Epilogue: Twelve Stories Later, the Sea

Over the past few months, QM has travelled across the different shores of the Mediterranean through the twelve finalist stories of A Sea of Words 2025. Twelve young voices, twelve ways of narrating a shared space and reimagining it. From Palestine, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco to North Macedonia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Spain, their stories have explored borders and displacement, memory and belonging, languages and identities, war, resistance and hope. Through fiction, these diverse perspectives have drawn an alternative map of a sea that divides us and, at the same time, brings us together.

With the publication of Mine, Yours, Our Sea by Croatian writer Chiara Pumper, winner of the competition’s First Prize, we have reached the end of this literary journey. Yet bringing the series to a close does not mean silencing the questions that echo between the lines of these stories. What kind of Mediterranean are we building? What makes us feel that we belong to this region? What can we learn from a generation that sees the sea not merely as an inherited geography, but as a space of infinite connections?

As an epilogue, we have invited Karima Ziali to take up some of these questions and carry them beyond fiction. Ziali had already joined this new generation of writers at the A Sea of Words 2025 awards ceremony, where she participated in a discussion alongside the competition’s female prize winners. She now returns to that dialogue through writing, offering a philosophical and poetic reflection that broadens our understanding of the Mediterranean while subtly echoing many of the concerns expressed by the young authors throughout the series.

A writer, philosopher and anthropologist, born in Morocco and raised in Catalonia, Ziali’s own intellectual and personal journey unfolds at the crossroads of territories and identities. She holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona and a Master’s degree in Anthropological Research from Spain’s National University of Distance Education (UNED). Having previously worked as a teacher, she is currently pursuing doctoral research in migration studies at the University of Granada. Her work focuses particularly on the intersections of sexuality, Islam and migration, and she regularly contributes to various publications and feminist spaces for critical thought. She made her fiction debut in 2023 with Una oración sin Dios (Esdrújula Ediciones), a novel drawing on autobiographical elements that challenges prevailing narratives surrounding migration and the Moroccan community in Catalonia.

In the text that closes this series, Ziali turns her attention to the Mediterranean itself and to our relationship with the sea, the land and language. Her starting point is a metamorphosis: to stop thinking of ourselves exclusively as terrestrial beings and learn to imagine ourselves as marine beings. In contrast to the solidity of the land, its boundaries and its grammars, the sea emerges here as a fluid space capable of unsettling established categories and forging new continuities.

A final invitation, after twelve stories dedicated to imagining the Mediterranean, to ask ourselves not only what kind of Mediterranean we want, but also how we wish to inhabit it.elling him stories about my hometown so he would come to understand my — our — homeland. When I promised him that I would take him to the desert, I imagined myself growing old near the sands I loved, and dying peacefully there. But the dictatorship still in Syria.

Mediterranean Metamorphosis

Karima Ziali
Writer, philosopher and anthropologist

We lost sight of land long ago. Before our eyes, a low mist gathered the last terrestrial horizon into a single point. The days passed in a wild upheaval, and only the blue sea, piercing and open, cried our names into the void. On the Earth’s crust, a distant memory condemned to dwell in oblivion, the verb is the origin, and the proverb the wisdom that history deposits in collective memory.

In fits and starts, we have ceased to be land animals and become marine mammals. Have we lost our minds? No, we are merely a humanity in transmutation. Cold-skinned and amphibious, we inhabit the vast, indolent expanse of the sea. We have allowed ourselves to be rediscovered by the warm, watery life. Once we have had our first taste of its temperature, there is no turning back. With hands full of restlessness and passion, like the first winged kiss of adolescence, we have let ourselves be carried away by the current. Cells dilate, the body opens and dissolves, the nucleus of life becomes gelatinous; everything awakens to the hope of a liquid, beautiful and archaic return. When density collapses and flesh loses its thick substance that resists the passage of oxygen, the gentle aquatic caress dissolves us like crystals of salt.

Surrendered to the contractions of the sea, the waves disturb our limbs, which will soon become useless amid these sidereal currents. Before long, nothing will remain of the strident vocal brutality with which we arrive on land but futile memories. We will leave our pulmonary condition behind, and two fine lines will trace the gills upon our obtuse faces. Stripped of epidermis, scales will cover our bodies, battered by the force of transmutation. And of our great illusion, of humanity’s greatest fascination, of the symbolic desire for duality through which we name the truth of every phenomenon, only spherical fragments will remain, floating upwards through the water, defying the predictions of terrestrial gravity. Beyond law, beyond the Word, the sea is the promise of a prelinguistic grammar.

Beyond law, beyond the Word,
the sea is the promise of a prelinguistic grammar

The sea has long been warning us, not only of its strength but also of its ancient presence: the wisdom of stillness lies beneath a hermeneutics of suspicion that we have failed to decipher. Yet we are syntactic beings: deprived of peripheral vision, we can only focus on objects directly before us. Disabled as marine creatures, we observe the behaviour of the waves as though they were stumbling clumsily against the land, still unwilling to understand that the curvilinear order of the swell erodes the law of the earth. This human metamorphosis is the contemporary ritual through which we acknowledge an authentic fluid temporality. Yet, as aquatic beings, we reject the liquid modernity that offers us only reasons for an elitist and privileged emancipation: we can embrace nothing but the radical freedom of every profoundly marine body.

The questions, however, remain pertinent: will we be capable of inhabiting an aquatic and democratically courageous sensibility upon the firmness of the earth? Which sea will accept us as terrestrial migrants? How can we construct our memory from the sea when our language is made of syntactic sediments?

It is the second question that challenges us most deeply: only in a sea that incorporates the land as the very premise of its name could such a transmutation be possible. The Mediterranean holds the possibility of an Ovidian miracle and is, for that reason, sacred in humanistic terms. In this sea, whose androgynous heart beats between lands, we can conceive of ourselves as beings consecrated in space rather than in a progressive time tending towards an end; not in a pathological modernity with pretensions to universalism, nor in a time that makes the past present through its constant reformulation.

The Mediterranean holds the possibility
of an Ovidian miracle and is, for that reason,
sacred in humanistic terms 

The Mediterranean is, tout court, space. But not space in the sense of a coordinate coupled with an ontological notion of time, nor of mythological or historical time; or, if one prefers, it is the space in which myth and history mobilise our actions in the present. The Mediterranean, as space, allows movements (social, cultural, political) to be measured not by their temporality but by their capacity to construct continuities (territorial, corporeal, affective, poetic…) through individual and collective trajectories. Political borders — especially those separating the northern Mediterranean from the southern Mediterranean — despite their fortification, are incapable of erasing the movements that trace a permanent desire for continuity. The much-admired cultural bridges make sense only to those who remain bound to a terrestrial ethic. Yet, thanks to the untimely waves that lick the rock, these bridges will collapse, making way for the foaming pathways that narrate our life in common.

The Mediterranean, as space, allows movements
to be measured not by their temporality but by
their capacity to construct continuities

It is our excessively terrestrial nature that drives us towards the logical telos of firmness and horizontal security; we are (despite everything) lovers of Estellés:

Our love is a rough and savage love / and we feel the bitter longing for the earth / to roll together amid kisses and scratches.

We know nothing of love except under the dominion of gravity; beyond it, far from its protective embrace, we pray to return without hesitation:

Sails and winds must fulfil my desires / making uncertain paths across the sea. / Mistral and westerly winds I see rising against them: / sirocco and easterly winds must come to their aid / together with their friends, the northeasterly and southerly winds, / offering humble prayers to the tramontane / that in its blowing it may favour them / and that all five may bring about my return.

Ausiàs March was a man of aquatic spirit, yet his marine and passionate aesthetic struggled fiercely against the corrective ethic of the land.

The nostalgia of the Valencian poets lies in living subject to the dictates of the earth when the flesh longs for the sea. The tenderness of the Mediterranean, however, resides in its rebellious determination to seek the land, to draw it towards itself and, in a fleeting and brutal instant, to wrest from it the humanity that gazes upon it in rapture. Perhaps, by embracing this abduction as an opportunity to surrender ourselves to the sea, we may finally come to understand that terrestrial topography could only have existed thanks to the untimely waves that kiss its hard, mineral skin. There is no other choice but to evolve towards the marine world in order to understand the destiny of humanity.