Who Cares About Ouacil? The Postmortem Itinerary of a Young Border Crosser

Abstract

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in May 2015, two young women walking by a lighthouse in Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the northern shores of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, found the lifeless body of a young man. As the police quickly soon confirmed, the boy had died while trying to jump on a ferry that would take him “to the real Europe” (i.e., the Iberian Peninsula). Using ethnography, this article aims at mapping the afterlives of this dead young man, in their multiple dimensions. It traces the body’s trajectory through the judicial system and bureaucratic registration; it investigates attempts made by various agencies at identifying the corpse and carrying it to its final destination; finally, it analyzes the efforts made to pay him tribute. By tracing the dead boy’s itinerary, this article sheds light on the conflictual interactions between different actors (state and municipal institutions, civil society groups, and migrants themselves) involved in the treatment of deaths at the borders.