His name was Alika Ogorchukwu. A Nigerian refugee and street trader in the port city of Civitanova Marche, Italy, he had been in a bicycle accident – a car had hit him in May 2021 – which had left him disabled. He now had to use a crutch to get around. Last July 30, a man, to whom he had tried to sell something, used this same crutch to immobilize him on the ground, beating him to death. The authorities believe that this man did not like being approached by Alika who wanted to sell him his products. A video of the event exists and is circulating on the Internet. In the summer of 2020, everyone I know posted a little black square on social media to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone said they were allies of the cause and yet, today, the dust has settled. I would like us to pay homage to Alika, that we don’t let her death fall into oblivion.
Alika had an eight-year-old child who will be able to see her father’s murder by Googling his name and also see the fact that no one on the street stopped her attacker from committing his crime in broad daylight on a busy thoroughfare. Of course, it will no doubt be said that the witnesses were perhaps afraid of the aggressor, too afraid to intervene. Of course, it will probably be said that this murder was not motivated by racial hatred, while the right in Italy propagates shameless xenophobia. At the heart of this murder, there is a total othering, the inescapable belief that the person being killed is different from us, that he does not belong to the same spectrum of the living.
In his book Bearing Witness WhileBlack (2020), Allissa V. Richardson warns against these videos of black people being killed: she considers them deeply dehumanizing. This spectacle of death directly echoes, she believes, the public lynchings in the United States which crowds came to watch for entertainment. We watched men die while eating candy and discussing the weather. Let’s remember the song
The black bodies who suffer this type of violence today are no longer in the trees: they are on the ground, immobilized by bullets, or asphyxiated, as Alika Ogorchukwu, Eric Garner or George Floyd were. Alika did not die as a result of police brutality, like many of the high profile cases in recent years, but I see her murder as a case of personal revenge that culminates in wanton murder. As was that of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in February 2020 while jogging in Georgia, by three men, ordinary citizens, who wrongly suspected him of theft. We don’t even bother to call the authorities: we take the law into our own hands.
I didn’t watch the video of Alika’s murder. I would rather have liked to know how Alika Ogorchukwu ended up in Italy. They say he was a refugee. What was he doing in his previous life and what were the circumstances of his departure? I wanted to know if he liked flowers and soccer, what he liked to eat for supper. Violence is a steamroller that annihilates and reduces, that massacres and flattens the surface of things. It forces a form on a life, on a story: it takes up all the space and does not allow us to glimpse the subtleties of human stories, their complexity. I wanted to write her name in full, here, in this column, a tiny gesture to give back a little of her humanity to Alika. I tell myself that words should be used for this, to give back life to lives that some would like to be tiny when they are as big as all the others.