Photo by Silvia Tsompanaki
Greece’s Aegean Sea, dotted with islands, is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. It is also a maritime mass grave. Over the last two decades, thousands of migrants have drowned attempting to sail across the border into Greece. Indeed, it is the Greek state, always attuned to geopolitical fluctuations and largely motivated by European Union funding, that controls the flow of migration, often opening up the border, ever so slightly, before tightly sealing it again.
“Pushbacks” are common. This is when the Hellenic Coast Guard, or groups of non-state actors who patrol the Aegean, intercept migrant boats approaching island beaches, often sinking them. Any migrant who does manage to reach the shores of Greece is incarcerated, forced to live in appalling conditions—in what are, essentially, concentration camps—beaten, and used as cheap labor. Every year, Greece receives hundreds of millions of Euros from the European Union for the express purpose of continued border surveillance and migrant-camp upkeep. These funds are dispersed throughout Greece and trickle down into every corner of Greek society, from the military, to police, to camp staff and provisioners, to local employers who exploit migrant labor.
In the 1990s, the Eastern Bloc collapsed and Greece became a host country for migrants, mostly from within Europe. Today, most of the migrants who arrive in Greece are from the Middle East and Africa. Since then, however, Greece has maintained a “revolving door” policy toward migration, a policy that dictates that migrants are illegal and thus devalues their labor. Migrants in Greece are deliberately left undocumented and work for meager wages in dehumanizing workplaces until they are eventually rounded up by police, beaten, incarcerated, and deported. Many deportees return, and the process of illegalization and exploitation begins anew.
This is what these poems are about. They are from a longer piece of mine titled Revolving Doors, a cut-up in which excerpts from poems, tweets, journalistic articles, and an antifascist publication about the illegalization of migrant labor are spliced together, following a specific sequence/structure that is outlined at the end, alongside a list of the texts that were used for the construction of the work. The verses sometimes complement and sometimes contradict one another. They sometimes embrace and sometimes push back against one another. Without warning, the prosodic flow is halted, exposing the violence of Greek state policy and the culpability of Greek society.
As a whole, Revolving Doors consists of thirty-six poems of fifteen lines each. The first sixteen are presented here in Barricade’s Ramparts web forum.* The remaining twenty poems are about migrant revolts in the camps, a proud multiethnic proletariat, antifascist demonstrations, and the actions of locals and migrants alike against the state and the bosses:
without a moment’s notice the new proletarian barbarians might appear at the city’s main gate
after a long, terrible, historic travail
creating something entirely novel and unpredictable
because the future, from the working class point of view, does not exist
Revolving Doors is also featured in my 2020 book But Is This Poetry?, published in Greece by Teflon Press. The English translation will be included in The Light That Burns Us, another book of my poems that will be published in November 2024 by World Poetry Books. I am grateful to Jason Rigas for his translation and to Barricade for publishing the English version.
Jazra Khaleed
June 2024
translated from the Greek by Jason Rigas
*The first 16 poems will be published serially on Ramparts throughout the month of August; the complete 36-poem sequence will be available as a print zine in September 2024.