autumnstated

[autumnstated]

Small Boat: Morality and the Migrant Crisis

Rating: 3.5 stars

Recommend: Yes

Are we all complicit in watching the "spectacle of suffering?"

Such is the question Vincent Delacroix raises in Small Boat, in which the desensitized narrator argues that the drowning of migrants on a small boat was the result of a long series of events that just happened to end with her negligence.

The police investigator and the media alike are quick to call the narrator "evil," and try to file away her actions as an independent anomaly stemming from personal trauma, rather than a manifestation of the corporate-instilled numbness instilled by her job—which seemingly would put all of humanity at blame for what happened, rather than just the narrator herself. 

However, the impact of this message is limited by Delacroix's failure to examine the role of individuals within larger immoral structural systems. He never goes into depth about what exactly causes the migrants to risk their lives on these small boats—or what causes them to have "sunk long before they sank" in the sea, as the narrator put it. At one point in defense of her actions, the narrator shallowly justifies herself by saying that most people do not care about "the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan," which could have been what Delacroix was considering. Part II of the book is entirely dedicated to the migrant perspectives, making it the optimal place to explain the factors that push migrants northward. And yet, rather than describing what life was like in their home countries, he focuses on vague racial descriptions of their appearances and recounts their panicked drowning. 

A potential reason why Delacroix does not deeply examine why migrants risk the journey could be because he wants to focus on how we react to suffering, rather than explore why it happens. Additionally, the vagueness of the portrayal of the migrants in Part II might be intentional, to reflect their erasure in the west, or to universalize migrant suffering in general.

However, the focus on the Western gaze is nothing new. And if Delacroix was going to come at this moral conversation from a Western perspective, why create a migrant perspective in Part II at all? Why add to the supposed suffering fantasy that the narrator calls the police investigator and the media out for having? Overall, while Delacroix's argument on the collective nature of individual moral failure is rooted in the negligence upheld by the systematic framework, his argument falls short because it lacks a dissection of what this structure consists of. To provide a few examples, the book would have benefitted from naming and describing historic colonial legacies, policy consequences, and economic exploitation. 

There are many broader themes and concepts from this book—banality of evil, empathy versus apathy, the definition of morality, and more. Although it falls short of examining the underlying systematic causes of the migrant crisis at the heart of the conflict, it's worth the read for its reflective messaging.