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ME AND THE OTHER IN (THE) CRISIS: A Literary Critique of Ethnic and Social Interactions within the Greek Crisis

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ME AND THE OTHER IN (THE) CRISIS

A Literary Critique of Ethnic and Social Interactions

within the Greek Crisis

Marianna Georgouli

Student number: 11312297

Thesis supervisor: Dr. Maria Boletsi

rMA in Literary Studies

University of Amsterdam

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Table of Contents

Introduction……….. 3-8

Chapter 1: From the Public Narratives of the Greek Crisis to its Artistic and Literary Stagings………...………. 9-25

1.1. The Public Narratives……….………... 9-13 1.2. Encounters with the Migrant ‘Other’ Within the Crisis…………...………... 14-19 1.3. The Artistic Production of the Crisis………...……... 19-25 Chapter 2: From ‘Light Racism’ to Dehumanization and Extermination…………. 26-45 2.1. Victoria does not Exist……… 28-34 2.2. The Crossing………... 35-45 Chapter 3: Revisiting the notion of Hospitality in The Crossing ……… 46-64 3.1. Probing Derrida’s Hospitality………. 48-49 3.2. A Repeated Transience ……….. 50-53 3.3. Dispossession……….. 54-59 3.4. Naming the Stranger………... 59-64 Chapter 4: From Ethnic to Social Differentiations within the Crisis ……… 65-70

Conclusion……… 71-74

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Introduction

The global financial crisis that broke out in 2008 with the US crash, hit Greece in 2009 radically changing the daily life of the biggest part of the population. Since its outburst, the ‘crisis’, as a word and as a state of living, has been haunting the Greek society. It has been haunting the way people think and act, the way they work and relate to each other, the way they (do not) hope, the way they produce art. A famous graffiti that lied (or still does) on a wall of Athens accurately conveys the omnipresence of the crisis in Greek people’s lives, asking: “CRISIS..what else?”1 But what does this word that has been dominating the lives of

Greeks during the last decade, and that often remains an uncontested term, signify?

Reinhart Koselleck dealt with the notion of the ‘crisis’ (‘κρίσις’ in Greek) in his eight-volume lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Basic Concepts in History), [written between 1972 and 1997 and co-edited with Werner Conze and Otto Bruner], in which he studied the history of the meanings and functions of this word throughout the centuries. As he notes there, “Kρίσις has its roots in the Greek verb κρίνω (krino): to “separate” (part, divorce), to “choose”, to “judge”, to “decide”; as a means of “measuring oneself”, to “quarrel”, or to “fight””. Thus, crisis in ancient Greece signified “not only ‘divorce’ and ‘quarrel’, but also ‘decision’ in the sense of reaching a crucial point that would tip the scales” (358), as well as “in the sense of reaching a verdict or judgment, what today is meant by criticism (Kritik)” (359). Hence, the term can designate both an objective state and a subjective diagnosis, Reinhart notes (359). Gradually, and especially since the end of the eighteenth century, the notion of ‘crisis’ started to be associated with “an exceptionally rare, if not unique, transition period”. In modernity, the term can signal a “culminating, decisive point at which action is required”, a “critical situation” which may be repetitive or momentous, or a “transitional

1 This is a reference to the famous Nespresso commercial that features George Clooney

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phase” whose outcome depends on the diagnosis offered (372). The concept of ‘crisis’, Koselleck stresses, “is often used interchangeably with ‘unrest’, ‘conflict’, ‘revolution’, and to describe vaguely disturbing moods or situations”. The ambivalence of these uses and the unpredictable outcome they imply “make it possible to keep open what [crisis] may mean in the future” (399).

Despite this possibility for an “unpredictable outcome” and, thus, alternative future that the notion of ‘crisis’ leaves open, the way the word is used in public discourses today often seems to facilitate clear-cut statements about its causes as well as its remedy, and preclude any space for alternative narratives, political choices and visions of futurity, as I will show in my first chapter. Within this restrictive framework, however, crisis has also spurred alternative modes of expression and perception of reality that seek to challenge the dominant narratives that have evolved around it and foster the incubation of different ways of thinking, acting and relating to each other. Such voices find particularly fertile ground within art; during the years of the financial crisis in Greece, artists, filmmakers and literary authors have been probing through their works the crisis as a master narrative, as well as the kinds of community that have been formed within it, proposing alternative paradigms or provoking the contestation of the present ones.

In the midst of this crisis, another kind of crisis has been taking place in Greece: the mass influx of migrants from the Middle East and Northern Africa, which culminated in 2015 with a mass advent of refugees mainly coming from Syria. The influx of migrants, which had been gradually increasing during the last decade, has caused changes in established communities and cityscapes in Greece, especially in certain neighborhoods of Athens and in specific islands. The life of many Greeks changed significantly in an abrupt way, while the two ‘crises’, the financial and the migrant one, have frequently figured together in public rhetoric to describe the unbearable burden a big part of the population has to endure. Indeed,

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the often racist way the migrants have been treated by the Greek citizens is often attributed, in the public discourse, to what the latter experience due to the ongoing debt crisis. Specifically, the advent of migrants is considered and presented very often as an extra burden that crisis-stricken Greeks cannot and should not bear. This attitude is intensified by the fact that the majority of migrants come from Middle Eastern countries whose inhabitants are often associated in the Western thought and rhetoric with lack of civilization and barbaric behaviours and customs. Particularly since 9/11 and the beginning of the so-called “war on terror”, a rhetoric of ‘civilization versus barbarism’ has been dominant globally, as Maria Boletsi stresses in her interview in Rethinking Greece in 2019. This rhetoric, she underlines, “is intensely mobilized by populist politics, by the alt right, but also by mainstream politicians, most notably in responses to terrorism and the ‘refugee crisis’” (n.pag.).

Against the backdrop of this reality, my thesis mainly asks: At times of racism and xenophobia, but also of economic recession and misery, how does literature deal with the encounters between the self and the various ‘others’ that have been taking place within ‘Greece of the crisis’? Does literature simply represent this reality, or can it potentially offer another way of relating to the ‘other’? For this purpose, my research will focus not so much on the way literature depicts the financial crisis, but mainly on the way it deals with the encounters that take place in the context of the financial crisis; encounters of the self with people of another ethnicity but also from other classes or social milieus. How does literature engage with the discourses that have emerged around the financial and the so-called ‘migrant crisis’? How does it (not) participate in the blame-game? Can it stand against generalizing and clear-cut statements about culprits and victims? To attempt to answer these questions, my analysis will be based on two contemporary Greek novels: the first, Victoria does not Exist [Η Βικτώρια δεν υπάρχει] by Yannis Tsirbas, was published in 2013. The second one, The Crossing [Το Πέρασμα], was written by Konstantinos Tzamiotis and published in 2016,

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namely after the mass advent of (mainly Syrian) refugees to the Greek islands. These novels were chosen exactly because they are written in the context of the crisis, which forms the background of their plots, and trace the “strange encounters” (Ahmed 2013) that unravel within this context.

Victoria does not exist2 is a small book characterized on its back cover as a ‘novella’. The story begins with a man from Victoria square – one of the main squares of Athens that has provided refuge for many migrants – sitting in a train and addressing a man that sits across him. Victoria consists of this main story and some shorter ones, which intervene as separate, autonomous chapters between the chapters of the main story and all take place on Victoria square. For the purpose of the present thesis I will focus only on the main story of the book, for this story refers to the migrants’ presence on the square. The protagonist starts describing to his interlocutor what he perceives as the disturbing reality of his neighbourhood that has changed significantly during the previous years due to the migrants’ advent and the financial crisis. As it turns out, the interlocutor is from Aghia Paraskevi, one of the Northern, affluent suburbs of Athens that has not been affected by the migrants’ advent, and whose inhabitants – at least most of them – have not experienced austerity in the way that the ‘weaker’ social groups, many of which live in the centre of Athens, do. The main focalizer in the book is the protagonist, whose speech at times is like a monologue since the interlocutor does not always react to what he hears from him. Nevertheless, the interlocutor also focalizes at times, and this enables the reader to gain access to the different realities that the two characters experience.

The Crossing constitutes a chronicle of the advent of 350 refugees on a small Greek island and the events that follow this advent. Specifically, the novel comprises small chapters, each of which zooms in on a different character, either citizen of the island or migrant. The

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narration is by an external imperceptible narrator, but the perspective is not one. Instead, the story offers a polyprismatic narration, in a way that the reader gains access to each character’s thoughts. In this way, the encounters between the islanders and the incomers are described and seen from the perspective of both groups.

The first chapter of this thesis outlines the context in which the two novels are written which is also the context in which their plot is set: the reality of the Greek crisis and the migrants’ advent in several parts of the country. In its first part, the chapter focuses on the different kinds of public discourses that have followed the outburst of the financial crisis seeking to give meaning to the crisis and its ramifications. Specifically, I give an outline o f the two dominant narratives that have evolved around the Greek economic crisis seeking to identify those responsible behind the present reality of recession and austerity measures. Further, I briefly trace the way that the migrants’ advent partakes in these discourses and the blame-game that accompanies the Greeks’ current misery, asking how attitudes towards the migrants in Greece are shaped by the spatiotemporal and sociopolitical context in which their advent takes place. In the second part, I shift my focus to the artistic and literary scene as this has taken form during the years of the crisis, briefly suggesting how the crisis has affected artistic production, as well as how it can contribute to envisaging another reality, even when this may not be the artists’ intention.

The second chapter traces the way that the two books, Victoria does not Exist and The Crossing, deal with the violence exercised by Greek citizens towards the migrants. More specifically, I investigate the way the novels engage the reader in their plot and what kind of responses their reading can provoke with regard to racism and xenophobia. The third chapter, focusing on The Crossing and the hospitable actions of the islanders towards the incomers as depicted in the novel, aims to probe the notion of hospitality, following theorizations of this notion by Emmanuel Lévinas and Jaques Derrida, and investigate how, through the novel,

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this notion could be re-visited, filtered by the current reality of massive displacement of certain groups of people and the dispossession that this entails for both the migrants and the locals.

Finally, in the fourth chapter, coming back to Victoria does not Exist, I wish to trace the way that this novel sketches the differentiations that have arisen, especially during the crisis, not only between Greeks and migrants, but between different groups within Greek society as well. Is Greek society a homogeneous entity consisting of individuals equally affected by the financial crisis and the migrants’ advent? What is the stance of the novel on the way neoliberal capitalism works in this context of crisis for different social groups?

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CHAPTER 1 

From the Public Narratives of the Greek Crisis to its Artistic and Literary Stagings

In this first chapter, my aim is to contextualize the books I will analyze, connecting them to the current Greek crisis and the migrant influx with which Greece has been confronted during the years of the crisis. Initially, my focus will lie on the dominant narratives that have been constructed with regard to the Greek financial crisis, to then move to the migrant crisis and its particularity when compared with previous migratory flows to Greece. Subsequently, I give an outline of the artistic and literary production during this last decade of the crisis. This is important in order for the reader to get acquainted with the conditions in which the novels are written, and the discourses by which they are surrounded. Also, this outline will enable me to show how the novels under discussion intervene in the reality shaped by this double crisis in Greece and which new or different insights they can introduce in debates about this reality.

1.1. The Public Narratives

Since the outburst of the crisis, countless debates have taken place and plenty of ink has been spilled regarding the reasons behind it and those responsible for what the country has been going through for almost a decade now. Angouri and Wodak, in an article on the rise of the far-right political party Golden Dawn during the crisis, state:

Crises are characterised by uncertainty regarding the nature and potential consequences of the perceived threat(s). This is what motivates various groups and individuals (e.g. governments, the mass media, citizens) to engage in ‘meaning making’ by constructing stories and images that may reduce or increase uncertainty and conflict generated by crises (Angouri and Wodak 544). 

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Indeed, in the Greek parliament, on television, in the press, on the radio, in personal conversations and public debates, attributing responsibility seems to dominate the discussions about the crisis. This tendency has led to a blame-game and a constant finger-pointing which is expressed through mainly two dominant narratives of the crisis. Both of them are usually based on the distinction between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’: On the one hand are those, in and out of the country, who posit the Greek crisis on a larger scale and view it as part and consequence of the neoliberal system, and on the other hand those who treat it as an isolated case and the result of the Greeks’ bad management of their  ‘household’.

Those belonging to the first category see the Greek crisis as part of the Eurozone crisis which, in its turn, is connected with a global financial and political one. As Keith Hart notes, “the economic crisis is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades, has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless” (1). This idea contests the representation of the crisis as crisis of the national economies of the Southern countries, with the Greek case as the first and most prominent one, casting it instead as a result of the forces of neoliberal finance capitalism that escape national control. This crisis narrative, as Athanasiou and Tsimouris stress, underlines the neoliberal, global and transnational character of the crisis, as well as the fact that its effects are not experienced in the same way by different social strata, ethnic groups and gendered subjects (10). In his contribution to the debate called The Greek Crisis: Politics, Economics, Ethics, held at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London in 2010 and published in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Costas Lapavitsas also argues that there are two proximate causes behind the Eurozone crisis. First, it is “the great turmoil” that made its appearance in 2007 in the financial markets of the United States and soon turned into “a global recession”, “mark[ing] the historical evolution of capitalism”. Second, he notes the structural nature of

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the Eurozone that is characterized by the “internal division . . . between core and periphery, typified by, on the one hand, Germany and, on the other, Spain, Portugal, and Greece”. This division is connected to the “progressive loss of competitiveness by the periphery relative to the core”, due to the keeping down of workers' wages in Germany for over a decade, which led to “systematic current account deficits for the periphery, mirrored by equally systematic surpluses for Germany”. In this sense, the Eurozone crisis “reflects these profound imbalances within the Eurozone” itself (Lapavitsas et al. 4).  

Coming to the particularity of the Greek case, Lapavitsas stresses that “the productive structure of Greece—this structural imbalance between the core and periphery of the Eurozone . . . — is particularly weak”, creating a “current account deficit, which has been gigantic (15–16% of GDP) and clearly unsustainable” (294).  Lapavitsas does not fail to underline that the crisis brought to the fore the weaknesses of the Greek state but asserts that these weaknesses are not the cause of the problem but rather came to the fore because of it (294). The way Greece was systematically fiddling the figures also contributed to the crisis through the country’s “loss of credibility in the international markets” (294-295), along with the small size of Greece combined with its public debt markets, which makes it much easier to speculate against it than in the case of other, larger countries (295). However, Lapavitsas emphasizes the role of the Eurozone and the way it has been set up as a monetary and a “broader economic and political union”. Specifically, he refers to the European Central Bank which, in 2008, tried in every possible way to rescue the banks, but when the problem was transferred to the states in 2009 it reacted with indifference and inertness. Even when it intervened by providing 120 billion Euros to the Greek state, it did this in order to “prevent . . . a bank collapse to the core countries”, namely Germany and France, which reveals “the nature of the hierarchy of power within the Eurozone, among the Eurozone states” (295). However, the crisis also stems from, and reveals, Lapavitsas states, “the social failure in

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Greece”, which does not have to do with people's corruption, as it is usually stated, but with the failure of the Greek ruling class that has proven to be “incapable of succeeding in the European markets”, of “sustaining investment” and “actually devising an independent economic policy at all”, namely a policy different than that imposed by the core countries (295-296).  In the same debate, Stathis Kouvelakis, drawing from Naomi Klein and her book The Shock Doctrine, refers to the crisis “as a necessary constitutive element for any neoliberal purge”, since the latter can only be implemented and tolerated by “the creation and the staging of an exceptional situation, of a situation of emergency, in the wake of which, somehow, normal life is disrupted and what seemed until quite recently unimaginable, just happens” (303).  

Moving to accounts that subscribe more to the second crisis-narrative, i.e. that of the crisis as flowing from the particularities of the Greek case and the Greeks’ ‘bad habits’, Kevin Featherstone, again in the same debate, expresses an opinion which seems to represent this narrative. Featherstone attributes the biggest part of the responsibility to the Greek chronic mismanagement of the state. Specifically, he projects “the domestic conditions” as the primary cause of the Greek debt crisis, accusing Lapavitsas for “a comfortable blame shift away from the general public and the workers to a Greek ruling class, a European Union, international capital” and, in short, for “a blame shift away from society as a whole” (Featherstone in Lapavitsas et al. 298). In contrast with Lapavitsas, Featherstone sees the “politics of rent seeking, of rousfeti (bribes), of clientelism” and the “growth of the state in a society in which there was no constituency to limit the growth of the state” (298) as the cause of the crisis and not as something that was just revealed through it. “There is a cultural setting here, which has led to the profligacy of the state”, he emphasizes (298-299). Featherstone acknowledges the Eurozone’s responsibility but only when it comes to the creation of “the risk of contagion to the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece,

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Spain)”, not to the creation of the crisis that, as he asserts, “has been largely invented in Athens” (299).  

It is worth noting that this latter narrative of the cause of the crisis usually takes a moralizing character. Sadia Abbas, in the article “Neoliberal moralism and the fiction of Europe: a postcolonial perspective” (2015), points to the discourse that presents the Greek crisis as caused by ‘bad manners’ or ‘bad house-keeping':

[T]he invocations of etiquette, codes, rules, and the repetition of cliches of fiscal rectitude and household thrift are part of the moral economy of a neoliberalism that manipulates people into thinking that nations can be run like households and life is a tea party, where all will be fine if one sticks out ones little finger while holding a teacup with delicate poise.

This kind of thinking, as Abbas notes, is dominant within the system of capitalism and provokes the illusion of agency and self-control among people, since it implies that “if everyone just behaved with propriety and thrift, life would be better.” David Graeber, in his article “There's no Need for All this Economic Sadomasochism” in the Guardian in 2013, points to the same direction. As he underlines, “austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality. We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement” (n.pag.). To Graeber, the original sin that generated the crisis has never been attributed a particular meaning; it can mean different things, but the general idea is that people are guilty of “having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy” (n.pag.) Economic theories, he notes, are only used by politicians to justify the measures they take.

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1.2. Encounters with the Migrant ‘Other’ Within the Crisis

To this reality of the Greek debt crisis, as well as to the constant finger pointing and blame shift that accompany it, the migrant crisis comes to be added, creating the complex nexus of the so-called ‘crisis within the crisis’ and making it even more problematic to identify the ‘root’ of the problem but also to draw a clear boundary between ‘culprits’ and ‘victims’. Of course, Greece has a long history in migration, but mainly as a country of emigration rather than immigration. However, since the late eighties, a big number of mainly Balkan migrants, mostly of Albanian origin3, started coming to Greece, finding the country

unprepared for this influx.  Despite this lack of preparation and the discrimination and social exclusion that these people encountered in Greek society, a direct or indirect tolerance was gradually shown towards them, since they were mainly economic immigrants that could be used as cheap labour hands. Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris, in their recently published article “Migration, Crisis, Liberalism: The Cultural and Racial Politics of Islamophobia and ‘Radical Alterity’ in Modern Greece”, touch upon the way (neo)liberal visions are interwoven with “racialized attitudes to migrant populations” (2). More specifically, they trace the passage, within the Greek society, from “Albanophobia” to “representations of Albanians as ‘integrated’ migrants in Greece” (10). As they note, the upward social mobility that became apparent in the case of Albanians enabled their integration and acceptance by the Greek society. Their “hard-working ethos”, their “linguistic competence” along with the fact that they “managed to adapt to an array of cultural, religious and (neo)liberal expectations” despite the victimization and the discrimination they encountered, led them to be categorized as “good” migrants. This gradual positive perception of first- and second-generation Albanians is, according to Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris, “indicative of the kaleidoscopic relationship between culturalist, nationalist, racialized, neo-liberal and neo-colonial

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understandings of the place and ‘ideal’ trajectory of the migrant in Greece and Europe, in general” (13).

However, the migratory scene changed radically after the outburst of the migrant crisis in Europe in 2015, when rising numbers of people – many of which were seeking to escape a devastating civil war or violent conditions in their countries in regions south and east of Europe – started crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It is telling that from 216,054 sea arrivals in 2014 the number rose to 1,015,078 in 2015, which turned the refugee ‘crisis’ into a deeply humanitarian one, with hundreds of people losing their lives every day in their effort to reach Europe 4. Most of them come from Muslim-majority countries with Syria being the

country with the most emigrants due to its chronic civil war (Park; Kingsely). The European Union proved to be largely unprepared for this influx and its response to it “focused [more] on securing the bloc's borders than on protecting the rights of migrants and refugees” (Park). What complicates the situation is that not all the incomers are refugees coming from war zones. Among them there are also economic migrants and, although this distinction is not always clear, and “these groups can and do overlap”, “this gray area is frequently exacerbated by the inconsistent methods with which asylum applications are often processed across the EU's twenty-eight member states” (Park).  

4

Previous years  Sea arrivals  Dead and missing 

2017  172,301  3,139

2016  362,753  5,096

2015  1,015,078  3,771

2014  216,054  3,538

The dead and missing in 2014 were 3,538 people, in 2015 they were 5,096, in 2016 5,096 and in 2017 3,139. 

(http://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean?page=1&view=grid&Type%255B%255D =3&Search=%2523monthly%2523) 

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Another major factor that enhances xenophobic attitudes and the need of many Greeks to differentiate between migrants and crisis-stricken Greek people is that the current incomers are in their vast majority Muslims coming from Middle Eastern and (North) African countries. Thus, Greek attitudes towards them are often motivated by Islamophobia, which has been intensified since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the political discourses that took shape in the aftermath of these attacks. As Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris note, especially since 9/11 and the War on Terror, there is a “widely circulating (in Greece and generally in Europe) xenophobic narrative of ‘Muslim cultural invasion’”. This narrative is strictly connected to the official discourse of the “high-level policy figures” that fabricates the refugees as a threat to public security “by claiming that Muslim terrorists, radicalized individuals, or terrorist sympathizers regularly infiltrate refugee populations” (7).

Apart from this, though, what significantly distinguishes the current migrants' reception from earlier ones, is the fact that this most recent migrant influx coincided with the country's severe debt crisis, the referendum in July 2015 and the capital controls it entailed. The overlap of the arrival of migrants with the financial crisis was regularly used in Greek public discourse as an argument for the country's inability to offer hospitality to such a big number of migrants and provided justification for the construction of “borders of the normative national subject”, namely the subject that “is constructed through heteronormative as well as racialised power relations” (Carastathis 1). Anna Carastathis, who broaches the topic of the ‘crisis within the crisis’ in her article “Nesting Crises”, eloquently describes how the perception of the financial crisis by the Greeks affects the tackling of the migration problem. Specifically, she argues that the construction of the economic crisis in the dominant public discourse as “a problem inherent in the national economy” of Greece opens the road for “the global war on migration [to be] reinvented as ‘Europe's crisis’ and then 'Greece's’” (2). This nationalization, the perception of the economic crisis as “a mainly national problem

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calls for national homogeny and patriotic feelings in order to be tackled, something that reinforces phenomena of nationalism and xenophobia” (Athanasiou and Tsimouris 11, my translation). 

Indeed, the financial crisis changed the political scene in Greece rapidly and radically. The Greek electorate's disappointment was expressed by the disapprobation of the mainstream political parties and the support of anti-systemic as well as anti-migrant ones, with the most striking example being that of the Golden Dawn [Χρυσή Αυγή, GD], one of the most extreme far-right political parties in Europe. It has to be noted here that “[f]or a long time, late-democratized Southern European countries were thought to resist the rise of far right parties observed elsewhere” (Ellinas 543). Therefore, for many it came as a surprise that, in the elections of May 2012, GD received 6.97 per cent with 441,018 votes as opposed to the elections of 2009 when it had only received 0.29 per cent with 19,624 votes (Ellinas 544). The abrupt and rapid empowerment of this party is closely related both to the financial and the migrant crisis as well as to their interrelation in the perception of many Greeks: 

[A]ny account of GD’s breakthrough must take into consideration the extraordinary conditions Greece has faced in the past few years. Following the outbreak of its sovereign debt crisis, the country received a first international bailout in 2010 and a second in 2012, both linked to a major austerity drive. The austerity measures, which included major spending cuts and tax hikes as well as reforms and privatisations, pushed the country into one of the deepest postwar recessions. (Ellinas 544)

This abrupt change of daily life that austerity engendered has bred feelings of despair and anger among Greeks, directed against the established political powers and giving rise to extreme political positions. Nevertheless, it is not by chance that GD has been “particularly popular in the sixth district of Athens, where it received 8.38 per cent of the vote” (Ellinas 549). The high concentration of immigrants there, particularly in the Aghios

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Panteleimon area, triggered citizens’ frustration against the indifference of the state and “pointed to the possibility [of GD] of using anti-immigrant violence and vigilante-type activities as a means to mobilize support.” Stressing the link between the economic precarity of a large part of the population and acts of aggression against marginalized and vulnerable groups, Vaiou and Kalandides argue that “[t]he insecurities of income cuts and precarity are aggravated by everyday aggressions, violent attacks against migrants, gay men, women, left parliamentarians and local activists and other non-conforming individuals and groups, leading to a gradual shrinkage of public space and participation” (460).  In their turn, Angouri and Wodak also note the role of anger and fear for the ominous future in the rise of GD and “the spread of extreme right-wing, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric”, in a society where people try to “to make sense of a crisis that has deeply changed the status quo” (541).

Nevertheless, despite the feelings and expressions of hate and practices of exclusion that can be traced within the Greek society, a remarkable sense of solidarity has also been demonstrated through several initiatives and networks aiming at alleviating the pain of the suffering people coming to Greece, as well as of those Greeks deeply affected by austerity. As Arampatzi notes, “the role of solidarity initiatives, structures and networks in the current context has been crucial in countering the impact of deepening austerity and producing practical alternatives to deal with growing needs of social groups” (55). The main domains in which these groups have been offering help are food and clothing, along with primary health treatment, especially to this “growing number of the population with no access to health insurance, such as the unemployed and migrants” (Arampatzi 55-56). Apart from aiming at covering basic human needs, solidarity networks often also aim at contesting the dominant socioeconomic models proposing “a social or solidarity economy” which

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will be able “to act as both a ‘buffer’ and an alternative to collapsing welfare provisions” (Arampatzi 56).5

To alleviate the serious humanitarian crisis on islands like Lesvos and Kos, where (mainly) Syrian refugees started arriving in the summer of 2015, civil society organizations in many different forms (e.g. professional NGOs, volunteers, ad hoc groups and collectives) tried to fill the gap” often created by the lack of “any larger policy guidance” from the end of the state (Evangelinidis 33). In Athens too, the lack of infrastructure to host the refugees coming from the islands resulted in their gathering in public squares and being fed by volunteers and NGOs (34). A remarkable example of an act of solidarity by individuals is the occupation of the closed-due-to-the-crisis hotel City Plaza in the centre of Athens in April 2016 by 250 activists and refugees and its transmutation “into a Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space” which “[has been] provid[ing] free and decent housing to over 1700 people in the center of Athens, irrespective of their nationality and residence status” (“Today City Plaza is One and Half Years Old” n.pag.). At the same time, there are several families that, despite the severe economic problems they face, have been hosting refugees in their houses – often entire families – offering them shelter, food, company and safety6.  Thus, as Arampatzi

underlines, solidarity in Greece of the crisis plays a crucial role on multiple levels, on the one hand covering governmental insufficiencies and on the other proposing a new way of acting and connecting with the ‘other’ (64).  

5 Vaiou and Kalandides offer a list of solidarity initiatives in several neighbourhoods of

Athens, “coping with/resisting the crisis” taking action in every aspect of social life (463-464). 

6 See for example here:

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1.3. The Artistic Production within the Crisis

The above described reality could not leave contemporary cultural production unaffected and, indeed, it has not. Rather, the crisis has changed the cultural scene in various ways. Despite the atmosphere of misery, worry, anxiety and lack of hope, austerity has also triggered a remarkable artistic flourishing, releasing people’s creativity and their need not only to express the dominant agony that the crisis brought about, but also to provoke other ways of thinking and acting. Thus, even though the state funding for artistic and cultural programs in Greece has been steadily shrinking, we can observe an inversely proportional proliferation of artistic production. While making art may seem a luxury in times when basic human needs are hardly covered, crisis generates the need for a sense of community and solidarity that are many times at the core of cultural and artistic production as a shared experience.

The need for the restoration of a sense of community, but also for a different future that will give place to new forms of community, has led to new forms of cultural expression. The limits between theatre, dance and performance have been blurred and hybrid genres are emerging that implicate the audience in their making, encouraging in this way a more communal way of thinking and acting. Despite the lack of money, and perhaps partly because of it, people’s creative forces are enhanced. People find inventive ways to produce art using cheap studios and other spaces, like streets, empty buildings and squares, which they turn into potential exhibition or performance spaces. It is not by chance that Athens has concentrated the interest of numerous artists from all over the world that come there as participants or observers of this artistic scene. In an article in BBC, Alastaire Sooke refers to the opinion of the British artist Michael Landy who stated that “Athens is the new Berlin”, referring to the “vibrant contemporary art scene that emerged in the German capital during the ‘90s, when rents were still low”, as Sooke explains. Austerity

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combined with the migrants’ advent have also influenced street art in the Greek cities, triggering the creation of “images of a new form of belonging in the city that focus on the need to create new territories for social inclusion” (Tsilimpounidi 553). As Tsilimpounidi notes, “in central Athens the walls are claiming the need for a new urban identity. The changing population is transforming the area and traditional notions of belonging, giving birth to a new street-level imagining” (553). 

 Contemporary Greek cinema has also been experiencing a remarkably productive period, giving us works that have received international critical acclaim and awards. The best-known example is probably Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth [Κυνόδοντας] (2009) that gained international attention and received several distinctions. This movie, along with others, belongs to what critics have called the ‘weird wave’ in contemporary Greek cinema, which involves films that contest the dominant normative structures of the Greek family, unsettle gender norms and domesticity and probe the troublesome aspects of Greek society. As Lydia Papadimitriou stresses in her text “The Economy and Ecology of Greek Cinema”, “the dynamism, extroversion and solidarity evident in the films of the generation of filmmakers that emerged in the late 2000s has offered strong impetus to Greek art cinema, and hope for renewed (national and) international presence” (154).  Greek cinema has also been dealing with the migrant crisis and how it is experienced and faced by the Greeks within the reality of the financial crisis. America Square [Πλατεία Αμερικής] by Yannis Tsirbas (2016), Worlds Apart [Ένας άλλος κόσμος] by Christoforos Papakaliatis (2015), and Plato’s Academy [Ακαδημία Πλάτωνος] by Filippos Tsitos (2009) are good examples of movies dealing with how Greeks and migrants interact in this context, contesting the strict boundaries between them and proposing new ways of looking at their interrelation.  

 Coming to the literary world, in his text “The Age of Discontent – Greek Publishing Through Six Years of Austerity”, Socrates Kabouropoulos writes about the changes that have

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taken place in the publishing domain during the years of the crisis, noting that “literature (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) rose from 20.5% of the total titles, in 2006, to 27.9% in 2011, led by Greek fiction.” At the same time, though, “the rate of translations in the book production fell from 42.5% to 32.1%, during the same period”, due to the cost of rights and translation fees as well as to the high interest in Greek authors which, Kabouropoulos observes, “bears witness to an extended usage of literature as a means of reaffirming notions of cultural identity, identifying with – and, at the same time, escaping from the harsh realities of the crisis.” Thus, it seems that reading preferences during the crisis confirm the need for a sense of community, belonging and identification, which will help survive austerity measures and the degradation they entail. Along with prose, Greek poetry has also been growing during the crisis. What is interesting is that young, politically conscious poets in their 20s and 30s are the protagonists in the contemporary poetic scene, writing “in websites, blogs, readings and public events” (Kabouropoulos). Anthologies with English translations of recent Greek poetry since the crisis, like Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (ed. by Theodoros Chiotis) or Austerity Measures (ed. by Karen Van Dyck) are indicative of the international attention Greek poetry has been receiving in this context and of the political sensitivity of the new poetic generation in Greece during the crisis. Karen Van Dyck in the introduction of her anthology of Greek poetry in the ‘crisis’, after sketching the reality of constant financial cuts, misery and shrinking of the welfare state, stresses: 

Poetry, though, is one thing there is more of. Much more. Poets writing graffiti on walls, poets reading in public squares, theaters, and empty lots, poets performing in slams, chanting slogans, and singing songs at rallies, poets blogging and posting on the internet, poets teaming up with artists and musicians, poets teaching workshops to schoolchildren and migrants. In all of the misery and mess, new poetry is everywhere,

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too large and too various a body of writing to fit neatly on either side of the ideological rift. (xvii-xviii) 

What is important about this poetry, is that, except for conveying the hardships of the current reality in Greece and the Balkans, it “offer[s] new ways to imagine what can be radically different realities” (xviii).  Vassilis Lambropoulos, in an interview he gave in the Greek News Agenda on Greek poetry of the crisis, states that “the new Greek poetry is distinguished not only by its broad, multi-lingual cultural learning but also by the superior university training and theoretical sophistication of its writers” (n.pag.).

Turning to prose, Eleni Papargyriou, in a recent article (2016) on the Greek ‘prose of the crisis’, proposes a distinction between those literary works published during the first four years of the crisis (2009-2013) and those having been published since 2014. The works belonging to the first category reacted, according to Papargyriou, in a reflective way to the crisis, explicitly referring to the suicides, the debts, the banks, the evictions, the homelessness. As she notes, literature of that period focused on the depiction of the crisis through its immediate consequences, as well as on assigning responsibility for the crisis, but in a way that did not essentially differ from that of the mass media that projected a homogenous image of a suffering people without drawing attention to class or other differentiations. What is more, Papargyriou notices a tendency in this wave of literary production to focus on the symptoms of the crisis at the expense of the depth of the literary characters. This often led to a moralistic discourse, a kind of "Whose fault is it?" that reminds one of social reportage. In this category Papargyriou places the Trilogy of the Crisis [H τριλογία της κρίσεως] (2010-2012) by Petros Markaris, The City and the Silence [Η πόλη και η σιωπή] (2013) by Konstantinos Tzamiotis, and The Ultimate Humiliation [Η άκρα ταπείνωση] (2015) by Rea Galanaki.

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On the other hand, works published after 2014 often take the reality of the crisis as a given and are set into it without explicitly referring to its symptoms (Papargyriou). The writers, no longer surprised by the crisis and its repercussions, use it not as a main element of the plot but as the context of their works drawing attention to the characters and their actions. Examples of such works are the Falling Man [Άντρας που πέφτει] (2015) by Nicolas Sevastakis, the Fish Tank [Ενυδρείο] (2014) by Yorgos Koutsoukos and the Close to the Belly [Κοντά στην κοιλιά] (2014) by Sotiris Dimitriou. Papargyriou also interestingly observes that the best works about the crisis are usually the ones of shorter length, in the form of short stories or novellas. Such shorter works, she argues, tend to focus more on the signifying details and on restricted frames that better reflect the way in which people have been experiencing the crisis: in the forms of traumatic events and intense experiences and not as a condition that can be described in generalizing terms. Something will happen, you'll see [Κάτι θα γίνει, θα δεις] (2010) and The good will come from the sea [Το καλό θα έρθει από τη θάλασσα] (2014) by Christos Oikonomou are examples of such works comprising short stories or episodic narratives. Papargyriou then refers to the works that respond to the refugee crisis, like The Crossing [Το πέρασμα] (2016) by Konstantinos Tzamiotis and the Victoria does not Exist [Η Βικτώρια δεν υπάρχει] (2013) by Yannis Tsirbas. To these works, the Garden in flames [Κήπος στις φλόγες] by Dimitris Nollas was added in 2017, after Papargyriou’s article was written. 

As is apparent from the above brief sketching of the contemporary Greek literary scenery, the reality with which the Greeks are confronted has deeply affected the literary production of the last decade. Although quite a lot has been published in – mostly Greek – literary magazines on the ‘literature of the crisis’, not much (English) academic work has been written on this literary production, especially on the way it deals with the double crisis. Some of the few examples of academic works on literary prose of the crisis in Greece

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are two articles recently published  in the volume Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity (2017): In its last section, named “Literature and the Discourses of Crisis”, one can find Patricia Felisa Barbeito’s essay “Undoing His/story: On Fathers, Domesticity and Agency in Petros Markaris’ Crisis Trilogy” as well as Maria Boletsi’s essay “The Unbearable Lightness of Crisis: (Anti-)utopia and Middle Voice in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Close to the Belly.” Nevertheless, the way literature negotiates the so called ‘crisis within the crisis’, i.e. the migrants' advent and coexistence with the Greek citizens within the context of the debt crisis, has not been academically explored yet and this is where the present project hopes to make an original contribution. 

   

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Chapter 2

From ‘Light Racism’ to Dehumanization and Extermination

“In naming or describing an atmosphere, whether to ourselves or to others, we also give it form. If there is tension we might search for an explanation: someone or something becomes the cause of tension.” (Ahmed 227)

In this chapter, the emphasis will lie on probing the responses that the migrants’ advent engenders among the Greek citizens. More specifically, I wish to trace the way in which Victoria does not Exist and Τhe Crossing unravel the gradual escalation of violence by the Greeks against the incomers. As I will show, if Tsirbas’s novella tracks this escalation on the level of the individual subjects, Tzamiotis’s work shifts the focus – though not exclusively – on the level of authorities. Can the way this violence is unraveled alert the reader to the ease of passing, especially at times of economic hardship, from ‘light racism’ to severely violent behaviours that dehumanize the ‘other’ to the extent that they even seek to exterminate her/him?

In an article in The Guardian from 2010, called “Liberal Multiculturalism Masks an Old Barbarism with a Human Face”, Slavoj Žižek points to the ‘covered’ way in which the contemporary “barbarism” of liberal societies, as he calls it, is expressed and practiced. More specifically, Žižek starts his argument by stressing that “we are entering a new epoch”, in which crisis and the austerity measures that accompany it lose the temporary character they used to have and become “a way of life” (n.pag.). In this era of late capitalism, the era of “depoliticised expert administration and the co-ordination of interests”, as he characterizes it, “[t]he only way to . . . actively mobilise people, is through fear”, the fear for everything and

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everyone that threatens to disrupt the “safe distance” one has from others, Žižek asserts (n.pag.). The fear that people feel is then used by politics to manipulate them and implement measures that are based on – and tolerated by the people because of – this fear. As an example, Žižek mentions anti-immigration politics that during the 2000s gained popularity in Europe and gradually became disconnected from the far-right ideology. Specifically, he stresses:

[I]n the new spirit of pride in one's cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – “it is our country, love it or leave it” is the message. (n.pag.)

In this sense, and following Western democratic standards, Western governments, Žižek asserts, condemn the racist and violent responses towards the migrants (and righteously so), but at the same time “they endorse ‘reasonably’ racist protective measures” in order to prevent “anti-immigrant defensive measures” (n.pag.). Žižek highlights the hypocrisy that is veiled under this kind of politics, which he calls “barbarism with a human face”:

This vision of the detoxification of one's neighbour suggests a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. It reveals the regression from the Christian love of one’s neighbour back to the pagan privileging of our tribe versus the barbarian Other. Even if it is cloaked as a defence of Christian values, it is itself the greatest threat to Christian legacy. (n.pag.)

What Žižek calls “barbarism with a human face” is akin to the attitude I call ‘light racism’, pointing to the kind of attitude that would make people say “Well, I’m not racist, but those foreigners are dirty, uncivilized, they occupy our neighbourhoods, they steal our things” and so on. This is an attitude that can be widely traced within the Greek society by people that do not consider themselves racist but keep distance from the migrants and try to justify their

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disdain for them as a ‘reasonable’ attitude that derives from the economic hardships they too face as a result of the crisis.

In both stories, I wish to show, there is a passage from “barbarism with a human face” to a kind of blatant barbarism; a passage that highlights the close relation of the former to the latter and provokes a shocking realization of the extremes to which hatred and racism can lead. In relation to the migrant characters in these works, I ask: Can these characters retain their humanity and agency even while living under dehumanizing conditions? To what extent do the two works provide agency to the foreign other and how do they (not) do this?

2.1. Victoria does not Exist

In Victoria, the protagonist of the novella, as mentioned in the introduction, has been raised and lives in the neighborhood around Victoria square. From the beginning of the novella, the change of the square due to the advent of migrants is presented as something that has deeply affected the narrator. Talking about how many foreigners and how many Greeks live in hi s block of flats, he stresses that the former outweigh the latter saying: 

Final score 12-24, man. Double score. Plus, the cleaning lady of Calantzi that is from Bulgaria or something like that, 12-25! I’m really desperate. Initially they did not disturb me, but I was not used to it, man. Do you know how nice it was before? And now you go to walk up to the museum and they do drugs around the peristyle . . . The national museum of drugs. It is my neighborhood, man. (8) 7

The stark distinction between the first and the third person, between the “I” and the “they” marks the boundary between the self and the other in the protagonist’s mind. The first person is associated with a former, “nice” state of homogeneity and harmony of the “I/We” which got disturbed by the arrival of the “they”, while the third person is associated with the

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present disturbing reality of misery that is also related to the financial crisis. As Anna Carastathis claims, “crisis evokes a certain embodiment of time, since the past presents a haunting nostalgia, the present is in crisis, and the future becomes increasingly impossible to imagine or picture. The only meaningful future is constructed through a romanticized and nostalgic remembrance of the past. In short, crisis breaks the linear contract of time: looking back seems like the only way forward” (31-32). This relation between present and past is traced in the protagonist’s thinking: in his romanticized construction of the past, the foreigners were not there, they were not part of the homogenous and flourishing community and, thus, in the present “[s]trangers are not simply those who are not known in this dwelling, but those who are, in their very proximity, already recognised as not belonging, as being out of place” (Ahmed, Strange Encounters 21, original emphasis). In her book, Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed deals with the way we come to recognize specific ‘others’ as strangers. In setting others out of place, she argues, the native ensures his presence into this place associated with a pleasant past and a bonded community that was abruptly disturbed:

Such a recognition of those who are out of place allows both the demarcation and enforcement of the boundaries of ‘this place’, as where ‘we’ dwell. The enforcement of boundaries requires that somebody – here locatable in the dirty figure of the stranger – has already crossed the line, has already come too close […] The recognition of strangers is a means by which inhabitable or bounded spaces are produced (‘this street’), not simply as the place or locality of residence, but as the very living form of a community. (Ahmed 21-22)

The following passage from the protagonist’s monologue is telling of how the “dirty figure of the stranger” came to contaminate the healthy body of the society:

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Victoria…I turned my head one day and I saw it full with hundreds of people. Such men, Moroccans, Pakistani, everything. Jam, the square was like a club. Children playing in filth, the statue full of Arabic letters written with red spray. Gobbledygook. Dogs, women, veils, headscarves, madness, I’m telling you. I don’t know when this happened, but it’s like I slept one night without them being there and woke up in the morning into this madness, man. (14)

The phrase “such men” is indicative of how the protagonist assumes to know the other as a certain ‘kind’ before even getting to know them. What are the properties of these men, what does the “such” signify here if not their perception as those that, dirty as they are, do not belong here? At the same time, “such men” clearly refers to the culturally others, those belonging to the countries of the Middle East and Northern Africa, as various word choices of the protagonist indicate: “Moroccans”, “Pakistani”, “Arabic letters”, “veils”, “headscarves”.

It is interesting that this man is the main focaliser in the narration and, since his interlocutor remains silent in the biggest part of their ‘interaction’, the reader feels as if the protagonist, using the second person, addresses him/her. When the narrator says “It is my neighbourhood, man” he seems to aim at the empathy of the reader who might feel some slight uneasiness as (s)he traces the character’s xenophobic views but may also develop understanding for the plight of this person, especially if (s)he has been experiencing similar changes in their life. What we have here is a sample of ‘light racism’ or “barbarism with a human face” in Žižek’s words, which is somehow presented by the narrator as ‘justified’ and may evoke to a certain extent sympathy as he explains how “really desperate” he is. This sympathy becomes even more intense as he explicitly refers to the financial crisis and the way it has radically affected his neighbourhood and his daily life, resonating the feelings of despair and frustration experienced by many Greeks affected by the crisis:

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And I see, man, several smiley guys on TV or I meet now and then someone reckless and I'm looking closely at them and I'm wondering whether they have dosh. How do these people live? Do they work, do they have a normal life, do they have dosh from their parents, are they penniless and they pretend to be cool? Who knows. Am I the only one that cannot sleep in the night? Am I the only one stressing out, man, about my mother and my father that cannot make a living? (23)

The potential force of this address lies in the way it engages the reader in the agony it expresses, inciting her/him to choose camp and align themselves with this perspective. The questions, which remain unanswered by the protagonist’s interlocutor, reach the reader and enable identification, since the narrator is for sure not “the only one that cannot sleep in the night” and that is “stressing out”. In this way, the novella shows the effects of the “crisis within the crisis” on people’s feelings towards the migrants and how this context can lead to the justification of thoughts and behaviours that can easily (usually also under the pressure of political propaganda) be attributed to the objectively difficult conditions they experience and not to xenophobia or racism.

The crisis that the country faces and its effect on peoples’ lives calls for the fabrication of a scapegoat, and the most vulnerable ones are used to this end. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed draws connections between emotions and the way “we come into contact with objects and others” (208), explaining how certain groups of people come to be scapegoated especially at times of crisis: 

In naming or describing an atmosphere, whether to ourselves or to others, we also give it form. If there is tension we might search for an explanation: someone or something becomes the cause of tension. Some attributions ‘take hold’, becoming shared explanations for an event or situation. Once someone or something is agreed to be the cause of tension, then shared feelings are directed towards that cause.

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Something ‘out there’ which is sensed and real, but also intangible, is made tangible. In ‘finding’ cause, feelings can become even more forceful. Political discourse is powerful as it can turn intangible feelings into tangible things that you can do things with. If we feel nervous, we can do something by eliminating what is agreed to be making us nervous . . . It is then as if fear originates with the arrival of others whose bodies become containers of our fear. Given that containers spill, fear becomes the management of the crisis. (227) 

Exactly this process of scapegoating, as it is described by Ahmed, can be traced in the novel, particularly in the way that the native subject, severely affected by austerity, associates his living conditions with these of the foreign other’s, implicitly or explicitly calling this ‘other’ the cause of the misery he experiences: 

Multiculturalism and globalization, like this is our problem. And I do not have gas in the car, man, and – what a humiliation! – I only put in five euros worth of fuel. Five euros of gas, dude, have you ever put five euros of gas? . . . And then, a dark man passes happily in front of me and he holds a cap full of ice-cream and syrups and almonds and everything on the top. Parfait. And he takes his time to enjoy it, man . . .  And I don't have money even for gas, dude, and I barely have money to eat and I smoke cigarettes of one euro, Gold Mound, illegal, you know, but how can you know? . . . And I don't know since when I haven't eaten ice-cream and I have restricted myself only to the necessary, and the African people comes [sic.] and eats my ice-cream. So does he have money for food and he also wants a dessert? I’m getting crazy, man. I got crazy. I’m turning on the hazard lights and I’m going out of the car and I’m doing “Psst” and with the first [punch] the ice-cream fell and with the second one he’s lying on the street . . . I’m also kicking him on the face (32-33).

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As one can notice in the above passage, the negative feelings toward the migrant ‘other’ are presented as a result of the native subject’s misery and the feelings of fear and anxiety he experiences in the present. The ‘other’ here is presented as an uncivilized intruder whose advent changes the native’s homeland and challenges his happiness. The ice-cream functions as the metaphor not only of what is lost, but particularly of what is stolen by a concrete other. To return to Ahmed, “[i]f there is tension we might search for an explanation: someone or something becomes the cause of tension” and this “someone” is incarnated in the figure of the migrant who becomes “the container of our fear” and misery. In this way, the fear and anxiety of the ‘native subject’ for becoming gradually marginalized and excluded from societal hope and expectations of a better life turns into hatred for the other’s pleasure-object, taking here the form of ice-cream. It could be argued that the ice-cream becomes a symbol of the national subject’s ‘jouissance’8 now taken away by the ‘other’. “The African people

8Žižek has borrowed this term from Jacques Lacan but he appropriated in his own work,

where he uses it in the following context: “Today, in our post-traditional ‘reflexive’ societies, we encounter th[e] enjoyment in its pure, distilled form in the guise of excessive, non-functional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life: a cruelty whose figures range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence that is not grounded in utilitarian or ideological reasons. What we encounter here is indeed W-Evil, that is, an Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the Ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance at its very heart. Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary ‘short circuit’ in the subject's relationship to the primordially missing object-cause of his desire: what ‘bothers’ us in the ‘other’ (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain privileged relationship to the object - the other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why

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comes and eats my ice-cream” states the narrator, as if the dissipation of his own hope is directly linked to the other’s perceived ‘expropriation’ of this pleasure object that metonymically represents ‘βίος’ (qualified life) as opposed to ‘ζωή’ (bare life) (Agamben 66). Hence, the narrator’s speech is characterized by the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between those belonging to the Greek nation and those who “appear to threaten, from without, what is felt as precariously within” (Ahmed 227).

The protagonist’s racist delirium reaches its peak when, close to the end of the novel, he discloses to his interlocutor, without guilt or reluctance, that he, with other (probably Greek) inhabitants of this area, leave poisoned food for the hungry migrants next to the trash bins:

Cement and water, dude. What do mice like? Cheese, this is common knowledge. So, you put two bowls in several corners of the house. In the one you have put grated cheese, mixed with concrete. The mouse goes there, eats and . . . fills its belly. In the other bowl you have water, thirsty as it is it drinks it and its stomach becomes concrete, water and cement, and the mouse blows up. Natural way of extermination, neither chemicals nor other means. (41) 

This practice, among others, not only underscores the vulnerability of migrants, as they are exposed to the senseless violence of the natives, but shows the lack of value with which their life is associated: for the precarious native subject to reassert a sense of power and agency, the migrant other has to be rendered sub-human, animalized, and even exterminated. Here, it

we don't have it), or poses a threat to our possession of the object. Here should suggest an ultimate symmetry between these ‘useless’ and ‘excessive’ outbursts of violent immediacy, which display nothing but a pure and naked (‘non-sublimated’) hatred of Otherness, and the global reflexivization of society.” (For they Know not What They Do xc-xci)

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