Bear with me on this. 

I wanted to do something different, original, for this episode, this milestone of 300. As you will hear in my introduction, I will be releasing seven parts for this, covering numerous themes that I've explored over the past 100 episodes of Last Born In The Wilderness. 

This first part is quite substantial, in and of itself. Weaving together fifteen carefully selected interviews, I present a narrative that conveys one of the most persistent themes of my work: ecological catastrophe, climatological disruption, near-term extinction, ruptures in the life-destroying industrial model, and humanity’s capacity to reclaim our regenerative role—in spite of the outcome.

// Timeline + sources: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/300-1

// Download: https://bit.ly/LBW300-1

// Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness 

// Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

Part One: Mother Earth, In Spite Of Everything

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300 / Part One: Mother Earth, In Spite Of Everything

To the people of the North African Spanish enclave of Ceuta, sub-Saharan migrants arrive in Spain in two ways. Occasionally, they appear on Spanish horizons as starving migrants huddled in rickety boats. Though unwelcome, they are fundamentally seen as poor souls that must be saved from the sea and the ego of populist Mediterranean leaders. More commonly, sub-Saharans try to enter Spain by dramatically assaulting Ceuta’s fortified border with Morocco. While the encounter at sea is conducive to hospitality, land entry induces both migrants and Ceutans to think of themselves as warriors locked in a fatal struggle, where victory can only be achieved by escalating violence. As casualties mount on both sides, the far-right party “Vox” has gained significant ground in Ceuta by championing the next level of escalation: arming the police and deploying the army.

A number of Ceutans, however, have grown restless by how their once prosperous trading town is now shunned as an impoverished fortress, famous only for the bloody tragedies occurring at its gates. This paper focuses on the measures that (some) NGOs, journalists and politicians take to challenge the spectacle of land entry: the beating heart of escalation. Specifically, they seek to retell the narrative of land entry to include tropes more associated with the sea. Their coverage focuses on migrants entangled and “drowning” in barbed wire, helplessly wounded and awaiting medical attention, or in a state of silent shock. Alas, these attempts to recast the “aggressive” migrant into a “meek” one are failing, and Ceutans continue to support policies that wreck their town. I argue that such contradictions can be only explained by foregrounding the material reality of both maritime and terrestrial borders.

Of Iliad and Odyssey: Competing spectacles of migration in a Spanish enclave in Northern Africa

abrahamheinemann

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