On opposite shores of the Mediterranean, separated only by a stretch of sea, the two are united by a very human relationship with those who try to cross that sea, often finding death there instead.
One day Mohsen Lidhabi, in Zarzis, Tunisia, while searching the beach for materials for his sculptures, found a body.
Without asking too many questions, he decides to give the stranger a dignified burial, sparking endless controversy in his home community and among Ben Ali's supporters.
On another shore of the Mediterranean, in Lampedusa, Vincenzo witnesses the same epiphany and makes the same decision, raising criticism from the religious community that contests the use of crosses for the burial of non-Catholic men.
Shortly afterward, Vincenzo will receive a letter written in French from an unknown sender who, like him, has chosen to bury the nameless bodies that arrived by sea following the Arab Spring.
The two men, Mohsen and Vincenzo, and their timid contact speak to us of a profound humanity confronting the obscene nature of current history; the reactions of their communities, instead, speak to humanity's perennial struggle for dignity, even at the cost of marginalization.
Through this simple and touching story of epistolary friendship—the common thread of this tale with Sophoclean echoes—I would like to discuss two shores belonging to different and changing space-time universes.
By listening to the two communities with their different customs, traditions, languages, and religions, I would like to gather new idiosyncrasies that outline a modern anthropology.
Post-Berlusconi Sicily, almost a lunar landscape crisscrossed by debris, stray dogs, intrusive tourists, blaring quads, and children now devoid of innocence, appears as a world of poverty and disenchantment that fears and shuns memory, suffocated by the cruel mechanisms of community. Tunisia, in the crucial post-revolutionary transition, instead relives the echoes of its own history between the museum of memory built by Mohsen—to remember those who left—and an identity in the process of being defined.
Irene Dionisio
