I’ve never seen a man drown. Writing these words already feels unbearable. I don’t dare imagine what is to follow. But I have wondered what I would do if I were one day confronted by a drowning man. Would I have the courage to jump into the water to try to save him? The word “courage” would probably not have the same meaning. I tell myself I would at least shout for help, alert passers-by, call the emergency services—in other words, shift any responsibility onto others. A way of confessing my helplessness in the presence of the unspeakable: seeing the spectre of death and instantly admitting defeat.
For the time being, Pateh, you’re a news banner running across the bottom of the screen. A dispatch from the Corriere della Sera picked up by Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien, Ouest-France and all the local papers. Mindless riffs on the theme of your death. A “tragic death”, they call it, as if they needed to reassure themselves and allay any suspicions right away. Categorise your story under the catch-all heading of everyday tragedy.
Pateh, I don’t know you, but it’s as if your story has taken care of the introductions. An impossible encounter brought about by my naïve need to catch up. Once again, I feel as if I’m too late. Like a missed appointment with the blank page. Writing after the fact. Telling myself I needed time to absorb the event or step back from it. All those worn-out excuses proffered so as not to look bad. I’m determined to write, but I already know that no book will suffice to tell the full story behind your death.
Your death has exploded between Banjul and Venice into clumps of debris that are impossible to grasp. I write to link the two cities, to create a topography from reports of what happened. To oppose the gaping wound of death with small islands of solidarity. Chart your loss, making it fluctuate between continent and islands, between bottomless depths and dry land. Reimagine your journey through my inevitably fragmented writing.
Faced with the proliferating versions of your story, I must not try to decide between them but instead create a void. Write to free up the tiny space of the funeral oration. Write fast, in one go, to overcome this helpless feeling. Gather up the splinters of a hypothetical portrait, like collecting broken shells on a deserted beach.
It occurs to me that the French word oraison (oration) contains both the water that swallowed you (eau) and the absence of a reason behind your act (raison). The unfathomable motive of the waters that swept you away.
When I decide to write about your death, I know that I will have to take on Venice. I have never visited that city, but, like everyone else, I’ve seen countless representations of it. Hosts of images in tourist brochures. Endless photos scrolling on social media. An almost indecent procession of all those supposedly romantic, decadent, legendary places. First self-evident fact: the entire world has visited Venice, but no one has really stopped to consider your death. A world-city enclosing a silent death. A museum-city showing an invisible painting.
On a map of Africa, I put my tentative finger on Gambia. I know little of your mother country. I only know that it’s virtually surrounded by Senegal. There is something portentous about this. My gaze follows the River Gambia, a sinuous waterway that plunges inland. The border follows the zigzagging blue line, as if to guide me, the lost reader. The waters slowly close over your name.
You arrive in Venice on Sunday, 22 January 2017. I can feel that insidious cold entering your bones. A cold you’ve never felt in Italy. Unpleasant shivers run over your skin. A strange feeling of unease. The same questions going round and round. What exactly are you doing here? What are you looking for? Venice whispers that you’re not welcome. But who is truly welcome?
From the start, your death brings up images of the thousands of men and women who have drowned in the Mediterranean. I must resist the infinite repetition of this death. Write differently. Rethink writing as an urgent whispering amidst the surrounding din.
I read that in the days before you arrived, it was much colder in Venice. As if the weather had suddenly turned mild. But I had to face facts. The mild weather didn’t matter. Variations in temperature would not have changed a thing. This was indeed your last winter on the lagoon.
Over the past few days, I’ve been re-reading Aimé Césaire’s Return to my Native Land. In my notebook, I copy out this quote: “So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered with death’s-heads. They are not covered with water lilies.” All those wounds lacerating the body of the continent. I must write to make the waters run dry, to unmask the face of violence, to restore colour to all the water lilies choked in the silent lagoons.
The newspapers repeat that we know “so little” about you. You’re the mystery man of the Grand Canal. A question mark haunting the local and international news. Here and there, bits of your life, scattered, interrupted, like dots on a vast, white canvas.
There are two of you. You and your backpack. The number two, as if thumbing a nose at your solitude. The backpack that was your companion for months. Silent witness to your departures and arrivals, to your wanderings and your hopes. It was your suitcase, your shopping bag, your makeshift pillow. It was your talisman, your compass. Not a lucky charm, because luck never came into it. The word luck like a sweet dream fleeing the shores of this walled off, high-and-mighty Europe. A taunting mirage from the banks of the River Gambia.
Yesterday, I came across a short video shot in Zarzis, on Tunisia’s south-east coast. The place is called the Cemetery of the Unknown. A man walks among anonymous graves. His name is Shamseddine. Shams—sun in Arabic. A miraculous sun in a grim night. Shamseddine is a fisherman. He speaks of “decomposed bodies”, of “half-men and half-women”. He pauses, then adds, “with no legs, no head”. A moment later, he pours a bottle of water over a small mound. A child’s grave, perhaps. He waters some red flowers. Every week, he transports the bodies from the morgue to the cemetery: “If you don’t feel the need to do something for these people, you won’t do it.” The camera films the graves. Heaps of ochre earth spaced barely a few yards apart. On one of them is a notice: “Rose-Marie, Nigeria, 27-5-2017”. The only corpse in the cemetery that has been identified. There are four hundred graves in all. Four hundred nails in the world’s coffin. Four hundred dead who are waiting, like you, for their funeral oration.
Pozzallo. In my notebook, I write down the name of the Sicilian town where you landed in 2015. I look it up online. This port town is in the province of Ragusa, in the south-east, just over a hundred kilometres from Catania. It’s the birthplace of Giorgio La Pira, an academic and prominent figure in Italian Catholicism, who became mayor of Florence in the 1950s and is known for his work promoting interfaith dialogue and bringing together the peoples of the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pozzallo was a fishing port before turning into a tourist destination. These days, the town is associated with the regular arrival of refugees in small boats. In the shade of the olive trees and fruit trees, stories like yours wash up on the Sicilian shores.
To write is to draw concentric circles around your tragedy. Each word that slips onto the page is a blow to the silence that bears down on your name, to the chasms that open and close to prevent the story from taking shape.
On that 22 January 2017, in the early afternoon, you arrived in Venice from Milan. A train journey of around two and a half hours. I looked up the Trenitalia timetable. You must have taken the 12:05 or the 12:35 train. Unless the timetable has changed. You might have been sitting by the window, at the far end of the carriage. Crucial not to attract attention. Sit close to the exit doors. Stay alert and keep your head down. You never know. Things can go wrong, and you must always be prepared for the worst. A lesson from the years of wandering and uncertainty. Your precarious life was always one of escape. The train between Lombardy and Veneto leaves in its wake the irreducible sum of your fears.
My gaze lingers on Pozzallo’s beach. A travel agency website extols the charm of the place. The two words used again and again are “relaxation” and “comfort”. At one end of the beach of fine sand, a fifteenth-century watchtower now houses a museum. On a map of Sicily, the shoreline looks strangely short. I scroll through images as if searching for unexpected signs of your having been here. I close my eyes, and the beach at Pozzallo becomes that long uneven band of overcrowded dinghies, and bodies abandoned to fate.
Four years later, you belong to the archives. Your death is now a file kept in the digital memory of newspapers. The articles about your death are still accessible online. You seem to have become a symbol. I am wary of that word, which reeks of displacement, effacement, hastily and indecently reducing you to an abstraction. A symbol of what, exactly?
This feeling of fighting the inescapable replaying of your death. As if you die again with every word, every image, every scene. I find I have an insistent craving for a different ending. For a technical glitch, a cancelled train, a journey delayed, your death avoided thanks to some miraculous intervention. Each time, I end up having to accept the facts. The blank page is the mirror of my resignation.
In her book Au pays des disparus, the journalist Taina Tervonen attempts to reconstruct the journey of a refugee who died off the coast of Libya in April 2015 after the capsizing of a trawler carrying eight hundred people, all now caged in a wreck lying at a depth of more than nine hundred feet. And the question that rises to the surface: how many deaths preceded yours? In my notebook, I copy these words of Taina’s: “It was there, in Pozzallo, listening to the stories of all those who dealt with the bodies, that I learned what it means to count the dead.”
Perhaps you feel a slight pang as the train pulls out of Milano Centrale station. You think of your first days under the Sicilian sun. You found the streets of Pozzallo extremely narrow. And yet you’d loved those solitary little palm trees in the Piazza delle Rimembranze—the square of memories. Yours had the strange ability to burst out of nowhere like sudden, blinding flashes. Luminous scenes of your home country overlay the fleeting landscapes of this Italy that flash past the window. Your body is imprinted with the ragged memories of these past two years. The tang of something half-tasted that will persist to the end.
The InfoMigrants website reports that on 24 November 2017, almost ten months after your death, a dinghy assisted by a fishing boat and carrying two hundred and sixty-four men and women arrived in Pozzallo. Among the group were some forty children and a two-week-old baby. The newborn’s mother was nineteen. She fell pregnant after being raped in a Libyan detention camp. I think of that mother cradling the echo of an unpunished crime. She gazes at the horizon which appears close and curved. The low clouds grow more threatening. An eerie silence hangs over the shore. Here, your brothers and sisters are numbers wrapped in foil survival blankets.
Now, Milan belongs to the past. The brutal notion that each stage of your life as an exile will be a nail in your watery coffin. Each train stop pushes you a little closer to the Venetian waters. Brescia, Peschiera, Verona, Vicenza, Padua. Successive stations beat out a painful tune in your head. You take refuge in those childhood songs that come back to you like the shattered mirrors of a past life. In the palms of your hands, you believe you can make out a patch of sky over Banjul, a scene from the neighbourhood where you grew up, smiles on your parents’ faces, a snatch of a story told by old friends, the ones who didn’t have the luck or the heart to leave, the ones who wait for news of their loved ones as if for a change of season. Your eyelids, suddenly heavy, close over the remains of a past swallowed up by the tracks.
Misrata, over there, across the sea, the other face of this tragedy. A thousand and one lives cut short. A thousand and one crimes. A thousand and one graves for a death that does not speak its name. Misrata: the gracious Libyan oasis whose palm trees stand watch over departing coffins.
See Pozzallo again and be reborn. The year 2015 is that of all hope. The promise of a new life off the Italian coast. Perhaps you remember that long beach that exhales revenge. Your gaze darts from the few sun umbrellas clustered around the fifteenth-century tower to the slightly faded ones shading the fruit and vegetable stalls of the Albert market in Banjul. Your motherland threads an uncertain way through your memory. Like a venomous snake about to attack, your past hisses, arches back, coils, prides itself on menacing you all the way to this ludicrous seat aboard this train that’s sending you slowly toward oblivion.
I hear the screech of the train pulling into Venice station. The window is a border crossing surrounded by barbed wire. Your past life is a ball of wool rolled up in your foreigner’s head. All around you, the palpable excitement of all those passengers rushing for the exits. The platform’s invaded by yells and laughter, the echoes of which reach you in scattershot bursts. Like a cacophonous tune you’re unable to make out.
And I feel unspeakable shame at being able to do nothing, or so little, confronted with the procession of those sacrificed lives, of the dead too hurriedly classified, archived, shut out of sight in the drawers of statistics. I write to summon up those faces, emaciated from the cold or exhaustion, the grimaces on chapped lips, the wounds on the maps of bodies and of territories opened but never closed. Pateh, each little scrap of your forgotten story is made from the bitter stuff of disgrace.
On 15 March 2011, four years before you arrived in Pozzallo, a Moroccan ferry attempted to dock in Sicily to refuel. Le Monde reported that Italy denied it access for lack of “certain information” on the passengers. On board the ferry were more than eighteen hundred people evacuated from Libya, where the civil war was at its height. Most of them were Moroccan workers. An RFI article shows a photo of another ferry arriving in Tangier. Men and women gathered on the deck lean over to inhale the smell of dry land. I’m reminded of an uncle who spent more than fifteen years of his life working on Libyan construction sites. He returned to Morocco in 2000. He told me about a country that no longer exists. He said he knew every street in Tripoli. In the months before he died, he followed events in Libya with a mixture of silent rage and wistful melancholy.
On the concourse of Santa Lucia station, you watch the streams of travellers trailing their suitcases or staring at the departure boards. Some of them look ridiculous, their faces intent or bewildered. Others display fixed grins. A hundred pairs of eyes glint around your silhouette. A theatre of deformed puppets. You have the curious feeling of witnessing an elaborate performance with you as the sole spectator. You are twenty-two years old, and you’re bracing yourself to leave this tumult.
For a long time, I saw writing as a refuge, a release, a place of retreat and regeneration. But I realize that recounting your tragedy is the exact opposite. Taking a huge risk. I may lose all my bearings. It’s a parlous attempt to corral a hypothesis, to try to give you back a little dignity.
You take your time. Moving away from the platforms without looking back. Walking slowly through the station corridors. Your backpack is even lighter, like a balloon about to fly off. You take your time, putting off entering the world city. You scan the jostling crowds of people in front of the shops or queuing at the vending machines. Avoid the police officers positioned around the station. Despite the constant danger, perhaps you have a novel feeling of detachment. As if, propelled by an invisible hand, you were sliding slowly down a steep slope. As if nothing could hold you back any longer, not even the daylight and the shadows of the buildings that you can already make out on the other side of the Grand Canal.
Images continue to rise to the surface. The waters will spit out their truth in the end. Yesterday, I came across a photo taken in Pozzallo in November 2017, a few months after your death. It shows someone from the Italian Red Cross welcoming a refugee. The man is wrapped in a foil blanket. His head is bowed and in his hands is a folded piece of paper. An official document? A temporary permit? An ID card? The Red Cross representative is wearing blue gloves and a face mask, right hand resting on the refugee’s shoulder. The gesture is suspended, as is my gaze, torn between the two figures, like this gulf between us, symbolic of all the gaps, all the failures, all the breaches that end up on the page.
Pateh, this Venice station is the first fragment of a landscape that stubbornly resists the written word. Your tragedy begins here, in this frightening din, in the belly of that carefree throng, among those excitable travellers, recognizable by their enormous suitcases or the cameras slung across their shoulders, barely disguising their delight behind the fancy frames of their designer sunglasses or laughing heartily in front of others who look just like them. But who is there to spell out the five letters of your name?
I return obsessively, relentlessly, to the place where you stayed in Sicily. Again, I think about your arrival in Pozzallo, one day in 2015. Did you have those same documents that two years later would be found among your belongings? Did you meet representatives from the Italian Red Cross? Were you too wrapped in a foil survival blanket? I repeat that word, “survival”, as if to hold it next to your name a little longer.
I dream of a book that would contain all the words refused you, all the silences imposed on you. A book where the word “help” is constantly repeated, in which the author would fade from each line, each fragment, to give you back the space denied you in life.
Standing at the top of the stairs in front of Santa Lucia station. Those elongated steps are like the tentacles of a giant octopus. The triple-headed streetlamps spaced a few yards apart cast slender, menacing shadows. The anonymous forms sitting on the steps appear to ignore one another. You look up and your gaze lights on the green copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo, on the other side of the Grand Canal, gleaming in the Sunday afternoon gloom. From afar, the statue of Christ the Redeemer appears to be dancing in the clouds. You are alone. Utterly alone.
How many brothers who left before you drowned in the insatiable whirlwind of the news? How many parents, sisters, mothers, newborns, and couples wrenched from the dawn of uncertain arrivals, forever released from the fear of ID checks, from the nostalgia for reunions postponed a thousand times? Since when has the rule of the arbitrary been ending lives at the bottom of the sea?
The River Gambia, witness to exiles and suffering. Your name rings out from the Fouta Djallon mountain region in Guinea to the Niokolo-Koba National Park in Senegal. Your bitter memory haunts the banks of the Kuluntu, Nieri Ko and Mayél Samu rivers. The waters of your African homeland endlessly hammer out your name. In Banjul, the angry river spills the splinters of your story into the unfeeling, unheeding Atlantic. The belly of the ocean has long since exploded, like a balloon escaped from the realm of childhood.
On the station steps, a semblance of tranquillity. Time stands still, and the Grand Canal looks like a long, bottomless pool. You sit to one side, your backpack wedged between your legs, your hands resting on your knees. You have closed your eyes, but no images have come to disturb you. You’re not even hungry. Just a feeling of emptiness inside, as if an invisible hand were slowly undressing you in front of the uncaring city. Quick, open your eyes to shake it off. Over there, to the left, the elegant outline of the Ponte degli Scalzi—the Bridge of the Barefoot Monks—like a floating parenthesis, suspended in the air.
In a photo taken in Pozzallo in March 2020, five refugees wait in a line behind a metal barrier. Two Italian security guards stand nearby. The five men are wearing identical flip-flops and are gazing in different directions. I focus on the fourth man. His left hand is placed on his chest. In his right, he holds a piece of paper on which I can read what appears to be an identification number: 43/C. No surname. No first name. Identity stifled. How many transparent, flimsy lives are thus abbreviated on scraps of paper?
Behind the words, the mapping of wounds. Yours and those of your brothers and sisters. All those inhospitable territories, hostile plains, lofty mountains, those impractical paths, inaccessible islands, choked estuaries, silted-up roads, and fraught sea crossings—those geographical distances that constantly reflect ruptures, gashes, breaks. I write as if reading an ancient, creased map of the world. All I see are broken lines, blurred shapes, approximate geometries, encircled spaces that become disrupted and dizzying. Before my eyes, the hemispheres merge, continents change places, borders dissolve, waters have the pale colour of defeat. Like an immense expanse of mud abruptly closing over your memory.
Waiting. Those long, interminable minutes on the steps of Santa Lucia station. Who knows, maybe someone will come and talk to you, ask you the time or inquire about train departures, or the quickest route to the Rialto Bridge. Maybe you’ll slip on your backpack again and turn around. Take the train back to Milan and find a way to get to Sicily. Maybe you’ll even reach Pozzallo with its comforting palm trees, quiet, narrow streets and beach of fine sand. You’ll think about going home finally. In Banjul, you’ll tell them it didn’t work out, your journey ended on the steps of an Italian railway station, your dream fell into the Grand Canal, soundlessly, without a ripple, like a pebble in a puddle of water. But there are too many maybes. Too many what-ifs. A howling lack of certainty in the face of the inevitable.
I have a constant need to reflect on the gap between writing your story and that of Venice. As if a secret had crept into the chasm and now it had to be revealed. I picture the green copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo. It will mirror your fragility, be the silent witness to your death.
Groping as I write. Stumbling narrative. Stuttering memory. Sentences tailing off. How can I recount your death other than in the broken thread of a text to come? I feel I must write in the margin of your death, push words along a ridge, string together images up to the brink of the precipice.
I find two photos of you online. In the first, you’re wearing a blue patterned shirt. In the second, a black jacket with a stiff collar. With your left hand, you’re making a slanting V-sign. A victory that needs straightening up. A victory that smacks of defeat.
The ballet of the ACTV logos on the hulls of the water buses. Your serene gaze follows the forest of hands loading and unloading suitcases, trying to calm excited children or handle bags that are nothing like yours. A few yards to the left, you see the vaporetto stop with its yellow bands and the word Ferrovia. People are queuing on the ramp. For the time being, you have no desire to move. Your bag is still wedged between your knees, like a final link to your past life.
My gaze constantly flits between Pozzallo and Venice on the map. It occurs to me that your story is surrounded by water. The Ionian Sea. The Adriatic Sea. The Tyrrhenian Sea. Water delineates a vast geography of loss whose echoes resonate as far as the banks of the Gambia River. Your homeland carries water in its belly foreshadowing those neighbouring seas flowing into one another and suspended on the borders of Europe.
I recall a memory from Oued Laou, a coastal town in northern Morocco. Some forty kilometres from Tetouan, the gentle whiff of summer holidays. On Saturdays, at the village market, the traditional headdresses glitter in the sun. On a clear day, Spain is visible from the shady balcony. The beach stretches to infinity and the horizon continuously recedes. At night, shadows push a flimsy boat along the beach. In the distance, whispers. Wan torch beams. Shapes moving around. The thrumming of an engine starting up. A light that’s extinguished in the sea. Each boat that leaves makes me think of you. That was at the end of the last century, but it feels as if it were yesterday. Pateh, I saw with my own eyes men from my country head into the night and vanish.
Write in brief snatches to ease the burden of the story. The only writing possible is that which leaves a trace.
A sudden, unexpected flash of sunlight on the surface of the water. It’s time to stand up and walk away from those dreary steps and face the city. On the opposite bank of the Grand Canal, the houses now look like cardboard boxes whose windows are dark, menacing little holes. Again, that feeling of malign cold that seeps into your pores. You slide a hand inside a pocket to check the plastic wallet.
To the south of the Sicily that welcomed you one day in 2015, an archipelago of names makes me giddy. I look for traces of your passage on those tiny islands scattered between the territorial waters of Tunisia and Italy. Off the coast of Sfax, the Tunisian islands of Kerkennah stare at their Italian counterparts of Lampedusa and Linosa. A little further north, it’s only seventy kilometres between the Italian island of Pantelleria and Cape Bon, the north-eastern tip of Tunisia. Curious symmetry between these unsuspected geographical proximities. Fascinating distribution of these island fragments that have broken away from the imposing continental land masses.
In my notebook, I jot down this description of Venice by Goldoni: “Maps, plans, models and descriptions are insufficient; it must be seen. All other cities bear more or less resemblance to one another, but Venice resembles none.” I wonder whether Venice’s unique character has something to do with your decision, Pateh. A final halt to finish with maps, plans and descriptions. Your presence alone in Venice speaks louder than any words or interpretations.
From my reading, I learn that you have a cousin who also lives in Italy. His name is Muhammed. It seems you haven’t met up since your arrival in the country, even though your families are from the same village, Wellingara, and know each other. I look it up on the map. The village is in the Kombo North district, some twenty kilometres southwest of Banjul . There’s very little information online about Wellingara. One article reports that in 2013, two years before you left, a new mosque was inaugurated in the presence of around a hundred people, including from the neighbouring villages. What were you doing in 2013? Were you already mulling over the idea of leaving?
You walk beside the Grand Canal. Your first few steps warm you up. Perhaps you pause under a street lamp to watch one last time the comings and goings of the vaporetti and the tourists milling around. Some take selfies with the dome of San Simeone Piccolo in the background. They twist and turn to get the best shot. Others, much more discreet, stand glued to the spot, as if hypnotised by the alluring body of the city slowly spreading out before their eyes. A few yards further on, level with the Calle Carmelitani, opposite the Ferrovia stop, you get your first glimpse of the gondolas lined up between the wooden posts. Their slender, dark shapes look like long coffins floating on the water.
All those dreams of dignity reduced to dust. All those hopes and dreams crushed under the weight of indifference. All those plans put on hold or nipped in the bud. What is left after so much heartbreak if not the desire to escape, to slam the door, to seek refuge in the silent explosion of death?
And this perpetual question eats away at me: Why Venice? To scream your pain to the world or to leave a bubble of silence amid the tumult? You could have stayed in Milan or tried your luck in another town in northern or central Italy. Waited for a break, for better days, the chance to start all over again elsewhere. Repeating over and over that “the best is to come”, that “nothing is ever completely lost”, that two years is a relatively short time, that you must remain strong. You could have. The searing pain of that “could have”, as if writing were forever doomed to be a resurgence of regrets.
