Following last Sunday’s piece on the Lampedusa tragedy I received a long e-mail from an old University friend whom I shall call ‘Frank’. Frank is a kind and thoughtful person who runs his own business and describes himself as a family man. Words like ‘racist’, ‘xenophobic’, and such are the last I’d associate with him.
He told me he was torn on the issue of African immigration, and that his two-mindedness troubled him no end. That’s because he ‘felt sorry’ for the thousands of people looking for a better life, to the extent that he wouldn’t ‘hesitate for a second to help them on a one-to-one basis’. Frank is also a practising Catholic and very much inclined to heed the Church’s teachings generally, and on this one specifically.
The thorny part was that he “saw a threat to European civilisation as we know it”. He meant that first in the cultural sense, as “a threat to our value system based on the respect for life, for private property, and for individual freedoms as upheld by the law across the continent”.
There was a darker side. As Frank sees it, Europe is and should remain essentially a white continent. He told me he couldn’t bring himself to “just accept” that in a few decades it may end up anything but.
The last lines of his e-mail were especially touching. He half-apologised, to himself more than anything, for his thoughts: “Am I being paranoid to have the above thoughts in my mind? ...I am seeking answers because everyone has a stake in the future, not least fathers like me”.
I know my answers – that desirable value systems are born of freedom rather than restrictions, that a black Europe would be as fine as any other, and so on – wouldn’t entirely put Frank’s mind at rest. So much so that I won’t even try. Rather, the reasons why I bring his e-mail to this column are twofold.
First, because of the intellectual honesty of both sender and contents. Second, and more importantly, because I think it gets at the heart of the matter. Which is that simplistic talk of racism and xenophobia is just that. The truth is much more complex, provided one gets past the official rhetoric and Facebook silliness and down to the ground level of everyday lived experience.
Someone recently sent me a link to Soltanto il Mare (Nothing but the Sea), a documentary film shot on location in Lampedusa in 2010-2011. The protagonist and co-director is Dagmawi Yimer, an Ethiopian who himself arrived on the island in a boat in 2006.
Yimer goes around Lampedusa and talks to its people. What emerges is that attitudes towards migration, and especially towards Africans, are mixed and complex. Most of his informants appear broadly sympathetic. Many of them have themselves spent long periods of their lives working elsewhere.
One sequence shows lampedusani making merry at the festa of their patron, the Madonna of Porto Salvo. The priest who leads the prayers and heads the procession is black. We also meet a part-time fisherman who made an amateur film about a man who, having lost his son, adopts an asylum seeker as his own. And so on.
The point is that while Lampedusa makes the news and figures in the popular imagination as a frontier to fortress Europe, its inhabitants experience a considerably richer reality. The island functions as a border but also as many other things.
I’ve a colleague who researches the lives of West African migrants in Malta. He tells me that what strikes him is the variety of treatment they encounter here.
Take work. Some employers are good and pay roughly the same rates as they would Maltese workers. They insist on the proper paperwork and make the normal vacation and sick leave allowances. With a bit of overtime thrown in an African worker can under those conditions make €1,200 to €1,400 a month.
There are employers who pay normal rates but do so irregularly, others who drag their feet to pay miserable rates, and a not-insignificant bunch of slave-labour aficionados who pay nothing at all and hire and fire at will. My colleague’s impression is that casual work in agriculture (where migrant labour is sorely needed) is particularly haphazard.
It is not quite right to say that Maltese people are racist and xenophobic and leave it at that
Building is a sector in which African migrant labour is especially conspicuous. It’s a line that brings together teamwork and its fun-loving cousins, banter and camaraderie. I would be surprised if Africans were being completely denied the second bit. I actually know one master-builder (‘imgħallem’) who was so moved by his labourers’ experiences that he ended up doing voluntary work with asylum seekers.
That’s the work bit. There are now African bars, restaurants, hairdressing salons, and grocery shops in Malta. Some Maltese have African friends. A number of people have married Africans (not all of whom are asylum seekers, of course) and have young families. There are black children in both state and private schools.
My point is that it is not quite right to say that Maltese people are racist and xenophobic and leave it at that. We can be and often are. But there is also another, infinitely brighter, side. Just like the lampedusani, many of us are coming to terms with the new configurations of race and identity.
The unfortunate part is that the theatre and rhetoric of frontiers and borders, and the related fixation with numbers and invasion, often make it hard for us to see the whole picture. That may have to do with being a small island, in the historical as well as the geographical senses. It probably has a lot to do with the choices made by politicians and the media, among others.
Which is my reading of Frank’s e-mail really. It can be hard intellectually and emotionally to commute between actual lived encounters with Africans in Malta and the twin spectacle of invasion and threats to civilisation.
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