Migrations And Mirages
Migrations And Mirages

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the relation between the urge to migrate and the lure of a distance that may be a mirage in the sense of an illusion, but may also, like mirages, correspond to something that really exists beyond the horizon – though that horizon may shift constantly. It will do so by drawing on the experiences of the author himself; on a poem by Mariève Rugo, who was born in Bucharest but grew up in New York; on Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Geh, ging, gegangen, which deals with African refugees in Berlin and a retired Classicist professor’s developing relationship with them; and Roberto Rossellini’s film Stromboli – terra di dio, whose protagonist, played by Ingrid Bergman in her first film with Rossellini, marries an inhabitant of the eponymous island in order to escape a displaced persons’ camp, only to find her marriage to be a mirage in both of the senses identified in this abstract’s first sentence, as it takes her to a place of both physical and metaphysical significance.

• Details
• Contents