“Without myth, however, all cultures lose their healthy, creative, natural energy […] The images of myth must be the unnoticed but omnipresent, daemonic guardians under whose tutelage the young soul grows up and by whose signs the grown man interprets his life and his struggles.”[1]
Prelude
I have stood on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea as well as those of the Atlantic Ocean, and the sensation is most certainly different; overwhelming in both instances, but incomparably so. The Atlantic Ocean experienced from its eastern shores is ever active, restless, loud, and intimidating. The Mediterranean Sea, experienced from any of its shores, is generally calmer, more restful, quieter, and almost inviting. Perhaps that is my own personal bias for the Mediterranean, or perhaps it is my own experience as an offspring of this sea. But I believe there is more to it than mere bias: when one stands at the shores of the Mediterranean and looks out onto the horizon, one can almost envision the people standing on the shores on the other side, in like fashion looking out onto their horizons. When Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote of the fusion of horizons as the space of constructive hermeneutical dialogue,[2] he was speaking of a hypothetical fusion that occurs at a hypothetical point between the interlocutors. For us who dwell around this sea and stand at its shores, however, it is not merely hypothetical nor hyperbolic, it is rather an experience of a space of fused horizons that we can almost sense when looking out, as we imagine others looking out towards our gaze. The space is not an empty one either, but rather is filled with shared voyages from shore to shore, and shared experiences of historical narratives told in different languages and dialects. That, I believe, is what creates the almost palpable familiar and welcoming feeling standing at the shores of the Mediterranean.
It has been many centuries since Aphrodite rose out of its froth, and more still since Poseidon roamed its shores; it has been quite a stretch of time since Herodotus looked out at its wine-blue waters standing before the walls of Tyre, and since Elissa sailed out to establish her famed kingdom in Carthage… and through it all, the Mediterranean, along with the peoples huddled around its shores, bore witness to the unfolding of myth and history, to the ebb and flow of cultures, civilizations, and empires, as they rose and evolved, as they dialogued in both words and iron. Through it all and across the ages, the Mediterranean stood defined as the sea between the lands, defined by the struggles and triumphs of the peoples that inhabited its shores; and through it all, it carried their memories, witnessed their tales, and echoed their songs. Or so it is that I offer this as a capture of the Mediterranean along romantic and nostalgic tones in a manner of a prelude, colored by the brush strokes of Pablo Picasso’s Mediterranean Landscape (1953).
Generating the Narrative
In reflecting on the contemporary story of the Mediterranean, however, one would be hard pressed to offer such a romantic retelling. One imagines that if Picasso were today to repaint his Mediterranean Landscape, it may be more akin to his Guernica. Today’s Mediterranean and the peoples of its land do not so much conjure up myths of gods and heroes, nor songs of wine-blue waters and olive-green oil. Rather, this space is far more often now an amphitheater of tragedy, and its people seem to be locked into space, being audience and actors both, though all too often subject to deus ex machina not of their own choosing. It is in fact perhaps a rather ironic serendipity that the very form of the Mediterranean basin echoes the structure and architecture of an amphitheater, bringing together the audience into the space across which the tragedy plays out. But unlike the ancient Greek amphitheater in which “there was no opposition between the public and the chorus” and wherein “everything is only a huge sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs,”[3] our Mediterranean today seems to be divided upon itself, the North and South separated by a sea that has morphed into a wall, and the East and West grown further apart, with the straits of Gibraltar almost closing in to shut off the sea from the world, and to the world. This enclosed body of water whose shores we share and whose ancestral myths shimmer at the edge of our hermeneutical horizons, seems to have turned a solid barrier against the ever-recurring Season of Migration to the North.[4]
Far from being a space of communal song
and dance to the echoes of epic tales,
the Mediterranean today has taken on the garb
of a most palpable tragedy,
and is in some ways transformed into ‘a cemetery
for children and their futures
Far from being a space of communal song and dance to the echoes of epic tales, the Mediterranean today has taken on the garb of a most palpable tragedy, and is in some ways transformed into “a cemetery for children and their futures.”[5]That being said, it would be amiss to suggest that this is the first time that we have known barriers and divisive walls in this part of the world, or that our past and Mediterranean history is free from tragedy and turmoil. Many have been the walls that have gone up, and eventually come down, over the centuries. From the walls of Troy to the walls of Constantinople, and all that rose and fell in between and since, walls have come up to defend some against others, and to keep out strangers from across the seas. But today’s barriers rise differently… Or perhaps they do not rise at all; perhaps they come down from on high, devices of some deus ex machina, creating divides and distances, and shattering long-established fusions of horizons. It is as if the sea itself is being weaponized, and the waters of our shared history and geography have turned solid against our gaze. And it is not just the waters that have been weaponized, of course, but the very lands themselves, the peoples, their histories, languages, and cultures. Perhaps the biggest struggle for us huddled around this sea is the question of (re)gaining ownership of the body of water and space, of (re)gaining authorship of its narrative, a shared struggle to reclaim the space with all its history and heritage, with all its contradictions, synergies, and discords, with the aim of reimagining a path forward from that history towards a future that we, as its offspring, aspire towards.
When one considers the classical history of this area, one perceives a space of dialogue, exchange and interchange of ideas. One of my personal favorite illustrations of such exchange is the myth of Atlantis which Plato relates to us in the Critias, and which in the Critias he tells us that Solon the Athenian had heard and carried from the Egyptians about the ancient Greeks. To my mind, this illustration offers us a rich glimpse into the open pathways of exchange and communication around and across the Mediterranean already present and captured in dialogue more than 2,400 years ago. That being said, it must also be admitted, and embraced, that our space has equally been one of conflict, strife and war, for that too has been our common shared history and narrative. That, however, is nothing particularly unique to this space, and (sadly) seems to be a common motif of the human inhabited world. But we need to own our past and come to terms with it, and to embrace its unfolding across our shared aquatic amphitheater, much as tragedy was embraced and affirmed in the Greek amphitheater. In doing so, however, in embracing our past, and present, and retelling our tragedies, we need to outgrow the lamentations of the narrative, and work through our history towards a future worthy of being the material for future myths. We are, collectively and individually as peoples of the Mediterranean basin, heirs to a great range of myths and epic tales, and our mythology is a great teacher; but we need to become more generative and less reactive in our weaving of the narrative. Our shared tragedies are not be ignored, and they are indeed a powerful impetus for us to generate from, rather than to sink into a status quo of lamentation of the past. As I have already referenced Greek tragedy on more than one occasion above, it is here important to note that in its initial form and manifestation, tragedy was not meant to be lamented; when one sat in the amphitheater and looked upon the unfolding of Oedipus’ tragedy or that of his daughter Antigone, one was not invited into a bemoaning of their fate, but rather a celebration of the tragedy through their heroism in the face of it. That heroism was largely built on their embracing their fate, their owning it so to speak, and rising up through their heroism upon its tragic foundations. In that same manner, and with all the tragedies that we can point to in the recent and far-flung histories of our Mediterranean world, we are invited to celebrate the Mediterranean, to embrace its history without exception or exemption, and to build on it towards a newborn mythology, told in our own voices and written by our own pens. As we do so, we need to also be aware that we are the heirs of myths that are not of our making and writing, myths that were not grown out of our lands and sea. We have over the years and centuries grown so familiar with these myths that we have taken them as our own, and internalized them as being of our making. If we are to launch forward towards (re)gaining authorship of the narrative of our sea and shores, towards a collective and generative myth-creation in our words playing to our own music, we need to wrest ourselves from histories about us that are not of our own making, while at the same time embracing all that is ours, no matter how tragic it may at times be.
The waters of the Mediterranean have endured the inexorable ploughings across their face over centuries and millennia, and will endure still, notwithstanding the alarming environmental and climate crisis impacting the sea recently; but the lands around it, and though they have endured in place, have been carved and re-carved, shaped and reformed, time and again. For the most part, our contemporary Mediterranean, is not of our crafting, and, as peoples of these shores, we continue to endure, collectively and across our varied horizons, the legacy of colonial histories and orientalist historiographies. Our borders, as much as our identities, have been penned for us by those who visited our shores not as pilgrims of peace and merchants of dialogue, but those whose trade is conquest and whose coin is power.
The Mediterranean, myth of odysseys and poetry,
has become a border impossible to cross, much like
the little drawing by the Lebanese child
who represents the sea as a wall.
The Berlin Wall has fallen, but the
Iron Curtain has shifted to the Mediterranean
In our contemporary discourse on this matter, and when we speak about the colonizer versus the colonized, we tend to have our debates focused on the colonizer, and rightfully so. But I believe that this binary, this distinction between the colonizer and the colonized, is only a clear-cut distinction in retrospect, and perhaps, I would dare add, is an overstated dichotomy that is nonetheless practical for the purposes of addressing the complex relation between the two sides, and thereon moving forward from said historical relational. However, I believe it is a simplification that we need to recognize in order that we may move forward on surer footing, and equally recognize that every simplification carries with it a measure of falsification. To be clear, in saying that, I am not offering a negative critique of the simplification, for I only wish to use the term falsification descriptively not normatively. As Nietzsche so artfully put it in Beyond Good and Evil “We do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection to a judgment.”[6] In employing the term falsification in this context, I mean to say that the dichotomy may be a useful tool to allow us a constructive reading of history, but it may not be the only tool nor the full story. If we aim to move forward beyond the space of the tragic theater of our past, we need to face our shared responsibilities, both in terms of our history but more importantly in light of our future. Decolonizing our past and present is not a generative action in and of itself, but rather the result of a series of actions, the outcome of which would be decolonization, or what we earlier referred to as reclaiming the space of the Mediterranean, most centrally in terms of reclaiming its narrative. In this respect, we need to move forward towards more local and localized action rather than reaction. If we look at and consider the history of our region, and from whichever shore one may happen to be standing on, we have the collective justification to be reactionary in this sense, to rise up against the imposed systems and worldviews that have been cast over us across decades and centuries. These worldviews are ones that have been imposed not through pacific means or as outcomes of constructive dialogue and exchange of ideas, but rather as part and parcel of global and regional power dynamics whose script was written far beyond the Mediterranean, but whose mise en scene was its shores and lands. In that context, both actions and reactions towards the end goal of decolonizing as the desired outcome have to be more homegrown and collective endeavors, driven not so much by the desire to overcome our past but rather by the impetus towards building our future, and rebuilding a Mediterranean that is a space of celebration rather than lamentation. In retelling our stories, in embracing our past, without any omission, through our own voices, we not only claim our history in our own words, but just as equally claim the tools and artifacts through which we can build our future. We could then perhaps set forth in planting the seeds for generative myths and narratives to be told through the eyes and across the tongues of the people of the Mediterranean, much as they were told and sung centuries and millennia ago.
Mediterranean Identity(ies)
In this retelling, in this process of reclaiming our shared space around the Mediterranean, we come across the question of our identities, and we often stumble and lose our footing as we try to clarify its varied and various parameters; for this too, and our perceived ‘identity problem’, are carryovers of our recent histories. This purported identity problem comes precisely from our attempts to respond to those who, across decades and centuries, have imposed upon us their own view of who and what we are, we the “exotic” orient, the “mystical” and (mostly) emotive non-rational orient. In the face of this, our attempts at identity formation have often been, and I believe continue to be, a reactionary response to that externally imposed identity. We take refuge in developed, and oftentimes artificial, identities, many of which can only take shape at the expense of much of what could actually define us. They are thus reductions of our being children of the Mediterranean towards more ‘manageable’ identities of Arab or Phoenician or Western, Muslim or Christian or Jew. At times, such identity formation also moves towards broader identities that speak to the global contemporary power dynamics, thus bringing some into the fold of threatened minority and others under the umbrella of threatening majority. All these various identities and identifiers (geographical, historical, religions, ethnic, etc.) that we have been conjuring up have developed as a response to the othering that we have been, and continue to be, subjected to.
If we step outside this struggle of identity formation as our mode of response and rejection of the othering, we may find that we, various peoples of the Mediterranean shores, do not have clearly fixed identities. That may scare us, as it may make us feel vulnerable in the face of the other that is othering us. But this lack of static identity may indeed be precisely what we need to embrace, and could be precisely our response to the othering. For that which is not static cannot be othered, and the othering is only possible once we allow ourselves to fit into the identity mold that has been externally enforced upon us.
Much like the Mediterranean itself, we are ourselves encompassed within a rich and varied space of fluid journeying and voyaging, with horizons stretching and finding landfall at all sides of the compass; and much like our very sea, we remain open to that which lies beyond, with our own proverbial straits of Gibraltar through which we travel outwards to meet the world, but through which we ever return home to rest on Mediterranean shores. That is the material of the myths of our own making that future generations could sing of around their campfires, and the echoes of which they could hear shimmering on their respective horizons… but only if we, today, collectively and individually as peoples of the Mediterranean, set our minds to (re)claiming our space in our own words and celebrating its tragedies and comedies through our own songs.
[1] F. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge, University Press, 1999.
[2] Cf. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London and New York, Continuum, 2004.
[3] F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Ian Johnston, 2017, https://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/nietzsche/tragedyhtml.html
[4] Title of a novel by Tayeb Salih, first published in 1966.
[5] Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia and Special Coordinator for the Refugee and Migrant Response in Europe, as quoted by UN News, https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/09/1141677
[6] F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.