Karina Horsti's "Survival and Witness at Europe's Border"

Karina Horsti is Government of Finland/David and Nancy Speer Visiting Professor in Finnish Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the editor of The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe.

Horsti applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Survival and Witness at Europe's Border: The Afterlives of a Disaster, and reported the following:

On page 99, there is a photograph of unidentified migrant graves in Piano Gatta cemetery in Agrigento, Sicily. I took the photograph in 2018 and the victims in the graves were buried there in 2013. The picture tells a lot about how Europe treats migrants who die at its borders. There are numbers, no names. Concrete walls are barren but two vases of artificial flowers communicate that some people have visited these graves and paid their respects.

The book was set in motion by my curiosity about how one of the most mediatized incidents of border deaths in Europe, the October 3, 2013, migrant disaster in Lampedusa (Italy), lives on and evades oblivion through mediated representation and memorialization. The book traces trajectories of different kinds of witnesses to border deaths, and here I discuss how local Sicilians who buried 368 dead bodies responded. They witnessed the corporeality of the disaster. Through the ritual of prayer, the locals adopt the unknown dead within their own community of deceased.

A paragraph from page 99:

There, I met Nicola Coppola, who had been the town’s mayor in October 2013. When we met, he had just recently lost his position and had time to show me the cemetery and introduce me to other locals who were active in engaging with the memory of the migrant dead. Coppola (2018) told me how he had responded to the call that went out from Agrigento for burial sites. Castellamare del Golfo is a town living off fishing and tourism in Trapani province. By Sicilian standards, it’s barely a midsize town with about 15,000 inhabitants. Thus, it is quite interesting that instead of accepting “one or two” coffins from another province, Coppola wanted a significant number of dead.

If browsers open my book to page 99 they would get some sense of what the book is about. The test works partly, not completely inaccurately but also not exactly perfectly. The book is about different types of witnesses and on page 99 I discuss just one type of witnessing a migrant disaster.

Learn more about Survival and Witness at Europe's Border at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue