It is as a geographer and ethnographer that Camille Schmoll presents to us, in The Damned of the Sea: Women and Borders in the Mediterranean¹, the details and conclusions of a field survey conducted from 2010 to 2018.

Divided into five chapters comprising between six and twelve entries each, the book draws on individual experiences of crossing the Mediterranean to illustrate the many questions raised by the reception of migrants, and more specifically that of women in Southern Europe. The intimate knowledge of the spaces crossed and the places of transit or confinement gives an indisputable empirical character to the narration of the trajectories, which is why it is difficult to separate, throughout the chapters, experience and commentary, as they combine, challenge and justify each other.².

The researcher's rigor is clearly visible in Camille Schmoll's refusal to be influenced by "currents that designate minority women as irreducibly submissive to a community man perceived as inevitably macho, domineering, imbued with a rape culture. Because these women, far from being the prey of an abstract patriarchy or, worse, "men of their community", are threatened and constantly hindered by policies that contribute to making them inferior and minoritizing them" [164]. Camille Schmoll does not deny being a feminist, however, and defends women's rights, but without giving in to the ease of abusive generalizations that often ignore nuance: "my approach is rooted in a feminism that rejects a version of male domination as transhistorical and prefers to reflect on its variations, its evolutions" [164]. We can only approve of it.

It is therefore more the migration policies, the places where they are embodied – even in the bodies of women – and the hazards, suffering, even torture that the latter undergo in their particular odysseys, which are objectified over the pages as so many borders to pass and surpass within “a broader picture, that of a world of mobilities and relations” [152].

Nevertheless, migrations undertaken by women remain a minority and Camille Schmoll denounces an "illusion of feminization" of migrations by returning, with figures to support her, to the small variation in the percentage between these men and women who have migrated for more than a century. In doing so, she refuses to essentialize migrant women: "This book is therefore not, far from it, the reflection of any migrant condition, nor even of the migrant woman today: the migrant woman does not exist, because migration is a polymorphic process, just as the situation of women in migration is multiple and plural"[152]. To meet her own analytical requirements, Camille Schmoll has therefore gathered factual data from an in-depth field survey she conducted with some eighty women who fled the southern Mediterranean to southern Europe by taking the Strait of Sicily, the "corridor of exiles," risking their lives - a life threatened both by the wrath of the sea and the documented violence of the Libyan coastguard, paradoxically responsible for sea rescues...

Borders and margin

In an in-between of suspended time, devoid of propitious hours, where life tries to continue – or even perpetuate itself – the contours of a labyrinthine landscape of new, undecided borders are drawn, which cross without meeting, interpose themselves via multiple imperceptible breaches, supposedly disappear to better constrain, immaterial but very real; they play on their lability to generate instability, insecurity and precariousness, until ultimately causing flouted intimacy and extimacy a saving moment.

For Camille Schmoll, the notion of margin differs from that of border and must therefore be understood in a political sense – and not in an essentialist or culturalist sense: "the margin in this sense is anything but an archaic or underdeveloped space. The margin is above all for me a rhetorical artifice which allows us to designate all at once, and not always simultaneously, phenomena of spatial peripherality, social and political marginality, marking and transgression of the border" [25]. It therefore does not have the stability of the line that the border can express, but the variability of a gradient.

Between migration policies and the realities experienced by those who experience them, a new field of investigation emerges, which the anthropologist explores through the trajectories and stories entrusted to him by those who, resilient, have tried everything to no longer be reclusive in invisibility.

For migrant women, these margins are a political laboratory. […] In this book, I will describe the margins as sites of intense moral activity, which socialize women into their “subaltern becoming,” but which can also be sites of hope, of the deployment of new solidarities and forms of struggle, in short, of resistance. [26]

Faced with a more repressive immigration policy since 2004, a logic of closure has gradually taken hold, restricting access to visas and indefinitely extending the residence of migrants in detention centers, thereby creating congestion in reception systems and a deterioration in reception conditions.

Julienne, luck, violence

The stories follow one another. First, Julienne's, fleeing a family, a forced marriage punctuated by beatings, during which a "husband" kills her child in her mother's womb, with punches, then pursues her to Mali when, after ten years of marital slavery, she tries to escape him. Then, Algeria, the bus, the Libyans, the rapes, the illness, the wandering... A Ghanaian, ordered to kill her by Libyans, takes pity on her and offers her the freedom to go to sea:

Rescued at sea in a leaking dinghy, which initially held 2016 people, Julienne was taken in by Italians who provided her with hospital care, took her fingerprints, and sent her to Sicily. She received a release permit. So, Rome, then a month in Montpellier begging, then Caen, and a shelter where Julienne volunteered, while waiting for the papers that finally arrived in December XNUMX.

This story sums up the essential question: Why do they leave? For Camille Schmoll, "the reasons that push women to leave are multiple and invite us to radically rethink the overly simplistic oppositions between voluntary and forced migrations, precipitate migrations and premeditated migrations. Rather than opposing motivations, we must instead consider positioning them along a continuum articulating individual and family, political and economic, gendered and non-gendered reasons" [60].

Whatever the reasons for leaving, violence is a constant that imposes itself at every turn along the way.

Fleeing Libya, where migrants are held captive and tortured by the women who employ them as domestic workers, fleeing Eritrea with its unspeakable physical abuse, "the North Korea of ​​East Africa" ​​[60], often condemns migrants to fall into the hands of organizations that live off human trafficking.

The centers, periphery of the margins

But being a refugee in Malta, in one of the detention centers, hardly offers a more cheerful outlook. Camille Schmoll gives an alarming description that raises questions about the lack of regulation and oversight of such establishments:

 At Ponte Galeria, Italy's largest detention center, similar to a maximum-security prison, the bodies are completely visible, day and night, leaving no room for privacy, and the dehumanization is completed by assigning numbers instead of names.

Regardless of the location, hotspots, detention centers, hubs, transit centers, Camille Schmoll tells us that it is the lack of autonomy and privacy that makes the most banal acts—eating, sleeping, washing—the source of violence bordering on sadism, and punishments inflicted without reason—one migrant even telling her that in this place, the boundary between humans and animals had been crossed. Here again, we wonder about the lack of national supervision and evaluation of these centers, which are supposed to help migrants.

Elsewhere, ethnicization is the order of the day, essentializing the migrants back to their culture of origin: "In Castelnuovo di Porto, people spoke of 'ethnicities'. It was thus a question of the Egyptian ethnic group, the Nigerian ethnic group, the Eritrean ethnic group, in a total confusion between nationality, ethnicity and the social construction of 'race'" [107].

Between closed and semi-closed centres, places of deprivation of liberty, and so-called integration centres, which attempt to help migrants find a place in the "host" society, there are emergency reception centres "in a grey area between selection and integration, between rejection and reception" [110], where asylum applications are submitted. And the emergency then turns into an indefinite wait, another form of subjugation, Camille Schmoll tells us.

It also alerts us to the fact that, as the migration crisis intensifies, the creation of centers could become a lucrative opportunity, with some centers being hosted by public structures but having private staff, or even benefiting from ad hoc measures to ensure their profitability:

While the confinement is not total, these centers nevertheless restrict mobility opportunities, often landlocked, even geographically isolated so as not to encourage contact with the outside world. Under the pretext of protection, women are monitored or confined to domestic work under the watchful eye of vigilant housewives.

The digitized body

This is when owning a mobile phone and being able to use the Internet becomes a lifeline that allows us to transform these places of frustration, mortification, and despair, prisoners of a dilated time that no longer counts a single second, into places where resistance can combine with resilience to rebuild an autonomy of life in the digital space.

In the fifth chapter, perhaps the strongest because it brings hope to the hearts of these women, Camille Schmoll chose to show that the process of empowerment is a dialectical process and that "in their quest for autonomy, the women encountered act on three scales in particular: on the scale of the body, on the scale of domestic space, on the scale, potentially global, of digital space. [137]".

The tortured, scarred, raped bodies will try to free themselves from their path of suffering to re-present themselves, re-shape themselves, re-build themselves and give a dignified image of themselves, which is visible to everyone on the networks and shows that in any migration, however unimaginably hard it may be, there remains the hope of self-transformation, of the rehabilitation of the project. A well-framed selfie, in flattering light, a smile, can achieve this.

A regained autonomy then springs from the capacity to reterritorialize oneself in one's own body, so that the portrait that one presents to the whole world on the Internet "is a tool for constructing a renarcissistic self-image" [139].

At the end of this journey, after meeting these women and sharing their difficult journey during the reading, we can no longer be satisfied with random statistics and warnings or warnings. Camille Scholl has managed to take us by the heart as much as by the mind to share with us her own experience of these women's journey and their ultimate quest for visibility in a world that has long preferred to ignore them for comfort and convenience.

The strength of his discourse lies in the rigor of his analysis and in his preservation of a defiance of the times that respects points of view without forcing them to fit into an ideology. It is a feeling of intellectual honesty and reliability of discourse that emerges from this writing that also harmoniously blends narrative, field experience, and research conclusions.

We can only warmly recommend reading The Damned of the Sea, which, in itself, is also a journey to the heart of a very terrestrial host territory, still insufficiently known to the general public, which could arouse or even stimulate ontological questioning in people steeped in certainties. Thank you, Camille Schmoll.