Since 2015, the so-called European refugee or migrant crisis playing out on the shores and borders of Europe has captivated the imagination of a handful of contemporary authors writing in French. Recent texts have started the process of memorializing an event even though it is still unfolding; and authors have been bringing to the fore images of WWII, of refugees turned away, of packed trains, of camps, of the mass disappearance of people who barely leave a trace, of the Mediterranean as a cemetery. In Marina Skalova's Exploration du flux [An Exploration of Flow] (2018), each part of the text starts with a date in boldface type, followed by what could be news headlines: September 11, 2015, November 13, 2015; we are reminded that this is a global catastrophe that merits as much attention as rather recent events that are now part of our collective memory. As Skalova notes, the images we see in news reports and on social media should make us uncomfortable, should wound us, and they call us out "because we had said Never Again" (17). For their part, Maylis de Kerangal in à ce stade de la nuit [at this point of the night] (2014) and Marie Darrieussecq in La Mer à l'envers [The Upside-down Sea] (2019) reflect on the semantic shift in what we now associate with the name of Lampedusa: it has, in recent years, become synonymous with catastrophe the way that names like Auschwitz and Hiroshima have. In this paper, I will also bring into conversation Patrick Chamoiseau's Frères Migrants [Migrant Brothers] (2017) and Fabienne Kanor's Faire l'aventure [Making the Journey] (2014), to show how the refugee crisis also recalls the lives lost due to the transatlantic slave trade. By reminding us to reach far beyond the catastrophes of the 20th century, Chamoiseau and Kanor emphasize the haunting of the past in our present, but also point to a future haunting, a haunting that is yet to come. Indeed, we witness here what one could term an anticipated memory of a global contemporary crisis or, in other words, the return of future ghosts.
