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Abstract

Louis-Philippe Dalembert, a Mauritian writer, published in 2019 his novel Mur Méditerranée that sheds the light on an actual issue: the migration crisis. To write this novel, the author was inspired by a real event that occurred in July 2014: the rescue story of illegal migrants by the Danish oil tanker Torm Lotte. In his novel, Louis-Philippe Dalembert portrays three women: Sembar Eritrean, Chochana the Nigerian, and Dima the Syrian; each of them flees the violence that rages in her country and throws herself into a ship that crosses the Mediterranean and leads migrants to Europe. Dalembert, deeply touched by the tragedy of illegal migration, denounces the brutality of smugglers, pitying the fate of migrants deceived by the European dream. The novel raises the issue of the writer's responsibility in a changing world: what is his purpose from presenting the suffering of passengers in details, the nightmare they endure on one hand and the horror of Mafia who exploit them on the other hand? Does he want to ring alarm bells, or to advice the candidates in exile to stay in their country and save their dignity and their humanity? Does he want to denounce mafia and the discrimination and racism of the extreme right in Europe? In order to answer these questions, we will proceed in a social analysis, as it appears in the novel to study the responsibility of the writer; we will also refer to the functions of language because the transmitted message expresses directly emotional reactions of the narrator, facing the suffering of the passengers, to impose a precise reaction from the receiver of the message, while showing that the act of inscribing this human tragedy into literature makes the characters so close and so human and that social responsibility goes beyond the writer's frame to engage the different actors in society.

Louis-Philippe Dalembert, a Mauritian writer, published in 2019 his novel Mur Méditerranée that sheds the light on an actual issue: the migration crisis. To write this novel, the author was inspired by a real event that occurred in July 2014: the rescue story of illegal migrants by the Danish oil tanker Torm Lotte. In his novel, Louis-Philippe Dalembert portrays three women: Sembar Eritrean, Chochana the Nigerian, and Dima the Syrian; each of them flees the violence that rages in her country and throws herself into a ship that crosses the Mediterranean and leads migrants to Europe. Dalembert, deeply touched by the tragedy of illegal migration, denounces the brutality of smugglers, pitying the fate of migrants deceived by the European dream. The novel raises the issue of the writer's responsibility in a changing world: what is his purpose from presenting the suffering of passengers in details, the nightmare they endure on one hand and the horror of Mafia who exploit them on the other hand? Does he want to ring alarm bells, or to advice the candidates in exile to stay in their country and save their dignity and their humanity? Does he want to denounce mafia and the discrimination and racism of the extreme right in Europe? In order to answer these questions, we will proceed in a social analysis, as it appears in the novel to study the responsibility of the writer; we will also refer to the functions of language because the transmitted message expresses directly emotional reactions of the narrator, facing the suffering of the passengers, to impose a precise reaction from the receiver of the message, while showing that the act of inscribing this human tragedy into literature makes the characters so close and so human and that social responsibility goes beyond the writer's frame to engage the different actors in society.

Keywords

Migration crisis, illegal migrants, violence, social responsibility, Mafias, discrimination, social analysis, language functions, Crise migratoire, migrants clandestins, les violences, responsabilité sociale, les mafieux, la discrimination, l’analyse sociale, la fonction du langage.

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