“Resonance is Contact Ripple”: Media and Contemporary Poems of Mediterranean Migration
This chapter focuses on three volumes of poetry published in English between 2014 and 2016 that take up the crisis of migration in the Mediterranean in the second decade of the twenty-first century: They Who Saw the Deep, by Geraldine Monk; Drift, by Caroline Bergvall; and the black maria, by Aracelis Girmay. All three focus their attention on the dead who never completed the crossing, and grapple with the question of how information about those lost in the seemingly unknowable ocean can be conveyed to those ashore. They foreground the counter-intuitive quality of knowledge whose object has been altered both by political violence and by immersion in the sea. The materiality of the sea inflects these representations of migration as much as do state policies and requires us to think differently about any knowledge we hold about such journeys. It also asks us to think about our own positionality with regard to that knowledge. Monk and Bergvall write from the position of white, settled Europeans; not migrants themselves, they seek to comprehend what is to them a profoundly “other reality,” how it intersects with their own lives, and how it might affect them. In contrast, Girmay, while born in the United States, counts herself as part of the same diasporic movement as the Eritreans who perished in the Mediterranean in 2013. The three volumes explore the ways in which maritime media shape information about migration, but also the way attention to the experience of migration might inflect our understanding of that media and its history.
