A small rubber dinghy went down in the English Channel in the early hours of November 24, 2021, drowning 27 migrants who were trying to cross over to the UK from France. As the boat started sinking, they kept calling CROSS, France’s regional monitoring and rescue centre in Pas-de-Calais, to ask for their help. But the staff at CROSS decided that the boat was closer to British waters, and told them that the British coast guards would send them help. In the event, neither the British nor the French came to their aid.
After the tragedy, and the consequent media uproar over it, there was an investigation to determine why the naval officer who took the frantic calls did not send out a boat to rescue the drowning migrants. The call recordings revealed that at one point she said, “Don’t you get it? You won’t be saved.”
Small Boat, French author and philosopher Vincent Delecroix’s taut, whiplash of a novella, turns on these true events to present a fierce critique of the moral values of our world, a world that is ever ready to be extravagantly troubled by the suffering of the less fortunate, while doing little to mitigate their distress, or save them, as it were.
The author takes a fictional dive into the mind of the CROSS staffer who is being investigated for dereliction of duty. She is interrogated by a policewoman who happens to look exactly like her, and she realises that her mirror image (perhaps the woman is really her own conscience) is more outraged by the fact that she did not express any empathy towards the plight of the migrants, than by the fact that she failed to send them assistance. She feels that she is being judged for her apparent lack of a moral conscience, a quality she could have claimed if only she had trotted out some banal words of comfort to those terrified migrants instead of telling them brutally that they would not be saved. Because this is exactly how the world redeems itself in its own eyes and convinces itself of its humanity — not by its actions, which are scant, but by its lofty sentiments and its noble outrage.
One question that looms over this compelling, and often harrowing, narrative, is whether the protagonist was infected by society’s casual xenophobia towards migrants. Though this is left unanswered, she is clearly tormented by guilt — she has intermittent visions of bodies floating in odd places. Even so, she wonders why she should be alone in her guilt. Haven’t these migrants, fleeing destruction and deprivation in places like Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, been sinking for a long time, she asks. “Who is banishing them… scattering them across the surface of the earth, and sweeping them towards the sea, where they vanish like dust shaken off the coattails of humanity?”
Translated from French by Helen Stevenson, Small Boat is like an exquisite scalpel slicing through the hypocrisy and moral muddiness of the world that we inhabit. Each of us is culpable when it comes to a human tragedy like this one, suggests the author. We are complicit in both creating the circumstances for it as well as in passively watching it unfold. Can we then claim any moral superiority over the officer whose appalling decision-making resulted in the death of 27 people? In truth, she is nothing but a symbol of our own morally compromised souls — souls that will founder, souls that perhaps will not be saved.
Shuma Raha is a journalist and author
Small Boat
By Vincent Delecroix
Simon & Schuster India
pp. 160; Rs 399