Confessions of a Wine-Dark Sea

Das Mittelmeer. The Sea between Worlds: Mediterranean. In recent memory synonymous with luxury travel, beauty, refinement (and a fair measure of decadence), the re-militarization of the Mediterranean basin as frontier for Fortress Europe has breathed new life into one of civilization's longest smoldering powder kegs.

This won't be a #history lesson, but to provide my two cents on the current realities of the Mediterranean, I thought it might be well-advised to take at least a cursory glance at how we got to where we are today. The starting point is not as obvious as one might think. Taking a cue from one of the 20th century's great scholars of Mediterranean history, Fernand Braudel (translated from the French original I didn't read by Siân Reynolds), it might be more prudent to begin with the geography instead. I quote:

...But how could one write any history of the sea, even over a period of only fifty years, if one stopped at one end with the Pillars of Hercules and at the other with the straits at whose entrance ancient Ilium [Troy] once stood guard? The question of boundaries is the first to be encountered; from it all others flow. To draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyse, and reconstruct it, in this case select, indeed adopt, a philosophy of history.

Whether lazing on its sun- (or blood) soaked beaches, wine-tasting in its coastal mountains, or observing the ongoing commodification of its memories, it's difficult to escape the thousands of years of human history along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Even a superficial tour of its coastline reveals the profound interconnectedness of the Mediterranean world. From Croatia to Crete, Venice to Istanbul, Jaffa to Gibraltar, Tunis, and Alexandria, the borders of successive empires have risen and fallen with the Mediterranean's tide. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Judea, Persia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, Arabia, Ottoman Turkey.. more than a few of these remain household names. Their tales are whispered from the pages of history books, celebrated in frescos and murals, or reenacted in the latest historical miniseries.

The boundaries of the Mediterranean have always been as fluid as its waters, and in our arrogance we tend to ignore that the history of what we call the West (or #Europe) has lapped all three continents along the Mediterranean rim. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all rippled out in successive currents across its waves; when the monuments of these three religions are reflected in such sparkling water it becomes difficult to ignore their common origins.

And indeed, for all its millennia of cultural development, a lazy jaunt beyond the #sea cliffs will soon take you into a sun-scorched landscape where few things have changed since the days of Odysseus. Whether Sierra Nevada, Atlas, or Accursed Mountains, a deliberate way of life (and death) persists here in the arid farmlands where seldom raindrops fall.

Lulled by the crying of gulls, the bleating of goats, and the sigh of the wind through rustling rows of olive trees, it is easy to forget that this dry garden state remains this side of paradise. The landscapes of Lorca:

Sobre el olivar hay un cielo hundido y una lluvia oscura

[Above the olive groves Hangs a hollow sky And a dark rain]

Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir's heart-wrenching images of the death of Alan Kurdi made world headlines in 2015, providing a human face to the tragedy of Europe's so-called refugee crisis. But little has changed on the humanitarian front of Europe's largest graveyard since then. Among the swirls of dissolving sunscreen and the broken bottles of soon-to-be sea glass float untold numbers of human casualties: those who tried (and did not succeed) to brave the unthinkable odds of transcontinental #migration in humble pursuit of a better life.

Denied the simple conveniences of travel documents, bank cards, ferry, train, or airplane tickets with which holiday makers from the Western World travel to enjoy the Mediterranean's salt and sand, would-be refugees from the Global South travel months overland, endure the ignominy and terror of human trafficking, family separations, untold violence, and death. The final hurdle of this odyssey to the shores of what we now narrowly define (confine) as Europe is more-often-than-not passage over the Mediterranean Sea. Those who survive this crossing face new hardships on a continent increasingly ill-disposed to recognize a universal claim to peace or justice after the legacies of poverty, climate change, (European) colonialism, and war have rendered its neighbors' homelands unlivable.

[for a thought provoking editorial on E.U. migration politics, check out this editorial by The Guardian's Kenan Malik]

As Braudel reminds us: Northern Europe, beyond the olive trees, is one of the permanent realities of Mediterranean history. But far removed from the experience of this scale of human tragedy, Europe as a whole is increasingly loathe to pay even lip service to the humanism and Enlightenment which have defined its philosophies and provided moral justification for its many conquests.

Densely-populated and resting on the laurels of successful appropriations, Europe's easiest solution seems to be to shut the door. Lord knows it's a long way to swim across the Atlantic where an even more hostile climate awaits on more recently acquired lands. So while summer tourism continues to boom along the intertidal zone of Europe's moat, a grim reality of subhuman detention camps, FRONTEX human rights violations, and watery graves is consolidating in the salty air. At its heart lies an uncomfortable truth: even in the celebrated days of a post-national European Union promising free trade and movement of peoples, we continue to place a higher value on the formalities of identification documents and invisible borders than we do on our shared history and humanity with those who look, talk, cook, pray, love, and live a little differently than we do. The ERASMUS-generation of young Europeans whose very philosophy of life is born of cosmopolitan exchange and cheap weekend getaways with Ryanair turns a blind eye to the atrocities at its door.

I don't put much stock in the recent fads of DNA-heritage testing, or the questionable methods with which they define their categories of ethnicity. But an example from my own family seems prescient for my conclusions here, despite my objections to defining historical origins within the boundaries of contemporary nation-states. According to not one but two successive rounds of scientific inquiry, my Sicilian-American father is of less than one third 'Italic' origin. Rather, like a seafood risotto of Mediterranean persuasion, his bloodline reads as a tangled web of seafaring cultures, among others: Greek, Italian, Arab, Berber, Turk, and Jew. There's even a fraction of a percent of 'Scandinavian' thrown in for good measure.

As the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote in his short essay "Die Grenze" [The Border] published on June 27, 1920:

...one Earth bulges beneath these foolish humans, one ground beneath them, and one heaven above. Borders crisscross Europe. Yet no one succeeds in dividing peoples forever—neither borders nor soldiers—if they don’t will it themselves.

Which brings me to my final observation on the current European debate about the legal/moral responsibility of saving would-be refugees (and future trespassers) from death by sea:

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?