WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, July: Crocevia review - Some notes on Crocevia Mediterraneo (Eléuthera, 2023) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 «(...) the shining and singing sea / which is deaf in truth, but man is

more deaf». ---- It's not easy to write a few lines about Crocevia
Mediterraneo, what are we facing? It is certainly the report of an
ethnographic journey, which offers interesting insights into
sociological and anthropological research. But it also lives in a very
powerful narrative and poetic dimension, whose protagonist is the sea:
the sea as a marine space governed by laws and regulations, the sea as a
source of sustenance (and an economic resource to be exploited), the sea
as a promise of salvation, the sea as the last landing place of life. In
fact, the sea is configured as a space that is anything but empty, it is
indeed the frame of an intertwining of lives, experiences, and it almost
seems like an extension of the space of the mainland, but with less
certainties, where every step is uncertain, like the steps of the
researchers who have decided to embark on the Tanimar and travel through
the places of the sea that are the scene of migrations, rescues and
rejections, of security policies and gestures of solidarity of the sea,
to which no one escapes, not even the fishermen who then, when it comes
to entering the voting booth, vote for Salvini: «although on land the
fishermen tell you everything, then at sea they cannot fail to save. If
you don't save them, how do you live, how do you look after your
children?». The sea is therefore a space full of people, relationships
and relationships in mutual correlation: the state (or its absence) and
local communities, migrants, fishermen... But the story does not only
show us the contradictions of the sea (the sea beaurocracy that stands
between the immediacy of the need to save a human life, the abstruse
regulations on SAR, the discretion hidden in the Byzantinism of the
rules...) but also what is said (and lived) of the sea on land. And
perhaps this is the part I loved the most about this book, the story of
the contradictions of those on the ground, of those who never see
migrants, because they are detained in those places on the edge of the
human that are the hotspots, of those has seen the territory change, of
those who have sold themselves to the tourism industry and those who
instead suffer this industry, of those who see the territories
impoverished and plundered, by those who feel abandoned by the State
(except seeing daily military boats, police and financial police moored
at the port). Crocevia Mediterraneo shuns the temptation to be treated
as a thesis: what do you want to demonstrate with a work like this? I
truly believe nothing, and this constitutes the strong point of the
work: the story does not demonstrate but shows, in a very delicate
dialectic between the individual and the collective, between existential
experiences and dramatic social realities, and winds through a polyphony
which, remain within the context of the musical metaphor, rather than
the development of a sonata, it is configured as a musical espace, where
the levels of harmony follow one another without chasing each other and
where the meaning is given only by the whole. A whole that is precisely
made up of the stories of individuals who find their dignity only in the
face of the collective action and becoming of history, of individuals
who make themselves universal bearers of the wounds and contradictions
of the present, and who can only prefigure a different future . It is
therefore not surprising that Benjamin is mentioned in the book and his
reflection on the messianism entrusted to the generations. At the
conclusion of this little note (which certainly cannot be called a
review) I therefore like to quote the pages of the book directly, when
it is stated that «bearing witness» is a «specific responsibility», that
is, that of «remembering what was promised and not maintained. An
anthropological dimension that takes on a trans-historical connotation:
the human need to fight so that past hopes are not extinguished".

Zoro Astra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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