In this world: some reflections on Matteo Garrone’s  Io Capitano

Representing the pain, sorrow, and poverty of others is always a delicate and complicated task. Migration today, made spectacularly illegal by European legislation and the media, is an obvious case. Empathy is generated only when the anonymity of foreign bodies can be individualized to be narrated. Broader structural powers and relations are usually banished, reduced to vague acknowledgments and the background. The story requires the identification of the individual. Or, at least, that is what our culture teaches us. It has been institutionalized in both political philosophy and the modern novel.

However, it leaves us with a poverty of explanation and understanding.

In Matteo Garrone’s recent film, Io Capitano, we encounter such questions and problems. The journey of Seydou and his friend Moussa from Senegal through the Sahel and Libya, and then across the Mediterranean, is told in harrowing detail. Seydou, induced by his Libyan captors to navigate a boat of migrants to Europe, experiences all the moral qualms of his responsibility. Despite everything, he succeeds. He is a hero, and there is a (temporary) happy ending. But we know that this is not the case. In addition to the torture in Libya, these migrants will also face near-slavery conditions in Italy. Without documents and protection, they are without rights. The European reality is invariably also a nightmare. Trapped in such mechanisms, further codified and reinforced by racism, this is certainly not a narrative that makes for easy conclusions. And if we are honest, it reveals, in particular, our primary responsibility in the tale.

Africa, as a place of human and material extraction for the benefit of the West, from slavery and the beginning of Atlantic modernity to the precious metals of our cell phones, is ultimately about the colonial constitution of the present. The modern migrant is not just an economic refugee or an unwelcomed bearer of crisis but represents the return and ramifications of that invariably unacknowledged history.

So what am I saying? Should Garrone’s film not have been made? And is it a political and ethical (and therefore aesthetic) failure?

Things are never that simple. The consolation of binary alternatives, even of dialectical reasoning, eludes us at this point. For now, we are stuck with an individualized narrative, with choices and horizons reduced to a subjective understanding of the

world that obscures deeper forces and broader relationships. The trick is to work on this

imposition so as to push us beyond such parameters. Sentimentalism and the humanitarian response to the migrant hero are insufficient. After all, this merely reaffirms our structure of feeling and the formation that produced the contemporary ‘migrant’ through our colonization of the human and material resources of the planet.

There is no simple formula or ready-made alternative. We must consider a cinematic aesthetic that will prepare us for an ethics in which our position and point of view are challenged, interrupted, and even canceled. The method can only reside in the practice of filmmaking itself.

I have in mind two films that address the ethical and aesthetic path proposed in lo Capitano. One directed in a ‘documentary’ style like Garrone’s film is In This World (2002) by Michael Winterbottom. The other, by Abderrahmane Sissako, Waiting for Happiness (2002), suggests a poetic manner of reconfiguring the brutal impositions of modernity. I will limit myself to Winterbottom’s film, which is closer in style and intent to Garrone’s, where both European directors address the otherness of worlds that their (my) culture has produced and now punishes. In the film In This World, we follow two Afghans, Jamal and Enayatullah, from the Shamshatoo refugee camp near Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, as they try to reach London by crossing Iran, Kurdistan, Turkey, Italy, and France.

Enayatullah dies of suffocation in the container that brings them and other migrants from Istanbul by sea to Trieste. Jamal eventually makes it to London. The rugged and indifferent beauty of the landscape, the violence of borders, and the greed of traffickers are present in all their rawness. The very young Jamal is a hero simply for surviving all the hardships. However, the social relationships forged along the way, from extended family life in Peshawar to solidarity in Kurdistan and friendship in the ‘jungle’ of Calais, constantly pull us into a larger world. The individual traveler is not simply part of modern migration flows. The Peshawar camp is presented at the beginning of the film as the product of first Soviet and then American and Allied aggression, where something close to $8 billion was spent in 2001 to drop bombs on Afghanistan. The brutal simplicities of geopolitics turn a personal odyssey into a radical reorganization of the maps of the modern world from below, from the margins, and from the silence of other histories.

My own narrative here fails to mark the difference. What lurks in cinematic language is an excess that alludes to something more than the verbal explanation. The image always contains something that escapes the simple unfolding of the story. Letting it, so to speak, breathe, taking us away from the linearity of the story, the image disseminates a complexity in which poetics sustains a more opaque but profound politics (this is most markedly the case in Sissako’s film).

Reflecting on Matteo Garrone’s film, both the idealization of family life in Senegal and the relentless momentum of the narrative that pushes us toward the Mediterranean and

Europe denies us that space: its unresolvable ambiguities and complexities. The images are dramatic, and the feelings are well-intended. But its aesthetics remain blocked. Its ethics are short of breath. Unwilling to dig deeper or let the migrant inhabit a story and a world that is not ours to tell, we remain in a world that simply reflects us.

Of course, there is no solution. Only a critical journey constantly circling back on itself, again and again. Our failures, once registered, mark further paths.

An Italian version of this text was previously published in Tiziana Terranova’s Technological Research Unit blog 

Iain Chambers is a writer and independent scholar. He previously taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental University in Naples, where he was director of the doctoral programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. His research work is in different fields, including migration, music and the phenomena of identity in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author, inter alia, of the books Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008).