In one of his more unsettling soliloquys, Macbeth marvels at his growing immunity to fear. A ‘cry of women’ offstage tells him that something terrible has happened. Even as he is told that his wife has died, he is unmoved and impassive.
I haven’t stabbed my Prime Minister. Nor have I contracted hitmen to murder my colleagues and their families. Still, I can perfectly understand Macbeth’s lack of feeling. That’s because one of the consequences of growing older in a life of relative privilege is that more and more things become bearable.
Thing is, the transformation is incomplete even for Macbeth. His words are that he has “almost forgot the taste of fears”. The emphasis – and it is both redemptive and damning – is on the word “almost”.
Among the shrinking list of things I still find unbearable is the thwarting of young people’s dreams, aspirations and life projects by cruel circumstance and injustice. Which is why the news of the death of a goalie matters.
Fatim Jawara was 19. She was the goalkeeper of the Gambia’s national women’s football team.
On one occasion she saved a penalty kick in a friendly match between her team and the Glasgow Girls from Scotland. Photographs show a smiling teenager wearing the national colours.
Last September, Fatim left the Gambia and crossed the Sahara to Libya. Some weeks later she boarded a boat to Europe. That boat capsised and Fatim died. She was among the 3,300 migrants who are thought to have drowned in the Mediterranean this year alone.
There is something doubly disturbing about that sequence of words. Somewhere out at sea, Fatim lost her life. Somewhere between the last two sentences, she lost her name. She became a ‘migrant’, one of a number who drowned. If having had a name is a privilege, it is one that’s denied to those who died with her. The only reason why Fatim has it is that she played international football.
We live in a time where the media record everything. We know what Donald Trump said in a private conversation in 2005. It took a few seconds for a plane to crash at Luqa two weeks ago, and the event was captured on camera. And yet, on something as big and predictable as regular mass drownings in one of the busiest bits of sea anywhere, the media suffer a serious crisis of representation.
In the popular imagination, Africans are black and faceless. Individuals like Fatim Jawara are the exception
The matter enjoys the attention of some of the world’s most resourceful and competent journalists. They risk their lives putting their good intentions into practice. Even so, they are only occasionally able to move us.
Part of the problem is linguistic. The big news channels struggle to find a language that does not routinely transform Fatim Jawara into one of thousands of migrants. In doing so, they show a remarkable degree of intellectual honesty.
The BBC, for example, publishes a disclaimer every time it uses the word ‘migrant’. It tells us that the usage refers “to all people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status, as well as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to rule are economic migrants”.
For their part, Al Jazeera will simply not use the m-word. They see it as vague and crude, a “blunt pejorative” that “dehumanises and distances”. The deaths of numbered migrants are more acceptable than those of named people: “drowning disasters drop further and further down news bulletins”. Besides, there often are political reasons why terms like ‘refugees’ are avoided.
Al Jazeera have a point. This really seems to be a case of the whole being smaller than the sum of the parts, just when we need that whole to be as big and as visible as possible. We also need it to be shocking – not because shocking is entertaining and sells, but rather as a means to break the political lethargy.
It was not so long ago that a news bulletin by Malta’s national broadcaster made associations between an invasion by jellyfish and the arrival of boatloads of migrants from African nations.
That kind of pig-headed reporting is hopefully gone forever.
Problem is, what has taken its place is equally dismissive. It routinely deals with the deaths of hundreds of people as little more than bulletin padding.
It doesn’t help that funerals are regularly held where the coffins are numbered and contain nameless bodies. Twenty-four people were seen off at just such an event in Malta in April 2015. No attempt was made to establish the identity of the dead. That’s also because in the popular – and political, apparently – imagination, Africans are black and faceless (“wiċċ wieħed”). Individuals like Fatim Jawara are the exception.
It’s the exact opposite of what happens with the various tombs of the unknown soldier. In that case, the dead are nameless precisely to make the point that they could be one of us, us being the nation. With migrants, the nameless drowned and buried have the opposite effect: they are effectively disowned.
It is revealing to watch journalists and news channels struggle to find the right words, and the living to mourn the dead. It’s a slap in the face of facile renditions of globalisation, mobility and possibility. In a profoundly fractured world, names, terminology and feelings find it almost impossible to travel.
If there is hope, it lies in the ‘almost’.
mafalzon@hotmail.com