This essay was first published in German in the Berlin journal Die Politische Meinung (PDF) under the title, Mediterran?: Eine Lebensart und das Phänomen der Entfremdung (“Mediterranean?: A way of life and the phenomenon of alienation”) and later appeared in the English edition of the same journal.
“At my first sight of the Mediterranean world I realized that I had never known light before. I was from the world of darkness. London was not so bad, but the light of the northwest is a very dull light. The light of the Mediterranean held my eyes so I decided to stay for a time.” – Albert Hourani (1915-1993)
Hearing the word “Mediterranean” can elicit metaphors of cruises, golden beaches, lush hills, and succulent cuisines. In fact, follow up Mediterranean by appending the words diet, sunset, and villa, among others, and you have already produced the mental image of a semi paradise on earth. Yet the so-called “Mediterranean lifestyle” is often a highly-charged romanticised product of western consumption habits, holiday brochures, and diaspora musings – with a heavy focus on Greece, Italy, and Spain with the rest of the other Mediterranean countries at times acting as background furniture. The lifestyle is habitually treated as a given – it evacuates economics, class, and gender, and presumes that geography is all that counts. I want to visit this idea of the Mediterranean lifestyle and broaden its meaning, to look at how modern alienation ails the notion of the Mediterranean lifestyle and how we can think of it beyond its olive oil coat of arms.
In the literature and popular culture, the Mediterranean lifestyle is mostly the domain of food consumption, followed by tropes such as laughter, simplicity, passion, pleasure, living the moment, and visiting family and friends. This is not to say that none of these can be true or one does not relate to them on some level, but an idealised Mediterranean lifestyle is a claimant to a shared identity and space which does not necessarily exist for many.
The Mediterranean lifestyle weds a collective imaginary with an individual identity to form outlooks, attitudes, social relations, and possessions. As a key marker of social geography, the sea is an integral piece to the mosaic of personal identity. Inhabitants of the cities dotted around the sea will have some conception of a lifestyle uniquely tied to the sea. This distinguishes their coastal metropolis as different or “privileged” by virtue of being by the water, even if they do not necessarily call it the Mediterranean lifestyle. Sitting on opposite ends of the basin’s shore, a Spaniard in Barcelona and a Palestinian in Gaza would understand the sea differently. It can be a poetical space or a tormenting space, but it can also be one of shared possibilities.
Retrospective of a wonderful sea
Yet it is one of the ironies that a beautiful basin can be made the least economically viable. The story is an all too familiar one. The newly-minted graduate in Alexandria that eats her last seafood meal with loved ones before rushing to catch the train to start her new job in Cairo; the Sicilian youth in Palermo that gives one last glance to the sea before migrating to the affluent north in search for work in landlocked Milan; the underemployed Greek man who leaves his homeland for the colder but prosperous lands of the EU; the young Lebanese woman who has for years worked in Beirut’s culture scene and has decided to leave for Montreal to start her PhD, not only for educational advancement but to acquire a western passport as a form of mobility and partial restitution justice in an unequal world. Over the years, you get the impression that no one seems to want to leave the Mediterranean, but they are given little choice. Short of family connections, viable monetary inheritance, access to meaningful employment, ability to save, marry and buy a home; a growing number choose to abandon a wondrous sea that does not deserve to be abandoned.
Historically, the Mediterranean is not without its darkness. It is the sea that saw millions of deaths and gallons of blood spilled over the centuries through empire building, colonial conquests, pirate raids, and two world wars that turned blue skies into recurring passages of grey. Not to mention today’s refugee who flees political persecution and economic destitution, and dreads the possibility that the sea might become his or her graveyard.
But history is not always a history of sorrow and despair. In the everyday spectrum of life, there was a time when the Mediterranean lifestyle was understood as part of the sacred route by a Muslim pilgrim from Tangiers crossing several cities of the Mediterranean to eventually reach Mecca. The traders from Venice and Damascus that intermingled at the port in Alexandria. The Syrian that decided not to leave Tunis after he married and settled down there. The aspiring scholar on the Libyan coast that goes to Al-Andalus to further their studies.
A distortion of time and space
This is not to engage in a past utopia but to highlight that mobility was much more frequent among key demographics that enabled a holistic approach to the Mediterranean unlike our modern era which is characterised increasingly by forms of alienation. To speak of a vibrant Mediterranean lifestyle today requires some contemplation on the missing human encounters and away from mutant capitalist discourse that treats individuals as commodities zapping between resorts for Instagram shots, and mostly by travellers from the global north.
The alienation, in part, commenced long ago when port cities fell out of fashion with the dramatic reduction in the use of sea travel and the rise of commercial airlines in the mid-twentieth century which meant a person can go from Athens to Cairo, bypassing Alexandria. The once demanding but rhythmic process of departure and arrival across the sea now took on a radical change in which the human being exited the terrestrial order and was now suspended above the sea and moving at high velocity across the skies. Time and space were not only distorted, but the traditional relationship between humans and sea became a form of alienation limited to touching or swimming in the waters of one’s respective city, rather than traversing it. The once familiar homecoming and farewell scenes at ports greatly diminished. Civilian travel by sea was now mostly restricted to trips of limited duration and environmental-destructive cruises.
The 1990s saw the revival of port or second cities, such as Tangiers and Alexandria, that became favourable to neoliberal trade and transnationalism which, unlike capital cities that heavily invested in national culture, favoured cultural experimentation given that it could also be monetised. But this new Mediterranean world fell victim to the Washington Consensus, northern European banks, privatisation, environmental damage, and debilitating strands of neoliberal modernity. The expression “I no longer recognise my city” became a frequent mantra of a new internal exile in the Mediterranean.
The other form of alienation is governed by the visa regimes and passport tyranny, especially for the southern and eastern shores. As I have written before, “no transnational Mediterranean project can materialize when one side faces insurmountable inequalities in partnerships, safety, movement, and engagements.”[1] While I was specifically referring to the notion of a Mediterranean social contract and projects, the absence of equitable passport and visa arrangements still has the effect of skewing lifestyles in the lands of the global south depriving them of meaningful travel, exposure, and growth in their own neighbourhood. This is not only obvious from south to north; an Italian national can visit the entire countries of North Africa and the Levant with little to no effort in terms of no-visa requirement or a cheap visa on arrival. The Egyptian national does not know this world, travel is possible but it comes at a high probable chance of rejection by the consulate. The postcolonial story is one of insecurity even towards fellow global south countries. The end result is that the Italian is able to acquire a developed acquaintance with the region which add layers to his or her understanding of the Mediterranean lifestyle while the Egyptian is trapped in a provincial dimension of what constitutes his or her idea of that lifestyle. The Mediterranean lifestyle is not just a social or economic question, it is in the end, a political one.
Perhaps the Mediterranean lifestyle needs an accompanying conversation on developing a Mediterranean philosophy, one that correlates and thinks with rising political thought and activities through a shared space beyond markets. Activists and organisations are glaringly aware of the inequalities and are endeavouring to revive some sort of philosophy or social contract grounded in human rights, climate change initiatives, backed by the pandemic-induced shunning of long-haul flights in favour of short trips. Yet as someone who has sat through numerous meetings at the institutional level to discuss subjects related to the Mediterranean, I would sometimes wonder where are we going with all this? Gianluca Solera, who has advocated for a “renaissance” of the Mediterranean, argued that institutions with a Mediterranean mandate suffer from “deleterious development ideas, the same void decision-making mechanisms, the same discriminatory interpretation of citizenship, the same lassitude vis-à-vis its founding values would be produced, in the middle of a crisis, which is, before being economic, a political and cultural one.”[2]
“Return to origin” myth
It is heartening that there has been a growing interest in the Mediterranean that has been driven by organisations, cultural currents, universities, and international bodies and this stems from the fact that the Mediterranean sells itself: it is a metaphysical blueprint and socio-geographical crossroads that furnishes centuries of civilisations, scholarship, trade, religions, philosophies, and marriages. In a sense, there is a “return to origin” myth that enchants even the coldest of cold international bureaucracies that deal with the Mediterranean subject. But the question remains, how to readjust the gaze at the sea that is often one of distortion? Exacerbated by the excessive focus on the securitization and the refugee crisis which does little to address the alienation question. A democratic bottom-up approach is needed to marshal the thousands of initiatives that are taking place, stories told to one another, theorizing through the nights, workshops and training, and solidifying grassroots networks across the basin in what Solera has dared to deem a Mediterranean “Shadow-government.” I was at a meeting in Brussels, at the Friends of Europe summit, in 2019 where there was even talk of a “talent passport,” which still came across as problematic, but at least the question of global south mobility was being recognised and was pushed by activists and cultural workers. Still, there is a long way to go, many conversations to be had, and difficult questions to be addressed.
A depoliticised Mediterranean lifestyle should be respected, but we should also allow its political counterpart to show another way out of the alienation abyss. As it stands, the Mediterranean lifestyle is an indeterminate, fluid, and elastic conception that means different things to different people, yet is bounded by the natural demarcations of an ancient sea that sees an overlap of history, trade, tourism, cultural ties, and social justice within wider shared narratives. Despite the region’s cultural richness, the internal exile is a modern phenomenon of our time. Alienation, in the midst of underutilised cultural bonds, is a peculiar aspect of the modern Mediterranean lifestyle.
Passing by the wave breakers on Alexandria’s shore, I came across an impoverished boy gazing longingly at the sea. I asked him his name, he replied “Shaaban,” I followed it up with what his dream was when he became older, “to be a pilot.” I knew everything was stacked against his dream but I still told him “I hope you become a pilot, Inshallah.” He gave a big smile. These little moments in our Mediterranean world still matter.
[1] Amro Ali, “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism.” European Institute of the Mediterranean, Issue 25, Barcelona (2020).
https://www.academia.edu/49551586/Re_envisioning_Civil_Society_and_Social_Movements_in_the_Mediterranean_in_an_Era_of_Techno_Fundamentalism
[2] Gianluca Solera: Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity. Beyond Eurocentrism, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2017.