2 - Harraga: Mediterranean Crossings in Arabic Migration Literature

Summary

Moroccan artist and writer Mahi Binebine has moved between visual art and literary texts in creatively probing contemporary issues in Moroccan society, including questions of how to represent the lives of those who migrate across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Queried about the blank human figures that recur in his paintings, Binebine responded that the seeming absence of individuality creates ‘excuses to tell stories about humans’. In an untitled painting with figures similar to the ones seen on the cover of this book, we see two ghost-like bodies in a boat and a larger number of human figures suspended in the waters below. One of the figures in the boat reaches a lanky arm into the water in what could be a gesture of solidarity or one of resignation. The painting evokes the images of Mediterranean migration that often circulate in the media: unsafe boats filled to the brim with people seeking a life elsewhere. Yet here, the image is abstracted and resists categorisation. The human figures overlap and intersect, invoking a sense of a shared fate. As we make our sense of the abstract qualities of the work, we might also be reminded that we are projecting our own knowledge and assumptions about migration onto the canvas. Pondering Binebine’s painting in relation to the texts explored in this book, it seems to offer a visceral representation of the transindividual, an awareness of how individual stories and subjectivities overlap with broader patterns, especially the ways in which border-building practices create precarious migration for some.

Mahi Binebine is one of many writers in North Africa and elsewhere who in their novels have ‘told stories about humans’ who cross the Mediterranean, the watery boundary that, for the past few decades, has been the deadliest border for migrants in the world. Although there are many official and vernacular ways of naming this migration, in North Africa, the term harraga has gained prominence. Harraga, which means ‘those who burn’ in Algerian Arabic, refers to the practice of burning citizenship documents before crossing the sea, but also, figuratively, to burning the past or burning paths, that is, insisting on mobility despite heavy border policing and the dangers of travelling on the sea and along the routes of human trafficking.