Up in Flames
A refugee crisis in Greece is the springboard for a meditation on the illusory nature of origin stories and national borders.
MORE THAN THREE YEARS after the fact, we still know too little about what happened in the migrant camp known as Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, on Sept. 8, 2020. That night, a fire started in Moria’s Zone 6, one of the makeshift areas abutting the main camp’s walls. Flames tore through the tents, the embers carried by the wind, leaving most of Moria’s 11,000 residents homeless.
Nearly everything else about the fire is contested. Within a few days, Greek authorities arrested six young Afghans, convicting them in two rushed trials over the next nine months. In one trial, the judges deliberated for less than 10 minutes before handing down guilty verdicts; in the other, the government’s sole eyewitness, whose account was already riddled with holes, didn’t even show up.
Because of Covid restrictions at the time, Lauren Markham says, these were months when she had to “follow the case from afar.” She had visited Moria in 2019, an experience she describes in “A Map of Future Ruins,” her ruminative new book about borders and identity. In 2021, she returned to Greece, where officials “repeatedly refused to provide evidence or facts on the case,” stonewalling her reporting efforts. (The defendants’ appeal, originally scheduled for last year, is now expected to take place in March.) She concludes that the six defendants “hadn’t set the fires — there was simply no proof.”
The Moria fire turns out to be only one part of the story she wants to tell. Markham is the author of “The Far Away Brothers” (2017), a powerful, superbly narrated account of Salvadoran twins who arrived in the United States as teenagers, fleeing the violence of their home country. “A Map of Future Ruins” is at once more ambitious and more diffuse, braiding together scenes from contemporary Greece with the history of Markham’s own family’s emigration from Greece a century ago, along with a detour to an ice hotel in the borderlands between Russia and Norway and a short chapter on what humans can learn from trees.
“Ultimately the Moria story would end up not only connected to but central within my larger inquiry into the mechanics of belonging, exclusion and whiteness in a heavily bordered world, the inquiry that had brought me to Greece in the first place — and central to the book that I would eventually write, this very book you hold in your hands, so different from how I first imagined it,” Markham explains early on. It’s an unwieldy sentence that conveys the hazards of such an expansive approach. When she describes what she sees, her observations are vivid; when she starts musing, the prose gets windy. Where her previous book was animated by an unflinching specificity, “A Map of Future Ruins” sometimes meanders so far afield that it loses its bearings.
Greece is an undeniably rich subject, both as a location and as a metaphor. As the vaunted “birthplace of democracy,” the country, with its storied past, has become the stuff of nostalgia, its iconography the stuff of veneration. Nazis and white supremacists have offered warped versions of ancient Greece to assert Western superiority. Yet as Markham suggests, the nation’s current troubles make all the mythologizing seem even more desperate and bizarre.
“Greece, with its rampant corruption, widespread poverty and increasingly autocratic leanings, now defied its own origin story,” she writes. Markham is attuned to reversals, to paradoxes and discrepancies in meaning. The more globalized the world becomes, the more ardently “so many of us yearn for a root system to tether us.” Yet so much of what she encounters is “absurd”:
Greece is an undeniably rich subject, both as a location and as a metaphor.
the flamingos (“bright pink absurdities on this dry island in Greece”); the proposal for a floating wall on the surface of the Aegean Sea (“something from an absurdist novel”); her own reaction when someone says she looks Greek (“that, absurdly, delighted me”).
AND THEN THERE is her seemingly fraught relationship to her own book. “It would be absurd and inhumane, I knew, to attempt any comparison between my own family’s story and that of today’s refugees,” she writes, and she (wisely) doesn’t attempt anything of the sort. Yet her book does include bits from her family’s story, and it does include sections on today’s refugees. She presents her refusal to draw connections as a matter of principle, declaring at several points her growing frustration with journalism, “an industry of extraction,” and the “logic of sequence” that governs linear storytelling.
So she offers a series of set pieces, a number of them vignettes from her travels in Greece — the place she yearns to know and identify with, even as it seems to bewilder her at every turn. She sees a woman talking to a duck and meets a man who says he knows how to “speak bird.” Her husband gets bitten by a donkey, and shortly after they spot a couple of writhing snakes on the ground. “The bewitched donkey, these twirling snakes, felt like missives to decode,” she writes, “but here I was again, grasping at meaning.”
Getting lost is a theme. So, too, is the nostalgia propelled by other kinds of loss. Markham frequently quotes Svetlana Boym, the artist and scholar whose 2001 book, “The Future of Nostalgia,” is an explicit inspiration. Yet where Boym’s meditations were girded by her brilliant and original argument about different ways of longing for a past that may have never existed, Markham gets lost in her lostness. “A Map of Future Ruins” is a collage that never quite coalesces. Even the Moria fire, which she calls “central” to her inquiry, doesn’t provide much by way of guidance.
“Whoever set the fire — if indeed it had been deliberately set — must have been attempting to disrupt some perceived order of things, that is, to revise the story.” That claim is plausible. But it’s a sweeping sentiment so laden with qualification that it leaves you like Markham on her travels: grasping at meaning with no sense of where to go. □