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Intermarium: Israel between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea

shaul marmari

Neighbours[1]

Sirens went off in Eilat on 31 October 2023. Soon after, aerial targets were intercepted off the coast of Israel’s southernmost city. The Houthi regime, which controls much of Yemen, subsequently declared that it had attacked Israel in response to the war in Gaza. Since then, the Shiite movement whose slogan calls for ‘death to Israel’ has launched numerous missile and drone strikes against Eilat, while at the same time targeting civilian ships plying the Red Sea. On 20 July 2024, the Israeli air force retaliated by massively bombing Al-Hudaydah. The odd conflict between Yemen and Israel exposes a forgotten geopolitical reality that connects these two seemingly unconnected countries. While direct military conflict between countries situated almost 2000 kilometres apart seems inconceivable, the missiles, drones and aircraft that traverse the Red Sea remind us that both countries adjoin a common body of water. Sharing a sea is more than a geographical detail. After all, water connects more than land does; its surface facilitates movement and allows coastal inhabitants to exchange. Eilat shares not only a landscape with Al-Hudaydah, but also a long history of caravans and dhows that once crisscrossed the region. Today, only traces of these ancient connections remain; the histories of the Bedouin, Sudanese, Eritrean, Ethiopian and Yemeni communities in contemporary Israel evoke old migration routes that antedate the arbitrary borders of nation states. Yet Israel is seldom associated with the Red Sea. Recently, the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ — referring to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean — has brought other aquatic images into the public discourse. It is especially the Mediterranean that has become the cornerstone of Israel’s self-understanding. The Red Sea, by contrast, seems out of place. Its relative absence from the collective consciousness renders the conflict between Israel and Yemen almost bizarre. Was the Red Sea always absent? Must it remain absent? A rough sketch of Israel’s historical relation to the Red Sea shows that the southern sea once briefly occupied the Israeli mind before it was eclipsed by other maritime visions. This brief history of emersion and suppression can afford new vistas for the contemporary Israeli imagination.

Strategic sea

On 10 March 1949, during the final stages of the First Arab-Israeli War, soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) raised an impromptu flag over the old British police station in Um al-Rashrash on the Gulf of Aqaba. The iconic photograph of the Ink Flag symbolises the conquest of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the UN partition plan of 1947. As the forces reached the southernmost point of the newly declared State of Israel, they took control over some 10-kilometre strip of Red Sea coast. Um al-Rashrash would become the site for Israel’s only port city on the Red Sea: Eilat.

Fig. 1: Micha Perry. The Ink-Drawn National Flag. 1949. Government Press Office, https://www.flickr.com/photos/government_press_office/7621028734/.

The Israeli leadership recognised the significance of these territorial gains. Located between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Israel saw an opportunity to bridge East and West. Israeli leaders let their imagination run riot with ideas about digging a canal to connect both seas — visions that still occasionally resurface.[2] While this fantasy hasn’t materialised, access to the Red Sea was immediately perceived as a strategic asset. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, spoke highly of the new route leading from Eilat to South and East Asia, where Israel could make new friends. Yet Israel’s optimistic marine visions confronted a gloomy reality. Israel had to share the Red Sea with Egypt, its then-bitterest enemy, which was seeking regional hegemony. Egypt controlled the Straits of Tiran and could close the coveted maritime route leading to Eilat at will. To counter that threat, Israel sought allies around the Red Sea. Besides the remnants of the declining colonial empires, like British Aden and French Djibouti, the Ethiopian Empire proved most valuable once it annexed Eritrea and obtained access to the Red Sea in 1951. Israel and Ethiopia shared not only similar legendary genealogies back to King David but also geopolitical interest of undermining Egyptian hegemony.

Fig. 2: Nadav Mann. An Israeli military advisor (Shmuel Eitan, second from right) in Ethiopia. 1963. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990049703970205171/NLI#$FL79244584.

In this geopolitical situation, the Red Sea became a locus of military, diplomatic and commercial activity. Throughout the first decades of its existence, Israel’s energy was largely directed southwards. Even prosaic transactions, like shipping canned meat from Eritrea to Eilat, became charged with strategic meaning. An incident involving a meat-laden ship sailing from Massawa to Israel in 1954 almost escalated into a full-scale war. Such a war indeed broke out in 1956, when Israel, together with France and the United Kingdom, attacked Egypt and temporarily captured the Sinai Peninsula. From an Israeli perspective, the main objective was to secure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. This goal continued to dominate Israeli policy in the years leading up to the 1967 war.[3]

Fig. 3: Unknown. The Israel ship ‘Queen of Sheba’ en route from Eilat to Massawa, calling at Sharm al-Shaikh. 1956. Government Press Office, https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=D329-097#Preview1.

A Red Sea moment

In centralised Israel, state interests trickled down to all spheres of life. Red Sea strategy was accompanied by growing curiosity about that mysterious space, which first had to be mapped and studied. During the brief occupation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1956-57, Israeli marine biologists explored wildlife around Sharm al-Shaikh, while a second expedition made it as far south as the Dahlak islands, off the Eritrean coast, in 1962.[4] A delegation of zoologists and parasitologists travelled to Ethiopia in 1958, followed by two expeditions of geologists, geneticists and physicians. One member of an archaeological expedition to the island of Tiran summarised the relationship between knowledge and power: upon Israel’s founding, the Red Sea straits ‘suddenly acquired military importance’; the events of 1956 ‘afforded opportunities for field study in relative favourable conditions’.[5]

Fig. 4: Benno Rothenberg. A woman looking towards the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba. undated. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997009858550305171/NLI#$FL169950643).

Beyond scientific knowledge, the military and diplomatic interest inspired literary and artistic engagement with the Red Sea too. Author Nathan Shaham was among the first to have sailed from Eilat to Massawa after the 1956 war, and his impressions from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia were narrated in the Hebrew travelogue Journey to the Land of Cush, which was colourfully illustrated by artist Shmuel Katz. The renowned Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever too travelled to Eilat and Sinai and was captivated by the landscapes. His poetry after 1949, praised by David Ben Gurion,[6] is permeated with images of wadis, coral reefs and — recurring in his desert poems — a great silence:
In the Sinai Desert, on a cloud of granite Sculpted by the Genesis-night, Hewn of black flame facing the Red Sea, I saw the Great Silence.[7]
For a moment, then, the Red Sea — its shores, water, landscapes and surrounding cultures — captivated Israelis. They expressed their fascination in various ways, for example through popular music. The folk duo Hillel and Aviva, with their darbuka and homemade flutes, became known for their desert songs; the Arava (steppe) trio recorded country tunes about Hebrew cowboys; and Lior Yeini employed a cool bossa nova to portray the Red Sea reefs as an escape from city life. The song To Eilat (1970) presented the city as a ‘gate to the south’, oriented towards Djibouti, Mombasa and Kolkata. There, the European capitals of Paris and Rome are but a hazy mirage.

Fig. 5: Uncredited. The Sinai Peninsula, taken from the Gemini XI space shuttle. 1966. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990035790120205171/NLI#$FL19169324.

The fascination with the Red Sea intensified after the Six-Day War in 1967, when the IDF defeated the Egyptian army and conquered the Sinai Peninsula, this time with long-term plans. Having more than tripled its size, Israel had become a Red Sea power, ruling over the vast Sinai Desert, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Tiran Straits. While Sinai was not as subject to Messianic projections as was the occupied West Bank — supposedly the heartland of biblical Israel — the conquered desert was similarly envisaged to be populated by Jewish pioneers. As the new frontier aroused an old Zionist passion for colonisation, hundreds of Israeli idealists flocked to Sinai to make the desert bloom. Several Jewish settlements — Ofira (Sharm al-Shaikh), Di Zahav (Dahab) and Neviot (Nuweiba) — concentrated along the Red Sea coast to become centres of fishing and tourism.

Fig. 6: Moshe Marlin Levin. Ofira. 1975. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997008872695805171/NLI#$FL151612284.

Fading space

During those years of occupation, a new Israeli identity began crystalising. In the spirit of the global 1960s and 1970s, the highly militarised territory, with its pristine beaches and solemn deserts, became fertile soil for ideas about nature, free love and recreational drug use. In that geopolitical hotspot, hippie culture merged with Zionist idealism, military duty, Oriental fantasy and biblical myth. Former settlers recall a feeling of idyllic freedom and liberation from modern life.[8]

Fig. 7: Boris Karmi. An Israeli plays the guitar in Nuweiba. 1975. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997009324688405171/NLI#$FL159538630.

The Neviot music festival that took place in Nuweiba in August 1978 marks the climax of Israel’s Red Sea era. Thousands of partygoers travelled to the remote Red Sea settlement to participate in what has often been described as the Israeli Woodstock. Amid the occupied land, they slept under the starry skies, swam naked and danced to Hebrew covers of Stevie Wonder. Singer Mickey Gavrielov recalled being ‘thrown into a world where the experience was different from your familiar reality’.[9] That experience was short-lived. While thousands were dancing in Nuweiba, negotiations between Israel and Egypt were underway. In September, the Camp David Accords were signed, paving the way for Israeli-Egyptian peace. The agreement prescribed that Israel withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. As Ofira, Neviot and Di Zahav were evacuated, it shrank back to its 10-kilometre strip of Red Sea coast in Eilat. As the leadership was determined not to dwell on the past, Israel’s 15 years in Sinai have largely vanished from the collective memory. The memories of the coral reefs and the barren mountains have faded, kept alive today only by a handful former inhabitants of the evacuated settlements.[10] Once the peace treaty with Egypt ensured safe shipping to and from Eilat, there was no longer any need for Israel to operate militarily or diplomatically in the Red Sea. That Israel’s newfound ally in the region disappeared when Ethiopia sank into a long civil war only diminished the region’s appeal. Without rivals or friends, the Red Sea lost its geopolitical and cultural meaning. As Israeli ships safely plied its waters, the sea became a conduit that moves goods so smoothly that they leave no impression. From a strategic arena, it became a non-issue or ‘non-space’ — a transitory zone without any meaning.[11]

Fig. 8: Sa’ar Ya’acov. The closed gates of the Neviot holiday village shortly before its evacuation. 1982. Israeli Government Press Office, https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=D320-064#Preview1.

At the same time, Israel turned its gaze elsewhere. In 1978, the year of the Neviot festival, an essay collection by Jacqueline Kahanoff suggested a new direction. Kahanoff, an Egyptian-born Israeli essayist, had previously published a collection of translated African stories, following the Red Sea orientation of the time. Her 1978 book From East the Sun turned away from Africa and the Red Sea towards the Levant. Together with the journal Apirion that has appeared since 1982, the publication marks growing Israeli interest in the Mediterranean.

Mediterraneanism and Erythreanism

Israel has a long history with the Mediterranean. While Zionism turned most of its energy and eros to the land, ‘conquering the sea’ played an important secondary role. In Zionist thought, the conquered water was always the Mediterranean, along whose coastline large Jewish settlements developed. Ultimately, the Mediterranean served as the setting for the Zionist drama of Aliyah, of Jewish migration to the Land of Israel. Fantastic Zionist plans to storm Palestine from the south, from the Red Sea, were overshadowed by the heroic narrative of crossing the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean has featured prominently in Zionist thought, affording Jews ways of belonging to the region while evading the hostility of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. For Israelis who feel trapped in their imagined outpost of Western civilisation, the Mediterranean provides an alternative self-image that is neither entirely Western nor Eastern.[12] Instead, the Mediterranean space emerges as a zone of cosmopolitan, fluid, syncretic identities between East and West. By adopting that kind of Mediterraneanism, the implied argument goes, Israel could forge greater harmony with its neighbours and among its internal divisions. Mediterranean identity contains more than lofty ideas.[13] It suffuses Israeli culture, where Greek music, Turkish mezze and a ‘Mediterranean temper’ are unanimously prized. Feeling thoroughly Mediterranean, Israelis forget or suppress any connection to the Red Sea. That Africa is next door, that Massawa is closer to Eilat than Palermo to Tel Aviv, is ‘cognitively, culturally and politically repressed and denied’.[14] And while the beaches of Eilat are still a popular tourist destination, they are drained of cultural meaning; grandiose attractions like waterparks and skating rinks dominate the landscape. Tellingly, even Eilat’s Queen of Sheba hotel, whose namesake’s kingdom flanked the Red Sea, invites its guests to ‘explore the culinary delights of the Mediterranean’.[15]

Fig. 9: Moshe Milner. Water slide in Eilat. 2005. Israeli Government Press Office, https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=D927-032#Preview1.

Israeli consciousness appears to have completely shifted away from the Red Sea and towards the Mediterranean. When the geopolitical reality required, however, Israel turned to the Red Sea with military, political, commercial, scientific and cultural enthusiasm. The connections it formed in that space only dissolved when the geopolitical circumstances changed. Israel’s history with the Red Sea is thus one of dis:connection, of globalisation and deglobalisation.[16] But some connections remain. The Negev Bedouin, the Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish communities, and the aging hippies of Ofira and Neviot all share affinities to the south. In Eilat, the colloquial designation for flipflops as ‘Djiboutis’ still recalls past ties overseas. The Red Sea need not resurface only in relation to drone and missile strikes; Israel might strike a better balance between Mediterraneanism and Erythreanism.[17]

Fig. 10: Boris Karmi. Nude swimming in Eilat. 1967. National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/images/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997009325145805171/NLI#$FL159554099.

 
[1] A longer version of this essay appeared in Hebrew in Hazman Hazeh magazine in March 2023 (https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/red-sea/). [2] See, for example, Mordechai Chaziza, 'The Red-Med Railway: New Opportunities for China, Israel, and the Middle East', Begin-Sadat Center Perspectives 385 (11 December 2016). [3] Eitan Barak, 'Between Reality and Secrecy: Israel’s Freedom of Navigation through the Straits of Tiran, 1956–1967', The Middle East Journal 61, no. 4 (2007). [4] Meirav Reuveny, 'The Heinz Steinitz Marine Biology Laboratory in Eilat: Science and Politics between Father and Son', in Dubnow Institute Yearbook, ed. Yfaat Weiss (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 486-88. [5] A.P. Schick, 'Tiran: the Straits, the Island, and its Terraces', Israel Exploration Journal 8, no. 2 (1958): 122. [6] Jowita Panczyk, 'Is the War Over Yet?', Shaul Marmari ed. Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut, Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow, 18 December 2013, https://mimeo.dubnow.de/is-the-war-over-yet/. [7] Avram Sutzkever, 'The Great Silence', in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Benjamin Harshav (Oakland: University of California Press, 1991), 343. [8] For recent recollections, see Osher Assulin and Yoav Gross. Sinai. Israel: Kan11, 2022. [9] Rachel Neiman, 'Looking back on the 1978 "Woodstock of Israel"', Nicky Blackburn ed. Israel21c, 9 October 2017, https://www.israel21c.org/looking-back-on-the-1978-woodstock-of-israel/. [10] For examples, see the testimonies on http://myofira.com/en [11] Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). [12] Yaacov Shavit, 'The Mediterranean World and “Mediterraneanism”: The Origins, Meaning, and Application of a Geo-Cultural Notion in Israel', Journal of Mediterranean Studies 3, no. 2 (1988): 112. [13] Alexandra Nocke, The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity (Boston Brill, 2009); David Ohana, Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). [14] Eitan Bar-Yosef, A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013); Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: A Geneaology of Moral Geography (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). [15] Quoted from http://www.dinearound.eu/en/189/195/132/eilat/hilton_eilat_queen_of_sheba . [16] Roland Wenzlhuemer et al., 'Forum Global Dis:connections', Journal of Modern European History 21, no. 1 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221148939. [17] This point has also been made by Ofri Ilany, 'Israelis Need to Stop Turning Their Backs on the Red Sea', Haaretz (Tel Aviv), 13 May 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-05-13/ty-article/0000017f-f571-d044-adff-f7f933f70000.
bibliography
Assulin, Osher and Yoav Gross. Sinai. Israel: Kan11, 2022. Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Bar-Yosef, Eitan. A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013. Barak, Eitan. 'Between Reality and Secrecy: Israel’s Freedom of Navigation through the Straits of Tiran, 1956–1967'. The Middle East Journal 61, no. 4 (2007): 657-79. Chaziza, Mordechai. 'The Red-Med Railway: New Opportunities for China, Israel, and the Middle East'. Begin-Sadat Center Perspectives 385 (11 December 2016). Ilany, Ofri. 'Israelis Need to Stop Turning Their Backs on the Red Sea'. Haaretz (Tel Aviv), 13 May 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-05-13/ty-article/0000017f-f571-d044-adff-f7f933f70000. Neiman, Rachel, 'Looking back on the 1978 "Woodstock of Israel"', Nicky Blackburn ed. Israel21c, 9 October 2017, https://www.israel21c.org/looking-back-on-the-1978-woodstock-of-israel/. Nocke, Alexandra. The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity. Boston Brill, 2009. Ohana, David. Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Panczyk, Jowita, 'Is the War Over Yet?', Shaul Marmari ed. Mimeo: Blog der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden am Dubnow-Institut. Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow, 18 December 2013, https://mimeo.dubnow.de/is-the-war-over-yet/. Reuveny, Meirav. 'The Heinz Steinitz Marine Biology Laboratory in Eilat: Science and Politics between Father and Son'. In Dubnow Institute Yearbook, edited by Yfaat Weiss,  Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. Schick, A.P. 'Tiran: the Straits, the Island, and its Terraces'. Israel Exploration Journal 8, no. 2 (1958): 120-30. Shavit, Yaacov. 'The Mediterranean World and “Mediterraneanism”: The Origins, Meaning, and Application of a Geo-Cultural Notion in Israel'. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 3, no. 2 (1988): 96-117. Sutzkever, Avram. 'The Great Silence'. Translated by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav. In A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Benjamin Harshav,  Oakland: University of California Press, 1991. Wenzlhuemer, Roland, Tom Menger, Valeska Huber, Heidi J. S. Tworek, Sujit Sivasundaram, Simone M. Müller, Callie Wilkinson, Madeleine Herren and Martin Dusinberre. 'Forum Global Dis:connections'. Journal of Modern European History 21, no. 1 (2023): 2-33. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221148939. Yacobi, Haim. Israel and Africa: A Geneaology of Moral Geography. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
citation information:
Marmari, Shaul, 'Intermarium: Israel between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 22 October 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/10/22/intermarium-israel-between-the-mediterranean-and-the-red-sea/.
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Odyssey of oblivion: a chronicle of displacement from the Kerkennah Islands

rim harmessi
 

Was not the earth of God spacious enough for you to emigrate therein? [1]

  Since 2020, I have frequented Kerkennah Islands — my mother’s homeland — to document illegal migrants’ attempts to reach Europe and follow the traces of their journeys. As destitution drove migrants to a distant shore, the archipelago became a harbour for human trafficking and corpses tainted its beaches with the stench of death.[2]

The Kerkennah Islands

The Kerkennah Islands, located off the coast of Tunisia, have gained notoriety as a transit point for illegal immigration. African migrants converge here, united in the pursuit of a better life in Italy or Malta along the Central Mediterranean route (CMR).[3] The CMR claims hundreds of lives each year, accounting for more than 90 per cent of deaths in the Mediterranean in 2016.[4] Tunisia is bearing the brunt of this tragedy, with 729 deaths in 2023. The majority of which occurred off the coasts of Sfax (349) and Kerkennah (140).[5]

A different view on migration

Being from the island, it has always held a primal allure for me. I envision it as a place of genesis where generations of mothers reach back to the source: the first mother and universal woman. Instinctively, the only compelling commentary on what was taking place on its shores lay in the voices and experiences of women. And while the hardship of the crossing is shared by all who attempt it, the gender-based vulnerability makes it riskier for women, who make up half the world's refugees and are disproportionately susceptible to abuse. UN statistics reveal that 60 per cent of preventable maternal deaths occur in humanitarian settings, and an estimated one in five refugee or displaced women have endured sexual violence.[6] Personal narratives in the form of documentary photography have helped tackle migration issues. Images of people with distinct names and faces, crying mothers in the chaos of capsized vessels and lifeless babies washing ashore next to striped parasols are potent tools for fundraising and policy-reform appeals. But is there a different approach in the same medium, one that would resonate with equal force. My work explores the narratives beyond immediate emotional effects. The focus shifts from ‘the displaced woman’ as a singular entity to the concept of displacement and how women actually experience it. These faceless figures embody the collective experience, and the lack of identification reflects the marginalisation that migrants face as their identities are replaced with the ‘Migrant Persona’.

Imperfections as narrative

Analogue photography is the medium that gives this project its voice. Shot primarily in the Kerkennah Islands, the work embraces the imperfections inherent in 35mm film. Scratches, light leaks, missing frames, faded hues and occasional blurs all complement the themes of absence that permeate the narrative. Further amplifying this concept are deliberate technical and chemical manipulations. Double and triple exposures, premature stops, bleaching, burning, etc. emphasise erosion and erasure, implying a sense of discontinuity. This exploration extends beyond the captured image. Collage and textual footnotes are also visual elements suggesting that absences define the Mediterranean as a fluid border. My aim is to transcend mere documentation, for it is insufficient to understand the psychological complexities of flight. I aspire to unveil and reimagine the feminine migration journey from the islands where I took the photographs. In four chapters, each echoing a specific location, emotional state and pivotal step in this odyssey, the narrative unfolds in a linear fashion, mimicking a traveller's physical journey. A fixed point of departure contrasts with the open-ended unknown in every clandestine voyage.

Chapter 1 LAND: SCENES FROM THE ISLAND

The first chapter depicts the point of departure. Earthy tones dominate the scenes, evoking a sense of connection to one's roots. These are not the perfect vistas commonly associated with Kerkennah, the vibrant tourist destination. Instead, the focus shifts to the marginalised scenery, easily overlooked by those seeking the allure of orange sunsets and glistening waters. Here, amidst the seemingly ordinary, lies the hidden face of the place that bears the invisible scars of human exodus. Vast, empty and abandoned spaces (Fig. 01) symbolise the vacancy that coexists with the buzz on the island. They underscore the duality of presence and absence, the actual scarcity and perceived abundance, and reflect the substitution of the land's fertility with aridity.

Fig. 01: Abandoned car, Kerkennah (2020), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

Double and triple exposures (Fig. 02) are visual metaphors to convey coexisting yet contrasting realities. The serene island life, steeped in tradition and governed by the quotidian rhythms, contrast with the ‘criminal’ world that emerges mainly after dark.

Fig. 02: Shore , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

  Any sense of belonging is fleeting, a mirage shimmering in the desert. The land offers no solace, no promise of a future. This chapter serves not as a haven but as a crucible to steel travellers for the journey.

Chapter 2

WATER: FIRST CONTACT WITH THE MEDITERRANEAN

The second chapter explores what it means to be a woman on such a journey. This overflows with a feminine presence. The concept of vessel-like entities is explored through the philosophy of inner and outer spaces. The outward journey is mirrored by the physical vessel, the ship, braving the elements. The inward journey is embodied by the female form, a vessel carrying the weight of the unknown (Fig. 03). Both journeys converge towards a shared destination.

Fig. 03: Woman chained , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

I have further manipulated some film. Bleaching, for example, dissolves colour so that the bleached area appears white in the negative and black in the print (Fig. 04). This erasure reinforces the theme of absence, exploring the transit from a place where the migrant was once present to a void through a visual metaphor for disappearance. Infiltrating a new space blends into the act of vanishing from the old one. The profound loss created by these journeys is often overlooked. The physical absence from one’s home, the replacement of familiarity with fear and estrangement, the emotional void left behind for loved ones and the silencing of the harrowing migrant experiences all add another layer of absence. Migration itself becomes a catalyst for absence, the severing of ties to surroundings and social connections is a journey into a liminal space, a state of being neither here nor there. The origin leaves an echo in memory even after physical departure. It is not merely a geographic point but a nexus of experiences, emotions and histories.

Fig. 04: Bleached away, Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan (Post processing: bleaching of the negative).

  While tension and anxiety permeate this chapter, the island is not as gloomy as the journey would suggest. Those not compelled to escape experience its vibrancy and charm with postcard-worthy sunsets and sunrises (Fig. 05). Not all enjoy that luxury. Postcolonial conditions, exploitation and discriminatory migration policies condemn entire regions to cycles of poverty and deprivation. For many women, the island could never be anything more than a sojourn. Philosophical meditations on absence take on a new dimension when juxtaposed with the harsh reality of the Mediterranean as a colonial sea.[7] Gaps and voids are geo-politically relevant, defining the experience of those who traverse it.

Fig. 05: Postcard series , Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

 

Chapter 3

PILGRIMAGE: THE JOURNEY WITHIN AND AT SEA

  Traversing the central Mediterranean can take several days. This section examines the heart of the voyage. Fully in black and white, it reflects the sacred nature of this transformation as a testament of faith and resilience. Each soul will emerge renewed, irrevocably altered and absolved.

Fig. 06: Mother and Son (2022), Black & White 35 mm film, digital scan.

  Black-and-white photography detaches itself from reality by stripping away vibrant hues, and it feels surreal because we experience the world in colour. But in this narrative, such detachment is necessary for the metaphor to sink in. We witness not the singular struggle of one migrant, nor a solitary woman's plight. Instead, this chapter is about a cluster of migrant women from several backgrounds aiming at the same end. Therefore, we must transcend individual journeys, aiming instead for a global phenomenon encompassing the full range of roles women play from daughter to mother and everything in between (Fig. 06).

Fig. 07: Parts of a sum (2021), Black & white 35 mm film. Intentional light leaks, digital scan (in-camera processing, light leaking).

  The narrative embraces intentional light leaks while photographing, mimicking water effects (Fig. 07). Fragmented portrayals of the female form are deliberate, as their sum may allow reconstruction of the body that once left the shore.

Fig. 08: Sum of parts (2021), Black & white 35 mm film. Intentional light leaks, digital scan (in-camera processing, light leaking).

  The experience and the tragedy remain obscure from the outside, but we yet hope that the vessels reach their destination whole ( Fig. 08).

Chapter 4

THE GREAT BEYOND: ARRIVAL OR LACK THEREOF

 

Fig. 09: Blouse on shore, Kerkennah (2021), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

The seemingly straightforward concept of arrival gains complexity on this trip. What does this hard-won destination signify for the individual? And for those lost at sea, claimed by the fear that haunted their journey, arrival is a grim fulfilment of prophecy. How do the adventurer and the observer grasp this notion (Fig. 09)? From the European perspective, the Mediterranean remains a frontier, a line dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’.[8] Eurocentric narratives paint the region with a broad brush, privileging the protection-worthy global North over the struggling South. This fosters not only the erasure of entire cultures through continued colonial marginalisation, but also a stark dichotomy in the perception of the same absence, referring to the migrants’ absence as well as that of the destination’s inhabitants.

Fig. 10: Gaze (2022), 35mm colour film, digital scan.

  Even in the celebrated kind of arrival, a disquieting truth lingers. Crossing this fluid border disorients identity, expanding beyond measure the emotional rift caused by the severance of intimate ties with land, people and perhaps life itself (Fig. 10). This project began as a personal odyssey, a quest to grasp the complexities of womanhood, the trauma of displacement and the resilience of the migrant spirit. I sought to illuminate, through the lens of femininity, secret journeys across the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 11). Ultimately, however, the exploration raised more questions than answers.

Fig. 11: Womanhood (2022), 35mm colour film , digital scan.

Yet a single question persists. And it is essential. And it is relentless: Where did she go? And what should we do about it?     [1] Quran. 'Surah An-Nisa [The Women] 4:97', in The Qu'ran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning, ed. and trans. Saheeh International (1997). [2] For more on this tragic pattern, see 'Four bodies recovered off Tunisia following migrant boat accident', 2022, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/45687/four-bodies-recovered-off-tunisia-following-migrant-boat-accident; 'Tunisia: Navy recovers seven bodies from Mediterranean Sea', 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/51170/tunisia-navy-recovers-seven-bodies-from-mediterranean-sea; 'Tunisia recovers around 210 bodies of migrants', 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/48625/tunisia-recovers-around-210-bodies-of-migrants. [3] Liska Wittenberg, Managing Mixed Migration: The Central Mediterranean Route to Europe (New York: International Peace Institute 2017). [4]  'Tunisia's Kerkennah Islands: A land for smuggling', The New Arab, 2018, accessed 2 June 2024, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/tunisias-kerkennah-islands-land-smuggling. [5] Riman Abouelhassan, Middle East and North Africa: Migrants Deaths [sic] and Disappearances in 2023,  (United Nations Migration, IOM, 2024). [6] 'Women refugees and migrants', UN Women, accessed 30 June 2024, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants. [7] M. Borutta, & S. Gekas, ‘A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean’, 1798–1956. European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire (2012). [8] Michael A. Kozakowski, 'Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century', Cahiers de la Méditerranée 89 (2014) 10.4000/cdlm.7776.
bibliography
Abouelhassan, Riman. Middle East and North Africa: Migrants Deaths [sic] and Disappearances in 2023: United Nations Migration, IOM, 2024. 'Tunisia's Kerkennah Islands: A land for smuggling'. The New Arab, 2018, accessed 2 June 2024, https://www.newarab.com/analysis/tunisias-kerkennah-islands-land-smuggling. 'Four bodies recovered off Tunisia following migrant boat accident'. 2022, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/45687/four-bodies-recovered-off-tunisia-following-migrant-boat-accident. Kozakowski, Michael A. 'Making “Mediterranean Migrants”: Geopolitical Transitions, Migratory Policy, and French Conceptions of the Mediterranean in the 20th Century'. Cahiers de la Méditerranée 89 (2014): 181-93. https://doi.org/10.4000/cdlm.7776. 'Surah An-Nisa [The Women] 4:97'. Edited and Translated by Saheeh International. In The Qu'ran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning, 1997. 'Tunisia recovers around 210 bodies of migrants'. 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/48625/tunisia-recovers-around-210-bodies-of-migrants. 'Tunisia: Navy recovers seven bodies from Mediterranean Sea'. 2023, accessed 15 May 2024, https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/51170/tunisia-navy-recovers-seven-bodies-from-mediterranean-sea. Wittenberg, Liska. Managing Mixed Migration: The Central Mediterranean Route to Europe. New York: International Peace Institute 2017. 'Women refugees and migrants'. UN Women, accessed 30 June 2024, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants.  
citation information
Harmessi, Rim, 'Odyssey of oblivion: a chronicle of displacement from the Kerkennah Islands', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 24 September 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/24/odyssey-of-oblivion-a-chronicle-of-displacement-from-the-kerkennah-islands/.
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Picturing the sea of absence

florian bachmeier
  In my work as a documentary photographer, particularly in my reports on refugees and their escape and migration routes from the Mediterranean and the war in Ukraine, I have consistently explored the theme of absence. Initially perhaps unconsciously, and later more deliberately, this concept became a central motif. Photography is a powerful tool, capable of evoking profound emotional reactions and shaping narrative discourses. As a medium, photography has an inherently intimate relationship with the concept of absence. Absence in photography refers to the deliberate omission or lack of elements in an image that one might ordinarily expect to find. This approach can serve various conceptual purposes and is intentionally used to achieve a specific effect. By omitting certain elements, photographers can amplify the significance of the objects that are present, guiding the viewer's perception. Absence in photography thus also fulfils a narrative function. In documentary photography, for instance, the absence of people in a place that would usually be bustling with activity can powerfully comment on social, political and emotional states. This absence can evoke feelings of isolation, loss and emptiness, prompting deeper reflection. It serves as a blank space, a hint of what is not visible in the image. It challenges viewers to think about the unseen and the unspoken. The blank space metaphorically represents absence or what is past and transient. Absence in photography creates a potent aesthetic impact. The presence of absence is, in a sense, the full stop, the ‘sudden awakening’ in the sense of Roland Barthes,[1] in many of my photographs.

Fig. 1: The horizon stretches across the sea off Lesbos Island, embodying the profound absence left behind by those who once sought refuge on its shores. Lesbos, Greece, 2017 (Image by the author)

Since my stays and travels to the hotspots of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean, I have been deeply engaged with these concepts as a photographer. Through my images from places like Idomeni, the transit camp in northern Greece, the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, warehouses in the Serbian capital Belgrade, refugee shelters in Bulgaria and the Spanish enclave Ceuta on the African continent, I strive to document and analyse absences. Absence here is not only the physical lack of something but also the emotional, social and cultural void created by flight, displacement and migration.

Fig. 2: Amid the barbed wire and bleak surroundings of Idomeni camp, the absence of certainty and stability hangs heavily over the refugees waiting at the closed border. Idomeni, Greece, 2016 (Image by the author)

The meaning of absence

Absence, at its core, is a state or feeling of lack. When one considers the inhumane conditions in the camps, this lack or absence, the shattered hopes and the associated pain become particularly visible. The absence or loss of home, security, family, belonging and identity. In the worst cases, it is the absence of any hope. These absences are tangible and experiential both physically and psychologically. Photography can capture and depict these absences profoundly. I think of the emptiness and hopelessness in the eyes of many individuals portrayed and the bleak, chaotic landscapes of camps like Idomeni or Moria, which seem to gnaw like festering wounds at their surroundings. Pieces of torn clothing on barbed wire fences and other obstacles, faded photographs of those left behind or deceased, abandoned belongings left by those who had no choice but to leave their previous lives behind. Possessions lost on the run or hoarded in a drenched tent. Traces of escape through hostile territory. Motifs that represent and symbolically condense absence, repeating themselves in varied yet similar forms, becoming a constant that runs through the situation of refugees and their flight.

Fig. 3: Empty blankets and drenched sleeping bags, painting a poignant picture of absence in the heart of the refugee camp. Idomeni, Greece, 2016 (Image by the author)

Susan Sontag argued that images, photographs, have the power to haunt us and elicit emotional reactions, something pure narrative storytelling often fails to achieve.[2] She describes the haunting quality of photographs that penetrate deeply into our consciousness, compelling us to reflect on what we see. I hope that my images from these camps and of the people I have been able to accompany on their journeys will ultimately serve not just as mere records but as windows into the reality of these people who otherwise remain largely invisible. They hopefully challenge viewers to confront the harsh reality of refugees and their flight, grasping the intolerable absences that shape their lives. Perhaps photography can thus serve as an alternative, complementary method to highlight, investigate and reflect on such dissociations and absences. Traditional sociological investigations rely on empirical and quantitative methods to collect and analyse data. But do these methods capture the deeper emotional and psychological dimensions of these existential human experiences? Here, photography as a medium can be a valuable complement. It can make the invisible visible, showing gaps and voids created by absences and document them. Camps like Idomeni or Moria are places where absence is omnipresent. The people who have to live in these camps have fled their home countries to escape war, persecution and poverty. They have left everything behind — houses, apartments, possessions. Often, they have lost loved ones. They have often experienced the unspeakable, carrying deep traumas with them. Arriving in one of these camps, they find themselves in a sort of limbo, a space between the past they have left behind and a future that remains uncertain. Many images from these contexts, including my own, depict people living in cramped spaces under often unbearable conditions, in cold, in extreme heat, without access to vital and basic services, without access to clean water, food and basic medical care.

Fig. 4: In the dim confines of a Belgrade warehouse, traumatised refugee Mohammed washes in freezing temperatures, the stark absence of safety and home evident in his solitary ritual. Belgrade, Serbia, 2017 (Image by the author)

Absences in refugee camps and other locations along migration routes refer pragmatically but primarily to the lack of resources necessary for a commodious life. There is often no medical care, injuries often remain untreated or are inadequately treated, chronic illnesses go untreated, and the lack of psychological support exacerbates the trauma many refugees have experienced and suffered. On migration routes and in camps, there is also a constant, often life-threatening lack of security. Extreme cold, constant rain and the outbreak of a fire like in Moria often have catastrophic consequences. Violence, abuse and exploitation are widespread. Security forces, where present, are often unable to adequately protect the residents. Women and children are particularly at risk and often suffer from sexual harassment and abuse. The sanitary conditions in the camps and informal settlements along migration routes are often catastrophic. There is no sanitation. As previously mentioned, there is a lack of professional psychosocial support and networks to provide mutual support. Conflicts between people of different nationalities often occur. All this exacerbates the burdens refugees already face. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety disorders. These absences have serious impacts on individuals and communities. They undermine human dignity and worsen the already precarious living conditions of refugees and those in flight. In some of my photographs, I depict the architecture of makeshift, hastily erected shelters that often provide no protection. I show people who have to live in hiding, who must remain invisible. I show their sparse meals, their torn clothes, their injuries, the effects of violence and the hardships they endured during their escape. There are images of blankets, drenched sleeping bags, camps in inhospitable areas, pictures of worn-out children's shoes—a sad reminder of a childhood denied to the wearers of these shoes, likely to remain thus. Images that tell of a lives in a constant state of emergency in the sense of Giorgio Agamben,[3] particularly relevant in this context and these places: a situation where seemingly normal laws and rights are suspended in response to a crisis, creating a space where human rights are systematically suspended. Especially the camps exist in a state of lawlessness, operating as legal grey zones, and this state of emergency has long become the norm. Ideally, images evoke emotional reactions — this, at least, is my hope and drive as a photographer — and make the absence of normality, of safety palpable. They hopefully speak a clear language and show the deep scars caused by this life on the run. Can photographs, as visual stimuli, evoke affective responses? Can they compel viewers to engage with the situations they depict, to connect with the people in these images? Images are a bridge between viewers and refugees, who are otherwise only perceived as abstract numbers in statistics.   [1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). [2] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). [3] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections of Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.  
citation information
Bachmeier, Florian, 'Picturing the sea of absence', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 10 September 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/09/10/picturing-the-sea-of-absence/.
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The shore of humanity

jonathan jonsson
  This article shows how the Mediterranean Sea became a symbol for involuntary exile and the war-time disintegration of reality in the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.[1] Endlessly rolling waves express the uncertain and undulating lives of Palestinians exiled from their native soil. A horizon without land illustrates the inability of the displaced and traumatised to visualise a future. Rejecting this disintegration, Darwish used poetry to turn the sea of exile into a space of agency and re-creation.

Fig. 1: A young Mahmoud Darwish in Cairo. (Photo: Al Akbar)

This analysis builds on my previous phenomenological analysis of Palestinian literature.[2] I also draw on mediaeval Arabic philosophy and Anette Månsson’s work[3] to show how Darwish uses language to construct a new world out of chaos, making sense of his frequent allusions to religious and historical texts. In his poetry, Darwish employs what historian Peter Burke calls a ‘polyphonic history’,[4] oscillating between the distant and near, the foreign and known. The story of Palestine is both ancient and modern, sacred and profane, narrated by contrasting but interwoven voices. Passages from the Torah, the Gospels and the Quran as well as Mesopotamian and Greek myth echo synchronously in his poetry.[5] In September of 1982, Mahmoud Darwish was forced to cross the Mediterranean: a displacement painful enough to tear his world into pieces. For 10 years, he had lived in Beirut, a city he came to love. The Lebanese capital had been home to tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees since their forced expulsion in 1948, when the state of Israel was established. In addition to housing refugees, Beirut had become the cultural capital of Palestinian intellectuals in exile as well as the base of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This Palestinian presence was perceived as a threat by certain Lebanese groups. In 1975, tension between Lebanese Christian militias and Palestinian armed groups exploded into violence, triggering a 15-year civil war.[6] Israel was one of several foreign powers that intervened, eventually launching a full-scale invasion, besieging Beirut in the summer of 1982. For seven weeks, the city was bombarded from sea, air and land. Thousands of civilians died, and the city’s scars remain visible today. In August, Israel attained their goal. The PLO fled the city. Mahmoud Darwish followed them to Tunisia in September. The siege was an apocalyptic event for the poet, and he experienced the final departure as the end of his world. In his autobiographical Dhākira li-l-nisyān (Memory for Forgetfulness) from 1986,[7] Darwish uses the Mediterranean as a symbol of existential nothingness, the final frontier of total emptiness stretching out in front of the displaced person, offering no visible future. He compares the ships full of Palestinians leaving Beirut to the biblical flood:
And in a short while, we shall travel to it [the sea], in the modern ships of Noah, to a blueness that leads to an unending whiteness, that reveals no shore. Where to.. Where in the ocean will the ocean take us?[8]
Dhākira li-l-nisyān describes one day in August during the height of the siege, when the Israeli forces unleashed all available firepower on the city in order to compel a surrender. In the fractured and fragmented book, part autobiography, part prose poem, part intertextual experiment, the reader enters Darwish’s mind as the world dissolves around him. Eventually, he accepts that despite all steadfastness and refusal, he will have to surrender to the sea. As he goes to bed at the end of the day, the final words of the book are:
The sea walks in the streets. The sea hangs from the windows and the branches of dried out trees. The sea descends from the sky and enters the room. Blue.. White.. Foam.. Waves. I do not love the sea.. I do not want the sea, because I do not see a shore, or a dove. I do not see anything in the sea except the sea. I do not see a shore. I do not see a dove.[9]
In Genesis 8:11, Noah waits for a dove to return with a sign that there is once again land above the water. In referencing the biblical flood, Darwish is watching the horizon, seeing only more water. No shore. No dove. The imagery of the flood does more than describe his sense of dislocation. All the world seems turned into water, even the windows and the branches of trees. Darwish belonged to a generation raised on the ideals of Arab nationalism, which included the promise of a future in which the postcolonial Arab nation-states would come together, eventually liberating Palestine. This dream faded slowly and painfully in the latter half of the 20th century. The United Arab Republic of Syria and Egypt ended in 1961 after only three years. Israel won a major victory in 1967, shocking the Arab world and inciting the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In 1979, Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel. The Lebanese Civil War was the final blow to the dream of unity, as Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese factions fell on each other in overlapping conflicts and brutal massacres. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon during this civil war is characterised by literary scholar Stephan Guth as the ‘total collapse of all hope’[10] among Arabic intellectuals. Under this flood lay the mutilated remains of the hopes and ideals on which Darwish was raised. The truths that structured his old reality had slowly fractured over the previous two decades, cleaving his world. In 1982, he found himself in an unfamiliar world where all ideals seemed hollow, and all structure was lost. All that remained was the chaos of foaming waves, tossing him around without the promise of a shore or a dove. However, a cosmic flood is not merely an end. The waters also carry the seeds of a new world. Like the roaring primordial chaos in mythologies around the world, his sea contained the potential for creation.[11] For Darwish, this was only possible if intellectuals finished the job of dismantling the old world. Meditating on the role of writers in times of war in Dhākira li-l-nisyān, he writes:
It is fitting that we honour the awe which these hours are unfolding, the hours in which human existence is transferred from one shore to another, and from one time (ṭawr) to another. And it is fitting that old poetry knows how to be silent in humility in the presence of this newborn. And if it is necessary for intellectuals, or some of them, to turn into sharpshooters, then let them endeavour to shoot their old concepts, questions, and morals.[12]
The word ṭawr can mean a time period, but also a state or phase of being. The collapse of a time and a movement from shore to shore is also a shift in the fundamental structure of lived reality. Throughout his creative dismantling of the old world, Darwish held his silence, unable to write poetry during the siege. However, he promised to one day go back to writing poetry:
When the guns quiet down a bit. When I unleash (ʾufajjir) my silence, which is full of all these voices. When I find my adequate language.[13]
The word ʾufajjir also means to bombard or to explode – his silence would one day be his way to return fire. When land rose from the waves of the sea, Darwish knew that he would find a budding language in the graveyard of old poetry, concepts, questions and ethics. In a poem written shortly after his departure from Beirut in September of 1982, Hymn to the Rising Shadow (1983), the first-person character has a conversation with a voice that repeatedly asks him, ‘What are you looking for, young man, in the broken boat of the Odyssey?’[14] He answers, ‘For a wave that I lost in the sea’. The voice asks him if the migrant does indeed find a wave. The reply is:
The migrant finds a wave that has drowned and brings it with him. A sea for you to live in, or to be lost. A sea for the new September or the return of the four seasons. A sea in front of you, in you, a sea behind you.[15]
Unlike Odysseus, Darwish is denied a nostos, the heroic journey home. Instead of returning to Palestine, he is plunged further into the sea, on the broken boat of the Odyssey, with nothing but sea in front of and behind him. However, by absorbing the sea into him, ‘a sea to live in’ that reaches into his being, he can seize a drowned wave and to bring it back to shore. His only weapon to do this is the Word. In Dhākira li-l-nisyān, the reader follows Darwish as he navigates the streets of Beirut in the morning, with artillery shells raining around him. He captures the moments before rebirth and re-creation, describing a disintegrating world:
The waves have married the moss of a rock on a distant shore, and I have just emerged from this marriage which has lasted for a million years. I have just emerged, but I did not know where I was. I did not know who I was. I did not know what my name was, nor the name of this place. I did not know that I had the capacity to tear out one of my ribs in order to discover a dialogue against this absolute silence. What is my name, and who named me? Who will name me: Adam![16]
The power to name someone Adam is traditionally reserved for the Creator. This right passes unto man in Genesis 2:19, where Adam is tasked with naming the animals. Naming is power, and as Månsson notes, ‘[t]o narrate, write and name is to make the speaker a subject, an act that is of utmost importance to the migrant’.[17] The rib Darwish tears out of his own body could be an allusion to Eve.[18] In this paper, however, I read his rib as a form of embodied pen. His own living body becomes the source of a new dialogue, one written against the madness of war, one with the potential for creation.[19] This theme is reinforced by an excerpt that directly follows the question ‘Who is going to call me Adam?’ from the introduction to the historical work Al-kāmil fī al-tārīkh by mediaeval writer Ibn al-Athīr (1160 - 1233 CE).[20] In the excerpt, Ibn al-Athīr engages with various transmissions from the Prophet (ḥadīth) in order to establish the order in which God formed the elements of creation; the Pen (al-qalam), the Tablet (al-lawḥ), the Throne (al-ʿarsh), water (al-māʾ), etc. These elements all occur in the Quran, in verses such as 11:7, where God is:
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضَ فِى سِتَّةِ أَيَّامٍۢ وَكَانَ عَرْشُهُۥ عَلَى ٱلْمَآءِ He who created the heavens and the earth in six days, and His Throne was on the water…
In Dhākira li-l-nisyān, the excerpt begins in the middle of Ibn al-Athīr’s discussion about the Pen:[21] ‘Then God created, after [creating] the Pen and commanding it (ʾamarahu) so that it wrote all that exists until the Day of Resurrection, a fine mist…’[22] This is followed by alternative theories on the order of creation. The intertext is never explained in the work. It could simply be one example of collapsing time. Al-kāmil fī al-tārīkh contains lengthy description of the crusades, told by the contemporary Ibn al-Athīr. By weaving this into a narrative on modern Beirut, Darwish creates a polyphonic history where the crusades appear to be ongoing in the streets of Beirut in 1982, fusing the madness and violence of past and present. However, this passage does something more. Discussing the order in which God formed the elements of creation through his verbal command is also a discussion on narration and emplotment of the world. I follow the theologians and philosophers Imām al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and al-ʿĀmirī (d. 992) who read Quranic elements such as the Pen and Tablet as symbolising metaphysical moments of creation. The Pen, corresponding to Intellect (νοῦς) in Neoplatonic philosophy, writes the cosmos into being following the command (ʾamr) of God, the Aristotelian first cause.[23] This λόγος, the Word of God, issued from His Throne (al-ʿarsh), is inscribed upon the Table (al-lawḥ). According to al-Ghazālī, this Preserved Table, on which all of Being is inscribed, analogous to the Neoplatonic World Soul, is what prophets access directly in moments of inspiration (ilhām).[24] Seeing the Table means witnessing the truth that ontologically precedes our lower plane of existence. Being follows divine writing-into-being onto this Table – creation is this Word incarnate. This is the power metaphorically seized by Darwish. He goes beyond the divine gift of naming objects. Instead, he demands the right to name himself, turning himself into a creator. His torn-out rib becomes a pen with which he can inscribe a new cosmic order upon his own table, reforming the world through discourse.[25] If the shattered world of Beirut lied formless and empty,[26] then the poetry of Darwish was the spirit hovering over the surface of the sea, ready also to grant the power of naming to whoever would hear and follow him. In his Hymn to the Rising Shadow, he tells the listener:
Take what remains of you, take me on as a helper in the presence of the ruins. Take A flaming Dictionary And triumph! … And triumph at the end of history![27]
Even if history met an end in Beirut, the fragmented words remaining under the flood, the drowned waves ready to be brought to shore, offers not only rebirth, but even triumph.

Fig. 2: Waves breaking on the Raouché rocks on the Lebanese shore. (Photo: Zheka Boychenko)

This book-length poem, Hymn to the Rising Shadow, was performed by Darwish at the opening of the Palestinian National Council session in Algiers in February 1983. As I have noted, the PLO was in renewed exile, at a point in history where all hope of liberating Palestine seemed lost. One might have expected the session to be a sombre event, but Darwish read his poetry with a victor’s voice. Covered in sweat but smiling warmly, his voice only rose throughout the 80 minutes it took him to read the entire poem.[28] Notables in the audience, including Yasser Arafat, smiled proudly and cheered loudly throughout the performance. For Palestinians, seizing the joy of life after moments of defeat has become an art in itself. Like the murals covering the West Bank wall, creativity is a way for Palestinians to claim their humanity and show pride in the face of occupation and degradation. In 1995, Darwish explained in an interview that his new poetic calling was to write the history of Troy. By creating a poetry of the vanquished, he could fill the void left in the Greek heritage, where history had only been written by the victors who completed their nostos. Paradoxically, he claims, being the poet of Troy makes him appear as a victor:
What I mean is that the language of despair is poetically stronger than the language of hope, because there is space in despair to contemplate destiny (al-maṣīr), and to survey the shore of humanity, in a way that is not granted the victor. This is because despair is the poetic, psychological, and linguistic ground which brings the poet closer to God, to the essence of things, to the first poetic speech.[29]
In his poetry, Darwish keeps the hope of recovery after loss alive. To return to the first speech means speaking a new world into existence, transforming the remnants from a life of defeat into triumph with the help of a burning dictionary. He was able to view the shore of humanity from the sea of absolute fragmentation, reclaiming his own threatened existence in the void of exile. With nothing but the sea surrounding him, he was able to build a new world from waves that had drowned. In the current madness of the world, as the burned bodies of children in Gaza make us question humanity, threatening us with a new Flood drowning all meaning and hope, the poetry of Darwish reminds us that while there is any life left, there is reason to hold onto hope. [1] Maḥmūd Darwīš (1941 – 2008). I use the standard transliteration ‘Mahmoud Darwish’ throughout this article. [2] I have previously explored the experience of time and the body in the work Dhākira li-l-nisyān by Darwish, which informs this article. See Jonathan Jonsson, 'The Music of Human Flesh: The Lived Time and Body of Exile in Ḏākira li-l-nisyān by Maḥmūd Darwīš' (MA University of Oslo, 2022), https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/101155; Jonathan Jonsson, 'Ord är ett hemland!', Babylon 23, no. 2 (2023), https://doi.org/10.5617/ba.11498; Jonathan Jonsson, 'Nakbans epistemologi', Kamilla Østerberg and Henrik Wathne eds. Salongen, Norsk Tidsskriftforening, 27 May 2024, https://www.salongen.no/artikkel/israel-palestina-konflikten/krig/204866. [3] This essay would not have been possible without Anette Månsson, 'Passage to a new wor(l)d: Exile and restoration in Mahmoud Darwish's writings 1960-1995' (PhD Uppsala University, 2003), 161-84, 217-32. [4] Peter Burke, 'The historian's dilemma: Domestication or foreignizing?', in History as a Translation of the Past: Case Studies from the West, ed. Luigi Alonzi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 102. [5] Darwish considered it his right as a Palestinian to live in all these cultures, to let all these voices from his homeland speak to him. In opposition to Zionist discourse, he maintained that he had this right since he was not a stranger to the land. See Mahmoud Darwish, 'Maḥmūd Darwīš li-l-Wasaṭ: Min ḥaqq al-shiʿr iʿlān al-hazīma', Al-Wasa 1995, 54. [6] Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 189. [7] Mahmoud Darwish, 'Al-zamān: Bayrūt / Al-makān: Āb', Al-Karmel, no. 21-22 (1986). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author with assistance from Raghad Abu Shaker. [8] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 95. The double periods are from the original Arabic text. Darwish uses them when he wants the reader to take a slight pause, or when he wants to emphasise a point, as if he were reading a poem and pausing slightly. This is opposed to single periods and ellipses (...), which are more used for thoughts trailing off. Darwish is first and foremost a poet, and he also brings creative use of puntuation to his prose. [9] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 96. [10] Stephan Guth, 'Novel, Arabic', in Encyclopaedia of Islam Three Online, ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2014).https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27115. [11] See Månsson, 'Passage to a new wor(l)d', 220-21. [12] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 35. [13] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 34. [14] Mahmoud Darwish, Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī (Beirut: Dār al-ʿawda, 1983), 108. [15] Darwish, Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī, 108-09. [16] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 22. [17] Månsson, 'Passage to a new wor(l)d', 211. [18] Thank you to Ben Kamis for this observation. Reading the rib as Eve works well with an analysis by Stephan Milich, in which a concern of Darwish’s poetry is to encounter the fe/male Other in the mirror, often in the form of the recurring Jewish lover. See Stephan Milich, 'Maḥmūd Darwīsh; A Plurality of Voices for Invoking the Other', in A Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie (Toronto: J. Wiley & Sons, 2019). [19] For a deeper analysis of the interface between the living body, text and the world, see  Jonsson, 'The Music of Human Flesh', 47-54. [20] Darwish, 'Al-zamān', 22-23. [21] See e.g. Quran 96:4-5 for an example of the Quranic Pen. [22] ʿIzz  al-Dīn Abu-l-Ḥasan, ʿAlī Ibn al-Aṯīr, Al-kāmil fī al-tārīḫ, al-muǧallad al-ʾūla (Beirut: Dār Bayrūt li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-našr, 1960), 16. [23] Elvira Wakelnig, Feder, Tafel, Mensch: Al-ʿĀmirīs Kitāb al-fuūl fī l-maʿālim al-ilāhīya und die arabische Proklos-Rezeption im 10. Jh. Islamic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 160-61. [24] Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad Ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazzālī, Die Wunder des Herzens, trans. Adel  El Domiaty (Braunschweig: Adel El Domiaty, 2022), 74. [25] On the porous borders between the lived body, language, and reality in the poetry of Darwish, see Jonsson, 'The Music of Human Flesh', 47-54. [26] ṯōhū wā-ḇōhū, see Genesis 1:2. [27] Darwish, Madīḥ aẓ-ẓill al-ʿālī, 7-8. [28] For a video of the performance, see Amor Ben Rhoma, Mahmūd Darwīsh fī qaīdatihi al-malamiyya «Madi al-ill al-ʿālī» (kāmila), 1983 (YouTube, 2020).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1HeUma-EkU . [29] Darwish, 'Maḥmūd Darwīš', 57. For a full analysis of this quote, see Jonsson, 'Ord är ett hemland!', 39.  
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citation information:
Jonsson, Johnathan, 'The shore of humanity', Ben Kamis ed. global dis:connect blog. global dis:connect, 23 July 2024, https://www.globaldisconnect.org/07/23/the-shore-of-humanity/.
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