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Paper short abstract

The paper examines how the violent sensory conditions of the sea crossing shape West African migrants’ bodily experience at sea. Grounded in theories of embodied space, it shows how the sea’s physical impacts produce bodily knowledge of life and death.

Paper long abstract

The sea is an environment that acts directly on the human body, and the vessel used for its crossing shapes the entire sensory experience. In this paper, I examine how the sensory encounter with the violent maritime environment affects West African migrants during their journey to Spain and continues to influence them after arrival.

The paper is grounded in the theories of embodied space, which offer a framework for understanding how place is made through bodily experience and perception (Low 2009; 2017). Experience is embedded in space and place, emerging through sensorial and phenomenological engagement and through “the creation of place through the body’s spatial orientation and movement” (Low & Lawrence‑Zúñiga 2003).

Migrants navigate and live through the violence of the sea through sensory extremes: the smell of the deceased, the screams and cries of others, bodily stiffness, sleeplessness, and the sight of a horizon devoid of land. Conflicting physiological stimuli leads to seasickness, as the instability of the visual horizon and overstimulation of the inner ear produce nausea and vomiting (Golden & Tipton 2002). Scarcity of food and water, and eventually drinking seawater, intensifies seasickness, and the bodily impact of the sea makes survival on the boat extremely difficult.

The paper concludes that a sensory perspective on the sea crossing shows that the life‑threatening journey at sea is a bodily experience that can constitute knowledge of one’s own mortality as well as of the deaths of others.