Counting migrations

We know the events concerning migration and migrants through the media. The news, the reports or the chronicles tell us about different "events" led by these travellers pushed to move: people who try to enter Europe or the United States through different borders and in different ways (in precarious boats that cross the Mediterranean or in "death" trains that cross Mexico), driven by reasons of mere subsistence, fleeing from violence or hunger or both... The journalistic, factual narrative, adheres to reality through the language and images that construct it.

Migrations and migrants are also present in other forms of storytelling which, ascribed to what we conventionally call literature, constitute nothing more than a continuum with the canonical journalistic narratives. I would like to refer to two concrete examples of these other forms of telling migration, forms that are close to the prototypical journalistic stories and that, because of the proximity of what they refer to the purely newsworthy current events of these weeks, have come to my memory recurrently in recent days. 

I begin with the most recent story, Tirar del hilo, the latest novel published in Spanish (March 2020), starring the curator Salvo Montalbano, the fictional character created by the Italian novelist Andrea Camilleri, who recently passed away. As the reader is probably aware, curator Montalbano works in Vigàta, an imaginary town (a transcription of Camilleri's hometown of Porto Empedocle) perfectly located on the island of Sicily. This detective novel, the twenty-ninth dedicated by Camilleri to Montalbano, includes in one of its plots the constant arrival of pateras to the Sicilian coasts, interweaving fiction and reality: the anonymous people of the news and media reports have a name and a voice here: Fiction is nourished by reality and, in turn, enriches it with details that journalistic accounts do not usually provide: the preparations on land to welcome the ship that brings shipwrecked migrants to port, the nervousness of these people in the face of the imminent disembarkation, the police routines, etc. We are witnessing a credible migration story, written in the form of fiction. A literary text that tells of events that the reader recognizes as common on the coasts of southern Italy today, and that he or she usually sees on television news and reads about in the newspapers.

The everyday reality has also brought to mind a second reading, this one a little further back in time, the book by Francesc Serés La piel de la frontera (originally published in Catalan in 2014 and in Spanish in 2015).  This book (a set of true stories in its intention, which recreate a world using language, but without departing from a commitment to truthfulness with the readers, in a "border" they too, between literature and anthropological text), allows us to approach in a privileged way (by close, delicate, adjusted and empathetic) to the reality of migrants who collect the fruit in the Segrià region, which the evolution of the COVID-19 has placed in the center of information in these weeks. The situation of the people we now see sleeping in the street or in conditioned sports centres has changed little since the date of some of Serés' stories (dating from the early years of this century). 

The pages of La piel de la frontera take us into the substandard homes of these people, who have travelled a long way from Mali, Sierra Leone or Guinea Conakry, to Alcarràs, Torres de Segre or Zaidín (already in Huesca), place names that are beginning to be familiar to us in this summer of 2020. And more, they take us into their desires, into their story told by themselves, without any intervening voices. A detective novel, a literary essay, a chronicle, a report or a news item, all stories that, with words (and images), make up fragments of a reality that is shaped by them, complementary ways of telling the story of migration, ways of knowing "reality", of accessing it, of creating it at last. 

Luis Guerra, Professor of Spanish Language at the European University of Madrid, is one of the main researchers of the INMIGRA3-CM project, financed by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund