Circe is a powerful witch that Homer also calls polypharmakos: the one who masters the pharmakon, both remedy and poison. After sharing her bed, the witch tells Odysseus that before leaving for Ithaca, he must go to the kingdom of the dead and see the diviner Tiresias. To go to sea is to leave for this world in between, between life and death, and that, not only because the sea has its dangers. More fundamentally still, what the myth condenses into a sensible idea is that the sea, not being solid ground, does not belong to this or that, its world is between two worlds. Aristotle, who preferred taxonomies to myths, will say that there are three species of human beings: the dead, the living, and those who go to the sea.
But then do the latter have to be rescued when they are in danger? To be pushed away from European territorial waters? To be “welcomed” in closed camps? To let them sail even if that would probably be synonymous with letting them die?
Pylos appears in the Odyssey, during the journey of Telemachus who came in search of information about his missing father, Ulysses. On the night of June 13 to 14, one of the worst shipwrecks in recent years took place off Pylos. There are 79 dead, 104 survivors, and several hundred missing (there were about 750 people on board). The ship’s holds were filled with women and children. No woman was found alive and no children.
If we take Aristotle’s taxonomy to its climax, those who go to sea do not count among the living and the dead. These are lives that don’t matter. These are deaths that do not count. And in a way, the sea is the Third World par excellence, neither that of the living nor that of the dead.
The trawler was spotted on Tuesday afternoon by a Frontex (the European Border Surveillance Agency) plane, . According to the official statement from the Greek port authorities, the refugees on board “refused any help”. The captain of the boat had abandoned his post, the engine was out of order, the boat was overloaded, and the passengers had no life jackets. But for fifteen hours, nothing seems to have been done to really come to the aid of these people. According to the testimonies, the coastguard tied the trawler to their ship with a rope, which may have contributed to making it capsize, and above all contradicts the official version which spoke of remote monitoring and non-intervention. On June 16, the authorities slightly modified their version, but without really giving any explanations. As for Frontex, it stated that it was “deeply moved” after the announcement of the tragedy. We know and those who make the journey know, that very often “help” means “push-back”, not to rescue but to pull the boat outside the rescue zone. Makeshift boats are pushed back towards Turkish and Libyan territorial waters… in any case far from European soil.
The sea can be what separates two lands, like a natural border. But we can wait at another kind of border, a sort of water barrier between two seas. This is one of the possible meanings of the Arabic word barzakh. Mohamed Amer Meziane evokes this term as a possible translation of this expression which is also the title of his book “at the edge of worlds”.
Here, between two seas, at the edge of the worlds, we are no longer faced with the problem of how to make the plurality of worlds cohabit, a problem that has always driven colonial “concern for the self”: how to cohabit with these “other worlds” which are in ours. This implies that in the end, and even at the beginning of the account, the world is ours; part and together at the same time. We can be ordinary racists prey to the danger of the barbarian invasion or even rescuers of the “others” and their “worlds”, we who take with them when they come to us. But in both cases, we are in the world that matters and whose globalisation implies making room for the other. Hence a very special hospitality: a hospitality of debt. The others are indebted to us. It’s true that sometimes accidents happen, tragedies, but – let’s put quotation marks up as if we were putting up barbed wire – “we can’t make room for everyone”.
The world is rotten. We feel it, it smells bad. If there is anything to do, it is to bring all this rot to the compost: to let rot and let live. But we still prefer postures of saving others, in an inclusion that excludes them. Being united is something else. And that may be what can build debt-free hospitality. Hospitalities or the word host can have two sides: it designates at the same time both the one who is received and the one who receives according to borders that are not solid, but shifting, troubled, aquatic; witches and polypharmakes.
The dream gives access not to another world but to the in-between worlds. It takes place in a place that challenges ontological divisions: what is and what is not, what matters and what does not.
This is why our collective struggles are always physical and metaphysical, witchy, trembling struggles. And if there is a decolonization of knowledge, there is a part of decolonization of knowledge about Greece and of Greece. Because the fabric of its westernisation, the fabric of its image as the “cradle of European civilisation” is a belated and retrospective image, largely fabricated at a time when the great colonial powers of the modern world were seeking to buy an origin: democracy, theatre, philosophy… all of this is with us. Since then, the rest of the world has been indebted, and moreover modern Greece is one of the worst payers.
Off Pylos the waters are very deep. The European tectonic plate passes under the African plate. We can be deeply moved, and never mobilised. Or actively dreaming of an earthquake of those who refuse the unacceptable and organise their anger…
taken from here