EXODUS
What does the physicist Albert Einstein have in common with singer Rita Ora, writer Elie Wiesel, activist rapper MIA (Mathangi Arulpagasam), and basketball star Luol Deng? Apart from being famous, they’re also refugees who were forced to leave the countries where they were born because of war, violence, and persecution. In every generation there are people like them who beat the odds to make a success of their lives. Tragically the forces that displaced them are alive and well in the twenty first century on a dangerous scale. The UN High Commission for Refugees estimates that globally more than 68 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes including 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under eighteen. What the numbers don’t reveal is that most of these people led ordinary lives that were probably no different to yours or mine. It’s easy to overlook this fact when the media portrays refugees as freeloaders who take without giving anything back in return. There are some people who find that point of view offensive and devoid of humanity, while for others it is an absolute truth.
The gulf between both positions is as wide as the oceans on which refugees make their escape from war and grinding poverty. Every journey is dangerous and thousands have died in the crossings. Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, is a transit point for African, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants entering Europe and for a quarter of a century Doctor Pietro Bartolo has been a witness to their suffering. Not only has he saved lives and performed autopsies, but he has also treated badly injured migrants and buried those who didn’t survive the journey to what should have been a new beginning. Lampedusa, Gateway to Europe is a powerful, emotionally charged testimony to Bartolo’s compassion in the face of overwhelming human need.
It starts with Bartolo’s own brush with death at the age of sixteen in the freezing waters of the Mediterranean. As a fisherman’s son he knows the sea is changeable and can be a “cruel and pitiless monster” that spits out “living or dead bodies at will.” When his dinghy overturns, he forces himself to stay calm knowing that his father, whose boat isn’t far away, is his only hope of rescue. His desperate cries for help are lost in the ocean’s vastness yet just as he is losing hope his father miraculously spots him flailing in the darkness. It’s a defining moment that explains Bartoli’s empathy with migrants, while establishing the book’s narrative direction. By weaving his life into the lives of his patients at the island’s medical centre, he reinforces the point that we have more in common with migrants than we care to acknowledge.
Bartoli has written down the stories of every migrant he has met and each account is harrowing; there is the African teenager left pregnant after an horrific gang rape: Hassan who carried his younger paralysed brother on his back through the Somali desert: the Nigerian man brutally castrated by thugs: the shipwrecked Syrian man who saved the lives of his wife and baby but couldn’t prevent his three-year old son from drowning. How did Bartoli select which stories to use from the hundreds he has gathered? He doesn’t say, but it’s not important because what matters is that he gives the migrants a voice. The world hasn’t seen or heard much from them since the numbers crossing into Europe began falling off from their 2015/2016 peak, which probably explains why migrants aren’t in the headlines as much as they used to be. It’s also possible the world has become as anaesthetised to their plight as it is to TV news pictures of dead and injured civilians in Syria’s bombed out streets. If that’s true, then Bartoli’s book is an even bigger wake up call. Migrants aren’t going away anytime soon, and Lampedusa’s fishermen will never stop pulling them from the sea even if that means breaking national laws!
Bartoli isn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and it’s difficult not to respect his emotional honesty. Why is it wrong for him to cry at the sight of body bags containing the corpses of children, adults, and a baby attached to its mother’s umbilical cord? Or vomit over the side of a boat after opening the hold and discovering the piled up, naked, suffocated bodies of nameless people?
Bartoli writes with an intense energy that burns with justifiable rage towards “greedy, ruthless human beings who put their trust in money and power.” Does he have anyone in mind with that comment? Quite a few! There are the people traffickers who make money from putting desperate migrants to sea in dangerous, overloaded boats: the TV “experts” who pontificate at length “about the differences between economic migrants and refugees”, and “our so-called political leaders” who casually sign the documents returning migrants “to the hell they have escaped”. Bartoli’s cynicism is justified although the weak spot in an otherwise excellent narrative, is that he overlooks how the migrant crisis has placed Europe’s politicians in a major bind. How many people should governments allow into their countries when the public are worried about the impact this could have on already over stretched resources? It’s a reasonable question that xenophobic parties have successfully exploited to tilt Europe’s political balance towards the right. To be fair, the book isn’t designed to answer that question although the inference we are left to draw is that migrant policy is driven by political expediency rather than compassion. His point is that because Europe has fallen morally short, migrants are being ruthlessly exploited and treated as no better than commodities. When they’re not being used as sex workers, cheap domestics, or slave labourers they are being trafficked for their organs. According to the World Health Organisation nearly 10% of kidneys used for transplants in the West have been illegally harvested. Shockingly, doctors are aiding and abetting that trade, people who like Bartoli took a professional oath to uphold the ethics of medicine!
Lampedusa Gateway to Europe is not an easy read. Bartoli doesn’t pull any punches when describing the suffering of his patients, and while his language is occasionally theatrical that doesn’t weaken the power of his message. He comes across as a man of integrity who’s also frustrated at the limits of what he can do. That’s understandable, although in truth he has done more than he realises. Fire at Sea, the 2016 award winning Oscar nominated documentary in which he appears, casts a much-needed light on an issue that isn’t going away anytime soon.
The cameras left Lampedusa a long time ago and for the islanders life goes on as usual, although for Bartoli “closed borders, minds, and hearts” means his work will never be over.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
This article first appeared in Dante Magazine: http://www.dantemag.com
