“The hardest thing to see is what’s really there.”
- J.A. Baker.
This walk begins with the earth. The same earth that refugees carry in their pockets. A handful of sand from home.
It is no accident that the day of our arrival in Sicily we were invited to see “Corpi migranti” (“Migrating bodies”), Max Hirzel’s photographic exposition organised by Muni Gyana and supported by Magweb. association. Epifania Lo Presti and Fabrizio Cacciatore’s, members of Magweb, hosted us during the first three days of our journey.
The pictures showed the unnamed graves of the migrants who died in shipwrecks offshore Libia and their few belongings. A handful of wretched remains is all that is left of those who embarked on a journey of no return.
Where their faces are visible, they evoke lives cut off ahead of time, as those of soldiers from the front, shooting stars that burnt and vanished in the void.
Among their belongings, a plastic rose (a late minute gift to wish a good journey?), an imprint of a picture on the back of the ID holder (whose ID was unfound), a couple of small plastic bags full of earth. The caption of the last one says: “bags full of earth from home found in the pockets of two victims of the shipwreck dating 18th of April 2015”.
How many stories, we thought, are behind bags of earth from home carried in the pockets of a refugee? We had read and seen many stories about refugees’s arrivals in recent years. However, nothing struck us as much as these images. It was as if we had suddenly looked at the matter from close range.
“Weren’t they better off staying home?”, I overheard once.
The hardest thing to see is what’s really there. And only when you see it closely you see it for real.
The refugees’ greatest tragedy is less to experience such a tragedy than to experience the lack of empathy towards them. Many to them would have loved to stay home so much that they brought some along.
How many stories are there in a bag of earth? And where does it come from? A dry plateau in the Sahel or a moist garden in Sokoto?
It reminds less of a number place than of a number of smells and sounds. Although we have never seen migrating bodies, nor met migrants, the bags of earth bring to mind the scent of earthy air blowing through the trees, of food being prepared on the stove.
And the sound of a barking dog, of the same door squeaking, the noise of the road, the voice of a mother. The very same sounds that make us close across the planet.
Only a bag of earth to remember who they are, who they were, who they’d like to become. If only they could bring all of those smells and sounds along with them. Moving towards the unknown, yet touching the ground from home.
The walk of those men and women begins with the earth on which they were born, continued through hostile seas and towards another continent, another dream of freedom, towards the future.
The bags full of earth from home show that the ground is much more than something to stand on.
All of us want to give meaning to our story, finding a fine balance between a longing for freedom and the warmth of home.
We’re all migrating bodies looking for this balance. We move because we like the new, but we are alike because we want to give meaning to this journey, always remembering where we come from.
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