The Gothic Mediterranean:
Haunting Migrations
and Critical Melancholia
ISSN: 1016-3476
Vol. 24, No. 2: 147–165
Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2015
147
THE GOTHIC MEDITERRANEAN: HAUNTING MIGRATIONS AND
CRITICAL MELANCHOLIA
LAURA SARNELLI
University of Naples L’Orientale
This article proposes to examine the contemporary Mediterranean as a melancholic cultural formation
and a transnational fluid space where histories intertwine and territories overlap. Drawing on
examples ranging from theory, literature, visual culture and cinema, the article will explore some
poetic and aesthetic representations of contemporary migrations across the Mediterranean, where
the body of the migrant is portrayed through Gothic tropes, such as watery graves, dead bodies,
zombies, and melancholy ghosts, as figures of resistance and survival. From this analysis, a new
theoretical configuration emerges: a ‘Gothic Mediterranean’ as an expression of ‘critical melancholia’,
a haunting countercultural space of memory which re-articulates the past in such a way as to
rethink the present.
What’s in a Name?
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S. Eliot, The love song of J.A. Prufrock
The Mediterranean is a vast archive, an immense grave.
P. Matvejević, (1999)
Submerged in Mediterranean waters is a bright heritage within which the idea of the human
was conceived: the cradle of Western civilization, the land of gods and myths, a vast
amphitheatre of encounters, voyages, shipwrecks, and seductions. Indeed, the Mediterranean
has traditionally been represented in terms of a twofold vision: the sunny portrayals of classical
antiquity, and the dark views of Gothic architecture, ancestral territories and sublime nature
(Scotti 2007: 53–54). For several centuries, these views have given shape to the literary and
symbolic dreams and fears of a cultural gaze arriving from the North of industrialized Europe,
for which the Mediterranean south represented its primordial origins (Chambers 2008: 33). As
a means of human acculturation through the knowledge of a glorious past, the voyage across
the Mediterranean is culturally loaded: it is monumental and archeological, according to the
model of the Grand Tour, and it is mythological, as it is associated with Odysseus’ archetypal
journey. The perception of the Mediterranean is invariably troubled by the weight of its
history; as an arena of crusades and trade in earlier times, and later of cruises and tourism,
Copyright © 2015 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.
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the Mediterranean remains trapped in its own stereotypes. As P. Matvejević poignantly observes:
‘This “homeland of the myths” endures the mythology that it generated or others fed. This
space, so rich of history was victim of historicisms’ (Matvejević and De Marco 2006: 2).1
These representations have fostered, on the one hand, views that over the centuries have
prompted fervent nationalisms and wars in the name of a hegemonic ideology and, on the
other, they have supported a politics of space that favors the centre over the margins and
considers distance a measure of cultural inferiority (see Botta 2010: 20). Modern European
colonizations and contemporary neo-imperialistic geopolitical orders clearly reveal these views.
However, the Mediterranean—‘the First Sea’—stopped being the center of the world long
ago. Instead, it is caught between a magnificent past and a decadent present.
Mar Medi-terraneum, from the Latin medius (middle) and terra (land, earth), literally
means ‘the sea in the middle of the earth’. As a sea in-between lands and continents (Europe,
Africa, Asia), it is a crucible of blendings and contradictions, encounters and conflicts: a
melting pot of cultures, a clash of civilizations, a crossroads of populations. A pluralistic
universe or a pluriversum irreducible to any unitary difference thus conceived is, by definition,
an indefinable concept in terms of universalistic assumptions.2 This ambiguity is also embodied
in the symbolic bisexuality of the sea. Drawing on Francesca Saffioti’s (2007) geo-philosophical
elaborations of the sea, the Mediterranean could be conceived as hermaphroditic in its nature,
as a sea that takes on both male and female attributes. The liquidity of the sea is associated
with fusion and separation at the same time: it refers to the reproductive amniotic fluid on the
one hand, and to the draining of the waters on the other; it is a life-giver and a life-taker; in
fact, the sea is also linked to the idea of engulfment and death which bears, once again, both
male and female connotations as a regression to an intrauterine condition. The sea has thus
both male aspects for its implications of violence, rape and abduction, and female qualities
as it represents life, birth, creation, regeneration, and metamorphosis (see Saffioti 2007: 12).
Massimo Cacciari stresses this gendered nuance by going back to the etymological derivations
of the word ‘sea’. From the Greek Pélagos, the sea represents a vast stretch of water without
borders, a deserted plain (plaga), a salty (háls) sterile sea, a virile space of conquest. Conversely,
the Greek Thàlassa refers to the maternal sea, which is nurturing and embracing, enclosed
within lands like a womb, thus recalling the Roman mare nostrum, a common sea.3 As both
protecting and threatening, caring and menacing, the sea is also Pòntos, a bridge to dangerous
passageways or uncharted territories, hence the sea appears as a tireless journey (Cacciari
1997: 13–15). Moreover, the Sanskrit Maru, from the root -mar, refers to the meaning ‘to die’
(Cacciari 1997: 14), which harks back to the semantic association of sea-mother-death. The
Mediterranean thus comes to be imagined as both womb and cemetery.
To think about the Mediterranean today is to re-conceptualize notions of geography and
history, in order to re-define its cultural geometries in light of a new chrono-topic matrix. An
originally Latin word now taken into numerous languages, ‘matrix’ etymologically is derived
from mater (mother), and recalls the interrelated significations of mother/uterus/womb/sourceorigin.4 A matrix could be a symbolic structure for analyzing the Mediterranean as a network
of cultural exchanges and human migrations. The contemporary crossings and migrations
recall another voyage, no longer a journey as nóstos (homecoming) but rather journey as
death, the one that does not guarantee any return, the one whose horizon is nothingness, the
one that leads to total loss. Death by water is, to some, ‘the most maternal of deaths’ (Bachelard
1983: 72–73). From this perspective, the Mediterranean as matrix can be imagined as a mater
terribilis, from a blue and bright oval of water to a devouring purple uterine sea.5
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The Wretched of the Sea
Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.
F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
In the wake of the ongoing migrations from North Africa to the closest European shores, the
contemporary Mediterranean Sea has become a contested arena for the crossings of dilapidated
vessels, or ‘ghost ships’, on board of which thousands of migrants flee their homelands
desperately in search of a better future in Europe. Indeed, shipwrecks and drownings have
been haunting the Mediterranean for the past two decades. The latest large-scale human
disaster dates back to April 2015, when a boat sank off the Libyan coast and an estimated 800
hundred people lost their lives at sea. These tragic deaths recall another substantial, deadly
crossing in October 2013, when more than 300 North African migrants drowned on their way
to Lampedusa, a small Italian island south of Sicily which is seen as the primary destination
between Europe and Africa.6 ‘Boat people’ (The Economist April 2015) are constantly caught
‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’. This proverbial idiom, which refers to a dilemma
between two undesirable situations, expresses exactly what is occurring between the shores
of the Mediterranean. An unknown number of migrants are refugees from Syria, Eritrea, and
Somalia, fleeing wars and persecutions in their native countries. Before they even embark on
the dreadful Mediterranean crossing, they must endure a dangerous journey through the North
African deserts, undergoing torture and the threat of beatings or death from ruthless smugglers
in Libya. For these refugees, clandestine channels of immigration are the only possibility.
However, the modern route is constituted by a system of border patrol and controls—what is
known as ‘Fortress-Europe’—which solidifies the Mediterranean Sea by creating invisible
administrative walls and frontiers, all while preaching the ‘free market’. In so doing it discards
that which it cannot host and assimilate, relegating immigrants, the ones who survive, to the
so-called ‘Centres for Identification and Expulsion’.7 There, they become even more vulnerable
as they are disowned and have no rights, and can be legally detained for an indefinite amount
of time. Migrants thus caught between death and detention enter the spiral of a neo-colonial
thanatopolitics (Agamben 1998: 115–122) or necropolitics (Mbembe 2003: 11–40), literally
a politics of death, as the state exercises its bio-power on their bare lives by turning human
beings into non-subjects exposed to a legal suspension of existence.
The migrant’s condition of ‘living death’, connected to the ensuing fear it entails of a
massive invasion of (un)human waves through the doors of the besieged fortress of Europe,
immediately recalls the figure of the zombie, a mindless revived dead body with no will or
agency. As an anthropological figure related to the Haitian tradition, the zombie bears connection
with African slavery and colonialism. Indeed, in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched
of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that the zombie is an apt metaphor for colonized people
who had been turned into mute subalterns suitable for slave labor and exploitation by the
power structures of European colonizers. Sartre also argues that the colonizers may become
zombies as well, as the natives’ rebellion will render them subordinate in a sort of ‘reverse
colonization’ (see Fanon 1961: xlviii).8 The internalized representation of colonized subjects
as zombies, as described by Fanon in the 1960s, applies in the present day to the condition
of immigrants who have been transformed by the collective imagination into a ‘terrible fiction’,
‘a Gothic tale’ portraying them as a source of contagion and horror, omnivorous figures ready
to eat you alive, and ‘an example of the undead, who will invade, colonise and contaminate’
our borders (Kureishi 2014). This ‘zombification of the other’ is a suitable metaphor to
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describe not only the material condition of migrants as dehumanized beings living in a liminal
space, deprived of any civil and human rights, but also to reveal contemporary anxieties over
immigration. As British Pakistani author Hanif Kureishi states: ‘Unlike other monsters, the
foreign body of the immigrant is unslayable. Resembling a zombie in a video game, he is
impossible to kill or finally eliminate not only because he is already silent and dead, but also
because there are waves of other similar immigrants just over the border coming right at you’
(Kureishi 2014). Posited outside the confines of the acceptable, this haunting interloper with
no face and no status might nevertheless be in ‘a position to tell us the truth about ourselves,
since he sees more than we know’ Kureishi 2014).9
From the contemporary waves of immigration towards European shores, a new
Mediterranean imaginary emerges. That ancient Mediterranean landscape, the sea of departure
and return in mythical voyages, suddenly acquires a Gothic configuration. From a seductive,
arcadian, picturesque space, it becomes an archaic, horrific cradle of death. That mare nostrum,
whose colonial implications of imperial power reverberate today in the militarization of the
waters, turns into a mare mortum / mare monstrum, a rotten sea of dead bodies adrift, a liquid
cemetery.
However, the metaphor of the Mediterranean as mare monstrum bears a hidden meaning
that reveals positive implications. In Latin monstrum is not only that which is awful, but also
that which is to be shown.10 The monster is, first of all, a sign that becomes evident and is
exposed to the public. From this perspective, the Mediterranean is mare monstrum insofar as
it shows that which would be otherwise kept concealed: migrations, postcolonial poverty,
forgotten wars, that which is ‘too hideous to be shown’. It shows that which is obscene, in
other words, that which is improper, indecent, repugnant, monstrous, and also that which is
off-scene, and which ought to be invisible. The Mediterranean today is a sea of monstrous
melancholia not only because it is a site of ongoing mourning which has never been worked
through, but also because it provides a possible basis for change. All that happened, and still
happens, in the African deserts has now been forcibly brought to the attention of the international
community. Migrant deaths not only take place, but also become visible, thus showing the
need for transformation. The mournful face of melancholia is combined with the transformative
potential that characterizes this passion since the time of Aristotle (see Mazzeo 2012). From
this perspective, the metaphor of boat immigrants as zombies takes on the same ambivalent,
melancholic character. On the one hand, ‘the return of the living dead’ embodies the resurrection
of uncanny dead presences that stand for what was meant to be forgotten or lost. On the other,
they represent ‘signs’ capable of transforming prescribed orders and changing the natural
course of events. In western culture, sea-figures have often taken on the liminal status between
what is alive and what is no longer living. In this regard, it is worth noting that English
corsairs, called sea-dogs, are mentioned for the first time in a religious literary work of the
sixteenth century titled Pélagos. Nec inter vivos Nec inter mortuos (Neither amongst the
Living, nor amongst the Dead, or, An Improvement of the Sea).11 The title bears witness to
both the figure of the undead and that of the sea as a space of conflict, passage, and invasion.
Not by chance, the cry of an African migrant reported in a newspaper, ‘we are between the
devil and the deep blue sea’ (The Economist March 2015), echoes one of the most important
studies about such figures of transit (foremost among them pirates and sailors) who have
populated the Atlantic routes in the last centuries.12 Zombies and pirates manifest themselves
as melancholic figures: denied forms of innovation, they question the world they belong to
by calling for answers and transformation.
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Archipelagos of Melancholia
Melancholia becomes the fluid foundation of dark waters,
a liquid matrix structuring the islands of the archipelago…
Dark drops of melancholia can be distilled to heal our times.
Because Gods often choose melancholia as a means to come back.
(Hillman 2001: 13, 15)13
The experience of the contemporary Mediterranean recalls another oceanic imaginary, that of
the Middle Passage, the crossing of the Atlantic ocean by slave ships partaking in the triangular
trade connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas from the sixteenth through the nineteenth
century. On the Middle Passage millions of the enslaved died and their bodies were thrown
overboard, as depicted in a famous painting by the British artist J. M. William Turner from
1840, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying.14 Past transatlantic crossings of
slave ships are recalled today by the crossings of improvised boats known as ‘old carts of the
sea’ in the Mediterranean, where drowning bodies are reduced to commodities, symbols of
modern-day migrant labor. 15 The contemporary ‘Mediterranean abyss’ (Lambert 2015),
populated by thousands of black bodies of those who never reached the European coasts,
dramatically evokes the abyss lying at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, a submerged cemetery
of relics and human bones (Glissant and Chamoiseau 2009: 1).
Looking at overpopulated ramshackle boats sinking not far from European shores with
indifference, from a safe distance, lays bare the impossibility of hospitality and empathy
towards the Other. From this perspective the Mediterranean seems to reflect the description
given by the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant, who defines it as ‘a sea that
concentrates’. In other words, it is an imperialistic continental sea of antiquity that, from
Greek, Hebrew, and Latin cultures through the rise of Islam and up to the modern age of
colonialisms, has imposed ‘the thought of the One’, thus forcing the multiple into the uniform
(Glissant 1997: 33). Glissant defines the Mediterranean in contrast to the Caribbean, which
he sees as ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc’, and ‘a sea that diffracts’
Glissant 1997: 33). In his view of a fractal and heteroclite world which subverts traditional
topographic delimitations, the Caribbean is considered an archipelago of exchange where
identities and cultures are mutually created and influenced by each other in a process of
creolization, meant as an ongoing hybridization of different cultural strands. The geographical
notion of the archipelago for Glissant comes to represent the quintessence of his ‘poetics of
Relation’, that envisions composite identities (in contrast with European atavistic ones) in
terms of interrelation, porosity, and proximity to the other.
However, in contrast to Glissant’s view of a Mediterranean emerging solely as a territorial
entity obsessed by the universalizing tendency to unify and assimilate, the ‘sea in-between
lands’ has been revalued and described as an archipelago from a different perspective. Italian
philosopher Massimo Cacciari adopts the Greek concept of archi-pélagos (from archè ‘chief’,
and pélagos ‘sea’) to refer to the Mediterranean as a fertile sea full of islands whose ‘truth’
lies in it being a privileged site of interrelation, dialogue, and exchange between the manifold
islands that inhabit it: ‘all divided by the sea and all intertwined by the same sea; all nourished
by the sea and all ventured into the same sea’ (Cacciari 1997: 16).16 In Cacciari’s view, the
Mediterranean archipelago comes to represent the multicultural matrix of a decentered Europe
whose harmony is founded on a dialectical relationship between diá-logos and polemos, that
is, between encounter and separation, relation and division (Cacciari 1997: 21).17
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Interestingly, both archipelagos—the Caribbean and the Mediterranean—bear witness to
submerged histories that vividly summon up similar imaginaries. The sense of the sea as a
repository of ancestral memories and watery ruins is a common literary topos in Caribbean
literature, where the histories of colonial violence and slavery are represented as sunken and
sedimented on the sea bottom. As Caribbean author Derek Walcott wonders: ‘Where are your
monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, / in that grey vault.
The sea. The sea / has locked them up. The sea is History’ (Walcott 1986: 364). Édouard
Glissant speaks of ‘a sea to be crossed, between the real and memory. A people caught in the
vertigo of oblivion . . .we all crossed the sea, so we all must remember’ (Glissant 1969: 188–
189). Canadian Caribbean poet Dionne Brand refers to similar oceanic images: ‘all beginning
in water, all ending in water’ (Brand 2001: 1). What she calls the ‘Door of No Return’, a
metaphor for the African doorways from which millions of slaves were thrown adrift into the
unknown, can be envisioned neither here nor there, but only in the liminality of the ocean inbetween. One of her latest long poems symbolically bears the title Ossuaries, inspiring images
of burial grounds in which the remains of exhumed bodies are collected, as well as images
of a mausoleum, a memorial place for the dead. Indeed, Brand’s poem performs personal and
cultural exhumation, a digging up of memory through the process of poetic memorialization.
Ossuaries is a disconsolate exploration of the condition of the contemporary world with its
‘fragile symmetries of gain and loss’ (Brand 2010: 21) and ‘momentous, ravenous, ugly times’
(Brand: 2010: 33). The desolation of Ossuaries echoes Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’
(Benjamin 1969: 257–258) where history appears as a pile of rubble, ruins and wrecks, a
spectral and appalling landscape in which events, like the living dead, claim their own presence
out of the oblivion of burial. Benjamin’s angel, like Brand’s ossuaries, bear witness to the
impossibility of getting rid of history; they both lay claim to the present’s inability to exorcise
a past unwilling to be forgotten.
Spread along the sea between the Caribbean and Africa, there are human traces that hold
the past in suspension. In Walcott’s The Schooner Flight, a modern Odysseus dives for
salvage in emerald waters when he is confronted with a visionary insight: what seem to be
bits of sand or coral are really bones of the dead buried in the same sea in which the living
try to swim: ‘I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans, / dead men’s fingers, and then, the dead
men. / I saw that the powdery sand was their bones / ground white from Senegal to San
Salvador’ (Walcott 1986: 349). These lines echo Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
where imagined deaths are returned by the Mediterranean sea: ‘Of his bones are coral made,
/ Those are pearls which were his eyes, / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a
sea-change, / Into something rich and strange.’ (Shakespeare 2011 [1611]: 200). Walcott’s
verses reverse the Shakespearean transformation, recognizing sand and coral as the bones of
the dead. In a contemporary Mediterranean re-contextualization of Shakespeare’s island, as
Iain Chambers points out, ‘Caliban returns as an illegal immigrant and Prospero’s island, midway between Naples and Tunis in the sixteenth century drama, becomes modern day Lampedusa’
(Chambers 2010: 5).
The Mediterranean recalls the horrific Middle Passage and links the so-called ‘Black
Atlantic’, which Paul Gilroy defines as a space of transnational cultural construction (1993),
to the ‘Gothic Mediterranean’. It thus becomes a countercultural space of memory, which rearticulates the past in such a way as to rethink western modernity. Alessandro Dal Lago
clearly illustrates this new imaginary in ‘Watery Graves’, a funeral oration written in the
ornate style of Baroque sermons and inspired by the death of a group of young Senegalese
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who left the African coast for the Spanish Canary Islands in 2005. After drifting for thousands
of miles off course in the Atlantic, lost at sea, the boat eventually washed ashore the island
of Barbados in the Caribbean Sea. The bodies on board the boat were discovered months later
by a fisherman who became witness to a dreadful ‘sea-change’, seeing their young black
bodies turned into mummies from the sun and salt spray:
the 11 mummified bodies (their thin skin pulled tautly across a fragile framework of bones, like
parchment across a canvas) are laid out in an organized fashion, eyes plucked out by seagulls and
arms in a resting position, although the jagged marks left by a shark are visible on the shoulder of one,
there, where the arm was cleanly amputated (Dal Lago 2010: 2).
Echoing the Gothic imaginary of British literary tradition from Alfred Hitchcock’s The
Birds to S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,18 this ghastly description counteracts
the maritime poetics of Caribbean literature which is expressed in images of bodies turned
into marine flora and fauna on the sea floor:
Our dead rest in seaside cemeteries. . . . When the coral invades the ports and cuts the keels of the
ships, these lost souls, no longer dead or alive who were once tall and beautiful as we are, will
reunite on the ocean floor. There are thousands and thousands, and amid all the flotsam and jetsam
there is no more room for them. Cast out, even from that place where corporeal existence has turned
to coral (Dal Lago 2010: 9–10).
The piece is a harsh denunciation of the blindness and indifference of the ‘developed’
Western world which prefers not to see the thousands of deaths in the Atlantic, the
Mediterranean, and the African deserts, all while claiming to safeguard the ‘European Fortress’
against the invasion of unwanted immigrants. Once again, these ‘non-persons’ (Dal Lago
2009), suspended in a limbo that does not allow them a worth or peaceful burial, are described
through the trope of the zombie: ‘No longer alive but not dead either, foreigners even to that
ill-defined territory between existence and non-existence’ (Dal Lago 2010: 6).
The oceanic space between the Western African coast and the Canary Islands represents
another tragic theatre of migration, as shown in the video installation Floating Coffins (2009)
by Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira. Filmed on the coasts of Mauritania where ‘the desert
meets the sea’, ‘Floating Coffins is a space where life, death, loss, escape, abandoned and
shipwrecked journeys meet. It is both a toxic graveyard and a source for survival and hope’ (Le
Feuvre 2009). Migrants’ dead bodies, mingled with marine sediments and debris, often remain
caught in fishermen’s nets, as many accounts of modern day shipwrecks show.19
In these poetical representations of transatlantic and transmediterranean crossings, the
shipwreck manifests itself as the literal image for absolute loss that nullifies the separation
between human and non-human, man and nature, subject and object. Also, the shipwreck
becomes metaphor for new critical thought. As Iain Chambers has argued, the illegal crossing
of small boats risking shipwreck questions the very concept of the Mediterranean as it ‘is set
adrift to float toward a vulnerability attendant on encounters with other voices, bodies, histories’
(Chambers 2008: 33). He refers to the sea and the ocean as a new form of theoretical drift,
what he calls ‘maritime criticism’, a critical space that ‘sets existing knowledge afloat’
(Chambers 2010: 3). Western paradigms of knowledge are challenged by new, illegitimate,
and unauthorized histories and cultures that propose a non-hegemonic worldview:
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Beneath the waves, on the other side of the official chart, are the anonymous processes and people
making the modern world from below . . . these clandestine histories sign the unexpected register of
a heterotopic modernity’ (Chambers: 2010: 3).
The Mediterranean Sea, as a multi-faceted space where West and East, North and South,
Europe, Asia and Africa are culturally connected, is thus conceived as a ‘heterotopia’, in
Foucault’s words; it is a ‘counter-site’ of modernity, a space of otherness, which is neither here
nor there. It is both physical and mental, and offers an alternative version of Western modernity
where real places are represented, contested, and subverted. Maritime criticism opens space for
cultural resonances from the sea in order to rethink new conceptual cartographies. Confronted
with submerged forgotten histories and voices brought afloat, we come close to ‘the threshold
of a postcolonial melancholia’ (Chambers 2012a: 12). Melancholia thus comes to represent the
very condition of the contemporary Mediterranean. Yet, as Chambers rightly notes, ‘in a
planetary economy, whose melancholia are we referring to?’ (Charles 2012a: 18).
The arrival of migrants from across the Mediterranean in the modern day is a haunting
reminder of the repression of the Italian colonial past.20 Actually, reports hardly mention that
a part of the thousands of migrants who make the Mediterranean journey from the North
African coast to Europe come from the former Italian colonies of Libya, Somalia, and Eritrea.21
By coming ashore on Italian coasts, or by becoming shipwrecked in the middle of the sea, they
bring to light what had been relegated to cultural amnesia (Chambers and Curti 2008: 392).
Paul Gilroy has defined the unresolved relationship of European countries with their colonial
histories as melancholic. Gilroy provides a rather bleak picture of melancholia which lies in
Europe’s inability to mourn its loss of empire, thus resulting in a process of historical amnesia.
This is reflected in the hostility towards migrants who are both a reminder of pain for Europe’s
loss, and guilt for its violent management of the empire (Gilroy 2005: 102–117). From his
perspective, ‘postimperial melancholia’ (Gilroy 2005: 98) embodies the pathological condition
of contemporary political culture dominated by anxieties over multiculturalism, hatred against
the immigrant, and a yearning for a romanticized past characterized by an allegedly culturallypure nation. Therefore, considered as ‘infrahuman and specters’ (Gilroy 2011: 188), unwanted
immigrants represent an eruption into the present of an unresolved past, which nevertheless can
point to alternative histories and more sustainable futures (see McClintock 2014: 819–827).
The concept of melancholia, meant as an emotional reaction to the denial of an irrecoverable
loss, be it individual or collective, has been re-articulated in cultural theory beyond its
pathological connotations, in order to revalue its positive implications as a theoretical tool that
questions colonialism and its aftermath.22 Beyond any simple binaries, we can detect a
reactionary and pathological melancholia resulting in a process of amnesia and repression,
and a form of revolutionary and creative melancholia thanks to which new forms of human
life can be imagined and power relations subverted (see Mazzeo 2012: 18). According to
Ranjana Khanna, ‘critical melancholia’ is conceived of as a reading practice and an
epistemological tool that unveils the violence of colonial discourse, which has produced a
dominant self in opposition to a concealed ‘dark continent’ (Khanna 2003).23 Its aim is to
acknowledge the unsaid and repressed colonial subject who hauntingly appears to claim his/
her own right to be recognized. Critical melancholia is thus based on an inassimilable loss
whose remainders nevertheless will continue to haunt and question existing conditions. More
broadly, this issue is relevant to all those individuals who are in minority positions or are
excluded from official public discourse but somehow manifest themselves onstage, including
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new immigrants, non-citizens, and those who are differentially affected by the global economy.
As uninvited guests at the doors of nation-states, migrants embody a subaltern subjectivity
that nonetheless manifests itself as an ethical demand of human agency and political recognition
(Khanna 2008: 61).
Politically, melancholia is invoked to prevent erasure and amnesia, to preserve memory
and accountability. The contemporary Mediterranean imagery, marked by global forms of
violence and vulnerability, as well as by experiences of loss—both personal and collective,
historical and cultural—call for a rethinking of mourning practices, which poses a fundamental
question: to what extent can the experience of the ‘work of mourning’ and the successful
emotional working-through of loss be ethically possible and, also, politically desirable? The
melancholic attitude toward loss, namely, the refusal to let go of lost objects or past grief,
takes the form of political commitment and resistance against normative mourning. In other
words, it acts against those strategies of reconciliation and amnesia that are meant to preserve
the hegemonic social and political order without accounting for the issue of ethical responsibility.
Reclaiming the body of the past by taking care of it means to reassess a crucial understanding
of the present.
The myth of Antigone becomes central in this respect.24 She proves to be a mythological
figure for revolutionary melancholia: she defies the law by mourning her brother’s death,
forbidden by Creon’s edict as it is considered an ungrievable loss, and fiercely proclaims her
crime. She stands for what is not represented by any symbolic law, thus embodying a ‘womanly
state of exception’ (Sarnelli 2013c: 38). According to Massimo Cacciari, she represents the
tension within the Mediterranean archipelago between the laws of the oikos and philia (home,
love) and those of the polis (city); she is the foreigner exiled from the polis who nevertheless
provides a burial to her dead brother, an outsider in his turn, in order not to forget him. The
only ethical relationship with what has been lost is not so much the reconciliation with it
which results in its oblivion; rather, the failure of mourning proves to be the only action that
can guarantee a form of fidelity and commitment toward the memory of loss. As Cacciari
points out: ‘the polis remembers the dead in order to overcome them . . . to abandon them.
The polis remembers the dead exclusively to survive. On the contrary, Antigone wants the
burial to be perfect. But from a perfect burial there is no detachment’ (Cacciari 1997: 50).
By exploring the reconfigurations of the contemporary Mediterranean archipelago,
melancholia can be viewed as a theoretical healing tool to recover the past and an ethical
response to loss. To reassess the histories of contemporary migrations means to talk to the
dead, past and present.
Talking to the Dead
Alive, I tread the chambers of the dead.
Sophocles, Antigone
In Asmat (Names, 2015), a short film by Ethiopian filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer, a woman’s
voice pays tribute to all victims of the Mediterranean sea, echoing Antigone’s sorrowful cry
from the dawn of time. She sings over a painted sea, a stripe of painted land marking the
horizon. Alternating shots of the sea intermingle with submarine sounds. Then there are
bubbles. The perspective is from below the surface of the sea, with a seashell-like sound all
around, as if the viewer has ears underwater. The bottom of a drifting boat is shot from
different angles, and then the view becomes blurred and watery images gradually fade away
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from the frame. ‘You who are alive are condemned to listen to these screams / You will not
cover your ears because our cry is loud and strong / Nothing can stop it / Our bodies will land
on your shores’ (Yimer 2015). Drawings of shipwrecked boats lying at the bottom of the sea
show sketches of debris and relics. A mother holds her baby tight to her breast, and two men
sink down in a close embrace, while other bodies swim up towards the surface. Real human
bodies walk on the seabed with their upper bodies above the water’s surface, while a subtitle
reads: ‘With each victim dying in the sea / you are more naked and exposed.’ Images of
drowning bodies underwater overlap with drawings of the living dead walking on the seafloor.
A father holds his child’s hand, a mother once again holds her baby in her arms. They look
for their children deep down, while the female voiceover exhorts them to speak their names
aloud. A disturbing and unsettling sequence closes the short film: shrouded bodies emerge
from the dark depths and float; they look like corpses wrapped in shrouds, but they also
appear as veiled ghosts dancing on black waters. Meanwhile, the narrating voice speaks their
names, which reverberate in an endless echo, written names emerging from and inscribed on
a dark sea. They are melancholic reminders of a loss that cannot be denied.
The figures of the crypt, the phantom and the zombie, as both Gothic literary topoi and
psychoanalytical concepts to define melancholia (see Punter 2012: 2), are reworked in aesthetic
and poetic representations of the contemporary Mediterranean: the crypt becomes a marine
vault and the undead appear in the guise of the migrant body coming back to claim some
symbolic debt that remains to be paid (see Žiž ek 1992: 22–23).25 Not only the seabed but also
the seashore, as a mobile threshold between sea and land uncannily exposed to the coming
of the Other, becomes part of a Gothic aesthetics of ruins. In the documentary film Un
consiglio a Dio (Dionisio 2012), an anonymous Italian shoreline littered with waste and
debris becomes a disturbing, horrific place where the bodies of the drowned are washed up
and mixed with garbage and rubble. A solitary beach watchman is intent on his nightly work:
he recovers the corpses of the deceased migrants and, as a modern Charon, conveys their
souls to the underworld. By talking to the dead, he gives vent to his anger over the miserable
condition of discarded clandestine immigrants which, however, parallels his own. He is given
the inconvenient task of speaking the unspeakable truth, too often repressed for fear, horror,
and revulsion. His disconsolate grievances alternate with accounts of surviving migrants who
significantly appear in the last sections of the documentary as ghostly silhouettes, thus again
embodying, in a way, the dead coming back to life.
Melancholia thus represents the return of the repressed to haunt the present. There is a
close relationship between memory and haunting melancholia. Indeed, they both highlight the
possibility of imaginary representations that can overcome the implosive implications of
melancholia leading to the denial of the humanity of the other (see Sarnelli 2011: 171–198).
Melancholia as revenant, the thing that comes back, happens to confront two complementary
and yet antithetical aspects of memory: first, the impossibility of handing down History and
histories, as each single history is culturally loaded; then, the inevitability of telling histories,
as this is a fundamental need for human survival and connection. The imperative of the
traumatic event giving rise to melancholy is at the same time offered to—and removed
from—representation or narration, as Toni Morrison’s eloquent quote shows: ‘It was not a
story to pass on’ (Morrison 1987: 274). This alludes to the ambivalence in the possibility of
memory (i.e. recollection and narration) and its limits (i.e. necessary forgetting). Creative
melancholia, the ability to recreate in the present what no longer exists or has been forgotten
through the workings of imagination, proves to be a healing process, that is, a creative process
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of symbols that can alleviate grief and envision more endurable forms of life (see Sarnelli
2013a: 145–156).
Within the new literature of migration in Italy, whose emergence corresponds to the first
migratory fluxes to the country in the early 1990s, women writers from the former colonies
of the Horn of Africa offer counter-narratives revealing the memory of a disavowed history
(see Curti 2011: 72–92; Curti 2014: 99–132). The writings of African Italian women migrants,
such as Gabriella Ghermandi from Ethiopia, and Igiaba Scego and Cristina Ali Farah from
Somalia, deal with loss and desire, mourning and melancholia, pain and hope. They bear
witness to several losses: loss of motherland and home, loss of language, loss of cultural
traditions, loss of family and loved persons. Yet, the very act of telling those losses proves
to be creative, thus enhancing a critical agency. If loss is told and put down, then it is already
reworked as creative melancholia (Kristeva 1992: 63). These writings can not only enhance
grief but also cure it by creating symbols, icons, and imaginary representations able to soothe
the obsessive memory of a lost object.
The power of storytelling in re-imagining the present in light of its forgotten traumatic past
is explored in Queen of Flowers and Pearls [2007] (2015) by Gabriella Ghermandi, born in
Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian mother and Italian father. Challenging the idea of a humane
Italian colonialism in Ethiopia during the period of Fascism (1935–1941), her novel recounts
unspoken stories of brutal violence, massacres, abuse, and racism perpetrated by the Italian
army and fascist militia in the 1930s and 1940s during the occupation of Ethiopia. It also,
however, relays untold stories of resistance and of mythical female warriors. A little girl,
Mahlet, is entrusted by the elder of the house, an old patriot during the Ethiopian resistance
to the Italian invasion, to become the azmari of the community—the cantora, a singer and
storyteller—and to cross the waters of the Mediterranean in order to tell the story of the
Ethiopians to Italians:
Collect all the stories you can. One day you’ll be the voice that will tell our stories. You will cross the
same sea that Peter and Paul crossed, and you will take our stories to the land of the Italians. You will
be the voice of our history that does not want to be forgotten (Ghermandi 2007: 2).
At first she cannot speak, as she is unable to remember the promise made to her uncle who
appears repeatedly in her dreams after his death. Only after crossing the Mediterranean shores
is she able to collect the stories of Ethiopians’ experiences of Italy’s cruel colonization and
to write her narrative down, which is both hers as well as that of the collective. Mahlet’s story
reverberates with other tales across the Mediterranean and has the potential to evoke connections
through time and space, both real and imagined. By taking care of the bodies of the dead, like
an undead Antigone, she becomes a melancholic revolutionary figure.
In the novel Rhoda (2004) by Igiaba Scego, born in Italy of Somali parents, histories of
Somali diaspora and experiences of contemporary migrations to Italy are told by a ghost
woman, a post-mortem narrative voice who speaks from beyond her grave in Somalia. The
novel shows an unconventional structure representing five narrative voices, including four
Somali immigrant women and an Italian young man, and a multiplicity of simultaneous
temporal and spatial dimensions. The title character is unable to integrate in the host society,
and bears on her body the marks of degradation, of a self that has lost her sense of identity
following emigration. She becomes a prostitute in Italy, contracts HIV, and returns to Mogadishu
where she dies as a victim not of the disease but of the civil war. She is stabbed by a gang
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of criminals who subsequently violate her grave. From that a-temporal space she speaks,
pondering on death, time, and memory:
Silence. The girl is gone. I am alone. No Balil, no girl, no grave robbers. I am finally (or unfortunately)
alone. When will my Hermes come and take me to the underworld? Or maybe is this already my
afterlife? This space empty of air and swarming with ghost worms? I am frightened. […] In this
suspension, now and then, I look back at my life on earth. The memory is fading. I strongly cling to
what is left to me. Is it possible that there is a second death? An oblivion that is more atrocious than
death itself? What will we humans be without our memories? (Scergo 2004: 160)26
Yet, her tragic ending proves to be a symbol of hope and survival for other migrant characters.
Her death restores them to life. In the last pages of the novel, she appears in a dream to a
young boy who attempts the cursed journey across the desert and sea. Her death and ghostly
appearance somehow grant him a second chance of life: ‘when I landed at Lampedusa on that
wrecked cart of the sea. . . . I thanked God for the great luck. In some ways, I got a second
chance of life . . . it was nice to raise from the dead’ (Scego 2004: 205).
Images of Mediterranean crossings between North African and Italian shores haunt these
narratives. In Rhoda, transnational flows across Naples, Rome, and Mogadishu resonate with
the double crossing of the desert and the sea:
That night the city was covered in a thick layer of dust. A yellowish thin dust that caused allergies,
fear, suspicion, anxiety and gossip. The TV said that it was desert sand. And the TV also said that it
came from Africa like those illegal migrants who landed every day on the Italian coasts. The TV often
lied. Or, better, it failed to say. Perhaps that dust was just the symbol of a nation’s decay and, who
knows, of the whole world. It was the symbol of global misunderstanding (Ali Farah 2007: 13–14).
In Little Mother [2007] (2011) by Cristina Ali Farah, born in Italy of an Italian mother and
a Somali father, a shipwreck in the Sicilian channel and the solemn funeral in Rome lead the
female narrator to bear witness to stories of desire and loss, which must be accounted for:
Boats have been coming and uploading illegal immigrants along Italian coastlines for a long time
now. The tides go in and out and the beaches keep filling up with garbage: tomato cans, shards of
green glass, small tubes of medicine, clumps of tar, and plastic bags, more and yet more plastic bags.
And, carried by the sea, lifeless bodies, wearing tattered clothes, their purplish skin blotched with
white salt . . . I warn you, I have a selective memory. I remember what I want to remember. And what
I want to remember is one of their voices urging you Italians not to forget your emigrant past. History
repeating the story of poor people spurred on by yearning, such total yearning that it uproots you, it
defies sea storms. (Ali Farah 2011: 13–14)
In Ali Farah’s poetics, like in Scego, the crossing of the sea recalls the first crossing of the
desert. But escape from war and despair is accompanied by hope and rebirth, as we read in
the last pages of Little Mother and in her poem ‘Red’ (2011):
Foamy dawn, you surprised us dark and alone,
While we went away forever.
I, on the dirty jeep and a precious package in my arms.
Dazed, I stared at the rifles resting on their shoulders.
Guerrillas accompanied our goodbye.
And the sand covered everything.
Among the slippery sand dunes, a few rare huts.
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Children came out screaming and women stretched out their arms.
Wait.
This is the last goodbye.
Still anguish hasn’t invaded their faces. I can feel it.
Now I realize I have salty lips.
But the sky is clear, clean, pale-blue.
I flee from death and I bring it with me.
If it were not for the serene face of the children.
The ocean looms in the distance […]. (Ali Farah 2011: 345)
Like Ghermandi and Scego, Farah fills in the void of spectral traces by giving a body to the
dead and a voice to the living of the Somali diaspora, the ones who survived, the ones who
did not get lost in the desert or do not lie buried at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. Not
only does the sea become a watery burial ground, but towns also become horrific places of
destruction and death. Italian cities are haunted by the traces of the colonial past, and colonial
towns are depicted as ossuaries of mangled bodies. In Scego’s poetic words, ‘when a city dies
you are not even given time to think. But that pain is like a corpse, it decomposes within you
and haunts you with ghostly memories’ (Scego 2010: 24).
Tropes such as seaside cemeteries, ruins, dead bodies, and ghosts abound in these texts.
Actually, a Gothic imagery characterizes African-Italian women’s writing, where the body of
the migrant is expressed through the image of the ‘ghostly feminine’ as a figure of resistance
and survival.27 The texts of African Italian women writers offer a re-writing, where postmortem narrative voices and spectral female figures bear witness to the hidden legacy of
Italian colonial history. These ghostly presences embody a critical agency in search of justice,
beyond forms of dehumanization. The video installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007)
by British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien offers another powerful example in this respect.
The work explores, once again, the journey made by illegal African migrants to reach the
Sicilian coasts, some never to arrive or return. The narrative structure of Western Union
revolves around the female figure of a witness who strolls over diverse locations like a
woman from another time and space, hovering like a ghost. She witnesses bodies moving
between the sea and the shore, bodies on boats afloat, panting in the foam, abandoned on the
beach in silver bags among the sunbathers, walking as if dead on the white cliffs of Sicilian
southern coast, or writhing on the baroque Palazzo Gangi where a voiceover recalls a scene
from Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard: the decline of aristocracy, outclassed by the Sicilian
bourgeoisie after the unification of Italy, is compared to contemporary migrants coming from
the south of the world as uninvited guests. This video installation offers another revisionist
account of Italian history where the Mediterranean south becomes an ‘ambivalent site of
planetary antagonisms’ (Chambers 2012b: 92). At the beginning of Western Union the female
witness stands in front of an iron gate at the end of a passageway that opens to a blue horizon,
recalling memories of the Middle Passage intertwined with present-day migrations. The closing
sequence shows her seated on the cliffs looking at shadowed ships sailing out to sea. By
talking to the dead, past and present, she invites us to rethink contested issues of migration,
borders, and human rights. These poetical and aesthetical representations of contemporary
journeys across the Mediterranean turn to a Gothic imagery to address questions that are both
ethical and political. Mediterranean poetics comes to represent a hybrid genre: a ‘Mediterranean
Gothic’ as an expression of ‘critical melancholia’ that can help to rethink the present.
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Notes
1. As Matvejević points out: ‘Mediterranean discourse has suffered from Mediterranean discursiveness:
sun and sea, scent and color, sandy beaches and islands of fortune, girls maturing young and widows
shrouded in black, ports and ships and invitations au voyage, journeys and wrecks and tales thereof,
oranges and olives and myrtle, […] such are the commonplaces plaguing the literature, all description
and repetition […]. The Mediterranean is inseparable from its discourse’ (Matvejević 1999: 12).
2. See the discussions of Cassano (2012: xxiv–xxv) and Resta (2012).
3. Mare Nostrum (‘our sea’) was used by Romans to define the Mediterranean as the center of GrecoLatin culture and the dominions of their empire, an integral component of Roman hegemony. The
expression was later used by Italian nationalists during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in 1880s which
led to the establishment of the Italian colonial empire. Fascists used the term to reclaim their legacy
to the glorious Roman Empire and establish Italy’s power over the Mediterranean. The contemporary
usage of the term refers to ‘Operation Mare Nostrum’, a military and humanitarian operation in
order to search and rescue migrants lost at sea and arrest their smugglers. On the idea of the
Mediterranean as ‘ever less of a Mare Nostrum and ever more of a threatening Mare Aliorium (of
the others)’, see Fogu (2010: 1–23), Fogu and Re (2010: 1–9).
4. See Oxford English Dictionary, entry ‘matrix’. www.oed.com.
5. The famous film trilogy by the Wachowskis, The Matrix (1999–2003), helps to understand in what
sense the Mediterranean is both a matrix and a liquid cemetery. The myth elaborated in the three
films brings to mind that the matrix is based, literally, on a black cemetery that has lost its solid
state. The machines gain the energy required to hold together the simulation which the majority of
humans are enslaved to thanks to a black substance (a reverse amniotic liquid) with which they feed
the human bodies used as living batteries from which to subtract electricity. In other words, the
contemporary world of technology feeds upon a dead sea of human beings in chains.
6. The other main routes for immigrants are across the Atlantic to Spain’s Canary Islands, across the
Aegean Sea to Greece, or across the Adriatic Sea to Italy’s east coast. However, in 2015 massive
numbers of migrants and refugees have made their way across the Mediterranean to Europe, thus
sparking a crisis of historic proportions that has seen a shift in migration flows. Indeed, reports
show that the eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece, and from there across the Balkans,
has overtaken the central Mediterranean route, from North Africa to Italy, as the main source of
maritime arrivals, with Syrians forming the largest migrant group. See http://www.bbc.com/news/
world-europe-34131911.
7. Andrea Segre and Stefano Liberti’s poignant documentary Mare Chiuso (Closed Sea, 2012) shows
the condition of those migrants who were forcibly returned to Libya and exposed to all kinds of
abuses by local police after being intercepted at sea by the Italian navy, as a result of an agreement
signed by Berlusconi and Gaddafi in 2008. From a different perspective, it is interesting to note
that what I call, drawing on Fanon, ‘the wretched of the sea’ (boat people, refugees, asylum seekers,
economic migrants) paradoxically represent the rich of North Africa, the ones who can afford to
pay smugglers large amounts of money for their ‘ticket’ to freedom.
8. In The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon, a theorist of the decolonization movements of the
1960s and of postcolonial thought, offers an in-depth analysis from a Marxist psychoanalytic
perspective on the dehumanizing effects of colonization and the nature of the psychology of the
oppressed. His work focuses mainly on France and North Africa where he worked as a psychiatrist
during the Algerian war of independence.
9. On the comparison of migrants and refuges to zombies, see Jean and John Comaroff (2002: 779–
805); Papastergiadis (2013: 145–167) and Brioni (2013).
10. From the Latin monstrum, ‘monster’ originally meant a portent, an omen or warning. Only later
did it come to refer to something huge or abnormal, something which deviates from the natural
order and, by extension, a thing that evokes fear and wonder. The term is simultaneously linked
to the roots monere (to warn) and monstrare (to show) and denotes something that needs to be
shown or exhibited, and something that shows a behaviour, a route, or a way to follow. See Oxford
English Dictionary, entry ‘monster’. www.oed.com.
11. (Pell 1659); see Mazzeo (2013: 261–284).
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12. See Rediker 1989. The title itself suggests the tension sailors were forced to face between the harsh
conditions on board of the ships sailing through the ocean and the Deep Blue Sea. Contemporary
middle passages are no longer between east and west, across the Atlantic. Rather they happen from
south to north across the Mediterranean.
13. My translation.
14. Turner was inspired by reading Thomas Clarkson’s The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade
in which Clarkson described the infamous case of the slave ship Zong which, in 1781, saw the
captain throw 133 slaves overboard in order to collect insurance payments.
15. On the historical and cultural connections between modern day Mediterranean clandestine crossings
and memories of the Atlantic Middle Passage, see Cristina Lombardi-Diop (2008: 162–180).
16. All translations from this text are mine.
17. The theorization of the Mediterranean as a heritage of relation, plurality, exchange, and hybridization
between cultures and ethnicities is supported by Franco Cassano (2012) in his Southern Thought:
‘In a land where many others have arrived, there is no monolithic and pure “we” to defend from
the snare of the Other […] Contaminations, arrivals and departures . . . turn the many people of the
Mediterranean . . . into incurable mongrels, into the antithesis of any purity, integrity, and
fundamentalism. Our “we” is full of Others’ (xlvii). Interestingly, Cassano’s view of the Mediterranean
envisions the idea of multiple “global Souths” as an alternative to the neo-imperial design of a new
world order. The Mediterranean becomes a geo-symbolic space stretching beyond the basin’s confines
to encompass the Caribbean of Glissant, and other Souths of the world (xlix).
18. Indeed, some passages powerfully evoke the Gothic poetics of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, where the sailors, like modern boat immigrants, die little by little and then reawaken like
zombies on board of the haunted ship: ‘See them die hour by hour, day by day, of thirst and hunger,
dehydrated, on fire, frozen, incapable even of fighting over the last drops of water. After a week
they all must have been dead. But ask yourselves how forty-eight young men disappeared so
completely, leaving no documents or any other clues behind (no signs of cannibalism were found
on the boat). Perhaps a storm shook the skiff, carrying off most of its contents. But open your eyes
and see them there, grouped together by village or city of origin, friends and relatives saying goodbye if they have the strength, then slipping overboard day after day where the sharks await them,
circling under the boat’s dark shadow. The eleven who remained were the youngest, the strongest,
the most alone’ (Dal Lago 2010: 4, trans. Magistro).
19. On shipwrecks and remains of corpses entangled within fishing nets, see Bellu (2004: 33) and
Lombardi-Diop (2008: 167–168).
20. As some scholars have pointed out, this refusal to account for colonial history is connected to
issues of race and racism in Italy, which are still absent from national intellectual debate. Following
the Lacanian concept of ‘foreclusion’—that mechanism of self-defense of the ego that expels from
its symbolic (culture, signification) the traumatic signifier that threatens its supposed integrity and
coherence—race as a discourse has been foreclosed, i.e. unconsciously removed from the public
sphere (Curcio and Mellino 2012: 19). For Renate Siebert, current Italian racism results from the
almost complete repression of the Italian colonial and fascist experience, both from the public
sphere and from common structures of feeling (Curcio & Mellino 2012:: 157–169). Foreclosure of
racism and the removal of the colonial past represent what has been defined as the ‘Italian Postcolonial
Unconscious’ (see Ponzanesi 2004: 26; Guadagnino 2011). Igiaba Scego’s Roma Negata (2014) is
an attempt to recover from oblivion a neglected colonial past whose traces manifest in the monuments,
squares and streets of the Italian capital. For an extensive multi-disciplinary analysis of issues of
colonialism and post-colonialism, race, gender and migration in contemporary Italy, see LombardiDiop and Romeo (2012).
21. Italy remains the primary destination for Eritreans and Somalis, but the majority of migrants who
cross the central Mediterranean via the Italian island of Lampedusa are people from sub-Saharan
Africa and the Middle East who are brought into the mare monstrum through African land routes.
See Segre 2006; see also https://s3.amazonaws.com/unhcrsharedmedia/2015/sea-routes-to-europe/
The_Sea_Route_to_Europe.pdf.
22. Contemporary discussions on mourning and melancholia turn to Freud’s traditional distinction
between the two terms, according to which mourning is the healthy response to the loss of a loved
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23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
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person or of an ideal, while melancholia is the pathological reaction to it. In other words, mourning
is the ‘normal’ form of grieving resulting from the withdrawal of the libido from its attachments
to the lost loved object and its transference to a new one. In contrast, melancholia is pathological,
since, rather than investing the libido onto another object, the melancholic identifies with the
abandoned object by ‘incorporating’ it into the very structure of ego that becomes caught up in
paralysis and impoverishment (Freud 1995 [1919]: 584). Yet, in its interrelated medical and cultural
histories, melancholia has maintained an ambivalent meaning, as a painful condition that opens up
an avenue to deeper insight, creativity and agency. Recently, melancholia has been re-articulated
from a postcolonial perspective as a non-exclusively Western condition and conceived as ‘productive
rather than pathological, abundant rather than reactionary’ (Eng and Kazanjian 2003: ix) insofar as
the ‘melancholic’s inability to get over loss’ shows the ego’s ‘militant refusal to allow certain
objects to disappear into oblivion’ (Eng and Han 2003: 365), thus preserving an ethical hold on it.
According to Ranjana Khanna, postcolonial melancholia represents ‘the ghostly workings of the
unresolved conflict within the colonial subject’ (Khanna 2003: 30), by which she means that colonized
people are unable to mourn the loss of their culture as it is made invisible or unknown by Western
hegemony. The loss of cultural memory, or the inability to find signifiers for themselves, leads
colonized people to incorporate the objects of the colonizers. It is at this moment that the melancholic
subject develops a critical agency. Triggered by a remainder that cannot be assimilated, critical
agency shows itself in ‘the unworking of conformity and into the critique of the status quo’ (Khanna
2003: 23). Critical melancholia becomes the unconscious response to the loss of an ideal
corresponding to the right to humanity, subjecthood, and recognition.
In Greek mythology and in the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus
and his mother Jocasta. She commits the crime of burying her brother Polynices who died in the clash
with another of her brothers in his attempt to oust the king, thus contravening the edict issued by
Creon, maternal uncle and king of Thebes, forbidding the burial. Because of her illicit act, Antigone
is condemned to be buried alive in a cave, where she commits suicide by hanging herself.
This is clearly evoked in a recent short film titled The Debt of the Sea (original language: Il debito
del mare, 2010) by Adil Tanani, which addresses the desperate journey across the contemporary
‘middle passage’ and the subsequent irrecoverable losses at sea.
All translations from this text are mine.
Considered a literary genre that develops from the second half of the 18th century and through the
21st century as a reaction to the discontents of an age, the Gothic refers in its broadest sense to the
terrifying, obscure, dark side of reality that escapes the enlightened human capacity to rationalize
and understand. It is a form of writing and an art of excess, from whose crypts ghostly figures
manifest themselves to evoke another version of reality. Elsewhere I have explored the trope of the
ghost woman in British literature and culture as a repr2esentation of a new image of femininity who
‘re-appears’ in the form of a complaint, a vindication embodied in ‘the other woman’ who comes
back to life to make her voice heard, to tell her own unconventional and alternative narration (See
Sarnelli 2013b).
References
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Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Ali Farah, C. 2007. Madre Piccola. Milano: Frassinelli. Trans. G. Bellesia-Contuzzi and V.O.
Poletto. 2011. Little Mother. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—— 2011. Red. A New Map. The Poetry of Migrant Writers in Italy. In (eds) M. Lecomte & L.
Bonaffini, New York: Legas, 345.
Bachelard, G. 1983. Water and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: TX.
Bellu, G. M. 2004. I fantasmi di Portopalo. Milano: Mondadori.
Billiani, F. & Sulis, G. (eds). 2010. The Italian Gothic and Fantastic. Encounters and Rewritings of
Narrative Traditions. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.
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The Gothic Mediterranean: Haunting Migrations and Critical Melancholia
Filmography
Asmat – Names, dir. Dagmawi Yimer, prod. Archivio Memorie Migranti, 2015.
A Sud di Lampedusa, dir. Andrea Segre, prod. ZaLab, 2006.
Il debito del mare, dir. Adil Tanani, prod. Film Rouge, 2010.
Inconscio italiano, dir. Luca Guadagnino, prod. First Sun, 2011.
Mare chiuso, dir. Andrea Segre & Stafano Liberti, prod. ZaLab, 2012.
Un consiglio a Dio, dir. Sandro Dionisio, prod. Axelotil Film, 2012.
Western Union: Small Boats, dir. Isaac Julien, prod. Isaac Julien Studio 2007.
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