On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: Despite the efforts of postmodern theorists to convince us that exile is the emblematic condition of modern life, when it comes to immigrants and refugees we still seem incapable of the barest gesture of recognition, much less empathy. We remember Oedipus Rex: lover of one parent, killer of another. We forget Oedipus at Colonus: exiled king who wandered twenty years in search of “a resting place” near Athens, “where I should find home” and “round out there my bitter life.” We feel Medea’s rage over Jason’s betrayal, driving her to kill their two sons. We scarcely notice her equally poignant–and more frequent–lament that she is “deserted, a refugee,” with “no harbor from ruin to reach easily.” ... Between 1994 and 2001, at least 1,700 migrants from Mexico died trying to reach the United States. Throughout its entire existence, by contrast, exactly 171 people died trying to cross the Berlin wall. For all its pretensions to liberalism and openness, Western Europe has hardly been more welcoming. (Moorehead cites the case of one refugee in Britain leaving a suicide note that read, “You have to kill yourself in this country to prove that you would be killed in your own country.”) In response, many Africans have attempted to sail surreptitiously across the Mediterranean in vessels the Phoenicians would have scuttled long ago. On a stormy night in September 2002, to cite just one of Moorehead’s examples, a boat built to carry fifteen people went down less than 100 meters off Sicily’s southern coast. As tourists danced unknowingly at a popular bar on the beach, thirty-five of the 150 Liberians on board drowned and twenty more disappeared. Watching the bloated bodies float to shore over a period of days was gruesome enough. But what truly haunted Vera Sciortino, a local resident, was the thought of hungry fish feeding on the corpses. The inverse of little Oskar Matzerath’s mother in The Tin Drum–so filled with disgust upon seeing a horse’s head writhing with eels that she begins to eat fish obsessively–Vera was never able to eat fish again. ... In southern Lebanon Palestinian refugees suffer from the racism of their hosts, which keeps them out of jobs and power, and from the fear among the Lebanese that this largely Muslim refugee population will upset the country’s delicate confessional balance. Forbidden to expand their refugee camps “outward,” Palestinians are forced to build Manhattans of misery out of cinder blocks and scraps of tin: “Much of the inner camp [of Shatila] is almost completely dark, the daylight reduced to a pale glimmer by the overarching buildings and the canopy of wires that dangle not far above the head. Windows open onto walls.” Where migrants to New York City like my grandfather could look out such windows and see the world, Palestine’s refugees gaze out on a road to nowhere.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 18:01:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015