31: The Optician of Lampedusa

A book by Emma Jane Kirby

Back in August, more than 1,450 migrants arrived in the UK by small boats, a reported record for a single month. The reasons for the increase—the figure almost matched the combined total from June and July—included good weather and the fact that fewer lorries were crossing the Channel due to the pandemic, so more people were forced to make the treacherous journey in inflatable dinghies. To the surprise of nobody, a well-worn (and pretty unsavoury) news cycle duly juddered into action. And as is their wont, YouGov took the pulse of the nation on the issue:

I will admit that my overwhelming emotions on seeing those statistics were not positive. They made me angry and quite ashamed. Because the question wasn't: Do you think it's right that migrants have been crossing the Channel from France to England? Or: Do you think migrants should be allowed to cross the Channel from France to England. It was: How much sympathy do you have, if any at all, for the migrants who have been crossing the Channel from France to England? And 49 percent of the 3,163 GB adults polled couldn't muster any. They couldn't be sympathetic to the plight of desperate fellow humans making a ludicrously dangerous journey in search of some kind of future.

I'll also admit, once the anger and shame had abated slightly, to a feeling of smug self-righteousness so befitting a middle-class, liberal, metropolitan member of the wokerati like me it's frankly embarrassing.

"Of course Brexiteers don't care," I thought to myself. "Every one of them's got that despicable poster Farage stood in front of in the Brexit campaign plastered on their bedroom walls, so no surprise there."

I continued: "No point looking for sympathy from a Tory either, they only care about themselves and keeping all the piles of money they got illegally from Matt Hancock during lockdown."

And finally: "Good to see that people like me aren't a bunch of callous *&^%s. Seems like a perfect time for a scream into the echo chamber."

With some distance I can acknowledge that, though there unfortunately will be some true lost causes among the 49 percent of non-sympathisers, there is a less sensational explanation for YouGov's August findings: apathy. The sight of woefully ill-equipped migrants crossing the Channel is so tragically quotidian that the human angle gets lost. Emma Jane Kirby's heartbreaking 2016 book The Optician of Lampedusa is an antidote to that apathy.

Lampedusa is an Italian island located between Sicily, Tunisia, and Libya. On October 3, 2013, a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy sank off the coast of Lampedusa. At least 359 people died in the tragedy. That number would have been higher had it not been for Carmine Menna who, along with his wife and six of his friends, pulled 47 people to safety aboard their 10-person-capacity boat. Carmine and his companions initially mistook the screaming of those drowning in the Mediterranean for squawking seagulls.

Menna is the optician of the title, but in Kirby's slim book, he is never named. He is merely "the optician". The effect is to democratise the story. This is not a tale of a uniquely heroic man, it is a tale of an ordinary man's natural reaction to a desperately tragic situation. And everybody would do what the optician and his wife and friends did had they been the ones to come across "bodies flung like skittles across the sea's glassy surface".

Before the rescue, the optician is largely indifferent to the plight of the migrants that arrive on Lampedusa "almost every day". He muses on the fact that "there's always someone rattling a tin" for them, and questions "why they all turn up here when this country has precious little to offer them". Even afterwards, he is realistic, acknowledging that Europe can't welcome every person looking for a better life, "but there had to be some alternative to this mess." He bristles at the playing of politics: "This wasn't about politics anyway; it was about humanitarianism." And Kirby does not make a political point. She does not make a judgement on which policy on migrants is right, and which one is wrong. But she humanises an ongoing tragedy in gut-wrenching fashion.

I bought this book back when it was released in 2016 but only finally read it in September of last year. Despite the time that has passed in between, it remains an all-too-relevant tale.