Great waves of migration caused by famines, diseases or wars have always existed in literature, have never been foreign to literature, and are already recorded in the Bible, which dedicates an entire book to the migration of the Hebrew people. Bookstores are now full of works that examine this phenomenon from different angles—mainly sociological and economic—and we see it in Sebastião Salgado’s classic Exodus, where he analyzes exiles, immigrants, and refugees at various historical moments. Or in Zygmunt Bauman’s most ardent works, such as Sami Naïr’s Refugees facing humanitarian catastrophe and Foreigners Knocking on the Door.
Contemporary war conflicts are reflected in various works. So, about immigration from Syria, a Green bus written by Jan Dost leaves Aleppo and we can cite Christy Lefteri’s Aleppo beekeeper. From the conflict in Afghanistan, there are Flowers for Ariana by Antonio Pampliega. The Kurdish question is addressed in Behrouz Boochani’s book, No Friend Other Than the Mountains. And the seas as a route of exile, Lawless Oceans and the Mediterranean by Ian Ubina. The Shipwreck of Europe, by Javier de Lucas.
Migration has always been present in our country as a result of the Civil War and immigration to European countries in search of better working conditions in the sixties. However, the current migration most reflected in the literature is from the Maghreb to Europe. Antonio Lozano (1956-2019) was one of the Spanish writers who most explored this phenomenon in his novels: Where the rivers die, My name is Suleimán, a long dream in Tangier and his multi-award winning Harraga. Lozano has always crossed the black novel’s scaffolding with moral, almost philosophical considerations, to raise vital questions about immigration. José María Deira also analyzed these issues with Las espinas del Eden, where he explores the brutal reality for undocumented immigrants in European countries. Andrea Camilleri from Sicily has left us examples of this migration in his different works and has come to define it as the power that turns the wheels of History. Petros Márkaris reflected this in The Death of Ulysses and more specifically in Three Days, where he refers to the forced migration of Greeks in the 20th century. Frenchman Dominique Manotti was caught up in this phenomenon in Black Gold and Marseille 73, where Algerian immigration and racist violence intersect. If the issue is Marseille-centered, we can’t forget Jean-Claude Izzo (1945-2000) and Total Kheops, where he brutally captured the situation:
– Neapolitan is spoken at my house, at Fabio’s. You speak Spanish at home. We are learning English in the classroom. But what are we after all?
“Well, Moors, all is clear,” Manu replied.
Now comes Youssef el Maimouni’s (Ksar el Kebir, 1981) second novel, Nobody Saves the Roses. In it, he uses the murder of Rihanna in the suburbs of Barcelona to rebuild the lives of unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the national territory, and the authorities house them in special centers until the age of sixteen and then leave them to their fate. streets of the city where consumption of thinner and diazepam is the norm for them. In this novel, Mossos d’Esquadra investigate the crime, but they lack clues and receive no cooperation from people who knew the victim. Therefore, Rihanna’s friends Marina and Yusuf embark on a parallel investigation that will take them from Barcelona to Casablanca, and they stay in Tangier, a city they love and hate equally. In these life-rebuilding investigations, surprises abound as they confirm that those in need are invisible, an obstacle, even a scourge. They also present us with a hypocritical and brutal Barcelona, starting with its president, and one of the characters says, “I wonder what it means for him to do ‘everything possible’”.
The summary of this harsh novel is that the lives and deaths of immigrants are “A shitty end to a shitty life” (p. 64).