate attempt to ‘perform’ refugeedom is the desire to show innocence through the presence of young children on these boats. Abdul Azizi, and 26 other refugees from Afghanistan and Syria boarded a boat from Turkey aiming for Greece. After two hours their engine failed and a Greek coastguard vessel ordered them to return to Turkey. ‘We said the boat had broken down. And we took the babies and held them above our heads, to show that there were children on board. But they didn’t listen’. Their boat was towed towards Turkey and then began to sink: The women and children were in the [hold] and we went to try and get them... Everything happened so quickly. There was no time to save our children. We had arrived in Europe. We were refugees. But in a flash I had lost my child and my wife.62 In this vein, there are even more horrific stories to tell. The three hundred plus victims of the October 2013 Lampedusa disaster included ‘a baby boy still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord’.63 After 1945, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust performed their persecuted state through adopting, according to frustrated British officials, a ‘Belsen’ pose.64 In the first decades of the twenty first century, the climate of distrust is such that migrants have to exhibit their children to show they are not a threat to the receiving countries. No children under 12 reached Lampedusa following 3 October 2013. And then, at the beginning of September 2015, the world was shocked by Nilufer Demir’s photograph of three year old Alan Kurdi washed up on the Turkish coast and cradled by a Turkish policeman.65 If only briefly, the conscience of the world, which Pope Francis had valiently tried but largely failed to call into action in October 2013, was stirred by the death of this child, his brother, Galip, and mother. In the case of Jewish migration to Palestine during the 1930s/40s, testimony extended only to routes taken, framed within a discourse of either legality/illegality or of organised resistance to British restrictionism. With contemporary boat people, there has been greater sensitivity from the media and NGOs in showing the individuality of the migrants, acknowledging their agency and explaining why they have been forced to break the law to continue their journeys. The concern has been with the present, understandable when for so many it has been and con- tinues to be uncertain. But it reinforces the tendency to treat refugees as people ‘with no history, past experience [and] culture’.66 Even in respect of the journey itself, the media tend to present simplistic maps of ‘migrants’ routes ‘directly connecting the Mediterranean Sea to sub-Saharan Africa’. As Luca Ciabarri, an ethnographer, concludes from deeper research, ‘what emerges are different seasons and histories of migration, each rooted in specific historical conjunctions, characterized by a different intertwining of social dynamics and different power relationships’.67 In much of the literature on refugees and forced migration in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, the work of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben on homer sacer (sacred 62 Testimony in Guardian, 3 June 2014. 63 Guardian, 11 October 2013. 64 See National Archives, CO 537/2373 and 2374, 14 and 22 April 1947. 65 See Guardian, 28 December 2015 for the background to why this photograph was taken. 66 Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 284. 67 Luca Ciabarri, ‘Dynamics and Representations of Migration Corridors’, ACME 13 (2)(2013), 246-262, 259.