They may have tipped it over themselves, rushing to one side
of the boat – these boats that have no name, never mind the hundreds crowded onto
them – in a pointless attempt to attract the attention of the Coastguard plane flying
overhead. Pointless because the plane would not have been there at all, if it
hadn’t been dispatched to track the progress of this overcrowded vessel.
Migrants, migrants everywhere, and all they do is sink.
Another 50 died yesterday; 300 the week before. Close enough to Italy’s
outlying island of Lampedusa for their African bodies to be recovered from the
wine dark sea and treated like Europeans – the Europeans they were never
allowed to become.
In the makeshift morgue, untidy plastic sheeting – stiff limbs
poking out at random – gives way to neat rows of well-made coffins. White ones
for the little black bodies of children. An extra large casket for a mother and
her new born baby. Umbilical cord still attached, the body of the babe was found
inside the dead woman’s leggings.
‘And she wrapped him in swaddling clothes....’
Leggings, jeggings; pushing and shoving. To get on the boat;
to get off when it starts to sink. The whole, tawdry business of trafficking
and signing up to be trafficked.
Now this: nativity scene drowned out; epic story of Homeric
proportions; matter of life and death.
From the outside, it’s difficult to make sense of it. Those
orderly rows of coffins which say, in their orderliness, ‘welcome to the EU’ – ludicrous.
Perhaps the survivor who was treading water with his baby in
his arms and watched his son drown because he simply didn’t have enough hands –
perhaps he knows whether the glass is half full or half empty.
But that’s copping out. How would that man, of all people,
be able to achieve a sense of perspective? It should be me, from this distance.
Yet all I can see is water, water everywhere; and who knows what to think?
(With apologies to the Ancient Mariner)
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