words by Heidi Kewin
As a 22-year-old Gambian refugee named Pateh Sabally drowned in a Venetian canal in 2017, bystanders filmed him, shouted insults and stayed on shore. “African” and “Go on, go back home” can be heard in the now removed footage. It was alleged that three life-rings were thrown into the water for Pateh, but he did not appear to reach for them, giving the impression that he wanted to end his own life. No one jumped in to help.
I for one had never heard of Pateh Sabally’s death until reading Venice Requiem by Khalid Lyamlahy (translated into English by Ros Schwartz) and, after reading it, I found that what is most shocking is not what happened, but how quickly it vanished – little sustained coverage, no public reckoning; a memory. The novel opens up in the shadow of this embarrassing absence, stressing the importance of writing against forgetting, against this ease with which a life can slip out of view when it doesn’t fit into Europe’s preferred narratives about migration, refugee statuses, and government responsibility. Lyamlahy refuses to let this be the end of Pateh’s story:
I’m determined to write, but I already know that no book will suffice to tell the full story, to do justice to your death.
Venice Requiem is a slender, meditative novel of just over a hundred pages, but it sits heavily. The author’s ambition to get inside the mind of Pateh feels almost mystical, as if the act of addressing Pateh directly could somehow pull him back into the world of the living. These early pages feel like a letter: personal, searching, insisting. No book will ever be ‘enough’ to honour a life or explain a death such as this, and this honesty becomes the book’s guiding force. It is a fascinating concoction of reconstruction and restraint: Lyamlahy is aware of how little can truly be known, yet he is compelled to keep searching. The writing moves incredibly slowly, deliberately so, drifting between memory, imagination, grief, confusion and anger. It is an intentional slowness: this is a story that is meant to be uncomfortable, as if Lyamlahy himself is directly telling us to feel the shame that a fellow human died in the middle of a city and nothing, in the end, changed. This is a story that the world rushed past, and the book insists that we sit with that instead.
Rather than turning Pateh into a symbol, a warning or a headline, the author circles his story gently, drawing concentric circles around what happened. We see fragments of the precarious journey that may have brought him to Venice: the noise of trains, the blur of strangers on platforms, the exhaustion, the private moments. There are no answers as to why, just a feeling that someone is finally paying attention.
What exactly are you doing here? What are you looking for? Venice whispers that you’re not welcome. But who is truly welcome?
Pateh’s place of death itself, Venice,is both heartbreakingly beautiful and morally hollow. The city is drenched in Catholic history, but the care that this history promises is nowhere to be found in the moment Pateh needs it. There is a considerable tension between Venice’s religious grandeur and the profound loneliness that he carried. He moves through a city surrounded by symbols of salvation, with Lyamlahy recounting how Pateh would have walked past paintings of Christ in and around the train station as he arrived in Venice, yet no one saved him. What is this history worth if it offers no protection to the living?
I have this compulsion to dwell on the images and to speculate on the meaning of your departure, on the things that you took with you and those you gave to your loved ones.
Streams of tourists pose for photos along the canal streets, punters speak of the city’s rich history, and people chase perfect angles for light on the water. Among them is Pateh, lifeless, hopeless, restless, contemplating the very last seconds before he plunges into the river. Who does this place welcome, and who does it reject?
The city’s famous canals activate a larger metaphor for Lyamlahy: borders, the water where he died, the rivers of his homeland, the line between here and there, citizen and stranger, seen and unseen, enough and yet not worthy of saving:
According to a few eyewitnesses, you made what looked like a final gesture in trying to grab one of the lifebelts. Your left or right arm outstretched to seize the last object that could have kept you alive or at least offered you a little respite. Some wondered why your attempt was so feeble and half-hearted. They even saw it as a form of indecisiveness. They’re forgetting that your body is now frozen stiff, that the first shivers have given way to slow, halting, breathing, that your fingers have turned blue, your ribcage has suddenly contracted, your pulse is more irregular than ever and you are perhaps beginning to feel drowsy, a sort of general wooziness that’s spreading like an unstoppable tumour, hampering your final reflexes.
Windows appear again and again in the narrative – apertures through which the world is observed. What do we look at, what do we look through, and what do we pretend we don’t see at all? These questions are all magnificently strung together, refuting even the description on the back of my copy of the book: “The cultural importance of Venice from an African point of view”. Such a summary feels dangerously antiseptic, missing the tragedy entirely. This is an examination of the importance of an African life from the point of view of Venice. To misread this as a book about a city is to look away from its central pulse. It is, instead, a devastating text about the mechanics of survival, the politics of migration, and the radical necessity of care and love in a landscape that offers neither.
In a photo taken in Pozzallo in March 2020, five refugees wait in line behind a metal barrier. Two Italian security guards stand nearby. The five men are wearing identical flip-flops and are gazing in different directions. I focus on the fourth man. His left hand is placed on his chest. In his right, he holds a piece of paper on which I can read what looks like an identification number: 43/C. No surname. No first name. Identity suppressed. How many transparent, flimsy lives are thus abbreviated on scraps of paper?
We quickly learn, unsurprisingly, that Pateh’s story is not an isolated case. Lyamlahy writes of lives that are “shut out of sight in a drawer of statistics”, blunt and clear. Why is it that some deaths receive national outrage while others pass unnoticed? Why do certain bodies provoke sympathy and others suspicion? Why does proximity – a canal in the centre of a global tourist city – still fail to compel intervention? These are raw thoughts, ones that should’ve already been asked, but that possess a never ending chain of dissatisfactory answers, each tugging at the frayed edges of Europe’s conscience. Europe is shown to have this flickering instability of hospitality – accepting refugees then refusing them, expressing solidarity then retreating from it. Lyamlay collects these contradictions and allows the reader to feel the whiplash of a continent that cannot decide who deserves safety and who is deemed an inconvenience. The river is a symbol of memory and erasure. To drift through Venice as a tourist or resident is to travel through stories that ended before they had the chance to begin.
But Lyamlahy also nods to the long standing fear that Venice itself may one day slip underwater. The city’s physical vulnerability becomes an ironic counterpoint to its emotional impermeability, a place threatened by tides yet unmoved by the suffering in its own canals.
You, the young African, the exile from Gambia, the refugee from Pozzallo, the lone traveller from Milan, the man with the backpack arriving in Venice: now you are alone in front of the greenish waters of the lagoon. A solitary figure feeling removed, separated, eradicated.
Ultimately and understandably, this book cannot save Pateh Sabally, but in writing this requiem Lyamlahy retrieves a name from the drawer of statistics, a monument in its own right to a life that mattered, even if the world realised it too late. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the world watches Venice with bated breath, terrified that rising sea levels will one day swallow its palaces and piazzas. We mourn the potential loss of stone and canvas while actual lives are dissolving in the very same waters. Venice Requiem is a corrective to this hierarchy of grief. Lyamlahy demands that we stop looking at the architecture, long enough to see the human being struggling for breath in the canal. The city may be sinking, but it is the indifference of Europe that is truly hitting bottom.
Pateh Sabally
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Heidi Kewin is the Founding Editor-in-Chief and an occasional writer for Zimmer Magazine. Alongside, she works as a photographer, graphic designer and a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teacher to Ukrainian refugees. She is in her third year of a Bachelor’s degree in English and Related Literature at the University of York and is eagerly awaiting acceptance into a master’s program. You can contact Heidi to discuss Zimmer at heidi[at]zimmermagazine.com