The porous [boundary
Posted on March 13, 2016 by akalfopoulou
Border: noun
the part or edge of a surface or area that forms its outer boundary
the line that separates one country, state, province, etc., from another; frontier line: You cannot cross the border without a visa
the district or region that lies along the boundary line of another
Touch: verb
to put your hand, fingers, etc., on someone or something
to be in contact with (something)
to change or move (something)
It's raining. Lighting breaks the night. The people in tents are getting wet. Amalia just got back from Xios. Soaked people kept coming up from the beaches, she said; she and others helped strip the bodies of wet pants, shirts. The people didn't care what parts of their bodies were being touched as she helped them into dry clothing, undressed and dressed them, made tea. Alicia tells me to bring a sheet or blanket to cover the concrete where we'll go for a few hours to entertain the kids. One girl keeps holding my hand when I get up to get something from the car. A woman watches me as we cross the street. The children are gathered on the blanket drawing and painting, like birds around thrown seeds.
"These are the people who didn't drown," Alicia says, the people who continue to let go of the known for the all-too-physical unknown, in tents, using towels and blankets for make-shift spaces to sleep. This physicality starts to obsess me; there are borders of geography, fenced and walled check-points, and the borders, too, of physical need, of hunger, getting a period, being sick, needing to pee, giving birth, – I lay on my sheets after a visit to the port, my sheets never felt more comfortable, and cry – I pick up packets of sanitary napkins to give to a volunteer group at E1. Another day I open the shopping bag with the colored makers and chalk and offer a Kurdish woman a packet of them. She shakes her head but thanks me. Two Syrian women, one in pale lavender and another in brown, seem so strangely ethereal, their hands clean, their hijabs made of what might have been silk. They could have been going out, or leaving someone's house after a visit but they are walking across the port's concrete from their tents. Their unruffled faces are a mystery to me – what will they look like in a month? Another woman is sweeping up trash beside the ground covered in some blankets. I use our broom, hers is straw; we gather the trash. They had come over from one of the islands on one of the boats. I'm appalled to learn everyone pays regular passenger fees. The Greek state is absent here too. Amidst the humanitarian efforts, are activities of a dark tourism. The sorting, feeding, and sustaining is being done by volunteer groups, some very efficient and organized people.
‪Rebecca Solnit‪ asked this question in a March 5 FB post: … Once the socialist cultural critic Raymond Williams said that, "To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing". Where do you stand on this?
These responses resonated:
‪Ruth Wallen‪: … It is fear of feeling that leads to paralysis, getting stuck in despair. Most importantly we need to cultivate our ability to feel fully, to act from sadness which is inevitable if we open our hearts, but also from the gratitude and possibility that comes simultaneously if we feel our own aliveness.
‪Annie Shattuck‪: Despair is almost always reactionary – (Sasha Lilley's great work on Catastrophism reminds us just how this is so). I think people misunderstand hope. We attach to it, as if hope means a certain outcome. Hope does not promise anything. It asks us to be present with what is, and to imagine and then to practice what could be.
Yassin, who might have been 16, helped us clean up. He was in good spirits and spoke some English. Alicia gets the kids to share markers and chalk and reuse some of the pipe cleaners she's brought which they are so happily blowing their bubbles through. Alicia has made a concoction out of suds. This second time I go to the port there are less Syrians, more Kurds, the men get involved too, drawing and writing, especially flags and names. One woman paints the colors of the Kurdish flag on a pastry she's shaped out of play dough.
A young man comes over to say it's kind of us to make the children happy but that this isn't solving the problem, the toilets are a mess and the borders closing, that "Europe is treating us badly"; he has come alone from Turkey, his brother is in Jordan. He is hoping to make it to Germany, studied engineering, and is 32. A Lexus jeep pulls up and an elderly couple come out; the woman has a bag of croissants she hands out to the children, only one or two of them take the croissants and she wants to know why they won't take them. "Because it's not really food," I tell her. Alicia saw Yassin some days later at another help point; he was in less hopeful spirits, and began to cry. On the metro going home a family of Syrians are on their way to the Larissa station where they were told they could get a bus to the Macedonian border. The man translates the Arabic into English on his phone for me so I understand what he is asking. They are a large group, two elderly men, a younger man, the man's wife, and their two children; they are carrying carefully folded blankets tied together and backpacks. If it wasn't for the blankets and the question of directions, they looked as if they could have been on their way to any city in Europe for a vacation.
Annie Shattuck is right "Hope does not promise anything. It asks us to be present with what is… to practice what could be," this family, like so many traveling to a now-closed border are carrying their hopes to a place where
the line that separates one country, state, province, etc., from another; frontier line [will tell them…] You cannot cross the border without a visa
we can only hope they will manage to touch people
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Greece, Refugees; Borders; | Leave a comment
"How will I ever eat fish again, or swim in the sea, but I will eat fish and swim in the sea," says Katerina.
How do you speak of days imbued with the halcyon sun as dead bodies wash up on the Aegean's shores?
Or write when the writing never quite expresses what you are trying to express? I think writing, like our speaking, is a way to outwit chronology, dodge the banalities of cause & effect, and complicate effects. The causes are too big, too concrete anyway. So why waste time and spirit discussing the corruption, the compromise, the evil Arendt already described as banal. Anyway apart from the very concreteness of death, there are gradations of "dying to live" to crudely paraphrase Lorca.
I stopped writing the blog, or maybe it was a pause because I've been trying to channel the writing elsewhere… and then last night Grigori called, an ex student who, like other ex students, is now a friend, and he wanted to know why I had not blogged in awhile.
There's always so much to do I tell him and he agrees and tells me that he is out of work but looking for work as he studies to be an ophthalmologist after his degree in English. We talk of other people out of work, and Natasha who will go to study creative writing in Scotland. I am suddenly feeling less burdened, happy to hear of this. It's been a long time. It's been months of not very good news all around.
I suppose I want to speak beyond what's happening here even if what's happening here has larger resonances than what's geographically happening here. I think I want to speak less about "inside voices" with its connotation of entrapment, and more about sensations of living in precarity, to be conscious in that space as Katrina was saying. Being conscious and alert is its own challenge; one Katerina considers a privilege of being alive.
As I was cleaning beets in the sink, cutting off their roots and watching the pure burgundy spread over the white basin, I thought of the beheadings going on (not an invited image…). Cutting the beets had me reluctantly imagining what must take place when another human being is objectified in that pure totalitarian moment of an executioner's unquestioned purpose. It's war's horror, that we kill each other to maintain an ideology, national purpose, border … the worst of history seems to boil down to that Freudian paradigm … how much easier to project onto some Other than deal with your own crap. Someone described one of the terrorists in last November's Paris attack as slick, outfitted in leather. I'd read it somewhere in a newspaper, and think it was someone renown who happened to be there. Fascism is all about looking good and keeping that image intact while you dis-member those who threaten the delusion. Whole races have been wiped out for the sake of such. I've been teaching the Puritans and they were as fanatic as any group with their errand, I don't think the Native Americans had a chance in that typology. But turning others into an object of projection is the mindset that allows refugee bodies to drown in the thousands.
There was a man at the stop lights today, his arm withered to the size of a twig and one of his front teeth strangely longer than the rest. He smiled and smiled when he asked for any change I might have and when I shrugged that I didn't have anything he kept smiling and I was mortified. People don't usually want their borders touched. They don't want to be unsettled. I couldn't stop thinking of him, that he didn't stop smiling. Ruptures are never invited but you can't deny them because they're devastating. It's Martin Buber's whole premise in I and Thou, the reciprocity of a subject-to-subject relationship as opposed to an I-It exchange that makes a thing of the other, one we can detach from.
So here's a poem titled so simply "Love" by Czeslaw Milosz that Anastasia posted, if only we could remember that simplicity, because we really are a mess. I wish Grigori would call me more often.
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Greece, Milosz, Refugees | 1 Comment
The Lament Tax
Posted on December 20, 2015 by akalfopoulou
"…I was thrown out of Smyrni and all I do is cry… I smoke hashishi and play the outi in café Aman…"
(from "Prosfigaki", or "Refugee" by Markos Melkon)
The Greek "Amanedes", or laments, prefigured Rembetika music, which, like the Blues, were born out of extremities of loss, displacement, grief; these songs carried the soul of a people; they became so popular in the 1920s and 30s that, Gail Holst-Warharft tells us in the Kimon Friar lecture she gave at Deree College, «The Asia Minor Refugees and their Influence on Modern Greek Music», there was discussion of taxing them. After the lecture I asked her if maybe I'd misunderstood but she said yes, in the 30s, there were editorials considering a tax. Kemal Ataturk made the laments illegal, as they were «not European enough» in his «Europeanizing agenda» for Turkey that included outlawing beards. So the lament came to Greece with the influx of refugees during the Asia Minor catastrophe, and the subsequent population exchanges mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Whole villages were uprooted and generations forced to move and resettle in places where their histories were unknown and foreign. The "Amanedes" was the music that told their stories.
How does one tax a lament? Not particularly first world to think in these terms, but after what's been happening in Greece, unsurprising that a government, or in this case the troika, might find opportunity in a people's pain. The taxing, for example of meat, which was then shifted to education, and now has settled on wine – expresses some of the disastrous fumblings to find ways to squeeze money out of a dying economy and repay an impossible debt. To try in all this to keep "positive" assumes agency, that there are choices that will at least attempt better conditions. It's the story of the refugee, and the tragedy of the crisis of Syrians and others gambling their lives to reach a shoreline into better lives.
That Greece is the entry point is another irony. There are constant updates on what's happening in Lesbos for example. A lot of people are involved. There's another a darkness to this, as there perhaps always is when people's lives come with a price tag. The stories are amazing and devastating; that one would get into a boat, and leave everything behind for some unknown tomorrow says a lot about the pull of sheer life as the example of someone like Aysha would suggest, a pregnant mother of two and a professional who left everything she's ever known in Aleppo to make her way to Europe.
The refugee crisis has generated a lot of discussion about essential realities worth defending, and fighting for. Germany continues to call the shots, but some in that government have realized the precarity. Still, Greece is slowly dying in its debt impasse, there's a malaise and sense of hopelessness that is palpable and also a radical reassessment of assumptions of certainty or safety.
One thing about inconsolable grief, it makes visible the human costs that can't be compensated. Maybe this is part of what Ataturk didn't like about the laments, the rawness of pain is a reflection of our vulnerability. And the chorus in any tragedy is always a collective voice, it warns and mourns and tells the story: "Aman, Aman" Roza Eskenazi repeats, a Greek-Jew, who made her name in the 20s and 30s. She was a legend in a world of mainly male Rembetika singers and musicians, her haunting refrain of "Aman" ("mercy" or "alas"), is a dirge of loss, of the excesses — hashish, wine, cocaine, beauty – that, alas, tax the broken in song.
Roza Eskenazi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO19a5T7Qqs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Luxw7Lfqls
Markos Melkon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNX3JXhMImk
Προσφυγάκι
FUTURES, Poetry of the Greek Crisis
Posted on November 27, 2015 by akalfopoulou
There are lines, stanzas, voices from Theodoros Chiotis' newly published anthology FUTURES, Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015) that will trip you up, scramble linearity, impoverish the predictable, and upset expectations. Out of the harrowing there is also an(other) sense of the world.
"It is this absurdity that tears apart the insides. All this outside invading the inside of the house and then the inside of Mr. Krak. The wires brought it in, the telephones, the voices, the screens. And then Mister Krak so full on the outside becomes transparent and no one on the street recognizes him." Thomas Tsalapatis, from "Transparent".
This from Emily Critchley's "Through an Internal Externalized/Spill/It Bumps Around the World/Tries Not to be Stupid' (Catherine Wagner):
"I'm learning about people & how to be political not emotional./I'm learning nothing really loving – I see that – everything abstract.//I'm learning to hold onto people,…"
And from Universal Jenny's "Now I Will Write Using Words of the Left": "First lesson/Insurrection, four stares, transmit/Collective memory, don't talk to me about work, don't/The Afghan died, ..// Second lesson/Overflowing, state of precarity, I offer my help…"
I'm not sure how these lines stood out as I sat to write about Chiotis' anthology, but they share a sensibility of invasion, of something "outside" (Tsalapatis) disrupting the consciousness of the speaker; a syntax of integrity, or syntax and integrity, are somehow reconfigured. These are poems that voice what has been broken up by "apostasy's ripping the feathers/from underneath" (Critchley), "the paraffin grit of Molotovs" (Philipou), a "glistening/in the tufts of the teargas/disseminated by the innards of rallying cries" (Mainas).
Collected in four sections, the section titles – ADJUSTMENT, IMPLEMENTATION, SINGULARITY and ACCELERATION – reflect the vocabulary of a supposedly bloodless fiscal war; at the level of what Chiotis calls "Bankspeak", the terms resonant with "an eroding agent in how we think of ourselves and how we think about language." Yet Chiotis' juxtapositions of such terminology with the poems, their "nervous and psychic energies" of "exhaustion and fatigue" but also of new scales of meaning, show how "These poems investigate not only the blind spots and cognitive bias we all have in a time of crisis; but also incite and excavate the voices that were previously silenced."
There is another consequence to this organization of the poems, that includes, also, several graffiti images – the breaking up of the textual with the visual and the splitting up of some titles reenacts the shock of precariousness when the familiar is no longer an expectation — we're forced to pay attention. It makes for more active reading. It also makes for an engagement with the texture of upheaval. As Tryfon Tolides writes in "On Suffering" – "You are less distinctly connected to the other and more to all/ others. Like chaos, which isn't separated from love… The day goes, a winged statue with head and one wing missing."
The variety of poems in Chiotis' anthology, from prose vignettes to formal verse, from acclaimed voices to those who have published very little or hardly at all, effects both "strangeness and difference" to use Chiotis description of his work of translating some of the Greek poems into English. Strangeness and difference is also a way to describe an experience of assault. Violence will break apart and ruin, but within this context there is a world of the lived and engaged that provokes a multivalence of consequences. These years of austerity and what they did, and continue to do to a small country, known, from antiquity, for its resilience and extremities maps now "the vertigo/of the unknown/" which Katerina Iliopoulou writes in "South" is what "lets the journey happen". Strangely too, a title like "Futures" for these poems that bear witness in so many different voices, to the crisis in Greece, is slyly hopeful in its irony.
There will be a poetry reading, and discussion of FUTURES, Poetry of the Greek Crisis, Wednesday, 2/12 @ Deree College (Faculty Lounge, 17:30). Alexandra Halkias (Sociology Dept. Panteion University) will be introducing and curating the event. Ask at the gates for directions to the Faculty Lounge in the main Deree College building.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Athens graffiti, Poetry of the Greek Crisis, Theodoros Chiotis. Greek financial crisis. Austerity. Futures | 1 Comment
We Were All About Collapse
"—and not simply by the fact that this shading of/forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,/the gloom of cypresses,/" Eavan Boland "That the Science of Cartography is Limited" In a Time of Violence
Collapse is what months of this year have been about… the months spilling into strange lacunae of location and time and dream and sudden waking shocked arrivals. A constant state, perhaps, for one on the run, either from lands like today's Syria or in continual displacement.
There have been lessons in all this, changes in border-shifting expectations of what constitutes security, or trust. After the exhilarations of a hopeful January election when Alexis Tsipras heading SYRIZA's anti-austerity voices so confidently claimed their fight against the troika's crippling measures, those hopes were completely crushed. The horrifying cat and mouse game of withheld loan tranches resulted in a summer of capital controls and near total economic collapse. It is hard within this vortex of realities to speak outside of them.
I guess I'm trying to find language to express why it feels difficult to talk of change at this level. So many economists, writers, Hellenists flocked to Athens to cover variations on a theme of disaster. And then there was the influx of refugees from Syria and Libya, which continues.
What marks boundary to the refugee? The traveller might, or can, return to a place of departure. None of this applies to the refugee, a continual traveller, always outside his or her point of origin, always expelled or departing.
The job environment I was a part of for the last 8 years fell apart. Two colleagues, and two of my closest friends in Athens, were fired. What was new wasn't so much the uncertainties, as a sense of some fundamental integrity being exploded. It's not easy to describe to those who have not experienced such dismantlings. Getting through a moment can come down to providing a blanket or having a conversation. Someone like Dionysis Arvanitakes, a baker on Kos, gave away 200 pounds of bread daily to refugees.
My daughter spent the summer working with groups helping refugees, I spent it working and traveling, and trying to keep myself emotionally intact as what I knew would again change. Seams, and borders, the porousness of trauma — as the thin-edged fabric of mind and flesh were often overrun I imagined what it might be to confront the intractable. The inflexibility of a Wolfgang Schäuble, the supposed pragmatism of a Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who personifies the lack of imagination and leadership of the Eurogroup machine (he had to amend his CV after being appointed finance minister because he never really got a Masters from Cork College University). The whole Euro drama which started and remains centered in, and on, Greece, is a family drama too, more like Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" than a Greek drama with its promise of catharsis. Why is it that when dramas are so obviously out of control there seems to be the most reluctance to solving them.
Things have changed fundamentally in the emotional landscape of the country. It makes certain kinds of behavior uglier than usual when contrasted with the initiatives of people like Dionysis Arvanitakes. Margaret Papandreou chose to promote her newly published book titled Έρωτας και Εξουσία (Eros and Power). I was amazed given the circumstances, to say nothing of backstories regarding PASOK's years of clientelism. Talking to C always gives me perspective, and she said very simply, "not everyone's capable of suffering."
As children and families are brought, or washed up, on the Greek shores, the small, necessary gestures of survival have provided a new understanding for scales of empathy. C says it's the excesses she worries about as countries collapse and the imbecilities of power and ego assert their hegemonies. I opened Alphonso Lingis' Dangerous Emotions, to this paragraph: "Awakening is proud and hopeful. The interruption of continuity makes possible the leap, with all the forces of the present, into what is ahead. It makes possible hope, the awaiting what cannot reasonably be expected." C and I were talking about Virginia Woolf who C mentioned had always aspired to write "the novel of the moment," C says she'd like, one day, to write "the novel of the unexpected."
— the right no —
Posted on July 27, 2015 by akalfopoulou
For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
drags him down all his life.
C.P.Cavafy, "Che Fece… Il Gran Rifiuto" (1901), trans. Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard
"We don't leave place for hope. We leave for the unknown." CK
There is something consoling about being in a room that feels like it has your basic needs covered. The chaos outside (& here in Freiburg there is little that seems chaotic) is distanced by small gestures of order. I also like the fact that I can see "German laundry" hanging across the way from my window
Before I left Athens I had a bunch of things to do that took a lot longer than they would have before the capital controls were imposed. It all happened very quickly… endless all night sessions in the parliament that followed endless all night sessions in Brussels… I mean how comfortable are any of us with the idea that decisions that are affecting our lives and livelihoods are being decided under these conditions. Hundreds of pages handed over to Greek ministers to sign in a matter of hours. You can take Varoufakis' view (shared by many) that this was a form of mental waterboarding, pushing the government to the edge of exhausted despair when all proposals (in the past 5 months) have amounted to failure, or you can take the view that the government was caught unprepared, proved itself dangerously incompetent, and had no Plan B if the euro group didn't budge from their austerity agenda. And they didn't budge. The two views don't have to be mutually exclusive but there are a lot of gray shades between the primary colors. As in any dysfunctional family, a metaphor I've been using about what's happened, it's never solely the fault of one side or member. Generally a crisis means that the functioning or integrity of the whole is at stake.
The looks on the faces of bank employees certainly expressed trauma. There was a numbed concern and almost trance-like tolerance for all manner of questions from the absurd to the mundane. No crisp first world efficiencies here. "How do I activate my card?" was one repeated question, usually from an elderly pensioner who most likely had no one else to ask. Many were in line to be walked through the steps to use web banking to pay bills. I kept expecting someone to crack. I spent several hours trying to transfer euros from one bank account, where my salary was deposited, to another where my bills were paid. I could have done it in 10 minutes or less in the days when we could withdraw larger amounts than 60 euros a day, or 420 a week. I also had to pay 12 euros for the transaction. The employees were not machines. Which is the point. Machines would be less tolerant of the ongoing questions. There would be some flat, automated "I don't understand. Could you repeat the question please" that would endlessly repeat itself if there was any confusion about the question. Inefficiency of course is one of the things the euro group is accusing "the Greeks" of, also a lack of speed when it comes to reforms and the like. They in turn, from the various summaries of what took place were quite machine-like in their repeated refusals to consider amendments to unsustainable economic measures.
But I want to speak to this human quality of people like the bank employees, and others working with little or no pay in initiatives like EMFASIS let alone doctors and nurses in public hospitals serving the community. Their exhausted endurance reflects the cost to the human, weary, unglamorous quality of sheer life in moments of extremity, a quality or value that clearly was not on the table in the euro group negotiations. Mark Mazowar goes so far as to speak of "the soul" of Europe being bartered.
I want to say that it isn't simply about what needs to be done fiscally but about making that possible. The catch-22 of the whole fiasco has been that the demand for repayment of the debt can't be fulfilled under conditions where there is no economic growth. Varoufakis' language on the morning of the referendum stunned me. Phrases like preparing for "the siege" and "stocking the war room" seemed mad. In hindsight he was right. No one expected the 61% Oxi (No) vote. And had Europe cut Greece off, as they did financially, there would have been, and was, still, a need for basic supplies.
We were "permitted" to continue in the euro in a capacity that has amounted to indentured servitude. I have a hard time accepting that Tsipras signed off 50 billion euro worth of state assets to a privatization fund. The tragedies and mistakes of austerity will continue, and it has reinforced rather than undermined the bipolarities of the euro zone and the scapegoating that goes with it. Thomas Gallant's historical assessment is informative.
The dysfunctional European family is clinging to a single currency that maintains a banking system with particular hierarchical agendas. But for hope there really needs to be some shared principle or ideology. I started to reread Arendt's Human Condition; it begins with a description of the activity of labor, that "does not need the presence of others, though a being laboring in complete solitude would not be human but an animal laborans…" Her description of the "special relationship between action and being together" taken from Aristotle's definition of the political animal "zoonplitikon" as an "animal socialis" speaks to the current schism between politics and economics. That is, "man is by nature political, that is, social" when there are shared principles at work. My friends in Germany are livid with what Merkel and particularly Schäuble have allowed. If we really are a European unity, which we really aren't, there needed to be an acknowledgement and some nurturing of shared values. The 61% No was a plea for inclusion, for terms that would allow for growth, rather than a bowing to terms that would keep the country broken and begging, the animal laboran of the European periphery.
Thinking through the Math
Posted on June 7, 2015 by akalfopoulou
My grandmother would always tell me never to leave change, or any money, where the bread was put. I might have put some change on the table where we ate.
Two of my colleagues were fired today. They were told, as I was told, that this wasn't the administration's choice but that there was no choice. This is the kind of doublespeak that's become part of austerity's rhetoric. Cutting down on the payroll to get lenders to lend us funds to save a body makes no sense when the method cannibalizes that body. Tsipras is saying all this to the euro group who are getting tired of the Greek tragedy. The lenders, institutions that they are, are thinking of their own meals.
I told myself I would stop blogging about Greece. At least stop writing directly about it, my imagination is in danger of being cannibalized by the austerity of repetitions — teetering, falling, slipping — the gifted ae tells her workshop to try to keep adjectives and adverbs to a minimum, maybe there is too much passivity in adjectives & adverbs when work needs to be done.
The treacherous ride we're on means we find ourselves holding our breath more often than not. Holding your breath, or forgetting to breathe, is an act of violence the yoga teacher tells us. Gandhi brought down an empire by wearing a loincloth and breathing.
Like the discussions in the euro group it's a question of what bodies are considered important enough to be saved. You might end up sacrificing the wrong body, or cutting into a column that will bring down the building.
There was an almost-agreement (there have been several of those since the Eurozone meetings in Latvia and Brussels); the VAT tax was going to come down to 7% on medicine and books. But while tentatively agreeing to this the euro group turned around and wanted a 23% tax on electricity.
Stoves, refrigerators, heaters, washing machines will eat up the quality of life: don't wash your clothes too often so you can afford to buy medicine. Keep cooking to a minimum. No one uses dryers anyway.
One of my colleagues will not get compensation because we were asked to sign on to freelance contracts though we have full time responsibilities. She was asked to sign a monthly contract since it's the end of the teaching period. She also pays rent and has no money saved.
Standards of living are relative to what people are used to. China burns coal and considers itself an emerging market, economically growing but the first world is concerned about the pollution. The first world keeps borrowing from China so that its most privileged members can maintain a lifestyle that makes me think of Catherine the Great's all-amber rooms and the small palace built for her shoes. It would be interesting to know what would change in people if some of the first world's baroque indulgences were harder to come by; if the women in Wednesday Martin's Primates of Park Avenue were suddenly unable to fund their excesses.
I watch a couple pile up the planters someone in the building has put out on the road. Then I see a Pakistani guy pull up in a three-wheeler and look for metal in the recycling bin.
I'm at the gas station with 20 euros, which is usually what I give for half a tank, but I say "10 euros" and apologize. The woman at the pump who I know as Natasha, says "10, then 10"; "If it's 5, then 5 – whatever you can give is what you give." She dismisses my apology.
When Venizelos was the finance minister he took money from the health sector and education to pay the PSI, which was the bond swap that allowed for the second bailout package installment. We have been waiting for a loan tranche that has been withheld because agreements haven't been reached yet; see John Psaropoulos' update.
One consequence of all that's happening is that priorities have been unmasked. When Yanis Yaroufakis brings up the fact of Greece's humanitarian crisis, a euro zone minister notes that there are countries poorer than Greece, economies that emerged from the Soviet bloc are still struggling; the comparison is really not worth my going into it. I've already broken my promise about blogging.
The other disagreements on #s beyond the VAT have to do with pensions & minimum wage; already low pensions of 488 euros would be reduced to 200 euros. In terms of the math again, how does a person pay a 23% VAT tax on electricity with 200 euros a month?
This is all beside the point. For the euro zone it's about balancing the #s, but it's more skewed, they don't want to forgive any of the debt — which is fine, but they don't want, either, to make it possible for the economy to rebuild itself so it might grow out of the "austerity-for-aide" ditch. It's more like "infinite servitude-for-food" but people are still starving.
I was never good at math, maybe because there was nothing particularly interesting to me in numbers in and of themselves. #s are cold & factually objective though they have their contexts too. On plasma TVs in different metro stops – the Patissia metro station, the Monasteraki station – there are black & white images of the German occupation, there are #s too. Zoe Konstantopoulou heads the debt truth committee but also the committee investigating the German war reparations controversy.
They've come up with the staggering figure of 350 billion owed in reparations. Many think this belongs to the past. The contexts are certainly different. As the country sinks into further despair because of these impossible choices, i.e. "austerity-for-aide" vs "infinite servitude-for-food," people are still starving.
We could do with less "punitive" drives. 300 million euros was due last Friday to the IMF and Greece skipped the payment. Not because they won't, or don't want to, pay, but they are simply doing exactly what was done on the part of the euro zone who (still) have not given the debt relief installment that was due in early June; they're still hoping to negotiate the terms.
Unlike George Papandreou who buckled under the pressure to come to a decision with the IMF in April 2010 — told he had to make the decision before the Japanese markets opened, and had 10 minutes left to decide — this government is refusing to buckle.
It's a Saturday night and I get together with a handful of friends from the neighborhood. I call them the Saturday night anarchists. We eat and drink too much but we also talk a lot. Sometimes the conversation goes on into the next morning. Lefki says "No one can do the math anymore. It's just too much. All of it." Kostas is not happy with Syriza's defiant stand. Lefki says that the govt is going through the infamous Lagarde list of names, & giving them ultimatums to pay up on their taxes. One "wife of a former prime minister" owed 400 thousand euros in taxes. Lefki says, "I guess some people never get tired of eating."
The math doesn't add up because it's not meant to. Monsanto sells seeds to villages in India so they will become dependent on GM seeds, and Monsanto, who will make a profit by selling them. It is a rape of what is indigenous. The same is true of Nestlé's bottling fresh water in places where it is (or was) free to drink; but according to Nestlé's CEO water isn't a human right but a commodity.
Some of the things that move me in Athens are very small moments. In the midst of so much visible pain these are reminders that we are not commodities. I had to have a foot X-ray & went early to a clinic, paid 10 euros and was told to come back in the evening for the results. An hour or so later a call from the clinic asked if I was close enough to come back because the doctor wanted a second X-ray to properly diagnose what was wrong, I was quickly told it wouldn't cost me anything; he just wanted a second look to make sure of the diagnosis.
My grandmother never wanted us to leave money where she put bread because what fed us was very different from the cost of managing it, costs being by definition vulgar, the baser value to nurture. Math is not about generosity. Sometimes it's convenient to ignore the context.
If Germany wasn't shown some generosity in 1946, if it had only been about the math they may never have achieved the kind of economic recovery they did.
Varoufakis points out: "By 1946, the Allies had reduced Germany's steel output to 75% of its pre-war level. Car production plummeted to around 10% of pre-war output. By the end of the decade, 706 industrial plants were destroyed. Byrnes' speech signaled to the German people a reversal of that punitive de-industrialization drive. Of course, Germany owes its post-war recovery and wealth to its people and their hard work, innovation, and devotion to a united, democratic Europe. But Germans could not have staged their magnificent post-war renaissance without the support signified by the 'Speech of Hope.'"
I'm doing some translations of Kiki Dimoula's poems, and a prose piece of the poet Katerina Iliopoulou's; here are some lines Katerina has after the verb "Meet" in a piece called "Collect":
"If you cannot construct it, you cannot devise it, in some way, somehow, you cannot enter it. Of course the procedure goes both ways.
The place also constructs you and gives you its characteristics. The meeting highlights the possibilities of my being here, or of becoming something else."
& the blossoms?
Posted on April 26, 2015 by akalfopoulou
"Surely spring has been returned to me, this time not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly." Louise Glück It's been a bleak winter, not without its splashes of light. The spring's longer days feel a little like unexpected coins in a mud puddle. Wishful thinking. In Athens the scent of lemon and orange blossoms perfumes the air, and sometimes so powerfully that I find myself pausing to take deep breaths. A radio channel aired George Papandreou's voice two days ago, the fifth anniversary of the signing of the IMF agreement. He promised all the good things this was going to do for Greece: recovery and economic possibilities. Instead it's been a pretty steady downhill slide in terms of recovery though there have been some signs of life. There are always signs of life. Like the scent of blossoms from the trees, but what's unclear is how any this is going to begin the steady if gradual building toward a more hopeful future. From a layperson's point of view, it seems like all the wrong turns were taken at the wrong times. What the Syriza government is doing, calling the bluff so to speak on the policies of austerity — the slashing of already dwindled pensions, hiked taxes on property, among other cuts/increases – should have been negotiated from the beginning. Personally, the G. Papandreou govt., and the K. Karamalis govt. before him really took the responsibility (or didn't) for how we reached this low point. G.P., for example had ministers who have admitted to not having read the IMF documents before signing them. Anyway, it's water under the bridge, and the bridge is about to be pulled under in the tide. Now the Tsipras government was elected because the previous governments 1) did nothing to bring culpability to the individuals or groups who siphoned off EU loans for personal &/or self-interested purposes bringing the country to its debt-gutted present 2) took the country further down the path of zero-growth since none of the stimulus packages stimulated what they were supposed to. I don't think the Tsipras government is managing very well either because 1) the discourse being used is at odds with other Eurozone members who are stolid neoliberals holding on, tooth & nail, to the neoliberal dream, even if it's a nightmare for some, and 2) they suffer from age-old hubris – I mean no matter how righteous the cause, why would people with power and all the reins in their hands simply hand over a rein or two to newly elected politicians who keep telling them that everything they've done, historically and otherwise, is wrong. I was talking to a friend and she said, "If someone was negotiating with a party of a completely different ideology would you waste your time telling them they weren't being democratic if that wasn't a priority to begin with." There are at least two kinds of languages, let alone ideologies, that this government has to navigate, a kind of Eurozone-speak that emphasizes unity, and the Greece-can't-take-anymore-austerity view. For the Eurozone these are mutually exclusive discourses, or so it seems. Within the government itself there are, crudely, three groups, hardcore Stalinists who hark back to the hauntings of a post Civil War period, old PASOK members who want the old unions and are worried about being implicated in EU loan dealings, and center-left Europeanists who want reform, and growth, but not at any cost. The radical left-wingers want out of the IMF/Troika no matter the cost, the majority though, including Tsipras, want to stay in the Eurozone with its currency, but are unwilling to continue in the "business-as-usual" manner of the previous governments. The ironies are many. One of the critical outcomes of a globalized economy has been how capital gain is prioritized over the sovereignty of nation states. The Greek crisis has dramatized the near-impossibility of equal consideration for all parties involved in the EU federation, despite the rhetoric that suggests otherwise. The question that this impasse has foregrounded is whether that will lead to a further leveling of democratic processes and their implied assumption that we keep ourselves in dialogue with our differences for the good of all. While Mr. Dijsselbloem, as chair of the Eurogroup now in session in Riga says to Mr. Varoufakis, "Yanis, you don't tell us what we want to hear." Maybe more should be said about what needs to be heard all around so our bridges don't go entirely under. Recent articles of note: Mark Weisbrot, "European officials may be pushing regime change in Greece" Nikos Konstandaras, "Greece's Eerie Calm" Paul Krugman, "Greece on the Brink" Robin Emmott and Ingrid Melander, "Isolated in debt talks…"
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Athens; austerity; Eurozone;, SYRIZA | Leave a comment
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Greece. Syriza. Austerity. Kiki Dimoula. Yanis Varoufakis. | 1 Comment
"Είμαστε όλοι ανάπηροι" (We are all cripples)
Each day for the past week, and today too, I come across moments that speak of what this year has meant for so many. What make them "Greek." That they are taking place during the holiday season in a city and country that has seen and continues to battle its economic ravage, that there is a tenor to the overlay of the poignant, heroic, and absurd that recalls the George Seferis poem "The Container of the Uncontainable" which in Greek is "H XΩΡΑ ΤΟΥ ΑΧΩΡΗΤΟΥ" – for some reason Keeley & Sherrard have translated "Xωρα" as "Container" — it is also Greek for "country". The first line of the poem from the Keeley/Sherrard translation that kept resonating: "Bells like coins falling sound today all over the city/between each peal a new space opens/" The week before Christmas I'd gone to see The Depression Era exhibit in Gazi at the Benaki museum, and also Rosi Braidotti had come to give a lecture on the occasion of the Greek translation of her Nomadic Subjects. Both Braidotti's talk and the Benaki exhibit were cartograhies of new spaces as much as they expressed the uncontainable aspects of people and their worlds within topographies of advanced capitalism. This next to a photo titled «Burnout» at the start of the exhibit: These are statistics. What elides their chilling factuality? At the Athens Bakery next to work where I go to get lunch (the bakery now has economical cooked meals along with its breads and pasteries). There was chickpea soup for 4.80 euros that day. At the cashier I stare at a pastry of feta and tomatoes and consider getting this too; Alexandros who works at the bakery is at the register. «How much are these?» I say, and he puts it into the bag with my soup. «4.80» he says, and repeats when I ask again, since I realize he hasn't added the feta and tomato pastry, «4.80» he says again. Athens, after 5 years, is still at the center of the Euro-crisis, though it is also very much its own space, as I am with others in line at the post office. People are tabulating the year's gains and losses. Mostly people talk of ways the government could have made things better. I am waiting for my turn to send Christmas cards. There's a lot going on in the streets, and there seems to be more grandparents pushing children in strollers than usual. More cars jumping the pavements to park where there is no parking space; the space in front of the post office is reserved for pick-ups and drop-offs. I see a woman get out of a car and remove the No-parking sign as a small blue car drives up. She speaks with an accent when someone asks what she's doing. She is making room for a coiffed 70ish year old motioning us to move out of the way so she can park. I see the sticker on her windshield for the handicapped. The woman helping her is from Romania, and brings out her two crutches from the backseat. A heavyset woman gets on her two crutches rather gingerly and makes her way into the crowded post office as another car drives up right next to hers. The guy's on his cell phone and barely looks the way of the grandmother pushing a stroller who is now yelling that he's blocked the pavement completely. He backs up into the traffic, still on the cell, then drives back up on the pavement as another stroller is about to negotiate the pavement. At that point he rolls his eyes, still on the phone. I say, "not only are you parking where you aren't allowed but you have an attitude." Someone nods next to me, and continues the conversation with the man who is saying he too is handicapped. But he has no sticker on his car, and seems to move fluently into the crowded post office after he gets out of his car. The man who spoke to him says, "We'll never learn. It's why we're in this situation." A younger guy next to me says, "we're all handicapped at this point." The woman who had gone in on her two crutches, now comes out looking pleased to have accomplished her task. Meanwhile the post office director is outside and sees the cars have parked in the no parking space and grabs the battered sign with a look of complete frustration. "They're handicapped," someone calls out, and he shrugs as the Romanian woman motions to people to move so her charge can back out again. But as she gets into her car and gives her her crutches she says, "I had to send those 20 euros, my children need it." The man next to me hears it too and shakes his head, "She can barely walk and here she is driving." I take this as a euphemism for his admiration of her purposefulness. "Some women are petty dynamic," he goes on and I smile. The time it takes to make the effort to help out, what can slow us down, somehow our humanity feels implicit in this. Like the body. Like the brokenness of our streets and sidewalks, the coming up short in our calculus of empathies. Near work an elderly and decently dressed man was yelling at the top of his lungs, "This is the country for the low life!" Drug addicts were shooting up on some benches. A woman yelled back, "Say it like it is father!" I don't agree, I think what we see is the wound and woundings that have brought us to another place, and another way of understanding time. Time is not so much money as it is the exchange of what money can't buy, cliché as that expression is. At the cash register yesterday a woman ahead of me didn't have enough to pay for all her groceries. The overworked and clearly exhausted cashier started to subtract what she wasn't going to pay for: a book, a shaker of salt, a box of cornflakes, two pairs of socks. The cashier was doing the math to see at what point she could stop subtracting as the young woman who was with her perhaps 10 or 12 year old son was counting out change. "I have some more in the car," she said, and the woman at the register said, "It's okay, 53 euros right?" "52.80 cents" she said, and the cashier took it, and wished her a happy new year. The Seferis poem is short: "Bells like coins falling sound today all over the city/between each peal a new space opens/like a drop of water on the earth: the moment has come, raise me up.//"