46,400 people from sub-Saharan Africa fled to Spain this year alone, 1,000 of whom died.
Photo: Andreas Hedrich/Sebastian Pampuch/Unrast
The colonial world is a world divided into compartments,” wrote Frantz Fanon in 1961 in “The Wretched of the Earth.” In the city of the colonized one is born “somewhere, somehow. You die there somewhere, from something.” Meanwhile, the city of the colonialists is a “stable city, made entirely of stone and iron”.
This city has become larger, because even if Europe no longer officially asserts its power in the colonies, this separation is also noticeable in Europe itself. For example, the tourists of Andalusia and the residents of Senegal are separated by the sea, barbed wire and guns. A holiday on the beach in Andalusia is a holiday in the cemetery of Europe. Lying on the sand where dead people washed up a few hours ago. They were cleared away by the garbage collectors, who otherwise also take the dead fish to the dump.
The white German Guero and the Mexican Carlos are a well-rehearsed team here. Before they get up, they collect dead fish and garbage on the tourist beaches of Andalusia and earn their money with it. On the idyllic beaches the two meander between chauvinistic men’s talk about women and football and philosophical debauchery.
Guero, a stable hippie with dreadlocks and a good pinch of pathos and melancholy, is significantly less detached than his colleague Carlos, who has experienced shootings and drug wars on the border between Mexico and the USA. “How you ultimately die is just a formality,” says Carlos, summing up the topic. “Look, life is like football: sometimes it ends with a nice move, sometimes with a bloody tackle. You have to finish the game, no matter what it looks like. Death means well to us.”
A little later the two find the body of the young Thenga from Senegal on the beach, wearing the shirt of Barca’s number 9 – Ronaldo. While some were betting on matches, the other died in a football jersey. The seagulls circle over the beaches. They also eat at Thenga’s body. It doesn’t take much for Guero to act like a white savior: a good dose of Peyotl (a Mexican cactus that has similar effects to LSD) and he decides not to dispose of the dead man as usual, but to take him out to sea to sail out – on a rickety raft on a deadly escape route. He wants to bring Thenga back to his friends.
The title of this comic story, “Sleeper in the Sand,” is reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “The Sleeper in the Valley,” which portrays a sleeping soldier in a blooming valley at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. The soldier is dead, but nature around him is blooming.
The comic jumps back to when Thenga was still alive and looking for a way to make money every day in Dakar. Sometimes at the fish seller, while wrestling or as a mask carver. Thenga’s father was a fisherman, but since the trawlers have been fishing off everything off the coast of Senegal, the small fishermen have nothing left.
Sebastian Pampuch, the scenarist for this book, studied European ethnology, modern German literature and Spanish and researched the life stories of South African and Malawian freedom fighters who lived in exile in the GDR. His colleague Andreas Hedrich, who was responsible for designing the volume, works as a draftsman, painter and sculptor. As Pampuch explained to the “Tagesspiegel”, her book is intended to be a “committed political comic” that makes use of various genre traditions such as the “surreal travel and adventure story” and the “grotesque”.
In fact, the pictures make it difficult to read. You can’t sit back. The texts and drawings are arranged in a complicated manner. The figures look similar and blur into vibrant color areas. Almost 20 characters are introduced in 90 pages. The situations change quickly and leave no time to take a breath and orientate yourself. This may put readers off, but it may also be the intention that this is not a story to be read, but rather a story that is intended to keep you occupied. Which doesn’t make it easy for European readers in particular to find their way around the many words and Aztec or Baule traditions that are foreign to them.
46,400 people from sub-Saharan Africa fled to Spain this year alone, the majority of them to the Canary Islands, a very dangerous route in the Atlantic. Many others, like Thenga, try to cross the desert to Morocco and from there to Andalusia. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 1,000 people died during the crossing this year. Around 10,000 die every year on the way through the Sahara.
However, “Sleeper in the Sand” is not carried away by pathos or pity. “Lazarus Man,” a song by American folk and jazz guitarist Terry Callier, is about the normality of everyday life, which covers up the horror that drives people to make their way to Europe.
Andreas Hedrich/Sebastian Pampuch: Sleepers in the sand. Unrast, 92 p., br., 16 €.
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