Headline, January 12 2022/ OPINION : ''' '' HUMANITY DEPTHS HUNTINGS '' '''

OPINION : 

''' '' HUMANITY

 DEPTHS HUNTINGS '' '''

FOR BILLIONS OF DISADVANTAGED PEOPLE AND STUDENTS - LIFE means nothing. Life is indeed a very waking nightmare. A garden cemetery in Africa sensitizes us to the perils endured by migrants the world over.

NO ONE knows the precise number of Africans currently dying in anonymity while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Those who don't make it aren't generally represented in the statistics, but estimates, based on the tallies of people rescued by the coast guards of southern Europe and northern Africa, suggest that African migrants in the thousands - women, men and children - drown in that sea each year.

And at the tail end of this chain of human despair are the people who bury these migrants, or their shredded remains, after the Mediterranean's cruel currents expel themonto their shores.

One such site is Zarzis in southeastern Tunisia, where last June Rachid Koraichi, an Algerian artist, decided to build a cemetery, scented by jasmine blossoms and flowering orange trees, that he calls the  Jarden d' Afrique, or Garden of Africa.

I have not been to see this garden-cemetery, but I was struck by a beautiful description in the newspaper Le Monde, in which a reporter noted the presence of ''yellow and green cups, meant to attract rainwater and birds,'' set into the white graves.

Mr. Koraichi offers this paradisiacal beauty to - in his words - those ''damned by the sea,'' as compensation for the suffering they endure on the way to their deaths. The Garden is already nearly full to capacity, bearing witness to the scale of this horrific modern hecatomb.

The global landscape is full of dangerous natural borders; the Rio Grande, which separates Mexico from the United States, takes several lives each year, for instance. But the Mediterranean is the most deadly.

According to the International Organization for Migration, approximately 20,000 Africans have died or disappeared in this sea since 2014, and the number does not take into account migrants from the Middle East and eastern Africa who disappear into the eastern Mediterranean off the coasts of Greece and Turkey.

Everyone believes they know why people from the Global South are drawn toward the Global North. We imagine these migrants choose to leave their homes because the south is uninhabitable, the south is intractable, the south is without pity for the impoverished.

The north is no less so, but we imagine the migrants don't believe this. These men and women from Black Africa and the Maghreb, many of them young, risk their lives to undertake the passage to Europe, to sail across the central Mediterranean by way of Libya in order to stop merely enduring and begin living, and to provide further for their families. The full journey can take many years.

I've always been struck by the familiar, recurring scenarios in American disaster films that denotes an apocalypse; no more electricity, no more running water, no food security, no hospitals - the disappearance of all the things people like you and me enjoy without giving them a second thought.

Yet this fictive evocation of the End of the World is lived out by half of humanity every day. For billions of disadvantaged people, life is indeed a waking nightmare. To be able to eat, drink, bathe and clothe themselves is a daily battle.

The migrants who decide to flee the violence of this immiseration know there exists a world in which to live does not mean merely to survive. These are people who are both cleareyed and blinded by hope, who see the north as the inverse of their own world :

An attainable haven of peace and tranquility, where the good life is within reach for anyone willing to work. While those swallowed by the Mediterranean may die without even having the chance to lose their illusions about the north, are the illusions of the survivors, who are being held in detention centers in southern Europe or North Africa, likely to remain intact.

The Sadness of the world's realities and The World Students Society's research and publishing continues into the future. The World Students Society thanks author David Diop, a French Senegalese novelist and academic who received the 2021 International Booker Prize for his novel : ''At Night All Blood is Black.''

With most respectful dedication to all personal reflections of great humans, and then Leaders, Grandmothers, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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