This is not a new book, but one I am glad to have discovered. Gazmend Kapllani was one of the roughly 700,000 Albanians to cross the border from the former communist country into Greece in the 1990s. Each chapter in his memoir, A Short Border Handbook, includes a memory from his childhood in communist Albania, one of the most isolated countries in the world at that time, juxtaposed with his migration, detention and subsequent residency in Greece. Though it was published in Greece in 2006 and in the US in 2009, it’s still a timely read given the current state of economic and political affairs in Greece.
I found this book illuminating, and it resonated with me on many levels. I’m the child of immigrants from Greece to Canada, and married someone who spent many of his formative years in Greece. Kapllani’s thoughts as an immigrant are universal, regardless of how one came to be in a foreign land: the challenges adapting to a new, likely more liberal country; the suspicion of locals; the experience of attempting to communicate in a new language at a later age. His sentiments as an illegal migrant often mirrored the stories my father, who immigrated legally to Canada over thirty years earlier, tells us about his own early years in Canada.
I also read this book through the lens of someone who has a biological and emotional connection to Greece, who has traveled there extensively and who speaks the language. However, though my blood and history are just as Greek as those who have always lived in the motherland, I am also Canadian, and so both a part of that society when I visit, but also distinctly other. His comments on speaking the native language resonated with me:
If you were a tourist, your broken Greek would endear you to people. When it comes to down to it, this is the real difficulty about difference: when an American speaks broken Greek, he is classified as a ‘nice American’, but when an Albanian speaks broken Greek, he is classified as nothing more than a ‘bloody Albanian’.
Though my Greek is actually pretty good considering I have never lived there, I do have a detectable accent. When I was younger – in the eighties, before the Albanians – most people in the village thought I was from Athens and people from Athens thought I was from a village. Now, my children and I are often “accused” of being Albanian (as if it’s a derogatory term) when we speak Greek to strangers. Obviously, this sentiment is being handed down through their parents and grandparents because most of those Albanian immigrants’ children have only known Greece as a homeland so their Greek is much better than ours. But as Kapllani states:
When an American speaks perfect Greek, he is an ‘exceptional American’, but when an Albanian speaks perfect Greek, all he hears is, ‘You’ll never be Greek! You’ll never be Greek!’
My teacher friends and cousins in Greece tell me their Albanian-Greek students try to hide their ethnicity. They have been taught to be ashamed of their backgrounds. There are countless stories of the honor-role Albanian student who isn’t allowed to hold the Greek flag at the Independence Day ceremony due to protests from the other parents. They are not Greek, despite being born there. They will never be Greek. But they are more Greek than their parents can ever hope to be, more Greek than their detractors may be willing to accept:
He doesn’t worry about being let down by his accent…because he doesn’t speak broken Greek like his father does. He is not like you…because you were a foreigner and felt like a foreigner, but he doesn’t feel like that. For your child this is home. This is when the trouble really starts…when he starts acting all familiar and making himself at home…Your child is regularly criticized, not for behaving like a foreigner, but for behaving like a Greek…The migrant is tolerated as a temporary extra, but feared and reviled when he looks like he’s about to move in for good.
What child of immigrants has never felt this dissonance? You are not really a part of your parents’ homeland, but not quite part of your own either. What immigrant hasn’t felt the growing tension between her experience of the adopted land and his child’s? Who hasn’t felt the fear of assimilation intertwined with longing for belonging?
I remember when I visited Greece in 1992, then again in 1996 and 1999, I heard all the stories about the Albanian murderers/thieves/rapists that were everyone’s favourite topic – mostly among those “who read too few books but watch too much television.” Hypersensitive to racism and stereotypes like the good little multiculturally-raised Canadian I was, I challenged some of these assumptions as best I could. I saw Albanian gardeners and tradesmen taking jobs in the city that no Greek wanted, now that everyone had a university education and parents who could support them until they found a ‘good’ job. I saw Albanian farm workers packed in the backs of pickup trucks who were probably working for well below minimum wage just so they could have a shot at a better life, completely vulnerable to their employer with no legal recourse should things go wrong. I saw a nurse who kindly and patiently took care of my great aunt in the last stages of her Alzheimer’s disease when her own husband and children had pretty much abandoned her. I felt threatened by the lingering gazes of groups of men waiting and watching as I walked in the town’s agora, and I understood a little of how the locals felt, though the Greek men weren’t exactly subtle a lot of the time either.
I saw my own father and his peers working in kitchens and factories, being held collectively responsible when one of their cohorts stole from someone, or gambled away his earnings, or looked at a local guy’s wife the wrong way.
Yes, some Albanians were certainly bad. Just as some Greeks were. But many were also good, decent people just trying to do better, just like the millions of Greeks who now live in other countries.
And that’s what both touched and infuriated me most about Kapllani and his cohorts’ experiences, and the experiences of all those illegals currently in Greece and being beaten up by fascists. There are as many if not more Greeks living outside of Greece as there are inside.
There was a time when Greece was considered what Kapllani calls a “bad-passport” country, and it looks to be headed there again. There isn’t one person in Greece who doesn’t have a brother or a cousin or an uncle or a niece living abroad as an immigrant or a student or a national. They argue that the Greeks have immigrated legally, and that the Albanians and others are in Greece illegally. And it is absolutely true that Greece has an illegal immigration problem, and that it is a stain on the entire European Union that those refugees and migrants are treated the way they are, both in Greece and other member nations, stuck in a country they don’t want to be in because they can’t get anywhere else and they can’t go back home. And yes, the current economic troubles have only exacerbated the insidious racism that has been growing since the 90s and have led to a few extremists exploiting people’s fear and insecurity. But at the end of the day, these are the same people who consistently and defensively point out what Greece has offered Western Civilization – Democracy! Academics! Philosophy!
They forget that the people who created these ideals and values that have shaped the entire Western world were the same people who believed in philoxenia – the reciprocal relationship between guest and host, with the host offering shelter and refreshment and the guest conscious not to abuse the host’s generosity. I know that many on the right will argue that the illegals in Greece aren’t holding up their end of the deal. But Kapllani’s description of life in a detention centre doesn’t demonstrate a lot of initiative on that front by the Greeks either, and I imagine that circumstances are even worse today, 20 years and hundreds of thousands of migrants later.
I made my kids watch the 80s sitcom Different Strokes the other night. I was curious to see their reaction. They were pretty bored. They didn’t really understand why a rich white man adopting a couple of black kids might be funny. Many of their friends are in mixed-race families. I told them about how my yiayia loved this show when she visited us from Greece. She especially loved Arnold, repeating his “Whatcha talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” in her thick Greek accent and cracking up every time. That and “Hello” were the only phrases she learned while she was here. I told my kids that my grandmother had never seen a black person before she saw this show. My middle child thought for a second and then asked, “Who did she buy her CDs from?”
Because for them, Greece has never been just Greek. It’s been Greek grandmothers and uncles talking rapidly over coffee, sure. But it’s also been Albanian bricklayers building walls in the oppressive heat. It’s been Nigerian boys selling pirated CDs and DVDs, smiling and practicing their English on my kids when they overhear them talking amongst themselves. It’s been barefoot Roma children smart-talking amused adults out of their change. It’s been Chinese men – ‘walking dollar stores!’ – peddling their wares in villages no Turk ever made it to.
It hasn’t been all that different from their home in Canada, on the surface.
They don’t understand this concept of a “pure” race or homeland. Their friends come from all over the world. Even most of the friends they see at Church and Greek School have two or three races. Their parents have always spoken excellent English. They haven’t ever really experienced being an “other”, except when on vacation in their grandparents’ homeland, they are asked if they are Albanian, which they laugh off, saying “No, Canadian.” As if the two are interchangeable. And they are, of course, to them.
We are all strangers here, wherever here is. And we all belong, too. Kapllani’s book reminds us that each of our journeys began somewhere. All of our stories are bittersweet, with the happiest ones ending with a kid or grandkid that is comfortable and assured of his or her place in the world, unconscious of any borders trying to keep them in or out. The happiest endings in these immigrant stories are new beginnings for another generation – but there is a tinge of loss there as well. And always a new border for someone to cross.
Incidentally, Kapllani has now left Greece, a migrant again. Borders can’t seem to contain him, despite his acute understanding of their limits and their potential.
