Notes from Aboveground

“I know nothing about them. Nothing – other than they are there and that I sat with them in quiet, taking a moment to be there. I still think they have many things to tell us about the borders, the regime of borders and about border-crossing – even if they cannot express those things to us now.”

Over the past year I have been conducting fieldwork research in Malta; because of my personal responsibilities it has not been possible for me to situate myself in the field continuously over the year or even for as an extended amount of time as I would have liked. Instead, like many, I opted for an approach dubbed patchwork ethnography (Günel, Varma & Watanabe, 2020 - patchwork manifesto).

I spent 5 weeks in July and August 2021 while my daughter spent her summer holiday with my folks in North America; I spent 6 weeks with my daughter in July, August and September 2022 during her summer holiday; and then I returned solo at the end of October into November 2022 for just over two weeks. There were, of course myriad challenges to making all of this happen – and the usual bumps of life wrapped up in all of it.

There is still much left unfinished. Nevertheless, I can acknowledge that have collected an impressive sample of data. And I continue to manage my expectations around the whole project.

All this to say, as I continue to “patch-work it”, I am taking Voltaire seriously: “Il megilo è nemico del bene”. Now, the English translation usually goes, “perfect is the enemy of good” and people warn: “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” but maybe there is something more to it if we take it literally: “the best is the enemy of the good”. There are, still – of course, myriad challenges – but good (enough) is what I am aiming for – I am continually recalibrating and reminding myself.

Some of the work I am doing touches deeply emotional parts of me; places that I have walled off and places that I sometimes would rather not go. But I also acknowledged that it has been deeply healing and that the bigger, braver part of me is open to these emotional stirrings. I have spent an inordinate amount of time in cemeteries. In fact, on the last trip, I walked into the office at Addolorata Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Malta, located in Paula, and was recognized immediately. I received a smile not dissimilar to one a local might get at their neighborhood bar… “oh hey, it’s you again.”

One of the studies I have been undertaking over this past year is ‘Deathnography’ (Senecal, 2020), an ethnographic approach to mapping Malta’s regime of borders by learning and understanding more about border deaths that occur in and around Maltese territorial waters and its SAR (Search and Rescue) Zone.

When I first conceived of this study, I imagined that I would locate some of the bodies that were buried in Malta and somehow “trace” (Derrida, 1982; Levinas, 1972) their life journeys backward and their death journeys forward. It was about the individuals, naming them, learning more about them, somehow – naïvely – reviving them, bringing them back to life. I had presumed that there was a lack of will to know more, to learn more about who they were but that sheer desire alone might counteract that.

Although one of the main aims of Deathnography still remains pushing back on enumeration as the dominant representation and approach (Horsti, 2021) to research on and discussions of border deaths; nevertheless, I am left to acknowledge Deathnography has also transformed – which is fitting because one of the theoretical concepts I am grappling with right now is the border as a site of transformation (Horsti, 2020).

The challenges to learning about who these individuals were are immense. During my first fieldwork visit, I went to Addolorata Cemetery and learned that there were in fact no bodies of people who had died crossing the Mediterranean currently buried there. That was a relief in a way. But it also made me curious. The people who worked at the cemetery told me they remembered that there were many bodies several years ago. But that there were currently no bodies of people who had died at the borders buried in the cemetery. Over the next two visits, there was a bit of confusion – were there now 3 or 4 bodies now buried there? And was there one body buried at the Islamic Cemetery?

There are four unidentified bodies currently buried at Addolorata Cemetery in Common Grave 159. I went to sit in quiet with those bodies on 1 November 2022, All Saints’ Day. I know nothing about them. Nothing – other than they are there and that I sat with them in quiet, taking a moment to be there. I still think they have many things to tell us about the borders, the regime of borders and about border-crossing – even if they cannot express those things to us now. I am still committed to listen to what their stories can ‘tell’ us, to providing an interpretation and a translation.

During that first visit, I also learned that in the Islamic Cemetery there were the bodies of two babies who had died attempting to seek asylum with their parents. This was gut wrenching. I could not imagine the impossibility of making that decision as a parent – both the paradox of not deciding to try and deciding to try, taking the risk that could result in what it did. No one knows how to live with this. This is what I want desperately to communicate from above ground, no one knows how to live with this kind of death – it is senseless, it is against nature even though it occurs in a natural environment, that environment is also crafted in such a way, by humans and human institutions and structures.

I knew I would not pursue that information any further than what I had learned. And on my last visit, I learned that there was one unidentified body buried in this cemetery, buried in Grave 84. This unidentified body seemed to have many similarities with the other four bodies that I had learned about. Except the place of death for the former was “Mediterranean Sea” and this one was recovered in Valletta. I later learned that this drowning was not the result of attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Rather, it was probably an accidental drowning of someone who had already survived that very same journey. Now the question remains, does this scenario, this reality also shed light on aspects of the regime of borders that are not at the edges of the territory, but are more metaphoric, more invisible, more normalized? In what ways might the deaths of noncitizens be ‘border deaths’ or deaths related to the regime of borders? This is another question that I have personally struggled with – and I am still not sure where I land on it. The noncitizen relationship with the State is complex one, grounded in both physical presence and limitations on belonging, hallmarks of the regime of borders even if paradoxical and inconsistent.

What do I mean by this? I have observed that, from the perspective of the Maltese State, the rights of noncitizens are conferred with inconsistency. Nash (2009) defines several subjective perspectives derived from or in relation to the citizen – for example: the super-citizen and the sub-citizen. These terms absolutely describe the kinds of border-crossing noncitizens I have tried to locate for the studies that comprise the whole PhD project. There does seem to be greater consistency to the logics applied to these more nuanced categorizations of “kinds” of noncitizens. And one concept that has emerged from the research that I want to explore further is – what we might call the responsibility of noncitizens – that from the perspective of the Maltese State, “sacrifice” is required of its noncitizens, especially those who would become citizens. The concept of sacrifice emerged from an interview with representatives of Identity Malta, now Community Malta.

In this last interview, when I asked this representative why I was not able to find any of the individuals who have successfully received the so-called Golden Visa (the MIIP) to speak with me about their experiences of borders – two lines just kept ringing in my mind: “These are low profile people. You won’t find them.” And after a while, I realized why this was on a loop in my mind – because the same exact thing might be said for Unidentified Body 153, Unidentified Body 155, Unidentified Body 156 and Unidentified Body 157 buried in Common Grave 159 at Addolorata Cemetery.

We tend to think of people who migrate differently as different. I think this is not precise. Their circumstances are different. Their motilities (Kauffman, et al., 2004), or potential for mobility, spatial or social, are different. The legal regimes that allow, facilitate or slow their mobility are different. How they are interpolated at borders is different. But all encounter myriad challenges, negotiate those challenges with what is available to them – capitals they possess: whether financial capital, social capital, body capital, etc. But the conditions for crossing are not simply natural challenges (natural borders, natural physical spaces) – rather they are constructed by other humans in various ways. Legal regimes, visa regimes, passports that facilitate travel, complex global financial systems, residence schemes, etc. This is to say in both physical and metaphysical terms (theoretical, philosophical, bureaucratic and conceptual ways) borders are established at the edges of space and within the territory.

Some people encounter the best-case scenario (red carpet treatment, quick wait times, private jets, easily ‘belonging’), a good-case scenario (waiting in line for passport checks, RyanAir travel, finding ‘your people’ outside of the ‘mainsteam’) and the worst-case scenario (deciding to risk your life or the lives of your loved ones, deciding that you must take the risk despite the potential consequences and then suffering them or arriving but never quite feeling as though you belong). It is in this final column that I think we can do better – we need to do much better. Crossing borders simply does not register as a dangerous undertaking for so many of us – a nuisance or a small challenge, yes but not dangerous. And I don’t think it needs to be – for any of us. The experience of border-crossing is uneven. This research seeks to find that which connects us, what makes us human as we engage in migration projects, and that which distinguishes us unfairly – to demonstrate that fact with the hope that, with the lived-experiences of some and the death experiences of others on the table, we can find a better way to address it. It doesn’t need to be the best, but in order to be good it needs to consistently and evenly make more sense. It needs to be better; this is where I will end this note from above ground.

Words by Lisa Ann Senecal