A Return to Life: Narratives of Birth and Death in a Southern European Periphery

While death at sea has always been a reality for Mediterranean fishing communities, it loomed large in the 2010s with the growing intensity of migrant crossings from North Africa, mostly departing from Libya since the fall of its autocratic leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011, and in line with the increasing European restrictions on regular migration channels imposed since the 1990s.1 Local fishers now perish less often at sea, but these irregular crossings produce new victims, strangers to the island’s fishing community, construed officially as ‘migrants’ or ‘asylum seekers’, many of whom are women and children. During the 2010s, gateways into the European Union such as Lampedusa grew synonymous with media representations and political discourses of a ‘crisis’ of migration in the Mediterranean, characterized as ‘archipelagos of melancholia’, surrounded by a ‘watery grave’ (Sarnelli 2015: 150–51). Migrant maritime disasters made a powerful mark on the public imagination in Italy and abroad, espe- cially in Sicily, and most of all among those working in rescue and treat- ment of passengers saved at sea, and in the handling of the remains of those who died. Often thousands of people were saved at sea by the coast guard in a single week, and after large disasters, such as those that occurred on 3 October 2013 and 19 April 2015, the emergency services must handle the remains of hundreds of victims (ANSA 2016; Marceca, Viviano and Ziniti 2015; Tervonen and Pourquié 2017). Survivors present serious physical and mental health conditions and complications related both to violence experienced on the trail and to the conditions of the crossing (Crepet et al. 2017; Grotti et al. 2008). Yet local people and migrants alike frequently emphasize the way that the passage of time and the succession of seasons and ecological processes can contribute to healing and to a return to life.