Why Do Thousands Try To Cross the Mediterranean in Flimsy, Crowded Boats?
In 2014 alone, nearly 3,000 people have died while fleeing Africa across the Mediterranean Sea – including some 500 in one incident in September. What reasons motivate so many African migrants to undertake the dangerous crossing to Europe? What ethical questions should inform our responses to patterns of mass migration?
Acclaimed African writer Véronique Tadjo will address those questions in a talk entitled “In Search of a Better Life: The Perils of Hope,” at New College of Florida.
Tadjo will discuss the issue of migration in the context of the Senegalese film “La Pirogue,” which is about a group of people enduring one such Mediterranean crossing in a small boat.
Tadjo’s talk, which is free and open to the public, will be at 6 p.m. Saturday, October 25, 2014, in Chae Auditorium of the Heiser Natural Sciences Center on the New College’s bayfront campus.
Tadjo is professor and head of French and Francophone Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She is a poet and novelist, a public intellectual and critic, a writer of creative nonfiction and children’s literature, and regarded as one of the greatest African francophone authors of our time.
Her most recent book is “Far From My Father,” with an English translation published in 2014. Her previous novel, Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice, was named an NPR Favorite Book of 2010. The original edition in French won the Le Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire. Both books were translated into English by New College Professor of French Amy Baram Reid.
In conjunction with Tadjo’s talk, there will be three free screenings of “La Pirogue,” which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and was a New York Times Critics Choice selection.
The screenings will be:
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 7:30 p.m. – New College, Jane Bancroft Cook Library, Room 248
Thursday, Oct. 23, 11 a.m. – Selby Public Library, Geldbart Auditorium
Thursday, Oct. 23, 7:30 p.m. – New College, Four Winds Café
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