On June 14, 2023, the migrant boat Adriana capsized off the coast of Greece, killing more than 600 men, women and children who had been crammed onboard the trawler by traffickers. As investigations by the BBC and The New York Times have revealed, officials and coast guard crews failed to treat the crisis as a rescue mission until the last few hours.
Those on the Adriana died torturous deaths. According to interviews with survivors, “those on deck were tossed into the sea. Panicking people stepped on each other in the dark, desperately using each other to come up for air, to stay alive. At the water’s surface, some clung to pieces of wood, surrounded by drowned friends, relatives and strangers. Others climbed onto the ship’s sinking hull. Coast Guard crew members pulled dozens of people from the sea.”
And yet, given the scope and horror of the disaster, few people seemed to care; the story was barely a blip on many news websites. Not long after, the world eagerly turned its attention and resources to an ultimately unsuccessful rescue of five wealthy passengers aboard a faulty OceanGate submersible. Two tragedies, two responses, and one staggering contrast. As the headline on another Times story, by Richard Pérez-Peña, put it: “5 Deaths at Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug.”
Refugees and migrants dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean in search of safety is not new. The United Nations estimates that more than 27,000 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. As I am an African American keenly aware of our history, the tragedy of the Adriana is in some ways familiar to me, a haunting that is almost heritage: Humans squeezed onto a boat by their traffickers, crushed skin to skin, bone to bone, throats gasping in the breaths of a hundred suffering others, enduring or perishing in the hellish conditions of starvation and dehydration as the vessel churns them away from their homeland.
I understand that the trans-Atlantic slave trade and refugee migration differ. African people were kidnapped, trafficked and enslaved; today’s refugees and migrants are forced to flee through perilous routes because of poverty, war and crisis. But as different as these two historical occurrences are, they share the cruelty and global apathy that allowed them. And the result is fundamentally similar: humans denied their homes, their humanity and, far too often, their lives.
In particular, the Adriana catastrophe reminded me of the case of the slave ship the Zong. (Its original name was actually Zorg, meaning “care” in Dutch, but a mistake was apparently made when the name was painted.) In 1781, the ship sailed from Ghana, packed with two times as many people as it was built to hold. The Zong’s owners claimed that, owing to dwindling drinking water supplies, they were forced to throw more than 130 living enslaved people into the sea. When the shipowners tried to collect compensation to offset the loss of their murdered cargo, the insurers refused to pay, and the two parties went to court in the historic Gregson v. Gilbert trial of 1783. As the insurers argued, the ship’s crew had had several opportunities to restock their water supplies from rainfall and various ports, but instead killed the Africans to turn a profit.
If, as James Walvin, the author of “The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery,” calls it, the Zong case was “mass murder masquerading as an insurance claim,” then the Adriana disaster was mass malaise masquerading as a claim to innocence.
The Western world often turns its back on refugees and migrants fleeing the flames of conflict we’ve fanned, claiming it’s not our problem. Yet perhaps the real truth is unbearable: that we who watch others suffer and do nothing are responsible for the tragedies we witness. I write not to wash my hands clean of these crimes, but to honor those still in the water.
Deeply inspired by the Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem “Zong!” — constructed only from text that appears in the court report of the Gregson v. Gilbert case — I have composed my own erasure, or “found” poem, from the same source. By writing an elegy through the words of history, I hope to unearth, or unwater, the dead from beneath a mass of waves.
The purpose of an elegy is to mourn the dead. But I also recognize it as a chance to move the living, to mobilize us to care, in every meaning of the word. To look into the wreckage and, piece by broken piece, find something much like ourselves.
These Means of Dying
by Amanda Gorman
May the took here
Rest.
This an action to recover the value of certain
want—
the perils of the seas, and contrary currents and
other misfortunes, rendered foul
the said ship,
for a quantity did not remain—
died
through thirst and frenzy there
drowned; their lives
a loss not within terms—
port of rule—
There appeared in evidence no necessity to justify—
At all events the loss arose not from the perils of the seas,
but from negligence—
The truth was, they took these means of
dying for want of provisions, but no attempt was made—
It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely
is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures
may be good.
The question is, first, whether any act.
reach currents stronger than apprehension—
Lord—
This is a very uncommon case, and deserves
consideration. There is great weight in the
Loss—
There should be a new
Will—
Justice, of the same—
Justice
is not the same as a stated declaration.
The law is the instrument
to recover
a remedy. Suppose the law clear, that
this declaration could raise that point
absolute
Amanda Gorman is a poet and the author of “The Hill We Climb” and “Call Us What We Carry.”
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