RECORD/ Old man prepares to cross the Atlantic alone, the nation is moved

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Those desperate boys who came from the sea resemble ours

2026-08-01 16:08:45Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA MELANIA MAZZUCCO

By Melania Mazzucco – La Repubblica

They swim or struggle in the water, aiming for salvation. These are the images of young people fleeing Morocco.

Faced with the images that appear one after another on the phone and TV screen, this time I don't ask myself what is happening, but what I am really seeing. The ambiguity of the photos and videos prompts me to reflect on the relationship between appearance and essence. From the multitude of these images, which touch my sensitivity and reason, I choose three.

The first: a multitude of spherical shapes floating on the water – a dark, choppy, turbulent sea. They look like the remains of a shipwreck, swept away by the current, but in fact they are all moving in the same direction. And they are not objects, but heads – of thousands of people. They float or writhe. The comparison to a shipwreck is not unfounded. All are aiming for the same shore: salvation.

The second view shows a very high fence, perhaps electrified, interrupted by a watchtower. It follows the ridge of the hill over a strip of sand, but extends down to the sea. It is a contemporary version of the rusty fences whose last posts, corroded by salt, sway in the waves on the Greek islands to prevent goats from grazing. The fence in these photographs is clearly a border – like the walls in Israel or the border between the US and Mexico. Others like it can be found in the forests of Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. That iron mesh is our limes, our real border: beyond it Europe ends.

Hundreds of people try to cross or avoid it, passing between the boulders.

The third shot shows crowds of young men in their twenties walking through the sun-baked streets of a ghost town. In everything – their clothes, their hairstyles, their shoes, their gait – they resemble the young men of our metropolitan suburbs. Some turn away from the camera and make a victory sign with their fingers. Others smile and cross their arms in front of their faces in a gesture I can’t decipher. Mocking? Are they saying, “Come on, handcuff us and arrest us all”?

What am I seeing, then? The biblical exodus of a people, reminiscent of the epic voyage of the Albanian ship Vlora in 1991? A peaceful assault on a border, beyond which many believe happiness begins? Or the defiant march of groups of young people who dare us to take away their newly won freedom – by force, as every freedom has always been won?

Few of us have ever been to Ceuta, or would find it on a map. This Spanish enclave, a remnant of a long-gone colonial era, is a small African triangle, separated from the European continent by the strategic Strait of Gibraltar. It is a real place, but also a mythical one: home to the Pillars of Hercules. Morocco surrounds it. The nearest cities, Tetouan and Tangier, are about 40 and over 70 kilometers away, respectively.

The sixty thousand people who entered Ceuta yesterday must have arrived there the previous days. Lured by a magic flute player? Summoned? Organized? Who sang the siren song to them? It is frightening to think that someone – who, I wonder, more than why – could so easily decide the lives of sixty thousand people. Some of them (57 at the time of writing) did not make it. They drowned during the crossing. All of them young or very young.

Youth is the wealth of African countries and the treasure of those who have nothing but their bodies, naked but filled with an irrepressible energy and the force of life. Yet this very youth is transformed into a disaster. At all times and under every regime, young people have been above all cannon fodder – manipulated, used and sacrificed in mechanisms they could not even imagine.

I see a fence that is both miserable and impassable. A hostile sea that is both a road and a grave. A wave of desperate and defiant people, ready to lose everything and take everything, because they believe they have nothing left.

I see the border guards and the soldiers, I see the Mediterranean. I do not see the Spanish, Arab and African inhabitants of Ceuta. I remember the graffiti I saw on the stones of Dura Europos, in Mesopotamia – the last outpost of the eastern border of the Roman Empire – carved 1,770 years ago. Latins, Greeks, Jews, Arameans, Palmyrenes, Chaldeans: all gathered within the walls of that fortress on the banks of the Euphrates, where they had lived together for centuries, awaiting the invasion of “the others”.

I see the dead on the sand. I see, as a rare exception, a girl emerging from the sea in wet clothes and a hijab on her head. Another girl – dressed in the Western style – helps her up the slope. I don't know if I'm seeing an image of a still possible future, or a scene constructed to counter the racism of a part of European public opinion.

I see the gesture of the handcuffs and I know that, in the eyes of those boys, I am still considered a prison guard. And I wonder who among us, in this year 2026, is behind the wall or inside it, and who can call themselves truly free.


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