Where is the child? Refugee narratives in contemporary European popular culture

1.1 Border spectacle and border regime

The 2015 refugee crisis, 2015 migrant crisis, or the Syrian refugee crisis, spans a larger period of time than just the year 2015. Following protests during the Arab Spring of 2011, the unrest in Syria steadily developed into an insurgency and later an armed, multisided conflict, which led to increasing numbers of people fleeing that country, especially from 2013 onwards. Merging with other flows from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, which had already been increasing since around 2010, and via a number of routes that did not see such high numbers of irregular migrants before, most notably via Eastern and Central Europe (Zaragoza-Cristiani 2015), the number of people applying for asylum in the EU nearly doubled in 2015, reaching up to 1,3 million persons (d’Haenens and Joris 2019). Most irregular entrances into the EU included a sea crossing via the Mediterranean, and thousands of people did not survive these (UNHCR 2015).

Within the EU, this so-called ‘refugee crisis’ – both words in this term are contested and ideologically loaded – led to a frenzied public debate, with politicians and other opinion makers arguing for or against admitting people into the EU (d’Haenens and Joris 2019). This debate was intertwined with the “border spectacle” (De Genova 2013): a constant stream of “images of vast numbers of refugees on the move, disembarking from boats, being rescued at sea, being detained in camps, or washing up on European shores” in the mass media (Bayraktar 2019: 356). This spectacle, ongoing as of today, is not a mere report on the arrival of irregular migrants: much more, it validates the notion that this arrival is problematic for the EU and those who supposedly belong there, and should therefore be seen as “an ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ that demands immediate intervention and top-down governmental solutions, such as the militarization of borders or deterrence policies” (Bayraktar 2019: 354). Thus, the “border spectacle” naturalises a “border regime” (Bayraktar 2017): the establishment and management of borders between “desirable destinations and undesirable origins” (Peeren 2015: 174). The aim of this regime is to apprehend those who try to cross from the latter into the former, exposing them in order to enable detainment and/or deportation (Peeren 2015). In its turn, this regime, with its monitoring, iron fences, barbed wire, strips of empty no man’s land, leads to images that make up the border spectacle: the dead at sea, masses of people pressed up against ironworks, the despondent waiting to be let in.

Thus, regime and spectacle are tied together in a feedback loop. Within the context of the EU, this feedback loop does not only ensure that actual refugees remain locked out of ‘fortress Europe’. It is also put to work to frame the crisis itself as something ‘not of Europe’, of outside the Union. Whatever is causing the push of the human flow arriving at the gates of the EU, cannot lie within it; and the crisis itself, too, becomes something un-European, brought to the Union by the refugee, “as if s/he is the carrier of a disease called ‘crisis’” (New Keywords Collective, cited in Bayraktar 2017). Of course, that is not how a border works. The border and its regime bring together as much as they keep apart. Although a border is meant to divide what is on either side of it, what lies on one side cannot exist without what lies on the other: whatever is deemed as ‘not of Europe’, can only be that because something else is deemed ‘of Europe’. Ultimately, the EU and its ‘refugee crisis’ are two sides of the same coin (Bayraktar 2017).

1.2 Boundary experiences, narrative working through and cultural aphasia

Binder and Jaworsky (2016) have argued that the border spectacle is experienced as traumatic by many of its European spectators, and the double bind of the border – that it ends up including what it is meant to exclude – may explain why. After all, the EU has carefully self-fashioned a collective European identity as beacon of freedom and enlightenment. This leaves Europeans unable to conceptualise the grim reality of the violence at their borders as an intrinsic part of what Europe is today (Moenandar 2016), but that is exactly what the border spectacle confronts them with: hence the traumatic effect. As such, for the European spectator the confrontation with the images of the border spectacle becomes a boundary experience. This concept from developmental psychology (originally in Bühler 1938) denotes an encounter with a situation, event, notion or person that is perceived as fundamentally different from ourselves (Lengelle and Meijers 2015: 318). In a boundary experience, we are forced to reconsider our sense of identity (Weijers, 2014: 26), as we are confronted with a rupture between what we consider ‘our’ way of being, and what lies beyond it (Lengelle and Meijers 2013: 67). Narrative is often used to make sense of the boundary experience (Lengelle and Meijers 2013: 67), especially because the experience does not only represent a rupture between sameness and difference (Ricoeur 1992), but also creates a rupture between before and after the experience. With the help of narrative, it becomes possible to give meaning to the different actors, actions and events involved in the boundary experience, how they relate to each other, and how they have led to certain outcomes (Moenandar and Huisman 2017: 176–177). The resulting narrative can be used to express a new sense of identity, but can also function as an attempt to resist doing so (Zittoun 2008: 165; Moenandar and Huisman 2017: 179).

This is true as much for personal identities, as it is for collective ones, since “the narrative identity of individuals and communities share a similar structure” (Leichter 2012: 117). Both are the translation of experiences and events into a narrative, which then becomes the foundation for making sense of further experiences and events (Ricoeur 1984). This translation takes place by way of emplotment: ordering experiences and events into a sequence. The resulting plot, and the narrative of which it forms the underlying structure, are characterised by a sense of probability and inevitability (Ricoeur 1984: 41). As a result of this, this narrative becomes the “actual history” of individuals and communities, and constitutes their identity (Ricoeur 1988: 247). Thus, we may expect a community to respond in much the same way to a boundary experience as an individual: by constructing a narrative to work through the rupture and the trauma it entails. This narrative will then shape the collective memory of the boundary experience it recounts. Emplotment is a process that automatically entails selection and manipulation: some events and experiences will be left out, some included; some will be made to ‘fit’ the narrative (Ricoeur 1984). This selection and manipulation may happen consciously, as the collective memory is curated in ideologically motivated ways, but also unconsciously, as some events are not recognised as significant or meaningful; and most often in a mixture of both. Ricoeur stresses that because of this, the narratives which constitute the identity and memory of communities are as much the result of forgetting as of remembering (Ricoeur 2004: 85).

However, mere remembering and forgetting may not suffice when shaping a collective memory, especially when there are traces everywhere of that which cannot be accepted as an intrinsic part of the community’s identity, such as archival evidence or oral histories. The historian Paul Bijl describes, for instance, how, in Dutch collective memory, there is a failure to acknowledge the violent past of the Netherlands as an aggressive coloniser in the former Dutch Indies, now Indonesia. This, Bijl argues, is not a case of forgetting, but of “Orwellian doublethink”: there is no failure to remember, but a failure to properly address what has happened. The Dutch simultaneously “know and do not know about their country’s colonial past” (2015: 442). Bijl calls this “cultural aphasia”: because “Dutch self-fashioning” tends to produce the image of a “small scaled” nation, “consisting of modest mediators that did good works in the margins of the globe”, the Dutch simply lack the “availability of language and possibilities for [the] expression” of its colonial violence (Bijl 2015: 449). Something similar is happening in contemporary Europe, where the border spectacle is not being forgotten or ignored: faced with the rupture between its self-image and the actuality of its border regime, Europe and, especially, the EU, is simply incapable of remembering this crisis as a fundamentally European crisis. As a boundary experience, the confrontation with the border spectacle of the 2015 refugee crisis demands of Europeans that they make sense of it. However, the most obvious way to do so – i. e., acknowledging that the spectacle testifies of how the European border regime did exactly what it was designed to do – will not be readily available to most.

1.3 Scope, methods and aim

In what follows, we will discuss five case studies – two pop songs and their videos, a comic, a rock concert film, and a cartoon – as attempts to make sense of the border spectacle. By doing so, we hope to form an idea of how the boundary experience of the 2015 refugee crisis has been worked through by producers of popular culture. Previous studies have addressed how artworks such as media art installations (Peeren 2015; Bayraktar 2017; Horsti 2019) and essay films (Peeren 2015; Bayraktar 2019) have dealt with this moment in time, often focusing on issues such as the way in which refugees are given voice in such artworks (Horsti 2019), or how visual artworks may negotiate and challenge the global mobility regime (Peeren 2015) and deconstruct the border spectacle (Peeren 2015; Mortensen 2017; Bayraktar 2017; Bayraktar 2019). Other studies have dealt with the depiction of refugees in mass media, often with a focus on the ideological implications of certain common representation strategies (cf, Wilmott 2017 and d’Haenens and Joris 2019 for overviews). Popular culture has received less attention, although specific cases are sometimes discussed in more broadly oriented articles (e. g., Mortensen 2017; Bayraktar 2019). Furthermore, the specific angle of analysing refugee narratives in popular culture as attempts to work through, from a European perspective, the traumatic experience of being confronted with the border spectacle, has been missing so far.

When selecting case studies for this article, we looked for works aimed at broad audiences, made within a European context, and containing refugee narratives. Beyond that, we opted for what could be called ‘convenience sampling’: since it was beyond the scope of the current study to do a thorough and inclusive search for all refugee narratives presented in popular culture in the past seven years and systematically map and analyse these, we gathered our case studies through a quick scan of popular culture, choosing a number of instances that we happened to be aware of and throughout which a number of strands in contemporary perceptions of refugees were addressed.

We will, first of all, analyse these case studies on their own, focusing not only on the narratives presented in the works at hand, but also on accompanying texts such as interviews by their makers and responses on online forums by audiences. However, we will also employ a dialogic approach, where we discuss these cases together as attempts to work through the aforementioned boundary experience. By doing so, we aim to analyse the “negotiation” (Greenblatt 1997) of the 2015 refugee crisis that takes place throughout a variety of visual and lyrical outputs made by commercially successful European artists with a wide reach. Our main interest is how these narratives – intentionally or not – confirm, subvert or elaborate upon (Pieters 2001: 31) the border regime and the border spectacle. This will give us a glimpse of how Europe’s collective memory of the 2015 refugee crisis is taking shape.

2.1 Men at the border

On 27 November, 2015, in the midst of the refugee crisis, British rapper M.I.A. published a video for her song “Borders”. By that time, M.I.A., who is of Tamil descent and who fled the Sri Lankan civil war to the United Kingdom at the age of 11, was at the height of her fame, having scored a number of worldwide hits, and having collaborated with Madonna in 2012 on a hit single and a high-profile performance during the Super Bowl halftime show of 2013. “Borders” featured M.I.A.’s typical stream-of-consciousness lyrics, rapped over rousing beats and somewhat threatening-sounding synthesizer chords. Almost every second line consists of the question “What’s up with that?” It remains ambiguous whether this repeated question is asked with wide-eyed naïveté, or should be interpreted as an angry accusation. Both modes seem to be equally invoked, as the song juxtaposes slang related to social media and its polished identity performance – “queen”, “killing it”, “slaying it”, “being bae” – with descriptions of refugee life – “borders”, “politics”, “broke people”, “boat people”. The implication is that a self-obsessed individualism is making people blind to the plight of refugees. Or, in the rapper’s own words: an “I’dom, me’dom” stands in the way of the “we’dom” that is the prerequisite for a true “freedom” (M.I.A. 2016b).

Figure 1

Still from “Borders” (M.I.A. 2016a).

Figure 2

Still from “Borders” (M.I.A. 2016a).

In the song’s video, directed by M.I.A. herself, the song is accompanied by striking images: large groups of brown men moving forward, climbing high fences crowned with barbed wire (Figure 2), wading through water, or sitting in overcrowded small boats (Figure 4). M.I.A. is the only woman among them, looking in the camera as she delivers her raps, standing on poles carrying surveillance cameras, at times wrapped in a silver and gold hypothermia blanket (M.I.A. 2016a). Although the video was filmed in India, the images would immediately remind its contemporary (European) audience of the refugee crisis around the Mediterranean Sea, since many of these (large groups at the border, fences, hypothermia blankets) had featured heavily in media reports at the time. The video, however, does not merely repeat these media images, but gives them a certain twist. The boats and the men often move in ways reminiscent of military tactical formations, forming, for example, phalanxes, lines or v-formations (e. g., Figure 1) and in a few scenes, the men are dressed uniformly in kaki parkas. Further emphasizing this sense of military order and drill among the large masses, at one point a group of men on a beach forms the shape of a battleship with their bodies (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Still from “Borders” (M.I.A. 2016a).

Figure 4

Still from “Borders” (M.I.A. 2016a).

Of all the examples we will discuss in this article, M.I.A.’s video most directly engages with the border spectacle of the 2015 crisis, during which one of the “dominant trends” in news media was depicting Syrian refugees as “large groups of male refugees at a long distance” (Wilmott 2017: 77). As has been argued in an analysis of this particular type of visual representation in U.K. online media, such visual representations of refugees “create fear” (Wilmott 2017: 77), and gender plays an important role in this: since men are “often associated with violent behavior”, an image of “a group of male migrants [...] effectively visualizes the feeling of threat” (Wilmott 2017: 73). Thus, during the 2015 refugee crisis, such images played an important role in, as it has been called, the “securitization” of refugees: turning them into an existential threat for Europe, and justifying the use of “extraordinaroy measures to combat [that] threat” (Wilmott 2017: 68). M.I.A. seems to undermine this particular securitizing way of representing refugees by turning it up a notch. Irony is the dominant mode of representation here, as so often with M.I.A., who tends to indulge in repeating common stereotypes of the non-Western Other. By amplifying the “feeling of threat” implied in the border spectacle, she again seems to ask: “What’s up with that?”

2.2 Girls in the sea

M.I.A.’s video is an exception to the typical depiction of refugees in popular culture as “powerless of acting and in need of intervention” (Wilmott 2017: 69). This second type of visualisation of refugees, most often in the form of single children or a mother and child, although repeated regularly, was less common in news media during the 2015 refugee crisis (Wilmott 2017: 72). It seems to appeal, however, to producers of popular culture. One striking example is the comic Zenobia (2017) by Morten Dürr (text and story) and Lars Hornemann (illustrations). Originally published in Danish in 2016, the book quickly gained recognition, winning several prizes, including best Danish comic book and best Danish comic book for children of that year. It was translated into ten languages, published in 15 countries, and is regularly read in primary and secondary schools around the world as a lead-in to discussing irregular migration (Dürr 2017; Teachers’ Notes 2019). The comic starts with images of a small, crowded boat, a “clichéd” (Bayraktar 2019: 360) image from the border spectacle. It goes on to zoom in on one small child, a girl called Amina (Figure 5). The boat then capsizes and as she is drowning, the girl has flashbacks to her life in Syria. We read about happier times, when her mother told her about an ancient queen, Zenobia, who she holds up to her daughter as role model. This is embedded in scenes from the Syrian civil war. When supplies run out, Amina’s parents leave the girl to search for food – never to return. The girl then follows an uncle through the war-torn country, attempting to reach safety. With not enough money to pay the passage for the two of them, only Amina can board the small boat. Finally, the comic returns to the girl in the water, as she drifts towards the bottom of the sea where a shipwreck named Zenobia lies.

Figure 5

Spread from Dürr and Hornemann (2016: 6–7).

Figure 6

Spread from Dürr and Hornemann (2016: 14–15).

On online forums, a few readers have expressed unease with the ultimate fate of the girl, with one person calling the comic “bleak”, offering “no hint of hope”. The overwhelming majority, however, is deeply moved by the comic, calling it, for instance, “[b]eautiful, but heart-breaking”. Although people are shocked by the fact that the girl drowns at the end, they feel this is a story that must be told to raise awareness for the plight of refugees, as it “brings home and personalizes the news we all read every day about” (Goodreads n.d.). What Dürr and Hornemann seem to have tapped into with their comic, is the fact that “children are innocent by cultural definition and function as the ultimate compassion magnets”. Just like “immigrant rights groups [that] use children of immigrants for their campaigns”, Zenobia’s harrowing story is aimed at evoking empathy (Binder and Jaworsky 2018: 6).

Another instance of this trope of the innocent child can be found in the 2019 song “The Forgotten Child” and its video by the Pet Shop Boys, an electronic pop band mostly known for their string of hits in the 1980 s and 1990 s. The video is a so-called “lyric video” in which the focus lies on the words of the song. It consists of a short video loop of waves breaking on a beach, treated to resemble an old, damaged home-video, with the lyrics of the song superimposed over it. The song starts as an electronic ballad, with lush synthesised string orchestrations that create a yearning, sad atmosphere. An unnamed we-narrator tells the story of, as the band’s singer and lyricist put it in an interview, “a refugee who’s gone missing while fleeing for safety with her family” (cited in Heath and Pet Shop Boys, 2019: 59). We give the lyrics in full:

Where is the child?

Does anyone know?

She’s been forgotten

When did she go?

The times are brutal

Borders are crossed

Where is the child?

The child is lost

Where is the child?

Someone must know

Who saw her last?

Why did she go?

We were under attack

reaching rock-bottom

That was our focus

The child was forgotten

It’s an open secret

we spread and react

and if it’s not true

then the rumour’s a fact

Although she may have been

sometimes forgotten

there’s no suggestion

she was misbegotten

She was our reason

our religion our cause

our best excuse for emergency laws

Invoked so often

to explain and subdue

the forgotten child

from whom we all grew

Child of our nation

our icon our future

gone from our records

on no computer

The times are brutal

Borders are crossed

I think she took flight

And now we’re all lost

Where is the child?

Where is the child?

The times are brutal

Borders are crossed

Where is the child?

The child is lost

(as printed in Heath and Pet Shop Boys, 2019: 59)

First a global situation is sketched: we live in “brutal times”. Then, zooming in as it were, a more specific setting is given: a country at war, where the situation has become unliveable. In that chaos, “[t]he child was forgotten”. Looking back from a point later in time, the narrator seems eager to stress that the child was much beloved, but that does not change the fact that she is now “lost”. Like in M.I.A.’s “Borders”, a single question keeps returning, as the narrator asks: “Where is the child?” – over and over again, more frequently than shown in the printed lyrics. This creates a strong sense of distress, and although there is the expectation that “someone must know” of the child’s whereabouts, one senses that “the child” is in grave peril, or even dead. After five verses, the song shifts mood. The lush string synthesizers remain, but more emphasized percussion is added, as well as an almost alarm-like synthesizer riff, which creates a feeling of urgency and despair, as if time is running out. This instrumental part goes on for about two minutes, after which the song’s outro is again much quieter and returns to the question, which is sung several more times, buried more deeply in the mix, as if the asking is slowly fading, the child now becoming truly forgotten. As the music fades as well, the sound of breaking waves can shortly be heard before the song ends.

Published four years after the 2015 refugee crisis, the song will still have reminded many of that moment in time. One commenter writing underneath the video on Youtube called the song and video “an ode to all the refugee children lost at sea” (Pet Shop Boys 2019). Another wrote: “The background images of the waves at the shore instantly reminded me of that sad and iconic picture of the dead child that was washed upon the Turkish Mediterranean shore in 2015” (Pet Shop Boys 2019). More commenters came to that conclusion, referring to the infamous case of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who had died while attempting to cross the sea between Turkey to Greece by boat. Photographs of the deceased boy on a Greek beach, taken on September 2, 2015, had been spread rapidly through official news organisations on websites and frontpages of newspapers, as well as through social media, and for many had become an “iconic representation of Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’” (Binder and Jaworsky 2017).

The Pet Shop Boys’ lyrics are quite multi-layered, and the precise point of view represented by the we-narrator remains unclear. Beside a more symbolic reading in which the child symbolises the human condition in which growing up means losing one’s innocence, one’s ‘inner child’, so to speak, more specific interpretations are being teased out as well. At times, we seem to be dealing with relatives of the forgotten child, searching for her. At other moments in the lyrics, however, this “we” seem to yield power, declaring “emergency laws” that supposedly are meant to protect the child, yet end up subduing her. At this point in the song, this could refer to the regime in the country at war that the child is fleeing from – which would make them the very reason she has to take flight – but “we” could now just as well be interpreted as those in power in Europe, overwhelmed by the influx of refugees, who put in place a border regime to stem the human flow, thereby causing her disappearance and probable death.

Mostly, however, “The Forgotten Child”, just like Zenobia, presents a narrative “that singles out a specific person’s condition as a figurative and literal embodiment of the gravity or intensity of the suffering caused by a humanitarian crisis” (Kurasawa 2012: 72). In real life, that was precisely what the Alan Kurdi photographs did for many, as they “galvanized public support for those seeking refuge from the war‐torn country” (Binder and Jaworski 2019). Summarizing previous research, Binder and Jaworski (2019) discuss a number of reasons for why specifically these photographs had this effect. There is the visual ambiguity: at first sight, this could just as well be a picture of a sleeping boy, thus making the picture more shocking – especially because many parents will have seen their own children at rest in a similar pose. A pose, moreover, reminiscent of that of sleeping putti (childlike angels) that is a recurrent motif in Western, Christian art, symbolising innocence, facilitating a strong resonance among Western audiences. The location of the beach has been mentioned as a factor too, a place where children are normally at play – again, parents who in September had only recently returned from their summer vacations might have been reminded of their own children. There is also the fact that the boy was fairly white-skinned and wore Western-style clothing, making it less easy to frame him as ‘not of Europe’ (note the stark contrast with the men in M.I.A.’s video). As such, the confrontation with the Alan Kurdi photographs was probably, for many Europeans, the most poignant instance of the boundary experience that we discussed earlier. This may explain why so many artists have created work referring to these photographs: they are attempts to, as we called it above, work through that experience (Ryan 2015: 44; Binder and Jaworski 2019).

Figure 7

Still from Us+Them (Waters 2020).

Figure 8

Still from Us+Them (Waters 2020).

A third example from the field of popular music of the suffering, innocent child as a main protagonist in a refugee narrative can be found in the 2019 concert film Us+Them by Roger Waters. Waters, who gained fame as a member of Pink Floyd, a prominent rock band since the 1960 s, had staged several grandiose world tours since 1999, the fourth of which is recorded here. The film, directed by director Sean Evans and Waters himself, shows him and his band playing mostly well-known songs from Pink Floyd’s back-catalogue at a concert hall in Amsterdam in 2018. Unusual for such a film, images of the musicians performing in front of nearly 60.000 elated spectators are interspersed with clips that tell, as an accompanying booklet informs us, “the story of a Middle Eastern woman [...], abandoning her past and her family, with hopes of a better existence” (Grow 2020: 2). An important role is given to the woman’s daughter, who is fleeing alongside her. There are striking similarities between Roger Waters’ concert film and Zenobia, such as scenes of the mother and daughter cooking, and images that focus on the young girl’s hair spreading in the water as she is drowning. Although these clips are part of a larger spectacle in which many more contemporary issues are taken up, such as the Palestinian intifada, the Trump presidency and the war in Iraq (with images referring, for instance, to the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse), the refugee narrative is given the most focus.

The effect is sometimes jarring. As Waters and his band clearly enjoy themselves playing these often rousing, well-known songs, and as the crowd cheers them on (Figure 7), the images of, for instance, a group of desperate refugees running towards the sea with a small boat (Figure 8), do not always seem fitting. As with all case studies so far, the sea is a recurring visual motif: there are images of waves breaking on the beach; short clips of the young girl floating face down in the water, her hair spreading around her; and images of the girl’s doll lying on the beach. The suggestion seems to be that the girl has died on her way to Europe. Unlike Zenobia and “The Forgotten Child”, however, Us+Them also explores who is to blame for this situation. As the booklet states, the mother is fleeing “the tyranny of her homeland” (Grow 2020: 2) and in the film much is made of the destruction and anxiety that they are facing because of soldiers with drones bombing their neighbourhood. It is made abundantly clear, for instance by zooming in on the flags on their uniforms, that these are American soldiers.

Figure 9

Still from Us+Them (Waters 2020).

Even though Alan Kurdi is not directly referenced in this concert film, just as with “The Forgotten Child” and Zenobia, its audience will for the most part have been reminded of those iconic photographs. Arguably, the Alan Kurdi photographs most poignantly presented inhabitants of the EU with the aforementioned boundary experience during the 2022 refugee crisis, and these works can therefore be seen as attempts to work through this by way of emplotment. In this light, it is significant that as the credits roll, Us+Them ends with images of the child joining her mother sitting on the beach (Figure 8). This seems to conflict with the earlier suggestion that the girl had died and poses the question whether these images are a dream, a memory, or an unexpected happy end. In any case, this is part of a trend, in which artistic appropriations of the Kurdi photographs portray the boy with angel wings, or simply playing on the beach or sleeping in his bed, an attempt to show, as Mortensen (2017) argued, “what the world could and should be”. As such, they have a “therapeutic” effect for those for whom seeing the original photographs was a “traumatic experience” (Binder and Jaworsky 2017: 8). Something similar seems to be the case with this ending to Us+Them: it offers the audience closure. In the accompanying booklet, the effect of the refugee narrative is described as follows: “The audience are clearly affected, during the movie you can sometimes see them moved to tears, overcome with emotion as they sing along”. Yet, towards the end of the concert, after the film gives way to a spectacle of lasers and stage lightning, “the crowd is transported, everyone feeling good” (Grow 2020: 4). If that seems a problematic response to a story about the death of a small girl, the suggestion that the child has survived somewhat validates it.

Zenobia and “The Forgotten Child”, which contain a more or less similar narrative, withhold this comfort of closure, something that one of the authors of the comic has reflected upon: “Originally we had the main character, Amina, be rescued by divers. [...] After a long while we had to abandon this plan. It did not feel right” (Teachers’ Notes 2019: 5). Similarly, the Pet Shop Boys song ends with that mournful question – “Where is the child?” – instead of Waters’ seemingly clear answer: safe by her mother’s side. The tendency to give clear answers – about the child’s whereabouts and the reasons why she had to flee – also sets Waters’ film apart from M.I.A.’s “Borders”, which like “The Forgotten Child”, sticks to bemused questions about border spectacle and border regime.

However, what Us+Them shares with Zenobia and “The Forgotten Child” is that, as a narrative attempt to work through the 2015 refugee crisis from a European perspective, it seems to be grappling with how “the Mediterranean has been transformed into a fatal space for those attempting to cross the sea without documents” (Bayraktar 2019: 354). While doing so, all three works remain more or less aphasic about the fact that this is, fundamentally, a European issue. Again, “Borders” offers a radically different approach: with its multiple images of men standing on and climbing fences, watched by security cameras, that video leaves no doubt about what is forcing refugees to take to the sea on crowded boats. In the other works, however, if little girls drown, disappear, or are at risk of doing so, this is not, or at least not explicitly, so because of European border regimes, and their “illegalization of migration” that have created this “extremely dangerous, even lethal, border zone” (Bayraktar 2019: 362). The Pet Shop Boys’ lyrics come closest to acknowledging at least some blame by suggesting that our – i. e., European – “emergency laws” caused the child’s disappearance, but this is only one possible interpretation. In Us+Them, the blame is solely put on tyranny at home and American drones.

Another shared aspect of Zenobia, “The Forgotten Child” and Us+Them, is the protagonist’s gender, which upon reflection becomes somewhat peculiar: if the most famous real-life example of a child drowning during the 2015 refugee crisis is that of a boy, and if it seems almost inconceivable that the makers of these works did not think of Alan Kurdi, just like their audiences cannot but be reminded of those photographs, then why do we only find narratives about drowning girls here? The obvious explanation is that to make the child at risk a girl heightens the sense that we are dealing with an innocent victim even more. Whether the makers of these works did so consciously or unconsciously, they thereby implicitly testify of what M.I.A.’s video explicitly addresses: Europe’s angst vis à vis immigrant men. Apparently, even a refugee boy is not as innocent as a refugee girl – the former may, after all, grow up to become a refugee man. Which brings us to our next example.

2.3 Boys growing up

In January 2016, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published the following cartoon:

Figure 10

Riss, “Migrants”, Charlie Hebdo, 13 January 2016.

The drawing in the circle (top left) reprises the shocking image of Alan Kurdi, which – as discussed above – had received global media attention in the previous months. The caption next to the child’s body reads: “What would have become of little Aylan, if only he had a chance to grow up?” (the spelling Aylan was initially the predominant one in international media). The question is promptly answered by the bigger caption in the lower section of the cartoon: “Ass groper in Germany”. This latter line refers to the 2015–2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Germany, when multiple cases of sexual assault were registered, with many of the alleged perpetrators being identified as migrants. In short, the cartoon juxtaposes two highly mediatized events related to migration, which triggered opposite responses on the part of the public – grief and sympathy in the case of Alan Kurdi, widespread indignation and xenophobia in the case of the sexual assaults in Germany.

Despite their differences, the examples discussed in the previous sections ultimately share the same goal – namely to promote empathy towards refugees, as opposed to Europe’s indifferent or securitizing attitude regarding their plights. As argued in Section 2.1, M.I.A.’s song does so by ironically criticizing the widespread perception of “large groups of male refugees” as a threat; the narratives analyzed in Section 2.2, instead, take a complementary stance by focusing on children refugees as powerless victims. In all of these cases, however, the two dimensions evoked above – adult refugees as a threat vs children refugees as victims – remain separate, with the latter often being mobilized as an antidote to the former. In contrast to that, Riss’s cartoon presents these two dimensions as deeply interconnected, thus reflecting on their hypocritical coexistence in the European border spectacle.

Before reflecting on the possible meaning of this shocking combination, it is worth noting that cartoons can typically be seen as generators of “implied narratives” (Fludernik 2015) based on what is known in humor studies as “script opposition”. This latter notion comes from the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) – which was originally proposed by linguists Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin with specific regard to jokes, and later extended to various forms of non-verbal or multimodal humor as well (Attardo 2017; Tsakona 2009). The GTVH defines script opposition as a combination of ideas or semantic frames that are usually considered mutually incongruous in a given cultural context. In successful cases of humorous communication, humor (whether light-hearted, dark, sarcastic or absurdist) usually results from a process of incongruity resolution, through which the reader understands the “point” behind the blending or juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scripts. In the Charlie Hebdo example under discussion, the two scripts are clearly foregrounded by the visual structure of the cartoon – in the upper section, the reference to Alan Kurdi activates the “refugees/migrants as victims” script; the image and caption in the lower section, instead, evoke the “refugees/migrants as a threat” script. But what is the point underlying this incongruous juxtaposition?

In the weeks following the publication of the cartoon, several commentators condemned Riss’ work as outright xenophobic, and as a despicable mockery of Alan Kurdi’s tragedy (Allegretti 2016; Freedland 2016). Nevertheless, the cartoonist’s intent – whether successful or not – was exactly the opposite. A first hint in this latter direction can be found in a self-commentary by another Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, namely Luz, regarding an earlier controversial cartoon depicting Alan Kurdi next to a giant McDonald’s billboard: “In the drawing, Alan is only sketched; only his posture allows us to recognize him. After several days with his image burned in our retinas, the drawing offers a rather healthy distance” (Luz 2015; italics are ours). The “healthy distance” evoked by Luz seems particularly akin to what literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky famously defined as defamiliarization (ostranenie) – namely the process through which art can disrupt habitual patterns of thought, thereby shaking us from the state of automatism and indifference governing our everyday lives:

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. [...] The process of “algebrization”, the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. [...] And art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. (Shklovsky 1965[1917]: 11)

Through its widespread circulation as an “icon” of the refugee crisis (Mortensen 2017), the picture of Alan Kurdi soon became the object of what Shklovsky described as “habitualization”. In other words, the shock value of the image was diluted by overexposure; rather than prompting a collective reflection on the responsibilities of the border regime, the Kurdi icon became the vehicle of an automatic (and deresponsibilizing) repetition of the border spectacle as an inevitable tragedy, where the EU can only be a passive – if sympathetic – spectator. This lack of critical self-reflection might contribute to explaining why, despite the “public outpouring of grief” and the pervasive circulation of positive humanitarian stories after the publication of Kurdi’s photographs, the general attitude and policies in the EU toward refugees remained largely unaffected (Mortensen 2017: 1156). This, by the way, also offers another possible interpretation of the fact that the titular child in the Pet Shop Boys song is “forgotten”.

In any case, looked at from this perspective, the intent of Riss’ cartoon becomes clearer – namely to denounce the hypocrisy of mainstream European attitudes towards the refugee crisis, where the predominant perception of adult male refugees as a threat can coexist with the emotional reactions to the plights of children refugees such as Alan Kurdi, or the fictional girls of the narratives discussed in the previous section. That the choice of gender of the protagonists of the latter narratives can be seen as an attempt to amplify their innocence and thereby make them even more unproblematic for European audiences than the photograph they are (partly) a response to, becomes clear when we put them alongside Riss’ cartoon. Through his shocking use of dark humor, Riss is exposing the limitations of the kind of superficial empathy that might be triggered by the narratives analysed in 2.2. The way in which he does so resonates with arguments presented by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy:

Empathy is like a spotlight directing attention and aid to where it’s needed. But spotlights have a narrow focus, and this is one problem with empathy. [...] Further, spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases. [...] It’s far easier to empathize with those who are close to us, those who are similar to us, and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary. [...] Empathy is limited as well in that it focuses on specific individuals. Its spotlight nature renders it innumerate and myopic: It doesn’t resonate properly to the effects of our actions on groups of people. (Bloom 2016: 31)

Bloom’s skepticism finds confirmation in the mainstream reception and circulation of the Alan Kurdi icon – as mentioned above, Europe’s collective grief at the publication of the photographs was definitely facilitated by the fact that the child was seen as “similar to us”, and did not lead to any consequential reflection on “the effects of our actions [i. e., Europe’s border regime] on groups of people”. As argued by Megan Boler two decades before Bloom, “passive empathy produces no action towards justice but situates the powerful Western eye/I as the judging subject, never called upon to cast her gaze at her own reflection. [It] motivates no consequent reflection or action [...]. Let off the hook, we are free to move on to the next consumption” (Boler 1997: 259–261).

But how can Europe effectively change its automatized perspective on the border spectacle/regime, if even the emotional connection secured by empathy falls short of this task? As suggested by Persson and Savulescu in a response to Bloom’s book, the answer might not lie in doing away with empathy altogether, but rather in moving from spontaneous (superficial) empathy to reflective empathy:

By means of our reason we can counteract the fact that our empathy is spatio-temporally biased, unjustifiably discriminatory, and innumerate, and develop a more reflective empathy, though we would be hard put to overcome completely these shortcomings of our spontaneous empathy. Such a reflective empathy would motivate a correspondingly more reflective and justifiable altruistic concern. (Persson and Savulescu 2018: 188)

By defamiliarizing the Alan Kurdi icon, Riss’ cartoon aims to expose the neglected links between the border spectacle and the border regime – thereby prompting a shift from short-lived emotional engagement to deeper, and possibly more consequential, forms of reflective empathy. To be sure, this ambiguous use of dark humor can be particularly risky, as it might end up reinforcing the bigotry and hypocrisy that it seeks to denounce. The appropriateness and effectiveness of Charlie Hebdo’s strategy cannot be properly assessed here, as that would also require a larger-scale empirical approach exceeding the goals of this paper. However, the “Migrants” cartoon represents an original reflection on the dangers of passive empathy, and on the often-overlooked complementarity between securitizing and humanitarian narratives on the refugee crisis.