Between Mediterranean Realism and Fantasy: Migrant Divides

The boat journey is central to the narrative of Mediterranean migration of the undocumented. While the boat itself is flimsy, fragile, unstable, it has powerfully captured the attention of the world—after all, its journey has produced recurring images of migrants washing up along southern Europe’s picturesque beaches in the archive of undocumented migration. As the boat in the south sets out for the northern shore, its trajectory provides an understanding of how we perceive the space of the Mediterranean: Narratives of migrants’ boat journeys commonly state that it is only a few miles of the Mediterranean that separates Africa’s northern shore and Europe’s southern shore. At the same time, however, they reflect on how the Mediterranean has been imagined as starkly divided into two incommensurable spaces and civilizational models—North and South (in actuality, by colonial powers in the modern period). ¹ In these texts, as well as in the popular imagination, the euphoric and metaphoric conception of the Mediterranean as a sea that has unified its northern, southern and eastern shores in the twentieth century appears at odds with the statecraft that transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a border between the European Union and the shores of Africa and Asia. By then, the colonial project had already captured the Mediterranean in an Orientalizing lens, while also distinguishing it as a space apart. This divided lens features, for example, in the works of Lawrence Durrell in Alexandria and Paul Bowles in Tangier, where the cities’ natives conform to the Orientalist fantasy of the backward, savage, and irrational yearning to be saved. Yet they also stand distinctly apart, due to their proximity to the Mediterranean, as members of a utopic cosmopolitanism celebrated for its openness. ² Gesturing to these historical continuities, recent accounts of forced migration portray the Mediterranean as a space of contradictions—the boat journey sharply calls into relief the divides of the Mediterranean as soon as it establishes it as a unified space—and the task of representation reflects these tensions.