What Was Moria?
By Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University)
I visited Lesbos several times, but never with the intention to conduct research. While on the island, something stopped me from visiting the Moria camp. I was afraid the intense spotlights of the notorious camp would dazzle my eyes, spellbind me, and make my gaze fixed only on it. I avoided the camp itself but explored everything around it. So rather than having conventional ethnographic data, what I took with me was an impression of a mood. And now, allow me to share it with you in a few snapshots.
Image from Tripadvisor.
Kabos
For fugitives and refugees (etymologically, both share the same root in Latin), where better to go than Lesbos. Mythology links the island to female homosexuality; the word “lesbian” is derived from the name of the island. Historically, the island was a refuge for Aegean pirates and outcasts. Moreover, Lesbos has been one of the main communist strongholds in Greece.
How could Moria happen on such an unfettered island?
One of the entry points for the refugees crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Lesbos is Skala Sikamineas, a small fishing village to the north of the island. On entering the center of this village, the refugees, many of them Farsi-speaking, see a big restaurant sign: Kabos. In Farsi, kabos means nightmare. The nightmare awaiting these refugees was Moria.
According to English dictionaries, the word moria denotes “a mental state marked by frivolity and an inability to take anything seriously.” This is exactly what Moria was: not taking its residents and their lives seriously. In Greek, the word mória (μωρία, -ας, ἡ) means absurdity, foolishness. The absurdity of Moria was best expressed by Morteza, who said, “Moria is our destiny. We can’t escape from it.” Is it not absurd that for people escaping war and death, Moria had become a source of fear from which one should escape?
A dramatic scene outside Moria was all men and women, young and old, walking along the road to or from the town of Mytilene. Visits were for different reasons: to meet friends, to find ways to escape from the island, to attend language classes arranged by NGOs, or to just elude the boredom of life in the camp. The Moria camp is 8 km from the town. A visit to Mytilene meant 16 km of walking to and from. If they, as some Afghans told me, visited the town every day, after nine months they would have covered the distance between Kabul and Lesbos. Moria meaning absurdity was exactly this; that people who had traveled thousands of kilometers to reach Moria had to walk even a longer distance to save themselves from it.
An Averted Gaze
One day in December 2018, after parking my rented car far from the Moria camp, I walked along the road toward it. I joined a group of young men who were going back, after a visit to Kara Tepe, another refugee camp on the island. After they went inside the Moria camp, I walked along its east wall. Here was a makeshift camp outside the official camp, known as the “Jungle.” Among ancient olive trees, countless shelters had been raised. The ground was muddy. It had rained heavily the previous night. While I was trying to walk in the slippery and sticky mud, my gaze connected with a young man’s gaze. He was standing outside a shelter. We both smiled. That was enough for Reza to invite me inside for a cup of tea.
In the tiny shelter made out of pallets and tarps, five people lived: Reza and his wife, their two children, and Reza’s brother. At that time, he was alone with his ten-year-old daughter, Saddaf. She was born in Iran, where her parents had been working as undocumented Afghan migrants for many years. Reza told me that Saddaf likes to speak Farsi in a Tehrani accent. She looked at me in silence. I thought of all the Iranians, like me, she had met when living in Tehran. I was afraid that they often left unpleasant memories. Only ten years old and already hoping that a Tehrani accent would protect her from a hostile society. When Reza went out to bring hot water for tea, she followed him. The foam underlay mat placed on wooden pallets, which were used as flooring, was too thin to keep cold and moisture out. I took out my camera to take a picture from inside the shelter. I could not do it. The disaster I witnessed made representation impossible. How can we represent disaster, as Maurice Blanchot asked, when we cannot fully comprehend it and when we are not able to see the whole catastrophe, the full scale of what has happened?
I took only a blurred photo of the foam underlay I was sitting on.
There are innumerable photos from the Moria camp depicting in detail its people and the material conditions they lived in. For me, however, more than ethnographic or documentary photographs, this blurred photo that shows “nothing” evokes the unimaginable disaster I witnessed there. Rather than showing the object of photography, this photo is a testimony of the mood I sensed that day, a mood of paralyzation set by the disaster around me. The photo reveals my head bent and the shame I felt. Shame of having double citizenship. Shame of knowing that I would return to my hotel room soon. Shame of the racism Saddaf faced in my country. I stayed until noon. Reza insisted on sharing the little food they had with me. I lied that I had a meeting in Mytilene and left.
Three months later, I returned to Lesbos. I went to Moria only to visit Saddaf. I wanted to give her a school bag with pens and notebooks. I had bought them for her. However, I could not find the family. No one knew where they were. So many people come and go. Who would remember names and faces? Through Moria, a place characterized by frivolity, people who are not taken seriously come and go, traceless. I gave the bag to another young girl in the “Jungle” and walked to my rented car. Beside the car, I found a piece of paper on the ground. On it, an Afghan (I assume) girl had written, “my beloved brother, I love you.”
The Unpresentable Camp
How could the crisis of Moria be represented when Moria itself re-presented crisis?
Moria re-presented the crisis because it was the place where the boundary between civilization and barbarism became blurry. Refugee camps are the emblem of what is assumed to be civilized humanitarianism and at the same time a space of incivility and viciousness. The same hand that gives food today will harm tomorrow. The very same shelter that is supposed to protect also facilitates hunger, rape, and death.
Rather than being the opposite of utopia, dystopia is a utopia gone wrong: a situation in which utopian ideas are available but not accessible. Moria was a hope gone wrong. It re-presented all the glossy conventions and declarations that promise rights for human beings while at the same time keep them out of reach of those for whom they were produced. Saeed, a gay refugee from Pakistan, had lived in Moria for a long time when we met at a café in downtown Mytilene. He said he was naïvely hopeful that Europe would let him be and live as the person he was. As a gay person, Saeed was more scared in Moria than in Lahore, due to constant threats of rape and harm by some religious fanatics in the camp.
I found this children’s lifejacket in the so-called lifejacket graveyard in the north of Lesbos. I thought it could be the one Saddaf had on herself. Most lifejackets are fake. They are rather death jackets, filled with sponge that absorbs water and becomes heavy, causing the wearer to sink. Among thousands of life vests, what caught my eye was one with an image of a young woman listening to music and laughing to the viewer. Below her were stars and three words highlighted: love, music, passion. Those who manufactured these jackets did not tell the migrants about what actually awaited them if they survived the sea. The lifejacket promised Saddaf a happy life, free from danger and fear, but instead took her to Moria. The manufacturers sell not only fake lifejackets but also a fake image of what life on the other side of the border looks like for people like Saddaf.
Hamed, a thirteen-year-old boy, did not know of Moria when I met him in Tehran a year after I had met Saddaf. He had worked on Tehran’s streets since he was seven. Son to undocumented migrants from Afghanistan, poverty pushed him onto the streets to work at an age when other kids usually start school. I met him first when, at the age of ten, he did not let me get past him until I bought something from him. He used to work informally as a street vendor around Pol-e Karim Khan, in central Tehran, known for its bookstores and coffee shops. He waited outside these coffee shops to sell petty goods but mostly fal, fortune-telling cards. The last time I met him, he was saving money for the smuggling fee to Greece. He was informed with details of the various phases of the journey awaiting him. Almost all. Except Moria. He had not heard the name. Thus, how can we represent the crisis when representation itself is in crisis?
Christian Water
Less than a kilometer from Moria camp, I saw this old drinking fountain. Someone had written “Christian water” in Farsi on it. I did not understand what it meant until a few days later when I was in Panagiouda, a nearby village to the east of the camp. There, I met many young Afghan men and women who were on their way to attend a religious ceremony at the church. Religion becomes a way to resist the condition of life in Moria, the predicament of not being taken seriously. The “Christian water” on the fountain ironically suggested that one has a chance to outlive Moria only as a Christian.
Subjects of Moria
Moria was a space of subjugation. A space to turn individuals into subjects through control and dependency. It was also a space that produced new subjectivities.
Spontaneous or planned protests often interjected the prolonged and tedious waiting time in the camp. Slogans chanted. Tents set on fire. Refugees clashed with the police. Teargas used. Clips recorded on mobile phones posted on social media and circulated worldwide immediately. These moments of mobilization were when refugees felt they “could not breathe” anymore. These moments denaturalized and therefore also historicized the condition they were in. It was no coincidence that, when the police pushed back and used violence against the protesting residents of Moria, they chanted azadi (freedom, in Farsi). The very same slogan people have been chanting for decades in Iran and Afghanistan. By chanting “freedom,” they linked the struggles for freedom in their homelands to the struggle for freedom in Europe. By chanting “freedom,” refugees disclosed how the oppressive fences in Europe were related to the oppressive fences in Tehran and Kabul. The action of burning down Moria in September 2020 was in the same line of burning of cars, banks, or governmental buildings by poor people in other countries and continents.
Moria triggered a subjectivity through these political actions. Camps are where refugees who do not know each other are forced to spend time together. Day after day, month after month, they talk, discuss, fight, and exchange experiences with each other. Camps turn into spaces of potentiality for connectedness and communicability of experiences. Journeys, fears, hunger, rage, and hope that have been individual and isolated are brought together and transformed into collective, accumulated, and historical experiences. When thousands of refugees from different countries with different backgrounds in Moria chanted the slogan, “We don’t want food. We want freedom,” it was the moment they demonstrated their political awareness of the very fundamental reason why they are refugees.
Shahram Khosravi, an anthropologist and an author, teaches at Stockholm University.