‘You Will Die at Sea’: dying with poetry in Mediterranean borderscapes

This essay examines the role of poetry as a medium of survival, testimony and ethical witness in the context of Mediterranean migration crises, focusing on the works of Eritrean poet Segen Tesfalidet and Sudanese poet Abdel Wahab Yousif (Latino). Through their verses and prophetic compositions, these poets navigate the liminality of borderised zones, transforming sites of disposability and necropolitics into spaces of self-documentation, communal memory and resilience. Segen's poems emerge from Libyan detention and European border regimes, asserting speakability against structural violence, while Latino situates the Mediterranean as both a site of disappearance and a metaphysical medium for reckoning with death, postcolonial trauma and diasporic longing. Engaging concepts such as the ‘technology of the self’ and Black Mediterraneanism, this essay argues that ephemeral, self-archived poetry transcends reportage, enabling migrants to assert narrative authority, resist erasure and construct ethical testimony. The study foregrounds poetry as a vital tool for humanisation, memory and survival amid postcolonial precarity.