Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope - Softcover

Enia, Davide

 
9781590519080: Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1590519086 ISBN 13: 9781590519080
Verlag: Other Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A moving firsthand account of migrant landings on the island of Lampedusa that gives voice to refugees, locals, and volunteers while also exploring a deeply personal father-son relationship.

On the island of Lampedusa, the southernmost part of Italy, between Africa and Europe, Davide Enia looks in the faces of those who arrive and those who wait, and tells the story of an individual and collective shipwreck. On one side, a multitude in motion, crossing entire nations and then the Mediterranean Sea under conditions beyond any imagination. On the other, a handful of men and women on the border of an era and a continent, trying to welcome the newcomers. In the middle is the author himself, telling of what actually happens at sea and on land, and the failure of words in the attempt to understand the present paradoxes.

Enia reveals the emotional consequences of this touching and disconcerting reality, especially in his relationship with his father, a recently retired doctor who agrees to travel with him to Lampedusa. Witnessing together the public pain of those who land and those who save them from death, alongside the private pain of his uncle's illness, pushes them to reinvent their relationship, to forge a new and unprecedented dialogue that replaces the silences of the past.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Davide Enia was born in 1974 in Palermo, Italy. He has written, directed, and performed in plays for the stage and for radio. Enia has been honored with the Ubu Prize, the Tondelli Award, and the ETI Award, Italy’s three most prestigious theater prizes. He lives and cooks in Rome.

Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator. His recent translations include Kill the Father and Kill the Angel by Sandrone Dazieri, The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati, Everything Is Broken Up and Dances by Edoardo Nesi and Guido Maria Brera, and Notes on a Shipwreck by Davide Enia.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

On Lampedusa, a fisherman once asked me: “You know what fish has come back? Sea bass.” Then he’d lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing down to the butt in silence.
“And you know why sea bass have come back to this stretch of sea? You know what they eat? That’s right.”
And he’d stubbed out his cigarette and turned to go. There was nothing more, truly, to be said.
What had stuck with me about Lampedusa were the calluses on the hands of the fishermen; the stories they told of constantly finding dead bodies when they hauled in their nets (“What do you mean, ‘constantly’?” and they’d say, “Do you know what ‘constantly’ means? Constantly”); scattered refugee boats rusting in the sunlight, perhaps nowadays the only honest form of testimony left to us—corrosion, grime, rust—of what’s happening in this period of history; the islanders’ doubts about the meaning of it all; the word “landing,” misused for years, because by now these were all genuine rescues, with the refugee boats escorted into port and the poor devils led off to the Temporary Settlement Center; and the Lampedusans who dressed them with their own clothing in a merciful response that sought neither spotlights nor publicity, but just because it was cold out and those were bodies in need of warmth.
 
Haze blurred our line of sight.
The horizon shimmered.
I noticed for what must have been the thousandth time how astonished I was to see how Lampedusa could unsettle its guests, creating in them an overwhelming sense of estrangement. The sky so close that it almost seemed about to collapse on top of us. The ever-present voice of the wind. The light that hits you from all directions. And before your eyes, always, the sea, the eternal crown of joy and thorns that surrounds everything. It’s an island on which the elements hammer at you with nothing able to stop them. There are no shelters. You’re pierced by the environment, riven by the light and the wind. No defense is possible.
It had been a long, long day.
I heard my father’s voice calling my name, while the sirocco tossed and tangled my thoughts.
 
I happened to meet the scuba diver at a friend’s house.
It was just the two of us.
The first, persistent sensation was this: He was huge. His first words were these: “No tape recorders.” 
He went over and sat down on the other side of the table from me and crossed his arms.
He kept them folded across his chest the whole time. “I’m not talking about October third,” he added, his mouth snapping shut after these words in a way that defied argument.
His tone of voice was consistently low and measured, in sharp contrast with that imposing bulk. Sometimes, in his phrases, uttered with the sounds of his homeland—he was born in the mountains of the deepest north of Italy, where the sea is, more than anything else, an abstraction—there also surfaced words from my dialect, Sicilian. The ten years he’d spent in Sicily for work had left traces upon him. For an instant, the sounds of the south took possession of that gigantic body, dominating him. Then the moment would come to an end and he’d run out of things to say and just stare at me, in all his majesty, like a mountain of the north.
He’d become a diver practically by sheer chance, a shot at a job that he’d jumped at immediately after completing his military service.
“We divers are used to dealing with death, from day one they told us it would be something we’d encounter. They tell us over and over, starting on the first day of training: People die at sea. And it’s true. All it takes is a single mistake during a dive and you die. Miscalculate and you die. Just expect too much of yourself and you die. Underwater, death is your constant companion, always.”
He’d been called to Lampedusa as a rescue swimmer, one of those men on the patrol boats who wear bright orange wetsuits and dive in during rescue operations.
He told me just how tough the scuba diving course had been, lingering on the mysterious beauty of being underwater, when the sea is so deep that sunlight can’t filter down that far and everything is dark and silent. The whole time he’d been on the island, he’d been doing special training to make sure he could perform his new job at an outstanding level.
He said: “I’m not a leftist. If anything, the complete opposite.”
His family, originally monarchists, had become Fascists. He, too, was in tune with those political ideas.
He added: “What we’re doing here is saving lives. At sea, every life is sacred. If someone needs help, we rescue them. There are no colors, no ethnic groups, no religions. That’s the law of the sea.”
Then, suddenly, he stared at me.
He was enormous even when he was sitting down. “When you rescue a child in the open sea and you hold him in your arms . . .”
And he started to cry, silently.
His arms were still folded across his chest.
I wondered what he could have seen, what he’d lived through, just how much death this giant across the table had faced off with.
After more than a minute of silence, words resurfaced in the room. He said that these people should never have set out for Italy in the first place, and that in Italy the government was doing a bad job of taking them in, wastefully and with a demented approach to issues of management. Then he reiterated the concept one more time: “At sea, you can’t even think about an alternative, every life is sacred, and you have to help anyone who is in need, period.” That phrase was more than a mantra. It was a full-fledged act of devotion.
He unfolded his words slowly, as if they were careful steps down the steep side of a mountain.
“The most dangerous situation is when there are many vessels close together. You have to take care not to get caught between them because, if the seas are rough, you could easily be crushed if there’s a collision. I was really in danger only once: There was a force-eight gale, I was in the water with my back to a refugee boat loaded down with people, and I saw the hull of our vessel coming straight at me, shoved along by a twenty-five-foot wave. I moved sideways with a furious lunge that I never would have believed I could pull off. The two hulls crashed together. People fell into the water. I started swimming to pick them up. When I returned from that mission, I still had the picture of that hull coming to crush me before my eyes. I sat there on the edge of the dock, alone, for several minutes, until I could get that sensation of narrowly averted death out of my mind.”
He explained that when you’re out on the open water, the minute you reach the point from where the call for help was launched, you invariably find some new and unfamiliar situation.
“Sometimes, everything purrs along smoothly, they’re calm and quiet, the sea isn’t choppy, it doesn’t take us long to get them all aboard our vessels. Sometimes, they get so worked up that there’s a good chance of the refugee boat overturning during the rescue operations. You always need to manage to calm them down. Always. That’s a top priority. Sometimes, when we show up on the scene, the refugee boat has just overturned, and there are bodies scattered everywhere. Africans, for some physical reason, maybe because they lack significant amounts of body fat, tend to sink much faster. So, you have to work as quickly as you can. There is no standard protocol. You just decide what to do there and then. You can swim in a circle around groups of people, pulling a...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590519086
ISBN 13 
9781590519080
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

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