Lights in the Distance by Daniel Trilling

Author:Daniel Trilling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

18 • CAESAR

I still didn’t understand what it was really like to make the journey from Libya. People seemed to spend months there before they even got onto the boats. What did they do? What was daily life like? Of my three interviewees, I thought Caesar would be the most likely to tell me. Despite his frustrations at the slow pace of Italy’s asylum system, he seemed to be the most rooted, the most sure of himself. I went back to Catania, to propose a longer interview. He was at home when I called on him, one Saturday afternoon in April 2016, and he invited me in. Since we’d last met, he’d had his first asylum interview and his claim had been turned down. ‘They’ve divided everyone from Mali into “north” and “south”,’ he said. ‘The south is safe to go back to, so if you’re from there, they turn you down.’ He’d had trouble explaining himself during the interview, he said, because the translator provided by the court came from a different ethnic group and didn’t speak his language properly. The asylum commission hadn’t believed Caesar when he said he’d been living in the north of Mali; he hadn’t managed to produce a residency certificate, so he was trying to get hold of one in time for his appeal hearing. ‘It’s not like one person has “economic migrant” written on their forehead and another has “refugee”,’ he repeated.

I told Caesar why I’d come back to visit, and asked him if he’d talk to me at length. He thought carefully for a few moments.

‘OK, I’ll do it,’ he finally said. ‘But I want some time to think about mes paramètres first.’ He wanted to think about what he was prepared to reveal and what he wasn’t. ‘Could you come back in a week?’

*

The following Saturday, I went back to Catania. It was mid-April, a year since the two shipwrecks that had precipitated Europe’s refugee crisis, and local activists had chosen this day to commemorate the deaths. At the city port, a small crowd gathered to throw flowers in the water and listen to speeches from representatives of different left-wing groups. Afterwards, several hundred people set off on a protest march through the city centre, playing Italian political songs from a set of speakers on wheels.

I went to meet Caesar at the point where the march was supposed to finish, by the medieval Castello Ursino, on the edge of the city centre. We sat on a bench, I took out my Dictaphone and he began to speak. Caesar talked for an hour, interrupted only by my occasional questions – and, once, when a tramp came over to ask us for a cigarette.

Caesar’s problems had started in 2012, when Tuareg rebels, who wanted their own independent state, took over northern Mali. It was another side effect of the war in Libya: Mali’s conflict was fuelled in part by weapons – many of which originally came from European manufacturers – looted from arms dumps in Libya during the uprising against Gaddafi.

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