“Fuel Burns Mixed with Seawater”: The Relationship between the Refugee Tragedy and the Ecological Crisis in the Mediterranean Sea in Khaled Mattawa’s Mare Nostrum (2019)

Abstract

With environmental sustainability gaining more attention in contemporary literature, Arab-American poets have begun to focus on the connection between nature and current Middle Eastern and North African politics. Khaled Mattawa’s fifth collection of poems, Mare Nostrum (2019), discusses the twenty-first-century refugee crisis in the Mediterranean through the effects of economics and environmental destruction on both humans and marine ecosystems alike. This paper aims to examine the Mediterranean migrant tragedy’s entanglement with its ecological crisis in Mattawa’s poems. The study seeks to answer the question: can an analysis of Mare Nostrum (2019) illustrate a parallel between humans’ oppression and the environment? A postcolonial ecocritical lens can explore this connection by looking at the “changing relationship between people, animals, and environment . . . that can be recuperated for anticolonial critique” (Huggan and Tiffin 12). The study’s significance exists in showing the destructive impact of political crises that extend beyond human displacement to become an ecological issue that threatens marine ecosystems. The study’s findings reveal that Mattawa’s poems illustrate that the environmental and humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean is a result of both economic and political instability.