What Do You Want From Athens?

After sharing a satisfying dinner of mezedes and wine, my French expat friend and I were walking by the closed-up stalls of the central marketplace in a crumbling stretch of downtown Athens when we realized a man was following us. He looked like an Afghan migrant, young, with thick sideburns and a leather jacket. Strolling up alongside us, he interrupted our bubble of talk and laughter with a big smile. 

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“None of your business,” I replied, staring back as we walked. My instincts as a former New Yorker dictated that because he had abruptly interrupted our privacy in public, this man must be avoided as either a miscreant or a nutso.

 He continued smiling and made some comment about his lack of English skills and not understanding. So I repeated myself.

 “How old are you?” he asked then.

 “I’m not going to tell you,” I said.

We mutely regarded each other in mutual incomprehension. After some time, he shrugged and walked on, bravely attempting to hold onto his smile.

It could have been that my instincts were correct. Maybe there was even some sinister code behind our interaction that I didn’t grasp. On the other hand, from our experience working with refugees and migrants in Athens, my friend and I thought it was equally possible that the man was alone and attracted to our good mood, or wanted help of some kind, or was just bored. I don’t know. By saying that my life was not his business, I spoke correctly in an outward sense, but I never asked the question that might have told me about him: “What do you want?”

 “What do you want?” is an interesting question to ask anyone you meet in Athens, a city whose layered and rugged environment is marked by the meandering journeys of thousands of individuals for as many reasons. Athens is a transitory city. With the seasons, Greeks, tourists, expats, and refugees flow into the capital and flow out across globalized borders, to whitewashed islands and mountainside villages. Movement through the city brings unexpected coincidences. New places are discovered. Chance meetings occur. 

I first came through Athens because, like millions of others every year, I wanted a good vacation. This put a certain frame of expectation on me in the eyes of the outside world. People gave me recommendations for fun beaches to visit. I went to beaches and they were nice, but crowded. I wasn’t satisfied with them. I had interests of my own. I wanted to see real life rather than fantasy, or failing that, at least a kind of fantasy outside of expectations. Since almost all the news about life in Greece when I arrived had to do with the refugee crisis, that’s where I started looking. I volunteered with Melissa, a network of migrant women in Greece which had developed a non-formal education program for refugee women in the neighborhood of Victoria Square. My involvement there led me to find opportunities for work and income and reasons to extend my stay in Greece for months and years. I came to Athens as a tourist, but I had an idea about myself that was different from what people read off the tag. I found myself interested in things that I never thought would interest me. Holding onto this double identity changed my life.

Now that I’m considered an expat, people give me different recommendations and ask me different questions. People tell me that things are very bad here and will never change, then ask me whether I like it here better than home and how long I will stay. These are polite and straightforward remarks and questions. At best, they can stage the beginning of a deep interaction with a stranger. At worst, they’re irrelevant, one-sided conversation. They give me a tag but they don’t give me an identity with a face. They preclude the interlocutor from uncovering something new in the immediate exchange: what I want. 

I see this conflict over navigating a social and a personal identity mirrored in the refugees I’ve worked with. The one desire I hear expressed again and again from refugees from all countries and demographics is the desire to not just be another refugee.

“I want to speak Greek, have normal friends, work, like anyone else in the country,” Michael, a refugee from China, told me over coffee. When I asked about it, he was open about having to leave home, in the process cutting off all ties with his family for their protection. He appreciates the help he’s gotten through asylum in Greece. At the same time, he wants to live a normal life and be seen as doing so.

Younger refugees are especially emblematic of a double identity. Sakineh, a 16-year old from Afghanistan, is the oldest child and speaks the best English and Greek in her conservative family. She was essential to them as an interpreter during asylum meetings and visits to the hospital. She struggles to find time in-between to study for classes at her Greek high school and while her father questions her European habits, she complains of people pulling at her headscarf and saying mean remarks on the metro. A large part of her experience is defined by the fact that she is a refugee. At the same time, like a tween from Southern California, she fawns over scenes from the “Twilight” movie and singers from “America’s Got Talent” with her friends. She translated this interest into enthusiastic participation in acting and photography classes given by refugee organizations. While she moves through the world as a refugee, the identity that Sakineh sees for herself, expressed through her tastes and the passions she pursues in her free time, is not a product of her asylum status.

I met students participating in the American College of Greece’s refugee scholarship program who are in many ways indistinguishable from their non-refugee peers. There’s a 19-year old computer geek in glasses and a hoodie who shined brightly in a State Department-sponsored hackathon and looks ready to go to Silicon Valley to pitch his startup. There’s a hacky sack and ukulele-playing history major in a baggy sweater, who would have been right at home after-hours philosophizing with other undergraduates in my college dormitory in Chicago. Except the computer whiz doesn’t have the money to get a laptop of his own and lives in a refugee camp with no wifi. And if the hacky sack player reveals his true identity, his family’s enemies will kill him.

“Who are you?” can be a material question. You are a tourist. You are an expat. You are a refugee. You are an Athenian. I expect certain things from you based on these tags. In a chaotic world, doing this can seem necessary. But I risk becoming a victim of my expectations for you. “What do you want?” is a spiritual question. What do you want from your visit to the Acropolis? What do you want from travels around the world? What do you want from your new life? What do you want from Athens? 

Dove