68091
Or, Every Death a Different Death
from Vol. 38, Nos. 3 & 4
Winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers
We may know how to count, or we may well rely on the reliability of certain humanitarian and human rights organizations to count well, but that is not the same as figuring out how and whether a life counts.
—Judith Butler
Four and fifty years
I’ve hung the sky with stars.
Now I leap through—
What shattering!
—Dôgen’s death poem
In the early 1700s, a sealskin-clad Inuk man landed in his kayak near Aberdeen, Scotland, lay exhausted for three days, and died. “He could give no account of himself,” noted a traveler who recorded the story years later.
This is, of course, untrue. The kayaker spoke to the incredulous faces leaning over him. He may have been telling them about his journey across the sea as he lay on his deathbed, but no one in Aberdeen understood Inuit language. His account of how he showed up alone, in a twenty-one-foot Greenland-style sealskin kayak more than 1,000 miles from Greenland, has been a matter of speculation ever since. Did he mean to do it? Did he really cross the North Atlantic?
Some people believe it’s possible. I want to believe it’s possible. And there are reasons to. The early 1700s was the height of the Little Ice Age, when the ice sheet around Greenland grew much larger in the winter than it does today. The ice would have cut off Inuit villages from the sea for large parts of the year and prompted hunters to roam far afield in search of prey. From the edge of the ice pack, they could have seen Iceland. From the other end of Iceland, they could have paddled south and east to the Faroe Islands, stocking up on fresh water from ice floes, harpooning seals, and catching fish.
In speculating that Inuit hunters may have crossed those 270 miles of open water, we are imagining that they went beyond the reasonable or necessary limits of a hunting trip and into, instead, the realm of an extraordinary human undertaking. Extraordinary, but not impossible. To cross that reach, it would have taken those travelers roughly sixty-eight hours of paddling time, 202,000 paddle strokes, 40,000 calories, and the confidence that there was land in that direction. From the Faroe Islands to Scotland, we can count another 200 miles, 42 hours, 151,000 paddle strokes, and 30,000 calories, with a rest stop on North Rona Island.
Contemplating the possibility is something that sticks in the mind.
It’s a starting point for places the mind can go.
In 2016, two British men decided to test the idea. Olly Hicks and George Bullard were adventurers with résumés of record-setting achievements: rowing, swimming, and running across various oceans and deserts. They set out from Greenland’s waters in a twenty-six-foot double- seat Kevlar-reinforced carbon fiber expedition kayak, barbed with stick-mounted GoPros to capture their exploit for a Red Bull TV production. At night, they deployed airbags on either side of the kayak, to prevent tipping as they slid down into their claustrophobic cockpits and zipped storm hatches closed over their heads. They cooked meals with spirit stoves in their laps, joking about singeing the crown jewels. When the winds were favorable, they raised a pair of little nylon sails to assist their paddling. Hicks assured the viewers at home that the Inuit would have done the same.
Interminable gray waters slipped past the Virgin and Netscape Capital Group sponsorship logos on the kayak’s hull. The two men made it to Iceland without incident and waited, glued to the weather radar on a MacBook. The North Atlantic is notoriously changeable, and they were nervous about picking the right moment to set out for the Faroe Islands. After two days, they took their chance.
Two more days and sixty miles out, Hicks and Bullard stopped paddling, as a fishing boat hove to beside them, in water as still as a sheet of steel. Its captain shouted that a gale of forty to sixty knots had just been forecasted for the night—enough wind to kick up seas that would capsize a kayak like a twig, airbags or no. The fishermen had sighted the adventurers by chance on their way back to port. “You’d be crazy not to come with us,” said the captain.
The decision fell to Hicks, the experienced ocean-crosser of the two. “Forty to sixty knots,” he repeated, and paused to think with his eyes fixed on the middle distance. A flock of taciturn gulls pocked the water around them, knowing about the weather in the way that animals do.
In that pause, Hicks and Bullard must have thought about death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates tries to explain to his friends the proper way to confront death. “Those who pursue philosophy aright,” he tells them, “study nothing but dying and being dead… it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing.”
The Phaedo is the last of the dialogues. It takes place after Socrates has been condemned by a jury of Athenian citizens. He will soon drink the hemlock, will soon convulse and vomit and fade from life. His friends cannot bear the thought. However far along they may be in their own study of death—meletē thanatou—in this sad moment, they are reluctant to understand why he embraces his own.
Seeing their reluctance, the old gadfly tries a different tack. Maybe a bit of poetic mysticism will reach them better than reasoned questioning. He tells them that he feels akin to the swan, which sings just before it dies. “Men, because of their own fear of death, misrepresent the swans and say that they sing for sorrow, in mourning for their own death. They do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or has any other trouble.” Socrates is convinced that Apollo gave the swans “foreknowledge of the blessings of the other world.” That is why they sing most joyfully when they are about to die. Socrates’s pursuit of philosophy has given him the same foreknowledge, and that, he tells his friends, is why he goes out from life with as little sorrow as the swans.
During the pause on the calm water, amid the gulls, Hicks and Bullard may have also thought about Andrew McAuley. McAuley was an Australian adventurer who, nine years before, had attempted to kayak the 1,000 miles of open ocean between Tasmania and New Zealand. He made it safely through a patch of heavy weather and reached the Southern Alps before he disappeared. His body was never found, but rescuers recovered his kayak, along with a camera and an audio recording.
“I hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew,” McAuley reflects amid the waves. “I was quoted in an article the other day as an ‘extreme kayaker.’ If liking this stuff makes me extreme, maybe I am. I just like it. It’s, I dunno, better than liking soap operas or something.”
McAuley’s wife and friends and young son had already gathered in the small New Zealand town where he planned to land. If whatever happened hadn’t happened, just eight more hours of paddling would have brought him to their arms. Instead, the champagne stayed corked.
Criticism emerged as McAuley’s loved ones began to mourn. They found themselves obliged to protest that his undertaking hadn’t been reckless, that he hadn’t had a death wish. He’d tested his equipment in sea trials and had it inspected by experts, they insisted. He’d carried an emergency beacon which would call a rescue to his location. Why he hadn’t activated it was a mystery. Extreme fatigue, perhaps, or a “rogue wave.”
McAuley hoped he wouldn’t die, but he knew he might. It’s easy to mock the simpleness of his “I dunno… I just like it” reflection, but his willingness to look with clear eyes in death’s direction mocks our fear. It confronts us in a way that Socrates’s determined joy in the face of his death does not, because Socrates knew he was going to die. Where we admire Socrates’s bravery, we shy from the deaths of those like McAuley, who intended to live while knowing they might not. People like these expose the pretense of living, as if we’ll have the luxury to consider our own deaths when we’re ready to, sometime down the road.
The problem is that death is always relevant. This is easy to say but difficult to actually realize. At Zen retreats, I’ve encountered something called death awareness meditation. You could call it a form of meletē thanatou. The practice, at least as I understand it, is simple: sit still and imagine your death. Contemplating our own deaths may help us realize the impermanence of things. It may, perhaps, inject some urgency into our own practice. At the retreats, we’re offered no particular instruction as to how vividly or by what means we should envision the manner of our passing. I err on the side of vivid and various.
I sit cross-legged on my cushion and imagine my body decomposing on the forest floor. I imagine my body withering beneath the sun. I imagine my body burning until it’s a charred skeleton.
It’s a peculiar experience. I’m conscious that I’m projecting onto the screen of my imagination, inventing what I see. At the same time, seeing my ruined body provokes something below the level of my conscious mind. Stillness spreads out of some core place, like dye through my being, and the fact that I am weeping is a part of that stillness. The weeping is not bereft of joy.
I practiced the death awareness meditation off and on for a few years. It took me a long time to realize that I was envisioning my body from a third-person perspective. When I imagined burning to death, my mind did little more than take the photo of Thích Qu ng Đ c’s 1963 self-immolation at a Saigon intersection and substitute me, sitting in the woods behind my house in West Virginia. I looked at the flames billowing from my own form. I could feel their heat but only on my front, like a campfire.
There was something else that took me even longer to notice, something that I realized only recently: I never envisioned myself drowning.
I look at pictures of the Inuk kayaker’s gear, which is preserved at Marichal College, University of Aberdeen: paddle, spear, bird-spear, throwing stick, harpoon. I try to imagine days and weeks alone on the gray water. Eating raw fish. Resting slumped forward at the waist.
Rousing awake. Resuming the endless work of paddling. Sighting land with bleary eyes.
My imagination is only so capable.
I read more and find out that during that era—the late 17th and early 18th centuries—there were a lot of sightings of elusive figures in the ocean near the north of Scotland. Orkney islanders ascribed them to legends of so-called Finfolk, otherworldly beings who could row from Orkney to Norway in seven strokes and lived under the water in a place called Finfolkaheem. Or perhaps they were selkies, humans who possessed the ability to turn into seals by donning a sealskin coat. Or perhaps, of course, they were Inuit kayakers. The Inuit, too, would have recognized the power of shapeshifting. Their stories are full of shamans turning into white bears and musk oxen.
Where is this taking me?
A central element of Zen practice is to observe what the mind does.
Eventually, you might clearly perceive the nature of the mind itself.
A central element of the essay is to see what draws your attention and, from there, where your attention bends. Eventually, you might understand why.
My thoughts keep bending southward from Orkney and Aberdeen to the other end of Britain, the Strait of Dover, twenty-one miles of sea that separate Britain from Europe.
A sprint kayaker traversed the Strait in two hours and thirty minutes.
A young woman campaigning against pollution paddle boarded across it.
Two brothers pedaled across in a paddleboat for a leukemia benefit.
A ten-year-old waterskied from Britain to France and back without falling.
Several men from Scarborough crossed in scuba gear using handheld propulsion devices.
A TV personality crossed in an old Nissan pickup outfitted with flotation barrels.
A forty-nine-year-old builder swam the Strait in eleven-and-a-half hours to raise money for Blood Cancer UK.
Dover Sea Safaris, among other companies, will support “un- orthodox crossings” by way of the above methods or anything else you can dream up.
When crossing the Strait under human power, it’s illegal to enter the French shipping lane. Dover Sea Safari and their competitors will ferry you across the shipping lane in a support boat and show you where you can make up the distance you lost so that it’s exactly as if you crossed the entire Strait.
At night in Dover, the lights of Calais look close by. At night in Calais, the lights of Dover look close by.
Two Iranian men crossed at night in a cheap eleven-foot inflatable touring kayak they’d bought from the French sporting-goods retailer Decathlon.
A Sudanese man tried to row across in a toy dinghy using shovels for oars, but one of the shovels punctured the dinghy. He didn’t know how to swim.
A man from Iran, who had been wandering Europe for fifteen years, tried to swim across with an improvised flotation device made of netting and plastic bottles. His body was found in Belgium.
A young Syrian man, who wanted to join his uncle in Bradford, donned a wetsuit and tried to swim across. His body was found in the Netherlands.
A friend swam with him in an identical wetsuit. It was found on a beach in Norway with only the bones of his lower legs remaining inside.
Three men from Eritrea tried to cross in a three-seat inflatable kayak from Decathlon and were spotted in the middle of the Strait by a TV presenter for “Good Morning Britain.” “No matter what you think,” the presenter commented into his microphone as the men bobbed in the distance, “those are three men in an unsuitable vehicle.”
Three more migrants attempted to cross in an inflatable two-seat canoe-kayak from Decathlon. As it started to deflate, they were picked up by a forty-nine-year-old builder on his way back from a swim.
Last November 11th, five more migrants tried to cross the Strait in inflatable kayaks. Three went missing; their kayaks were found adrift off the beach of Sangatte.
Last November 16th, Decathlon stopped sales of kayaks at its Dunkirk and Calais locations. That included 280€ inflatable recreational models as well as 1,000€-and-up rotomolded models referred to on their website as “ocean kayaks.”
In a press release, Decathlon stated that the kayaks were “not being used for their original sporting purpose.” Instead, they “could be used to cross the Channel.”
An unorthodox crossing from Dover looks to Calais and sees its reflection.
It calls its reflection unsuitable. It calls its reflection unsporting.
Socrates was tried before a 501-man jury on charges of corrupting the youth and making a mockery of the state gods. The guilty sentence was by no means definitive: only 280 of the 501 voted to convict. Once convicted, he was invited to suggest his own punishment. He could have said exile—indeed, he was expected to, and he knew it. It was a conscious provocation to propose instead that the jury reward him with free meals at the public dining hall in the center of the city.
They knew then that he was making a mockery of them, just as he’d made a mockery of the powerful men whom he’d badgered with his questions and found not so wise as they thought they were. Just as he’d made a mockery, indeed, of the state gods.
Socrates was forced to retract his proposed punishment in favor of a serious one, and he duly offered to pay a modest fine. But the damage had been done. In the sentencing phase of the trial, 360 of the farmers and tradesmen on the jury voted not to levy the fine but to put him to death. That is, eighty men who’d believed Socrates to be innocent, having then been made a mockery of, voted for him to die.
I read article after article about people who attempted to cross the Dover Strait to the UK. Quite often the timestamp of the article followed soon on the heels of articles about evictions of migrant camps in France, asylum denials, housing assistance being cut off, and NGOs prevented from delivering aid. The drowning victims mostly remained nameless. Sometimes, their country of origin was mentioned. Infrequently, a friend or family member was quoted. Hardly ever was there any attempt to depict their character or motivations. Never was it possible, reading these articles, to imagine what it had been like for any one of these people to wade into water that they knew full well they might soon be breathing.
One of the few whose name was reported was the young man whose lower leg bones were found in his wetsuit on a Norwegian beach, Shadi Omar Kataf. His family home in Damascus was destroyed in the Syrian civil war, and his father asked him to leave the country so he could find a job. He worked for a couple of years in a print shop in Benghazi, Libya, and learned to dive in his free time. There’s a picture on his Facebook page of him underwater, smiling around his scuba regulator. A friend posted a joking comment about his love for his new hobby: “Truly, Shadi, you gave up living here on land with the rest of us. Come back.”
Shadi replied, “There is no coming back. I’ve made my decision. I want to live here in the sea. I’m waiting for you.”
He eventually left Benghazi for Europe. In Calais, Shadi saw Britain in the distance and believed he could swim to it. His friend Mouaz Al Balkhi said that the UK had good laws for refugees. Mouaz’s uncle had hidden on a truck going through the Channel Tunnel. He’d gotten asylum and now lived with his wife and two daughters in a redbrick house in Bradford. It was harder to hide on the trucks now, but Mouaz, like Shadi, saw Britain and believed he could swim there, across the sea.
In Zen prostrations, we lay our foreheads on the floor, extend our hands forward, palms up, and lift them a little. I envision that I’m offering everything up, whatever there is to offer. It’s more about the gesture than what those things are. All the frass of living, allowing it all to float upward as my body sinks toward the earth.
Where does your attention bend, and where does it break?
I moved to Europe as the seas around it were filling with bodies. “Refugee crisis,” the press called it, an ambiguous term that seemed to blame the very people who were living through the emergency. “Border crisis” seemed more apt. People who had lost everything or who feared for their lives at home could have traveled safely and requested asylum. Instead, the European political machinery of border enforcement shunted most of them toward dangerous routes like sea crossings. As I settled into Athens, 5,000 miles from my home in West Virginia, thousands were dying trying to cross stretches of water the width of a shipping lane.
In 2015, the narrow straits of the Aegean mushroomed with smuggling operations.
Turkey to Lesvos: six miles.
Turkey to Chios: four-and-a-half miles.
Turkey to Kos: three-and-a-half miles.
Turkey to Samos: two miles.
These were places where you could paddle a sea kayak to Turkey in a couple of hours, enjoy a lunch of köfte and lahmajoun, wash it down with a couple of Efes beers, and paddle back to Greece in time for sunset, a souvlaki, and a couple of Mythos beers.
Or, without the proper stamps, you could cross at night, in the cheapest variety of inflatable dinghy that could mount an outboard motor, for a fee in the neighborhood of $1,500, which you paid to a person who would not accompany the boat, did not anticipate getting it back, and had packed it with more people than it could safely hold.
In 2015, 856,723 people arrived in Greece by sea.
799 died or went missing in the attempt.
One of these 799 was a three-year-old boy named Alan Shenu, known in the press as Alan Kurdi. His body was washed ashore near a resort outside Bodrum, Turkey. As first responders arrived at the scene, a photographer took a picture that spread around the world and became the emotional emblem of the slow violence unfolding at Europe’s borders. #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik, “humanity washed ashore,” became the top trending hashtag on Twitter. In the photo, Alan’s prone form is dressed in a red T-shirt, blue shorts, and gum-sole sneakers. The limpness of his arms lying palms-up at his sides communicates the profound unconsciousness of a worn-out toddler. He could be asleep but for his forehead embedded in the sand, the foamy edge of the sea lapping against it.
Alan’s mother Rehana, his older brother Galib, and nine other people also drowned that day. His father Abdullah survived. Abdullah later described clinging to the overturned boat, searching in desperation for his wife and sons. He’d been a barber in Damascus, but the war had made it impossible to stay. After trying to live in Aleppo, then Kobani, then Istanbul, the family decided to join Abdullah’s sister in Vancouver, Canada. First stop: Greece. Abdullah paid a smuggler 4,000€ for two spots on the boat. The children traveled for free.
Most people did not drown. They registered on the islands and took subsidized ferries to Athens, where they could continue straightaway to their final destinations by way of the Balkan route. Or they could stay awhile, request asylum in Greece, rent an apartment or live in one of the open refugee camps tucked into out-of-the-way corners of the city.
There was hope during the surge of 2015. A fisherman and a grandmother from a small village on the coast of Lesvos were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their efforts to save migrants’ lives. An upswell of sympathy for asylum seekers generated optimism that Europe would rise to the occasion. “We can do this!” declared Angela Merkel. Germany accepted an unprecedented number of asylum applications. But at the same time, the EU kept trying to deter migrants from coming, which meant migrants kept trying to make their way across the sea.
In 2016, 441 people died or went missing trying to cross the Aegean.
The Greek Coast Guard began speeding by migrant boats to toss them with their wake.
59 dead and missing in 2017.
The Coast Guard cut fuel lines and bashed engines with steel poles. 174 dead and missing in 2018.
The Coast Guard towed migrants back toward Turkey and left them drifting.
71 dead and missing in 2019.
The Greek government made it illegal to assist migrants as they arrived.
102 dead and missing in 2020.
Aid workers were arrested and charged.
53 dead and missing in 2021.
Instead of rising to the occasion, Europe sank to grimmer and grimmer methods of deterrence.
“What spot on earth is not full of the story of our sorrow?“ Aeneas asks Achates in the Aeneid. The two friends are wandering, shipwrecked, on a foreign coast. They are refugees from a brutal war far to the east and have fled across the Aegean, where a storm descended from the heavens and drowned most of their companions. It washes Aeneas and Achates ashore near Carthage, a burgeoning city founded a generation before by refugees from a different part of the eastern Mediterranean. On its outskirts Aeneas and Achates come upon a temple covered in murals which Aeneas realizes, to his shock, depicts the very battles they’d lived through back home in Troy. Gazing at the murals of their ruined home, he offers this lament, “There are tears at the heart of things.”
It sparked a glimmer of recognition to read this line from Virgil’s ancient text. Tears at the heart of things: that’s what it felt like on the occasions I had realized I was weeping while meditating on my own death. What of it, though? Did it help anything? In Athens, I was having a very different sort of death-awareness meditation forced on me: the experience of living near a sea that kept swallowing the lives of people who did not want to have to cross it. When I contemplated my own death, it was as a fait accompli—the fact of it was before me, just as it had been for the condemned Socrates. The point of the meditation was to depart the space of “it will happen someday” and enter the space of “it is happening now.” Then, to face up to it. To arrive, perhaps, at a place of graceful acceptance. But there is death, and there is death. Contemplating one’s own inevitable end did not seem to offer any tools for bearing witness to the deaths of others, deaths that were anything but foreordained. It would have been an additional cruelty to approach these losses simply as manifestations of the tears at the heart of things, without reflecting on what had steered the people to the sea in the first place. I realized that in this sense, living in proximity to a deadly border crisis was not so much a death awareness meditation, but instead a contemplation of life and its management, of life disallowed.
Hannah Arendt uses two words from Aristotle to describe life. Bios is a life full of action, a life that tells a story. We can connect it to its cognate “biography.” The other word is zoē, cognate with “zoo:” the basic animal fact of living. Arendt asserts that state power can strip bios from people and reduce their lives to “mere” zoē, bereft of self-determination or political power. Her focus was the German concentration camps, which revealed that “the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human… a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.” This was the same thing I saw in the EU’s deadly border regime.
Death, of course, was not the declared objective of the border apparatus. It might be seen as a regrettable outcome, but the political refusal to provide routes of safe passage revealed that death was, in the eyes of Europe, acceptable. The well-known Greek journalist Aris Portosalte gave voice to what most people wouldn’t say—or even let themselves think—when he insisted, “If your sensibilities tell you that no one should drown, the conversation is over… Let’s not pretend.”
There was less and less pretense.
There were more and more pushbacks.
9,741 people were turned back in the middle of the sea in 2020.
15,803 in 2021.
It became less and less likely to make it from the Turkish shore to the Greek shore.
It became more and more likely to die in the attempt.
And for those who did make it to Greek soil, the abductions began.
On the afternoon of January 9th, 2022, twenty-five people from Afghanistan landed on Lesvos, including fourteen children and three babies in carriers. Photos they sent via WhatsApp to an activist in Norway show them huddled in an olive grove as the weak winter light dimmed. They stayed in the grove all night, using trash bags to try to stay warm. They exchanged messages with the activist in hopes of finding an organization on the island who would help them.
As dawn broke, they walked along a road toward the nearest town. On its outskirts, four armed men in balaclavas stopped them. A few members of the group tried to run. The masked men fired four warning shots to force them to return. They strip-searched the adults and confiscated their phones and money.
After an hour an unmarked, windowless van arrived. It took the group to a small gray boat, which ferried them out to a large gray boat, where they were placed on deck under a big white tarp. They stayed under the tarp for eight hours as the boat moved. By the time it stopped the sky was dark, and the wind had picked up. The twenty-five people were forced down a ladder into an inflatable LALIZAS-brand life raft. One of the children was pushed, and her foot was broken landing in the raft.
An hour later, the Turkish Coast Guard reported that it had rescued twenty-five people, including fourteen children and three babies, adrift in a LALIZAS-brand life raft near Seferihisar, 200 kilometers south of Lesvos. One of the children had a broken foot.
The winds near Lesvos had blown from the east that day and would have pushed the raft back into Greek waters. The winds near Seferihisar were blowing toward Turkey.
How many times has this happened?
201 life rafts in 2021.
Twenty to thirty people per raft.
Forty-seven life rafts in the first two months of 2022.
1,500€ in EU-apportioned funds per LALIZAS-brand raft.
LALIZAS is a Greek company founded by a former Olympic sailing champion. Its rafts are well made of a far higher quality than most of the smugglers’ inflatable boats coming from Turkey. Migrants who survive the sea journey only to be abducted and returned to the sea in a LALIZAS raft are victims of a flagrant act of state crime, but they are, at least, relatively unlikely to die in that raft. That, however, is not the experience of all the migrants who are abducted on the Greek islands.
On September 16th, 2021, Didier Martial Kouamou, Sidy Keita, and a man using the pseudonym Ibrahim landed on Samos with a group of thirty-three others. Tweny-eight of them were quickly apprehended and left out at sea in a LALIZAS raft. Four made it to the island’s refugee camp. Another was caught later and left at sea, by herself, in a cheap inflatable raft.
That left Kouamou, Keita, and Ibrahim, who spent the night in the forest on Samos before being stopped the next day. The three men were put on a Rafnar speedboat, taken half an hour out to sea, and pushed into the water.
“I resisted,” Ibrahim told investigators later. “They beat me properly before throwing me into the water.”
Ibrahim had been in the Cameroonian Navy. He was a strong swimmer. With the help of a favorable current, he made it to a remote beach on Turkey’s Dilek Peninsula.
Keita’s body washed up soon after. Ibrahim planted a stick next to the body and began to walk.
He walked for a night and a day through the wild land at the feet of Mount Mycale. Past patches of soil churned up by wild boars. Through the territory of a pack of golden jackals. Beneath oleaster-leafed pears and elm-leaved sumacs and the nearly full moon. Ibrahim walked, quite possibly, in front of the cool eyes and tufted ears of a secretive caracal cat, which beheld him and knew his sadness, in the way that animals know things, but it didn’t move.
Turkish police eventually picked up Ibrahim from the wilderness.
Kouamou’s body washed up the next day.
Ibrahim identified both bodies in a morgue in Izmir.
Kouamou’s brother Séverin, who lives in Paris, had enough money to send the body back to Cameroon.
Keita’s family in Côte d’Ivoire could not afford to do the same. Keita was buried in a cemetery near Izmir.
The wooden marker on his grave says simply “68091.”
Philosophers following Arendt have emphasized the power dynamic implied by the distinction between zoē and bios. A life reduced to zoē is totally vulnerable to a sovereign power, to its ability to make live and let die. Giorgio Agamben argues that certain lives are incorporated into the political body through their bios, but those that exist in the eyes of the state as “bare lives”—nothing more than living bodies—can be excluded from the realm of the law. Achille Mbembe, meanwhile, introduces the term “necropolitics” to describe the mechanisms that cheapen the lives of broad groups of people, habituate them to loss, and ultimately reduce them to “the status of the living dead.” For Mbembe, this political power, often driven by racism, determines how certain people live and certain people die. Necropolitics, he writes, creates suspended around us the presence of “deathworlds.”
The power to cheapen lives and to push them toward death doesn’t mean that the holders of power remain unmoved. Greece and Europe have been moved, in a way, but not to compassion—at least, not for years now. There is a way in which the evolving response to the migrants resembles the reaction of Socrates’s jurors when they perceived they were being made a mockery of, and turned on him. The deaths at sea made a mockery of the EU’s founding principles of human dignity, the right to life, and adherence to international law. So, Europe turned on the refugees, with brazen tactics, and previously unimaginable cruelty. Or, to be more precise: the leaders in Brussels endorsed the brazen cruelty of the Greek authorities by sitting on their hands, which amounted to the same thing.
This is where I found myself, sitting in Athens, turning to philosophy to try to wrap my head around the reports of drownings appearing constantly in my Twitter feed. It was a strange sort of grief to confront, and these philosophers following in Arendt’s footsteps offered a strange way to confront it. Deathworlds. Living dead. Lives reduced to bodies. People stripped of the ability to form a biography. Bitterness, fragility, powerlessness.
My attention wallowed here.
There was plenty of grim truth in these concepts, but they also denied something of the people who’d died in the attempt to write a new chapter for themselves. It reminded me of reading all those news articles which lacked any details about the people whose deaths they reported. Each one of those people who tried to come across the sea and didn’t make it, no matter how little political power they had, was fully living until the moment they drowned. Referring to them as the living dead or to their lives as “mere” and “bare” only stripped something further from them.
In Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer, he imagines a father gazing at his sleeping child on a Turkish beach, preparing to board a dinghy:
I look at your profile
in the glow of this three-quarter moon,
my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy,
closed in guileless sleep.
In those eyelashes I see another aspect of Aristotle’s conception of life, something the modern philosophers have left out in their interpretation of zoē as “bare” life. Their emphasis on state power leaves little room to consider Aristotle’s more nuanced depiction of zoē. In his book Politics, he wrote the following:
But men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple living [zoē], because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself [kata to zēn auto monon]… clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold onto life [zoē] as if it were a kind of serenity [euemeria, a beautiful day] and a natural sweetness.
The father waiting on the beach with his sleeping child prays the sea will be merciful, even while knowing that it is vast and indifferent.
As he waits for the boat to inflate, the reasons that have brought him here seem far away.
How can we regard him? As we follow his gaze, it’s impossible to think of him as Europe seems to, as simply one body among so many thousands.
He’s been through much suffering. This is not where he wants to be. What is he thinking of? He’s thinking of his son’s eyelashes.
In that moment, as in so many others that you could hold up to the glow of the moon, life in the mere fact of itself is a kind of serenity. A natural sweetness.
Eyelashes like calligraphy.
On the steel-gray North Atlantic, after quite a long pause, Olly Hicks’s gaze finally returned to the captain of the fishing boat. “Yeah. We’ll come with you,” he shouted up. He and George Bullard climbed aboard and helped the fishermen hoist the kayak with a davit crane as the last of the day’s catch was reeled in.
It blew hard that night. As the wind buffeted the windows back in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland, Hicks and Bullard knew how close they’d come to dying. It had been dumb luck to be sighted by one of the few fishing boats in those waters.
A few weeks and 450 paddling miles later, the Kevlar-reinforced bow of their kayak ground into the sand of a Scottish beach. They’d completed the Greenland to Scotland Challenge. Soon, both of their personal websites would boast of their voyage as “a world first” even though the possibility of that not being true is what inspired them to make the attempt.
The Inuk man, who came about as close to living as Hicks and Bullard came to dying. What might he have been thinking, as he lay in Aberdeen? If he understood that he was going to die, perhaps he wondered where these strangers would bury him. I also wonder where he was buried. It’s one of the few things that could actually be known about him, and yet I don’t think anyone knows.
The way I originally conceived of the arc of my attention, it started with this one man who crossed the sea and died, and from him, it bent southward and forward in time. I realize now that it went the other way before coming back. The Inuk kayaker only drew my attention so strongly in the first place because I couldn’t figure out how to make sense of the ongoing count of deaths in the Aegean. Turning this one man’s story over in my mind was a way to rest in not knowing what to think about a death at sea. Perhaps it was also a comfort to hold onto the possibility that he embarked on his journey out of curiosity, or adventurousness, rather than desperation.
It’s hard to rest in not knowing when there is always something further to know. Like this: it was a fad in the 17th century for whalers to abduct Inuit people. They brought them back to Europe as curiosities, along with their kayaks and hunting gear. This happened so often that the practice was outlawed in the Netherlands. In England, a portrait of a man and a woman who were kidnapped from Baffin Island hung for many years in one of the royal palaces. A French travelogue from 1647 describes nine Inuit captives in Denmark:
Poor Eskimo! They often looked northwards, and once tried to escape in their skiffs, but a storm cast them ashore… Two of them again tried to escape in their kayaks; one was caught, the other, who got away, was drowned at sea... [Another] died of grief after the failure of his third attempt to return to Greenland in his kayak. He was thirty or forty miles out to sea before he was overtaken. [Two others] were pursued as far as the entrance of the Sound, but could not be overtaken…
Maybe the Inuk man who died in Scotland was an escaped prisoner trying to make his way home from Europe. Or perhaps he made his escape from a homebound whaler before arriving in Europe at all, gathering his equipment at night as the sailor on watch looked the other way, slipping into the water and paddling away with a glance at the North Star. I wanted the man who died in Aberdeen to have arrived on that shore for reasons that didn’t include cruelty, to believe it was possible that there was someone in that era, too, who would leave home and paddle 1,000 miles away because, I dunno, he just liked it. Maybe it doesn’t matter if he was paddling from Greenland or if he was trying to return there, but one of those deaths is different from the other.
Those last two Inuit captives mentioned in the 17th-century travelogue, the ones who were pursued but could not be overtaken—I imagine them reaching the limits of the harbor and shapeshifting in their sealskins.
They are selkies piercing the waves.
They’ve given up living on land with the rest of us.
They live there in the sea.
In my imagination, they wait there for me.
Gabriel Rogers is a woodworker and essayist from West Virginia. He earned his MFA in nonfiction writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College. His essays have appeared in Still, The Waking, Kestrel, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and Full Stop. He lives in Athens, Greece.