International Migration, Social Demotion, and Imagined Advancement: An Ethnography of Socioglobal Mobility

International Migration, Social Demotion, and Imagined Advancement

Erind Pajo

International Migration, Social Demotion, and Imagined Advancement An Ethnography of Socioglobal Mobility

Erind Pajo University of California, Irvine 3151 Social Science Plaza A Irvine, CA 92697 USA [email protected]

ISBN 978-0-387-71952-8

e-ISBN 978-0-387-71953-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007926593 c 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC  All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com

emigranteve ¨

Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to those who allowed me insight into their existence. Although I cannot mention anyone by name, my respect and my gratitude are profound, and to “the emigrants” I dedicate this book. For financial and institutional support over the many long years that led to this book, I thank the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine; the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation; the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation (for award 0210142); the Global Security and Cooperation Program of the Social Science Research Council and its donor, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the German Academic Exchange Service in New York; and the Institute for European Ethnology at Berlin’s Humboldt University. For invaluable help during my research in Greece in 2000 and 2002, I thank Andi Mahile, then Consul of the Albanian Embassy in Athens; Professors Nikolaos Tatsis, Vassilis Karydis, Christina Kolouri, Despina Karakatsani, and Dora Lafazani; Mr. Robert Goro and Mr. Ardi Stefa, then senior editors of Gazeta e Athinës; Dr. Marina Petronoti of Greece’s National Centre for Social Research; as well as Ms. Effie Tsiotsiou and Ms. Ellie Tzavara of the Onassis Foundation, and Professor Theodore Couloumbis of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. In Tirana I relished the continued friendship of Professor Nikoleta Mita and the charming erudition of Professor Vladimir Misja, the friend of my great-uncle Qemal. From the distance, Zanusha ensured that Judith and I would have where to turn to when needing help with navigating the ways of Athens. For guidance both intellectual and personal, as well as for myriad other forms of support through various stretches of the journey to this book, I am indebted to my teachers Mike Burton, Karen Leonard, Janine Wedel, Victoria Bernal, Liisa Malkki, Jim Ferguson, Susan Martin, Andy Schoenholtz, and Lucy Cohen. The graduate seminars of Leo Chavez and Frank Bean insightfully brought to life the vast and complex body of literature on international migration. Wolfgang Kaschuba read an earlier version of this manuscript and bestowed much wisdom upon me. John Tirman, Caroline Brettell, and Caesar Sereseres helped me hone my arguments and enlarge the frame of the study. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their perceptiveness and generosity. All of this could not have become a book were it not for Teresa Krauss: profound thanks to one astute editor. vii

viii

Acknowledgments

This book benefited greatly from Katie Chabalko’s superb editorial assistance and the professionalism of Springer’s copyeditors and international production team. The United Nations Cartographic Section and Mr. Vladimir Bessarabov made possible the reproduction in the book of the maps of Albania and of Greece and the use of the map of the Economic Commission for Europe as background image for the cover design. The International Media Network of Athens and Mr. Achilles Kalamaras arranged the permissions to include in the book quotations from Gazeta e Athinës. At a number of complicated stages I benefited in no small ways from the ingenuity and kindness of Kristy Harris, Petra Ticha, and Kathy Alberti, who on all occasions surpassed their formal roles. On a personal note, Ludmilla Antonia, Judith, Mezin, Bora, as well as Maria and Erich and Simone, were with me through much of what it took for the following pages to emerge—and more. As was the memory of my mother, perhaps a topic for another time. None of these individuals or institutions can be responsible for my views or for errors. Irvine, California, USA Summer 2007

Erind Pajo

Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

List of Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xv

List of Photographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii 1 International Migration as Socioglobal Mobility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Down and Under as Economic Advantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Meaning of Migrants’ Money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socioglobal Mobility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 2 8 9

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

3 Ethnography and the Discursive Scape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emigration as Everyone Knows It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Feeling of All the Emigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Never a One Will Know What Every Emigrant Knows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Structure of This Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 25 30 35 38

4 Portrait of Lumturi F., High School Teacher, Domestic Cleaner, Kitchen Help, Maid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Beginning Is Always a Little Difficult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Time “in Europe” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They Had Come to Greece for Their Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Restaurant to Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maybe a Cursed Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44 44 45 48 48 50

5 Greece Is Better than Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Objective Inferiority of Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Objectifications of Individuality, Distinction, and Indistinction in Albania Objective Contradictions in Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greece Is Better than Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52 52 57 63 68 ix

x

Contents

6 Portrait of Petraq Z., Research Scientist, Plumber’s Aide, Maker of Icon Frames, Champion of Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A PhD Is about Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Capitalism in Greece Is Fairer Than Socialism in Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Starting Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greeks Cannot Be Blamed for the Bad Name of the Albanians . . . . . . . . . . Greece According to Marx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Your Country Is Something That Can Never Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70 70 72 73 74 75 76 78 78

7 Sufferings of the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Richer and Unhappy Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sufferings of Intellectual Superiority in the Employment of Economic Inferiority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Xenophobia, Racism, and Hate of Albanians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From the Economic Inferiority of Intellectual Superiority to Economic Justice for Inferiority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

90

8 Portrait of Fatmir R., High School Principal, Democrat, Janitor, Maintenance Technician, Contemporary Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There Was an Economic Elevation in Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Getting Out of the Red Circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Always Willing to Learn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cutting Off the Emotional Relationship with the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95 95 96 97 98

80 84

9 The Economic Disadvantages of Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Racism and Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 The Economics of Illegality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Economics of Statelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Remittances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 10 Portrait of Llambi S., Math Teacher, Member of Albania’s Party of Labor, Olive Plucker, Construction Helper, Lottery Peddler, Café Proprietor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Albania’s Downhill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 A Minoritar in Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 The Party Had Exaggerated a Bit about the Capitalist World . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 An Ethnic Greek, but an Albanian at Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 11 Why Emigrants Do Not Return to Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 The Past in the Present of Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 The Continuity of Decline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 The Objective Position of the “Common Human” in Albania . . . . . . . . . . . 135 When You Have Moved Forward, It Is Hard to Move Backward . . . . . . . . . 138 12 Portrait of Drita H., Chemical Engineer, Domestic Cleaner, Moviegoer, Balletomane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 The End of Albania’s Good Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Unexpected Turns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Contents

xi

Emigrants Will Never Make Millions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Without Fruit, Life Would Not Be Worth Living . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Books, Movies, Ballet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 13 The World According to the Emigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Territorialized Fulfillment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Geography and Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 America, Where Things Are as Things Ought to Be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 The World Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 14 Portrait of Ilir, Known As Panajotis, Embassy Child, Ex-Politically Persecuted, Internment Farm Worker, Baker’s Aide, Specialist of Floors, Would-be Rebuilder of the World Trade Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 The McDonald’s on the Syntagma Square . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Towards Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 An Architect, or Perhaps a Diplomat Like His Father . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 In Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 The American Lottery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 15 The Logic and the Experience of Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 The Logic of Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 The Subjection of Emigration Experiences to the Imaginary of World Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 The Roots of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 The Albanians of Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 16 Portrait of Genci K., Student, Waiter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Reflecting on Things He Never Thought of Before . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 To Become Somebody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 “Self-Realized” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Differences Between People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 The Good Things Life Once Had . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 17 Socioglobal Articulations and Imaginaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 The Necessity for International Advancement in 1980s Albania . . . . . . . . . 192 The Impossibility of International Advancement in Contemporary Greece 196 The Socioglobal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

List of Maps

2.1 2.2

Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

xiii

List of Tables

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

World’s Highest Annual Emigration Rates, 1995–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . World’s Largest Annual Emigrant Cohorts, 1995–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Albania’s Gross Domestic Product, 1980–2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Albania’s Average Annual Economic Growth, 1980–2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

12 13 21 21

xv

List of Photographs

3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1

4.2 5.1 5.2 7.1 8.1 9.1 9.2 10.1 12.1 13.1 13.2

14.1 14.2 15.1 16.1

From the top of Lycabettus one could see “how big Athens is” . . . . . . . . . 27 Everyone had come to Greece for a better life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Sometimes I was taken by surprise at hearing Albanian in places where I should actually have expected it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 The agaves on Lycabettus often had Albanian inscriptions carved on their leaves. This one, MEMORY FROM LIFE, includes a name and, perhaps, the author’s city of origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Bargaining in Piraeus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 A butcher’s stand on Athinas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 A used refrigerator about to emigrate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 At work near the Akropolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Reconstruction in one alley in downtown Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Towards the Albania bus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Each night, three, four, and sometimes more busses left Athens for Tirana from this station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 On weekends, some emigrants from Athens traveled to Piraeus for shopping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Certain neighborhood squares in Athens were named after cities in Albania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Leisure and labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Not all comprehensions of the world could be articulated through the common ways of thinking about the world: Geography was sensed to be a hierarchy of a different sort, yet economic critiques of capitalism were evoked to counter that tacit order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 A meeting point for many emigrants, this kiosk on Omonia Square carried dozens of Albanian publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 The qualities of objects commanding attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 “We are all the same. All Albanians” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Joyous pride: Selling Albanian music and shirts of Albania’s national soccer team in Piraeus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

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Chapter 1

International Migration as Socioglobal Mobility

Contemporary migration involves a dramatic paradox. Much of what is considered international or transnational or labor migration today transforms people of a wide range of social standings in the countries from which they migrate into laborers at the bottom social ranks of the countries towards which they migrate. We read in the papers of Russian one-time doctors, for example, and of Czech one-time managers, who, as immigrants to the United States, clean Wal-Mart stores for seven nights a week; we learn that Chinese one-time professors and one-time senior executives maintain casinos and bathrooms in Connecticut, that Armenian one-time engineers pump gas in New York City, that Vietnamese one-time medical doctors become census-takers, that Ethiopian one-time engineers sell candy in San Francisco.1 Yet the swelling millions of people who migrate internationally every year do so voluntarily.2 In fact, as the borders of the countries that attract international migration become increasingly difficult to penetrate, the dire determination of would-be immigrants to reach their desired destinations comes to the fore quite stirringly. It was not uncommon over the last decade to hear of would-be immigrants locked in cargo planes or ships or trains for days or even weeks on end, with no food and no water, just to physically make it to the other side of the border that divided the world in which they were from the world in which they wanted to be. With some regularity, we also hear of those who, desiring to slip undetected through the ever less yielding border controls, squeeze their physical selves into the inner tubes of truck tires, stow themselves away in airplane wheel wells, or walk through deserts for days. Several thousands of such would-be immigrants died while attempting to reach the United States and the countries of the European Union in the last decade alone.3 Yet the global number of people who long for a chance to get to the West is 1

Similar cases are reported with some frequency in various American local papers—or can be found live at a gas station, restaurant, or coffee shop near you. The examples I cite here come from the Associated Press (2003), The New York Times (Greenhouse 2003), New York’s Daily News (Beale 1996), and The San Francisco Chronicle (Hua 2001; Costantinou 2004). 2 The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration (Stalker 2001) estimates that two to three million people migrate internationally every year. 3 It is difficult to calculate with any degree of accuracy the number of those who have died over the course of their attempts to migrate without documents to the West. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration (Stalker 2001) quotes data from the United States Immigration and

1

2

1 International Migration as Socioglobal Mobility

believed to have only increased since the 1960s, especially after the early 1970s and again in the 1990s.4 Why do millions of people from a range of social standing in many countries all over the contemporary world yearn, in effect, for a chance at domestic servitude or for toiling in sweatshops and restaurants? Why do millions of would-be migrants so desire to be in the United States or in the European Union, where, as it is widely known, regardless of who they are when they start their journeys across international borders, they end up at the bottom and earn their keep by cleaning dishes and homes and offices, by shining shoes and waiting tables, at wages that are often but a fraction of those in the legal labor markets? What is the contemporary global appeal of a life lived sometimes quite literally under used cardboard or in drainage culverts?5

Down and Under as Economic Advantage The social decline that international migration brings about escapes notice in the destination countries, by and large free-market liberal democracies that regardless of their geographical location are colloquially referred to as “the West.”6 The way we see it, international migration is rooted in an individual migrant’s economic advantage.7

Naturalization Service that bring the number of deaths by drowning or dehydration along the Mexico-US border to 700 for the three years 1997–2000. During the same period the INS reports rescuing over 2,000 others who faced a similar fate. Figures from the International Organization for Migration for the year 2000 put the death toll among those who attempted to enter Europe without permits to over 1,500—a figure that refers only to the documented cases, and that might thus be just about one-third of the actual number (ibid). 4 According to the International Labour Organization, “the rate of growth of the world’s migrant population more than doubled between the 1960s and the 1990s” (ILO 2002); see also Sassen 1988; Habermas 1998; cf. Castles and Miller 1998. 5 See, for example, the numerous cases documented photographically by Don Bartletti. One of Bartletti’s photojournalistic projects, “Enrique’s Journey,” which was awarded a Pulitzer in 2003, can be viewed on the Los Angeles Times website, latimes.com/news/specials/enrique. 6 Though a great many international migrants never reach the United States, the European Union, Canada, or Australia, it can be plausibly argued that in today’s world international migrants typically head for countries that resemble the West more closely than do the countries they leave behind. According to the United Nations Population Division, in the year 2002 migrant stock comprised 8.9% of the population in the world’s “more developed” regions, versus 1.5% and 1.6% respectively in the “less developed” and “least developed” regions (UNDESA 2002). 7 A revealing example of the way in which we perceive international migration, one that materializes the otherwise metaphorical “seeing,” is the visual representation of immigration to the United States in American popular magazines. Analyzing the covers of several such magazines since the mid 1960s, Leo Chavez (2001) argues that, in the United States, the discourse of immigration is a discourse of the nation. The remarkable selection of visual material Chavez reproduces in his book shows also how the images of immigration that feed on popular sentiments—and that in turn also shape those sentiments—typically depict immigrants as drawn towards the United States by prospects of indisputable economic advantage.

Down and Under as Economic Advantage

3

Our media’s representations of international migrants’ social trajectories must reflect with some accuracy the ways in which we all, neighbors and scholars of migrants, or migrants ourselves, tend to think about international migration. Even though the common demotion of immigrants can now be seen in feature films,8 we continue to assume that contemporary international migration is driven essentially by a nebular blend of the need and desire for “more money.” True to the perspectives from which we commonly view international migration, the media portraits of the individuals, who, as international migrants, undergo dramatic social demotion, focus on their bravery and their profound determination to make it to the country of their dreams despite the typically tremendous hurdles that mark their lengthy ways. These portraits do not really question why an international migrant ventures to leave his or her past in the first place, or how an immigrant’s present fulfills his or her dreams. The absence of reflection on the lot of the immigrants as human and social beings cannot be blamed on their invisibility. As “immigration,” conceived of as a political “problem,” moves towards the center of numerous contemporary discourses, immigrants are becoming increasingly visible in both Europe and the United States. Instead, the absence in our culture of genuine sociological reflection on international migration as human mobility can be traced to the commonsensical belief that international migration has simply economic roots. In fact, the popular understandings of international migration and of the economics of the contemporary world appear to be trapped in a closed conceptual circle. One can easily see how myriad cultural representations of the wealth disparities between the countries towards which people migrate and the rest of the world from which they come, feed the general sense that the most profound reason for emigration is nothing but the material poverty that, in this same understanding, characterizes the countries where immigrants come from. Given the cultural visibility of what are technically called “differentials of income” between countries, it is virtually never doubted that international migration brings to individual immigrants shockingly more money than what they could possibly have in the countries they leave behind. In fact, much of the media reporting on international migration can be seen as simply supplying individualized examples to our dominant imaginary about the immigrants’ eventually being better off. Scholars attribute this effectively hegemonic vision of international migration as a move prompted by the prospects of relative economic advantage to the perspectives of especially those economists who have traditionally considered rational choice and maximization of economic benefit as the core grounds for nearly all individual decisions. In the early 1990s landmark review of the “inherently contradictory” theories in the then “segmented” field of the study of international

8 A Nigerian one-time doctor who randomly drives taxis in London after night shifts at a hotel reception desk is the central character in a recent production of the BBC, Dirty Pretty Things (Frears 2002), which proved to be of quite mainstream appeal. Unfortunately, the film assigns the transformation of the one-time doctor into a hotel receptionist and taxi driver to the lot of a refugee, the genuine hero who, unlike many of the other immigrants with whom the plot of the film involves him, has had to escape what shattered his family. As an artistic portrait of contemporary international migration, Dirty Pretty Things reaches the coda when the Nigerian one-time doctor, once he can, decides not to remain in Britain—a move perhaps not typical of contemporary immigrants.

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migration,9 Douglas Massey and his colleagues10 assigned to neoclassical economics the vision of the individual as a rational maximizer of income (Massey et al. 1993). From the perspective of neoclassical economics, international migration represents a response to the differences in wages and in conditions of employment between countries, and the simple and compelling explanation of international migration offered by neoclassical macroeconomics has strongly shaped public thinking and has provided the intellectual basis for much immigration policy (Massey et al. 1993, 433).

Predictably, theoretical frameworks about virtually anything are sooner or later challenged, and some are eventually revised or replaced by alternatives. As Massey and his colleagues thoroughly discuss, the neoclassical economics model for making sense of international migration has drawn elaborate competition. Various alternative frameworks have taken issue with neoclassical economics’ model for international migration and redefined several of its dimensions. Both the macro and the micro versions of the neoclassical economics model, for example, are founded upon a conceptualization of the individual as the maker of the decision to migrate internationally. This vision of the individual as the one who assesses the condition of the labor market in his or her country of origin, compares it to information about the labor conditions in a targeted country of destination, and so decides to emigrate, has been revised by “the new economics of migration.” Focusing on the “pull” dynamics, this competing school views the larger collective of the household, rather than the individual, as the entity that makes the decisions about international migration (Massey et al. 1993). A different focus on the “pull” is central to another influential perspective, the “dual labor market theory” associated with the work of Michael Piore (1979). In this framework, international migration is attracted by advanced industrial countries, the high wages of which represent structural needs for labor (ibid.; see, again, Massey et al. 1993). Yet none of our theoretical perspectives on international migration questions international migration’s economic advantage (see also Massey et al. 1998). Significant as various perspectives’ corrections and revisions to the neoclassical economics model are, the alternative frameworks for understanding international migration leave intact the neoclassical economics core notion of international migration’s economic advantage either to the individual who emigrates or to the immediate family or kin unit to which he or she is seen as belonging. And this reveals the sheer centrality to the field of migration studies of the sentiment that “first money comes, then people follow.”

9 The sense that studies of international migration were incongruous was shared also by others in the early 1990s, albeit perhaps less emphatically (e.g., Portes and Rumbaut 1996; cf. Massey 1990). This situation has changed; there appears to be some agreement that, at present, the study of migration might even constitute a subfield within the social sciences (DeWind 2000). 10 At the Committee on South-North Migration of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Problems.

Down and Under as Economic Advantage

5

Articulated in the raw in the neoclassical economics model for understanding international migration, and otherwise not contested, the idea of economic advantage remains as accepted—indeed as fundamental—in scholarly work as it is in popular visions of international migration and in migration’s coverage by the media. And this is not just the case within the disciplinary boundaries of economics or economic sociology. The inveteracy of conceptualizing international migration as driven by the prospects of economic advantage can be particularly striking in sociocultural anthropology, given the tradition, from Bronislaw Malinowski (e.g., 1922) to Eric Wolf (1982), of recognizing native economic systems as genuine alternative equivalents to Western capitalism, and of attempting an appreciation of the less-than-universal appeal of money (e.g., Bohannan 1959). As tradition has in recent years become a topic of discussion among those anthropologists who work on international migration, their debates have mostly revolved around certain aspects of the history of anthropology’s engagement in its study. The prominent stance that anthropologists have traditionally shunned the study of migration was articulated recently in Caroline Brettell’s authoritative review of the field (Brettell 2000). Substantiating and furthering one earlier critique of anthropology’s “sedentarist bias” (Malkki 1995), Brettell recounts the omission of migration from Margaret Mead’s 1930s work on rural New Guinea, a relic from a time when anthropologists did not consider migration a legitimate topic of study, and one that has also been cited in Nancy Foner’s more recent overview of the study of migration in anthropology (Foner 2003). Leo Chavez, on the other hand, has seen endurance in the anthropological engagement with international migration, and has recalled the interest Franz Boas showed in the physical transformation of immigrants in the United States (Chavez 2003). This stance is shared by Nina Glick Schiller, who, in arguing that “ethnography is . . . the most appropriate methodology for the study of transnational migration” (Glick Schiller 2003, 100), admonishes those who do not acknowledge the heritage of ethnographies of migration, including the anthropologists who write as if the ethnographic study of migration, complex societies, and transborder processes is something new to their discipline (Marcus 1986; Rosaldo 1989). In fact ethnographers of migration have long maintained a creative tension with certain mainstream currents in anthropology and sociology and offer a critique of both (Glick Schiller 2003:101).

While the history of the study of migration in anthropology might thus be a matter of some disagreement, general agreement exists on its increasing prominence since the 1970s and especially in the 1990s and after (Foner 2003; Brettell 2000; di Leonardo 1998). The canonical interest in culture, and more recently on identity as a dimension of culture, appears to have predominantly focused anthropologists on the “cultural” intricacies that migration brings about in the communities from which migrants originate as well as in those to which they come. Besides generating a wealth of documentation of and keen insights on the lived experiences of international migration, anthropologists have also engaged the various theoretical perspectives on the workings of contemporary migration (e.g., Mahler 1995; Levitt

6

1 International Migration as Socioglobal Mobility

2001), and they have done so to the degree that anthropology is presently considered a prime disciplinary setting for such discussions (Brettell 2000). As their interest in migration has grown, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars who share the ethnographic methodology and its related perspectives have conducted research on both ends of migration, and a number of recent studies have covered within the same framework more than one migration or re-migration routes or more than one destination of migration.11 This encouraging trend fits well with the—by now central—conceptual framework of transnationalism, which was initially formulated by the anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc.12 Yet even though the question of why people emigrate has legitimately been seen as underlying such works, and even though ethnographers approach this question from an angle that is distinct from that of the economists (e.g., Brettell and Hollifield 2000), the view that economic advantage lies at the roots of international migration remains unquestioned by this scholarship. Anthropologists may have not felt so strongly about the explanatory frameworks of push-pull economics as to extensively engage in illustrating them through ethnographic investigations. But neither have they felt so particularly opposed to the economic models of push-pull as to take issue with them. Despite their contribution to understanding complex cases of international migration, and despite the notable novelty of the paradigm of transnationalism, contemporary anthropologists appear to engage exclusively those dimensions of international migration that are secondary to the allegedly fundamental economics of push-pull. The focus on specific dimensions of the experience of international migration that ethnographic work typically adopts has often resulted in adding particulars to, and in effect reinforcing, the view that income differentials and economic advantage drive international migration. The focus of some outstanding work on remittances, for example, also implicitly emphasizes the superiority of the migrant’s economic condition in the country of destination over his or her economic condition in the country of origin. One singly unusual stance has been the recognition, by Maxine Margolis, of the decline of Brazilian immigrants in New York City in a paper published in the year 1990 under the veracious title “From Mistress to Servant.”13 Typical among the Brazilian middle-class émigrés Margolis interviewed in the late 1980s were a onetime chemical engineer who drove a cab in New York City, a one-time accountant who earned his living waiting tables, a one-time psychologist who catered food, a one-time journalist who cleaned apartments, and a one-time teacher who washed dishes. Other one-time professionals in Margolis’s paper sold books in the streets of New York, rain or shine, and shined shoes. “From Mistress to Servant” displays remarkably the tension between what an ethnographer draws from the field and what can be articulated in the terms made 11

E.g., Small 1997; Tsuda 2003; Parrenas 2001; Foner 1985, 1987; cf. Ong 1999; Espiritu 2003. E.g., Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Szanton Blanc, Basch, and Glick Schiller 1995. 13 For all the valuable insights it may promise, the study of downward mobility tends to attract little attention in the social sciences. I know of only one book-length ethnography explicitly devoted to downward mobility, Katherine Newman’s Falling from Grace (Newman 1989).

12

Down and Under as Economic Advantage

7

available by the dominant theoretical paradigms and popular sentiment. Although Margolis has the merit of putting the name of decline to the transformation of status that Brazilian immigrants undergo in New York City, she funnels her ethnographic findings into conclusions that reproduce the usual view of international migration as a move of economic advantage. Margolis appears uncomfortable with the popular views of migration as escape from poverty and recognizes, very insightfully, that Brazilians “who have difficulty feeding their children are unlikely candidates for emigration to the United States” (Margolis 1990, 217). Yet she concurs with her informants as to the reason they state for their emigration— that being in the United States allows them to earn money in a solid currency which translates to a great deal in Brazil. Margolis argues that despite their talk about their presence in America as just temporary and a means for earning US dollars, most Brazilians are in America to stay. On the other hand she resolves that the Brazilian migration to the United States is explained by the context of Brazil’s momentarily volatile economy and the hyperinflation of the late 1980s. In a strained conclusion, Margolis asserts that the reason why highly educated Brazilians “cope” with their demotion in social status is the higher income that they can earn in the menial jobs listed above or in New York City’s nightlife entertainment scene.14 In assigning the reason for the Brazilian migration to the United States to Brazil’s 1980s moment of economic instability, Margolis’s interpretation resonates with the sociological explanations of international migration developed under the inspiration of the world-systems perspective (Wallerstein 1974, 2000) by Alejandro Portes and John Walton (1981) and by Saskia Sassen (1988), among others. Critiquing the push-pull model as an essentially post facto explanation for international migration (cf. Portes and Bach 1985), and focusing instead on the imposition of structures of the capitalist economy all over the world, this framework conceptualizes international migration as an outcome of the economic and social disruption caused by the global spread of Western capitalism. Colonization forcefully drew people of different economic systems into one system and made wage laborers out of former natives. But rather than converting the colonies into full capitalist systems, colonization only created economic enclaves that functioned in dependency to and were exploited by the core capitalist economies of Europe. Although the postcolonial era did see economic shifts in the global capitalist economy, one of the consequences of the global liberalization of finance was the intensification of the dependency of the former colonial economic enclaves on forces beyond their control. And this is how large numbers of people in formerly non-capitalist economic systems, who during the colonial era had been proletarianized and whose livelihoods had come to depend on cash wages, by the 1970s were increasingly left without work, thus forming a global pool of unengaged labor, available and ready to migrate to other countries.15

14 Margolis has elaborated on her positions further in her later ethnography Little Brazil (1994), as well as in its revised update, An Invisible Minority (1998). 15 This view is evoked also in more recent writing on pressures for emigration (cf. Habermas 1998).

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1 International Migration as Socioglobal Mobility

The intellectual merit of such sociological positions, as well as their conceptual advantage over the push-pull model of neoclassical economics, lies in great part with their historical grounding, especially with the recognition that had already occurred earlier in anthropology, that at one point in the not very distant past, money remained meaningless to “the natives” outside of the capitalist economic system.16 Still, by focusing on the disruption of the non-European socioeconomic systems, the sociological frameworks of accounting for international migration in terms inspired by the world-systems theory appear as if seeking to relieve the economic push-pull models from the historical evidence of their incapability to account for international migration. Focusing on how a range of formerly colonized countries entered a stage of economic compatibility with European capitalism, disruption frameworks show how, at present, people all over the world have in effect been brought into the same leveled field in which one or another of the economic pull-push models does finally explain international migration. Albeit through the initial use of force, money eventually became meaningful even to those people to whom it did not mean much before. And as soon as that was the case, international migration could and can be accounted for by the economics of push and pull: once the livelihoods of the former “natives” depend largely on cash, higher wages necessarily attract migrant laborers from regions where wages are lower.

The Meaning of Migrants’ Money Can relative economic advantage explain the paradox of international migration’s social demotion? Can the prospects of possessing more money account for the dire determination with which international migrants pursue their decline abroad? Examined on the level at which it is lived, in migrants’ everyday existence, the notion of economic advantage loses much of the universal appeal it exerts upon our commonsense and scholarly frameworks for understanding international migration. On this level, income differentials between countries, for example, appear blurred at best: immigrants often earn wages that are well below the legal minimums established in immigration countries while suffering the economic weight of legal and other expenditures intrinsic to their immigrant existence. Even remittances, which from above might look like undisputable proof of immigration’s economic advantage, are just the opposite on the ground level: by decreasing the disposable income of the immigrant while increasing the disposable income of those who did

16

The very idea of the hungry and miserable savage has been long debunked in anthropology by evidence of the well-fed pre-colonized humans who spent significantly less time in labor than most of us do today in the most developed countries of the West. I am indebted to Mike Burton for this insight and for the reference to Paul Bohannan’s 1959 paper, “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” See also certain writings of Marshall Sahlins (e.g., 1972, 1963, 1958), as well as Karl Polanyi’s earlier references to anthropological research (Polanyi 1944).

Socioglobal Mobility

9

not emigrate, remittances typically reverse the differentials of income on both ends of international migration. But even if immigration’s economic advantage were to be proved beyond any doubts, a reflection on its meaning would only accentuate international migration’s paradox of willed demotion. A broad and historical consensus exists in social and economic thought that, once the basic necessities of life have been provided for, the essential function of money is as a means to achieve one or another form of social distinction. In assigning the drive of capitalist accumulation to the Protestant ethic of hard work that aimed at divine recognition, Max Weber argued in effect that, in its entirety, worldly economic striving sought the establishment of individual distinction (Weber 1905). The sentiment that wealth wields little meaning outside of a social context was also articulated by Thorstein Veblen’s less subtle notion of “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen 1899). The consensus on the social function of economic power is in fact so sweeping as to include not only the related sociological thinking of Georg Simmel (e.g., 1978) and the social critique of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 1984, 2000), but even such diverse political and philosophical stances as the mundane pragmatism of Alan Greenspan and the socialist idealism of Karl Marx. Years before becoming the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, Greenspan elaborated on the premise that gold stabilizes a national currency because it symbolizes luxury (Greenspan 1966), while Marx, in theorizing the logic of capital as accumulation for the sake of accumulation, implied the value of money to be a relative rather than an absolute measure (Marx 1976; cf. Harvey 1999). If international migrants pursue money for the same social function everyone else pursues money for, social thought to date concludes that the view of international migration’s economic advantage is inherently contradictory. Counterintuitively, in light of the social demotion that much of contemporary international migration involves, the logic of economic advantage would make sense only for what we call “forced” migration—when the alternative to emigration, remaining in the country of origin, endangers one’s physical existence, and the alternative to social demotion is an end to life. This evokes again the paradox of willed pursuit of social demotion through voluntary international migration. While the logic underlying the vision of economic advantage might, perhaps ironically, help us theorize refugee flows, how are we to account for the “labor” migration that is clearly not escape from famine or war? How are we to understand the one-time Russian doctor who willingly demotes himself into a janitor in the United States? How to explain that the numbers of those who willingly pursue similar paths of demotion are at present growing all over the world? How does the prospect of drastic decline in status, even when paired with relative economic advantage, account for those who audaciously face death itself while attempting to make it physically to the West?

Socioglobal Mobility To understand international migration’s paradox of willed pursuit of social demotion, this book takes the ethnographic route of exploring the everyday existence and the words of some of those who have pursued their decline by migrating

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internationally. To learn why people cross the borders of nation-states in spite of the social demotion that awaits them, and why they willingly remain in their demoted positions, the following pages focus on a byword for the global condition of heightened emigration pressures as well as for the dramatic decline many international migrants undergo—the outcome in Greece of the Albanian emigration that started in the early 1990s.17 To the Albanians of Greece, “emigration” happens because, quite simply, Greece is “better” than Albania. Furthermore, Italy is better than Greece, Germany is better than Italy, and America is the best country of all. And a country’s being “better” or “worse” in this global hierarchical order essentially means that different countries territorialize different degrees of fulfillment and of morality and allow for different degrees of individual achievement. Paradoxically, seeing like the Albanians of Greece—as well as like the rest of the Greeks and perhaps the rest of us—people irredeemably belong to countries. The “emigrants,” as the Albanians of Greece refer to themselves after well over a decade in Greece, cannot escape their condition of economic and social inferiority quite simply because they are Albanians, not Greeks. To the extent that the experience of the Albanians of Greece is part of a contemporary social and cultural reality that reaches beyond the physical boundaries of their world, and to the extent that my ethnographic conclusions can be generalized, this book holds that the essence of contemporary international migration lies with the articulation of the social in terms of the international. Social status in our time’s world seems to be a matter of envisioning society and of envisioning the world as much as it is a matter of territorial presence; hence contemporary international migration might be driven by the social desire to advance from a location envisioned as low in the international hierarchy towards one envisioned as higher. Social status is at the same time a matter of territorial belonging, and that typically makes international advancement impossible. In short, rather than as a move of economic advantage, contemporary international migration might be best understood as socioglobal mobility.

17

Fieldwork took place in Athens in the summer of the year 2000 and over most of the year 2002; the ethnography that follows was written between 2004 and early 2007.

Chapter 2

A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

What makes the contemporary Albanian emigration an ideal case for investigating the paradox of willed pursuit of social decline through international migration can be seen, in a way, as a matter of numbers. Over one-third of all teachers and more than one-half of all Albanians with graduate degrees have left Albania since the early 1990s to become mostly unskilled or low-skilled laborers in Greece, Italy, and other countries in the West.1 The Albanian case also marks a pinnacle of the global increase in emigration pressures, which are otherwise not easily measured. At least one-fifth of the country’s population must have emigrated during the 1990s,2 making the Albanian emigration perhaps the world’s proportionately most massive volitional migration (see Table 2.1). What is more, it is generally thought that throughout the 1990s, as hundreds of Albanians perished while trying to penetrate the mountainous border to Greece or drowned in the sea while trying to make it to the Italian shores,3

1

Jamaica appears to be the only comparable case: 77% of the college-educated and about 33% of high-school graduates have emigrated (Stalker 2001, 104). 2 The Albanian emigration has been thoroughly undocumented, so its statistic descriptors are fragmentary and often span wide ranges (e.g., IOM 1999). It has been suggested, however, that at least one-fifth of Albania’s 1990s populace, and likely one–fourth or even more, has emigrated since the early 1990s, bringing the relative demographic weight of the Albanian emigration to over four times the average figure for the other countries of post-socialist Eastern Europe (Misja 1998). 3 No comprehensive numbers exist on these deaths and not much public notice is made of them, for they are generally considered misfortunes that concern only an individual and his or her relatives. In fact even the family of the deceased may often not know what has happened for a long time. During my fieldwork in Athens, for example, I observed that the very visible Albanian-language weekly Gazeta e Athinës repeatedly printed notices by relatives of missing emigrants who sought information about where and when an individual—always a man, and typically in his late teens to early forties—might have been seen last. Such notices usually included a photograph above a brief description of the route the missing emigrant was known to have used, the cities in Greece he was known to have worked in, and the Greek name by which he was known there. A notable exception to the customary tacitness surrounding the attempts to emigrate resulting in death was the publicity of the drowning of 83 Albanians as their ship was allegedly capsized by an Italian naval patrol in April 1997, which became a politicized event (Pajo 2001). Since then the government of Albania has declared time and again that the smuggling of people has been “successfully” interrupted. Judging from reports in the Albanian media, however, up until the year 2003 the traffic route from Vlorë to Bari must have remained as busy as ever, sending a steady flow of Albanians and others to Italy. Out of fear of the Italian border patrol, smugglers are nowadays

11

12

Global rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 9 10 11

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration Table 2.1 World’s Highest Annual Emigration Rates, 1995–2000* Country Net annual emigration rate Annual emigrant (per 1,000 population) cohort Timor-Leste Samoa Albania Burundi Kazakhstan Guyana Tajikistan Suriname Guam Fiji Estonia

40.6 22.8 19 12.9 12.2 10.6 10.3 10.3 9.5 8.8 8

32,000 4,000 60,000 80,000 200,000 8,000 61,000 4,000 1,000 7,000 12,000

While Albania’s emigration rate ranks third, the Albanian emigration is the only one among the world’s proportionately most numerous that is not sanctioned by special agreements between countries and does not include refugee flows or ethnic repatriations. *Based on data from the United Nations Population Division International Migration Wallchart 2002 (UNDSA 2002)

perhaps as many as 80% of those remaining in Albania would have emigrated if they could4 . Despite these distinctions, the Albanian emigration remains little known outside southeastern Europe and the small circles of scholars interested in the region. This, too, can be seen as a matter of numbers: The weight of Albanian migrants in the global migration scene is relativized in light of the far smaller percentages of people emigrating from significantly more populous countries (see Table 2.2). Obscurity, then, makes it necessary to provide here, as context for the following ethnography, a preliminary portrait of the Albanian emigration. Informed in spirit by the tradition of exercises in social history that often precede ethnographic studies, this preliminary portrait blends the way the Albanians of Greece understood the “emigration” and told it to me with the way in which the Albanian emigration was generally

said not to actually land in Italy but to drop their human cargo within swimming distance of the shore. When the Italian border patrol is visibly approaching, smugglers are said to hurry to lighten their speedboats so as to escape the scene, throwing “the passengers” into the open sea and causing an unknown but likely substantial number of deaths. Like the deaths on the land borders, these too happen one or two at a time and go without much notice. Another recent exception to this was the death of 20 to 27 would-be immigrants when one boat capsized in bad seas in January 2004, which became a politicized event not dissimilar to that of the year 1997. 4 Emigration pressures in Albania have been estimated by several polls and studies throughout the 1990s, and the 80% figure has been quoted by the media on several occasions (e.g., Kongshaug 1995). Studies of specific groups—such as Albania’s “intellectual elite” (Gedeshi et al. 1999) or rural youth (Fuga and Dervishi 2002)—report emigration pressures in the range of 50% to 60%.

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

Global rank

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 12 13 14 15 15 15

13

Table 2.2 World’s Largest Annual Emigrant Cohorts, 1995–2000* Size of annual Emigration country Emigration country’s emigrant cohort annual emigration rate (per 1,000 population) 381,000 340,000 310,000 280,000 200,000 190,000 180,000 100,000 91,000 80,000 80,000 77,000 70,000 61,000 60,000 60,000 60,000

China Congo (Dem. Rep.) Mexico India Kazakhstan Philippines Indonesia Ukraine Iran Burundi Egypt Sudan Pakistan Tajikistan Albania Bangladesh Burkina Faso

0.3 7.1 3.3 0.3 12.2 2.6 0.9 2 1.4 12.9 1.2 2.6 0.5 10.3 19 0.5 5.5

∗ Based on data from the United Nations Population Division International Migration Wallchart 2002 (UNDSA 2002)

understood and reported in the media while unfolding.5 The threading is a critical commentary of my own. If one were to pin down the start of the Albanian emigration to a specific moment, the way a history textbook would do, the pointer would be the 2nd of July of the year 1990, the day when a handful of citizens of the People’s Socialist Republic6 sought an exit out of the reality of the lives they had always known by entering the premises of the embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Tirana. In many contexts, this must have been an unimaginable occurrence. For more than a week the Albanian state media did not make any mention of it, while rumors that “the embassies were opened,” as several emigrants put it, must have spread so rapidly that, within days, hundreds of people from all over the country had poured into the capital “to enter the embassies.” The embassies were guarded by

5

As an undocumented movement of people that started almost one and a half decades ago and that, despite official denials, is ongoing at rates that are not well understood, the Albanian emigration has not been written about with any degree of rigor. Its most reliable written record is a scattered array of media reports from sources almost always outside Albania. The Albanians of Greece appeared to have their own firm ideas on the developments in Albania over the last decade and a half, and they were usually reluctant to state those in more than a few pithy sentences. Immersed in their eventful everydayness, most emigrants paid little attention to the “little details” of the larger picture of emigration, such as the dates, for example, when specific events had actually happened. I have therefore attempted to crosscheck “the facts” referred to in this section against selected media sources and studies by Albanian scholars. Even so, I have often had to judge what appeared more plausible. 6 Albania’s official name until April 1991.

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2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

the Albanian police, who, without much success, tried to deter the would-be emigrants from climbing various walls and palisades. There had been rumors that a truck full of people had driven through the wall of the German embassy, and the embassies of Italy and of France were apparently also key targets. Many of the would-be emigrants did not know “which embassies were with us,” however, so a number of unlucky individuals found themselves on the other side of the fence of the Cuban and Vietnamese embassies, which were recounted to have subsequently handed them back to the Albanian authorities. An anecdote much-circulated among the emigrants in Athens reveals the atmosphere of chaos and of “first time,” “never seen before” naïveté associated with “the entering of the embassies”—as well as the commonly encountered contempt for “villagers” who, allegedly, did not know much about civilization: A villager comes to Tirana to enter the embassies. But the villager has not been in Tirana before. He has only been in his village. He does not know his way. He does not know where the embassies are. He asks some pedestrians: “Where do you go for abroad?” “This way, Uncle,” say the pedestrians, “just look for cops. When you see cops and a fence and a lot of people climbing the fence, that’s an embassy.” All right, the villager goes that way. He sees a cop in front of a fence and a lot of people waiting in line. He gets all excited. This is Germany now! All right, he jumps on the fence and he climbs up. The villager is going to Germany! “Where are you going?” says the cop, “Come down!” But the villager does not want to listen. “Uncle is going to Germany,” says the villager. “Come down, Uncle,” says the cop. “Come down, this is the Ministry of Education.”

The bureaucracy did not appear ready to admit what was happening. A demonstration was staged by the authorities in the middle of Tirana’s Scanderbeg Square a bit later in the month of July to denounce those who had entered the embassies, and rumors were somehow spread, through state channels or otherwise, that one of Albania’s best known fiction writers, who at the time was seen as harboring implicit criticism of the regime, had played with the “ex” in “exodus” and “excrement” and called those who had entered the embassies “the excrement of the nation.”7 The Albanian state also issued several official notes to protest the embassies’ allowing of the “Albanian citizens” to remain in their premises, disregarding that they were “not allowed” to “travel” out of the country, and asked that the citizens in question be delivered to the Albanian authorities. With the exception of the regime’s closer allies mentioned above, however, “the embassies did not give in,” and most of the would-be emigrants were sheltered inside their premises until a deal was eventually brokered for issuing them Albanian passports valid for travel abroad. By mid July of the year 1990 the entrants to the embassies became the first ordinary citizens in the history of Albania’s socialist state to receive such documents, and once they had them, busloads of “embassy people,” as they were later called, were escorted to the port of Durrës and ferried to Italy. They were treated as political refugees: some remained in Italy, others were sent off towards destinations previously arranged for them, such as Germany and France. Because of this chaotic eruption of what later came to be known as “the exodus”—in addition 7 Whether this quip can really be attributed to the writer, Ismail Kadare, remains a question. Less than three months later Kadare followed the exodus trail by requesting political asylum in France.

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

ALBANIA

SERBIA

15

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MALSI E MADHE

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HAS Krumë

SHKODËR

Lake Scutari

Shkodër

Lake Fierzës

PUKË

(Scutari)

Pukë Kukës

Bunë

KUKËS LEZHË

Drinit Bay

MIRDITË

Lezhë

Rrëshen

DIBRA Peshkopi

Laç

Rodonit Bay Kepi i Rodonit

RR ËS

LAÇ

Erz

Durrës

Kala e Turrës

en

Librazhd

Elbasan

Lushnjë

Se

n ma

ELBASAN Gramsh

Kuçovë

Lake Prespa Little Lake Prespa

Berat

Patos Vjosë

Selenicë

Ballsh

Maliq Korçe

BERAT SKRAPAR

MALLAKASTER

KORÇE

Bilisht

DEVOLL

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Vlorë

TEPELENË

u ab

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Memaliaj

run

VLORË

PËRMET KOLONJË

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GREECE

Vj os ë

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30

POGRADEC

GRAMSH

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Pogradec

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Vlorës Bay

Lake Ohrid

Cërrik

Peqin

Fier

Kepi i Treporteve

LIBRAZHD

PEQIN

LUSHNJË

10

MACEDONIA

Bulquizë

TIRANË

KAVAJË

Karavastasë Bay

0

THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF

Kavajë bin um Shk

National capital District capital Town, village Airport International boundary Republic boundary District boundary Main road Secondary road Railroad

i

BULQIZË

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SEA

iZ

(Tirana)

Durrësit Bay

ADRIATIC

M

Tiranë

Shijak

ri n

Maqellarë

MAT

Krujë

at

Bishi i Pallës

Burrel

KRUJË

DU

Lalëzit Bay

D

Lake Ulzës

Delvinë The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations

A L B AN IA

Sarandë

SARANDË 0

10

20 mi

GREECE Kérkyra (Corfu)

Map No. 3769 Rev. 6 June 2004

Konispol

UNITED NATIONS

Department of Peacekeeping Operations Cartographic Section

Fig. 2.1 Albania

16

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

to state socialism’s long history of doctoring records—the number of those who eventually left this way cannot be known with certainty.8 Of the over 5,000 people who are believed to have entered the embassies, perhaps more than 3,000, and by some accounts as many as 4,500, were brought to Italy in this first wave.9 The success of the “entering of the embassies” exposed the illness of Albania’s socialist state. Unable to deny that many more Albanians would leave Albania if they could, the regime openly and quite aggressively sought to keep them from doing so. Simultaneously with issuing passports to those who had “entered” the embassies, the authorities greatly intensified patrolling in the surroundings of all the foreign embassies in Tirana, and for months on end after the “embassy Albanians” had gone to Italy, all busses and trucks approaching the capital city were searched thoroughly by heavily armed police patrols. But as the foreign embassies in Tirana were thus removed from the reach of “the masses,” by the end of the year 1990, hardly five months after the embassy people had left Albania, thousands of other Albanians had already “discovered” the country’s southern border with Greece. And this flow turned massive. Within “a single night” on the last day of the year 1990, an estimated 3,000 “refugees” were reported to have “flooded into Greece.”10 In the words of an Associated Press dispatch of January 1991, [t]ired Albanians wearing tattered clothes fled by the thousands into Greece on Tuesday, crossing snow-covered Mount Mourgana.. . . Albanians braved freezing temperatures, snow and craggy terrain to cross through [Greece’s] remote northwestern border outpost of Tsamandas. A police spokesman in nearby Filiates said more than 3,500 crossed the border overnight. The number could be higher, however, because police said many more refugees might not have reported to Greek authorities. . . . there were 4,000 refugees in [the] town . . . of 5,000 . . . the Albanians had no clothes, food or shelter and many were sleeping in muddy courtyards and on sidewalks.11

Quite rapidly, the situation became dramatic enough for the Greek prime minister Konstandinos Mitsotakis to personally go to Albania in the second week of January 1991—the first Greek prime minister to visit Albania since at least before the start of the Second World War.12 Touring the country in the company of high-ranking Albanian officials, Mitsotakis urged the “ethnic Greeks,” as the first waves of emigrants 8 Numbers remain uncertain even on the subsequent waves of the Albanian emigration and up to the present; see, for example, the 1999 IOM/ICMPD report. 9 IOM/ICMPD 1999; cf. Hein 1998. 10 The Toronto Star, January 3, 1991, p.A12. 11 The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario), Wed, Jan 2, 1991, p.A14. 12 Since 1940, Greece has considered Albania a foreign invader, and upheld what emigrants referred to as “the law of war.” The official reason for this was that the formal excuse for the initiation of Fascist Italy’s attack on Greece in 1940 was the alleged killing of an Albanian shepherd by the Greek border patrol—since Albania had been annexed by Italy in 1939, the shepherd was an Italian subject, and Italy would not allow any of its subjects to be so maltreated by a foreign power (see Fischer 1999). Greece maintained normal relations with Italy after the war and eventually became part of the same European Union. But “the law of war” with Albania, which at the time of my exploratory fieldwork in the summer of 2000 was anticipated by some emigrants to be lifted “within a few months,” was still in place through the end of my fieldwork in the year 2002.

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

17

were portrayed in the media, to “remain here, in the place of their ancestors.”13 An estimated 11,000 “refugees” entered Greece in the week following this visit.14 By early February 1991 the tensions inside Albania must have reached an extraordinary height. In a country where even domestic travel had been restricted for decades, thousands of people from virtually everywhere were now flocking into the port city of Durrës in the hope that the rumors they had heard about ferries taking everyone to Italy were true. Another dispatch of the Associated Press describes a day in Albania in February 1991: Albanians crowded on to ships sailing for Italy . . . and police fired over the heads of thousands of others who mobbed Tirana’s embassy row seeking exit visas . . . The crowds had gathered outside the French, German, Greek, Polish and Czechoslovak missions, drawn by rumors of wholesale visa giveaways. Police fired warning shots and doused people with water cannons. Some in the crowd threw rocks at the police. In Durrës . . . thousands of people ignored police warning shots and boarded the 11,000-tonne ship Tirana, which they forced to sail for Italy . . . a total of 15 ships headed for Italy, 80 kilometres across the Adriatic Sea, and some carried children without their parents.15

This suddenly massive eruption of emigration from Albania stirred up a political crisis in Italy as well. By March 1991, the number of Albanians who had landed on Italian shores was estimated to be 20,000; and it was said that the Italian ambassador to Tirana had proposed to the Italian Parliament special legislation to officially allow all Albanians to migrate to Italy. Since it was apparent that all Albanians wanted to get to Italy, went the logic of this alleged proposal, keeping them from doing so would not be feasible in the long run; the better way would be to deal with the “crisis” by maintaining control over their move.16 Instead of sanctioning the Albanian emigration, Italy soon enough began its effort to stop it. By March 1991 Italy sought to no longer allow the would-be immigrants to leave their ships, and declared that Albanians would not be eligible for political asylum.17 Italy’s vice prime minister, Claudio Martelli, was sent to Albania, essentially to tell the Albanians to “stay home.” Martelli did so, and he also urged changes in the country’s political system, promising aid to the Albanian state in exchange for tighter control of the country’s borders.18 The Albanian authorities did tighten their control of the borders, Italian aid did follow, and later Italian troops were even sent to Albania to guard the port of Durrës. But the emigration only intensified. By the end of 1991 Albania’s situation had become a concern to certain political institutions at the European level. A special report issued by the Parliamentary

13

Albanian Telegraphic Agency in English, 14 January 1991, 1052 gmt. Reuters dispatch, reported in The Toronto Star, January 22, 1991, p.A4. 15 Associated Press, reported in The Toronto Star, Thursday, March 7, 1991, p.A20. 16 Cf. Hein 1998. 17 Associated Press reports in The Toronto Star, Thursday, March 7, 1991, p.A4; Friday, March 8, 1991, p.A3. 18 Martelli Law was in part triggered by the Albanian exodus; see Calavita (1994) for an insightful general discussion of Italian politics and policies regarding immigration. The ramifications in Italian politics of the Albanian crises reached a new high with the social implosion of 1997 (Perlmutter 1998). 14

18

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

Assembly of the Council of Europe in January 1992 describes an ongoing “Albanian exodus”: During the first days of August 1991, thousands of Albanians reached the western port of Durrës and the southern port of Vlora, in the hope of going on board ships that would take them to Italy. The Albanian authorities tried in vain to prevent its citizens from leaving the country by putting the ports under military control and halting passenger trains. On 8 August 1991 an estimated 10 000 Albanian nationals aboard several ships forced their way into the port of Bari in the south-east of Italy and approximately 1 000 into the port of Otranto. Moreover, 675 Albanians aboard two other ships who tried unsuccessfully to land at ports in Sicily, were diverted to Malta and later returned to Albania. After several hours of waiting in the port of Bari, the Italian authorities allowed the Albanians to disembark for humanitarian reasons and led them to La Vittoria sports stadium. As the Italian authorities started forced repatriation using military transport planes and ferries, clashes broke out between policemen and Albanians. The Albanians barricaded themselves in the stadium refusing to return to their country; some 300 succeeded in escaping. The Italian authorities offered the Albanians 50 000 lire (40 US dollars) each and new clothes if they would return home. As this offer did not attract the Albanians, forced repatriation continued. . . . By the end of December 1991, more than 200 000 Albanians were estimated to have left their country since the exodus began in July 1990. However, the UNHCR considers this figure could be substantially higher.19

This institutional assessment was grounded on the same common view of international migration I outlined earlier. In combination with Albania’s political condition, the country’s poverty was unanimously thought to be the reason for the massive exodus. The report even opened with a pithy statement of the sentiment that what the Albanians sought through emigration was, quite obviously, economic improvement: The disastrous economic, social and political situation in Albania has had a traumatic effect on its citizens and left them with little hope for the future. Since mid-1990, several hundreds of thousands of Albanian nationals have tried to leave their country, often illegally, seeking economic betterment in neighbouring countries.20

In the view of most scholars, the adjective “disastrous” may capture well Albania’s general deterioration in the late 1980s (e.g., Misja 1998; Della Rocca 2000). Those looking for the causes of the overall disaster in the history of the country’s economic realities can argue that the successes of Albania’s socialist state through the early 1970s were largely financed through political allegiances with powerful entities of the socialist world—in the 1940s Yugoslavia, in the 1950s the Soviet Union, and between the mid 1960s and the early 1970s, the People’s Republic of China (cf. Pollo and Puto 1981). As Albania’s socialist regime distanced itself from the Chinese in the mid 1970s, officially for ideological differences, its window to industrial technology was shut and its lines of credit vanished. So while Albania’s population continued to grow throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this line of argument would go, capital investment remained constant or even declined and the rigid policies of the centrally-planned economy further sped up the country’s overall economic

19 20

Council of Europe 1992, paragraphs 23–27 and 36. Council of Europe 1992, opening paragraph.

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

19

decline (Misja 1998). The severe forbidding of private property,21 for example, confined economic activity exclusively to Albania’s centrally-planned state sector, which, since the state guaranteed employment, had to assign every citizen to a job regardless of the level of capital investment, let alone market need. At the time of the eruption of the exodus Albania was also characterized by extreme political isolation. After coming to power at the end of the Second World War, the Communist Party ruled Albania single-handedly and began a course of increasing disconnection from the rest of the world.22 An official animosity of both ideological and nationalistic tones towards the Yugoslav Federation had already ripened by the end of the 1940s. After diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were cut off in 1961, Albania was not an active participant in the life of the Eastern Bloc, which the Party of Labor dubbed “the revisionist countries.” Of those, Albania’s closest ties were to Romania and, to a lesser extent, Bulgaria and Hungary; the relations with the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia appear to have been simply formal. The geographically distant regimes of Cuba and Vietnam, which were also ideologically out of the East European mainstream of state socialism, maintained a prominent diplomatic presence in Tirana. For the rest, the diplomatic corps accredited in Albania appears to have consisted of representatives of communist parties from a number of African and Latin American countries with or without governmental power at home. The People’s Socialist Republic did not have diplomatic relations with the United States,23 West Germany, the United Kingdom, or Canada. In the words of one emigrant, “of all the Western world, only France and Italy” maintained embassy personnel in Tirana. The number of Albanians who could travel abroad shrank after the end of the Second World War, and foreign travel was largely limited to the friendlier countries of the Eastern Bloc. Even the number of those who could travel East began to decrease after Albania’s ties with the Soviet Union deteriorated following the death of Stalin in 1953. The subsequent severing of diplomatic relations with the “revisionist” Soviet Union in 1961 shrank that number further. From the late 1960s through the eruption of the massive exodus in the 1990s, the only Albanians who could set foot “outside” were certain high officials of the Party of Labor who paid

21

Albania’s agricultural sector had been collectivized by the 1960s, and by the 1980s people in the countryside could no longer own cattle, sheep, or even chickens. Emigrants often remarked in tragic tones that throughout state socialism Albanians were not allowed to own cars, and that very few could own even a motorcycle—for which a property license was needed. One emigrant said that in the northern city of nearly 10,000 where he came from, the only motorcycle belonged to the local police station. 22 The official ideology of the socialist state, including history written in Albania under socialism, portrayed the Communist Party as the active force that pushed out the foreign occupation (cf. Pajo 2002). In recent work written outside the ideological and political context of Albania’s state socialism, Bernd Fischer (1999) portrays the Communist Party as only the militarily better organized among the various political forces present in Albania at the end of the Second World War—a no longer occupied Albania was delivered to the Communist Party as it were; the Communist Party did not liberate the country. 23 The diplomatic relations between Albania and the United States had been interrupted in 1939, when Fascist Italy annexed Albania.

20

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

honorary visits to the meetings of communist and “revolutionary” groups in distant Third World locations, or who participated in delegations to the countries with which Albania maintained some ties; the diplomatic personnel of the perfunctory Albanian embassies abroad; and, from the larger mass of the population, the handful of truck drivers for the state’s export-import entity. The drivers of the “Albanias,” as their trucks were colloquially referred to for the word written in large red capital letters on both their sides, delivered Albanian produce as far as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and, on their way back, transported to Albania chemicals and replacement parts for industrial equipment. Yet until well into the late 1980s, attempts to flee Albania were extremely few. Understanding why there were few attempts to flee a state that had been experiencing economic stagnation and decline for at least two decades, and that after 1991 was called by everyone a “dictatorship,”24 should bring us closer to understanding not just the roots of the sudden Albanian emigration, but the story of Albania’s state socialism itself. According to the popular and otherwise unchallenged view on the country’s socialist past, the virtual absence of attempts to escape Albania’s dictatorial state can be explained by that state’s harsh repression of any form of dissent until the mid 1980s.25 More people would have attempted to leave the country, it is generally assumed or maintained, if the dangers associated with fleeing had not been as great as they were. The attempt to flee Albania was indeed considered “treason,” and the potential punishment faced by those who would attempt it was indeed harsh. Yet, another way to look at the absence of significant attempts to escape Albania, and at the very theme of Albania’s “dictatorship,” may be by asking whether it was not popular legitimacy that allowed the dictatorship to maintain its hold on Albania for almost half a century. The co-occurrence of the eruption of the exodus with the first popular political protests in the history of Albania’s state socialism indicates that the socialist state’s legitimacy had not been eroded until well into the late 1980s. The first popular protests erupted no earlier than the very end of the year 1990, when a handful of students who had incited the small demonstration against the shortage of electricity, water, and heating in Tirana’s Student City26 were eventually 24

One of the socialist state’s key slogans proclaimed that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is the true democracy.” This became an object of derision during the 1990s, as “dictatorship” began to gain negative connotations in Albanian discourses. 25 To illustrate such a point, some would bring up the entering of six members of one extended family into the Italian embassy in Tirana in December 1985, a few months after Hoxha’s death, which is generally seen as the starting point of the regime’s “loosening up.” This was the most visible effort to flee socialist Albania prior to the storming of the embassies in June 1990. After an initial effort to obtain the family from the Italians failed, Albanian authorities surrounded the Italian embassy in Tirana with a heavy 24-hour police cordon that did not cease until the year 1990, when the embassy was practically taken over by the “crowds.” Between 1985 and 1990, to ensure that those six would-be emigrants would not be smuggled out of Albania, every single vehicle of the Italian embassy was followed at all times by extended police escorts. 26 The “Student City” is a district of the city of Tirana where most of the dormitories of the University of Tirana are located.

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

21

Table 2.3 Albania’s Gross Domestic Product, 1980–2000* 1980 1990 GDP (US$ billions) ∗ Based

–

2000

2.1

3.8

on data from the World Bank (www.worldbank.org/data)

joined by a solid majority of Tirana’s populace. This protest gained a political bent as well as momentum by the day, and by February 1991, the month in which the port of Durrës was first taken over by the crowds of would-be emigrants, the motley group of protesters from Student City flooded downtown Tirana and felled the most prominently displayed tangible symbol of the socialist state, the large statue of Enver Hoxha in the city’s center. As the pressures of emigration did not seem to subside, what later came to be called “the international factor”—i.e., Italy and a range of organizations dealing with Albania on behalf of various interstate entities—pressed a great deal for political changes. Albania’s Party of Labor eased its political hold in the months that followed the popular protests in Tirana, and after sanctioning the formation of opposition political parties, by 1992 the Party of Labor was eventually voted out of power. While a discussion of Albania’s following decade does not belong in this sketch of the “emigration,” suffice it to note that the numerous transformations of the 1990s led to legislation that is at present thoroughly compatible with that of most countries of the West and includes the necessary legal framework for a free-market economy. Even though other aspects of Albania’s rapprochement to the West have been problematic in practice,27 the sheer poverty described in the 1992 report of the Council of Europe I quoted earlier was rather speedily replaced by a visibly improved economic condition (see also tables 2.3 and 2.4). Much material wealth that does not show in the official figures also made its way to Albania, and ordinary Albanians soon came to own not only cattle and sheep and chickens, but Mercedes cars too, obtained legally or otherwise. It is this very economic revitalization that questions anew the assumption of international migration’s economic roots. For in spite of Albania’s overall economic betterment, the “emigration” did not cease. If anything, throughout the 1990s the Table 2.4 Albania’s Average Annual Economic Growth, 1980–2004* 1980–1990 1990–2000 GDP GDP per capita ∗ Based

27

1.5 –0.6

3.4 2.9

2000–2004 7 6.4

on data from the World Bank (www.worldbank.org/data)

My ethnographic fieldwork in Tirana during 2002–2003 made me believe that, as many in Albania seem to feel, the country is at present mired in social injustice, severe inequalities, and crime; and also that the tensions of power legitimacy can offer a valuable perspective on Albania’s transformation since the early 1990s (Pajo 2003). Chapter 11 recounts how the emigrants too reflected these sentiments.

22

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

emigration involved even more Albanians.28 While by the end of the year 1991, one and a half years after the “embassies,” only around 200,000 Albanians had emigrated—less than one-seventeenth of the country’s population,—it has been estimated that by the end of the 1990s at least one-fifth of Albania’s people had left.29 What is more, during this same decade of Albania’s continuous economic and political rapprochement with the West, the greater majority of Albanians, more than 80% of the country’s populace, desired to emigrate.30 The way most of the emigrants I met in Athens seemed to feel, the Albanian emigration is also largely misrepresented in the international media. Certain individuals were keenly aware, for example, that, outside Greece, the visuals of Albanians climbing aboard overcrowded rusty ships heading for Italy, and of boatloads of Albanians landing at Italian ports, which became internationally iconic in the early 1990s,31 must have somehow grounded a general sense that all the Albanians who emigrated had gone to Italy. The fact seems to be that as late as 2001 Italy had only about 120,000 Albanian immigrants—no more than one-sixth to one-fifth of the Albanians who had emigrated by that time. The majority of those who left Albania ended up in Greece. It has been estimated that about 5,000 Albanians tried to enter Greece “without documents” every single month throughout the decade of the 1990s. While, absent a census or a genuine legalization with published outcomes, we might never really know how many Albanians there are in Greece, 650,000 to 700,000 might be a plausible estimate for the year 2002.32 At this estimated number, “the Albanians” may constitute between 7% and 15% of Greece’s national labor force. When the emigrants, many of whom have now lived in Greece for well over a decade, become the topic of local media attention, the favored topics still seem to be

28

While Albania’s economic improvement was measured at annual rates double those of other post-socialist countries in Europe, Albania’s emigration remained proportionally the single highest among all these formerly socialist countries (Misja 1998). 29 Precise figures are hard to come by since the Albanian migrations, both domestic and international, remain largely undocumented. 30 As I discuss in chapter 15, judging from the emigrants with whom I spoke, participation in the United States’ Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, or, as the emigrants called it, “the American Lottery,” must have been universal among “all Albanians” throughout the 1990s. 31 Upon arrival in Italy, the “embassy Albanians” were greeted with great media attention as the first ordinary citizens of Albania to set foot outside the country in many decades. These migrants, and the ones who took to the boats shortly after, also brought Albania into the news all over the world. Accessing the Lexis-Nexis database of newspaper articles in April 2004 to search for coverage of the eruption of the Albanian emigration, I noticed that a remarkable surge of coverage marked the event. Up until the year 1984, there were fewer than 100 hits per year for the keyword “Albania” in the database—which includes the world’s major English-language media publications and most of these were two- or three-line dispatches fed by the socialist Albania state news agency. From 1984 to 1989 the number of hits per year was well under 200, but it jumped to 413 for the year 1990, when the first storming of the embassies in Tirana took place, and to 737 for the year 1991, when Albanians massively sought escape to Italy on boats. 32 While this takes into consideration deportations and re-emigration, it remains only an estimate— the numbers reported by different sources range widely.

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The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.

50

ADMINISTRATIVE REGIONS OF GREECE 1 ATTICA

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2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

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23

Fig. 2.2 Greece

24

2 A Preliminary Portrait of the Albanian Emigration

the “illegal” crossings of the borders as well as their alleged criminality,33 though more positive accounts focus on their impact on the Greek economy. Religious differences between “the Albanians” and “the Greeks” also tend to be emphasized, with the common irreligiosity of the emigrants being systematically misread as adherence of Islam. Occasionally, some “Albanian” children’s good performance in “Greek” schools makes it into the papers too, raising yet again the topic of their ethnicity.34 What receives no attention at all is the severe social decline that most of the Albanians of Greece have undergone. The emigrants, who are typically employed in construction, in domestic service, and as unskilled laborers in Greece, include most of the more than one-third of Albania’s teachers who have emigrated, and, quite likely, most of the more than half of all Albanians with graduate degrees who have also left the country during the last decade.35 Why did these educated and not-starving individuals chase after manual occupations? And why do they stay in their condition?

33

See Karydis (1996) for a discussion of the criminalization of the Albanians, who turn out to be no more prone to participate in crime than the other people who live in Greece, including the ethnic Greek majority. A study of the case of the Albanians in Italy has concluded similarly (Jamieson and Silj 1998). 34 There is a tradition in Greece that a school’s best student marches at certain festivities holding the Greek flag. I was told how this practice had ruffled feathers because, on a number of occassions and in a number of schools throughout Greece, the best student had been an ethnic Albanian. The emigrants rarely paid attention to when and where; but details for this were not difficult to find. In December 2000, for example, Migration News reported that [i]n the northern Greek town of Thessaloníki, local residents prevented a 15-year-old Albanian boy from carrying the Greek flag at a local national day parade. Culture Minister Theodoros Pangalos called the residents of the town “stupid” and “primitive.” The result was a national debate on immigration. Greece’s president, Costis Stephanopoulos and the opposition parties said the boy should have been allowed to march with the flag, while senior clergy in the Orthodox Church publicly objected to the involvement of immigrants in Greek society, arguing that national traditions will be damaged. 35

E.g., AbREES 1999; UNDP 1998.

Chapter 3

Ethnography and the Discursive Scape

This ethnography is structured as a conversation: I interweave a mapping of what I heard the Albanians of Greece say with an interpretation of the visions of the world and its workings that appeared to undergird what they said and what they did. This very dialogical engagement of the explicit with the implicit was fomented by the tensions between what the emigrants stated and the logic undergirding their words and actions.

Emigration as Everyone Knows It My research in Greece was marked by the awkwardness of a novice ethnographer’s learning the ins and outs of fieldwork through trial and error and efforts at correction. The fieldwork itself started out with the idea of collecting different views held by individual Albanians in Greece, especially those with high degrees of education, as to why it was that they had left Albania and remained in Greece despite their decline into positions of unskilled manual labor. Somehow I expected that the emigrants would tell their different stories of how they came to Greece, and that those stories would eventually add up to a collection of diverse explanations of emigration, each shaped by the serendipity of how each of the individuals I would talk to had chosen to go to Greece and to remain in Greece rather than to remain in Albania or to return to Albania. Ethnographic writing, especially in anthropology, makes much of how fieldwork leads one to the unpredicted or even the unknown. It was in the context of my expectation of diversity in answers that my fieldwork began for real, with the realization that there was little if any variety in the immediate responses to my question about the reasons for emigration. To the Albanian emigrants I met in Athens, there seemed to be little mystery about the reasons for their emigration. Regardless of how I put it, my question about why they had emigrated dumbfounded the emigrants and received from all directions the same stale answer that, aside from the use of “emigrant” for “immigrant,” amounted to a summary of the core of the economic push-pull theories of international migration: Albanians had left Albania because Albania was “poor,” and they had come to Greece because Greece was “rich;” emigrants were in Greece because they wanted “a better life.” Everything about 25

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emigration was so clear to the emigrants that, as a former hydraulic engineer who peddled lottery tickets in the streets of Athens put it, all of the emigrants have left Albania for the same reason, because of the economic condition. Why else do you think I am here? I have been an intellectual in Albania.

Responses similar to this one were so common during my early weeks in Athens, and so common were phrases such as “as everyone knows” and “as it is known,” that I entertained for a brief while the idea that this was because, as it is put in anthropological parlance, I had not yet gained sufficient “entry” into the field. The colorful diversity of elaborations on the reasons for emigration was not coming to me, I thought, because the emigrants did not yet trust me, perfect stranger that I was. Those emigrants who showed little will to cooperate reinforced my impression that I lacked entry. A former teacher of French, for example, who was introduced to me by another emigrant as “a true intellectual who now earns her living cleaning homes,” did not want to repeat the same sentences about Albania’s poverty and Greece’s wealth before first assessing what I was really after: There are people who ask the emigrants—they come to us, like you are coming to me, to interview the emigrants. A professor from England came here last year, she also wanted interviews with the emigrants. She gave me a tape recorder, a small tape recorder, one that you can hold by hand. She had brought it with her from England. She paid 25,000 drachmae [$68] for the interview. How much do you think she would have gotten herself?

Refusing to take the hint that what I needed to know about emigration had a cash price, I elicited a further expression of resignation at the unfairness of the world and a remark that struck too personal a note: Europe pays persons who have no idea about emigration to interview the emigrants. I am not saying this about you. I am saying this in general. They come to interview the emigrants because they do not know anything about emigration. The emigrants themselves never have that kind of opportunity. The emigrants get only words. It is clear that no one cares for the emigrants.

Soon enough, I decided to no longer carry the tape recorder with me everywhere I went, and also to slow down the interrogations. I began, instead, to spend more time around the newspaper kiosks in the center of Athens, especially in and around the Omonia Square, as well as in certain cafés and fast-food eateries that drew emigrants, engaging in apparently casual chats with virtually any emigrant who seemed up to it. I continued this strategy for long weeks before attempting to set up formal interview appointments with those who got a bit closer; and, when I felt that a particular individual was not up to a taped interview despite having agreed to it, I often even “forgot” to bring the tape recorder with me to the interview appointment. Approaching the emigrants slowly and suppressing for as long as possible the urge to “get interviews” did eventually result in better communication. I got to know several impressive individuals this way and my conversations came to feel smoother. But when it came to their reasons for emigration, even those who showed the kindest willingness to help with my work repeated the same view as those who did not want “to be interviewed.” To all of them, there was little that was not known about emigration. In the words of a former high school teacher of biology from a small

Emigration as Everyone Knows It 27

Fig. 3.1 From the top of Lycabettus one could see “how big Athens is”

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town in northern Albania, who sold fresh fruit and vegetables in one of the movable neighborhood markets in Athens, [e]migrants come here, to Greece, because they want to work. This is well known—because Greece is a rich country. It cannot be compared to Albania. Greece is a member of the European Union. Albanians are not the only emigrants in Greece. You have emigrants from Bulgaria, from Russia, from the Philippines. Every emigrant comes to Greece because his country is poor.

And quickly, this elaboration on how there was nothing really special about the Albanian emigration was followed by a topic of more direct concern: Every emigrant wants to work here.. . . The emigrant does not want to steal. The emigrant is not a thief. He is a worker. The emigrant wants to work hard, to earn his money. If Albania were not poor, emigrants would not have come to Greece.

Among the insights into the daily reality of emigration which eventually resulted from my improved communication,was this: Despite my initial lack of entry, emigrants had never held back from me their genuine understanding of emigration. Seeing that those who most generously spent hours in front of my tape recorder shared the same “as it is well known” answer about emigration as those who were not as keen on being interviewed, I also came to realize that the rationale for emigration was apparently something of little relevance to the everyday existence of the emigrants. No one seemed keen on wasting time talking about it. Why emigration had happened was considered not simply known by all the emigrants, but also settled at the removed level of Greek professors, Greek politicians, Greek lawyers, and Greek journalists. Hints of this, I came to reflect, had already been there, albeit in disguise. The bitterness of that former teacher of French for example, about the differences between the pampered pseudo-scholars of emigration and the emigrants themselves, about whom “no one cares,” was not to be interpreted only as an expression of personal envy, or only as a sign that the condition of decline was all too real, but also as an indication that the emigrants thought of the explanation for emigration in terms of a fixed entity, as something that could be transferred from one person to another for a price. Other encounters too confirmed that the emigrants thought of the explanation of why they had left Albania in terms of a learned statement or series of statements that one could possess or not possess. In fact, rather than having that much to do with one’s own daily life, “knowing about emigration” was instead something that came from reading. After explaining to me briefly how emigration had happened because Albania was a poor country and Greece a rich one, another former teacher shared with me a fact about emigration which, he explained, was not as well known, or at any rate, not as well accepted: Albanians came here to work hard. And, as you know, emigrants work hard in Greece. Greeks know that too, even though some speak against the emigrants. Emigrants are good for the economy. When the Albanians came, the Albanians provided a lot of benefits to Greece. They took the jobs that no Greek wanted. They took hard jobs, they took jobs that paid little money. They did this because they were poor. Albanians had come from a poor country. And this was good for the Greek economy. I have read this in a Greek magazine— not something that is printed for the emigrants, but a Greek magazine, a magazine that writes for the intellectuals in Greece. It was a serious article. A Greek professor has said

Emigration as Everyone Knows It

29

that Greeks themselves must know that Albanians are good for the economy. But some Greeks do not want to accept that fact. They do not want to accept it, although they do know.

Given this understanding that knowledge about emigration was what was written in magazines or books, asking questions about the rationale for emigration must have made me appear rather uninformed. Some of those who had by then befriended me even showed concern at seeing my eagerness to approach any emigrant who remotely appeared to want to talk. Occasionally, I was advised to concentrate instead on only the most distinguished individuals: Not [only] the teachers who now clean homes. You should find the true intellectuals. Many of Albania’s intellectuals are here in Greece. Sometimes these intellectuals get together. They have meetings. You must look it up in Gazeta e Athinës.1 There are people of all kinds here in Greece. All of Albania has come here! There are some who have been professors in Albania. They read a lot, they speak Greek well. And that means that they read in Greek. You should meet them, they can tell you best about emigration.

Those who were not considered intellectuals could themselves succumb to the seriousness that clearly defined expert knowledge on emigration. Such individuals would at times treat my questions as some form of school test, and appeared as if they felt an urge to show that they too did know why emigration had happened— that, as it was known, Albania was a poor country, Greece a rich country, and that emigrants had come to Greece for a better life. Among those whose education could be considered questionable, or who did not have formal credentials, there was an urge to position themselves within the more learned discussions rather than simply to repeat the statement that “everyone knew” about Albania’s poverty and Greece’s wealth. A youth who aspired to study at the university, for example, but who had been working for several years as a waiter at two different restaurants in Athens—and therefore perceived himself to be in an inferior position compared to the former university professors, the former journalists, and those former teachers from Albania’s distinguished urban high-schools who were typically considered “intellectuals”—assumed an elaborate perspective on Albania’s poverty: Greece was not any better than Albania before the [Second World] War. Before the War, we did not come here; before the War, Greeks came to us. They came to Albania to work—in the south. They herded the sheep. Because at that time they did not have money, the Greeks. The Albanian lek was made of gold. Yes, Albania has not always been poor. At that time, the Albanian who went to the market to buy goods took golden coins out of his pocket. The king paid in golden coins. Greeks had not seen that. The lek of the Greeks, the drachma, was made of paper. After the War, as you know, we got Marxism-Leninism. We punished those who had the golden lek. And you know how the Albanians were impoverished—socialism. Everyone knows how the story went—for fifty years. And now we are here, working for the lek of the Greeks. Were it not for socialism, the Greeks would come to Albania today, to work for our lek.

1 Indeed, this visible Albanian–language weekly published in Athens often printed announcements for upcoming meetings of writers and poets.

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Still, even though the emigrants reflected thus quite a bit on the overall state of things, and most of them would strike one as quite well read, many opined that I needed to find “the right people,” “the people who knew,” to tell me about emigration. One emigrant, to whom I was introduced as somebody who “needed” to know about emigration, insisted that he did not have anything to say: Why have I come to Greece? To work! I came here as an emigrant in order to work. I do not know what to tell you about emigration. You have come from America to study emigration? I have worked in Albania. Simple jobs. I am not some kind of a philosopher, I just work here. You must go to somebody else. There are emigrants who know about emigration. There are emigrants in Greece who read a lot.

There was consensus, in other words, that one either knew about emigration or did not. And when one knew about emigration, that knowledge came essentially from reading. After having held several occasional construction jobs in Greece, a onetime engineer at a copper-wire factory that in the 1980s was extolled by the propaganda of Albania’s socialist state as the surest sign of the technological progress of socialism, now earned his living translating for a Greek immigration attorney. He kindly made allowances for what that former teacher of French could not—that despite my noticeable awkwardness, I was obviously being paid to understand emigration. In one of our coffee appointments he gave me a book, the soft covers of which he had wrapped in newspaper for protection, the way diligent pupils did or were expected to do in Albania at one time. The book was written by “a Greek professor.” All the questions you have about emigration are here, all the answers you need. It is in Greek, so you will need someone to translate it for you. But you can keep this book as long as you need it. How long do you need it? One week? Keep it, keep it for two weeks. I only request that you return it to me, because I do not want to lose this book. I trust you, I know that you will return it. Use it all you want. It is a very good book—it has everything about emigration in it. You will not need to interview anyone else.

The Feeling of All the Emigrants Not only did the question of why emigrants had emigrated receive the same standard answer, it also met with largely the same visceral reaction. Whether slipped into a conversation or in the context of a formal interview, the “why” question was rarely responded to without awkwardness. I also began to notice that after a few words on the poverty-to-wealth idea that everyone “knew” about emigration, or after simply mentioning that “the economic reason” for emigration was well known or that Albanians were in Greece because they had wanted a better life, my interlocutors quickly moved on to other themes. Their talk often concerned emigration as a condition, but not the causes of emigration. Those who felt they knew what the magazines and the books wrote about emigration, went on to talk about the “facts” of emigration, or the “details,” which they presented as not known well or widely, and which they eventually connected to topics they cared about, especially to the ethnic discrimination in Greece. Those who

The Feeling of All the Emigrants

31

felt that they needed to prove their knowledge of what was written in books acted in the same way. I could not help thinking, however, that the political capitalismversus-socialism stance articulated by that young waiter who would rather have been a student, for example, was not simply a reflection as to why Greece happened to be wealthier than Albania, but also a discursive reversal of the foundations of his own present in Greece. By evoking, or imagining vividly, a past time when the Greeks rather than the Albanians had to emigrate, that would-be university student expressed his profound frustration with his current position of a restaurant waiter. Such a “change of topic” was widespread. Those who did not exhibit the ambition to engage in the game of knowledge about emigration, or who were not as fluent in discursively reversing the present, quickly followed their versions of the standard statement about emigration as the route from poverty to wealth with talk about everyday concerns such as their difficult working conditions—the difficult working conditions “of the emigrants”—ethnic discrimination, or the many technical problems they encountered in the round of “legalization” that was going on in Greece at the time.2 Furthermore, I could not but take notice that, in contrast to the short shrift they gave to the reasons for emigration, emigrants seemed to spend endless time in cafés talking about seemingly trivial occurrences in their own lives, or in the lives of others, about which they knew first-hand or had heard or even read about. After the newspapers were commented about at length, emigrants would return to such “episodes of emigration,” as they called them sometimes, which seemed to me to be little more than repetitions of essentially the same bunch of stories. Could this explain the pattern of topic or focus change in the answers I was receiving? Could it be that the emigrants, considering the poverty-to-wealth explanation of emigration to be a settled topic—or, at any rate, one that did not concern their daily existence,—channeled their answers to other aspects of emigration because their personal interest in them was greater? In cafés emigrants clearly dwelled on their favorite episodes of emigration, many of which I had come to recognize as being about their early days in Greece. Since such episodes had likely been told and retold for years, I eventually reflected, the value of continuously telling them could not be in their plots. But whereas the plots were well known to those with whom the stories were shared, re-telling provided continuously fresh opportunities for assessing “the condition of the Albanian emigration.” I decided to adapt my ways of asking accordingly. I had started with general questions about emigration out of concern that life histories would not work out without having first developed rapport. After concluding early on that the reason why I was not receiving the sort of explanations of emigration that I expected was a 2 After emigrants had been in Greece for a decade without virtually any papers, two rounds of legalization were ventured by the Greek government, one in the year 2000 and another one in 2002, during my fieldwork. The emigrants generally complained about the overly bureaucratic nature of the process, and the demands for documentation that could be very difficult to meet. By 2004, the outside consensus seemed to be that the second effort at legalization was as ineffective as the first (cf. Migration News 2000).

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Fig. 3.2 Everyone had come to Greece for a better life

The Feeling of All the Emigrants

33

matter of gaining more entry, I had tried to “loosen up” even more, for example by making do without the recorder. But since emigrants seemed to freely repeat to each other episodes of their lives, I eventually resolved to begin asking directly about their lives. Unfortunately, life histories proved not any easier to obtain than I had initially imagined. Lacking any enthusiasm for telling the story of his life in the reflective mode that I imagined or expected, one of the first emigrants I approached dismissed my request in stern rhetoric: [T]he life of the emigrant is a long day of suffering. The sufferings of the emigrant cannot be put into words.

What could be the problem now? Ordinarily, emigrants made no secret about their lives and volunteered commentary upon commentary on those much-retold “episodes” of emigration. Their witty stories were not at all thwarted by my presence; just by being there, without ever asking, I had heard much about many individuals. In fact, not only did emigrants talk with each other uninhibited by my presence; sometimes, simply because I happened to share the table, I was encouraged to “listen, listen to this,” or to “listen to this one, you need this one for your study,” or “this one is great, you must write this down.” And while the stories I had heard this way often had a clearly humorous side to them, asking for a life history appeared to invite not just hesitation but also narratives of suffering. When I asked him for a life history, a former agricultural farm accountant who worked in a metal workshop in Greece, and with whom I had by then chatted a few times, replied, impersonally: How emigrants live, how emigrants suffer in Greece, these cannot be put into words. Life in Greece is not a field of roses.

The word “suffering” was often used in describing the general condition in which emigrants lived, and in one or two instances my request to tape a life history resulted in the cessation of all communication. Other acquaintances did not want to talk about their lives but rather about “the condition in Greece.” Even though most of the time most emigrants appeared engrossed by their own personal circumstances, when asked for a life history many simply generalized that “all the emigrants” felt tormented, and linked the prevailing sense of suffering to having emigrated to Greece. A medical doctor with much clinical experience, who after several years of “varied kinds of work” had started a small practice in an apartment he had rented for the purpose in a neighborhood where many emigrants lived—he hoped to attract them as patients,—reflected that there is nothing that can be said about this. This is our fate. Who came to Greece? What do you think? Who came to Greece? We came to Greece because we did not have anywhere else to go. Those who had cousins—kin, uncles, what have you—they went to Germany, to America, while the emigrants, the common emigrants, [those] who had nobody, ended up in Greece. Who else came here? Can you tell me? There were some who went to Europe—they were smart, they saw [the end of the socialist state] early, and they entered the embassies. Whoever was left came to Greece. That is why the emigrants suffer. The common emigrant has to suffer. If you have no support, you will suffer.

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Several others opined that suffering was especially unbearable among “the intellectuals.” In the words of a former accountant who in Greece worked as a painter’s helper, [i]ntellectuals are more delicate. The other people who have been workers in Albania are all right in Greece. They make more money in Greece, that means they are all right. They cannot understand the subtler offenses. They can understand them, but they do not feel as much, because they were more used to injustice than the intellectuals, because they were in a lower position in Albania. They have had injustice before too, so it no longer impresses them.

Intellectuals could not only understand discrimination better; in several accounts they emerged as experiencing in an especially acute way that which everyone else also felt. As a former professor of visual arts, who after several construction stints in Greece produced portraits for tourists in the streets of one of Athens’s central districts, and who was happy with the income he generated that way, put it: [s]ome Albanian intellectuals came to Greece thinking that they would find it all ready-made and waiting for them. There were some Albanians who could not bear the emigration and returned to Albania. Emigration is hard. The Greek is there, you have to deal with him, and he is the boss. The emigrant has had more education than the boss, the emigrant is more cultured than the boss, the emigrant has read more books than the boss. But, every day, he must say “yes” and “please” and “thank you” to the boss. The intellectual hurts more, the intellectual is wounded by every word.. . . That was in the beginning. Then you get used to it.

Just as they shared the same understanding of emigration as a move from poverty to wealth, emigrants also seemed to share the same “feeling” about their emigration. Yet while the intellectuals were perhaps better at articulating it, all the emigrants shared in the suffering. Judging from their visceral reactions to my questions and remarks, the feeling about emigration was actually shared at an even more profound level than the knowledge about emigration. While emigrants believed that they differed from each other sharply with regard to “knowing” about the causes of emigration, those differences were clearly perceived as negligible when it came to suffering. Unlike the knowledge about emigration, which was considered to be explicit, something that had to do with one’s being an intellectual as well as with reading newspapers and magazines and listening to professors interviewed on radio shows, the feeling about emigration stemmed from one’s lived condition. Suffering had to do with one’s life path and required no verbalization. The condition of emigration, in other words, was something that necessarily, or “logically,” to use a word preferred by many emigrants, led to the feeling about the emigration. A consequence of a condition at once personal and shared, that feeling was visceral. And this is what defined or distinguished the emigrants as a cohort, dividing the world into emigrants and others—be those Greeks, Albanians who had not emigrated, or other kinds of others.

Never a One Will Know What Every Emigrant Knows

35

Never a One Will Know What Every Emigrant Knows, or The End of Fieldwork How “every emigrant” thought about emigration and how “every emigrant” felt about emigration ruled each other out. If emigration had happened out of the desire for a better life, and if emigration was described as geographic mobility from poverty to wealth, how could the desire for a better life and the reaching of wealth go together with the ubiquitous experience of a suffering so bitter that it could hardly be put into words? Did the pervasive suffering not indicate that the lives of the emigrants could not really be as rich or as good as they purported? Did the emigrants’ acceptance of their present suffering not suggest that they might have come to Greece for something other than the better life they talked about? As inconspicuously as I could, and without confronting my interlocutors with the contradiction between their pronounced rationale for emigration and its outcome of suffering, I began to broach the topic of the inexpressibility of suffering by wondering aloud why emigrants suffered after all: So, emigrants come from Albania for a better life, but still, in Greece they suffer.. . .

No one took such remarks as I intended, however. Instead of a hint at a contradiction that demanded an answer, emigrants usually found in my words recognition of their suffering’s ubiquity and bitterness. What I had intended to be an inconspicuous question was met with further confirmation of the state of suffering with which every emigrant seemed to identify the condition of emigration: You see? It has been written: The emigrant is born to suffer.

Or: What can we do.. . . [sigh] Lucky are those emigrants who entered the embassies! To us . . . Greece is made for suffering.

After a few unsuccessful trials to elicit elaborations on the contradiction between the aspiration for a better life, which had allegedly brought them to Greece, and the emotional torment that had ensued, I had to make my questions more explicit. I asked whether suffering was so ubiquitous and unspeakably severe given the emigrants’ desire for a better life in Greece. The young waiter who wanted to become a student confirmed that suffering stemmed from the very downward trajectory I had set out to investigate. He elaborated that it was all rooted in a violation: the logic of continuity implied by an emigrant’s “original profession” was violated by the need of the emigrant to earn a living through “another profession.” Why do the emigrants suffer? Let’s take a teacher, for example, someone who has been a teacher in Albania, and who comes here. The teacher mops the floors in a restaurant. Or he washes dishes. This means he is missing his pupils. The teacher needs pupils. He knows how to teach the pupils, he has been teaching his pupils in Albania. When he works in a restaurant, there are no pupils. The teacher does not know how to mop the floors. This is just an example; anyone can mop the floors. This means, the teacher, who knows how to teach pupils, works for a living. He does something anyone can do. That is why the teacher

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3 Ethnography and the Discursive Scape suffers—because he needs pupils. He cannot have pupils in Greece. Who is he going to teach in Greece? Who is going to take the Albanian as a teacher?

But locating the roots of the emotional torment at the interruption in the “logical continuity” of a profession’s course did not reconcile the willingness for emigration with the suffering of the emigrants. Instead, while this elaboration implied the presence of emigrants in Greece to be a given fact of life, the emigrants’ suffering emerged as inherent to their being Albanians in Greece. And yet, if the answer to the question “Who is going to take the Albanian as a teacher?” were obvious enough to make the question rhetorical, why then had so many Albanian teachers actually migrated to Greece? A former high school teacher of geography, who, as a domestic cleaner, was her family’s main income earner, embodied the contradiction. In her words, she and her family had migrated to Greece out of the desire for a better life. The money she made at the time we spoke was far less than what she would have considered sufficient, however, and she had grown bitterly pessimistic about the prospects of “ever” earning enough to cover her family’s “necessities of living in Greece.” In bits and pieces, I had also learned from others as well as from her about how her everyday life provided the reasons for the pit of despair into which she had fallen. Yet, at my probing into the contradiction between her desire for a better life in Greece and her actual life in Greece that was certainly not better than her life in Albania, this one-time teacher regarded my very question as just another instance of the larger impossibility of communicating the condition of emigration to those who had not gone through it themselves: Nobody will understand our stories. I find it difficult to tell these to my own daughter. My daughter grew up here and went to school here in Greece. We also speak Greek at home. We did it for her, so she would know Greek well and do well in school. But how can she now understand how we waited in the queue for milk in Albania? She has become a Greek. She will never know what it was to not have eggs for weeks on end, or that people were hitting each other in the eggs queue. A pensioner was walked over by the crowd at the eggs’ opening 3 once; I recall it as if it were yesterday, it happened right in front of me. Those times cannot be told.. . . My daughter wanted to join the basketball club at her school, about two years ago, when we were in Thessaloníki and she was still in high school. My husband did not want her to. We wanted her to put more time into studying, we wanted her to work harder for her grades. But my daughter and her two girlfriends (three girlfriends, all three very tall girls, for my daughter has inherited it from her father’s side; they are all very tall), the three of them wanted to join the basketball club at school. “Look,” her father said to her, “I liked to play volleyball when I was in high school in Albania too.” And it is true, I remember it also. His father did not let my husband join the volleyball club; he had to work hard for his grades. He had to study; no volleyball. Their biography was not very good, you know, because one aunt of my husband’s had married an Italian before the war, an officer,

3 People queued in front of the door of a “Fruits Vegetables” store where they knew “eggs would come”—a store that expected delivery of eggs from the distribution center—and waited, usually for hours, until one of those who worked in the store would open the door—after the eggs had been unloaded from the truck and all paperwork for their receipt by the store was completed. In stores with more than two or three counters inside, those queued outside did not always know which of the counters would sell the eggs. So once “the eggs would open,” people would rush in and not always honor the queue in which they had been waiting outside.

Never a One Will Know What Every Emigrant Knows

37

and had gone with him to Italy. They were not in touch with the aunt, of course.. . . I actually think the aunt had died a long time before this volleyball story, but still their biography was not good. You know how things were back then. So his father, my father-in-law, forbade my husband draw attention to himself in the city.. . . Volleyball might have made some people there envious. They would have been reminded of the biography, of “the blot in the biography,” as it was called then. My husband could have easily been denied entry to the university. The aunt in Italy had died, as I said, and even before she had died they had had no contact with her. Still my husband could have been denied entry to the university. Such were the times. So my husband was now trying to relate this to my daughter. He was struggling to explain to her the story about his biography, how it was back then in Albania, and so on. Entry to the university was allotted by the executive committees4 that we had. They looked into your biography. My God, you should have seen my daughter! Her father was telling her this and that, and she was not saying anything. When he stopped, my daughter went to her room. The whole time she had not said anything. A few minutes later, I followed her. I needed something from the refrigerator I think. We kept the refrigerator in the children’s room, for the heat in the winter. We keep the refrigerator in the children’s room here in Athens too. It makes the ambience nicer. So I went to her room and she was almost bursting into tears. “Why can’t you just tell me you are not going to let me join the club and that’s it?” she said. “Why do you have to lie to me? Volleyball! Why, did you have volleyball in Albania?” My own daughter could not believe there were volleyball clubs in Albania! We tell so many stories about the things we did not have in Albania, she could not fathom how there were sports clubs there.. . . I was shocked at first, I was really shocked. But my daughter was right, when you think of it. Could we have had volleyball clubs in Albania if we hardly had eggs? My daughter is a Greek now, she cannot understand Albania, what we did have and what we did not have.. . .

The violation of the implicit logic of continuity, which the waiter who wanted to be a student had blamed as the reason for the suffering of the emigrants, extended thus onto a whole society’s existence. And it made communication impossible. The experience of emigration could not be communicated not simply because of the discontinuity in one’s employment, but because of the persistent violations to the inherent logic of continuity of “numerous things”—a continuity of violations that was itself an inescapable consequence of emigration. This hurting statement had also performed two key conceptual transformations. On the one hand, the one-time geography teacher turned domestic cleaner rendered literal the usually rhetorical impossibility of communicating an emigrant’s suffering. Suffering was not simply too great to put into words, but, as part of the larger condition of emigration, it could not be communicated to those who were not themselves emigrants. And this impossibility made tangible the presence of what has traditionally been the core object of ethnographic expertise. That no one who is not an emigrant would understand the emigrants confirmed anthropology’s premise that to understand the inside one needs to experience it. On the other hand, suffering was defined as one of the many dimensions of the experience of the inside, which, as such, lie beyond what an outsider can possibly

4 During state socialism, cities and towns in Albania were administered by appointed “executive committees” that were also in charge of the surrounding counties. In larger cities such as Tirana, many of the local administrative functions were carried out by the executive committees of the districts, which reported to the county’s executive committee.

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comprehend. In other words, even the ethnographer who observes the inside remains essentially an outsider, albeit one with limited experiences of the inside. Yet my question had been dismissed. That suffering domestic cleaner and onetime teacher had simply disregarded the contradiction between her desire for a better life, which she, like other emigrants, maintained was the cause of her emigration, and the state of suffering into which her emigration had apparently thrown her. What confirmed the empirical premise of ethnographic understanding, marked thus also the limits of the empirical reach of ethnography. Emigration as a lived reality appeared to be tangled in a major contradiction with the discourses of emigration. But the emigrants did not give an explanation of this contradiction because they did not have an explicit answer to my question about it. Conceptually, fieldwork had thus ended.

The Structure of This Ethnography Conceptually, this ethnography starts at the point where fieldwork conceptually ended. Concurring with the sentiment conveyed by those emigrants I talked to, I resolved at one point that our different positions vis-à-vis emigration lay at the heart of why emigrants did not have answers to my questions: that which appeared to be a contradiction if one was not an emigrant constituted to an emigrant the implied truth of the lived reality. Since I was not one of the emigrants, in my eyes emigration revolved around a central paradox: despite leading to social decline and to a state of suffering, emigration was undertaken voluntarily and was talked about as the pursuit of a better life. To emigrants, on the other hand, their everyday existence made perfect sense: they had emigrated to Greece for a better life, and they experienced their world as cruel and unfair too. The ethnography that follows is structured as a dialogue between these two positions—an engagement, in other words, of the view of emigration the way the emigrants saw it with the view of emigration as I saw it, seeing how they saw it and also how they lived it. It is a conversation, if you will, between what the emigrants said and what was implied in what they said and in what they did. And as such it makes explicit through interpretation what was implied in the emigrants’ talk as well as in their actions. So while this ethnography resembles the progress of my research project, proceeding dialogically from one domain of discourse to another while also from one level of conceptualization to another, it could not be a chronology of my fieldwork in Greece. Rather, this book is an effort to reach for the essence of emigration through mapping the discursive scape of emigration over the course of articulating its implicit logic. I conceptualize myriad instances of individual speech from a wide range of conversations and circumstances as, heuristically, fragments of the discursive scape of emigration, and these fragments are the basic elements for the ethnographic mapping. Mapping the discursive scape of emigration distributes different themes as if on a plane, bringing to the fore and aligning around these themes a number of oppositions

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between domains of talk, statements, and stances. I outline these and meet them with additional questions that arise from my own position on the outside.5 Early in the process of making sense of the ethnographic material it became clear to me that a small number of core notions permeated much of the discursive scape of emigration. I turned this discovery into one of the structuring principles for the ethnography. Each of the following chapters outlines one of those core notional nodes of emigration by taking fragments drawn from the multitude of narratives I encountered in the field and engaging them with each other, as in a conversation, and by ordering them according to their logical relations to each other. Different episodes and stories of emigration were told in different contexts. By “context” I mean not only who talked, to whom one talked, or where talk took place, but also what was being argued: to establish different points, the same person would tell conflicting stories or stories of conflicting lines of underlying logic, sometimes even over the course of one conversation. Envisioning spatially as a scape all of what I heard from the emigrants in Greece—or, to put it in the criticized “ethnographic present,” all of what the Albanians of Greece say—seeks to convey this temporal coexistence of narratives and lines of thought that sometimes complement each other and at other times contradict each other. I often pursue the implicit logic of the discursive scape to reaches where it conflicts with the emigrants’ spoken words at their explicit level. To this end, I have sketched what I believe to be the most plausible answers that would be given to the questions that arise if domains of talk that are normally separate were to be juxtaposed, and if what was said were to be juxtaposed to what was done. Not only were the emigrants’ words important in thus mapping the discursive scape of emigration, but also, often especially, the turns that their conversations took. Defining which answer was to be given to which question, or which stance or statement would constitute an alternative or a corollary to which other one, the turns of talk revealed significant dimensions of the discursive scape’s logic. As it will be easy to imagine, even though “at the end of the field” the ethnographer might feel as if he or she “was there,” the number of the emigrants I met and heard was finite, and the number of those with whom I shared more than casual conversations was even smaller. So I am the first to recognize that this ethnography’s pronouncements with regard to which views were commonly held and which ones were controversial could not but be influenced by the human presence and the opinions of those I spoke with. Further along on the technical side of things, I have included in the pages that follow instances from all of what the emigrants said, treating as elements of the discursive scape of emigration, and as ethnographic data, not only the answers I

5 This mapping of the discursive scape of the Albanian emigration is heuristically aimed at understanding the paradoxical pursuit of social demotion through international migration. Hence I have veered clear of the discussions revolving around text and narrative and interpretation that are prominent in fields such as folklore and linguistic anthropology, as well as in literary and communication studies.

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received in formal interview settings,6 but also all that reached me from what was being said around me—while I walked a city street or loitered in a square, sat in a café or lunched in an eatery, chased after fresh produce in an open market or after air conditioning in a department store, traveled on a bus or a boat, waited in line at a public phone booth, and so on and on. Far more “data” reached me by virtue of my being there than what I gathered through formal interviewing—and it could not but be so, given that I speak Albanian as a native language.7 Naturally, I could not record in the fieldnotes more than only a small fraction of what I heard. This struck me especially after I began writing the ethnography, a long and charged year after I had wrapped up my fieldwork in Athens.8 Over the course of writing, I was often reminded of narratives and situations that I could not trace back to my notes; those I have reconstructed from memory. The discursive fragments that come from my notes or tapes have been edited too. I have summarized lengthy instances of speech into shorter fragments, omitted various marginal narrative lines, or added explanatory words for essentials that were not pronounced, given the original conversational contexts that made verbalization redundant but that could not be reproduced here. For all of these departures from the literal, I have also tried to preserve the flair of the field. For example, while I have not included the names of the individuals speaking or being spoken about, I have striven to reproduce the speaking styles of those whose words I quote or paraphrase. While omitting or modifying those details that could identify particular individuals, I have kept the sentences long or short as the original speaker tended to do, and have selectively included repetitions, pauses, or sighs that characterized the spirit of particular conversations. I have also tried as much as possible to convey the shared oddities of the emigrants’ vernacular. For example, already during my exploratory fieldwork in Athens in the year 2000, I had noticed that, most of the time, the emigrants referred to both the Albanian currency, the lek, and to the Greek currency, the drachma, as “lek.” In the year 2002 I observed how that practice was not affected by the replacement 6 With the notable exception of interviews with those few emigrants who owned small businesses, which usually took place in their business premises, formal interviews were arranged appointments in cafés that promised to be quiet enough for taping the conversation. When recording did not feel comfortable, as it often did not, I used a notepad to take notes, which I typically expanded with additional commentary within a few hours after the end of the interview. 7 I should note, however, that by the time the bulk of fieldwork took place, I had not used Albanian as my everyday language for a number of years. Many new concepts had found their way into the Albanian speech during the 1990s (cf. Jacquemet 2001), so occasionally a younger emigrant would poke fun at me for not understanding a word or an expression or note what he or she thought of as my “fluctuating” accent. Rather than a problem with communication, however, I took this to mean that I was being treated as someone with whom one could make jokes. On the other hand, the emigrants themselves stammered occasionally at translating a given concept from Greek into Albanian—usually a legal or administrative notion for which they used the Greek word among themselves. Over time I became familiar with a number of the Greek words that the emigrants blended into their Albanian and did not always need translation. I never gained fluency in this however, and could not freely use the adopted Greek words in talking with them. 8 I had initially desired the fieldwork for this project to be “multi-sited” (see Marcus 1995), and spent most of the year in Albania following the end of my fieldwork in Greece.

The Structure of This Ethnography 41

Fig. 3.3 Sometimes I was taken by surprise at hearing Albanian in places where I should actually have expected it

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of the drachma by the euro. The emigrants continued to talk in “lek” also after the drachma was no longer legal tender in Greece, specifying in certain contexts whether they meant “old lek” (the drachma) or “new lek” (the “evro,” as the euro is pronounced in Greek).9 So in the following pages I have maintained the emigrants’ referral to the Greek, the European, and the Albanian currencies as “lek,” despite the confusion that this may cause. For all the lek the emigrants talked about, I have also followed their colloquial referral to the currency in the singular form.10 For reference, approximate conversions into US dollars appear in square brackets.11 To an emigrant, the shared condition of emigration is always a personal predicament. To convey how emigration was lived, the mapping of the notional nodes of emigration in the following chapters is interspersed with a series of ethnographic portraits. I have arranged these portraits so as to support the larger ethnographic structure when this book is read from beginning to end. Reflecting the serendipities of human life, however, the portraits do not—could not—illustrate exclusively the chapters preceding or following them. In rendering the lived condition of emigration recognizable I had to render unrecognizable the individuals who made this study possible by allowing me certain degrees of insight into their lives. Hence, while all the portraits have been thoroughly fictionalized, they have been fictionalized through techniques that aim to exaggerate neither the condition of emigration at large nor that of the characters portrayed. All the names in this book are aliases, composed of a fictional first name that strives to represent an individual’s background and an often but not always fictional last initial.12 Since certain identities could be compromised if places other than the 9 The distinction between the drachma and the euro was thus somehow rendered in the terms of the odd discursive life of the Albanian lek. During the first decade after the Second World War—at a point that remains unknown to me despite one research assistant’s week of digging at Albania’s National Library in 2003—the Albanian Bank must have converted the currency to a new denomination, in which 10 old units came to constitute 1 new unit. The name remained unchanged, “lek,” and one may speculate that the Bank of Albania perhaps retained the name so as to not add to the monetary confusion of the time—when, as can be gathered from contemporary newspapers, whether officially recognized by the government or not, “franga,” “golden franga,” and “lira” were all among the circulated currencies of the day. Although after the currency change official documents had to be written using the new lek, talk did not convert to the new currency: as late as the last days of Albania’s socialist state, the “50 cent” coin continued to be talked about as “the five lek,” the bill that read “5 lek” was read “the fifty,” “10 lek” was “the hundred,” and the highest denomination, a large bill that read “100 lek” in imposing deep red was read “the thousand.” The changes in purchasing power and social meanings of Albania’s currency after its destabilization in the 1990s have not affected this practice: to this day “the thousand lek” comes as a coin minted “100 lek,” while, discursively, books are kept and daily expenses are paid in the old lek of after the Second World War. 10 As is the case in a number of continental European languages, in colloquial Albanian a currency’s plural is identical to its singular (while the two forms can be distinguished in educated writing). I have therefore spelled “lek” in this form throughout the text, but have followed the common English plurals for the other currencies. 11 Exchange rates are those of the time for which the amount is quoted; a note clarifies the amounts that could be interpreted according to coexisting “official” and “market” exchange rates. 12 A not fully intended consequence is that this resembles the naming of characters in a good deal of the fiction that was read in Albania during state socialism.

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major Albanian cities or emigrant hubs in Greece were to be identified,13 for any locale other than Athens, Durrës, Ioánnina, Piraeus, Thessaloníki, Tirana, Shkodër, and Vlora, I only indicate the locale’s relative size and geographical orientation within Albania or Greece and whether it is urban or rural.14 Furthermore, in each of the ethnographic portraits I have selectively removed certain lines of events and often replaced them with comparable lines of events drawn from the narratives of at least one unrelated individual. On the other hand, while I have selectively shuffled narratives of employment and altered various identifying details, I have in each case sought to maintain not only the age and gender of the portrayed core individuals, but also their ranges of employment in both Albania and in Greece, especially in terms of frequency of employment, duration, and occupational status. I hope that, while the privacy of those few dozens of emigrants who actually spoke with me is preserved, any emigrant can recognize in the ethnographic portraits included here at least some aspect of his or her life “in emigration.”

13

Sometimes I noticed, for example, that certain families from a same town maintained contacts in Athens. 14 This spelling is a compromise—Athens and Tirana are spelled in this form since this is how it is mostly done in contemporary English; for the other cities I have used spellings that are hopefully closer to the native ones.

Chapter 4

Portrait of Lumturi F., High School Teacher, Domestic Cleaner, Kitchen Help, Maid

In the last ten years in Greece Lumturi F., age 52, must have held over fifty different jobs as domestic cleaner, kitchen help, and maid in hotels and in medical and old-age facilities. Before coming to Greece she was for 18 years a teacher of literature in a prestigious high school in the city of Durrës. Even though she speaks Greek well and has the legal papers, Lumturi has not been able to find a permanent job in Greece—“as an Albanian,” she says. She does not doubt for a moment that Greece is incomparably better than Albania, and her search for a better job continues. Yet sometimes Lumturi wonders why, even after they have left Albania, emigrants cannot escape the misery.

The Beginning Is Always a Little Difficult In the summer of 1992, at the age of 42, Lumturi took a leave of absence from her teaching position at a prominent high school in the city of Durrës and took the bus from Tirana to the city of Korça in Albania’s southeast, and from there another bus to Thessaloníki. With her were her husband, Kosta, who had recently been discharged from the Albanian army, where he had been a detonation engineer for over 20 years, her daughter of fifteen and her son of seven, both on school holidays, as well as a three-year-old niece. The niece was the daughter of one of Lumturi’s two cousins, two brothers who had gone to Thessaloníki the previous year, right after the borders on the Albanian side were no longer guarded. Only about three months after setting foot in Greece, the cousins had sent money to Albania to “pull” their wives, and after over one year of exchanging phone calls and letters, Lumturi had asked her cousins for her and her immediate family to be pulled to Greece also. The cousins had been reluctant in the beginning; they had said that their condition in Greece was “not that good.” But Lumturi knew that their condition could not have been very bad either. The younger cousin had been a car mechanic in Albania, and although he had never gone to the university, people used to say that he was more competent than an engineer. As Lumturi knew, in less than one and a half years in Greece he had managed to get himself a job at a small mechanic plant. He had worked at a car wash first, and there he had met a mechanic who had later hired him as help. 44

The First Time “in Europe”

45

The older cousin, who had worked in the post office in Albania, had first found work at a bread bakery in the outskirts of Thessaloníki, through his wife’s kin’s connections. When his younger brother had started at the mechanic’s shop, the older cousin had left the baker, who was by then demanding more hours for the same pay, and had taken over the job at the car wash. Both their wives worked too, cleaning in the houses of their two adoptive Greek families. So Lumturi knew the cousins could help. Many times on the phone, she reminded them how bad things were in Albania. The wife of the older cousin, with whom Lumturi had always gotten along unusually well, almost “like two sisters,” must have played her part in convincing her husband to try to pull Lumturi and her family to Greece. After negotiations, the cousins had eventually succeeded in having their adoptive Greek families agree for Lumturi, Kosta, and their two children to share one room in the basement in the house of one of the Greek families where both the cousins had lived in the beginning, and where the older cousin now lived with his family. The cousins also arranged for Lumturi to clean in a home which belonged to a relative of one of the adoptive Greek families. Her cousins had explained to Lumturi on the phone that, in the beginning, the money would be enough to support her and her family, until Kosta could find work. As everyone knows, “the beginning is always a little difficult.” Lumturi would also bring to Greece the youngest daughter of the younger cousin. Back then she was only three, and, since it had not been possible to arrange the papers for her to travel with her own mother, when the cousins’ wives had gone to Greece a year earlier, she had been left in the care of the mother of Lumturi. In theory, that is. In practice it had been Lumturi who had to take care of the little girl the whole time, “raising her like her own daughter.” Through connections she had in Durrës, Lumturi had also managed to arrange documents according to which she and her husband appeared to be members of Albania’s Greek minority. In the documents, the three-year-old niece showed up as Lumturi’s daughter. Without these documents they would have never obtained visas to cross the border legally. The arrangement with her cousins was that in Greece Lumturi would continue to take care of the little girl for a while.

The First Time “in Europe” Lumturi recalls how, after crossing the Greek border, their anticipations of a better life in Greece advanced with every mile the bus drove towards Thessaloníki. The cousins had told her on the phone that the beginning would be difficult. But the houses on both sides of the highway “seemed like paradise” compared to the concrete apartment they had left behind in Durrës. Because this was their “first time in Europe,” all four of them (the three-year-old slept most of the time) were in complete awe when the bus entered Greece. Driving towards Thessaloníki, they gobbled up with their eyes the houses outside the bus windows, the shiny red

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4 Portrait of Lumturi F.

Fig. 4.1 The agaves on Lycabettus often had Albanian inscriptions carved on their leaves. This one, MEMORY FROM LIFE, includes a name and, perhaps, the author’s city of origin

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roofs on them, the metallic heating elements on top of the roofs, “not knowing” at that time “what these things were.” In self-condescension, Kosta had mentioned the large old aluminum pot Lumturi had insisted on taking with them from Albania, which now was in one of their heavy bags in the belly of the bus. “Not even dogs would want to eat out of that pot in Greece,” Kosta had said. He had said that because of a small incident at the border; the way the Greek customs officer had laughed at seeing the pot had embarrassed him. Lumturi thinks the dog association must have come from some Albanian emigrant in the bus, a type who had been in Greece before. Wanting to impress everyone in the bus with his detailed knowledge of the wealth of Greece, this emigrant had said that, unlike in Albania, where dogs ate their owners’ leftovers, in Greece dogs did not eat people’s food but “special foods” that were sold “specifically for dogs” in supermarkets. Everyone “knows now” how many stray dogs feed on the garbage that is loose in the streets of Athens. But back in that first day in Greece, driving on the bus, they all believed instantly that Greeks bought the food for their dogs in supermarkets. Because of their heightened expectations, the place where they were to live shocked them more than it would otherwise have. In surface area, the basement was larger than two single-room apartments in Albania put together. But it had neither windows nor what one could call a real floor. Lumturi’s cousins had spent some time trying to press down and level the earth bottom and had layered black sheets of plastic on top. Later Lumturi was to figure out that the black plastic sheets had been produced by cutting oversize trash bags. On that first night she could not know this—she had just arrived in Greece, and trash bags were then not known in Albania. She remembers how the walls of the basement were cold, and how the corners reeked of mold. All electrical wires were outside the walls, hung on nails by the cousins who had had to get the electricity from the central dispenser themselves. The owner of the house, who would eventually become godfather to Lumturi’s niece, had allowed them to use some old furniture he had long stored in the basement. Most of it had been broken, “as it can be imagined,” but Lumturi’s cousins’ “golden hands” had brought everything into a condition in which it could be used. The cousins had put a chest of drawers in the room where Lumturi and her family were to live, the missing legs of which they had replaced with bricks they had broken in half and piled in threes on top of each other. For sleeping they had laid on the floor several pieces of crate plywood, layered with several old blankets on top. A “heating brick,” one that the cousins had made themselves in Albania using resistance wire originally from an electric heat reflector, was to be used for cooking. “Good God,” Lumturi recalls thinking to herself, “where have we ended up?” The cousins appeared happy to see them, however, so Lumturi had to be happy too. She knew how difficult it had been for them to arrange for her and her family to come to Greece.

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They Had Come to Greece for Their Children All Lumturi made in the beginning was 7,500 drachmae [$20.45] a week, 4,000 [$10.90] at the one home where she was prearranged to clean, and 3,500 [$9.55] at another one where she was to work together with the wife of her older cousin. Not bad at all, given how little other Albanians made in those days. Yet the reason why Lumturi and Kosta had come to Greece was to have a better life than they did in Albania. And one had to be honest about it: on 7,500 drachmae a week their living was worse than it had been in Albania. Food was plentiful and immensely better; they were now having foods they had never had before. But the point of life was not eating only. They wanted to live in a place that had windows, they wanted to go to sleep on beds. The children needed clothes, and soon they would also need books to go to school. In school they would also need “all kinds of other things,” things that, as it turned out later, in Albania they never even knew existed. Kosta seemed to regret having agreed to come to Greece. True, he already had lost his job in Albania, but at least the room in which he slept there had a bed and sunlight. So it was natural for Lumturi to start looking for more houses to clean. To boost her husband’s morale, she prompted Kosta to buy a book and to start learning Greek so that he could eventually get to work “in his profession.” Lumturi knew already that she could not get any other kind of job herself—who would need a teacher of Albanian literature in Greece? But she hoped that, once Kosta could speak Greek, his skills as a detonation engineer would become useful. Lumturi had reached the point where she cleaned at perhaps five different houses every week before it started dawning upon her that even with his skills Kosta would not be able to find work related to his profession. Although they had the papers, they did not appear very convincing as ethnic Greeks. For one thing, none of them spoke Greek well. With every day that passed, Kosta’s regret about his decision to emigrate grew, and that showed. Lumturi had to go through one of those “once-in-the-life-of-a-marriage” discussions with him. She had to remind him that they had come to Greece for their children and that Kosta had to keep up with his responsibility for their future. Lumturi had “to open his eyes” to see how things in Greece were better. Their discussion had been heated enough for Lumturi to fear that Kosta might divorce her and return to Albania without her. But his commitment to the future of their children eventually won. After their talk, Kosta resolved to forget about his past in the army and start on any job he could find, “just like all the other Albanians.” The fact was that they had discharged him from the army; being an officer in Albania was no longer an option. In Greece all Albanians were the same and he had to do as everyone else did.

From the Restaurant to Athens By the time Kosta made up his mind to accept any kind of work that would come up, Lumturi had gotten into an evening job at a restaurant, washing dishes

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Fig. 4.2 Bargaining in Piraeus

From the Restaurant to Athens

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4 Portrait of Lumturi F.

and cleaning in the kitchen. She continued cleaning homes in the daytime; the restaurant work was in addition to those jobs. She had to work very hard. She thinks that, in a typical summer night, the restaurant had perhaps over 200 customers for each hour of the evening. Since there was so much work, and also because Lumturi worked well, the owner readily agreed for Kosta to work there too. He would share the shifts with Lumturi, and they would earn almost twice as much as Lumturi working alone. “Needless to say,” Kosta was uncomfortable. But there were no other jobs. Other Albanians they knew worked in construction and did not earn any more than what Lumturi and Kosta would be earning in the restaurant. Those who could find construction work would not make more than 3,000 drachmae [$8.18] a day back then; some Albanians who worked in farms earned only 1,000 drachmae [$2.72] a day. So Kosta took the job. Lumturi was relieved to see him adjusting, and the money was much needed. But Lumturi also suffered to see Kosta hurt by the work in the kitchen, being given orders by the boss in front of his wife. Lumturi and Kosta were surprised at how much money the restaurant made. The owner regularly brought the meat from a village, where Lumturi believed he bought it for little, for it was his own cousins he bought it from. The restaurant resold it for “astronomical prices.” One of the meat plates on the menu, just a simple plate with meat, went for about the same amount that the owner paid Lumturi for a whole shift. The kitchen was not very clean either. When meat was left over in the gyro that the restaurant had on the street, they were told to put it back in the fridge for the night so that it could be used the next day. This is “hard to imagine,” for Thessaloníki was a clean city, “much cleaner than Athens,” as they would realize later. Having seen it “with her own eyes,” Lumturi only wonders what it would be like eating from the street gyros in a large city like Athens. Even though Lumturi and Kosta managed to have their children attend public schools in Thessaloníki, where the children progressed well, remaining in Greece continued to be a matter of family discussions. In Thessaloníki Lumturi often reflected on the reasons why their condition was what is was. Greece was incomparably better than Albania. So why did she and Kosta not have it better? Deciding that the reason was the lack of jobs in Thessaloníki, which “was not a capital city,” Lumturi brought another move upon the family, from Thessaloníki to Athens.

Maybe a Cursed Land Even though compared to the day when they came to Greece in 1992 many things have improved, in Athens life is also “very difficult.” Lumturi still cooks in the same aluminum pot they brought with them from Albania, the one that had embarrassed Kosta in their first bus drive through Greece. After selling their apartment in Durrës in 1995, they even brought to Greece all the other pots and pans they had, as well as another heating brick which they now keep beside that same heating and cooking brick which had shocked Lumturi upon arrival in

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Thessaloníki. Both bricks belong to them: Lumturi’s cousins, who are now “much better off,” no longer needed the first heating brick and they gave it to her when she moved out of the basement. Lumturi had thought that she would “get rid” of the brick soon, but as things turned out, they even brought the second one from Albania. After so many years, Lumturi, Kosta, and the children still move from apartment to apartment with both the bricks. It may be that Lumturi and her family arrived in Athens too late, at a point when, as they read in the newspapers, the Greek economy was “in crisis.” As it was said, all the jobs had been filled. When she thinks of it, however, Lumturi knows that not all jobs have been filled. The point is that there are no good jobs for the Albanians. Yes, Lumturi and Kosta do have papers, and on paper they are of Greek origin. But no matter what the papers say, in reality they are Albanians. “Like all Albanians,” Lumturi has changed many jobs during this decade in Greece. Besides cleaning homes, she has worked in several other restaurants and hotels, she has cleaned in hospitals and in nursing homes, and once she even worked for an agency that sent her to take care of older and terminally ill patients in their own homes. If she is to count all of her jobs, the number will perhaps be greater than fifty. Lumturi tries to “not waste too much time” dwelling on this, however; neither does she dwell on the past and on what has been lost. Unlike many Albanians, she also tries to not waste too much time thinking of the Albanian politicians. She has come herself to accept the saying that Albania may be a cursed land. She used to ridicule it in the past, when she heard people say it. “Ignorant,” she thought, “these people can be full of such macabre superstitions.” But why is it then that Albania never gets ahead? And why is it that even when Albanians are no longer in Albania, they still cannot escape suffering? Why is it that even in Greece emigrants cannot escape the misery?

Chapter 5

Greece Is Better than Albania

Demotion is obvious when a one-time chemical engineer cleans homes to earn a living or when a one-time senior research scientist employs himself to manually produce icon frames for sale. But it was not easy to talk with the emigrants about their social decline. Asked about the rationale for emigration, the emigrants evoked instead the abundance of material objects in Greece, which to them made tangible the superiority of Greece over Albania.

The Objective Inferiority of Albania The discursive scape of emigration recasts the social trajectory of emigration into a general juxtaposition of Greece and Albania. Instead of juxtaposing their own employment in Albania and in Greece, the emigrants talked about the two countries as if emigration stemmed from the conclusion that Albania is inferior to Greece, which in their words was the necessary result of a general comparison of the two. Despite not having a job at the time we met, a one-time high school teacher of biology from a small town in northern Albania did not doubt for a moment that being in Greece was “better” than being in Albania: The very economic level of Albania means that economically it is better here in Greece. Concrete examples: There are four in my family; my wife and my son work. I worked for two and a half years in that factory, and now I am on state assistance, which pays me 110,000 drachmae [$300] a month for one year. But to tell the truth, if I make the calculations that the Albanian makes—even though the bills here are many and steep, and even though the lights, the price of electricity, is steep, and the rent too, and so forth, and even on as little money as I make—still I am left with five lek on the side. Perhaps not every month, but still I am left with five lek on the side most of the time. This means that if I have an urgent need, I will have five lek.. . . The everyday needs of life are more solved here. There is no shortage of electricity here in Greece. There is no mud in the boulevard. We have heating here.

This was a common turn of talk. When asked about their present in Greece, most emigrants talked instead about Albania of the 1980s. As the tangible present reality in which such talk took place, Greece usually required few words besides interjections of the kind “look for yourself.” By contrast, the past in Albania could be endlessly 52

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talked about. Money was sometimes mentioned in the comparison between the speaks-for-itself present and the past that demands narration, though Albania was typically talked about in terms of a variety of material objects. Sometimes money and objects were used interchangeably. There was nothing [in Albania]. You could have as much money as you pleased, but you could not buy anything. But where would you find the money then? There was no money. Shops were empty, and there was no money either. Dire poverty it was.

The contrast between the two countries was often presented in terms of the opposition between socialism and capitalism as larger social and political and economic orders—or as the emigrants usually put it, “systems”—in which every absence of tangible objects in Albania was treated as objectifying the superiority of Greece. An anecdote about “an American tourist” who, during “the time of socialism,” somehow finds himself in the Soviet Union, was told to me as an illustration of the material poverty in one-time Albania: [The American] cannot read the writing above the doors to the shops, because all the writing is in Russian. So he does not know what all that writing means, and he enters a shop. There is a counter inside the shop, and behind the counter there is an old woman, and behind the old woman there is a large empty shelf. So the American asks the old woman, “What kind of shop is this?” “We sell meat,” the saleswoman says, “we also sell chicken, and sausage, and ham, and we sell fish too. But we are out of them at this time, we are waiting for a delivery.” So the American leaves the shop and walks a little bit further down the street. There he sees another shop, and again, he cannot understand what the writing on the door means. So he enters again, and he sees the same thing: there is an empty counter inside the shop, a large empty shelf behind the counter, and an old woman. “What kind of shop is this?” the American asks. “We are a general clothing store,” the saleswoman says, “we sell everything from lingerie to overcoats, we sell knitwear too, and textiles by the meter. But we are out of stock, we are waiting for a delivery.” So the American walks out again, and, further down the street, he sees another shop with some red writing above the door. He enters the door, and this shop is completely empty. There are only the four walls, and an old man walking back and forth. “What kind of a shop is this?” the American asks. “We sell shelves,” says the salesman, “and counters.”

The brutal emptiness of the shops of state socialism thus cast the difference between Albania and Greece in the quantitative terms of scarcity versus abundance. But the absence of tangibles was also a violation of order. The stores of socialism were not simply empty, they were depicted as embodying the opposite of what they proclaimed to be, perhaps even the opposite of what they ought to have been. And this was the order of the wrongs that Greece had redressed, this suggested, object by object; starting with the most basic necessities of everyday living, practically all that was now tangible in Greece could be counted as once lacking in Albania. You cannot really compare food here to food in Albania. When we came to Greece in 1992 there were no eggs in Albania, and people ate that milk powder that had come with the foreign aid—at least, those who could get it and who had money to buy it. But only in the cities; in the villages they did not have even that. They could never get the powdered milk in the villages. They did not have cows, or even sheep. They did not have animals because of

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5 Greece Is Better than Albania the herding.1 Let me not mention any other articles. It had always been like that in Albania. The government wanted to produce the bread in the country,2 but they did not care what kind of bread. The peasants produced the wheat, but the cities ate it. Villages would only get the corn bread. Can you imagine, small children eating that yellow corn bread with a little sugar and water on top? Infants who did not yet have teeth! There was no cheese, no oil, no meat. Sugar was the most desirable thing, and there was not much of it. Sugar was on the voucher too. When we arrived [in Greece] I had my first piece of cheese in months. The first thing I did when I arrived [in Greece], I ate a big piece of cheese. I fried it with butter! Hohoho! The smell of the fried butter filled that basement. Each of us had some.

After a decade in Greece, the scarcity of foodstuffs in late 1980s Albania continued to attract much talk and such ruminations were quite common. Many emigrants, for example, could remember vividly the Albanian state’s policies for rationing meat. The decade that had passed had not only not diminished their resentment, in some cases the abundance of Greece seemed to have bred new bitterness. Even the one kilo of meat, the one kilo of the voucher, which meant one kilo for a family of five people—even that was not guaranteed. It could not get any worse! In the beginning it was one kilo per week, then it became one kilo per month.3

It was often remarked that towards the last years of state socialism the scarcity of meat and dairy products extended to basics such as rice, beans, sugar, and later oil, flower, and “even noodles,” and that queues outside food stores had grown long. Yet foodstuffs were only one class of thing among the multitude of things that were remembered to have been lacking. Emigrants talked of 1980s Albania also in terms of a constant shortage of clothing: Greece has dressed up the emigrants. In Albania people were known by the clothes they wore, especially if someone had a bright color. Most colors were brownish in those years, 1 Carried out in the mid 1970s or mid 1980s as an “advanced step” of the socialist state’s “agricultural reform,” in reality “herding” was the forced collection of all the domestic animals owned by people in the countryside into small herds that were to be administered by the agricultural cooperatives. In the absence of alternative forms of opposition, many peasants were said to have slaughtered their animals by the deadline the state had given them for “voluntarily” pooling their animals together. Even though not all of the animals were slaughtered, herding resulted in wholesale economic devastation: by giving the animals away, peasants were left with no source of income other than their wage labor in the agricultural cooperatives. 2 “Producing bread in the country” comes straight out of the propaganda of Albania’s socialist state. The centrally planned economy sought, among other things, Albania’s economic independence from the foreign world. The production of bread grains in the country was a key pillar of this independence, and officially, since the year 1976 enough grain was produced in Albania to cover all domestic needs. 3 Until the mid 1980s, meat was available for purchase theoretically without restrictions, but, as many emigrants recalled, free availability meant in practice that most of the families who did not have a retired person to rely on for spending the day in queues could not get hold of any meat at all. This appears to have been recognized by the state at some point in the mid 1980s, for “vouchers” were put into place in the larger cities at that time, a system entitling each urban family to one kilogram of cow’s meat per week. As cows grew scarcer with the passing of time, however, the voucher was said to have been honored every other week by pork (which was not widely consumed, perhaps in part due to many families’ “not knowing how to cook pork”—itself perhaps a consequence of the Islamic tradition’s pork taboo), or chicken, and by the late 1980s sometimes even by preserved fish, the “sardine tins.”

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when I was a student especially.. . . There was a lot of white, a lot of off-white, but they were all very washed colors. Clothes were very memorable. Because people wore the same pair of trousers or skirt for years and years. I had only one winter sweater for the whole time that I went through the university, my pink sweater. And I had two white shirts. I kept wearing the sweater after I started working too, when I was teaching at the high school. I wore it until it thinned at the elbows, but I did not throw it away. Clothes were never thrown away in Albania, we did not treat clothes like we do now in Greece.. . . I wanted to unravel the sweater, to use the yarn for knitting something else. I would have had to add new yarn though, for that sweater had been so used, the yarn would have no longer been enough. I thought, if I undo another old sweater I have, which my sister-in-law had given me, I could knit something for my daughter, a new sweater out of the two old sweaters.. . . Then we came to Greece, and we did not need those things any more.. . . A sweater worn for fifteen years, and then saved for its yarn.... But that was Albania! That is where we come from.. . .

While the one-time shortage of food and clothing was usually emphasized rhetorically so as to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of Greece’s superiority to Albania in the sense of “even such basics we did not have,” conveying a definite air of past time about it, the absence of electrical household appliances over a decade ago could easily trigger fresh agitation. It was said that “every emigrant” owned those appliances in Greece at present, and a television set or refrigerator were spoken about as instances of such undisputable proof of Albania’s inferiority that their very mention often seemed to constitute the most immediate and surest way of making tangible the superiority of Greece. To several emigrants, the one-time lack of an automatic washing machine, a refrigerator, or a television set, seemed to denounce their past in Albania even more severely than their one-time dependence on one single sweater for many years, and even more severely than the lengthy queues in which at one time in the past they had had to wait for hours for purchasing the most basic of foodstuffs. The fervor that asserted the mutual inferiority of Albania and the superiority of Greece sometimes peaked in lip-smacking descriptions of an entire class of electric and especially electronic appliances, the very existence of which was not known to most emigrants in Albania. Greece has everything, any way you want it. An electric razor: How do you want it? Do you want it with electricity? Do you want it with batteries? You get one with batteries. As I say, any way you want it. Where had we seen such things in Albania? Hm? We had no idea what [things] the world had. We shaved with blades. An Albanian man would use a [disposable] blade for a month. Each day he would shave with the same [disposable] blade, till the blade would no longer go, till there were no blades. When there was no shaving soap, we shaved with hand soap.

While the difference between Greece and Albania in terms of material objects was usually expressed quantitatively, as in the comparison of the two countries implied in the anecdote of the empty stores, the nature of the objects that the emigrants lacked in their past in Albania also mattered. So bitter could many emigrants get about not having known of the fancier “things the world had” that their one-time ignorance with regard to the compact disc or the electronic watch with an integrated calculator was narrated as weightier proof of material deprivation in Albania than the scarcity of meat.

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Fig. 5.1 A butcher’s stand on Athinas

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This underlying logic of emphasizing the absence—and rhetorical weight—of that which was once not known as evidence of Albania’s inferiority thoroughly permeated the emigrants’ talk about eating. One former high school teacher of Albanian literature, who did not have a stable job in Greece at the time we talked and earned her money cleaning in a number of private homes, expressed the absence of bananas in Albania as the culmination of deprivations that she once had to endure: In Greece I tasted the first banana in my life! I had never had a banana before coming here. I have read that bananas are very healthy. Is that right? The newspaper said that there are many studies about it. Bananas have iron. Doctors recommend them for babies and for older people. We did not have bananas in Albania.

Litanies that compounded all of what the emigrants considered as having been wrong in Albania were common and casual enough to tempt one to think of those objectifications of the country’s inferiority as random. Yet the continuum of ever weightier evidence that started with foodstuffs, went on with clothes and household appliances, and culminated with electronics that were at one time not even known— in other words the order in which objects discursively established Albania’s inferiority to Greece as being intrinsic to Albania—was present in virtually every instance: Greeks think that the Albanians came here for a dry crust of bread. But you should see for yourself how the Albanians live now. Many Albanians live better than the Greeks! Albanians eat better. They have cleaner homes. All these Albanians you see, who work for 5,000 drachmae [$13.60] a day, have color televisions at home. They have videos, refrigerators, electric ovens. The people who come to my café, all have all of these electric items at home. When I go around among the tables at night, many people talk about apartments. They are buying apartments. It is only ten years since Albanians came to Greece, and they are buying apartments! Would you get an apartment for ten years of work in Albania? I worked in Albania for 36 years! 36 years of my life! When I came to Greece in 1991 I did not have a video recorder. I had never seen a video recorder at that time! We had a black-and-white television in Albania. Do you remember the “Adriatik” televisions that were made in Durrës? We had one of those at home. 36 years of work! I was a teacher and a respected man for 36 years. And when I arrived as an emigrant in Greece, I had not had an egg for breakfast in months! We lived on one kilogram of sugar per month! We ate one hundred grams of minced meat a week! Not one person, the entire family! The family of a teacher on one hundred grams of minced meat a week! Some weeks, when they did not have meat, they gave us a tin of sardines instead.

Objectifications of Individuality, Distinction, and Indistinction in Albania It would be hard to dispute that, compared to Greece at present, fewer material objects existed in Albania in the 1980s. But the objectification of the superiority of Greece over Albania in terms of material objects, and hence the objectification of the economic heart of the rationale for emigration at which the enumeration of the lack of objects aimed, was belied by the firm—albeit implicit—order in which emigrants mounted the objective evidence of Albania’s inferiority. The elevation of the electronics not even known in Albania, and of bananas never tasted before emigrating to Greece, to the pinnacle of the objective evidence of the superiority of

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Greece over Albania suggests that the importance of objects in the assessment of how the two countries compared lay beyond the immediate needs which the objects were meant to fulfill. But if emphasizing the fancy over the necessary speaks against the material uses of objects as the reason for emigration, where then did the importance of objects lie? As narrated by the emigrants, the pervasive material scarcity that characterized Albania’s state socialism meant also that under that system objects were so few that they necessarily marked one’s individuality. Within the conceptual frame that emphasizes distinct states of material fulfillment as intrinsic to each of the two countries, a one-time teacher of biology from Tirana recounted how at one time in Albania people used to be remembered by the features of the clothes they wore “for years”: Once a woman came to the parent-teacher meeting at the school; she was the parent of a pupil I had. It must have been the beginning of the school year, the school would have just started, because her daughter was new. I mean I had never seen this parent before, but [she and I] were of the same age, it was clear—we were of the same generation. She came to me, we talked about her daughter for a few minutes.. . . Later it turned out that her daughter was a very good student. [sighs] I believe that later she went to Denmark, the daughter of this woman, this pupil of mine. I believe my pupil married a Kosovar, and she went to Denmark, or to one of those countries.. . . But I was telling you about her mother in the parent-teacher meeting. She said that my face appeared familiar, that she remembered me from somewhere. But I could not remember her. We were of the same generation, but still I could not remember her, even after we figured out that we had attended the university at the same time. It even turned out that she had lived for two years in the dormitory building right opposite to the one where I had been for four years. She had graduated one or two years before me. Still, I could not remember her. But when she said that she had had a green coat during those student years, would you believe it, I remembered her coat! She had been the girl with the green coat! The light green coat that she had had! How could I not remember it? There had been only three green coats in the entire Student City! I still remember all three. A girl in our school had one of them. Another one must have been a student in history, or in languages, because I knew that their school was very close to the dormitories. And the third one was a girl in the building next to mine. So this third one, who had had the green coat, was now the parent of my pupil! I think I even recalled that she had graduated one or two years before me. Now this woman worked in the executive committee of one of the city’s districts.

The material functionality of an object should not be understood as necessarily opposed to that object’s function as a marker of individuality however; generally speaking, the two appeared related. But it is clear that they were also related in a specific order. An account of how one former partisan4 and mother of an emigrant was muffled during Albania’s state socialism employed the utility of an object, an

4 The way it came to be used in Albania, “partisan” meant a certain kind of veteran of the Second World War, one who had voluntarily joined the armed forces organized by the Communist Party to oppose the Nazi occupation. Since the Party had successfully vilified everyone who had opposed the Nazi occupation without being part of the armed forces the Party organized, and since most of those other veterans who remained in Albania after the Party’s takeover were eventually prosecuted as “traitors” or even executed, “veteran” and “partisan” are used synonymously in Albanian.

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armchair once seen on Yugoslav television, to denounce the oppression to which one’s individuality was once subjected in Albania: In Yugoslavia they also had celebrations of [Second World War] battles. There was one that occurred at the same time as a celebration in our city. We watched their celebrations on the Yugoslav television—we watched the Yugoslav television just like everybody else did,5 because the war had been on both sides of the border. The cities had been liberated around the same time so there were celebrations around the same time. My mother had been a partisan and she was always invited to the celebration.6 But it was a big deal to find a stool to sit on. They brought a lot of children from the schools to the celebrations; there were many people. My mother needed to sit down. She had grown old, and she could not stand up for long. She had been a partisan.. . . My mother used to say about the partisans in Yugoslavia, “Look at them, look at the armchairs Yugoslavia puts its partisans in.” My father would tell her to shut her mouth or she would end up in jail. Poor mother. She had to shut up. It was hard, because my mother was very progressive. She had been a partisan, she was very progressive. It had been progressive to go into the mountains as a partisan at that time, especially for a woman, for a young girl. My mother always said it like it was. She did not know diplomacy.

In the context of one elderly veteran’s need to sit, the armchair does not simply serve the need to sit, which a stool can also fulfill, but it rather objectifies the social recognition of one’s special status as a partisan. In the logic of the discursive scape of emigration, an object embodied thus both material and social functions, related to each other so that the greater or most profound function of all the material functions of an object was to enable that object’s functions as a marker of individuality. Qualifying that Yugoslavia put its partisans in armchairs emphasized the armchair’s function as a marker of one’s individual “worth,” since sitting on an armchair marked the sitting individual as distinct from the others who sat on stools or who had to stand. On the other hand, it is this marking of individuality through objects that also distinguished Yugoslavia from Albania. One-time Albania was not just a country where armchairs happened to be in shortage, but a country where one’s individuality was ignored to the deplorable degree marked by the absence of even “a stool to sit”. The still-recounted absence of an armchair for a former partisan at a public commemoration articulates thus the most profound denunciation of Albania’s state socialism: the one-time scarcity of objects did not simply deprive one of one’s physical or material needs, but of one’s social recognition. This logic was pervasive. Throughout the discursive scape of emigration, objects embodied the primacy of the social over the strictly material, and they did so not just in contexts of public commemorations but also in everyone’s everydayness. Those 5 Given the Party’s denigration of the watching of foreign television as “unpatriotic” activity, “like everybody else” should perhaps be read as a way or desire to legitimize one’s one-time dormancy as political opposition—but it should not be taken literally. A number of measures were in place to prevent the reception of foreign broadcasts. Several interceptor signals were run in the ranges of the receivable broadcasts, for example; and at the neighborhood level the cells of the Democratic Front, an initially independent organization that during the war had fallen under the Party’s control and become a so-called “Party lever,” were in charge of educating people not to watch foreign television; suspicious antennas on the roofs were reported to the authorities. 6 The socialist state eagerly exploited the war for propagandistic reasons, and celebrations of liberation days such as the one described here were turned into key propaganda events.

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who had not been partisans seemed also to have experienced the one-time scarcity of material objects in a similarly smothering way—and they too attributed to Albania their social suffering articulated in terms of objective scarcity. While not many could have expected armchairs to have been brought for them at public festivities, common people too did long for the three household appliances that a relatively small but visible cohort had managed to possess towards the last years of Albania’s state socialism. They were, in the order of their desirability, the black-and-white television set, the refrigerator, and the automatic washing machine. Each of those three universal markers of individuality cost around 45,000 lek [$600],7 the rough equivalent of about ten months of income for a factory worker, or of about nine months of income for an elementary school teacher. A common strategy that had emerged for coming into such large sums was by pooling money together through so-called “lotteries”—not lotteries in the sense in which the word is used in English, but socially-regulated schemes for disciplining everyday consumption so as to afford the more expensive objects desired by all: My mom always found a lottery to join. At the beginning of every fifteen-day8 she had to give away 250 lek [$3.33] or 500 lek [$6.66] for a lottery—old lek, but still, it was a big deal. 500 lek [$6.66] was a fortune. 250 lek [$3.33] was a lot of money too. It was not easy to set aside that much money. But then she would have 3,000 lek [$40] together, or 6,000 lek [$80] together. That is why people joined the lotteries. It is never easy to set money aside, money slips through your fingers, as my grandma used to say. Here in Greece too, it slips. People participated in lotteries to get a large sum in one chunk. You could buy something for that. 3,000 old lek [$40] was not that much though. You could buy clothes, and shoes. Well, that actually was a lot in Albania. But people entered lotteries mostly for larger sums, say for 12,000 lek [$160]. Lotteries were the only way to save, they obliged you to give the money away on payday. My mom used to say that lotteries are the only way to save. Otherwise you could not do it. The lottery forced people to tighten their belts. You only set the cash aside when you did not have it in hand. People did it with a goal, and with people they trusted. You needed to know that they would pay, especially if your turn to collect the money was towards the end. They usually ran lotteries where a lot of people worked, so that the person who was in charge of the lottery could collect all the money on payday, at the beginning of each fifteen-day. People paid their lottery installment as they received their wages. Some entered one lottery after another, in order to come up with the money for a big item, like a television, or a refrigerator. There were a lot of lotteries going on.

Such tightening of the belt one lottery after the other so as to arrive at a television set or at a refrigerator exemplifies the one-time subjection of everyday consumption to the desire for status. “Intellectuals” had to partake in this subjection too, for 45,000 lek [$600] was not little for them either: it equaled at least five months of income for a university professor or research scientist. Yet it appears that intellectuals usually

7 The official exchange rate of the last years of Albania’s state socialism was 75 old lek to the US dollar. 8 The thorough centralization of Albania’s economy meant that wages were universally paid out twice a month, on fixed dates. The bimonthly wage, as well as the period of time between wages, were unofficially known as pesëmbëdhjetëditëshi (pesmediçi for short), which literally means “the fifteen-day.” Since the number of days could not always be the same in each of the two fifteen-days of the month, the shorter fifteen-day was for most Albanians also more affluent than the longer one.

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did not “enter” the lotteries. A one-time junior university professor, who after years of working in Greece almost exclusively as construction help now finally supervised the progress of work at three construction sites, explained that lotteries were going on all the time. I, my family, never entered a lottery. Lotteries were run in the factories. [Pauses] Because a lot of people were needed. In large working centers, that’s where they ran lotteries. Intellectuals did not enter, except through cousins, those who had cousins.

The three most desired appliances, the television, the refrigerator, and the electric washing machine, were said to have been scarce beyond the scarcity of money because they were either imported to Albania as finished pieces or, especially the television sets, assembled in Albania of imported parts. In addition to money, an “authorization” was needed to purchase any of the three, and such authorizations were distributed by one’s “work center,” as one’s place of work was then called. To an intellectual, these authorizations appear to have been perhaps the most appalling impediment standing in the way of the desired household appliances. According to a one-time engineer who in Greece earned her living as a domestic servant, obtaining an authorization for purchasing a television set, a refrigerator, or an automatic washing machine involved extensive politicking and grave injustice: I was a mother of two small children, and my husband was sick all the time, everybody knew that, and I was in charge of a team of ten workers.. . . There was so much that I had to do: I had to supervise the production of the team, I had a lot of work responsibilities, and I also had to manage the family. But the laundry, even the laundry I still had to do by hand.. . . They never gave me an authorization for buying a washing machine. The factory did not get many authorizations for washing machines. There were many people who wanted them—everybody. A lot of the engineers wanted them. But the distribution had to favor the workers, the workers had to get the authorizations first. The ruling working class, you know.. . . Once, when an authorization for a washing machine was given for the team I headed, the Professional Unions9 decided to give it to this woman, who was a member of the Party. She always went to the meetings of the Professional Unions, of course, she spoke there—oh, she had a lot of words.. . . I will never forget it, I will never forget that in my life. I had so much hoped that they would consider my situation, that I had a sick husband, that I had children to raise.. . . I was the one who needed a washing machine the most, I deserved it the most.

To a certain extent, not being given the authorization to purchase an automatic washing machine must have been functionally depriving—the laundry had to be done by hand. But it amounted to a slight because of the fact that this former engineer saw herself as the one who deserved a washing machine more than anyone else in her “work center,” including all the other engineers who also desired it. Two decades later, the graveness of the injustice of this slight was elaborated accordingly, not simply in terms of the missed washing functions that generally define a washing machine, but by recounting at length the character of the individual to whom the 9 Similar to the Democratic Front, the Professional Unions were another “lever” of the Party, a centralized top-down organization with “cells” at each and every “work center” in the country, which addressed the individual in her or his capacities as an employee. Typically, it was the cell of the Professional Unions that distributed the authorizations for purchasing television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines, as well as contracts for vacation rentals.

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authorization to buy an automatic washing machine was instead given, the one whom the automatic washing machine unjustly individualized. This woman who got it, she must have been around 30 when they brought her to my team— I’d say she was rather 28 or 29 years old, at the most 30. She was not older than that. She had not had much schooling. She had gone through the compulsory 8th grade in the village, of course, but she could not have gone further than that.. . . But she had become a member of the Party, so they brought her from the agricultural cooperative to work in the factory. She must have had strong connections somewhere, of course.. . . So I had to work with her—I was the engineer, I was the head of the team.. . . I had to assign the work to the workers in my team, I had to check how they did it, I had to give different assignments, I was to be in charge. This woman felt as if she had touched the sky. She had come from the agricultural cooperative to Durrës, and she felt that she had been brought there to explain to me the directives of the Party. I mean, with as little schooling as she had, she just could not read the technical specifications of a product. I had to explain everything to her about the work she had to do. But I could not say much else to her, because she was a member of the Party. She always attended the meetings of the Professional Unions.. . . She had no idea of the production processes, and still I had to take directions from her. She was to control how I worked. I had to do what she liked. I was an engineer and she only had eight years of school, but she was to give me the directives. It must have been a big deal for her, to come to Durrës, to live in the city. She had worked in the open field before, in an agricultural cooperative. Why should she not go to the meetings of the Professional Unions every time? Of course, she had to offer her precious thoughts on every occasion.

In the logic underlying this statement, an automatic washing machine ought to have marked a hard-working engineer and family-raising mother—or, as put in terms whose modesty shows best this former engineer’s assuredness of the legitimacy of her claim, the washing machine had to be the marker of the most deserving. Authorized for an unschooled hypocrite who could blather loudly in the meetings of the Professional Union, the automatic washing machine profoundly violated such order, unjustly marking the unschooled hypocrite as distinct from others, and by its absence, failing to mark the deserving engineer. Because of their scarcity, objects thus violated the order in which “the things of life” ought to have been arranged. And this sheds a new light on the emigrants’ indelible unhappiness with the Albania of yore. In 1980s Albania, objects appear to have objectified a profound social tension. Given their scarcity, the most desirable objects were generally understood as marking one as an individual rather than just a member of “the masses” or “the working masses,” as some emigrants referred to the rest of “the people,” regurgitating or perhaps mocking some of the socialist propaganda’s most beloved words. Indeed, the black-and-white television set, the refrigerator, and the automatic washing machine must have emerged as desirable appliances because they made tangible that one was a teacher, or a medical doctor, or a truly special factory worker. Yet within the same context, the route for procuring these most-desired objects violated the very premises that they were to objectify: to obtain an authorization for purchasing an automatic washing machine, which one felt one deserved for being an engineer or a teacher, one had to play up to the secretary of the Party or to the head of the Professional Unions. Objectifying that one had had to lower oneself to certain others whom one perceived as relatively less accomplished, socialist

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Albania’s objects thus also objectified one’s becoming the individual one would not have wanted to be. That intellectuals did not participate in lotteries also appears in a new light, since the intellectuals too had to limit their everyday consumption in order to be able to buy the desired household appliances. Given what the desired objects were desired for, intellectuals would have not commonly participated in lotteries because of their aversion to joining a “mass” of others—it would be absurd to think that the intellectuals would have suffered shortages of cousins. In fact, lotteries must have constituted yet another assault to the very individuality which the desired objects were to mark. While joining the lottery was for many the only feasible way of disciplining everyday consumption so as to meet the financial prerequisites of the universally desired objects, joining the lottery showed also that one belonged in the same pool as everyone else, and it did so perhaps at an even more profound level than working one’s way through Professional Unions politicking.

Objective Contradictions in Greece Virtually every emigrant appeared appalled by Albania’s state socialism and the discursive construction of Albania’s inferiority to Greece commonly derailed into litanies against “the dictatorship.” But emigrants usually did not acknowledge that being in Greece had left unresolved the contradiction between the height of one’s distinction, which the desired objects objectified or were to objectify in late 1980s Albania, and the overcoming of one’s “self” that was the necessary route to them. As I said, [Greece and Albania] cannot be compared. I never had a refrigerator in Albania. I would have never had a refrigerator, to this day, if the dictatorship had continued. What refrigerator? The secretary of the Party was after me. He was waiting for me to make a mistake. One mistake, to report it.. . . The authorizations were given to those who said “yes, that is so,” from morning till evening. “Yes, as you say, comrade secretary.” . . . In Greece I am only a janitor, but I have a refrigerator and a washing machine. There are no authorizations in Greece. In Greece I have a television, a color television that no one had in Albania. Not the secretary of the Party in my school, not even the secretary of the Party of the county. I have a video recorder. I am a janitor in Greece and I have a color television and a video recorder that an official could not have had in Albania. I think that the comparison is clear.

An unrecognized contradiction between how things in society are and how they ought to be permeates this statement. That one did not need an authorization in order to buy a television set in Greece, and that emigrants often did own color televisions that were more desirable than the black-and-white ones they once desired in Albania, already establishes the superiority of Greece over Albania. But Greece is elevated to its indisputable relative height by the declaration that, even as a janitor in Greece, one possesses more and better objects than one had as a teacher in Albania. In other words, the magnitude of Greece’s superiority over Albania is grounded not simply on the understanding that possessing a refrigerator is better than not possessing one, but also on the acknowledgement that a teacher’s stature is higher than a janitor’s, and that a Party official is of even higher status than a mere teacher.

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The contradiction in Albania between the social prestige objects carried and the baseness that was necessary for procuring them had thus been replaced in Greece by the contradiction between the social prestige objects carry and the subordination, through manual labor below one’s former status that, for the emigrants, was the precondition for possessing them. The relative abundance of objects in Greece could be grounds for emigration only if the material condition in itself, detached from its social functions, were to be the aim of each and every emigrant’s life. And certain narratives suggesting that objects of at least certain classes were desired for their own sake were also part of the discursive scape of emigration. For example: We were sitting around the table, we didn’t know what to do. Edgar said, “Let’s play one game of cards.” The others were going, like, “yeah, yeah,” you know. We were bored, you know, it was Sunday. Beni got us glasses, and he went to the fridge to get us drinks. He was going, “What do you guys want to drink,” and everyone was going, “Coca-Cola, CocaCola.” Then we heard him in the kitchen, swearing out loud. “What’s going on?” I said. Beni kept swearing. “Guys, we cannot play,” he said. “We are out of Coca-Cola!” [Laughs] I can’t tell you how much I laughed when I heard that. When Beni said, “Guys, we cannot play, we are out of Coca-Cola.” I must have had the longest laugh of the week! No, I had the longest laugh of the month! I laughed for five minutes. I am serious, I laughed for five minutes straight, until tears rolled down from my eyes. I could not stop laughing. It sounded like a commercial. When Beni said, “we cannot play cards because we are out of Coca-Cola!” [Laughs] Edgar was there too, and he was also laughing.. . . Some of the others were also kind of laughing a little. Then came Beni, and he sat on the table. He began apologizing to us, because he should have bought the Coca-Cola before the weekend. But you know, nobody stepped forward with the game of cards. Nobody wanted to play. Because we were out of Coca-Cola! And because it was Sunday. We could not get the Coca-Cola, you see, because it was Sunday and the supermarket was closed. So what to do now? Eventually, we went to a gyro place that is around the corner, and we bought Coca-Cola cans there. One can for each. We’d probably had more if we had had bottles. It is kind of expensive when you buy the cans at the gyro, you know. But we really could not play without it. I mean really. Just like Beni said, a game of cards does not go without Coca-Cola.

Yet this came from a youth who was brought to Greece as a child by his emigrant parents. That a few youth such as him conceptualized objects essentially in terms of consumption might be explainable through their having been brought to Greece and supported by their parents through the years of school. Not having emigrated by themselves—not having volunteered to leave one social position for another, that is—and also constantly inundated with their parents’ laudations of the special properties of objects, such youth must also have experienced the whole condition of emigration differently from the vast majority of emigrants who had made it to Greece on their own. That for most of the other emigrants consumption was not an end in itself was keenly shown by the fact that, in order to establish the superiority of Greece over Albania in terms of objects, most emigrants preferred to speak of the availability of objects in Greece as a larger condition rather than as a personal circumstance. Indeed, in their objective comparisons of Greece to Albania, many emigrants enumerated objects that they did not even possess. A one-time coal miner and aspiring actor, for example, who had become a welder in Greece and thus earned more than

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most other emigrants, described the superiority of Greece over Albania as something immediately perceptible as well as overwhelming: Never before had I seen that long a stretch of asphalted road. I had heard of the highway, but I had never seen one. I had become 29 years old [in Albania]. This was the first time in my life I saw a highway with my eyes. I stopped on the side [of the road] and listened to the humming of cars. I had never seen so many cars in my life! If you stopped and counted, you would lose your mind! Tens of cars, what am I talking about, hundreds of cars passed you by in two minutes, in three minutes. What am I talking about? There had not been so many cars in the whole city of Tirana! Where had we been?

This laudation of the abundance of cars seen upon arrival in Greece did not include the fact that, like virtually all the others, after nearly a decade in Greece the welder still did not own a car. Even the discursive downplay of the deterioration of one’s individual material condition in Greece was not uncommon. In fact, emigrants typically did not talk about those aspects of the general material conditions that had been better in Albania. While they spoke much of the improvement emigration had brought about in clothes, for example, most of the emigrants I met would rather not mention that their apartments in Greece tended to be smaller than their apartments in Albania had been. When one consumption-conscious youth recognized that his one-time living situation in Albania had in fact been generally better, he sought to emphasize that, in Albania, apartment buildings did not have elevators. The apartment in which I lived in Tirana was actually larger than the one where we are now. And we had more light in the apartment in Tirana. We were on the fifth floor, which was the highest floor of that building; the fifth floor was the highest floor of all apartment buildings, I should say. They did not build higher than that in Albania. There were no other higher buildings to block the light. Also, there was no bad smell. In Albania, the windows of the kitchens and of the bathrooms of each apartment opened into open air. Not like here. In Athens the windows of all the bathrooms and of all the kitchens of the building face each other. That is how all apartment buildings have been built in Athens. You cannot quite open the window in the kitchen without that old stench bursting in.. . . The only way in which the apartment here is better than the one in Albania is that here we have an elevator. The building here has an elevator that always works. We could not have had an elevator in our apartment in Albania, of course. No apartment building in Albania had an elevator.

The deterioration of the housing conditions in Greece can be inferred also from the words of another consumption-conscious youth, who also sought to silence it. I have more space now than I had in Albania, that is for sure. I have more private space now. Because in Albania we lived with my grandparents. My grandparents moved in with us when my dad was given the apartment from his job.10 The apartment was in a very central location in Tirana. My dad’s job was always given good apartments, because they were under the Department of Defense. The army used to build a lot in Albania, and the

10

During Albania’s state socialism, the eligibility to rent an apartment, called “authorization for sheltering,” was typically channeled to a person through his or her “work center” in a way similar to that in which authorizations for purchasing a major household appliance were distributed.

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Fig. 5.2 A used refrigerator about to emigrate.

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army had the soldiers who worked, so they got the work done without much delay.11 So my dad pulled my grandparents from the village to come and live with us, because they were already old. They had already started coming to Tirana often for checks at the hospital.12 So once the job gave him the apartment, my dad decided to pull his parents to Tirana. So we were kind of tight, even though we had a large apartment. The grandparents had one bedroom, the parents had one bedroom, and I shared the other room with my sister. We had a pretty big apartment.. . . Three bedrooms were not that common.. . . But the rooms themselves were pretty much the same size as in the other apartments that were built. For all I know, at least, most apartments in Tirana had similar rooms to the ones we had. What was different was that we had three bedrooms instead of two bedrooms, which most apartments had. But the rooms we had were not any larger than those of other people.. . . So the reason I have more space now in Athens is that the grandparents are not here. I have my own room, and my sister has her own room, so we do not need to share. That means I have more private space—I have a room I can call my own. If my grandparents were not still living in Tirana, in the apartment we had, we would be a lot tighter here—because there is less space here, the rooms are smaller.

That the worsening of the housing condition was silenced in the statements of the general superiority of material conditions in Greece indicates, on a broader plane, that emigration might have been undertaken regardless of how one individual’s material condition in the two countries compared. The very contention that Greece was abundantly superior to Albania in the tangible terms of material objects should also be understood as independent of how any individual emigrant’s past and present compared. In fact, the emigrants’ efforts to equate these two could lead to conceptual tensions, as can be seen in a one-time chemistry teacher’s recounting of her first impressions of Greece: It was unreachable. To see their [the Greeks’] houses, to see all the things that they had inside. It was completely unreachable. Where had I been all my life? In Tirana I just had the four walls of concrete. Of course, I wanted to have all those things I saw. But I could never reach them. I had to either be born again, to live my life again from the very beginning, or I had to learn to want what was possible.

That the abundance of objects in Greece was brought up as the most undisputable justification for emigration in the same breath with the recognition that most emigrants had less money than most Greeks—and therefore could own fewer objects— points at another contradiction as well. While the color televisions, video recorders, refrigerators, automatic washing machines, and all the other electric or electronic appliances that the emigrants pursued and owned in Greece would have objectified one’s special standing in the social context of late 1980s Albania, at the present time in Greece these same objects could not do so. On the one hand they could be

11

It had not been uncommon during Albania’s state socialism that apartment buildings took longer to build than expected. Often the problem was a shortage of labor. As many “work centers” were directly involved in the construction of rental apartments for their employees, one’s work center’s surplus of labor power could translate into one’s distinct housing advantage. 12 During state socialism, healthcare in Albania was said to be “universal” and free of charge, and even the smallest of towns had at least one comprehensive healthcare center. Tirana’s several hospitals were regarded as the country’s best, however, in terms of equipment as well as staff, so many of those who had relatives living in Tirana often tried to go there for medical needs.

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possessed by virtually all emigrants—most of the emigrants I met owned a color television set as well as a refrigerator, and a good number of them appeared to own automatic or at least semi-automatic washing machines as well—while on the other hand the objects that the emigrants typically owned could not match the objects owned by most Greeks.

Greece is Better than Albania That Greece might be superior to Albania in terms of material objects does not necessarily mean that an individual emigrant is better off in Greece. Just as obviously though, that fact appeared not to keep any emigrant from using the overall material conditions of Greece as the explanation for his or her emigration. Indeed, even a one-time better material condition in Albania commonly turned out not to keep the emigrants from sharing in the widespread consensus that emigration brought a materially richer life. That the difference in the material conditions between Albania and Greece was ubiquitously presented as the reason for emigration should therefore be understood as a sociocultural fact in its own right. The nature of this prominent fact was revealed in its assertion by many one-time professionals whom emigration had transformed into manual laborers—independent of whether or not emigration had improved their own material condition. The ubiquitous sentience about the material superiority resulting from emigration could not be a conclusion which the emigrants had arrived at individually, through pondering the facts of their everyday lives. It was rather a framework for conceptualizing emigration that they shared widely and perhaps universally. The words of a former “cultural worker”13 from a rural area in central Albania, who was not keen on talking about his employment in Greece, reveal that the shared vision the emigrants sought to objectify through their evocation of everyday objects was of a Greece that was better than Albania on a plane higher than that of everyday objects: What percentage of the Albanian people, especially of the peasants, was equipped with the necessary household objects? I would say very few of them. Which are the necessary objects? I would say that a tired woman should wash with a washing machine. A man who is tired by his work in the [agricultural] cooperative should not need to collect [fire]wood, but he should have an electric heater. A human being of the 20th century should not cook water in a cauldron to wash himself; he should wash himself in a shower. And so many other things. Considering where the world was, a person of the 20th century should not have needed to sit on a rug on the floor; he should have sat on a couch. Just these simple things. I am not talking about a car—that was a luxury in socialism, even though it should have been a necessity.

13

The broad category “cultural worker” included individuals typically employed by one of the Party’s lever organizations or by local governments in small towns and rural areas to organize events such as musical concerts or art exhibits, as well as smaller scale weekly activities, such as group readings of the newspaper. Not all cultural workers had a university education.

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Rather than simply improving their material condition, and perhaps even despite their material condition, by being in Greece the emigrants could share in larger aspirations properly articulated in the broader terms of contemporaneity and “humanity”—they could “belong to the 20th century.” In its heart, then, the emigrants’ notion that “Greece is better than Albania” revealed the profundity of their vision that different states of being, material and especially otherwise, are territorialized in countries and are intrinsic to countries.

Chapter 6

Portrait of Petraq Z., Research Scientist, Plumber’s Aide, Maker of Icon Frames, Champion of Capitalism

At the age of 67, Petraq Z. is self-employed as a maker of icon frames. He holds a doctoral degree in chemical engineering from the University of Tirana, has been a postdoctoral fellow at research institutes in Czechoslovakia, China, and Vietnam, and for 12 years headed a testing department at a national research institute in Albania. Petraq had to start as a helper to a plumber when he came to Greece in 1990, but his income “more than decupled,” and, for the first time in his life, Petraq was free to express his opinions. Even though the comforts he enjoys in Greece may not be available in Albania, Petraq will return there once he stops working. He wonders about life in America and would like to see America “once at least.”

A PhD Is about Learning To show a little bit of “the Albanian pride,” an Albanian who worked at the school construction site where Petraq was helping his master do the plumbing, and who knew Petraq from Albania, told the plumber that Petraq was a chemical engineer and a “scientist with a PhD.” The plumber was sufficiently shocked to stare Petraq in the eye for several seconds. He wanted to ascertain whether what the other Albanian had said was true. Then, self-consciously and apologetically, the plumber shrugged and said that he had not known. Then he told Petraq that he did not feel comfortable employing him as his helper. Then he apologized again, repeating that he did not know that Petraq was a scientist. “Why,” Petraq exclaimed, “a PhD is about learning. I may know about chemistry, but you are the maestro of plumbing. I can learn this profession from you.” But the plumber was not easy to convince. Petraq had to sit down with him and reiterate how happy he was with his new life in Greece, and how happy he was with his job as the plumber’s aide, and that without the job he would not be able to pay his rent. “With this job I am a scientist who has a shelter above his head,” Petraq told the plumber, “but if you let me go I will become a homeless scientist.” Even though the plumber eventually agreed to keep Petraq employed, he became so uncomfortable that he no longer wanted Petraq to fix the coffee in the morning. Petraq continued to diligently come to the shop early and to clean up before the 70

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day would start. He was always the first one to arrive, as he also happened to live closer to the shop than the plumber himself. But now the plumber too started to come to the shop early, and made a point of fixing the coffee himself. In fact, the plumber made a point of fixing the coffee for both of them: before starting work, the plumber would sit to have coffee with Petraq, and he would ask Petraq his opinion about a million things. Not very long after the revelation of Petraq’s PhD, the plumber introduced Petraq to a retailer of icons. “It was serendipity.” They had both gone to fix some water pipes at an icon shop, the owner of which was a friend of the plumber’s. As the three of them sat together for coffee after the work had been finished—for the plumber would now always have Petraq sit with him for coffee with clients—the plumber told the owner of the icons shop that Petraq had been a scientist in Albania. The owner was the “matter-of-fact” kind. He gave Petraq one of the frames he sold in his shop to hold in his hands. “If you are a scientist,” he said to Petraq, “can you then make icon frames such as these?” Petraq was caught off guard. He took the frame in his hands and started looking at it from all sides. Then he said to the seller of icons that he had never made one of them, but that he could try to figure out how they could be made. The seller of icons imported the frames from Italy at that time. He told Petraq that he wished he could make the frames for less than what he imported them for from Italy. He was sure the frames could be made for much less than what he bought them for—how else could the Italians make money out of selling them to him? But the seller of icons did not know how to make them. Could Petraq, “as a scientist,” help? Petraq could see that the frames had been pressed into shape from a silver sheet. And he could guess that the silver sheets would be expensive, not to speak of a heavy-duty metal press that would be required. However, Petraq thought, the same result could be obtained through electrolysis. He had not done any electrolysis since the days he had to teach at a high school in Tirana for his practical training as a student of chemistry. And the experiment had involved copper, not silver. But why should silver not electrolyze through a similar process? He told this to the owner of the icon shop. “If you can do that for me,” the owner of the icon shop replied, “I will hire you for 50,000 drachmae [$136.36] per week!” They agreed on the spot that Petraq would give it a try. Petraq would need one night to think, and then he would tell the owner of the icon shop what materials would be needed for testing his idea. The plumber seemed relieved at this too, for even though he needed help in his shop, he had become uncomfortable around Petraq. The two weeks that followed were a long nightmare, though, thankfully, they ended well. At first the electrolysis of silver did not want to work, and for days Petraq felt he was left without a job. Were it not for the help of his wife, he would have had to look for different work. Petraq’s wife had taught chemistry at a high school in Albania, and therefore had more lab experience with electrolysis than Petraq himself. After Petraq had been stuck for days, his wife was able to identify why his test was not working. Petraq followed her advice, and, two weeks after he had begun testing, one morning he held his first frame in his hands. It was a

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very simple, plain frame. But it was enough to prove that the “little invention,” as Petraq called it, worked. Just as Petraq had said to the plumber, a PhD is about learning.

Capitalism in Greece Is Fairer Than Socialism in Albania The owner of the icon shop kept his word. He got Petraq all the materials that Petraq asked for, and hired him as promised, for 50,000 drachmae a week. He even paid Petraq a bonus of 50,000 drachmae, just for having come up with the “little invention.” Petraq set up the workshop for the seller of icons and worked very diligently. But as time passed, Petraq started to grow aware of the volume of icon frames that were passing through his hands in the workshop. He started realizing how little 50,000 drachmae was, compared to what the owner of the icon shop was making by selling them. The idea that the seller of icons was exploiting his work never crossed his mind. How could Petraq think that when he was making “fifty times” as much as in Albania? Moreover, it was Petraq who had agreed to be hired for that amount of money. And he had done so for his own good: in the icon workshop he received 10,000 drachmae [$27.27] per day, while he had received only 4,000 drachmae [$10.9] from the plumber in his previous job. What became clear to Petraq now, however, was that he would be making more money if he could start a workshop himself. In his own workshop Petraq would even have the independence “to perfect the technology” so that he could benefit from it even more. This is the difference between Greece and Albania. In Greece Petraq is not exploited, and he does not need to have other people agree with what he is doing. If he thinks something and wants to take the risk of trying it out, it will be Petraq’s own risk. If things turn out good, Petraq wins. If things do not turn out good, it would have been his own fault, and Petraq would have the incentive to do things better the next time. The capitalist system in Greece is thus much fairer than socialism had been in Albania. Socialism had a lot of beautiful words, but little else. It is in capitalism that he who tries harder can earn more. It is in capitalism that nobody stops anyone from trying harder. In Albania the members of the so-called “technical-scientific councils,” the peer committees that were to evaluate the work of Petraq, had stolen his ideas more than once and gotten medals for themselves. Some were even rewarded with trips abroad, as members of official delegations. Petraq was never sympathetic to such dishonesty. And he loathed those clans of pseudoscientists and manipulators. That is why he was never promoted beyond head of the testing unit at his research institute in Albania. And that is why he was sent to those postdoctoral trainings in Vietnam and China, which tied him to the testing machines and did not allow him to move up. Because Petraq always looked after his own work. Having thoughts of his own, he did not need to steal the work of others. Whereas those who stole his ideas were sent to postdoctoral positions in France. Thankfully, capitalism is more honest. There is no Party cell in Greece,

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there are no superiors, no peer committees, there is nobody to steal one’s original ideas. Greece is more upright.

Starting Capital The only thing that Petraq still needed in order to become independent was starting capital. He had saved a little as he worked with the plumber, and then he had saved some more in the icons workshop. But before he could start making any money, much more money was needed than what he had on the side. He had to buy equipment, and in order to sell, he also had to pay the high rent in a location close to the icon retailers in the center of the city. So Petraq decided to sell the house in Thessaloníki that he had inherited from his father. Before the Second World War, Petraq’s father had been a merchant who worked most of the year in Greece, and the rest of the year traveled back and forth between Greece and Albania. When Petraq’s father had decided to return to Albania and settle in their town in Albania’s southeast, he had sold his shop in Thessaloníki. Half of the money he had brought home to Albania and had started a small shop in town; with the other half he had purchased a small house in Thessaloníki, so that the family could go there for vacations. His father had had some Greek friends who had kept an eye on the house, but because they had used it very little, the house had slowly deteriorated over the years. After communism had taken root in Albania, Petraq had felt fortunate that people did not know about his father’s house in Thessaloníki. It certainly would have been held against Petraq. But by 1993 his father’s house finally became useful. While Petraq had begun to feel he needed starting capital for a workshop, the papers were also finalized for the transfer of the ownership to him. Petraq had started working on the papers for getting the ownership transferred to him as soon as he had migrated to Greece in 1990. The matter had been finalized just a few months before he had made up his mind about the workshop. Initially he had wanted to rent his father’s house for liquid income. But they lived in Athens, not in Thessaloníki, so it would have been difficult to keep an eye on the tenants and to collect the rent. After making a few calculations, Petraq decided that selling the house and investing the money in his workshop would be more beneficial than receiving rent from it. So in 1993, after finalizing the ownership titles, Petraq sold his father’s house. He sold it for very little. Yet the capital that he was able to raise allowed Petraq to close on a rental agreement for an apartment in the middle of Athens, in proximity to many icon shops, which he could use as a production workshop. From the same capital Petraq also bought the equipment and the first batches of raw materials that were needed for making icon frames. Over the course of these transactions Petraq experienced once again the great difference between Greece and Albania. In Greece Petraq arranged all the documentation for the transfer of the ownership of the house in less than two years. And he managed to do so even though his emigration documents were not quite in

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order in the beginning, for he had entered Greece on a tourist visa. Whereas the titles for his father’s property in Albania, the shop in Petraq’s hometown that his father had purchased and run after returning to Albania, which was nationalized after “the communists took over,” are not yet in his hands. No matter how much they talk about the return of nationalized property to the original owners, Albanian politicians have the socialist mindset. In Greece Petraq was allowed to make more money by investing the money that he got from his father’s house in his own workshop. There was nobody to tell him not to do this, but to do something else instead.

Greeks Cannot Be Blamed for the Bad Name of the Albanians Petraq admits that in Greece too bureaucracy is a burden. There are many papers that he needs to fill out all the time for his workshop. Filling them out correctly feels a little unfair, especially because Petraq can see that many Greeks underreport. Petraq is the only one in the apartment building where he rents his working space to report his taxes in full. None of the other tenants, who are also manual producers of jewelry and of small mechanical items, reports taxes like Petraq. How does Petraq know that they all underreport? He can tell from the mail that they receive. Anyone who knows the work they do could tell. Petraq has to do the taxes diligently because, as an Albanian, he is “more visible.” He has to be extra careful as an Albanian, it is true. But this does not mean that the Greeks have been unfair to the Albanians. The reason is the way in which the Albanians behaved when they arrived in Greece in 1990. Half a century ago, at the time Petraq’s father worked in Greece, Albanians were just like everybody else. Albanians traveled all the time, they came to Greece and then they went back to Albania. Some of them were wealthier and some were more needy, but none of them stole and none of them murdered. In Albania too there was a lot less crime at that time. The whole city of Durrës had only four police officers under King Zog.1 Petraq was then a young boy, and he remembers those times himself. People were quiet and respectful. The communist regime destroyed their values, it destroyed the moral character of the Albanians. That is why Albanians have such a bad name in Greece; Greeks are not the ones to blame for the bad name of the Albanians. Personally, Petraq has not experienced discrimination in Greece, because he has shown in his deeds that he is “different.” “Nobody” discriminates against him for being an Albanian. He has several Greek friends; as he treats them and their families with respect, so they treat him and his family with respect.

1

Ahmet Zog was proclaimed King Zog I in 1928 and reigned until 1939, when Fascist Italy annexed Albania.

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Greece According to Marx The reason why Petraq mentions the situation with the tax papers is not to say that he is not being treated fairly in Greece. He is happy in Greece; he believes that he was given the opportunities to make the best he could make out of his life. He has actually gotten ahead, at least as much as he could get ahead at the age he was when he got out of Albania. The reason for regretting paying his taxes in full, and the fees for his business, is that these obligations are becoming more of a burden as the business is going down. That is why it hurts to see that other folks in his building can avoid taxes. When Petraq started the shop in 1993, the money was more than he had expected. That continued for a few years, until at least 1995, or perhaps even 1996. During that time the market was so strong that Petraq encouraged his son-in-law to start a workshop similar to the one Petraq himself has. Petraq’s daughter, who had been a medical doctor in Albania, and who was employed as a nurse in Athens, could also help her husband in the shop. Given the market demand during those years, she could make more money helping in her husband’s shop than as a nurse. And, helping in the shop, she also had the benefit of more time to raise her children. But after 1996, as the economy started slowing down, the demand for icon frames diminished. Since the year 2000 the demand has dwindled to less than one quarter of what it was at its peak in 1995. Accordingly, Petraq now makes only one quarter of the money he used to make. He knows, however, that such are the rules of capitalism. He may be hurt by these rules at the moment, but that does not make him disagree with them in principle. Even though he is having a difficult time now, capitalism is still a more honest and fair system than socialism was. And even that little that Petraq makes in these days of low demand is still enough to pay the rent and to cover other living expenses without needing to touch any of his savings. So Greece has definitely been a stage of advancement in Petraq’s life. “As we know from Marx,” classes are defined by the material wealth that they have. In Albania Petraq’s labor was exploited. He worked “like a horse,” at work and at home, without ever knowing whether it was day or night. All he got was 10,000 Albanian lek per month.2 His wife worked hard too; she was a teacher at a high school, and she made 7,000 old lek a month.3 In Greece, even at the time when Petraq was still helping the plumber—when he was not even a plumber, but a plumber’s aide, a whole twelve years ago—Petraq made 4,000 drachmae [$10.9] a day. That was enough to pay the rent, to buy all the food that they wanted, and even to have a little bit left over to set aside. Within half a year in Greece, Petraq

2 At the official exchange rate of 75 old lek to the dollar, approximately $133.33. By the time emigration started, however, a “black” exchange market had begun emerging in Albania. The exchange rate for the dollar in the black market was approximately 250 old lek, shrinking this salary to only about US$40 per month. 3 Approximately $93.33 at the official exchange rate, but only US$28 in the black market.

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had started working at the icons workshop, and was making 50,000 drachmae [$136.36] per week. The work was never as hard as it used to be in Albania. He worked only five days a week, and still he made 10,000 drachmae [$27.27] per working day. Within the first year in Greece he could buy a car. Of course, it was a used car. But could he have ever even thought of owning a car with the salary he was paid in Albania? So the country where his labor was exploited was socialist Albania, not capitalist Greece. In Greece Petraq is richer. “According to the definition of Marx,” Petraq has “moved up in class.”

Your Country Is Something That Can Never Change Meanwhile, when Petraq visits Albania, which, lately, he does in the summer almost every year, or at least every second year, he notices that Albania is “going up.” There is so much being built that the entire country looks like a large construction site. And it may look like a mess too right now, but wait and see it when it is finished. Petraq hopes he will live long enough to see how good it will become when all that is being constructed now will have been completed. Albania is his country; that is “something that can never change.” Even though Petraq is embarrassed by the bad name that some Albanians have made for themselves in Greece, Albania is still his beloved country. That is where he grew up, that is where other members of his extended family still are, that is where all the friendships of his adult life took place. Petraq knows that this may be difficult to explain to the youth. He still remembers the days of his own youth, when it was difficult for him to understand his father’s patriotic devotion. When Petraq’s father returned from his trips to Greece, the boys were happy to see him; they wanted to hear stories about Thessaloníki and about America, where their uncle had gone. Petraq’s father was the only one who exchanged letters with their uncle. So as a boy Petraq was disappointed that, when his father returned home from Greece, he talked more about having missed Albania than about Greece. Petraq was young then and he could not yet understand what love for the motherland is. But he knows it now, after living in Greece for twelve years. Some people may say that their country is where they are now. Some flaunt it in your face how good they have it in Greece or in Italy. Petraq knows that “those are all lies.” He certainly has a very good life in Greece, but his country is where he was born and where he grew up; that is something that can never change. Hence Petraq wants to return to Durrës after some more time in Greece, when he will decide that he can no longer work. He looks forward to seeing Albania beautiful in the days of his old age. Perhaps by then most of the construction that is going on now will have been completed. The only thing Petraq has not “fulfilled” in his life is visiting America once. There were many stories about his uncle who went to America, stories that he

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heard in the family as he was growing up. But the uncle had died in America, he had died relatively young. “As we know,” after the war Albania was isolated from the world, so Petraq could never even dream of being able to see America. That is the only reason he wishes he were younger. The business may go up again though, and Petraq may be able to visit America as a tourist “once at least.”

Chapter 7

Sufferings of the Soul

Greece hurt. The air of suffering could be so crushing that, much as the abundance of material objects in Greece served to elevate the economic advantage of emigration beyond the level of dispute, so too did the discursive scape establish that, as a lived experience, emigration amounted to distress. To the emigrants, however, this made for no contradiction: the improvement emigration had brought about was economic; suffering was of the soul.

A Richer and Unhappy Life The discursive scape of emigration was rife with expressions of the sentience that emigrants were “destined to suffer.” Yet how suffering related to the alleged economic betterment could not be explicitly questioned. Inquiring into what to me was a rank incompatibility between the representations of emigration as the achievement of a desired state of being and the distress that had ensued was unavoidably perceived as ungraciously focusing on one’s private life, as suggesting to an emigrant that, after all, his or her “own case” might not have been one of improvement through emigration. This could not but be very unwelcome. Many did express in one way or another that the condition of emigration was impossible to communicate to one who had not gone through the experience oneself—I could keep throwing gauche questions at the emigrants, yet despite the generosity of their answers, I would “never be able to understand,” for I was not an emigrant. No matter how softly I tried to put it, occasionally an emigrant would make a point of taking umbrage at my remarks and “show me the boundary,” as the Albanian idiom puts it, avoiding not just my inappropriate questions but also my person. The egg-of-Columbus way out of this gridlock came from a big-hearted one-time teacher, portrayed here as Fatmir R., who had gone through a typical trajectory of manual jobs in Greece and was unemployed at the time we talked. Unlike most of the other emigrants, he had not emigrated in the early 1990s but in 1997, forced by the aftermath of “the war” over the “usury firms.”1 His own story did not give 1 About a dozen “usury firms” operated in Albania between 1990/1991 and 1996, the most prominent half of them attracting financial deposits from the public for monthly interest rates of

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rise to the common incongruence between pursuit of a better life and the suffering to which that pursuit had led, for he had left Albania “for security.” There was no pressure on this one-time teacher to justify the decision for emigration in terms of the economic superiority of Greece, and he could have easily dwelled on his own personal demotion from teacher to manual worker, or on emigration’s larger condition of suffering. But instead of shunning the contradiction between the idea of a better life in Greece and the state of emotional turmoil by characterizing himself as essentially a “refugee,” this one-time teacher sought to make clear that for him and his family too emigration was a richer life: I also am a realist. And as a realist, I admit that economically it is better in Greece.. . . My life in Greece, in the city of Athens, cannot be compared to my life in Albania, economically. It is much better. Much better.

Though having emigrated for safety rather than for the hackneyed “better life,” and despite having gone through several manual jobs and being without a job when we met, this one-time teacher was nevertheless firmly convinced of the economic superiority of Greece over Albania, and he was also remarkably open to illustrating it with the example of his own family: In the period before 1990, it is known that we were very poor. We were so poor that in the year 1990 I did not have a refrigerator at home. And we were a family of intellectuals, both husband and wife; we worked in the administration. We had two salaries, which were not very high, and we had three children to raise.. . . I think that the key factor in emigration was the economic poverty of the country. As we all know, this economic poverty resulted from the [political] course followed in Albania and in Eastern Europe. This was the key reason. I am not excluding other reasons, but those were lesser ones. Most of the emigrants have emigrated because of the poverty.

At the same time, and just like so many other emigrants, he also admitted to the dejection that pervaded everyday life in Greece, speaking of suffering as so prominent in an emigrant’s existence that I would not have chosen to emigrate. Not at my age. If I could live a normal life in Albania, I would still be there. [I came to Greece] because of the war, because my life and the lives of my family were in danger.

So was this not an embodiment of the very contradiction I was after? If the everyday life of emigration was so unbearable, how come the other emigrants had chosen to emigrate? To the one-time teacher, emigration just was so. Just as it could not but be “admitted” that Greece was superior to Albania in terms of material objects, there could not but be suffering in Greece.

5%‘to 10%. Participation in the usury firms was so massive that when they were to end by late 1996, armed conflict resembling a civil war engulfed Albania. The government lost control, army depots were looted in much of the country, and several hundreds of thousands of weapons and tons of ammunition fell into the hands of the public. After thousands were killed during the first few months of 1997, the formal successor of Albania’s Party of Labor was eventually reinstated to power with external political backing.

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7 Sufferings of the Soul [B]ecause the emigrant is in a foreign land. Sufferings are sufferings of the soul. The problem in Greece is not economic. I am speaking for the emigrants. Any emigrant who speaks about economic hardship does not want to accept reality. Economically, it is better in Greece.

The way I had conceptualized my inquiry, a life sought after could not be congruent with suffering of the kind I encountered among the emigrants. But in the view of this one-time teacher, a contradiction simply did not exist. He recognized both emigration’s dejection and its economic improvement, and he recognized the two as two different aspects or dimensions of life. While the improvement emigration had brought about was economic, suffering concerned things other than economic. The decision of emigration was “personal” or “individual,” and, perhaps dependant on “age,” some people would accept demotion as the price for economic improvement, others not. This had to be the answer. It just was so. Defined as separate domains of the lived experience, economic improvement and emotional distress did go side by side. There was no conflict between the two. To abide by the logic of ethnography, I had to accept at face value a fact that I would rather deem a contradiction: to the emigrants, emigration was an unhappy as well as a richer life.

The Sufferings of Intellectual Superiority in the Employment of Economic Inferiority Accepting that the material betterment implied by discourses on the objective superiority of Greece went hand in hand with pervasive dejection and quite often intense suffering, the ethnographic task became one of shifting the focus towards understanding such suffering on its own terms. Where did “the suffering of the emigrants” come from? Conceptualized as “of the soul,” suffering could appear as stemming “out of everything” emigrants encountered in their everyday lives. To another one-time teacher who worked at the same gas pump and “garage” for years, suffering stirred the soul and originated in both the physical hardships of manual labor as well as in the experience of “being treated unfairly.” I have had many other hardships.. . . I was not used to hardship, I had never before in my life gotten my hands dirty. Never before had my hands been defiled with motor oil. I was not used to being treated unfairly.

Being treated unfairly could involve unpaid wages and unkept promises on the part of an employer, or even “false accusations” that were often narrated as immediate causes of distress. Other emigrants seemed to articulate the weight of broader and structural tensions all but explicitly, indicating that the suffering of the soul stemmed from the incompatibility of the emigrants, as “humans” and specifically as “educated people,” with the kinds of employment they had in Greece. A one-time teacher who had otherwise clearly settled for her position as a domestic servant, spoke of “limits” she “cannot surpass,” of “different things” she wished she could do that she could

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not, of questions that she could “not even ask,” all aspects of that larger reality that bred suffering and that was not immediately material or simply economic. At this time I was working for these very high-class people, and their niece came to visit. She had studied in England. Can you imagine the kind of furniture these people had? Old walnut wood. Dark furniture. All antiques and woolen rugs. Not just walnut veneers. No, no, their furniture was made of walnut wood, all of it. I was cleaning the desk, and I looked into the small computer that the niece had brought with her from England. She had one of those small computers you can carry around, I forget what they are called in Greek.. . . She was a very pampered young lady, this niece, you cannot imagine. And I saw the word metanaste in her small computer. That word means “emigrant” in Greek. I became very curious. I looked more carefully, and I saw the word “Albanian” too. But I could not ask her. She must have been working for one of those projects from Europe, I think. There are many projects from Europe here in Greece. One project is 600,000 euros [$530,000]! 600,000 euros is actually the smallest project.. . . And what do the emigrants get out of all these projects? Nothing. The emigrants do not get to even hear about them. I am the emigrant! I have been a teacher all my life. And I am cleaning the desk of this young lady! And I cannot even ask what this project actually is about! This project, which is about me! I simply cannot ask about it. We do not get even the crumbs of the projects that they eat. This young lady, the niece, she was in Athens on holidays only. The lady for whom I worked had told me that her niece would go to France to marry, and that then she would work there, in the Greek embassy in France. Yes, these people were very well connected. Later I heard from her aunt that her niece had gone to England instead of France. She had gone to England, and had her wedding there, in England.

It was injustice, thus, where suffering came from. Injustice was not only the unpaid wages and the false accusations that stirred the soul and caused emigration to not be an overall better life in spite of the material superiority of Greece. What stirred the soul even more violently than the “crude” denials of the material realm was the impossibility of “even asking,” an utter denial of access to another realm of existence or participation or communication that, though not defined explicitly, many a former intellectual recognized as naturally his or hers. Most of the former intellectuals narrated this as a “never before” experience. But the intensity of their suffering had to do with more than just the newness of confronting injustice; it was intrinsically linked to their transformation into manual laborers. While virtually all emigrants encountered insults of one kind or another in their jobs and beyond, as well as varied forms of injustice, and while they virtually all suffered, the intellectuals among them, those who could not find “appropriate employment” were nearly universally thought of as suffering the most: These problems that I have had are not only mine. Every Albanian in Greece endures such hardships of the soul. It was a rare exception, when luck and chance had it that one emigrant would find appropriate employment. I know tens of emigrants with higher education, who have hard-earned degrees from the University of Tirana. They all work in inappropriate jobs and are exploited.

To a one-time intellectual, distress commenced as soon as he or she, as an emigrant, accepted employment that, while providing for living necessities, amounted also to a position of intellectual inferiority. A youth who had come to Greece just after having finished law studies in Albania, cast the unforgettable trauma of the first encounter of the differences between himself and his new co-workers in terms of this very contrast between intellectual and economic differences:

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Fig. 7.1 At work near the Akropolis

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I started to notice how the people who would never be able to tell you what nine times seven was, when we got out of work, they got into their cars to drive home; I always had to wait for the bus. At first they did not even say goodbye, for I was an Albanian.

Hence the one-time intellectuals usually articulated more vividly than others what was wrong with emigration. Not only were they generally more “sensitive” to injustice, for them suffering stemmed from a shocking violation of order. Emigrants seemed to expect that, as it was once put to me rather rhetorically, in a civilized world, in the twentieth century, superior intellectual capabilities should be paid for. They should produce a superior standard of living.

In the context of their intellectual capabilities, virtually all the educated emigrants experienced remuneration itself as injustice. In the unembellished words of a former physics teacher, I was the least paid of the eighty workers in the factory. What else can be said?

In accordance with its nature as essentially a violation of order, the injustice of low pay was also relative in nature—all the harsher given the higher pay that Greeks of “lower intellectual level” received. And the emotional load of this injustice led to the roots of an ethnic articulation of everyday life. While it was out of economic need that emigrants pursued jobs that many “would have never accepted in Albania,” “the Greeks” were largely perceived as being constantly in positions of economic superiority. Even when the Greek has less education than the Albanian, the Greek is in a superior position, because the Greek is the boss.. . . Even the Greek who does the same job as the emigrant, and who is always intellectually inferior to the emigrant, is usually economically superior to the emigrant. The emigrant is economically inferior even when the Greek is not the boss.

Depicted thus in ethnic terms, as things distinguishing Albanians and Greeks, the intellectual and economic discrepancies that working made tangible appeared to also cause the absence of otherwise logical solidarities between coworkers or neighbors. The way one emigrant put it, who had once been a mechanic in a steel plant in Albania, even when an emigrant held the same kind of job as a Greek, the Greek and the emigrant were often not “true colleagues.” There existed numerous difficulties of communication between them, and the misunderstandings are not because of the language.. . . In the beginning the emigrants did not speak Greek. But Albanians learn quickly. Misunderstandings come because the Greeks have money but they have no understanding.

That the differences in intellectual capabilities between an emigrant and his or her Greek coworkers embittered the meager pay was accordingly narrated as something that had to do with money and at the same time as something that had to do with more than just money. “The Albanian intellectual” suffered “in the soul” for, as an emigrant, he or she had to “always” be in an inferior position. In the immediate sense, the inferiority was economic—the emigrant always received lower pay. As a consequence of the lower pay, however, even when an emigrant was intellectually equal to a Greek boss or to coworkers, let alone when intellectually superior, his

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or her economic inferiority did not allow the emigrant room for expressing “the true nature” and “the intellectual superiority” that at one time defined him or her in Albania. Hence the ubiquitous accounts of the manual employment of the one-time intellectuals often amounted to articulations of the sheer hurt of the incompatibility between what the emigrants were capable of and what could be reached through the socioeconomic arrangements in which they found themselves. The boss called me to go upstairs one day, where he was meeting with his two accountants. These two ladies had degrees in economics. He had received a new piece of equipment for painting, along with the manual and a test tube about 140 centimeters long. The water and the pigment were to be mixed in the test tube, and the manual specified that only so and so many milligrams of pigment were to be used for every two centimeters of the test tube. He showed me the test tube and said, “Well, we just received this. How much pigment do we need for this test tube?” This may sound unbelievable to you. I looked in the manual and I said, “Well, give me a pencil.” The way the accountant handed me the pencil, I could tell she had tried to figure it out, but had failed. I did not even do as much. Just the rule of three: if so much pigment is needed for 2 cm, then x amount is needed for 140 cm. It took me two seconds to figure out how much pigment was needed. “Yes, well,” the owner said, “I thought so too, I thought it would be that amount, but I just wanted to be sure.” I did not say anything and went back downstairs to continue my work. About an hour later the owner came downstairs. And I asked him, “Why did you have to call me upstairs? Don’t you have your accountants?” “I don’t trust them,” he said, “but I trust you.” “Listen,” I said, “do you understand now who I am and where I have ended up?” “Of course I understand,” he said, “I would not have called you if I did not understand that.” “If you really understood,” I said, “my pay would show it. Do you think I don’t need the money? Why am I here to work in your factory?” Well, the conversation continued.. . .

From the perspective of a one-time intellectual, thus, the heart of suffering seemed to be this blending together of intellectual superiority and economic inferiority into one and the same experience.

Xenophobia, Racism, and Hate of Albanians A cause for suffering of the soul in its own right was the “leveling,” through employment, of all the emigrants into the same social cohort that was conceptualized and spoken about mostly in terms of an ethnic category. A one-time engineer and colorful narrator experienced a “clear provocation” at work first and foremost as an intellectual: I will tell you one example, one provocation that happened to me when I worked at the carpet shop. We were two Albanians—a young guy was with me, he had just been hired by the boss of the shop where I worked—and we were to lay the carpet of a house in Ioánnina. We had to work in two rooms. In the hallway between the rooms, they were supposed to have taken the furniture away. But they had left the door of another room ajar. We were not to work in that room, we only had to put the tools and the materials at that end of the hallway. But the owner of the house had put a bundle of banknotes into a glass jar, a jam jar, and had rolled the jar towards the corner of the open door, in that room where we were not to work, to look as if it had fallen from his hands. The open door was just where we were to put our tools. It was a provocation. It was a clear provocation. The owner wanted

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to see whether we would take the money. I worked the whole day laying the carpet, and, of course, I did not touch the jar. I could see it all the time though, because the door was in my way. And I was getting furious looking at it. I told the other Albanian to be careful, because he was a young guy and the money on the floor was a clear provocation. At the end of the day, when we were finished with the carpet, I called the owner of the house to see the work. I asked him whether it was good. The work was to his liking. Then I said to him that he should have bought a better carpet. I said to him that we had laid it well, but that the carpet was not good enough for him. “It is too cheap for you,” I said. He asked me what I meant. “You can buy a better carpet with all this money that you have lying around,” I said. When I said these words, he pretended that he didn’t know anything about the money jar. But how could he not have known? He had put the jar with money on the floor himself! “Why do you Albanians get so offended?” he asked. I had grown heated. “I am offended,” I said, “because you are treating me this way.” That was a low provocation. I was an engineer in Albania for fourteen years! I have seen the sun before him. He may have had more money, but he was not able to discern the differences in people.. . . “You are a racist because you are ignorant,” I told him. I was trying to speak slowly, and to not let my fury show. “Now you are offending me,” he said. “You Albanians come to our country, you take everything away, then you call us ‘racist’ and ‘ignorant.”’ “I am not talking about all Albanians,” I said, “I am talking about myself. Did I take anything away from you?” He did not know what to say. “And you are ignorant,” I said, “because you think that all Albanians are the same.”

While the core of the insult in this narrative is the Greek customer’s failure to recognize—understand for himself as well as make public—that different Albanians are different, the clearly non-intellectual emigrant, the “young guy,” remains rather silent throughout the evolution of this episode; he might not experience the insult the same way as the one-time engineer and is even warned to stay away from the money. Yet from another angle, the episode reaches its pinnacle of tension in the altercation about belonging in Greece versus coming to “our country” and in the charge of racism. Though rooted in the incompatibility between one’s intellectual standing or personal particularity and one’s condition of employment, the cause of emotional suffering is articulated by the one-time engineer in ethnic terms, as discrimination against him as an Albanian, part of the indiscriminate discrimination against all Albanians. Virtually all emigrants I talked to agreed that they were discriminated against in Greece—or at least that they were aware of “other Albanians” complaining about the discrimination in Greece. Numerous discourses attributed suffering to racism, “xenophobia,” and “hate of foreigners,” concepts used interchangeably by emigrants for describing the entirety of antagonism and animosity they encountered in a wide range of circumstances. For many, these were the only causes of suffering that they called by name. Though she would contend that racism no longer “impressed” her, a young woman who had been brought to Greece in her early teens and had gone to school in a small Greek town close to the Albanian border seemed to have not really lost her astonishment at being a target of racism. In the beginning I was very insulted. Deeply insulted. At school, it was depressing when the kids would say all those kinds of things. I did not know how to react. I did not know what to do.

While virtually every emigrant was able to tell a story of a personal encounter with racism, many appeared eager to illustrate their talk of xenophobia with episodes

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from the experience of others close to them. Emigrants were especially insulted that, “in the public opinion,” Albanians were considered almost by default perpetrators in a range of petty crimes. Instances of such assignment of blame must have been many, or, anyway, very visible, for talk about them was widespread, albeit often consisting of generalizations: There are some [television] stations that do that. They report a crime. They say, for example, this store was broken into. Then they say the police do not know who has done it. And then they say it was probably Albanians. Without knowing it, how can you say that? If the police do not know who has done it, that means that they cannot know an Albanian did it. Or they interview an old person in the street who says, “Maybe Albanians did it.” Then they discover that is was a Greek who did it.

On the other hand, the blaming of Albanians as involved with drugs and prostitution was perceived as hypocritical. In the words of a former chemistry teacher from a southern Albanian town: Who do you think uses all the drugs that the Albanians smuggle to Greece? Is it not the Greeks themselves? The Albanians have been poor. The easy way to get rich quick is to do things that are illegal. But who is the customer? Who is the one who wants the things that are illegal? It is the Greeks! If they say that the Albanians bring prostitutes to Greece, who do they bring the prostitutes for? We do not have bordellos in Albania; here they have them. Then they say that the Albanians smuggle, that the Albanians commit crimes.. . .

Stories abounded also of the numerous everyday circumstances in which racism was encountered: in the commuter busses, from words murmured just audibly to loud altercations among passengers or between passengers and emigrants; in rental or real estate ads that asked foreigners not to call—“they mean ‘Albanians’ not to call”; in the threats of “reporting to the police” that certain employers made after having withheld due wages. Yet most emigrants emphasized over and again that “not all Greeks” were racists. Often, episodes of racism were contrasted with good words about one’s Greek friends. My best friend at school is a Greek. I have Albanian friends also. There are Albanians in my school. When Greeks are good, they can be even better than Albanians. It depends on the person. It depends on who is your friend.

Much was made of the typically young emigrant men who were involved in romantic relationships with Greek women, and of the Albanian-Greek couples who had married. If your girlfriend is Greek, she is the closest person to you. She cannot be a racist. The young people, you know, the young people are not racist. Most young [Greeks] are not racist.

To a number of emigrants, there had been virtually no racism in their early days in Greece; Greeks had started “becoming” racists only after “more Albanians were coming.” And even though most emigrants lived in Greece for over a decade, they typically employed the metaphor of the visit and of themselves as “guests” to emphasize the hospitality “the hosts” showed when they first arrived in Greece in the early 1990s.

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[T]here were many Albanians. All Albania wanted to come here. The Greeks were frightened. Then the newspapers started about Albanians.. . . And the television stations.. . .

Often the origins of Greek racism were thus blamed to “the media”; it was the media depictions of the Albanians which had turned the previously hospitable Greeks into racists: [The media] always present the negative side. That the Albanians change their names, for example. Or that the Albanians do not have a religion. When Albanians do something good, [the newspapers] call them Vorio-Epiriots,2 not Albanians. When Albanians do something that should be punished, they are called Albanians.

Such blaming of the media for “the negative image” of Albanians in Greece led the way to a taxonomy of Greeks with regard to racism. The sentiment expressed by the one-time engineer of the money jar episode was common: many saw racism as wrong for pooling all the emigrants together into the same cohort regardless of one’s individual deeds. And since extending prejudice to all was thought of as rooted in the imperceptiveness of the differences between individuals, racism was understood as a characteristic of the less educated Greeks. In a number of accounts, the less educated Greeks were considered to be racist because of the crudeness of their “visions of society,” because they lacked the skills and “the culturing that is needed” for discerning the “thousands of differences” between people. Because of these lacks, the less educated Greeks were also thought of as more prone to the negative influences of the media, which were spoken of as having been constantly hostile to the Albanian emigrants. The opinion held sway that, “unfortunately,” a majority of Greeks had “little education.” [In] the literature on emigration as a social phenomenon, which I read in Greek, I have found that there are two groups in Greek society. The first group are the natives, who have the power; and the second group are the foreigners, who in Greece are often blamed for all the negative phenomena. If you listen to the Greek news, in many cases you would hear that when something has happened for which there are no known perpetrators, they say that the criminals must be Albanians. Or you hear people say that even though one particular individual may be a good Albanian, the mass of Albanians are bad. So even when you come up with proof [of being good], it is thought to be an exception. And I think there is another reason for this. The Greeks are not an educated people. The notion of human rights does not mean much here—I mean for most of the Greeks. Why do I say this? Because the people who are educated behave differently towards us, different from the large mass of the Greeks who have little education. There is a very great difference. This is a shortcoming of theirs, and it does not let most Greeks see how most of us Albanians are good people.

By contrast, the more educated Greeks were commonly thought of as specifically not racist, and emigrants usually appreciated the educated Greeks highly. Many emigrants spoke very respectfully of how the more educated Greeks received their “information” from “trusted sources” and therefore were not xenophobic. In fact,

2 The designation Vorio-Epiriot, meaning “of Northern Epirus,” had come to imply Greek origin, although historically the Epirus is thought to have been inhabited by both Greek and Illyric tribes, and more recently by both Greeks and Albanians. Since the present borders between Greece and Albania date back to only 1912, Vorio-Epiriot was sometimes used negatively, to denote those who, in the recent past, had upheld Greek chauvinistic claims over Albania’s southern territory.

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while the majority of Greeks were generally thought of as backward, emigrants often described the more educated Greeks as having “very advanced” understandings of society that sometimes compared positively to—were “much more advanced” than—even the understandings of society of the intellectual emigrants themselves. Of the more educated Greeks, certain figures of public visibility were said to be outspoken “defenders of emigration”: a number of emigrants told me of radio and television programs in which certain Greek professors, lawyers, and journalists “documented” the positive effects for Greece of the Albanian emigration. In the gushes of making a point of speaking well of Greeks, which wove virtually always into the talk of discrimination and racism, the Greek defenders of emigration were not only a few highly visible intellectuals but could also be characters one encountered in everyday life: One time I knew a police officer. He was the head of a station, a chief, not just an ordinary officer. I said to him, “Only ten thousand Albanians damage the image of all the Albanians in Greece.” “There are not ten thousand,” he said, “there are only one thousand.” So he gave me an official figure. He stressed what is known: that it is only a few of the hundreds of thousands of Albanians who work hard in Greece, who surpass difficulties, and who are needed here, that are the problem—as even the Greeks understand, though they do not say it. The Greeks who are educated, those who study, or those who work in the government and know the facts, acknowledge this. But they are very few. One really needs to listen to a lot of news to come across them.

By and large, talk of discrimination and racism was emotionally charged, balanced at every step by recitations of the virtues of at least certain Greeks, and, despite the clear contours of a taxonomy of Greeks with regard to racism, remained profoundly ambiguous. It could happen, for example, that even the more educated Greeks would be portrayed as xenophobic under a surface polished by education. A one-time writer and translator, who had been long unemployed in Greece, once told me: I was talking to a Greek who had completed his studies at Oxford, and who is a big businessman. You understand that, having studied at Oxford, he has a different worldview from most Greeks. He said to me very sincerely, “They hate you because what you have gotten, what you have, you have earned it away from the Greeks.” I share this view. But even this gentleman said to me, “You are one of the few Albanians. . . .” And I said, “I am one of the many Albanians who are here.. . . ”

Especially when coming from those with more education, signs of xenophobia were taken to indicate that “Greek xenophobia” targeted emigrants for being Albanians. Indeed, the more educated Greeks were not racist, the logic went, and so they were not opposed to emigrants who had come to Greece from “other countries”; that even some educated Greeks were opposed to Albanians was understood as indicating that Albanians were hated not as members of the broad category of foreigners but because of their specific ethnicity. I was watching TV one day, and the title of a show on one station was “Albanians are Dangerous.” It was midnight. I called the station, and I said that I wanted to express my opinion, as an Albanian. The person on the other end said that there were about fifteen calls waiting to go on the air. I said, “I may be helpful to your show because I am not just a [manual] worker, I am someone who has worked with people.” He connected me immediately. “Mr. journalist,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Please do not interrupt me,” I said, “because the

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fact that I do not speak the Greek language so well may confuse the meaning of what I have to say.” “Yes,” he said. “I am sorry you are hosting this show,” I said. “Why?” he said. “You have titled it wrong,” I said. “The title ‘Albanians are Dangerous’ shows that you are a racist. Do you know that, in addition to social identity, which is about the country one comes from, people also have personal identities, which make them different from each other? Do you accept this sociological notion?” “Yes,” he said. “Then you should have not titled your show that way.” “May I ask you a question?” he said. “Do you reprove your compatriots who commit crimes?” “First,” I said, “I am against all kinds of crime, regardless of the origins of the one who commits it. I denounce all criminals, whether they are Albanians, Russians, Bulgarians, or Greeks. But,” I said, “your title is about all Albanians. And I am surprised that a show hosted by a journalist has such a title, because a journalist should be a cultured person. And a cultured person should have clear visions about human rights. A cultured person should know that a person’s character is not defined by the country he or she comes from.” He cut me off the line. So my answer did not please him. But I think I said the truth—I did not defend the Albanians blindly.

Some emigrants explained the tensions between Greeks and Albanians as stemming from historically deep-rooted prejudice—“this is the Balkans”—and linked the hate they encountered as emigrants in Greece to the history of nationalist frictions between Greece and Albania over the question of the official borders between the two countries.3 Yet no matter where the emigrants assigned the roots of the discrimination against them, at the end the prevailing air of being the main target of xenophobia and racism had consequences that made life miserable. One implication of the vision of discrimination as being specifically against the Albanians was that discrimination in Greece was inescapable, that the suffering of emigration could not be ameliorated. Because every other nationality, every emigrant of every other nationality they have here, the Greeks do not object to. If you are Polish, or Russian, they do not object. Or Ukrainian. They do not object. Greeks actually like the Poles. You get good work if you are Polish, because then the Greeks think you work hard. You work hard and you drink a lot. [Laughs] Work like a Pole, drink like a Pole. Even the Russians, even the Bulgarians—Greeks have no problems with any of them. The whole socialist camp is here, they all get work! Even the Romanians! The Greeks still do not object! They think only of the work you do, they think you do good work. Only when you are an Albanian, only then do they object. If you are an Albanian, you do not get the job. They think you are a criminal. They think you will rob them or you will murder them. Or they give you the job, but then they pay only half of the money they would pay to a Pole.. . .

3 For example, some spoke of the “question of Southern Albania” that “Greeks call ‘Northern Epirus,”’ a territory largely populated by ethnic Greeks which was assigned to Albania in 1912, but which certain groups in Greece believe should belong to Greece. Others often referred to the question of Çamëria (less-known outside Albania and Greece, yet a persistent problem), a region populated by Albanians which was assigned to Greece in 1912, briefly made part of the Nazi-ruled greater Albania in 1943, and assigned back to Greece at the end of the Second World War. In 1940 the Metaxas regime forcibly expelled to Albania some 30,000 of its ethnic Albanian citizens from Çamëria, confiscating their land and property in retaliation for the use of Albania’s territory as a base for the invasion of Greece by Fascist Italy. At the time of my fieldwork in Greece, an organization of survivors and their descendants in Albania was pressing for reinstatement of Greek citizenship to the expelled Çams and for the reinstitution of their land and other property rights.

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From the Economic Inferiority of Intellectual Superiority to Economic Justice for Inferiority An alternative interpretation of suffering denied the very incompatibility between economic inferiority and intellectual superiority. Feeding on the loathing of Albania’s state socialism that was so widespread among the emigrants, this radical stance viewed suffering as rooted in a regrettable, albeit logical, emotional reaction to the economic justice that was done in Greece—that “Greece did”—with respect to the overall inferiority of the emigrants or, at the least, to their inferior performance in the labor market. Perhaps also out of the desire not to appear ungrateful to the Greeks, a number of emigrants were reluctant to talk about racism. Do you know the old adage? Every home has a toilet! Every home has a hole that stinks. That means that every country has its own problems. That’s what it is. A home has things like this as well as things like that, a country has good things as well as bad things. The same with Greece. Just as we emigrants have our own good things, so do we have our own bad things. Every home has its own toilet.

I encountered situations in which one would remind his or her fellow emigrants that, if they were genuinely against racism, they had to show it by not speaking of “the Greeks” but instead by “judging” each individual as an individual. Others denied outright that there was discrimination against them in Greece. One young emigrant who, while holding two part-time table-waiting jobs, had become a university student in Athens, reasoned calmly that enough emigrants speak about racism. What more should I say? Personally, I have not been discriminated against. I have Greek friends. I have never felt they discriminate against me. I know that there is xenophobia in Greek society. But I cannot come up with an example of discrimination. It has not happened to me.

To certain emigrants, the reason for the Greek fear of foreigners lay not with the less educated Greeks or with the negative influences of the media, but with “the Albanians themselves.” These emigrants agreed that the number of “Albanians” who had engaged in criminal activity was small. But “the acts” were “truly appalling” and therefore the Albanians had a bad name in Greece because of “their own deeds.” Some would go so far as to say that, given the severity of certain “criminal acts,” Greek xenophobia was quite “logical” and not something to be “surprised” about. It is shameful for us as Albanians that an Albanian commits a crime. But the Greeks are in the right. If Albanians come here and steal or kill—what should the Greeks say? Should the Greeks say, “Welcome”? Would you not fear the Greeks if they were to commit these acts in Albania?

Most of “the shameful acts” were said to have been carried out “in the beginning,” however, when the emigrants had just come to Greece. An elderly one-time professor, who continued performing manual labor though his entrepreneurship had thrived in Greece, maintained an elaborate explanation of why “many Albanians” had violated the laws and the moral norms of the Greek society in the beginning. That had happened “logically,” because the Albanians’ own moral values had

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been destroyed by the immorality of Albania’s socialism. Making himself into the illustration of this reflection, he recounted how in the early 1990s the Albanians who had just arrived in Greece did not possess the “necessary” habits for living in “this much freedom.” Our daughter had taken us for a walk in Plaka,4 to show us the beautiful shops there, the restaurants and the kiosks.. . . We had been in Greece for only a few days—it was the beginning. My wife and I entered a gift shop. We had never seen so many articles before, so much wealth. The shops in Albania were empty. What I want to say is that there was no respect for private property in Albania.. . . Here in Greece the rule is that what is mine is mine, and I do not need to protect it every day. You know this thing is mine and you respect that. It is understood by everyone. I do not need to go out of my shop to tell people that this article in front of my shop is mine. People come and want to buy something, they can touch the things, I can leave the goods on the rack outside the shop, people can choose what they want to buy, and then they come inside to the cash register and they pay. So, the story I began to tell—my wife and I, we walked for a while in Plaka, and then we entered one of the shops. I called my wife, “Come here, quick! Let’s get out of here! We did not see anything!” She saw that I was very shocked, but she did not know what had happened. “Why?” she said. “We just came in here!” I pointed at the newspaper stand. There was a magazine in there, on the stand, and on the cover of the magazine they had put Mr. Mitzotakis in a woman’s bikini. It was a caricature. Mitzotakis was the prime minister of Greece at that time. They had put the picture of his face on top of a woman’s body in a bikini. But it looked real, it looked as if that was his face and it was on his body, as if Mr. Mitzotakis was wearing a bikini. It was a magazine cover, in color. My wife was shocked too when she saw it, and she became pale in the face. “Quick,” I said, “Let’s get out of here, we did not see anything!” We hurried out of the shop. I was trembling because I heard some cars honking and a police siren. I thought the government had heard about this, and the police were now coming to arrest everyone in the shop. We know now that [in Greece] you can say what you want, that this is a democracy. A magazine can publish what they want on its cover. This is the market economy: the magazine wants to attract people to buy their product. But we did not know this in the beginning. We had been kept under the dictatorship for a long time. Our daughter was walking with her husband behind us. We told her what we saw, whispering in a low voice, so nobody could hear. She started laughing. Her husband started laughing too. They had been in Greece for several months already; they knew that it is all right in Greece for such a thing.. . . You see, the Albanians were not used to these things. They were not used to this much freedom.. . . The Albanians did not know that they could say what they had in mind, that it is their right to say what they have in mind. In Albania people have been executed for words of the mouth. Albanians were not used to the concept that this is a piece of private property, and that it belongs to me. No, they saw that the shops put their goods outside on a stand, and they thought it was like in Albania—you just take it, and you put it in your pocket. We believed we saw something political brewing, and we left the shop right away. We were going to say that we had not seen anything. The system degenerated so badly in Albania that it corrupted everyone. Everyone learned to say, “I did not see it.” Everyone learned to say, “I did not take it.” Everyone learned to say, “I did not do it.” People became thieves and idlers and spies. This was the “new human” that socialism produced—a thief, an idler, a spy.. . . 5 And after 1990 the new human came to Greece. He started to take things that did not belong to him, he lied about his name.. . . That is where the bad name of the Albanians comes from.. . .

4

Plaka is a predominantly tourist district in central Athens. The “new human” was one of the key concepts of the propaganda of Albania’s socialist regime. The “creation” and “upbringing” of the new human with “the communist morality” and virtues was at one time blazoned as the “greatest achievement of socialism.” 5

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Accounts that blamed the bad name of the Albanians on the acts of the Albanians themselves usually highlighted Greece’s political democracy and especially its market economy to contend that “each individual” gets in Greece what he or she “deserves.” Contradictorily though, narratives such as the one above often recognized that Albanians had a bad name in Greece while denying that in Greece individuals were treated other than individually. I definitely blame the one who steals. Because it is his hand that steals! If I take something from you with my hand, it is not the system, it is my hand that steals. But I also know that it is not just the person to be blamed.. . . That is why the Greeks are very careful with the Albanians now.. . . Personally, I earn my bread with my own sweat. I try hard, I work hard, I do not take things that do not belong to me. I get respect. Every person should be treated for what he is. The Greeks have had the culture of democracy for many decades. I do not mean Ancient Greece, that is too far in the past. I mean the decades after the Second World War. Greece had the generals, but then it became a democracy. Greeks were fortunate to have capitalism. That is why they understand that every person is for himself, that everyone is different. Greeks do not treat all Albanians the same way. So you cannot blame the Greeks for the bad name that Albanians have created for themselves. Personally, I have always been treated with respect. People see that I work hard, that I earn my living with my own sweat, that I am upright, that I respect them—and they treat me just like I treat them.

And while to most one-time intellectuals the suffering of emigration stemmed essentially from the blending of intellectual superiority with economic inferiority, whether or not they articulated it explicitly so, narratives in the spirit of the above blamed the economic inferiority of emigrants on the emigrants themselves. A few emigrants were thought of as having “made it” in the city of Athens, and they were the object of much talk. I was often told of “exemplary cases,” for example, of individuals who had emerged out of the vagaries of manual labor with more than one kind of one-man businesses. Indeed, I often sat in a handful of small emigrantowned cafés, for example; and once, a profile in the emigrant paper led me to a small but cozy and well-stocked Albanian bookstore that an emigrant had just started in Athens. Given such stories of success, the reason why “Albanians in general” were not well off in Greece was, in the narratives that praised Greece’s capitalism, every individual emigrant’s own or “personal” performance in Greece’s market economy. A former accountant in a state agricultural farm not far from Tirana, who after working as a mason’s helper for a few years had become a construction subcontractor, complained of the working ethics and attitudes of “the Albanians”: Go to the Omonia Square in the morning, early in the morning. You will see all of those Albanians standing there. They are waiting for work. But if you ask any of them, “What work can you do?” they do not know what to say. They reply, “Any kind of work.” They do not say, “I am a carpenter,” or “I can work with wood.” Nobody says, “I am a painter,” or “I can lay tiles.” . . . They are arrogant too. They think they know everything. If you ask one, “Can you lay tiles?” he says, “No problem.” I hired two young guys one day to lay tiles; they seemed strong. I had to finish the floors in an apartment. I was going to work, and they would help me. I asked, “Have you worked with tiles before?” “Yes, yes.” So I put one of them in one room, and the other in the other room. I gave them the tools and told them what to do, all right. When I went to check an hour later, to check what they had done, what they had done was not a floor! It was a flight of stairs! No two tiles were on the same level. They did not know how to use the tools. I gave them the money and I said, “Here it is, go away.” I had to do their work. I had to do myself the work for which I had paid them. I told myself,

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“This is your own fault!” Don’t I know the Albanians? They never learn. But why do they have that bad habit? Why do they say, “I know how to do it”?

In this line of reasoning, the suffering of the emigrants could not result from the combination of their intellectual superiority with economic inferiority, but simply from the economic inferiority of the Albanians in Greece. And the economic inferiority of the emigrants was a consequence of their poor performance in Greece’s market economy, something to be blamed on their own inferior abilities, be those “habitual” or technical or even intellectual. Accounts that focused on praising the capitalism of Greece thus shifted the core cause of the emigrants’ sufferings from the blending of intellectual superiority with economic inferiority to nothing but economic justice for sheer inferiority of performance. A young woman, who had studied the Italian language at a university in Albania, and who had come to Greece without graduating, because a “good opportunity,” about which she did not want to talk, had arisen, remarked that although the emigrants might get paid little when compared to Greeks, they did get paid much “for what they do.” Given the skills the emigrants had, she argued, and given the jobs in which they actually worked, Greece allowed them to earn more than what they could “imagine” in Albania. Tell me, who has come to Greece? Tell me. The high school teachers! Nobody else! What can these high school teachers do? In Greece? Are they going to teach algebra or geometry in the Greek schools? Greece has better teachers than them! Are they going to teach Marxism-Leninism? The Albanians say, “I have studied at the university, I have done this and that.” But what did they study? What kind of knowledge do they have of the world? I am not blaming [the Albanians]. It was the fault of the regime. A truly criminal regime. The regime destroyed the schools. All they taught was Marxism. Are the teachers going to teach Leninism in a Greek high school now? Who will pay money for that?

Denying injustice and racism on the grounds of the general understanding that capitalism and the free market economy had done justice where state socialism had done injustice, this one-time university student recognized the suffering that the emigrants endured. But that suffering was to her not the result of the discrepancy between what the emigrants could do, given their qualifications and abilities, and what they actually did do, given their legal status and the climate of discrimination in Greece. Instead, the market economy was seen as assigning each person what that person deserved, individuals getting paid for their own performance. As it was once pithily put to me, [i]t does not matter who you are; the issue is how much you are worth.

To support the conceptualization of the pitiful condition of emigration as well deserved, every now and then the cases of a handful of medical doctors and dentists were brought up. They, like the entrepreneurs mentioned above, after working for several years in Greece in manual occupations “like all other emigrants,” had in the last year or two emerged with small private practices tending to the emigrants. Assuming that, unlike these individual exceptions, the majority of “Albanians were not used to work hard” under socialism’s system of “guaranteed jobs,” the work ethic of many an individual or of the emigrants as a group was sometimes brought

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up in such narratives. Accordingly, the ubiquitous emotional suffering was assigned to, among other things, the exertion which was necessary to earn a living in Greece. Work in Greece is hard, while the Albanians were used to getting paid and to getting respect for not doing much.. . .

Such thinking implied that most emigrants suffered not because of some injustice done to them, but on the contrary, because of the consequences of the economic justice of Greece: Whereas in Albania all were used to being paid the same, in Greece only those emigrants succeeded who truly deserved to succeed. Coming mostly from emigrants who, one way or another, saw themselves as financially well off, or at any rate as better off compared to most other emigrants, these alternative visions of suffering may therefore be read as mostly assertions of individual distinction, or efforts at legitimizing such distinction, by implicitly contrasting one’s own work ethics and better ways with those of others. But does not the case of a one-time medical doctor who re-emerges as a practicing doctor after years of manual labor show that, for at least the stretch of years of manual labor, the doctor’s intellectual superiority was coupled with economic—not to mention social—inferiority? On the other hand, for those who concluded that the Albanians themselves were to be blamed for their condition in Greece, for their bad name, as well as for not willing to work harder or learn, these conceptualizations of suffering also articulated self-denial. The sense that the suffering of the emigrants stemmed from their own inferiority to Greeks reveals how some emigrants internalized their distress so profoundly and unknowingly as to feel the urge to justify the injustice of the discrimination against them. Even when one imagined oneself as having made it, emigration thus remained a beleaguered life.

Chapter 8

Portrait of Fatmir R., High School Principal, Democrat, Janitor, Maintenance Technician, Contemporary Citizen

At the age of 56 Fatmir R. is trying to become a night watchman at a construction site on the outskirts of Athens. He taught physics for nearly twenty years in Albania, sympathized with the Democratic Party, and was promoted to the position of high school principal in 1992. An illegal immigrant in Greece since 1998, Fatmir has earned his living first by cleaning the floors at a small chemical plant, and then by fulfilling the tasks of the maintenance technician before the plant went under in 2001. In 2000 he gained the legal right to temporary residency in Greece. As of early 2002, Fatmir receives some unemployment insurance and sees in himself “the contemporary citizen.”

There Was an Economic Elevation in Albania Fatmir would have never thought political things would change in Albania when the socialist state, to which he refers interchangeably as “socialism” and “dictatorship,” came to an end in 1991. The Democratic Party that assumed power promoted Fatmir to the position of principal of the high school in a small city in central Albania where he had taught physics for nearly twenty years. There were many challenges. After half a century under “the most severe dictatorship,” Albania was very poor. The pupils would often not have money to buy books. For many of the subjects, no books were printed, for there were strikes in the printing factories at the time, as well as a severe shortage of paper. Some parents would rather have their sons emigrate. Others were afraid something could happen to their daughters and did not want to let the girls come to school. Not that people were fanatic about the traditional moral rules; the reason was that the country was truly in chaos. As a principal, Fatmir saved his school from the disciplinary violations that beset many schools in other Albanian cities at the time. He spent days and nights working in the school, did not tire of explaining things to people, used his reputation in the community to get parents to do things for the school, organized many meetings with parents, and often traveled to Tirana to gain support there. He also managed not to fire any of the teachers. Those may have been years in which “the authority of the educators diminished,” but despite the difficult conditions, Fatmir 95

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managed to abide by the programs of the Ministry of Education and to observe the progress of each and every one of his pupils. Whereas during socialism his work had always gone unnoticed, things started getting better after the Democratic Party promoted him to the position of the school’s principal. In Fatmir’s “simple mathematical analysis,” there was an economic elevation for everyone in Albania. The year 1990 “caught him” with a salary of only 7,800 old lek, but when he was fired from his job in 1998, Fatmir was being paid 140,000 old lek.1 Over seven short years, his income had “thus increased nearly twenty times.” Some people might mention the prices. True, there also was an increase in prices. But while the salary he received in hand went up twenty times, prices did not go up more than ten times “at the very most.” If this rate of increase were to continue in Albania, his colleagues would now be making 2,800,000 lek [$2,074] a month, which is “perhaps more than what high school teachers make in Greece.”

Getting Out of the Red Circle But that pace was not to continue; Albania’s progress was halted by early 1997. The usury firms where every Albanian had invested “everything they had” were forced to close down. Fatmir does not know where all that money ended up. All the savings of all Albanians, the proceeds from the sales of thousands of apartments, the money received from the emigrants—it all disappeared. All Fatmir can say is that during the year 1997 life in Albania got “completely off the equilibrium.” Arms were spread among the population, thousands of people were killed, and the government eventually withdrew from power. To Fatmir, the coming back to power of the old political clan of the Party of Labor, now called the Socialist Party, was a coup d‘état. By 1997 everyone in Albania was in danger, even those people “who had never done anything,” even those who were never involved with illegal things, even those who never participated in any form of corruption. People were killed on sheer whim. Those who had served the state under the Democratic Party were eyed askance and threatened in the streets “for reasons that are unjustifiable.” Having been principal of the high school during the years of the Democratic Party, by late 1997 Fatmir started hearing that he too was “in a red circle.” Nobody would look at what he had done for the school, that he had worked with great integrity and that he had resisted corruption. Instead, it was mentioned to him that he had been the chairman of the electoral commission in the elections that were won by the Democratic Party. Was all his work at the school reduced to that? After being fired in the early winter of 1998, Fatmir resolved that exiting Albania was the order of the day. He paid 550,000 drachmae [$1,500] to some

1 At the official exchange rate, Fatmir’s 1990 salary was approximately $104; at the exchange rate of the “black market,” Fatmir’s 1998 salary was approximately $140.

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people “known to be connected” with “the Greek Mafiosi,” and was smuggled to Greece together with his family. They were accompanied through the border by a man in his early 30s who seemed to know his way very well. Fatmir never got a visa in hand, but all of his family was flown from Tirana to Athens on a regular flight and escorted through airport controls without problems in both Albania and in Greece. There was another family with them as well, ten people all together, being smuggled in one batch. The one who accompanied them would go first to the border officers; he would show them some papers and say, “These ten are mine.” They would then be let through the checkpoints without any problems. “Of course,” those who worked in the airports would have had their share of the money.

Always Willing to Learn The price of the basement that was arranged for them in Athens was high and the conditions “very bad.” There was mold everywhere. Fatmir’s children seemed at a loss, and soon it was clear that they wanted to return to Albania. To stop the little money that they had brought with them from “sifting through their fingers,” Fatmir needed a job as soon as he could get one. Through a friend who had emigrated in 1991 to Ioánnina, and who was in Athens by 1998, Fatmir was introduced to the owner of a small chemical plant. The owner agreed to have Fatmir clean around the shop floor for 3,300 drachmae [$9] a day. To Fatmir’s good fortune, the knowledge he had in physics and chemistry enabled him to understand the processes of production in the plant, and eventually to understand also, “theoretically at least,” what was going on with the machines. And he was always willing to learn. In addition to simply cleaning the floors and shoving things from one corner to the other, Fatmir soon helped keep up the plant’s output. The owner, who noticed this, shifted more of Fatmir’s time to the maintenance of the machines and eventually trusted to him the role of the plant’s maintenance mechanic. Now Fatmir was to make sure that all equipment worked properly, and a Romanian was hired as a janitor. But the pay did not change very much. As the business started running into problems a short while after, the Romanian was fired and Fatmir was again to do both the cleaning of the floors and the maintenance of the machines. It was clear that he had to work even harder for the money, but it was also clear to him that the plant was going under; so if he wanted to keep the job, he had no other choice. By the end of the year 2001 the plant went bankrupt, and Fatmir heard that the owner was about to move to the United States, where some of his relatives lived. Fatmir was left without a job, but having managed to get a temporary residence permit in 2000, he received unemployment insurance from the Greek state. It was much less than what he would have “actually deserved,” for while Fatmir fulfilled the duties of the maintenance mechanic, and then kept two jobs that made him work every Saturday at the plant, on paper he continued to be paid as a half-time aide. Still, the unemployment insurance gave him more money than what he

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would have been making in Albania teaching physics, were the government of the Socialist Party to keep him in his former position at the school. That does not mean that Fatmir is satisfied with the way things are. He hopes that the Greek godfather of his daughter will be able to introduce him to a construction firm that has several projects on the outskirts of Athens, where he has heard that watchmen are needed for the night.

Cutting Off the Emotional Relationship with the World Although the money is better in Greece, Fatmir reflects that emigration is not a better life. That is why he never wanted to emigrate. When the borders were opened in the early 1990s, Fatmir felt he was too old to undertake “the hard labor of the emigrant.” And by the time he emigrated to Greece in 1998, there was nobody in Albania who did not know what jobs Albanians held in emigration. People also knew about “the bad name” of Albanians in Greece and in Italy, so Fatmir had no illusions as to what emigration would mean. Neither did he have any respect for those who would carry him across the borders. But being illegally smuggled, and paying dearly for it, was the only way to fulfill the imperative of leaving Albania. He would have not emigrated if life in Albania were not to have taken the dramatic change of the year 1997. What happened in 1997 is “beyond the comprehension of the present time.” The causes for the catastrophe of 1997 are deep. Were those firms really pyramid schemes, as they are being called now? Fatmir hopes only that time will let the truth come out. Fatmir recounts the day he left Albania as the cutting off of his emotional relationship with the world. Working as an emigrant, “especially as an Albanian in Greece,” is a matter of much emotional complexity. Having been a person who could speak his mind, and used to be surrounded by people who respected him, Fatmir first experienced coming to Greece as a “fall into darkness.” He did not know how to say a single word in Greek and “lost the life of the soul.” Everyone in his new environment was much “below” Fatmir in terms of their cultural potentials. And yet, even though they were inferior, most Greeks would look at him and think that he was the one who had just made it to the world, that he was the one who did not know anything about anything. Fatmir attributes the exploitation he has suffered in Greece to the fact that Albanians were not legal. But although in a disadvantaged position, as time went by he worked to represent his values “as a human being,” and as “an Albanian citizen.” He learned Greek by himself, using a book from the university. He paid great attention to grammar, and not just so that the foreign language would be a window for his life, for it was already “very clear” to Fatmir how limited his opportunities were in Greece. He paid attention to grammar in order to know how to argue in Greek “the true values of the Albanian.” Fatmir learned Greek in order to argue in Greek that “Albanians are good” despite “the wrongheaded Greek mentality.”

Cutting Off the Emotional Relationship with the World

Fig. 8.1 Reconstruction in one alley in downtown Athens

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Albanians are good and cultured despite their past under the dictatorship; they are “contemporary citizens.” And although the way many Greeks looked at him never changed, just because he “has it written in the passport that he is an Albanian,” the things he did and the way he spoke obliged his Greek coworkers in the factory to start addressing Fatmir as “Professor.” Through his behavior over the two and a half years he worked in the chemical plant, Fatmir achieved being seen by others as a “contemporary citizen.”

Chapter 9

The Economic Disadvantages of Emigration

The widely shared sentiment that international migration brings about economic advantage links that advantage to macroeconomic indicators such as income differentials between countries. My fieldwork among the Albanians of Greece, however, abundantly showed how income differentials between countries do not necessarily translate into economic advantage for every individual immigrant. And even though the emigrants never doubted the economic advantage of emigration, not even when speaking about the “exploitation” of their labor, a motley assortment of narratives went on about the mundane economic hardships they encountered. Those narratives reveal how, to an emigrant, being in Greece equaled being in a position of severe economic disadvantages, vis-à-vis the “Greek” workers as well as vis-à-vis at least some of those who had not left Albania.

Racism and Economics After a few months among the emigrants, it became clear that an ethnic conceptualization of reality determined how things were spoken about. Absorbed by their suffering, emigrants spoke of “Albanians” and of “Greeks” when speaking of the injustices they encountered in emigration, and they commonly rendered ethnically the very categories “emigrant,” “boss,” and “coworker.” Similar to the view of Greece as being materially superior to and generally better than Albania, the view of the everyday universe as populated by Albanians and by Greeks underlay myriad instances of talk—not just on employment but on a far wider range of topics. The emigrants’ ethnic conceptualization of their world—and of the world—resembled perhaps what some anthropologists describe as schemas of cognitive underpinning.1 The way the emigrants spoke, things in general were either Albanian or Greek. An injustice done to an emigrant by an employer, for example, was typically spoken about as something that a Greek had done to an Albanian. Caught in the explicit dimensions of the insults and provocations they encountered, the emigrants often saw ethnic discrimination as an intrinsic feature of their specific circumstance of being 1

Strauss and Quinn 1997, cf. Ortner 1990.

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Albanians in Greece. Some propounded that the tensions of the present were rooted “deep in history,” though this could not be quite logical.2 Along the same path, an emigrant who had stolen from the shop where he worked was an Albanian who had stolen from a Greek. Even the “scandalous cases” of those handful of emigrants whose running amok had attracted some media attention, and which at another level were explained as collapses of weaker human psyches under ubiquitous pressures, were seen in this same ethnic grid, as rooted in the ethnic dynamics of the emigrants’ being Albanians in Greece: Because he cannot stand it any longer. One endures, one endures—then one explodes. That’s why the guy gets a gun, that’s why the guy hijacks a bus—because his mind is gone. If you have an old person, you can say things to him. Not to a young guy. If you say “Albanians, Albanians,” all the time, the young guy can no longer control himself.

But if suffering resulted from “the Greeks” exerting pressure on “the Albanians,” the injustices suffered by at least certain emigrants were not recognized. One former math teacher, portrayed here as Llambi S., presented himself as a member of an overlooked category of emigrants, those of Greek ethnicity. The legal arrangements of the ethnic Greeks who had emigrated from Albania were often thought of as “better” than those of the majority of the Albanians in Greece, and certain emigrants envied them openly and loudly. Yet, as this one-time math teacher who had emigrated legally would make clear, even though considered “luckier” than the rest of the emigrants, the ethnic Greek emigrants too could be quite unhappy with their condition in Greece. What was even more, as both an ethnic Greek and an emigrant from Albania, this one-time teacher felt alienated by the much talked about opposition between Greeks and Albanians. He was disturbed perhaps by the very ethnic view of things that dominated the social world he inhabited. To him, the emigrants carried the ethnic articulations of racism too far. An ethnic Greek though he was, the one-time math teacher had been just another emigrant in Greece; he had gone through one manual job after the other just like the other emigrants, and felt that he had been treated not that differently from them. I know so many people think that way. They think of the words the boss has said to them, or of the words they hear in the bus. Some emigrants tell me of the good treatment of the minoritar3 in Albania. “We treated you well in Albania; you had your schools, your villages were prosperous. Is this how you pay back the favor to the Albanians?” As if I am to blame for the racism in Greece! It is painful to see young people, even some young people who 2 For one thing, emigrants were separated from “history” by at least the four decades of Albania’s state socialism, a time during which the governments of Albania and of Greece maintained relations that were too distant for any engaged animosity to breed. Furthermore, if the present tensions between “the Albanian emigrants” and “the Greeks” were somehow expected as being due to tensions between the governments of Albania and of Greece from a distant past, suffering had to also be expected—at the very least, the emigrants would not get as agitated by the insults and provocations as they typically did. 3 During state socialism, a member of the Greek minority in Albania was colloquially referred to as a “minoritar.” While denoting both being ethnically Greek and being in a demographic minority, the term appears not to have had any profound negative connotations: those handful of ethnic Greek emigrants that I met commonly used it to refer to themselves.

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call themselves educated, be so naïve. Can they not see what racism means? Do they not see that I, too, am discriminated against in Greece? I am treated just like every other emigrant, Albanian or not.

Feeling more entitled than most emigrants to speak of his agitation at how the Greeks he knew were in fact typically prejudiced against the Albanians, he grounded his words in “facts.” The work of the emigrants speaks in their defense! How can a Greek say that all who come from Albania are criminals? How can they say that we come here to take their jobs? . . . If the Greek economy is bad, that is not because of the emigrants. We make the economy good. We work hard. Let me tell you that without the Albanians Greece would have been even worse than it is. Everyone you see in this café tonight has worked a long day before coming to sit here. The new airport, the new buildings in [the outskirts of] Athens—they stand there only because of the work of the emigrants. That construction would have taken 50 years to complete if the Greeks had had to work by themselves.4

If the adversities the emigrants endured in Greece stemmed from deep rooted ethnic opposition, this one-time teacher reasoned, how could one explain the hardships he had had to go through? He agreed with the majority of the others that there was much injustice in Greece. But the injustices done to the emigrants were not done to them because they were Albanians. Reminding the interviewer whenever he could of his former membership in Albania’s Partly of Labor, this one-time teacher articulated what he meant to be a “Marxist” perspective on life. In his view, the “exploitation” of the emigrants was nothing other than the exploitation of labor by the “capitalists of Greece.” He empathized with those emigrants “whose soul hurts” because of the insults. He empathized especially with the youth “who do not have much life experience,” for “people are made of flesh and blood.” Yet this one-time teacher believed that the emigrants were wrong to think of racism as involving insult only. Discrimination clearly affected one’s emotional as well as economic well-being. Whereas most emigrants focused on the emotional suffering and on the sense of “personal lowering”—as some had called their experience of living their lives under interminable ethnic discrimination—the atmosphere of racism in Greece had brought upon the emigrants economic hardships of the kind that could be encountered by anyone, anywhere: low wages, few or no employer-paid benefits, long stretches of time spent in finding work, great difficulty in keeping a job, and so forth. Xenophobia worked against all the emigrants, regardless of their ethnicity, and discrimination had hurt him too during his emigrant years in Greece. The consequences of discrimination, he emphasized, had been economic. If racism was about Albanians as a nation, why did I have so much hardship? I am a Greek. I rolled up my sleeves when I came here. I have worked hard. If I were paid what the Greeks of Greece are paid, I would have retired as a king now.

4 The new airport of Athens was already completed early in the year 2001, about one year before the bulk of my fieldwork; this remark pertains especially to a campaign of public as well as private construction in anticipation of the 2004 Olympic games that was at the time ongoing in Greece.

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Not only was the economic inferiority of the emigrants the most significant consequence of racism; what emigrants typically described as mere consequences of Greek xenophobia were exactly what made the discrimination against Albanians economically advantageous for those who employed them: The boss does not pay, does not pay for the insurance stamps. The emigrant works for less, number one; and number two, the employer does not pay for the insurance stamps. Nor does the employer pay the other taxes. He has to pay those taxes for the Greeks, for the Greek workers. For them the boss must pay. And he pays. For the emigrant he does not. This is why racism benefits the bosses.

In words racism targeted the Albanians, but in practice the emigrants of Greek descent too were affected by xenophobia as much as all the other emigrants from Albania. In any event, the essential purpose served by ethnic discrimination was therefore the economic superiority of the employers, not of the Greeks as an ethnic group. The Greeks are not getting richer on the labor of the emigrants. Plenty of Greeks have to compete with the emigrants for the same work. Greeks may be earning more money than the emigrants, but they have to work harder than before. A Greek can lose his job to an emigrant if he does not work hard.

In this “Marxist” perspective, the climate of xenophobia allowed for the employment of emigrants to become a mechanism for the perpetuation of their economic inferiority. Work was not simply the setting in which the discrepancies between what an emigrant could do and what he or she was allowed to do and paid to do became tangible; it was what coupled one’s relative intellectual superiority with one’s relative economic inferiority. The essential reason for the ethnic discrimination to be directed especially against Albanians lay “simply and clearly” with the fact that Albanians made up the bulk of the emigrant labor in Greece. Racism was therefore to be defined not in terms of ethnicity, but by its economic function of providing inexpensive labor to “the capitalists of Greece.” Employers make it harder for Albanians to find jobs. They do not give the job to an Albanian right away, because that way they can keep the pay low. That way they can have people ready to work for any price. Why does nobody talk about the numbers? How many emigrants are there in Greece? How many Albanians? All this state, all this government, all the institutions they have. Do you think they do not have the numbers [of the emigrants]? Can they not find out what the numbers are? What are they doing all day long?5

Such questioning of the “deep” and “historic” ethnic visions of the world side by side with their everyday economic consequences or economic roots overlaps with a broader—and not really Marxist—question about emigration: If the climate of xenophobia, ethnic discrimination, and racism perpetuated the economic inferiority of the emigrants, did emigration put the emigrant in a position of economic disadvantage? Emigrants did not speak of their being in Greece as being in a position of economic disadvantage. To them, the reason for emigration that everyone acknowledged was Greece’s superiority to Albania, and that was challenged neither by 5

At the time of fieldwork in 2002, there was indeed no official count for the Albanians of Greece.

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the common vision of economic injustice as essentially an ethnic dynamic nor by the much rarer “Marxist” focus on labor exploitation. At the same time, numerous mainstream narratives recounted the myriad economic hardships of emigration. An awareness of racism as an economic mechanism, for example, underlay the knowledge that emigrants of other nationalities were less discriminated against than the Albanians, the kind of knowledge that could occasionally be exploited for economic ends: Once I saw an ad in the paper. They wanted someone to move furniture and to scrape the plaster from the walls. I called, and there was a woman, and I told this woman that I was a Bulgarian. I said my name was Boris. I once had a Bulgarian friend, whose name was Boris, when I was in the street market. We worked together. We had a good time together, a real good time. This Bulgarian, he was a monkey. He had been an accountant in Bulgaria, an accountant under socialism. Oh, yes! We drank together after work. [Laughs] He was younger than me, but not much younger. He told me how to swear in Bulgarian, how to say a lot of things. [Laughs] So I told this woman on the phone that I was Bulgarian, and I told her the name of this friend. She said I could come to her apartment. I said “Bulgarian,” and right away she gave me her address! She even gave me the bus line, right away on the phone! No “I have somebody else.” No “Call me tomorrow.” I just got the job.

Yet even with such recognition of the economic consequences of ethnic discrimination, discrimination was still understood as essentially ethnic. Dwelling on the ethnic articulations of injustices rather than on their economic dimensions, most emigrants saw ethnicity where an ethnic Greek emigrant such as the one-time math teacher could legitimately see sheer exploitation of labor. One can think of the emigrants’ narratives of economic hardship as somehow misfocused: while the emigrants recognized that the insult of ethnic discrimination usually came together with the injury of lower pay, the insult seemed to hurt them more than the injury. Another one-time teacher, for example, recalled an episode of hard work as a kitchen helper in an island hotel that had resulted in both unpaid wages and in ethnically-charged accusations of stealing: We were working on an island that summer—it was our second summer in Greece, and my husband did not have work. Then a [former] neighbor from Tirana called; they were on this island, he worked in a hotel there, and they also lived in the basement of the hotel. In the summer the hotel had work, and they needed another person. Because my husband did not have work—he had been shining shoes over the winter, in the summer he did not have much work—we decided to go to the island. It would also be good for the children . . . [to] get some sun. One night an Albanian from another hotel came to us, they were to host a party at the other hotel, and they were late, they needed help in the kitchen. They needed a lot of work done. They said that the owner would pay [wages] after the party. Well, we went there. I remember I was tired from the work of the day, and did not want to go. But . . . my husband had not been able to make any money in a long time, and it would make him feel better to earn at least one day’s worth of work. So we both went. We worked until midnight for the party, there was so much food to cook. [The hotel guests] were rich Europeans, I think from Finland, or from Switzerland. The party lasted until midnight, and then we had to clean up. It was maybe two in the morning when we finished, and they thanked us, and the owner said to me I could take some food for the children from the leftovers. It will spoil, he said, why not take some home? So I thought, all right, it was good food they had there, so I took a bowl from the kitchen—I did not even have a dish with me—and I picked up a few pieces of pie and of meat, a few small pieces for my children. My husband was embarrassed, he kept telling me not to take too much. So I took just one or two pieces of meat in that

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bowl, and one or two pieces of pie, that was all. The owner said he did not have any cash at that moment, that he wanted to make the calculations for the party first, and that he would pay us the next day. When I went there the next day [the owner of the hotel] pretended he could not understand what I wanted.. . . “You got a lot of food last night,” he said. “That was the pay.” That was the pay for the two of us! I almost burst into tears. I wanted to hit him. I am glad my husband was there with me . . . to keep me from doing anything.. . . So we told the owner that he himself had asked us to come and work for money. I told him that I had taken only one bite for the children the night before, as I had been told I might, and that this was unjust. He started yelling at us. “Greedy Albanians!” And a lot of other words. “Albanians steal!” “Albanians are thieves!” We had a long quarrel.. . . When the Greeks start yelling, they do not know how to stop. Then the Albanian from this hotel came down to the basement and tried to tell the owner that I had taken only a very little food the night before. He said that the owner himself had promised to pay . . . and that he should keep his word. The Greek shouted and shouted—I tell you, he could not stop! At the end he gave us eight thousand drachmae [$21.81]. Eight thousand drachmae for the two of us working a whole night! Because of two pieces of meat and two pieces of leftover pie. That food would have spoiled, it was leftovers. And I would not have taken any had he not said to!

Exceptionally charged as this narration was, such a way of speaking of injustice followed a not uncommon pattern: subsuming their economic perceptions under the view that Greece was superior to Albania, emigrants spoke of the economic consequences of racism as unfortunate circumstances that befell one or the other without conceptualizing them as dimensions of an essentially economic reality. Yet when woven together, the motley assortment of economic narratives that are otherwise dispersed throughout the discursive scape of emigration does reveal a picture of emigration as a condition of severe economic disadvantages. Giving rise to a conclusion at which emigrants themselves do not arrive, and which challenges the assumed economic advantage of international migration, these narratives depict emigration in terms of insurmountable economic disadvantage to the emigrant— economic disadvantage both vis-à-vis the native workers as well as vis-à-vis at least some of those who did not emigrate. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the three main nodes of emigration’s economic disadvantages that emerge as one maps the discursive scape of emigration—the economic disadvantages rooted in the emigrants’ “illegality,” the economic disadvantages of their de facto statelessness, and the economic disadvantages caused by remittances.

The Economics of Illegality The notion that every person has the right to be anywhere in this world, which at one point found a formulation in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights6 as the right to be in the territory of any state, had early on inspired this project. While I tried to spell out the paradoxes of the Albanian emigration, as well as during the earliest stages of my fieldwork in Athens, I was easily absorbed by the conceptual

6

See Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948).

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contradictions pertaining to human mobility that permeate the international legal framework. While, for example, the right to mobility is recognized as a “human” right, i.e., as a right of historical and therefore theoretically legal primacy over the rights of the state, other charters at the legal fundaments of our world order institutionalize in effect the supremacy of territorial sovereignty over the right to mobility and other human rights.7 Unreflective, perhaps, about my own position in the world at the time, I once marveled at this violation of order. I used to find it ironic, and a point to be pronounced, that even the very United Nations act that recognized free movement as a human right referred to geographic territory in terms that implied that every territory belonged to a state.8 The more accustomed I grew to the emigrants’ ways, the less did such contradictions of law stir me at their philosophical and rhetoric levels. The emigrants took it as a given that they were “all illegal” in Greece, and soon enough I found myself emulating them in focusing on the how of things rather then delving ever deeper into the why. Virtually all the emigrants had come to Greece “without permits,” and although more than a decade had gone by, they remained “without documents.” More broadly, they spoke of illegality as a condition that affected not only them, “the emigrants of Greece,” but virtually all of the Albanians who had left Albania in the 1990s, whether they had “become emigrants” in Greece or elsewhere. If you do not count those who entered the embassies [and who therefore] got papers wherever they went, then everywhere they went, the Albanian emigrants were unlawful. Therefore the life of the Albanian was very difficult, regardless of the country where he went. Because being unlawful, the Albanian did not enjoy any rights. The Albanian lost the rights of a human being. The result of this was that the Albanians ended up working in the so-called “black jobs,” which discredited [their] labor, as well as the personality of the individual Albanians and the mass of Albanian emigrants.

For all everyday purposes intrinsic to the condition of Albanian emigration, illegality was insurmountable. Accordingly, the emigrants’ talk about their legal status revolved not around the philosophical contradictions of illegality, but rather around what illegality meant in everyday life. And though typically not conceptualized this way, in everyday life illegality had essentially economic implications. Being in Greece without a right to be and work there recognized by the Greek state9 put an emigrant in a position of perennially insurmountable labor market disadvantage vis-à-vis any “Greek.” While the emigrants’ lower pay forced the

7 See the Charter of the United Nations (United Nations 1945), esp. the preamble and Article 2, paragraph 7. See also the discussion of this paradox in International Migration Policies (UNDESAPD 1998, 11). 8 See Paragraph 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948). 9 The Greek state is not alone in this. As the current international order places state sovereignty ahead of human rights, an individual’s right to be in any country is—insufficiently though universally—interpreted as an obligation of the state of which the individual is a citizen to allow him or her to leave that state’s territory. Should a universally declared human right to mobility not mean that each and every state should recognize to any individual human being, including non-citizens, the right to be in the piece of the earth which, in law, is that state’s territory?

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economically most vulnerable Greeks into intense and, from certain perspectives, unfair competition, illegality meant that the pay an emigrant received was typically lower than the pay of a native: not having access to proper legal process made it impossible for most emigrants to claim the minimum wages and the various additional forms of compensation established by Greek law. An individual immigrant’s actual income was typically further diminished by the reality of a depressed economy—virtually all of the Albanians I met had at one or another time hit lengthy periods during which they could find no work. The emigrants’ sentiment was that there were not many jobs that “took Albanians.” In this environment of disadvantageous employment, the emigrants could rarely find compassionate “understanding” even of one another. There seemed to be insecurity in every form of employment an emigrant held; it was said that “most emigrants” tried to keep from others the whereabouts of their jobs, given “how many emigrants” there were in Greece. One Albanian takes a job away from the other Albanians. That is not good. The Albanian should not go to the Greek boss to tell him that he can do the work for less than the Albanian who already has the job. An Albanian should not be afraid to tell another Albanian where he works. It is a shame that some emigrants do such things. We should show that we are all brothers—just like the Russians, just like all the other emigrants in Greece.

Emigrants could be fired quite “at whim,” and sometimes illegality was looked on as that which made an emigrant’s job entirely dependent on the good graces of a boss—or at least to appear to be so for all practical purposes. Oftentimes the state of illegality could be exploited quite explicitly to an emigrant’s economic disadvantage. Certain individuals, for example, were said to have more than once received threats of being “reported” to the Greek authorities, who were in turn to deport them to Albania for lack of “documents,” or “letters.” Stories did circulate of emigrants, especially on farms, who, in lieu of compensation for their labor, had been thus reported at the completion of their work. Such instances were occasionally seen as causes for those reactions of “hot blood,” the countering of an employer’s threat to report with an emigrant’s threat to that employer’s property or person—which in turn had contributed to what so many referred to as “the Greeks’ view” that “the emigrants” as a whole were a cohort with violent and perhaps criminal tendencies. Others were barred from engaging in at least certain kinds of economic activity. I knew a guy who wanted to start a travel agency. He was here, he was an emigrant. He was well off, he had two brothers engaged in business in Albania. Well, he tried [to start a travel agency]. He tried and he tried. They were saying to him, “You need this paper, that paper.” He persisted. He was very persistent. He persisted for a couple of months. When I saw him one night here at [the bar where we were], I asked, “What’s new? What about your papers?” “You know, I am going back to Albania,” he said. “They don’t let you do it here.” It’s not allowed for the Albanians. It is a right that only the Greeks have.10 Not the Albanians. He

10

From another emigrant I learned that, in Greece, tourism was considered an industry of “special” or “national” interest. This other emigrant, a former university professor who entertained the idea of a travel agency himself, explained further that a travel agency could also be established in Greece by certain other foreigners, such as the citizens of a European Union country.

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returned to Albania about a year ago—a year or a year and a half ago. He [now] has a travel agency in Tirana.

The emigrants had entered the labor market from a position of general inferiority, and the market had taken advantage of them in numerous ways. Employment exploited not only the initial economic inferiority of the emigrants, but ultimately also their legal position, by perpetuating their position of economic inferiority in Greece. In the beginning the emigrant is happy to have a job. It’s not easy to find a job; there are many emigrants in Athens. But unhappiness comes to the surface soon—when the emigrant sees who the boss is, when he sees that the boss is unfair, when the boss does not pay overdue wages, when the boss threatens to lay people off.

In numerous cases, an initially weak legal position readily translated itself into a weak economic position, which in turn prevented an emigrant from becoming legalized, eventually perpetuating both the emigrant’s illegality and his or her position of economic disadvantage. A former army officer, whose own papers were “in order,” for he worked in a well-established transportation company, was concerned about his wife, a one-time teacher who, because she cleaned homes in Athens, could not get “insurance stamps” to prove the duration of her employment in Greece, and therefore remained ineligible for legalization. [. . . B]ecause [the wife’s employers] have not been paying insurance, they have not given her the stamps. She cannot get her papers. We have gone there five times! They say, “The husband is all right, but the wife is not.” How can one keep a family together like this?

The ethnic discrimination that so many talked about could have its economic consequences only in the context of the emigrants’ illegality. Yet, just as they took their illegality for a given, the emigrants typically took as quite natural their economic position which could be legitimately seen as a consequence of their legal position. It is not that the emigrants never talked of things legal; their framing of injustice in legal terms, however, involved only the narrowest conceptualization of law. Instead of focusing on the legal side of things, the emigrants commonly saw it as a cause of essentially emotional turmoil that they were forced to be continuously on the lookout for jobs “regardless of who they were,” regardless, that is, of their skills and abilities and one-time social standing in Albania. Teachers are looking to do all kinds of jobs. They have to, they need the money. Unjust! The need for employment makes people accept all kinds of pay. Emigrants get paid less than what Greek law specifies.

Being illegally in Greece had met a fitting articulation in the emigrants’ usage of a phrase adopted from Albania’s socialist past, where the de facto absence of judicial procedure had relegated the “solving of problems” to a tortuous route of “complaints” to ever higher rungs of the joint party/state hierarchy. Emigrants spoke of the economic disadvantages of their position in Greece as “injustices” for which one “could not complain,” for there was “nowhere to complain” in Greece. Worst of all, the emigrants’ necessarily illegal employment bound their labor to their employers by ties external to the market. Forced to receive employment as a personal favor, the emigrants spoke about work in terms of personal favors. At a more profound level, illegality thus caused the emigrants to see primarily economic

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relations as primarily non-economic—a misidentification that is likely to have economic consequences for a long time to come. Lacking the freedom to participate in the “free market” economy on the same footing as most Greeks, it was part of the economic price of the emigrants’ illegality that virtually the only way to receive employment was as a favor distributable through extra-economic relationships. A majority of the emigrants appeared to be employed by Greeks to whom they had initially been related through one or another non-economic channel. Hence, much as the emigrants spoke of emigration as a move of economic betterment, the relationship of wage labor was typically framed in terms of an essentially non-economic relationship. In cafés the emigrants discussed their employers primarily as acquaintances who were part of networks of neighbors or friends. They even spoke of those who employed them in terms of faux kin, as their or their children’s godfathers or godmothers or scores of cousins and acquaintances thereof. Though never spoken of as a consequence of illegality, baptismal connections stood out among the extra-economic ties that bound the emigrants’ labor to their employers. At one time socialist Albania had prided itself on the distinction of being the “first” and “only” atheist state on the face of the earth: religion was not simply suppressed as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but all the churches and the mosques had been shut down and all religious practices had been declared illegal.11 Many members of the clergy were executed, and of those who were not, most were sentenced up to life terms. Of the rest of the populace, those who cared knew only too well that the slightest external remnants of observance, such as the lighting of candles at the time of a religious holiday, could be very costly. As a consequence, in Greece the emigrants had found themselves utterly ignorant of even the most basic of religious rites. Whether in order to gain social acceptance, bending to outside pressures, sensing vaguely definable benefits, as penance for their past under socialism, or perhaps because of experiencing faith, once in Greece many emigrants had come to the Orthodox Church. When not seeking baptism for themselves, they sought baptism at least for their children. Stories abounded of generous Greeks who had welcomed so many individual emigrants to the Church, often pledging to be godparents for the baptized emigrant or for his or her children. The closer human contacts that surrounded these religious rites, however, had a typically strong economic dimension. The newly baptized or their parents were employed domestically or otherwise by their religious sponsors or by their sponsor’s relatives or social connections. Now, to tell the truth, the family of the boss has helped us. The wife of the boss became godmother to my daughter, right after we brought my daughter to Greece, when she was one year old. They baptized her, with a ceremony, in the church. They made one hundred and one presents to my daughter! But wait a minute, that is all money! Then when my brother-in-law came to Greece—he was very young, my wife has a younger brother—the wife of my boss introduced him to her sister-in-law. And the sister-in-law, the sister-in-law of the wife of my boss, she baptized him, she became his godmother. [The ceremony] was even recorded with a camcorder, on a videocassette. They gave him a job too. In their own depot. They

11

Socialist Albania’s law against religion was passed in 1967 and remained in force until 1991.

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have a depot for packed candy and cookies, for kiosks, for shops.. . . They took him there as if he were their own nephew. In those days Albanians walked around the Omonia Square! Albanians worked for 1,500 drachmae [$4.09] a day! Whereas my brother-in-law had his job secured. They have helped us a lot. Let’s leave aside what some Albanians say, that they are treated badly and what not. The Greek helps you! When you connect to the Greek, the Greek helps you. Sometimes the Greek is better than the Albanian! I speak for my own case.

While it clearly was the emigrants’ legal position and its consequences that restricted their opportunities for employment to personal favors, in practice a personal favor was a personal favor and was talked about as such. Because many emigrants gratefully referred to those who employed them as “a cousin of my godfather” or “the godmother of my daughter,” their talk about things economic systematically shifted focus from the economic dimensions of life to the extra-economic. Such silencing of the economic dimension in primarily economic realities reflected a broader and perhaps ironic misidentification: whereas emigrants brought up economics when speaking of the reasons for emigration, when speaking of their employment they typically focused on family, religious, and social connections. The emigrants’ misidentification of themselves as existentially bound to receive employment only as a personal favor culminated rhetorically in the occasional outright denials of the economic consequences of illegality. There were even emigrants who, assuming a pseudo-historical angle on what had happened “first,” placed the blame of illegality on themselves. “Greeks were not to be blamed” for the Albanians’ social position in Greece, for the Albanians had violated the law by entering Greece illegally. “It’s the Albanians’ own fault,” went this line of reasoning; they might have escaped one-time dictatorial Albania, but from the legitimate perspective of “Greece,” the emigrants had crossed the borders illegally. Even worse, some emigrants had followed that initial violation of the Greek law with “shameful acts” of criminality. Nobody invited the Albanians to come. Did you have poverty in Albania? Yes? All right, then you crossed the border, you came to Greece. The Greeks did not send an invitation to you—“please come!” If Greece gives you a green card,12 you say, “Thank you.” You cannot ask for it. I want it or else.. . . Then why do you steal? It’s our own fault. Not that there are many who steal. But they are Albanians. You came here to work hard, like all the emigrants . . . you were not invited. We can all return. Thousands of Greeks will be happy.. . .

The Economics of Statelessness The one major exception to the emigrants’ generally non-explicit recognition of the economic disadvantages stemming from their illegality is the “Marxist” view espoused by rare and “different” individuals, in which the very reason for the massive

12

The “green card” was a temporary permit for aliens to both reside and work in Greece. According to other emigrants, the green card initially only showed one’s “registration” with the authorities, and was later turned into a temporary permit of residence.

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illegality of the Albanians was economic and implicated the Greek state. Cheap labor was needed in Greece, went that line of reasoning, especially in construction and domestic service, and large numbers of emigrants were needed to keep the wages low; Albanians had been left out of the legalization process for they constituted the majority of the emigrant labor force in Greece.13 Bending to the interests of the “capitalist” employers, the Greek state had turned illegality into the mechanism for carrying out and perpetuating injustice. Rather than caring for “its” people, the state served the interests of “the capitalists” and thus maintained its position in the global order. It is because of the labor of the emigrants that Greece keeps afloat in the European Union. The state is bending to the dictate of the market and its social nature is a lie. The Party of Labor [of Albania] was not so very wrong after all, even though nobody in Albania wanted to listen to it any more.

Although virtually all emigrants agreed to the general and rhetorical statement that they lacked a state to protect them, to most it was incumbent upon the Albanian state rather than the Greek state “to defend” their rights “as human beings.” Not that the actions or inaction of the Greek state received approval. But in the eyes of several emigrants, the stance of the Greek state towards them was somehow not striking in itself. Rather, it was striking as part of a larger, perhaps universal, condition. It was noted, for example, that the Greek state’s turning a semi-blind eye towards the emigrants was met with tolerance by “Europe,” thus compromising Europe’s own moral integrity. Europe knows how Greece treats us, but Europe pretends it does not know. Europeans are afraid of the emigrants. They do not want to do anything for you if they hear the word “emigrant.” They give Greece all that money for the emigrants—supposedly for the emigrants. Europe does not care what Greece does with the money it is given. . . . In fact, they give the money to Greece so that Greece keeps us here. They give the money so that Greece does not let us go to other countries. When the emigrants try to get a visa for [any country in] Europe, the embassies are afraid that we will emigrate to these countries. How do they know that we want to emigrate? If Greece were treating us well, why would the other countries be afraid that we would emigrate there?

Yet while emigrants recognized that the Greek state was “not on our side,” their words about the role of the Greek state in their prolonged condition of illegality could be strikingly benign. A one-time student of the University of Tirana, who after years of manual labor in Greece had once again become a student at one of the universities in Athens, suggested that “Greece did not know” how to deal with the emigrants. Another student, who felt that such lack of experience in dealing with immigration, though real, was still “too easy” an excuse, was himself not particularly unkind to the “inaction” of the Greek state. All right, Greece had never had emigrants before. Albanians were the first emigrants to come to Greece. But why did Greeks not seek experience from Germany? Germans could have told them how to deal with the emigrants. When you do not know something, you go to your neighbor. You knock on the door. Knock, knock. You tell your neighbor, “Dear 13

As mentioned earlier, the Albanian immigrants are estimated to constitute between 7 and 15% of Greece’s national labor force.

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neighbor, I have this problem.” Greeks should have known how to deal with the emigrants, because they have been emigrants themselves in Europe and in Australia. And if they did not know, they should have asked.

The emigrants’ acceptance of the stance of the Greek state towards them appeared rooted in the prevalent feeling that they were foreigners in Greece—“as Albanians,” they did not belong to the Greek state. As much as they detested racism and as much as they were disadvantaged by being treated as Albanians, the emigrants also accepted their not belonging in Greece as a natural order. One former army officer was visibly amused by my question of why the Greek state did not consider the emigrants its own and why the emigrants did not consider the Greek state their own. To have the same rights as Greeks, that would be ideal. [Pauses] But we cannot compare ourselves to the Greeks. This is their country.. . . If Greeks were to come to Albania, they would be foreigners there too.

The emigrants’ indignation about “not having a state” concerned the Albanian state instead of the Greek state. The state that had succeeded socialism, and to which the emigrants belonged by default even though they had lived in Greece for over a decade, caused great frustration. The emigrants seemed to feel that the Albanian state “did not care” about “its people,” even though, in their eyes, it was incumbent upon the Albanian state to “defend the rights of the emigrants.” The only emigrants who do not have their own schools [in Greece] are the Albanians. Why, there are so many teachers, so many intellectuals, who could have taught these children. The children are losing their mother tongue.. . . The Greek state cannot be blamed for this. And emigrants cannot be blamed either. This is the fault of the Albanian state. The [Albanian] state remains a great distance from us. It has abandoned us. The Albanian politicians do not care what will become of our children. The Albanian emigrant is not supported by the [Albanian] state.

Given that virtually everyone in Greece, including the emigrants themselves, seemed to think of emigrants as “foreigners,” people who, despite living in Greece, did not belong to the Greek state, the indifference of the state of Albania to “its people” had left the emigrants in de facto statelessness. The condition of de facto statelessness meant, among other things, economic deprivations and a profound sense of economic insecurity. A former teacher of history complained that lack of “coordination” between the Albanian and the Greek state with respect to her old-age pension would eventually translate into an economic burden to her family. I do not know where this is going. We do not have a state. [In Albania l]ife was secure. I knew what I was going to do. Here there is no security. It is a strange emigration. I am afraid of what life holds in store. There is no agreement that the years I have worked in Albania will be recognized here [for an old-age pension]. You cannot even think about a pension! I will only have half a pension from Albania. I will be a burden to my children.

The perception that the two states did not coordinate with each other to aid the emigrants was sweeping. Yet at the same time there were indications that emigrants perceived some kind of conspiracy against them by both Albania and Greece. For example, to comply with the most basic legal obligations for remaining in Greece even “illegally,” the emigrants found themselves in constant need of documents that

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could be issued only by the Albanian state. The perception was that the Albanian state heavily abused its monopoly on these documents. It is almost as if the Greek state and the Albanian state have a hidden agreement with each other to make the life of the emigrant difficult. The emigrant is suffering enough! No need for more! Look, the Greek state requires papers that the Albanian state should give. From the hand to the mouth. The emigrant has to pay for getting the papers. Why does this not happen with the Polish emigrants? Or with the Russians?

The process of obtaining personal documentation from the Albanian embassy in Athens drew spirited complaints from virtually everyone I spoke to. We need to pay 30 euros [$25.97] for one document at the embassy. The Polish emigrant, the Bulgarian emigrant, they pay 1.5 euros [$1.30] to their embassies. And they get their certificates in order. Not like the Albanians. And they have schools for their children in their own languages. That is because [the Polish and Bulgarian] emigrants have states. Because their states care for their people.

As the Albanian state made the financial burden of illegality heavier, some of the complaints could be in hackneyed nationalistic tones. Emigrants are the sons of Albania, the sons and daughters of Albania. Why does this government not raise its voice for their rights? Why does it make us spend endless hours waiting in front of the embassy? The national interest.. . .

But numerous emigrants voiced their unhappiness with the high consular fees in economic terms. A construction subcontractor who at one time held an academic position in Albania took a “cool” look at things: Albania does not export anything. Electricity is not paid for. It is ridiculous. The state loses money because people steal the electricity.14 So the government does not make any money. All the money that they make is from taxes. That is why the consular fees are high. Extraordinary! They should collect the money to run the state from the customs, not from the emigrants.

To some others, there was intentional cruelty in the economic exploitation of the emigrants by the state of Albania. The Albanian Embassy in Athens . . . the mouth of the Albanian state . . . sucks the sweat and the blood of the emigrants. Prices [i.e., consular fees] are inhuman. A certificate that you need for your child is 5 euros [$4.33]. A certificate that you need for getting a permit of residence in Greece is 30 euros [$25.97]. Everything that they do . . . costs the emigrants dearly. Every single stamp they put on the paper. You cannot blame the people who work at the embassy for the fees. It is the Albanian state that sucks the blood of the emigrants.

Consular fees were not alone in drawing such words, however. Everything from the size of the embassy staff to the way in which the embassy’s business hours were scheduled was perceived as a contribution to the worsening of the economic condition of the emigrants. The general impression seemed to be that the very setup of the Albanian embassy in Athens could not but breed corruption.

14

Under Albania’s state socialism, public utilities were a monopoly of the state; the perception among the emigrants was that that continued to be the case.

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It takes two days to get to talk to somebody inside [the Albanian embassy]. Every emigrant needs papers; you will not be given a residence permit without a load of papers from the [Albanian] embassy. The passport and the certificates that the Greeks need [for an emigrant to be issued various sorts of permits] have to go through the hands of the [Albanian] embassy.. . . The emigrant has to lose at least one day of work to get to the embassy, if an emigrant is not in Athens. Then the emigrant has to wait in a queue. If you do not have a connection inside [the embassy], then you have to wait in the queue. It is longer than the lines for curdled cheese in Albania!15 People wait for days in the queue. So it is cheaper to pay somebody for a slot in the queue—one opportunity for corruption. But giving some money for a slot saves you one day of work. One day of work is not only money. A missed day of work is also a dented relationship with the employer. The emigrant can lose his job if he does not show up to work for two or three days. Easily.. . . What about staying in Athens? Not all emigrants have a cousin here. Even when they do, you cannot always come to stay at the cousin’s.. . . Instead of adding one person to the personnel of the embassy, which would have made the waiting lines shorter, the Albanian politicians have vacations abroad. They do not have 12,000 dollars to pay another employee at the embassy, but to buy Mercedes cars for 100,000 dollars they do have the money.16 The salary for an extra employee at the embassy is not going to be more than 12,000 dollars. That is what the Albanian state pays them, one thousand dollars a month. There are one million Albanians in Greece. Every emigrant needs at least one certificate. One million people times 5 euros [$4.33] per certificate? If each emigrant needs only one certificate from the embassy in one year, the Albanian state makes 5 million euros [$4.33 million] in one year from these certificates alone. What does it cost them to put another person here?

The emigrants’ very condition of statelessness, not simply that condition’s negative economic impact, were at times blamed on Albania’s politicians. Corruption was widely perceived as the reason why “they,” the politicians who were talked about as proxies for the Albanian state, “do not care.” The limited number of transportation channels that connected Greece and Albania, for example, was widely believed to be but one instance of such corruption.17 While the emigrants speculated about who exactly benefited from one or another particular instance of corruption,

15

The proverbial length of the queues for curdled cheese in one-time Albania was due to a series of peculiarities of the planned economy’s retailing sector. While milk and yogurt were distributed to stores very early each day of the work week, and drew steady queues that required the discipline of waking up very early in the morning, the two other main dairy products people commonly used, the feta cheese and the butter, typically being in shorter supply, had ended up in the voucher by the 1980s and could theoretically be purchased when there were no queues. By contrast, curdled cheese was as unpredictable as this context had made it desirable. Not deemed essential enough to be included in the voucher, curdled cheese just popped up in the urban dairy outlets once every few months, at random times, and unlike milk and yogurt, typically not early in the morning. Because it was not included in the voucher, curdled cheese could be purchased in addition to the regular voucher allotments. All of these apparently made even the rumor that curdled cheese “might be coming” a good reason to form lengthy queues in front of the dairies. 16 At around the time this conversation took place, a number of emigrants seemed impressed by a media report about one or another individual of Albania’s legion of ministers and former ministers who had recently purchased a Mercedes automobile for well over $100,000. 17 Those who were settled in Greece were said to no longer go across the borders by foot. And because most did not own cars, the emigrants relied on the bus lines for their travel to Albania. The busses were extremely old and unmaintained. One trip between Athens and Tirana that I took on the bus ended up being a trip on three different busses: The first bus broke down literally a few minutes after starting; two hours of waiting later, we were transferred to a different bus; and

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Fig. 9.1 Towards the Albania bus

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they felt that, as they carried the financial burden, virtually “everyone” was involved in a conspiracy of profound economic impact against them. Don’t go as far as the embassy. Tell me about the bus lines. Why are there no other bus lines—only this one bus line? Because the money goes into the pockets of those high up. I do not know who. Some say [the prime minister of Albania at the time], some say [a previous prime minister of Albania], some say [a senior member of the Albanian government]. I do not know. One of them—one of those who can do this. It’s not just the [consular] fees. Even the money from the buses . . . they steal! Have you seen those people who put the bags in [the belly of] the bus? Even they want money. One thousand lek [$2.73]. One thousand lek here, one thousand lek there. What kind of thieves must these people be! It’s enough to make you lose your mind!

Remittances The emigrants weakened their economic condition even further by sending objects and money “home,” to members of their immediate “family” or to more distant relatives in Albania. Virtually every emigrant I spoke with remitted. There is no typical amount. A person sends what that person can. It also depends on what the folks [in Albania] need. It mostly depends on what the person can send. In Albania, they need everything. It depends on how much one can afford [to send].

“Sending” to Albania was a subject of much talk and it is likely that most emigrants remitted more value in objects than in cash. We find [various consumer goods] for little money here. Things they do not have in Albania. [Albania] has deteriorated completely. Trash. The trash of all the world goes there— especially from Turkey. Not to mention the prices! Poor them, what they spend their money on.. . . We can find [various goods] for only a little here.

The involvement with sending objects consumed not simply money but also attention and time. Last week a friend of my wife’s went to Albania, with her son. But they did not tell us [in time]. [Pauses] She told us Wednesday, and she was to leave Friday night. There was no time to buy anything.. . . I wanted to send something small to [a cousin about whom we were talking], for his son that was born. It takes time to do the shopping. You need to run around a lot to find things. For the right prices. Because if you want to pay any price, you can easily find things. At the Hondos18 you find everything. But I am talking about things that are affordable, prices for the pocket of the emigrant.

Those emigrants who did not have close family left in Albania, or whose families were said to be “good,” i.e., well off, could be talked about in envy as exceptions who “did not have needs.” A former librarian, who after selling the apartment she

then, after this one also broke down just before reaching the Albanian border, we had to squeeze into the bus coming behind us. 18 A local chain of upscale department stores, one of which occupied a multi-story building on the Omonia Square in the center of Athens.

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Fig. 9.2 Each night, three, four, and sometimes more busses left Athens for Tirana from this station

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and her husband owned in Tirana had lost the money in the collapse of the usury firms in 1997, described the fortunate economic position of her brother. My parents live in their home in [a town not far from Tirana]. They had been with my brother, but moved back [to their home] when my brother and his family came to Greece. But my brother kept his apartment.. . . “No,” he said, “I will not sell it.” Not that he knew what would happen to [the usury firms]. Who would have imagined that? He was thinking, the parents are old, pensioners.. . . If the money [from the hypothetical sale of the apartment] is in a firm, they would have to wait in line every month to pick up the interest. He did not want to let the pensioners wait in line. There were long lines [at the usury firms to collect the interest]. People used to say “waiting at [the name of the firm] is like waiting at the Italian embassy.” Oh, those times! But they passed. My brother thought, better an apartment, with a tenant inside, than to have the pensioners wait in line. So he saved his apartment. He used to say, “That apartment is their morsel of bread, let them have their morsel in peace.” He rented out his apartment when they came to Greece; the tenant pays [directly] to my parents. Every three months . . . a good apartment in Tirana, no problem to rent. My brother, my sister-in-law, they do not need to send anything [to Albania] now. Only little presents, when they go there. They both have jobs. All that they earn is for them.

Relatives who had not emigrated were often described as having difficult times making ends meet, given the “situation in Albania,” so that the objects and the money that the emigrants remitted fulfilled some sense of duty. But the emigrants also seemed to depend on their kin in Albania in certain ways, so remittances could be more appropriately seen as part of an ongoing exchange among relatives. In addition to allowing for social communication beyond the immediate family members in Greece, such networks usually produced “favors” that were essential to the emigrants’ livelihoods. For example, virtually every emigrant obtained documents that could be obtained only in Albania with the help of his or her kin network—documents ranging from “original” birth certificates and school degrees to any of a number of doctored papers. The understanding was also that, until recently, some emigrants received money from Albania as well. In the years of the [usury] firms I went to Albania in the summer and in the winter. My brother collected the interest from the money at [the usury firm], and he kept it for me, the money that I did not want reinvested. Those were the good times—the times of Sali Berisha19 ! I could see the family often, my parents. The last time, before the war [of 1997] broke out, I had just put the green card in order, and I took the plane back to Athens.

Though emigrants thus drew benefits from maintaining their connections across the borders, the money and objects they sent to Albania were taken from what could have been consumed in Greece. A youth reflected on her enjoyment of shopping “for Albania”: It is fun to shop . . . I wish we could have for ourselves some of those things we buy for Albania. But we are here, as [the parents] say. They are in Albania, they do not even get to see the things we have.

Remittances thus put into question the purported economic advantage of emigration for the individual emigrant more than any of the other causes of economic

19

At the time, Sali Berisha was the former president of Albania.

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disadvantage. They decreased even further the emigrants’ disposable income, which already was below native workers’ levels. Yet the emigrants typically did not complain about sending money and things to Albania. In the words of a former army officer who worked at a station of regional buses, providing for the people one cared about amounted to the very “meaning of life”—and showed, again, the superiority of Greece. [T]he best thing would have been to have had my parents in Greece. Since that cannot happen, the next best thing is to send them things there—so that they can feel like they are here. Because their son emigrated. The sacrifices he is making in Greece for himself will at least serve his parents. Emigrants can send because they are able to.

Chapter 10

Portrait of Llambi S., Math Teacher, Member of Albania’s Party of Labor, Olive Plucker, Construction Helper, Lottery Peddler, Café Proprietor

At the age of 66, Llambi S. works ten hours every day in the one-room café on the outskirts of Athens which he has owned for not very long. He practically never takes the weekend off. The café embodies the savings from his working on a farm in Greece and in the construction of a hospital, from his peddling lottery tickets and affixing posters on the walls in a small city not far from the Albanian border, from his wife’s work as a domestic cleaner, as well as from the help given by Llambi’s brother-in-law in Albania. Before migrating to Greece in early 1992, Llambi taught math in Albania for over three decades, was a member of the Party of Labor, and vice principal of his high school. Although an ethnic Greek, in emigration Llambi has realized how much of an Albanian he is at heart.

Albania’s Downhill Llambi remembers the early 1990s in Albania as if they were yesterday. Some of the members of the Party of Labor began sending letters to the Central Committee for their names to be written off the membership lists. Everything that was wrong in Albania they blamed on the Party, and wanted to get out. “Cowardly,” Llambi thought, “to benefit from the Party a lifetime, and then switch sides when it is sliding.” To this day Llambi is upset with those who blame the Party of Labor for everything that went wrong in Albania. Young people now speak as if Albania had always been bad. But Llambi, who has lived through all those years that the others only talk about, knows well that it was not until the early 1980s that things in Albania started going downhill. It was only after the breakup with the Chinese that food shortages, vouchers, and long queues started. Llambi, for one, is convinced that if things in Albania had continued the way they were before the early 1980s, the need to emigrate would never have arisen. He, for one, would never have emigrated. 121

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Unlike many of those who “betrayed the Party,” Llambi never asked to be written off the Party’s membership. Instead, right after the Albanian state lifted the restrictions on passports, Llambi and his family sought the help of the Greek embassy in Tirana to emigrate to Greece. Fortunately, this could be done legally, for he was an ethnic Greek.

A Minoritar in Albania In Albania Llambi was considered a minoritar. The whole village where he was born and grew up spoke Greek, although most youth could also speak Albanian. His maternal grandmother was the only one in his family to not speak any Albanian; all the others could speak at least some, though the elderly not fluently. Llambi himself was always good at school and fluent in Albanian. After two years in the military service, during which he was sent to the north of Albania, he could go for specialized teachers training in a city near Tirana. Llambi worked hard, for he had no powerful connections to draw on, and completed the training successfully. He was proud to receive a 5 in every subject, for this was before the introduction of the grading scale of 10, when 5 was the highest grade. Back then grades were also harder to get than they became later. It was the late 1950s, and the distribution of jobs to people, or of people to jobs, as it was called back then, was centrally done “by the state.” At the end of the last year in school, the head of the education section of the executive committee had come to Llambi’s class with a list of the names of all the students and announced in front of them the jobs to which they had been assigned. Llambi was sent to a village on Albania’s southwestern coast, to teach math at a newly founded universal high school. In the village Llambi met his wife, who back then was a young accountant at the local branch of what was called the State Enterprise for Social Food. Seven years after having settled in the village, Llambi requested to become a member of the Party of Labor. It was not very difficult for people in the village to join the Party, far less difficult than for those who lived in cities—at least when people did not have problems in their biographies. To the chagrin of some in the village, “as a minoritar” Llambi was especially encouraged to join the Party. He too realized that the willingness of the Party to add ethnic Greeks as members was perhaps a bit for show. Llambi knew that there were “differences” between the Albanians and the ethnic Greeks. But he also believed that things had generally gotten better after the National Liberation War. He reflects that he may have been indoctrinated; perhaps he used to believe a little too much in the cause of the Party. Still, to this day in 2002, Llambi would repeat again that after the War many things in Albania improved. Two years after becoming a member of the Party, Llambi was promoted to vice principal of the school. Another two years later he was sent to a small town nearby, to fill the position of vice principal at that town’s high school. His wife was given a job in accounting for the town’s executive committee. People had

A Minoritar in Albania 123

Fig. 10.1 On weekends, some emigrants from Athens traveled to Piraeus for shopping

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respected him in the village, and in the town he also gained respect. Although he was a minoritar, Llambi was treated “just like everyone else.” Also, the pupils were generally eager to learn; they respected his subject. In those days math was “the brain” of education in Albania. Literature was the heart, and the other subjects were the organs. But math was the most respected, because it was the brain. Instead of making math hard, like some other teachers did in order to command even more respect, Llambi won the respect of the pupils by making math understandable for everyone. Some of his pupils even went on to study math at the university in Tirana.

The Party Had Exaggerated a Bit about the Capitalist World Llambi was shocked by many things when he entered Greece in 1991. He realized that the negative propaganda of the Party of Labor about the capitalist world had clearly been exaggerated. He had never before seen anywhere near as much merchandise in Albania. Virtually all the stores in Greece, even those in the small town where Llambi settled first, were loaded with carpets and with clothes. Even the electric and electronic objects that back then were nearly impossible to get in Albania, such as color televisions, refrigerators, and washing machines, could be had in plenty. Llambi was most impressed by “the custom” of placing the goods outside the shop to attract customers. In Greece one could buy any kind of food one wished, there were no queues, there were no vouchers. It was the year 1991, and Llambi had simply not been able to imagine that so much food could be so freely available. Still, the wealth of capitalist Greece and the exaggerations of the negative propaganda did not mean that the Party had been entirely wrong. Work was hard in Greece, and there was a lot of exploitation. Those who did not have capital, such as Llambi himself in the beginning, were especially exploited. It also hurt Llambi that the respect a teacher received in Albania was missing. Already in his mid 50s, and having taught math for three decades, Llambi had to earn his money by working with his hands. For the first few months in Greece, both he and his wife worked in the fields, collecting olives and doing every other kind of work that was needed on a small farm. Language was a great problem; Greeks spoke Greek differently from the way Greek was spoken in Albania. There were also discussions about communism in Albania, and Llambi did not like it that many Greeks called Albania’s socialism a “dictatorship.” Truth be told, the Albanians themselves should be blamed for this. In those early days, there were Greeks who respected Enver Hoxha. But the emigrants, who had “not yet seen the world with their own eyes,” spoke ill of Albania. So it was the Albanians who first spoke ill of Albania, it was the Albanians who spoke of “the dictatorship,” and only then did the Greeks pick it up. After only a few months on the farm, Llambi and his wife moved to a small city not far from the Albanian border, where he could work for a hospital construction project, and his wife could clean houses. But Llambi could not endure the physical

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toil for long. He felt something he is still not quite able to express about working like that at his age. Within two weeks his back had started aching and things ended up in “a crisis.” Virtually all the Greeks he met appeared incapable of understanding his life in Albania. They thought everyone in Albania was poor to the point of literal starvation. Many believed that the Greek minority in Albania was oppressed. It was nearly impossible for Llambi to communicate that he had been neither hungry nor oppressed in Albania. When he tried to explain that he had been a respected person in Albania, his interlocutors would rudely ask why then he had emigrated to Greece. On the other hand, the merchandise Llambi and his wife saw in shop windows intimidated both of them. After the initial disbelief, shock, and other emotions that are hard to put into words, Llambi began reflecting that, since both he and his wife were no longer young, if they were to continue earning the amounts of money for which they were working at the time, they would never afford most of the objects they could see in the shop windows. In a gust of desperation, he quit the construction job. Yet they would not return to Albania. Albania “was going down” at the time, and as a member of the Party of Labor Llambi could never know whether he would again be given a teacher’s job there. So Llambi began peddling lottery tickets in the daytime, and, at night, affixing posters on walls for a small advertising agency. His wife continued to clean houses and she always tried to expand her network among the relatives and acquaintances of those she worked for. They set themselves the goal to start a small business, perhaps a restaurant, and not let themselves be exploited. It was clear that capital was needed to survive in Greece. And to get the capital, they had to work even harder and save. Over five years of doing just that, working hard and saving, they managed to accumulate “something.” Then Llambi traveled to Albania to talk things over with his brother-in-law. It was the first time he had returned to Albania after almost six years in Greece. His brother-in-law had left the village on the coast to start a small shop in Tirana, selling hard liquor produced in the village. There was still a lot of money going around in Albania. This was all before 1997, before the war of the usury firms began. The brother-in-law promised to help, and, soon after Llambi returned to Greece, he sent to Llambi the money he had promised. Pooling together the savings of five years of both his and his wife’s hard work in Greece, and with the contribution of his brother-in-law in Albania, Llambi finally had the capital for the small shop he and his wife had wanted to start. A restaurant would have required much more starting capital. But that was all right too, as both Llambi and his wife felt that they had become too old to run a restaurant. The money they had was enough only for a small café or for a kiosk. Liking the idea of a café better, they decided to move to Athens and start their café there. After considering different possibilities for a while, Llambi managed to buy a one-room unit that could be used for a business in the ground floor of an apartment building. It was in the outskirts of Athens, very far from the center, but Llambi “could smell” that the location was good for a shop. A few months later Llambi and his wife also bought the necessary licenses and equipment from a liquidation. While his wife established a new network of acquaintances in Athens,

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and continued to clean homes, Llambi began spending day and night in the café. Yet from the first moment he owned the café Llambi felt he was no longer exploited by anyone. And soon his shop began returning the money that had been invested.

An Ethnic Greek, but an Albanian at Heart After all the years in Greece, Llambi still keeps his card of membership in the Party of Labor of Albania. The reason why he joined the Party decades ago was his ethnicity rather than his career prospects; after all, he already was a teacher when he joined the Party. In Albania Llambi had felt that his ethnicity was a central part of his identity. He was a Greek after all and he sought to be accepted as an equal to the Albanians. He had sometimes felt that a member of the Greek minority could encounter small barriers to certain things. But the socialist state treated him well; in day-to-day life he had not felt that he was treated “different.” Did he not get a good education? And was he not promoted to the position of the vice principal of the town’s high school? Not long after coming to Greece, Llambi found himself thinking ever more about his identity. Who was Llambi in his heart? Was he an Albanian? Or was he a Greek? The Greek spoken in Greece was different from the Greek they spoke in the village in his youth. His wife, who is Albanian, knew even less Greek. They were treated as if they had never seen the world before. In Albania Llambi had never questioned his being a Greek. But in Greece, Llambi began to realize how much of an Albanian he was at heart. Eventually he came to the conclusion that even though he is a Greek, Albania is the country where he truly belongs. So while working in his own café is more rewarding than working for others was in his first years in Greece, Llambi plans to remain in Greece for only as long as he will continue working, perhaps only “a few more years.” Then he wants to sell the café, and, together with his wife, return to Albania. Not to the village where he grew up, however. Llambi’s parents died a long time ago, and, after not living in the village for so long, there are no real connections left. They will also not return to his wife’s village on the southern coast; his wife’s parents are also dead. Truth be told, Llambi and his wife are now used to the life of a big city. They will perhaps like to move to Tirana, to be near Llambi’s brother-in-law, the one who helped them start the café in Athens.

Chapter 11

Why Emigrants Do Not Return to Albania

Put together, what the emigrants said about the condition of emigration should have made the case against remaining in Greece. Lacking proper permissions to reside and work in Greece, indeed, de facto stateless, the emigrants suffered from ethnic discrimination as well as from numerous economic disadvantages. They also bore “the bad name of the Albanians,” for which none of those I spoke to saw himself or herself as responsible. Why then did the emigrants not return to Albania?1

The Past in the Present of Albania The proposition of returning to Albania as an alternative to their present in Greece typically invited the emigrants to describe contemporary Albania as the reason why they would not return. Contemporary Albania was to emigrants their past territorialized on the other side of the border, unchanged and perhaps unchangeable. In the words of an exasperated youth, [t]here is no promise in Albania. Albania does not promise anything. If you meet people in the street, they never talk about anything meaningful. They never talk about anything other than a fight. Or they talk about the quarrels of the politicians. They are seeking out a fight—always. Always on the lookout for a fight. They want to put the other person down all the time. They want to figure out whether someone offended them so that they can start a fight. And if you do not do anything to them, then they want to offend you, they want to start it themselves. There is nothing better to do in Albania. People are all busy showing off their vanity and their arrogance.

While the superiority of present-day Greece over 1980s Albania could be made tangible through descriptions of the lack of televisions and refrigerators, the emigrants were well aware that all the formerly unreachable objects were now available in Albania. Yet to them, present-day Albania still contained and even stood for the poverty and “backwardness” which they had overcome. To justify their remaining in Greece in the preferred terms of tangible objects, the emigrants often employed

1 Though in the absence of proper documentation, scholars believe that there is little if any return migration to Albania (e.g., Barjaba 1999).

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narratives of their recent visits to Albania to establish that, in Albania, the present was not very different from the past. While most acknowledged that a wide range of once lacking material goods were now available in Albania, they saw the inferiority of contemporary Albania vis-à-vis Greece in the intrinsic inferiority of the objects that were available in Albania vis-à-vis those that were available in Greece. According to those emigrants who had traveled to Albania recently, “things in Albania” had changed their appearances while substantially remaining the same. To a former mine worker and amateur actor who had become a welder in Greece, the constant shortage of water and electricity in Albania2 was one of the many things that, while not immediately visible to an outsider, made the present there not that much different from the past, and made Greece “incomparable.” We do not lack anything [in Greece]. We have all the conditions here. True, we do work harder. I work harder than I used to [in Albania]. But then when I return home, I can take a shower. There is electricity, there is hot water. These are basic things, which they [people in Albania] do not have. [In Albania] you can have a boiler in your bathroom, but when the water has been interrupted and there is no electricity, you cannot take a shower. People have now bought water deposits for the roof. But you still have to wait for the electricity to be restored. [City] busses run without any apparent schedule, and are filthy. Scary. The private shuttles are filthy.3 No rule seems to govern them.

Other emigrants focused especially on electric or electronic items that, although available in Albania, they regarded as “simply forget it” because of the profound differences in these objects’ qualities, spoken about as intrinsic worth. The differences in the qualities of objects established that while, say, clothing or small electronic items or various household goods that were available to the emigrants in Greece were available in Albania too, those in Greece were intrinsically superior to the ones in Albania. This intrinsic superiority of objects implied the larger conclusion of the superiority of Greece over Albania, which justified remaining in Greece. Medicines are expired. There is no control. The pharmacists attend to their own [economic] well-being.. . . Why should they attend to the well-being of the others, when their economic interest is at stake? They sell expired medicines, with the expiry dates wiped out. Or they put a label on top of the expiry date so people cannot see that it has expired.

2 Albanian cities must have first begun experiencing shortages of electricity and water in the early 1980s. Due to, among other things, the weakening and eventual collapse of the socialist state’s planned economy and the obliteration of urban infrastructure because of domestic as well as international migration, these shortages were continuously exacerbated. The bottom was perhaps hit by the late 1990s, when water ran for only about two to three hours per day in Albania’s main cities—even shorter during summers—and electricity “came” for only about half of the day—less during winters. Through at least the end of my fieldwork in Tirana in 2003, there were no signs that this situation was about to improve, though scores of Albania’s “politicians” seemed to have a taste for unceasingly announcing that the “situation” of both water and electricity would be normalized “within weeks”—sometimes the situation was even pronounced as already in order. 3 After the de facto collapse of Albania’s public transportation system in the early 1990s, some of the domestic and even interurban routes previously served by state owned and operated busses began to be served by “shuttles”—a wide range of individually owned vehicles, mostly small trucks, which were converted for transporting passengers and were generally run without much in the way of licenses.

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Food was a prominent medium for the discursive transition of Albania’s past into its present. Whereas the economic policies of the socialist state had kept Albanians from decent food in the pre-1990s past, the emigrants described their choice of foods in Greece as “just like in Europe,” sometimes even “better than in Europe.” The fact that many years “after democracy” Albania still largely lacked real supermarkets was brought up as clear evidence that the condition of the past more generally had remained unchanged. Foodstuffs were said to be often imported to Albania from Greece, so even when an item that was available in Greece was available in Albania also, the quality of the one in Albania was deemed necessarily inferior to the quality of nominally the same item in Greece. In Greece we do pay more money for the food, but at least we know what we get. When I went to Albania, to my parents in [a southern city], they have the same Greek margarine there as we have here, the same brand. [Albanian m]erchants buy it in Greece, when it expires in the depots, and they sell it there. [In Albania] the same margarine I buy here, to spread on my bread, was more expensive than it is here! My mother had bought a pack before I arrived, because she knew I liked it.. . . When I opened the pack, it was dark yellow. I almost could not eat the stuff. Next time I go to Albania I will bring my margarine with me from Greece. I am serious! But the bus takes fourteen hours to get there! In fourteen hours the margarine is all liquid. If you freeze it after it has melted, then it is yellow, like the one you buy there. . . Albanians do not have choices.

The lack in Albania of supermarkets worthy of the name, and the intrinsic qualities of fresh foods, discursively established the difference between Albania and Greece as one that, while perhaps subtle, was more profound than monetary terms could express. In addition to the country’s dependence on imports, the shortage of electricity, and the poor infrastructure more generally, good food was thought impossible to be had in Albania also simply because Albania was not Greece. They make souvlakia4 in Albania now. But the meat is old. There was one place in Tirana, on the Durrës Avenue,5 when I went to Tirana to visit my uncle for a day, where it looked like they had kept the meat in the gyro for a week—or even longer. There is not as much consumption there. I read in the newspaper that they had given fines to a souvlakia place in the tourist quarter in Athens, because the meat in the gyro was old. Look what they did! [In Athens t]he police caught them in the morning, when they were putting in the gyro the meat from the night before. Where would you find such police in Albania? To look at the gyro? The police in Albania are chasing bribes. They would keep the meat there for a week. If you get diarrhea, that is your own problem.

To a youth who attended a college in Athens supported by her emigrant parents, and who was herself not so concerned with the difference between the two countries— the decision to emigrate to Greece had not really been hers—encountering unpalatable ice cream had nevertheless proved right the implicit view that, as in Albania money could not buy everything, being in Greece was an intrinsically superior way of being.

4 Skewered meat commercialized as fast-food; the emigrants used souvlakia also to refer to any small fast-food joint. 5 Rruga e Durrësit is among Tirana’s core landmarks.

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We went out to have an ice cream in one of the places near the Lana.6 We sat down and my cousin said that I should get the Greek ice cream. I was visiting in Tirana—you know what I mean, I was a guest, coming from Athens—so he wanted to be nice to me, my cousin. He wanted to treat me in such a way that I would not lack anything—just like the way we have things in Greece. So I ordered the Greek ice cream, a cup from EVGA. That was the lousiest ice cream I have ever had! I mean, it was stale. Can the word “stale” describe ice cream? That’s what it was, really stale. It had no flavor. In Albania electricity is cut off all the time, you know, so ice cream melts in the fridge all the time. When the electricity comes back, the ice cream freezes again. And they sell it that way. I could not eat it! I mean it. I just cannot understand how these people can live that way. I licked my spoon two or three times, and I had to let it stand. I was sorry for my cousin’s money. But I could not get that ice cream down my throat. I simply could not. I apologized to my cousin, I told him I was feeling lousy. I said maybe I was getting nauseated because of my periods. I did not want to offend him, you know, because he was taking me out to this place, which was an expensive place. But that ice cream tasted like nothing.

The Continuity of Decline It was not simply the continued absence of quality objects that made returning to Albania not an alternative to emigration. To a former newspaper editor who peddled lottery tickets nearby a metro station in Athens, there was more than just a lack of taste to the inferior quality of food in contemporary Albania: the daily thawing and refreezing of imported foods due to power interruptions amounted to a health hazard with unforeseeable long term effects for the young. How can the children be healthy? When you think of the electricity that is cut off all the time.... All those foods that children are fed in Albania, they have all been frozen, because they are all imported foods. In Albania practically all food comes from the refrigerator.. . . [O]ne time [foods] thaw when the electricity is cut off, then they freeze again when the electricity comes back.. . . One time this way, one time that way. In the winter they cut off the electricity three times a day, because they do not want people to use it for heating.. . . If people use electricity for heating, one can say, all right, they may have a right to cut the electricity off. But what about the refrigerators? In Shkodër, where my brother lives, they had only four hours of electricity per day last winter. How can the foods be healthy—for the children? There is no way! There is no control over the food in Albania. There is nothing like that in Greece. In Greece at least you know what you are eating. You cannot know what you feed your children in Albania. Poor children! Small babies eating spoiled foods. Many people get food poisoning in Albania. Food poisoning, all the time. They wonder where it comes from. Was it the fish? Was it the chicken? The cheese? The milk? Anything can be spoiled. But there is nobody to complain to. People have to take it just like that. If you get food poisoning, you drink a glass of sugared lemonade to throw up. Or you go drink a glass of water with baking soda and lemon to soothe your stomach. What will become of these children who are poisoned this way?

6 Before the usury firms were brought to their end in 1997, several dozens of cafés, restaurants, and other small shops were operated alongside the banks of Lana, the stream that runs through downtown Tirana.

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In accounts even more explicit about it than the above, the problem with contemporary Albania was not just that it continued to be “where it had been,” but that it had not even maintained its one-time condition. Albania “had fallen.” Mirroring the opinion of scholars, some of the better read emigrants identified Albania’s economic decline to have begun “after China,” at some point in the 1970s or early 1980s.7 Dismissing in effect the economic effects of the political changes after the 1990s, a number of emigrants viewed that trajectory of decline as simply having continued. The present-day result of the continued and continuing decline was that “the basic things” which in a faraway past were taken for granted, simply no longer existed in Albania. To a former engineer who maintained close connections with his relatives across the border, food was an obvious case in point. While food in Albania was thus said to have never been as good as the food that emigrants enjoyed in Greece, the food of the past had been better than the food of the present. Albanians themselves complain, those who have to live there. In the past, food could be eaten without fear. You could eat anything. Anything that was put in a shop, anything that was for sale—all was controlled. Have you heard the story of the butcher? Who sold donkey meat for beef? Who was jailed? Yes, he was jailed for twenty years! [Albania’s one-time socialist state] did not forgive! That state had its own sins . . . but in things like that, such things it did not forgive. Does anybody care now? Donkey, horse, dog. If they see it red and bloody, people eat it.

The decline in the quality of foods and other objects, such as the similarly often recounted clothing items, was only one dimension of the continuity of the past into the present as continuity in a trajectory of decline. Another prominent dimension of Albania’s fall was the much-contemplated physical violence there. Violence and the ubiquity of crime contrasted Albania, where life had become “practically unbearable,” to Greece, where “you can walk outside at any time of day or night without fear.” In the account of a young emigrant who lived in Greece only since 1998, violence in contemporary Albania had become random, entirely devoid of reason, and inescapable: [I]t became fashionable to be a murderer, to have killed someone, to have killed people. Why? Why are these youths not using their minds? Where is their logic? The ignorance in Albania is such that people do not know what they are doing. They do not know why they are doing what they are doing, they act without a purpose. That is to be an animal; the person who acts without a purpose is an animal, he is not a person. No, even the animal has a purpose. These youths are lower than the animals. Their heads are empty, they are missing their brains.. . . The youths, the young guys, have killed people for the sheer excitement of taking aim with a gun.. . . There were young guys with a Kalashnikov in their hands who looked at people walking in the street and decided on the spot, they decided on a whim, that they did not like the way some person looked, and they decided to shoot that person. They have shot people who were just walking by, who were just minding their own business! I have been there myself. Once I had a bullet fly next to my feet. I was deafened by the whistle, my ears were buzzing. I was shaken, I got dizzy. But I was lucky—it was simply luck that that bullet missed me.

Maddening brutality was said to have peaked especially after the conflict over the collapse of the usury firms in 1996–1997. 7

See chapter 2.

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In whose hands do you think the guns ended up in 1997? It should not be that hard to make the connection. I mean really. Do you know how many criminals got out of prison in 1997? The doors of the prisons were opened. All the criminals got out. And they got guns from the army. There were arms everywhere, after the army garrisons had been looted. In Vlora, if you had a medical emergency in the middle of the night, you could not go out anywhere.8 If you needed to go to a hospital, you would rather die in your own home. Better to die in your own home than to be killed in the street by some hoodlums. There was random shooting outside, especially during the night.

Compared to even the darker aspects of Albania’s past, the violence of the present marked clear decline: There had always been fights among the guys; there were fights all the time before 1997. But then the fights usually ended up being with fists, or with knives—at the most with knives. Young guys drinking together, you know. Someone would diss someone, then they would swear at each other, then they would hit each other or stick out a pocket knife. But that would be it, a small fight. Someone might have gotten wounded, at the most. Today people get killed for one word out of their mouth. And other people get killed too, other people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Albania people can get killed just like that, without having anything to do with the quarrels. Just because they happen to be there when some guys start a fight.

The events of the year 1997 were the object of pervasive talk, and the violence that had ensued was said to have made daily life in contemporary Albania unbearable. In virtually all accounts, all of what had happened involved “the state.” The opening of the military depots was the worst thing that ever happened to Albania. It should not have happened. The state should not have let it happen. Because the blood heats up quickly, you know. One insult, one misperceived insult, that is all it takes—even one wrong look. That is all it takes now to have a bunch of guys dead. You know how the youths are. Their blood heats up quickly. Blood always heated up quickly, we know that of Albania, but now they all have guns. The opening of the ammunition depots in 1997, that should not have happened. That really was the end of the state in Albania.

“Living like a human being” was precluded in Albania by what the emigrants typically described as “the absence” of a state. This condition was sharply contrasted by Albania’s past. The way many emigrants saw it, “there was no one” in present-day Albania to protect “the honest citizen.” Hence Albania’s honest citizens were forced to take their own measures for their “physical protection.” Though thus relatively safe, those “forced to defend themselves” were said to experience such a turn of events as a measure of their—and the country’s—decline or “fall” or “lowering.” In the words of a young woman who in the year 1997 still lived with her parents in Vlora, we were forced to take part too. It is regrettable. But we had no other option. We had to get guns too. We had to pay money for them, of course. The criminals just stole them from the army. But they stole so many that they did not need all of those guns. They were selling guns in the streets in those days. In Vlora, you could get one automatic rifle in exchange for one kilogram of bread flour, or one kilogram of sugar. There were people who exchanged a case of grenades for a sack of bread. My father paid ten thousand old lek [$7.40] for

8 The 1997 conflict was especially intense in Vlora, the most prominent city in Albania’s southwest.

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a Kalashnikov. We are two sisters, so my father could not risk having two daughters at home and not have a gun. The most cruel of stories were circulating in those days. Sheer inhumanity! I had never known that people could be capable of such inhumanity! Murders, rapes, violations. My dad had to buy the Kalashnikov, even though in his conscience he is against firearms. He had to get it for protection. What would you do if the criminals came to your home at night? It’s probably OK if they take your stuff away. You’d probably not open gunfire for that. But what if they want to take away your children? What if they want to rape your daughter? What do you do? Do you stand by and watch? That is why everyone got armed. Everyone—even those people who are against any violence, like my dad. My dad would never have bought the Kalashnikov if he’d had a choice. People were forced to do things they would never have done normally. He did not agree.. . . He is not . . . compatible . . . he is not the kind of person who does this kind of thing. He had to lower himself to that level. But what do you do in Albania? If there is no state to protect you, you have got to protect yourself. There is no other way.

In numerous accounts, the events of the year 1997 emerged as crucial to understanding Albania’s current condition. They were said to have hurt common people not only in the immediately physical sense of “dehumanizing” violence; rather, violence and insecurity were inextricably connected to the “economic demotion of every Albanian” that the collapse of the usury firms had caused, and this connection also blended in with it Albania’s state and the political class. The state was said not only to tolerate crime, but to thrive on it. “Corruption” emerged out of such accounts as the key characteristic of Albania’s political class. Emigrants were typically convinced that “the state,” “the government,” and “the politicians” of Albania, spoken about interchangeably, had appropriated the money that had been accumulated in the usury firms. The state, the government, and the politicians emerged as the node in which violence, crime, corruption, and all else that was thought as wrong with Albania interconnected. The charge, repeated in myriad forms, was that those individuals who had managed to obtain political power in Albania enriched themselves through unscrupulous abuses. In fact, the blend of crime, corruption, and political power was widely perceived as “the only” avenue to wealth in contemporary Albania. There was no real differentiation in the accounts of the emigrants between Albania’s new rich and the country’s politicians; they were considered to be the same cohort. Hence instead of showing that the material condition in Albania had improved, the conspicuous consumption of some Albanians was virtually always understood by the emigrants as the sure sign of their corruption. How much money do the Albanian politicians make? What are their salaries? 400,000 old lek [$308]? Let’s make it one million old lek [$770]. One million old lek a month. And let’s also suppose that a politician does not eat or buy clothes. Right? I mean, how can this be possible? Do the Albanian politicians not spend any money on eating? How then did they all become that fat? But let’s suppose they do not pay for their food. How many months will it take to get enough money to buy a Mercedes? At one million old lek a month, more than one hundred months, right? Well, the average time in office for a member of the government in Albania is two or three months. Actually, it may be shorter. Can anyone even remember how many ministers have changed since the year 1990? How can you, then, on a salary of 400,000 old lek [$308], or even a million old lek [$770], which you got for three months only—or let me make it one year, that you got for one year—how can you buy a car that costs one billion [$77,000]?

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Just as the former state was hated for being “a dictatorship,” the present state was condemned for its insecurity and its ill-gotten wealth. In most of the narratives that I heard, the corruption of the former state had only grown worse and more blunt as it had extended into the corruption of the present state. Have you heard the joke about the Albanian politician? The one about the prime minister who goes to Italy? The Albanian prime minister goes to Italy “for experience,” as they say, “for training.” So he goes to Italy and the Italian prime minister shows him around. The Albanian is shown a factory that has been built with money from the European Union. Then another factory. Then a farm, then a school, and so on. At the end of the day the Italian prime minister shows him a new highway that has been built with money from the European Union. The Albanian prime minister is impressed. “Amazing!” he says. Then the Italian prime minister invites him for a dinner at his home. The Albanian goes there and he cannot believe his eyes. The Italian prime minister has a large house, a beautiful house.. . . He has fifteen rooms, he has the most modern furniture, he has a lot of lights in his house, he has a garage, he has a brand new Mercedes.. . . There are servants everywhere, the food is delicious.. . . “Wow,” the Albanian wonders, “how can you afford all of this?” “Well,” says the Italian, “do you remember that highway we drove on today before coming here? The one built with money from the European Union?” “Yes,” says the Albanian, “I remember it.” “Well,” says the Italian, “I made it one centimeter narrower than the plan called for. That is where this house comes from.” So the Albanian returns home. One year later, the Italian prime minister visits Albania. To see how things are going, how Albania is improving, you know.. . . To see how the Albanian politicians have used all the money from the European Union.. . . The Albanian prime minister awaits him at the airport. He welcomes the Italian with a great ceremony. All the Albanian politicians have come to the airport, all those who are in Albania at that time, who are not abroad, you know.. . . And they drive the Italian to the Albanian Parliament in a brand new Mercedes. And they tell the Italian, “We have done such and such a reform, we have changed this law and that law.” So everything is as smooth as oil. At the end of the day the Albanian prime minister invites the Italian prime minister for a dinner at his home. The Italian is speechless when he arrives: the Albanian prime minister lives in a home that is bigger and better than that of the Italian prime minister. The Albanian prime minister has made a castle for himself! “How can you afford this?” the Italian asks. “Well,” says the Albanian, “do you see that highway, the one right behind you? The highway that we built with money from the European Union?” The Italian turns around to look. He looks through the palisades. And he says, “No,” he says, “I do not see any highway.” “Well,” says the Albanian, “that is where this house comes from.”

Ultimately, “the fall of Albania” was made tangible by the fact that, to many emigrants, corruption was not something that only the politicians were to be blamed for, but “a disease” permeating “the entire Albanian society.” In bitterly ironic words uttered to me in bitter seriousness, a former clerk in the executive committee of a small town in northern Albania, who in Athens worked in a street market, contemporary Albania’s politicians were “not any different” from “the rest of the Albanians.” If I had the same opportunities that they have, if I had in my hands what a minister in the government has in his hands, I’d do the same things. Why should I not? I would have taken my share of the traffic money if I could have! I would have taken it running! Or if I worked in the customs. . . . Look, the problem is not the Albanian politicians. It is understandable why they do what they do. The problem is, why does the world look at them and let them do what they do? Since the world has decided to let them have it their way, I say “Bravo!” to them. Bravo for doing it like this!

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The Objective Position of the “Common Human” in Albania While a few in Albania were said to have grown rich beyond what “an emigrant can even imagine,” emigrants considered the “condition” or “lot” of “the majority” of Albanians across the border to be the most dismaying dimension of contemporary Albania’s decline. Acknowledging that, quality aside, more objects were now available for purchase in Albania than during socialism, emigrants yet reckoned most “common people” unable to afford most of those objects. In the words of a one-time accountant who cleaned in a hotel, “the common human being” in contemporary Albania was impoverished. Even though there are many things to buy, common human beings cannot buy them. Where can they find the money? Common human beings in Albania, and their families, they dress in the clothes from foreign aid which are sold in Albania—those they can afford. Everywhere else, prices are prohibitive, even the prices of those things that in Greece are not considered expensive.

By contrast to the common human being in Albania, it was endlessly repeated, in Greece emigrants could afford to buy a great many objects. They demonstrated their purchasing power by sending over the border objects of even higher quality than those which, even though available for sale there, were “unreasonably” expensive and thus remained beyond the reach of the emigrants’ relatives. I sent my niece a pair of glasses, maybe two or three months ago, not more than that.. . . Glasses like those, you cannot find them in Albania, not even for 100,000 lek [$77]. I bought them here for 20 euros [$18]. This is my favorite niece, my brother’s daughter. She is a student. We did not know about the glasses, that she needed glasses. In September, after the university had started, it turned out that she needed glasses. They told me on the phone. They did not ask me though.. . . They were telling how expensive things have become [in Albania]. My niece and her father had gone to one of those new shops in Tirana. There are new shops in Tirana everywhere.. . . Opticians. . . . The frames alone were 100,000 lek [$77]! The cheapest frames! Then you needed to pay for the lenses, on top of the frames. My brother is retired, he was discharged from the army, after the changes.. . . Where can they find the money? But my niece is a young girl, she needs them. She is a young girl, you know.. . . My brother, he was telling me on the phone, you know . . . they are tight on money.. . . It is not their fault.. . . They have a son in Italy too. He keeps them afloat. But he cannot send them everything.. . . And he has lost his job in Italy, because the firm was closed, where he worked. I do not know what he did, but he is one who sweats his own sweat. He does not do any of the dirty things that some others do. That is why he is without a job.. . . My niece had asked her brother on the phone, she had told him that she needed glasses, and he had said to her that she had to wait a little. He could not send anything right now.. . . I was just looking in the supermarket one day. By chance, I saw a pair in her strength, for only 20 euros [$18]. So I bought them and I sent them.. . . She is a young girl, you know.. . .

The reason why objects similar to those that emigrants could afford in Greece were beyond the reach of the common people in Albania was thought to be the impossibility, in Albania, to “earn with your sweat.” There seemed to be broad agreement among the emigrants that no honest jobs in Albania paid enough for one “to live like a human being;” diligent work did not get rewarded.

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[In Albania] the salaries of a teacher and of a doctor are very low. A mason may not want to emigrate, because a mason makes enough money in Albania—enough for being a mason. There are masons who get paid 20,000 lek [$15.38] per day, 400,000 lek [$308] a month. I have heard that there are some who get 500,000 lek [$385] or 600,000 lek [$460] a month, depending on how much they work. But a teacher gets only 200,000 lek [$154] a month, at the most. One kilogram of meat is 7,000 lek [$5.38] in Albania. One small chicken comes to 6,000 lek [$4.61]. A pack of cigarettes is 1,000 lek [$0.76]. A teacher would therefore want to emigrate, because a teacher cannot have two teaching jobs. He only has one salary; he cannot work more hours, like a mason. The same for a doctor. These people have gone through a lot of schooling, and they have worked hard for many years in order to be good. But they are not paid for that in Albania.

Through the idea of reward, the unavailability of objects to most Albanians reflected the changes in their positions vis-à-vis each other. There appeared to be wide consensus among the emigrants that, in contemporary Albania, riches were ill-gotten and therefore one element of that larger condition of injustice. Emigrants also associated contemporary Albania’s wealth with crime; the newly rich were believed to have become rich because of their inhumanity. In the vision of a young waiter, Albania’s state was, as ever, present. The Albanians have been dealing with a hundred thousand kinds of trafficking—drugs, prostitutes, illegal migrants—because they have seen, they have seen that dealing with something that is not allowed, that is not legal, brings a lot more profits.. . . Think of unemployment in Albania. This is a way in which the state indirectly stimulates crime. Why? Because all Albanians have Mercedes cars. Where did they find them? Why does the state not ask where they found them? And what kinds of Mercedeses! Just sit in a bar in the Block9 in Tirana and look outside of the window. Or in any café in the center of Tirana. Just sit and look at those cars! The latest Benz models! Half of them look like the 5000 series. They would cost upwards 80,000 dollars. Where would that person who owns the Mercedes have found 80,000 dollars? Look at all the Mercedeses! Not everyone can win the lottery. And look at the cannibals inside the Mercedeses! Do you think those guys have actually earned that much money? Some of them, you can see in their faces what kind of cannibals they are! Those cars come from blood!

While it was implied that this coexistence of wealth side by side with poverty was unjust, the fact that some Albanians had become richer while most had become poorer was never explicitly articulated in terms of exploitation of the latter by the former. Instead, the implied injustice embodied by Albania’s new rich was conceptualized as corruption and “moral unraveling.” As the actions of the new rich were irredeemable, the country was seen as mired in hopelessness.

9 “The Block” refers to a small section at the heart of Tirana’s one-time “district eight,” which until the end of state socialism was not accessible to the public. While in the field in Tirana in 2003 I was somehow captivated by the transformation of the Block:

As luxury apartment home high-rises have eruped over the last decade around what once were homes to the members of the Political Bureau that ruled state socialism, the Block has become a key symbolic site of Albania’s allegedly illicit wealth and multiply-disputed political and economic power. As such, it has also grown into a place synonymous with teenage flair and promiscuity, and with little luxuries for the mouth—near-expired industrial foods allegedly imported from Germany that are sold in the super-expensive mini-markets in the basements of the high-rises (Pajo 2003).

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Here is something to pity. How did these people become rich? The specialists in this field should give an answer. The rich in Albania do not contribute to the welfare of the country. I have a couple of friends in Albania who are rich. They come to Greece on holidays. About a year ago, they visited me at home when they were here. I said to one friend, “I feel sorry the rich class is made up of people like you. Because you do not understand that capitalism is built by the rich class, by the investments.” “What do you mean?” he said. I said, “We are in the same neighborhood in [a city near Tirana].” Again, let us not get into how these people got rich. “There are three schools in our neighborhood,” I said, “each has 150 pupils. Have you ever thought of saying, let’s bring these 150 pupils together, and I will invest five million old lek [$3,850] so these pupils can have a nice evening? Five million are nothing for you,” I said, for five million are really peanuts to him. “So,” I said, “have you ever thought of doing this?” He did not speak. He had not thought of it. And he never will. For he himself lacks the culture. He lacks the sensibility. He lacks the understanding that the children are the future of the country, and we, who are in a position today to do so, should contribute. That is why I say that the rich class in Albania does not contribute to the development of the country. They do not feel the need for contribution.

What was typically considered as the most disheartening fact of all, corruption in Albania was thought not to be limited to the relatively small cohort of politicians and the new rich. Emigrants regretted that, in present-day Albania, corruption permeated “every cell of life.” The other thing in Albania is that they skin you. They skin you like a sheep. Just wait till you need something. Once they see you are in need, they skin you. Everybody, everywhere. There is no mercy. Everyone wants 2,000 lek [$1.53]. That is the standard fee for small things. The traffic police go to the streets to collect their 2,000 lek. It’s the standard. Especially if you have a car with foreign license plates. I drove from Vlora to Tirana once, with my car, which has Greek license plates. I was stopped six times. I mean, six times between Vlora and Tirana! You would think Albania is the best protected country on earth! Everyone wanted to look at my papers. Everyone wanted to find fault with something, it did not matter what. The point was their bribe. Every police officer wanted 2,000 lek. On my way back, I stuck a bunch of 2,000 lek bills in my glove compartment. Every time they stopped me, I just handed out a 2,000 lek bill from the window. I only said “Hello,” and I handed out the bill. There was no point asking what the problem was, why they stopped me. [Laughs] The 2,000 lek, that was the problem.. . . [laughs] I usually got a smile in return. Sometimes a mumble. Some raised their fist to the forehead to honor me, just like they did under socialism.. . . [Laughs.] Not a single one asked for any documents when I handed out the 2,000 lek. They honored the 2,000 lek with their fists and I could go. It makes you laugh out loud. It makes you cry and laugh at the same time.

Emigrants were usually not interested in what had come first, corruption or misery. They were not firm on any casual explanation of the way the two were related. Corruption was seen as leading to misery while at the same time the reasons for corruption could be found in the misery of everyday life. You understand who you are dealing with when you see the faces of the policemen. They are just peasant folk. Really. I pity them. I do pity them at times, when I really think of them. They are not to be blamed. Their condition is miserable. They harm you though. I mean, they make your life miserable. But their condition is miserable in the first place. That is why they want to get your money. If you look at their faces, you can see that they are people who have suffered. Their faces show it. You see wrinkles in the face of a 30-year-old. A policeman of 30 years in Albania looks like a 66-year-old pensioner in Greece. They are aged. Some of them are thin too, wizened. When I see the wizened ones I think about how they have not had enough food. Then you have the really fat ones too, those fat guys who have been milking bribes for a long time. They are not really policemen—I mean, none

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of them. They are just peasants who do not have work. Village guys who do not have any other opportunity. They have just put on a uniform. They are not trained to be officers. They are not there because they believe something about justice, or because they are trained for this. No. They are there because there is nothing else for them to do. They are there to take everyone’s 2,000 lek [$1.53].

It was also not clear what bothered emigrants the most—the ill-gotten wealth of some, or the decline of most of the others. But as contemporary Albania was defined by these two trajectories, the rationale for remaining in Greece appeared clear. Why would the emigrants even think of returning? From Greece they could even “help” their relatives. Moreover, even though the emigrants would clearly never have as much money as the rich Albanians, the money of the emigrants felt morally superior. I take pride in the work of the emigrants. People should know that not all Albanians are the same. When you hear about the corruption of the Albanians and those stories of crime, a distinction should be made. Emigrants earn their money with their sweat. Everything you see them have, they have from their own sweat. This is not easy money, it is not like the money of those people who drive Mercedeses in Albania. I take pride in being an emigrant.

When You Have Moved Forward, It Is Hard to Move Backward At times exaggerated and other at other times understated, some logically plausible and others less so, the interconnected elements of the argument against returning to Albania were by and large prompted by my question about returning as a possible alternative to the emigrants’ condition in Greece. Asking this question I realized that the emigrants did not ask it among themselves. In other words, returning to Albania was not an organic alternative to the emigrants’ present. There were two exceptions to the otherwise absolute absence of talk about returning. In the first, since several of the older emigrants planned to return to Albania once they would no longer be able to work, Albania was envisioned as a country where one “enjoys living.” As a one-time research scientist put it, Albania is our country. I can hardly wait till the day when I can no longer work. I wish to live long enough to see all the construction completed. I cannot wait to see Albania beautiful.

In this context, economic well-being could be a concern, however. A carpenter’s aide, for example, who was firm on returning to Albania for his “days of old age,” worried that the pension he would receive from the Albanian state for the “couple of years” he had worked in Albania as a geography teacher might not amount to very much. This concern could be relativized, however, in light of the savings accumulated “in emigration.” The one-time geography teacher rationalized that, by the time he would no longer be able to work, the money he would have set aside from his earnings as an emigrant would cover his “needs” sufficiently, for by that time his needs would have also been diminished. How much can you consume as a pensioner? A cup of coffee. A bite of bread. You will not need new clothes every day. Everything else we have here, we will bring from here. The television, the refrigerator, all the electric appliances. They will last—they will last long

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enough for us.. . . When you are old you want to see people. The pensioner wants to have a conversation. Like we are sitting now, having a conversation. The pensioner wants to play cards, to read a newspaper.. . .

The second circumstance in which returning to Albania emerged organically— though only implicitly—as an alternative to the present in Greece was the recounting of the deeds of those emigrants who had returned to Albania to start small businesses there. Those emigrants clearly seemed to command the awe of individuals who I usually thought would have wished to undertake the move themselves, but had somehow resolved that they were not in the position to do so. In such accounts contemporary Albania was clearly a country where earning decent money was not for everyone. A former university professor, for example, who at the time we spoke was unemployed and dreamed of publishing books in Albanian for the children of the emigrants, remarked that those who had returned to Albania to start businesses there “can be counted by the fingers.” By hypothetical contrast, if a “common emigrant” were to return to Albania, that emigrant would encounter the sheer impossibility of getting anything done. Nobody opens the doors for you. As things have turned out over there, one needs connections. If you have connections, all the doors open. Or if you have money. But without connections, just by going there and saying, “I want to start a business”—there is no chance. I am speaking of the common emigrant. The common emigrant, who does not have connections. But if the emigrant had connections, if the emigrant had a normal and good life in Albania, why would the emigrant come to Greece?

In both these exceptions to the prevailing absence of the alternative of return migration, Albania emerged as a country where one would be when one no longer needed to work or could no longer work. Put another way, the way in which the emigrants saw their world, for as long as one worked, one would not return to Albania. One former librarian also quoted earlier, who had lost the proceedings of the sale of her family’s apartment in the collapse of the usury firms, similarly conceptualized Albania to preclude earning a decent living. She was the only one of the emigrants I talked to who said she had “contemplated” returning to Albania. She acknowledged that her living arrangement in Athens was inferior to what she had once had, and that the social position she once enjoyed had become “only a memory.” She would have returned, she said, had she still had a home in Albania. The reason for remaining in Greece was that in Albania she no longer had a place where she could live. Yet since this former librarian did not own her apartment in Athens either, and spent a significant portion of her earnings in rent, her portrayal of her remaining in Greece in terms of a necessity was difficult to accept at face value. Were she to return to Albania and again be a librarian there, she would have perhaps earned less than what she earned in Greece for her occasional assignments of domestic work. But as her rent in Tirana or in Durrës would perhaps also have been less than what it was in Athens, it might not be too far-fetched to think that she would have had at least as much disposable income in Albania as she had in Greece. And in addition to being in Albania legally, she would ultimately also have had a job of greater social prestige. That she still framed her remaining in Greece in terms of necessity

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indicates that, despite her claim, returning to Albania was not really an option an emigrant would “contemplate.” It almost seemed as if the emigrants thought of Albania temporally, as a stage which they had surpassed. Greece was what had come next. So while potentially solving a number of the emigrant’s worries in Greece, returning to Albania would have been the reversal of the move the emigrants undertook a decade ago. A former army officer reminded me dryly that emigrants do not return. Nobody returns. If you have moved forward, it is hard to move backward.

Chapter 12

Portrait of Drita H., Chemical Engineer, Domestic Cleaner, Moviegoer, Balletomane

At the age of 53, Drita H. still cleans the same homes she began with when she came to Greece a decade ago. She never needs to look for work: the people she works for are friendly and respect her, and the money is enough for Drita to buy all the books and magazines she wants to read, see all the movies she wants to see, and go out with friends for coffee and sweets as much as time permits—her time and theirs. Occasionally, Drita can even attend ballet performances. This life in Greece is a welcome relief from the food shortages, the rule of mediocrity, the hateful hypocrisy, and the political oppression that Drita had to endure for the 18 years she worked as a chemical engineer in Albania. Present-day Greece is almost as good and carefree as the early 1970s of Drita’s youth, the time when Tirana still was “a truly modern capital city” and “everything in Albania worked.”

The End of Albania’s Good Times Three years after having emigrated to Greece, Drita visited Albania for one week in 1995. She slept at her mother’s apartment in Durrës. The reason for sleeping at her mother’s was that the apartment Drita and her husband own in Albania was being rented to support Drita’s mother financially—that is also what allows Drita not to have to send to Albania what she makes in Greece. Her mother’s apartment is right in the center of the city. Eager to see “how people in Albania lived” after the three years she had been in Greece, Drita would get up early in the morning and go to the balcony to look at the marketplace. There, on the balcony, she could not help thinking that only three years ago this had been the city’s main square. Drita’s three years in emigration had thus been a long time. All the beauty and tranquility of the past were now gone. Tiles were missing in the square and the cement was broken in many places. Crates and cardboard boxes of all kinds were piled up everywhere. As early as 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning people would already be rushing around, shoving wheeled carts—large rectangular trunks welded together out of metal scraps and mounted on old bicycle wheels—loaded with all kinds of colorful goods. As soon as they would arrive in what once was a green park, the merchants, all men, would set up counters on top of their wheeled carts. 141

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The women—their wives?—would come later to help with the selling. Drita was horrified that all these men and women would stay there the whole day, rain or shine, shoving their carts and shouting their prices right in what not so long ago was the city’s central square. Neither could one walk in the park nearby, for that park too was there no more. Two or three butchers had set up small tents around what once was a monument. Smelly qoftes1 and chicken thighs were endlessly being grilled on top of steel manhole covers which had been lifted off the streets and mounted on old wheelbarrows, thus turning them into peddling grills. The beautiful Durrës of Drita’s youth and adulthood had entirely disappeared. It was “nauseating” to see people eat slices of pie the whole day long as they walked by the parked peddling carts, looking at things, buying things, rushing. After the market day was over, the whole center of the city would be full of banana peels, orange skins, cigarette packs, spittle of chewed chicken bones, shards of beer bottles and pickle jars, and oiled pages from books of the classics of Marxism-Leninism in which the peddlers wrapped the hot pies and the fried qoftes. Here and there flies would buzz over crusts of vomit. Drita reflects that her student years at the University of Tirana may have been the end of Albania’s good times. After the 1970s things started deteriorating so speedily that by 1980 or 1981 all the pleasures of life had already fizzled away one by one. When Ramiz Alia2 started with “those lame reforms” in 1989, life in Albania was already unbearable. Living in Durrës, Drita could have easily gone to Italy; she could have boarded one of the boats when the crowds were leaving. But the hope that the factory where she was a chemical engineer would be privatized kept her. Things political were rapidly changing in Albania in those days. There was talk that the state would “give the factories” to those who worked in them. The state would then no longer be responsible for the salaries, but the products would compete in the market, and everyone who worked in a factory would own some share of it. If that kind of privatization were to have happened, Drita would have had a decent part in Albania’s major producer of glassware and would have never needed to emigrate. A chemical engineer, Drita had worked hard during all her years in the factory. She still believes that the factory, “one of Albania’s best,” would have been “strong” and “very competitive” in the new market economy. But what politicians called “privatization” was a mere excuse for encouraging everyone to loot. One thing had led to the other. Production had almost ceased by 1991, but all the employees still received 80% of their salaries from the state. Yet, fearing loss of income amidst rumors of privatization, by 1991 “everyone in the factory” seemed to feel better “taking home something.” It had often happened before that a worker would try to take home a tool that he worked with or that an electrician would steal a reel of wire or a spare bulb. It was not even considered “stealing;” indeed, “that was

1

Qofte is a link or patty of minced meat, chopped onion, and spices. The successor of Enver Hoxha, head of the Party of Labor after Hoxha’s death in 1985, and president of Albania from 1982 through the end of state socialism in 1992. 2

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how the country worked.” But after the coming of democracy, even that which was tied to the ground started being dismantled. Looting became massive when the word was spread that the state did not have enough money to pay “the eighty percent” and that there would be firings. At one point the depot of spare supplies was broken into by what were then called “the dark forces.” Piece by piece, lathes and electric saws disappeared. Soon no power switches were left on the walls. “It all happened before everyone’s eyes.” Some of the engineers too took home “parts of the factory”—whatever they could get their hands on. When Drita went by the factory site during another visit to Albania in 1999, she saw that even the bricks had been taken away. The settlers from Albania’s northeast, who had squatted on land nearby, land which used to belong to the factory, had built themselves homes with the bricks from what had once been the factory’s walls. The bare skeletons of the factory’s two main buildings were now its only remnants.

Unexpected Turns All of this is to say that emigrating to Greece had been an “unexpected turn” in Drita’s life: she decided to emigrate only after she ultimately became convinced that the privatization of the factory was not going to happen. That was in 1992. Together with her husband, who had been sick a long time and did not work, Drita entered Greece on a family tourist visa which they bought. In the beginning, Drita did not need to work, for both she and her husband could live at their son’s place. Drita’s son had left Albania a year earlier to join some distant cousins of Drita’s father, who had been able to come to Greece even earlier with “genuine documents” because they were members of Albania’s Greek minority. After working initially in construction, Drita’s son had found night work in a large restaurant. It was work in the kitchen and around the tables, both in and outdoors, and the son worked long hours. But he was better paid than those Albanians who worked in construction. Drita and her husband could have a separate room in the basement that her son shared with a former classmate from his high school in Durrës. They did not even need to contribute to the rent. The roommate of Drita’s son was actually happy they had come to share the basement, because Drita’s husband cooked Albanian dishes for all four of them. All four of them continued to share food until the roommate moved out a year later. Not all of them ate at the same time though. Their working schedules did not allow Drita’s son and his friend to meet more than once a week. Drita’s son would come home exhausted at 4 o’clock in the morning and go to bed right away; his friend would get up half an hour later, at about 4:30, and leave. When the friend of Drita’s son would return in the evening at 7 or 8—and in the summer he would remain out even longer—Drita’s son would have already left for work at about 4 pm—even in the summer his work would start around 5. Now that Drita works, this is happening to her. She can rarely find the time to talk something over with her son, for when he comes home in the early morning

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Drita is sleeping, and when he gets up in the afternoon she is gone. They see each other only twice a week for about half an hour, when she does not have to work in the afternoon. The only one who can spend some time with everyone is Drita’s husband, who still does not work outside the home. He continues to cook for the three of them though.

Emigrants Will Never Make Millions As a child, Drita had once had the opportunity to learn Greek, for her grandmother on her father’s side had been an ethnic Greek who had settled in Durrës before the Second World War. But Drita had considered the Greek language just one of the backward oddities of her grandmother. If even Drita’s father was not fluent in Greek, how could Drita imagine back then that she would live in Greece one day? She would have laughed out loud if someone were to have told her that at the age of 43 she would be spending time learning Greek! Yet that was what happened. Soon after setting foot in Greece, Drita bought a Greek learning book for English speakers in one of the bookstores in the center of Athens. Starting from “that little” English she had learned in school, Drita taught herself Greek. She also sat in front of the television a lot, that is how she began to understand more. Within only three months she could speak Greek! The amusing thing is that, having learned it “in front of the television” rather than from her grandmother, she can pronounce Greek better than many Albanians. In front of the television Drita learned the language spoken in modern Greece—although her vocabulary was not rich in the beginning, she could speak Greek more intelligibly than even some of the ethnic Greeks from Albania, who, like Drita’s grandmother, spoke in their local accents. Drita cannot stress enough what great fortune it was that, once she could speak some Greek, she could get work with an elderly couple who lived in the same street where she and her husband shared the basement. Initially, the couple hired her to clean their home once a week for 1,000 Greek lek [$2.73] an hour. She would work about five hours there, and in those five hours everything in their house would be clean and tidy. They had a good vacuum cleaner, and much better conditions for keeping the house tidy than what Drita had in the basement. They had running warm water too. And Drita could also get from the supermarket all the cleaning liquids and equipment she needed; they would reimburse the receipts. But even more important than the working conditions they provided was the fact that they both were very good people, “a very, very good family.” Although the husband had been a university professor—that is why Drita refers to him as “the professor”—he and his wife showed no arrogance. In ten years of working there, Drita has never experienced with them “the sort of stories” she hears from many Albanians. There never were disputes or provocations. They were always friendly to her, and, from the very beginning, they always complimented her Greek. In fact, the couple was so happy with Drita’s good work that the word spread. Within

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about half a year Drita had work for all the days of the week, and she was able to earn between 6,000 lek [$16.36] and 9,000 lek [$24.54] each day. It should also be said that in those days Drita worked more than she does now. She also even went for occasional jobs. At present, she sticks only with her regular families and does not take new recommendations. She wants a little more time for herself now. Meanwhile the pay has gone up to 1,500 lek [$4.09] per hour, for she now has years-long relations with the people she works for. Drita also knows that over the last decade “the pay has increased for all Albanians.” The increase took place gradually: from 1,000 lek [$2.73] it first became 1,200 [$3.27], then it became 1,300 [$3.54], and now, since last year, she makes 1,500 lek [$4.09] an hour. But this is only home maintenance and Drita knows that the pay cannot get much higher. Working only four and a half days a week, and earning the equivalent of about 10,000 lek [$27.27] for each day of the week, including the days on which she does not work, Drita feels she has hit the ceiling. Hence, in the strict sense of earnings, “none of the emigrants” can be compared to “the Albanians in Albania.” Drita is keenly aware that Albanians in Albania have made a lot more money over the last decade. When she goes to Albania, for Drita does now go to Albania every year, she marvels at the cars that some people drive. She cannot say she likes what the shops in Albania sell. But looking at the prices, and looking at the amounts that people in Albania spend, Drita can see how “some” there must have a whole lot of money—money that she, as an emigrant, cannot even start to imagine.

Without Fruit, Life Would Not Be Worth Living At 10,000 Greek lek [$27.27] per day, or even at 15,000 lek [$40.90] per day “you cannot make millions.” That is why Drita does not mind spending all of what she earns. She spends freely because she has figured out no matter how much she may try to save, she will never own millions like some do in Albania. Drita has never been of the character that at one time in Albania used to be called lekist; all her life she has been “against those” who tried to collect money for money’s sake. That does not mean that she is wasteful with money. For example, she would never even want to buy cherries when it is the first pick of the season. Because when cherries “just come out” to the market they cost 3,000 lek a kilo [$3.68/lb]. Drita would not fall dead for not having cherries then; she can wait. Instead, she spends money wisely to buy other kinds of fruit; something that is inexpensive. She always buys prudently, she gets those things that are necessary, and she gets them for the best price that she can get them for. At the same time, she is not going to deprive herself of the pleasures that life can give just for the sake of piling up money on the side. While she does not have to have cherries when they “have just come out,” Drita does need to have some fruit. Life would have not been worth living if she never had fruit, if she never had anything “other than bread and cheese.”

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To Drita, those who are making a lot of money in Albania are also wasting their lives. They may have more money than the emigrants, but the lives that they live are miserable. In the past Albanians had to get up early in the morning to buy milk. They had to wait in the milk queue, they had to wait and wonder whether milk “was going to come or not.” Then they had to work a full day before they could come back home. The same routine would repeat itself the next day. If Drita did not manage to get milk one day, for example, then there was no milk for that whole day and Drita would have to get up early the next morning to give the queue another try. The difference is that, while Drita had to get up early then and now no longer has to, the Albanians in Albania still do have to get up early. Even though “they may think differently” about their toil now, and even though they can have milk without restrictions, Drita is convinced that the kind of life most Albanians lead is the same as it used to be under socialism. Instead of the milk bags of the past, today Albanians may pick up their wheeled carts and push them to the market. But most of them still do get up as early in the morning, “just as they used to do all their lives.” Instead of standing in the queue waiting for the delivery truck of oil or sugar or some other scarce food, now the Albanians set up counters where they themselves sell. At the end of the day they are exhausted all the same. Money they may have made, but where is the joy in “that kind of life?"

Books, Movies, Ballet To Drita, “life like that” would have not been worth living. What she enjoys is buying books. When she is in Albania, Drita buys a lot of books. Then there are the annual and semi-annual book fairs in Greece, where Albanian publishers participate. Not all the Albanian publishers come to Greece, but the important thing is that there are a lot of books coming from Albania nowadays. For a long while after the change of the regime, no good books were published in Albania. Fortunately though, since a few years “they have restarted” translating good literature. Albanian writers Drita does not read; “there are no new Albanian writers” and she is tired of those writers from the past being republished all the time—“old stories.” Drita enjoys going inside Greek bookstores too. She does not really know that much about the contemporary Greek authors, for she usually buys magazines that are easier to read. A lot of her money goes into books, and she is happy because she gets a lot of pleasure from reading. Drita also goes to the movies often, and to musical concerts too. “Once in many months” she can also go to a ballet performance. She loves ballet, in fact she regrets that attending the performances is not very affordable. Still, she can go there occasionally. Is that not the purpose of money? To get things that make one happy? She will never become a millionaire, it is clear. Yet Drita does make enough money to have a pleasant life. In the 1980s Drita often thought that the happy days of her youth were forever gone. She tried to make the best out of life in the 1980s too, but eventually she

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Fig. 12.1 Certain neighborhood squares in Athens were named after cities in Albania

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came to believe that the 1960s and 1970s, when Albania was “more alive” and when Drita had few worries, were forever gone. It is good fortune that those days have returned. The life Drita now lives in Greece is “as similar as it can be” to her 1970s life as a student in Albania. In Greece Drita no longer needs to wait in the queue for milk—everything she wants is there to buy. The money is enough too. These are “almost the same” worry-free days of her past, the time when Tirana was a modern capital city and everything in Albania worked. Another cheerful thought for Drita is knowing that she will have the same life when she returns to Albania “in a couple of years,” when she will not be able to work any longer. She will “not need to build a house there,” for she still owns the apartment in Durrës, the one where she lived with her husband before emigrating. She might need to spend a bit of money to fix a few things in the apartment; as for the rest, the apartment is quite good. It is not a large apartment. But why would she need so much space? “The electronics” she will never again need to buy; she will bring those she has in Greece. Drita does not need to have the newest television set or the newest video recorder—not as long as the ones she now has in Greece still work and allow her to enjoy the movies. The point of life is not to accumulate junk, but to live, to enjoy.

Chapter 13

The World According to the Emigrants

While returning to Albania did not occur to the emigrants as an alternative to their woes in Greece, the emigrants had many stories of other Albanians who “had become emigrants” elsewhere in the world—and were happy there. Implying an organic alternative to the present reality of emigration in Greece, those ubiquitous narratives of fulfillment in other countries led on to deep-rooted visions of a world hierarchy.

Territorialized Fulfillment The emigrants tended to talk at great lengths about those Albanians who had become emigrants elsewhere in the world. An emigrant would occasionally burst with fascination at the fact that “in this day” Albanians could be found “everywhere.” Albanians have gone to the four corners of the earth. There is no country where there is not at least one Albanian emigrant. An Albanian has gone up to Hong Kong—at least one Albanian.. . . What kind of people must we have been? The uncle kept us put for forty years!1 He kept us inside [Albania]. Uncle is no more; there is no country left where there are no Albanians.

Narratives abounded especially about those who had gone to America. It seemed as if every emigrant either knew personally someone who had gone to America, or knew personally someone who in turn knew personally someone who had gone to America. In truth, stories about some emigrant who had gone to America could regularly be overheard in cafés or bars from loud-talking strangers. So even if having no connection to anyone in America, any emigrant could recount the deeds of some Albanian who had emigrated there just from what he or she would have heard by virtue of spending a few Sunday mornings or afternoons in one or another of the 1 Socialist Albania’s propagandistic material addressed to the children referred to Hoxha as “uncle Enver.” When used by adults, as it happened with some frequency by the late 1980s, “uncle” was ironic and implied at least some measure of disapproval of the regime. With the humorous effect intact, the use of “uncle” for Hoxha by the emigrants was ambiguous: both those fervently opposed to the “dictatorship” and those few who spoke appreciatively of more than a few things about Albania’s past seemed to use it.

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cafés or eateries in downtown Athens or Piraeus where scores of emigrants spent some of their free time. The Albanians of those continuously circulating stories could be one’s former neighbors or distant cousins who had either emigrated to America directly or after “having been emigrants” in Greece. Many or perhaps most of them “had won America” through “the American Lottery,”2 and a few were said to have paid their way there. Unfailingly, all of their deeds commanded fascination. In direct or implied comparison to the present life of the emigrants in Greece, in America the Albanians were better off in all kinds of ways. They had found happiness. A former physics teacher, who after years of occasional manual jobs finally owned and operated a rather small café in Athens, knew such an emigrant who “had gone with the Lottery.” The brother of this emigrant continued to be a regular client at the café. He was here, for three or four years, with his wife and with his family, children, they had three children.. . . Sometimes he calls here to the café. He has called twice since he left. Once he called when he had just arrived in America. Last year, that was last year, his brother did not have the cell phone yet.. . . It was not even two weeks ago, when the phone rang again. At night, because they have the time different in America. I was about to close the shop, and I thought to myself, “Who would be calling at this time?” And it was Lani! “How are you?” I asked. “How is my Bill Clinton?” He was happy. “It is great,” he said, “you folks in Greece just cannot imagine!” That is what Lani said. “You cannot imagine,” he said. “There is nothing to worry about,” he said, “I am calling just because I wanted to hear your voice.” He misses us. “How is my professor?” he said.. . . That is what Lani always called me, “professor.” There are not many Albanians in Detroit. He is in Detroit, do I say it right? That is in Chicago, right? America is big, you know that yourself.. . . Lani had worked at the Electro-Medical Enterprise in Tirana. Do you know where that is in Tirana? In Greece he never had a fixed job. He went from construction site to construction site, every couple of weeks. He learned how to lay tiles, but there was not much work for him here. There is not much work for anyone here! Lani had a lot of troubles. They also did not give him papers for his wife. Now in America he has not one but two jobs! In Detroit. He works in a gas station in the daytime, he said, and in the evening he works in the kitchen, at a restaurant. The job in the restaurant is not difficult, he said. People are cultured in America. And they have all the machines. Everything is done by a machine. That makes the work easy. He just needs to stay in the kitchen for the shift, he said, the work is done by itself! I teased him a little. “Have you learned English?” I said. He is learning English, [Lani’s brother] has told me. I always ask [Lani’s brother] about Lani. But you do not need much English in America. As long as you want to work hard. His wife has a job too, they both have all their papers, orderly papers, from the Lottery. “I make 1,900 dollars a month,” he said. And his wife makes another 700 dollars. That is 2,600 dollars a month! It is not easy, to make 2,600 dollars. “But we work hard,” he said, “there is no enjoying life like in Greece.” America is work, and then work again, and then work again. And a lot of money. In America you work, then you eat, then you go to bed, then you get up early to work again. Well, we work hard in Greece, but who can make 2,600 dollars? That is a million lek, a million drachmae [$2,727.32]! Who can make a million a month here? There are Albanians here, intellectuals, who have finished two universities, and they would be lucky to make 200,000 [Greek] lek [$545]. Or even 150,000 lek [$409]. Lani knows that, he has been in Greece and knows.

In the immediate sense, narratives such as this appeared to be about the deeds of specific individuals. But their focus was consistently on contrasting the experiences 2 The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program of the United States Department of State was colloquially referred to as “the American Lottery.”

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of those Albanians who had become emigrants in other countries to the experiences of the emigrants in Greece. So, in effect, the emigrants’ ubiquitous talk about their cousins or former neighbors or acquaintances who were now happy emigrants elsewhere in the world was talk about the countries of the world where those individuals had now found their happiness. The ubiquitous stories of Albanians in America, for example, portrayed America in sharp contrast to Greece. America was “incomparably” better. Not only did the Albanians who had settled in America earn amounts that in Greece were “unimaginable,” they also did not suffer from racism or ethnic discrimination. Even in those cases when their documents in America were not in order, it was remarked, emigrants in America did not have anything to fear from the police, at least for as long as they “did not ask for it themselves.” It is America, there, man. Nobody puts a hand on you. If you do not put a hand on anybody, nobody puts a hand on you. Nobody else.

Similar comparisons between other countries and Greece were implied also in the narratives of various Albanians who had settled elsewhere in Europe. If one had no work the next day, such talk went on for hours and various countries of the world were contemplated thoroughly. Sometimes the emigrants explicitly compared the Albanians in those countries with themselves. The deeds and the newly-found fulfillment of those who had settled in Germany, for example, or “even in Italy,” served as little more than excuses for engaged conversations about Germany and Italy, and about how Germany and Italy compared to Greece, to other countries of Europe, to America, and to the rest of the world. A former police officer who had visited Albania the summer before we met described meeting there a former neighbor who had emigrated to Denmark. [. . . ] was saying to me, he was saying . . . You don’t have any idea, man, how things are there. They have houses, not like here.. . . [In Denmark t]here are no apartment buildings. They have private houses. He has seen for himself, because he was learning to drive, because he wanted to get a [driver’s] license. He was saying, “The way it is here, old man, it is not like in Greece.” . . . Outside it is cold there—snow, freezing. But inside the home, it is hot.. . . They stay in short sleeves inside! Eh, how much there is to the world.. . .

At times, certain Albanian emigrants to other countries in Europe were thought of as being in conditions comparable to that of the emigrants in Greece. It was said, for example, that those Albanians who, in order to obtain political asylum in various countries of Europe’s northwest, had presented themselves as “Kosovar refugees,” had to endure great difficulties. That was until they could receive their “documents,” a stretch of time known to be lengthy. Yet the other countries of “Europe” were virtually always described in warmer tones than Greece. An emigrant’s “lot” in virtually any of the other countries sometimes spoken of as “the West” was more desirable than the lot of the emigrants in Greece. “All of the Scandinavian countries,” for example, were narrated as being better. One law graduate who worked in a street market in Athens commented that, in the Scandinavian countries, [y]ou work like a human being! Not like here! You have insurances, you have everything. If someone hires you, then you are hired, there are no more words about it later. Either you do not work or you work. But there are no words later.

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Fig. 13.1 Leisure and labor

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This then was the organic though implicit alternative to the emigrants’ “condition” in Greece: In order for their present woes to be taken care of, emigrants had to be in America or somewhere in Scandinavia, not in Albania. But how could the other countries of the world provide an organic alternative to being in Greece when the emigrants could not get there? To the emigrants, the question was apparently not whether they could easily go to those other countries. Instead, the state of being that was ubiquitously narrated as an implicit alternative to the present in Greece was fulfillment. Fulfillment and happiness did not have to be easily accessible. Quite possibly, though quite as sadly, fulfillment could be unreachable. Yet it existed. Faraway. Somehow as a property of countries. Territorialized. Fulfillment was being an emigrant elsewhere in the Western world. As I was sitting in a café one day, waiting for an appointment, three emigrants were talking loudly about the successful emigration to America of, perhaps, a mutual friend. One of them, who, over the course of a few beers, seemed to have lost some of the everyday restraints of being an emigrant, re-portrayed America endlessly to his friends: Your soul is joyful! You have all your heart wants, brother. Your soul is joyful!

Geography and Hierarchy While a number of countries of “the West” were spoken about as territories of fulfillment, they were not the same among themselves. Some countries attracted more talk and more enthusiasm than other countries. And it was not even just the amount of attention that countries drew that distinguished them. At the explicit level too there seemed to be a great deal of consensus that some countries were better than others. Greece, for example, which emigrants systematically considered to be “incomparably” better than Albania, was generally also thought of as lesser than most all the other countries to which Albanians had emigrated. Greece was our lot, our fate.. . . When the lots were drawn, this was our draw.

America was better than Greece. Germany was better than Greece. Denmark, too, was better than Greece. But while America was better than Greece, and Germany and Denmark were better than Greece too, America was better than Germany and Denmark. As he was enthusiastically telling about the living arrangements in Belgium of one of his former mates from high school, I asked a university student where he would have emigrated if he could choose any country of the world. America. I know this. [pause] If I had a choice. I am not saying I don’t like to go to Belgium. I like to look at the art museums. They have a lot of culture [in Belgium]. But America is the best country for the emigrant.

What made some countries better than others? Clearly, countries had objective features of the kind that many an emigrant could easily be prompted to enumerate.

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Countries had cities, and highways, and buildings, and cars, and these distinguished them from each other. Then there was science. Then there were the everyday objects that countries made available. The quantities and the qualities of those. And how reachable those objects were to the people who lived in those countries. And so on and on. And while in such objective terms America and Germany were better than Greece, Greece’s own good things could be endlessly recounted to establish that Greece was incomparably better than Albania. But while Albania was worse than Greece, the Albanian-language weekly published in Athens once reported the “Albanian Embassy in Peking Surrounded.” The amusing point of the report—whose air of hurry I try to reproduce in my translation below—was that, in the eyes of some North Koreans in faraway China, Albania was better than North Korea. To the North Koreans Albania was in fact so good as to be associated with Germany, Switzerland, or Spain. TWO NORTH KOREANS CROSS OVER THE PALISADE. The Albanian embassy in Peking is surrounded by many troops of the Chinese police forces. The reason is the arrival of two North Koreans, who have requested our representatives to move them to South Korea, which is an unusual event for the Albanian representatives in China. On Tuesday morning, around 10:30 Albanian time, two North Koreans, one 22 and the other 26 years of age, managed to avoid the eyes of the Chinese guards protecting our embassy, crossing over its palisade. At their first contact with Albanian personnel, as made known by sources associated with the Albanian Foreign Ministry, they asked that our embassy protect them and then transfer them to South Korea, which was their goal. Before now, embassies of other western states such as Germany, Switzerland, and even Spain had experienced such cases, where North Koreans had asked their embassies to move them to South Korea. Only recently, 25 North Koreans had approached the representatives of Switzerland. THE FATE OF THE TWO NORTH KOREANS. The entering of these two persons into the Albanian embassy in Peking, which marks the first such case for an Albanian embassy, has caused Albania’s Foreign Ministry to begin contacts with the ministries of China and of South Korea in order to decide what will happen with the two North Koreans. Talks are expected to last until this morning. According to the same sources, based on international conventions between countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and Spain, and in which Albania is also included, it is thought that these two should be allowed to transfer to South Korea, as has happened in all previous cases with other foreign representatives in China. While the Chinese side considers such an act not unusual, since North Koreans are free to enter China because of their communist government system, from the Albanian side, entry of other citizens into this embassy still remains inexplicable . Albanians, during the years after the overturn of the dictatorial system of Enver Hoxha, used to break into foreign embassies and request political asylum in the developed western states. Meanwhile, yesterday’s case of the two North Koreans who have chosen our embassy to realize their dreams for a better life shows that our country is not only a country from which Albanians may depart towards the western world, but that it can also be a country which can host other citizens—in this case, two North Koreans.3

Was there a geographic logic to the emigrants’ geography of fulfillment? Of the countries that drew the most curiosity and contemplation, the farther west and north a country lay the “better” that country was considered to be. A good number of emigrants knew Albanians who had emigrated to Italy, for example, which 3

Gazeta e Athinës, Friday, 16 August 2002, p.2.

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lies both north and west from Greece; the general view was that Italy was indeed better. A university student who also worked part time at an upscale boutique in Athens, excused the clothing tastes of “most of the emigrants” because of their being in Greece. If we lived in Italy, we’d be used to different things. Therefore we would have different demands. We would want other things from life—better things, which we do not know about now—because we would have been used to them. We would have had those things if we had emigrated there.

Farther on north and farther on west, Germany was even better than Italy. With great consistency, America emerged out of such narratives as the best of all countries. An anecdote that I first heard from a former aspiring actor, who in Greece had become a welder, captured pithily the logic of the international order implied in the ubiquitous narratives of countries to which other Albanians were known to have emigrated. In the beginning, when the emigrants came to Greece, one emigrant was astonished by what he saw here. He saw the supermarkets, and the shops, and the cars. He had not seen all these things in Albania, and he says to his Greek efendiko, the owner where this emigrant worked, “I can see with my own eyes here in Ioánnina that in Albania we are 100 years behind Greece.” “I know exactly how you feel,” replies the efendiko, “because I felt that same way when I went to Germany to work 20 years ago.” This efendiko had been an emigrant in Germany. “I was agape,” continues the efendiko. “The shops in Germany were bigger than in Greece, the cars were bigger, everything in Germany was better than in Greece. And I,” continues the efendiko, “I said to my German efendiko that I could see how Greece was 100 years behind Germany. I thought Germany was the top of the world! But do you know what the German efendiko said to me?” The Greek efendiko is saying this to the emigrant. “The German efendiko said that he knew exactly how I felt,” says the Greek efendiko, “because my German efendiko had been in America, for vacations. The German efendiko had been left with his mouth wide open in America! In America the German efendiko had seen that Germany was 100 years behind!”

Yet the geographic principle one could infer from the relative positions of Greece, Italy, Germany, and America, was only approximate. For one thing, Albania lies north and west of Greece. Moreover, America, Germany, and Italy are perhaps best understood as core locations in the emigrants’ geography of fulfillment. While there was broad consensus about their relative standing vis-à-vis each other, the geographic principle did not determine the positions of various countries other than those key points of reference. The European countries that lie north of Italy and west of Germany did not draw as much talk. Of those better countries that were not talked about as frequently as Germany or America, the geographic principle seemed to provide only a vague sense as to their ranking. It took little effort to elicit from various emigrants the conviction that Denmark had got to be better than, say, Spain. But when it came to how Denmark compared to Germany or to Austria, the consensus no longer held. Not many emigrants knew personally someone who had emigrated to Canada, yet, consistent with the geographic principle, little doubt appeared to exist that “a country like” Canada “must definitely be” a great deal better than Greece. But when a former hydraulic engineer, who explained that several of his former colleagues had emigrated to Canada, suggested in a conversation that Canada privileged those emigrants who had business connections in Albania, in that “Canada required” proof

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of a large amount of money for issuing “legal emigration documents,” another emigrant, also a former engineer, but who was older and did not have any personal contacts in Canada, voiced his disbelief: How is this possible? Why would Canada prefer the Mafia? I have heard that Canada is almost as good as America. Personally, I do not know. But from what we hear, those are countries where they have law. Canada does not go by our ways. We do make those distinctions—businessman, common human. In Canada you are just an emigrant, like all the others.

While Canada’s geographic position suggested a rather high standing in the world order, Canada turned out to be not as good as its geography would lead one to imagine. The settlement of this conflict was illuminating. That Canada was actually not as good as one would have reasonably guessed was something one emigrant actually “knew.” Geography made this a controversial fact. Still, the emigrant who did not possess the knowledge about Canada’s actual position ultimately had to accept that it was so; Canada was actually not as good as its geography indicated. The principle that the farther west and the farther north a country lay, the better that country was, was thus incidental. It was the ranking of countries as such that really counted. In the eyes of the emigrants, all the countries of the world, including those one barely knew about, were positioned vis-à-vis each other in ways that allowed for definitive “better-than, worse-than” verdicts. Hierarchy was the logic of the emigrants’ geography of fulfillment.

America, Where Things Are as Things Ought to Be If each country occupied a specific location in the emigrants’ world hierarchy, how was that location defined? If not geography, what was it that made certain countries better than others in the eyes of the emigrants? Since America was undisputedly considered to be the most desirable destination “for emigration” and “the best of all countries,” narratives of America could be instrumental for understanding what made certain countries better. Typically, that America was “the best country in the world” amounted to an axiomatic truth. But emigrants could also be prompted to a range of answers as to why America was the best. From the narratives of those who were willing to articulate the reasons for “everyone’s desire” to emigrate to America, several portraits of America emerged. “Technology” and “science,” for example, were to several emigrants key reasons why America was “the most advanced country,” “more developed” than any other country on the face of the earth, “ahead” of all of them. In the words of a former technician in a wire factory in Albania, [a]ll the new technologies come from America, all the inventions. Computers, everything. Space ships. They do not say it for nothing, that America is the brain of the world. America values science. Science is development. Do you see Greece? Why is Greece here? Eating souvlakia? Because there is no science. There is some science, but not very much.

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A number of narratives identified America’s greatness with the abundance which America “was known” to have bestowed upon “its emigrants.” While the account quoted earlier on the earnings of that one emigrant in America was unusual in specifying plausible earnings, most narratives hyperbolized to various degrees America’s emigrants’ wealth. In a more typical account, an emigrant in America and cousin to a former taxi driver emigrant who had been in Greece for several years and worked in construction, once visited Greece for a week of vacation on an island. Every time, he put his hand in his pocket. He was generous. Oh, yes! Without saying anything! He did not let any of us put a hand in our pocket. No. Every time. We would be walking in the street, seeing a bar. He would say, on his own, without us saying anything, “Come here,” he would say, “let’s go in here.” One time, two times, three times. “What are you doing, old man?” I said. “You are wasting all your money.” “Come on, man,” he said, “it is for wasting.” Well, he had money, that is why he wasted it. We wanted to do the same. But with what? I had seen him. The first day when he came, we went to the bank. He did not go inside—he had brought his card, for the automatic machine on the wall. He pulled money from the wall, with his card. His wallet became fat. With dollars! This fat!

To more pensive souls, however, America was better and more desirable than any other country not simply because of the money that an emigrant made there, but because of its “justice.” “To the emigrant,” America was fair. One youth who appeared to be somewhat critical of the ideas of the emigrant mainstream, still remarked on America’s difference and fairness. There is a lot of technology in Europe, especially in Germany and in the northern countries, like Sweden, and Austria. The standard of living there is very high. But America is the only country where emigrants can become rich. America is more just to the emigrants. In Europe emigrants can have a high standard of living. But emigrants cannot become rich in Europe—unless they deal in drugs. Look at the Albanians in Switzerland.

Wealth and justice were related in the reckoning of an elderly former chemistry teacher who worked at a market near a metro station in the outskirts of Athens: it was America’s justice that allowed emigrants to earn more money than they could “in any other country of the world.” The emigrant earns what he works for. In America one gets what one works for. That is why we say that Albanians have become rich in America. When we go to America, we Albanians work hard. Our emigrants in America are the honor and pride of all of us! They show that we Albanians are not lazy, that we love work, we love hard work. But justice is necessary, for redeeming the hard work. Not every country prizes the hard work of the emigrant. That is why every emigrant desires America. Every emigrant would go to America first.

A former teacher of literature remarked that the opportunities America offered to “the intellectual emigrant” were “unique.” She illustrated her view that justice set America apart from all the other countries with the example of the husband of a cousin of hers, a former surgeon from a southern city in Albania who within “a very short time” after emigrating to America had become a nurse there. It’s not even three years since my cousin won the Lottery. They went to Ohio. Her husband had been a doctor in Albania, a surgeon. Won the Lottery, so they went there with all their papers in order. He began working in a hospital. As a helper, you understand. He did not even know English. He knew Russian. That didn’t help. My cousin is the old generation—I am joking, she and her husband had learned Russian in school. He began slowly. First one

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thing, then the next. Learned English. Took some exams. Then they hired him as a nurse. Then he passed another exam. Then he got his license. He works as a nurse now. They have even bought a house! Where else would you see that? To work in your profession! Only three years to buy a house! Not even three years. We have been here a decade and we cannot buy a house. They do not say it for nothing—there is nothing like America.

Many emigrants were firmly convinced that, unlike in Greece, in America, “nobody judges you for being an Albanian.” One emigrant was amazed at having learned that in America “even the illegal emigrants” were not pestered by the police. There are no broom operations! They do not send you back, unless you are a criminal. But if you don’t do anything, if you just look after your work, they let you stay. They don’t care whether you have papers or not.

To a student in an American college in Athens, “the fact” that in America one was “not singled out for being an Albanian” contrasted America to Greece even more sharply than the opportunities America offered for earning more. The absence of ethnic discrimination was something profoundly unique to America and the reason for this student to want to go there. Americans are different. They differ from the Europeans, especially from the Greeks. They are different. Where would you see that here, to get what you deserve in school without at least some comment thrown in? Even in the college here, some people have to mention where you come from. If you come from Albania, there is no way they are not going to mention it! It is not just how much you have worked.. . . They’d not say it for the Greeks, you know. But they have to say you are an Albanian if you are one! They have to! They would say something like, “Bravo to Edgar, he comes from Albania.” Some of them may mean it well: “Look, there’s an Albanian who is studying a lot.” Or, “Look, the Albanian got the highest grade.” But I am so tired of it all. I do not want such compliments. I want to be treated like a human being, like a person, not like an Albanian! I am Edgar. Period. It doesn’t matter where I come from. If I do something good, it should be something good I did; if I do something bad, it should be something bad I did. That I did, I did it, Edgar, the person. Not something that “the Albanian” did.

In the absence of ethnic discrimination, it seemed fairly easy for an emigrant to imagine how various of the arrangements that aggravated them in Greece, which could be seen as consequences of discrimination and described as “violations” to “the logic of things,” did not take place in America. The very idea of the existence of such a reality where things were “as things ought to be” could exalt certain emigrants. To a former journalist and writer, America’s “unique justice” could be seen in the very way in which America chose its emigrants—the American Lottery. Everyone has the same chance to go to the country where he can become the person that he wants to be. Every person in the world. You mail your card, and then it is a matter of luck. You either get it or you do not. Every year! The same! You cannot bribe your way to it. This is extraordinary! Have you heard some Albanians say, “Why the Gypsies?” Because even Gypsies have won the American Lottery! This is unique justice! Those Albanians who say “why” for the Gypsies forget what racism means. They are as racist as the Greeks! This shows you what justice is. Every citizen of the world who wants to go to America has the same chance. America knows that everybody wants to go there. Every emigrant wants to go there! A lot of Greeks want to go there too. The Greeks are envious of America! That is why they say, “America this, America that.” They are envious. But they want to go there

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themselves. I know Greeks who have thrown [an entry ticket in] the Lottery. The chances of everyone are the same.

Justice was thus more than having “strict laws” and “abiding by the law,” which were talked about as features of other countries also. There were those emigrants who explicitly contrasted the universal justice that characterized the American Lottery to the injustice of various otherwise law-abiding and orderly countries. I was once told of a cousin of one emigrant’s friend who “had paid” seven thousand dollars to be smuggled from Albania to England at the time “when the Kosovar refugees were in Albania.”4 In England, that emigrant had had to “pretend” that he was a Kosovar, a refugee. Why should a person be forced to pretend such a thing? Why pay so much money? Does England not know that emigrants want to go there? Why does he need to pretend he is a Kosovar? There is no need for that. How do they do it in America? They have the Lottery. Whoever gets it, gets it.

It was thus justice in a far broader sense than that implied by “the rule of law” which set America apart from the rest of the world. America’s justice was a dimension of America as the country where things were as things ought to be. America understood what the emigrants wanted—to emigrate to America. Other countries too understood what the emigrants wanted—how could a country like England not know that “emigrants want to go there”? But whereas England and other “developed” and “rich” and “orderly” countries “obliged” the emigrants to pretend that they were refugees, America alone offered to all the emigrants of the world an equal chance to emigrate there. This was what made America the best. America was not simply technologically advanced, wealthy, non-discriminating, and law-abiding; it was the country where the apparent logic of things was pursued straightforwardly, where things actually were as things ought to be. And that is why, to an emigrant, America could not but provide the greatest degree of fulfillment.

The World Hierarchy Thus, another loop. And I had come to it while trying to make sense of the emigrants’ talk about the other better and happier countries of the world. It had turned out that America was the best of all countries because America was the best. Certain countries territorialized greater fulfillment than other countries because they did territorialize greater fulfillment than other countries. Was I projecting external views in interpreting the emigrants’ words about America? My own dormant views perhaps, ones I would not even have been that aware of? Had my trying to make sense of what emigrants said carried their words a step further than their words warranted? 4 About 450,000 of the 850,000 who fled Kosovo during the NATO strikes in the spring of 1999 found temporary shelter in Albania.

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Fig. 13.2 Not all comprehensions of the world could be articulated through the common ways of thinking about the world: Geography was sensed to be a hierarchy of a different sort, yet economic critiques of capitalism were evoked to counter that tacit order

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There was another problem as well. The emigrants’ deliberations on why America was the best of all countries paralleled their discursive objectifications of the differences between Greece and Albania. When pressed to rationalize about their emigration to Greece, which they would not do ordinarily or by themselves, the emigrants tried to illustrate the economic model of emigration that “everyone knew” with various examples from their life in Greece. Responding perhaps to the logic implied by my questioning about the reasons for emigration, they spoke as if their experience in Greece had led them to their views of the relative standing between Greece and Albania. Yet the emigrants had decided to leave Albania for Greece before having first been in Greece to experience it; they must have already believed in Greece’s material and overall superiority over Albania before their experience of emigration could lead them to what were narrated as experiential conclusions. In spite of the absence of experiential proof, the belief in Greece’s superiority must have been strong enough for the emigrants to put their very lives at substantial risk for crossing the borders to Greece. At one point I came to realize that the problem could even be seen as rooted in the act of my inquiry. Just like questioning why they had emigrated to Greece, trying to elicit from the emigrants what made certain countries better than others, implied that the emigrants would know as if from experience why it actually was so. On one occasion, when my asking about the relative standings of various countries must have appeared particularly insensitive to the implications of prestige that “knowledge” originating from personal connections to emigrants elsewhere in the world seemed to carry, a former teacher of biology who did not have contacts outside Albania and Greece took umbrage: There exist no ignorant people today. All people read. Emigrants have advanced with the times. Here in Greece things are a bit backwards. This is the ill fate of the emigrants, that they live in this condition. But this does not mean that emigrants don’t know how things should be. Emigrants have advanced with the times. We all have eyes and ears. It is not hard to imagine America. Everybody has a head. Everybody has a mind. Everybody knows how things should be.

Indeed, the emigrants’ visions of the world order could not be empirical. They were immersed in talk about other countries, yes, and some of them would have perhaps also read about other countries. Yet while everybody knew about how things ought to be and talked about various countries of the world, nobody had actually been to those countries. The global hierarchy that emerged out of the emigrants’ discourses had a vivid social life; yet, at its heart, it was an imagination. So what could I conclude empirically? Just a few things: That the way the emigrants saw it, the countries of the world somehow territorialized fulfillment. That the way the emigrants saw it, different countries territorialized different states of fulfillment, and any country in the world, including those not well known by the emigrants, occupied a given position in the world hierarchy. That the emigrants’ visions of the world order could not come from their experience. That the world hierarchy was essentially a social imagination.

Chapter 14

Portrait of Ilir, Known As Panajotis, Embassy Child, Ex-Politically Persecuted, Internment Farm Worker, Baker’s Aide, Specialist of Floors, Would-be Rebuilder of the World Trade Center

In Greece, Panajotis, age 41, has become “a real specialist” of floors. He has taught himself how to lay tiles flawlessly and he has also taught himself how to lay laminated floors. He can now even read construction blueprints, just like an engineer. Ilir, for Panajotis was born Ilir, comes from one of Albania’s “more elevated” families. He was not allowed to receive much education there, however: “for political reasons,” his family was persecuted. That, however, had been after Ilir’s father’s stint at the Albanian embassy in a very developed East European country. Ilir has not visited Albania since he emigrated and he will “never go back.” Panajotis is willing to do “anything it takes” to emigrate to America. For America he would even rebuild the World Trade Center.

The McDonald’s on the Syntagma Square Panajotis brings his son of 10 to McDonald’s almost every Sunday. And it is no surprise to him that that is little Dimitri’s most favorite event of the week. “Even in America the burger is the king of foods.” This “habit” of going to McDonald’s started about one year ago, when Panajotis began bringing his son to the McDonald’s restaurant on the Omonia Square. Soon, however, he began minding the many Albanians who sat around the small white tables everywhere in that restaurant. “The Albanians” did not eat, they only drank coffee or Coca-Cola. Panajotis did not like his son to hear so much Albanian spoken so loudly around him. Why had he brought his son to Greece? To listen to the Albanians? He took an oath to himself to never go to that restaurant again. Fortunately, there is another McDonald’s in the center of Athens, “just below the level” of the Syntagma Square. That one is “even more modern” than the Omonia McDonald’s, and it is always packed with European and American tourists. As a matter of fact, those tourists have become to Panajotis a major 162

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appeal of that restaurant: by sitting at the Syntagma McDonald’s every Sunday afternoon, little Dimitri can hear English spoken around him by “real Americans” and “real Europeans.” That is good preparation for the day when Panajotis and his wife get lucky, win the American Lottery, and emigrate to America.

Towards Athens Ilir belongs to the first wave of emigrants who crossed the border into Greece by foot in the winter of the year 1990. That was two years after he was released from internment in a village “deep” in Albania’s south and relocated to Tirana, and one year after he married “a Tirana girl.” From the beginning, Athens was Ilir’s ultimate destination. He had prepared himself to walk deep inland before entering a Greek city to board a bus or any other means of transportation to Athens. He walked through “the Greek woods” for days, eating from the bread he had carried with him from Albania, and drinking from a bottle he had also brought with him. He refilled his bottle in the streams and other sources he found along the way. The two things he was most concerned about as he walked through the woods alongside the highway were the Greek police and the other Albanians heading inland. The reason why he would not enter a town before reaching deep into Greece was to avoid being caught by the police and sent back to Albania. He had heard many stories about those who were sent back. He had heard that “the Greeks” arrested the emigrants, that they took their money, and that they beat them before deporting them to Albania. Ilir could well imagine how the border patrol would beat the Albanians. But as far as money was concerned, he feared the other Albanians more than he feared the Greeks. There were many cruel stories of “friendship” in those days. Two guys, say, would leave Albania together, heading for Greece. A month later only one of the families in Albania would hear from their son. Alive and well in Greece, the son would ask his family on the phone whether they knew about his friend, from whom, it would now turn out, he had departed before reaching the border. The word would thus arrive to the family who had not heard from their son that their son had not been seen for a while. Sometimes, months later, the Greek police would find the body. Other times the body would never be found. There had also been many bodies that were found but were never identified. All of this is to say that Ilir was careful to avoid the other Albanians while heading towards Athens. Every time Ilir happened upon other Albanians going through the woods, he would greet them briefly and make known to them that he was not alone. Ilir would say that he was catching up with friends who were either a few hundred meters ahead or a few hundred meters behind. That was convincing for, unlike Ilir, Albanians walked mostly in groups of three or four. They could perhaps “not even imagine” that he would be walking all by himself. On the other hand, most of them too seemed not to like meeting other Albanians. Everyone must have been frightened in those days.

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Fig. 14.1 A meeting point for many emigrants, this kiosk on Omonia Square carried dozens of Albanian publications

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As Ilir walked through the woods, the Greek “inhabited areas” were nearby and he could see houses, shops, and gas stations from not very great distances. There was brightness day and night: in the day it was the sun, at night the electric lights. But, even in the first moments after crossing the Greek border, Ilir was not surprised by “the wealth” and by “the life of the foreign world.” The reason for his not being surprised was that, unlike the other Albanians one could happen upon while walking through the Greek woods in those days, Ilir had already lived in a European city before. It was at that time that, looking at the Greek towns in the distance, Ilir became aware of how different he was from the other Albanians. He was different in a more profound way than he had ever known. Even those Albanians who had lived in Tirana or in Durrës for all of their lives “had not seen Europe with their eyes.” They had never been out of Albania before. Because of his family’s internment, Ilir had had to spend many years of his life in an isolated village. Still, Ilir had lived in a major capital of Eastern Europe “before anyone.” He had lived there for “almost four whole years,” when his father worked for the Albanian embassy. Walking through the woods in that winter of 1990, Ilir became viscerally aware of what it meant to be different—different from all the others who walked through the same woods. During his internment in the village, Ilir had almost forgotten that he had been born in an elevated family. A cousin of Ilir’s father had at one time been more important even than a member of the Central Committee of Albania’s Party of Labor. In the early 1970s, Ilir’s father had become “one of the most trusted people” and sent to a key post in the Albanian embassy in one of the “most developed” countries of the Eastern Block, a country that “was very important to Albania.” That happy life had continued through the year 1980. As Hoxha eliminated what he called an “enemy group” within the Party of Labor, the cousin of Ilir’s father was demoted from his high post and eventually imprisoned. Ilir’s father’s term at the embassy had been renewed just before this had happened. But once that cousin was demoted, Ilir’s father was recalled to Tirana urgently.

An Architect, or Perhaps a Diplomat Like His Father Ilir remembers his embassy days vividly. Being returned to Albania remains the most traumatic event of his “whole life.” Years later Ilir was told that the whole family would have applied for political asylum were it not for Ilir’s younger sister who had been left in Albania with a grandmother. In those days, nobody was sent to an embassy without leaving at least one member of the immediate family behind; a whole family was never allowed to be outside Albania at the same time. Hardly a surprise, “for Enver Hoxha knew” that he was “keeping people by force” inside the country. Ilir’s parents were well aware of what their daughter would have to go through if they were not to return to Albania. Willing or not, they returned just as they had been ordered.

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All the goods that they had brought with them from the embassy were sequestered in the airport. “A whole treasure,” that was, for Ilir’s parents had been very thrifty. Subsisting for the most part on foods that they brought from Albania, the family could save virtually all of the salary of Ilir’s father. They never had to buy much in the way of food while at the embassy; they never ran out of Albanian trahana,1 noodles, beans, dried figs, fruit preserves, tomato paste, and olive oil. Sometimes they even had fresh feta cheese from Albania: whenever they could, Ilir’s uncles sent packages with the members of the official delegations who traveled to that country. The members of the delegations were happy to do a small favor for Ilir’s father. Thriftiness allowed for the salary of Ilir’s father to be converted into goods that, in Albania, would have been “the envy of all.” Even the women of the country where the embassy was stationed did not have so many fur coats as Ilir’s mother had bought. Ilir’s mother had also bought all of the “heavy” household equipment that was hard to get hold of in Albania. She had actually bought them in doubles. Upon their arrival back, Ilir’s family brought with them two washing machines, two refrigerators, and two color televisions—one of each for the dowry of Ilir’s sister, and one of each for Ilir’s future family, with whom the parents planned to share a household in retirement. They also brought 150 square meters of synthetic carpet that “could not be found” in Albania. Of all of these, “and much more,” they could take nothing with them. Nothing except for “the clothes on their bodies.” All their suitcases and cardboard boxes were sequestered at customs. Two men in gray suits had taken Ilir’s father with them, while Ilir and his mother had been put in a small empty room. After a while, the two men had come back and taken Ilir to another room, where someone in military uniform had inspected Ilir’s clothes thoroughly. None of them had spoken a single word to Ilir. Ilir cannot remember how many hours he had stood in that room in the airport. It must have been long, for it was already night when he was eventually brought outside by the men in gray suits and put in a minibus with the engine on. His mother was already inside. Ilir can never forget the cold sweat on his mother’s forehead. They were driven to his grandmother’s apartment. Ilir’s mother did not speak a word for the entire ride. Back then, the tradition in Albania was for “the entire kin” to come to the airport to welcome back relatives returning from trips abroad. But nobody was there for them. As it had turned out later, Ilir’s grandmother had known that they were coming. A cousin had advised her, however, not to show up at the airport. Besides the men in gray suits, their “only reception” in Albania was a Chinese jeep,2 “certainly of the Sigurimi,3 ” which followed the minibus until Ilir and his mother were delivered to the apartment of Ilir’s grandmother. 1 Dried crumbs of dough made of wheat flour and yoghurt which, when cooked, produce a sour thick soup that is usually poured on diced dry or toasted bread and served with hot melted butter or olive oil. 2 Under state socialism, the Albanian military, police, and secret service in the cities used rugged passenger vehicles made in Russia or in China that were referred to as “xhips” or “gaz.” 3 Sigurimi was the name of Albania’s secret service under state socialism.

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One week after this return to Albania, an officer of the Sigurimi had showed up to tell them that their father was all right. When Ilir’s father eventually returned, another two weeks later, he said that he had been ousted from the Party and that all of them would be sent to work in a state farm in a village “deep” in Albania’s south. For “re-education through working with the peasantry.” Much later the children had learned that, had their mother wanted to remain in Tirana, she would have needed to divorce their father after he had been ousted from the Party. To “say it simply,” the reason why they had all been interned was that their mother had decided not to divorce their father. At the embassy, women and children were not allowed to be alone in the foreign city. Except for once or twice a month, when one of the embassy’s three cars drove them to the discounter where all the embassy families bought virtually all of what they wanted to take with them to Albania, time was spent indoors. Ilir remembers how, during such trips, he looked eagerly from the car windows at the buildings, the bridges, and the lights of the foreign city. In those moments he wanted “to do something for his country.” He wanted to build buildings even taller than those he saw. Yes, he dreamed of becoming an architect. Or perhaps a diplomat, like his father. He reflects that he was young at that time. He still thought that that would be possible. With the turn that life took, however, Ilir was never allowed even to complete high school. Before joining his parents at the embassy, Ilir had had just one year of high school. In the embassy he was home-schooled by his mother. The plan had been that, upon returning to Albania, Ilir would undergo examinations for a high school diploma. Given what had happened to his father’s cousin, however, in Albania Ilir was not allowed to study any further. Neither had his homeschooling been recognized, nor could he go back to high school. Ilir was deemed old enough to work on the farm “like the villagers.” His sister was the only one who still attended school for three years after they had been sent to the village. After completing the compulsory eighth grade, she too was to work on the farm. Ilir also reflects on the transformation of his “emotions.” In the years he spent at the embassy his parents spoke with love about the Party of Labor. In those days “Uncle Enver” was to Ilir as dear as his own father. Ilir was told that the Party had liberated the country, that the Party had eradicated Albania’s illiteracy. Ilir’s parents used to say that in the near future the cities in Albania would become more beautiful than the foreign city they were in. Even when they were hastily packing their belongings to leave the embassy, when Ilir’s father had just been recalled, Ilir believed that something of a mistake must have been made. Ilir believed that everything “would be cleared” as soon as Uncle Enver “would hear” about it. But after some time in the village Ilir began fearing Uncle Enver. Eventually his fear developed into hate. And he also began hating “most of the Albanians.” How could he not? Although Ilir and his family were not “enemies,” nobody from the village spoke to any of them. Ilir missed everything about the embassy and the foreign city where he had been.

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In Greece The determination never to return to Albania has carried Ilir through numerous difficult situations in Greece. He was not the specialist of floors that he is now on the day when he first came to Greece. And he did not become so in one day, either. The first job Ilir held in Greece was with a baker in a small town in the north. After walking for a week, he felt that he was “deep enough in Greece” not to be caught by the police, and he entered a city. His idea was to find transportation to Athens. Two men and a woman in white aprons were the first people he saw. They kept walking in and out of a building that looked like a house. It was perhaps three or four in the morning, and from the smell Ilir could tell that they were baking bread. The one who later turned out to be the baker greeted Ilir and gave him a loaf of white bread with sesame seeds. That was the first time in his life that Ilir tasted sesame seeds. The baker seemed to be a “very good-hearted” person. Ilir did not speak a single Greek word. “With hands and with feet,” he tried to explain to the baker that he wanted to work. The baker agreed right away to keep him at his shop, to help with chopping wood and other chores. Ilir could sleep in a barn in the backyard of the bakery, where the baker kept his supplies. Ilir received “little money,” but he could also eat for free: besides the bread they baked, the baker also gave him cheese, butter, and various canned foods. Ilir tried “to catch” as much Greek from the baker as he could; he always carried a small notebook and a ballpoint pen with him, which he had brought from Albania for the purpose of writing down Greek words. He asked the baker and his son who also worked in the bakery what the words were for different objects that they worked with. And he always wrote down the Greek words in his notebook. The baker himself could not spell very well, but the baker’s son had gone to school and he seemed to enjoy helping Ilir with spelling. As a matter of fact, the baker’s son was very friendly; he even gave Ilir a larger and thicker notebook for his words. In just about three months Ilir had saved some money and learned “enough Greek” to find his way around. He decided it was time to head for Athens and “bade farewell” to the baker. Ilir boarded a bus to Athens and pretended he was sleeping for the entire duration of the ride—he did not want to be recognized as an emigrant if the police were to come. Ilir did not know anybody in Athens, but he had brought with him the 50,000 drachmae [$136] that he had set aside. This money allowed Ilir to survive for the first couple of days in Athens, until a constructor picked him up from the Omonia Square for a one-day stint. Here Ilir was given his first chance to show that he was different from the other emigrants. Ilir could already speak some Greek, and he tried to show to the constructor that he worked hard. The constructor liked the way Ilir worked, and the one-day stint became full-time employment.

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The American Lottery Ilir did not “simply work” for the constructor; he also tried to learn the skill of laying tiles. Just as he had learned Greek at the baker’s, all by himself, Ilir began to teach himself the mastery of laying tiles. Whenever possible, he also looked at the construction blueprints. Now, after so many years, Ilir can say that all of this diligence has eventually paid off. He now knows not only the techniques of making straight tile floors, but also of making “excellent floors” out of laminated panels. Ilir has become so good that he is hired in construction projects “everywhere in Athens.” He also works for individuals who are repairing floors in their houses. They call him, and often they even recommend him to others. Ilir also advertises with his own flyer, which he prints in many copies at home, using his own computer and printer. At the baker’s shop Ilir learned also “how to say” his new name well. His new name is Panajotis. In Greek it means “saints, all the saints.” Panajotis chose this name for himself while at the baker’s and, once in Athens, he made it a habit to introduce himself everywhere as Panajotis. “Not like the Albanians” who used Greek names with their bosses, but went around among themselves with the names they had in Albania and often even made jokes about their Greek names. Panajotis cannot say whether it was out of belief in God that he introduced himself with the new name in Athens, or whether it was out of the reasoning that with a Greek name Greeks would help him more. “Perhaps a little bit of both.” “It is a fact” that, given Albania’s atheism, in Albania Ilir had never been attracted by religion. Before coming to Greece he did not really know “anything at all” about religion. But in his first days in Greece, as he walked through the woods and became aware of all the dangers, Ilir felt the existence of God. Those were truly frightening days, more tense even than the first days in Albania after having been returned from the embassy. The fact that he made it through the woods all right, and that he found the baker where he could live like a human being for many weeks, and where he could begin learning the language—all of these showed to Ilir that there was a God. In sum, Panajotis is content with his new name. About one year before leaving for Greece, Ilir had married a Tirana girl who also came from a family that had been politically persecuted. Within one year of having crossed the border Panajotis sent 250,000 drachmae [$682] to Albania, which allowed his wife to buy a visa and join him in Greece. After a few difficulties in the beginning, she too learned Greek well and began to work. Now that both Panajotis and his wife earn, they can afford the rent for an apartment “in a good neighborhood” in Athens. They also can afford to eat meat twice a day. After a “whole life’s share of cabbage” in internment, “meat tastes good.” But even though both Panajotis and his wife earn, “managing the money” can be hard. Most weeks it is impossible to save. Panajotis feels that, even though he is now paid much better than in the beginning, earning more and “doing more” in Greece may not be possible. He does not blame the Greeks for not liking the Albanians. The Albanians “deserve to not be liked.” At the end of the day,

170 14 Portrait of Ilir, Known as Panajotis

Fig. 14.2 The qualities of objects commanding attention

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however, Panajotis knows that to Greeks he remains an Albanian who does not have documents. So Panajotis hopes that some day he and his family will all be able to emigrate to America. Both he and his wife participate in the American Lottery every year. To maximize the chances of winning, they “throw” separate applications; their son, Dimitri, is not yet old enough to do so. And while the three of them hope that they will get lucky and eventually win the American Lottery, Panajotis wishes that there were “some other way” for emigrating to America. The Lottery is just a matter of luck; “the one wins who is lucky.” Panajotis would have wished for a “more just contest.” America should choose more wisely among all the emigrants who want to go there. America should choose the one who has “improved the most” since coming to Greece. Panajotis wishes “America could see” what each emigrant who throws the Lottery would be willing to do for being allowed to go to America. Were the Lottery such, Panajotis has no doubts that, with the skills he has gained, he would have already been chosen to go to America by now. He should have been chosen “before many” of the emigrants who have won the Lottery. If there were a way to show it, Panajotis could show America that he is willing to do anything it takes. Just to be let in. In Greece Panajotis taught himself not only how to lay perfect tile floors and laminated floors but even how to read construction blueprints, just like an engineer. In America, he would learn even more. Deep in himself, Panajotis feels that, were America to let him in, for America he could even rebuild the World Trade Center.

Chapter 15

The Logic and the Experience of Emigration

The social imaginary of a world hierarchy implied the logic of emigration: moving from a country of lower standing towards one of higher standing meant international advancement. The emigrants’ imaginary of the world hierarchy was sufficiently powerful for the lived experiences of emigration, including those of social demotion, to be conceptualized in accordance with this logic of emigration as a move of advancement. But when it came to driving further action, the experiences of emigration thwarted the urges of the imaginary. The ongoing struggle between the logic of emigration and the experience of emigration shaped the discourses of emigration as much as it shaped the emigrants’ strategies for carrying on in Greece.

The Logic of Emigration The social imaginary of the world hierarchy implied the logic of emigration by bestowing a profound layer of meaning on the much-repeated view that emigration was nothing but a move towards a better country than the one the emigrants had left behind. The trajectory from Albania to Greece was not simply a move in geographic space; in the emigrants’ register of the world hierarchy, it was advancement from Albania to Greece. The emigrants typically spoke as if the upward draw of emigration was an intrinsic property of the global order. It was ordinarily not doubted that the logic of international advancement was universal; to the emigrants, anyone anywhere in the world of not-so-good countries would be naturally drawn towards the world of the better countries. In scores of instances of international migration that they learned about, the emigrants perceived essentially the same dynamics as those that they implicitly understood to lie at the roots of their emigration. A colorful dispatch from Gazeta e Athinës, titled “The World’s Tallest Man Requests Political Asylum in England,” emphasized the generosity of England in allowing one exceptional individual to pursue his fulfillment, after briefly making a mockery of rationalizing why a Somali might want to emigrate. The world’s tallest man is now in London and is requesting political asylum. Husein Bishad, 27, 2.36m tall and weighing 210kg, has a shoe size 65, but this number continuously increases. Bishad wants to enter the Guinness Book of Records, dethroning his predecessor,

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Raduard Sarbib, 2.33m tall. Bishad declares that he is very pleased and enthusiastic to live in England and says that his only eternal problem is that he bangs his head against a variety of objects. The world’s tallest man is from Somalia. He deserted his fatherland in September, leaving all his property behind, after a robbery during which the thieves shot him in the knee with firearms. In England he was given a residence permit without any expiration and was considered a legal emigrant who has the right to gain political asylum in England.1

So truly universal in the eyes of the emigrants was the logic of emigrating with the aim of advancing in the world hierarchy, that it applied not only to the Albanians who had emigrated to Greece, to the North Koreans who struggled to go to South Korea, or to a Somali wanting to settle in England, but also to “the Greeks themselves.” Certain emigrants, and not only those “who read,” would occasionally remind me that, especially in the past, Greeks emigrated to America. Many Greeks have emigrated to America themselves—for generations. The owners of one of the houses where I work, they have an aunt. A sister. The husband, he has a sister in America. In Boston. They go there, almost every year. “You just do not know how it is there,” says my landlady. “The things they have! Don’t even begin to ask! You will lose your mind!”

That emigration was understood as advancement in the world order also explains why ultimately the emigrants could not envision their woes in Greece as resolvable by returning to Albania. Despite the absence of ethnic discrimination against them in Albania, and regardless of the prospects of comparable if not better living circumstances there, in the intrinsic logic of emigration, returning to Albania would have amounted to demotion.

The Subjection of Emigration Experiences to the Imaginary of World Hierarchy But how did the emigrants reconcile their visions of emigration as advancement in the world hierarchy with their experiences of social demotion, and sometimes of decline more broadly? How did an Albanian former engineer or former high school teacher believe he or she had advanced by migrating to Greece, all the while he or she had to earn a living through manual labor in construction or domestic service? In other words, if the social imaginary of international advancement had driven the emigration from Albania, what sustained “the emigration” in Greece? Was that erstwhile imaginary of the world hierarchy not transformed by the emigrants’ experiences? In light of their social demotion, how could the emigrants actually experience advancement? No emigrant I met spoke of emigration as downward mobility. In fact, rarely did any emigrant talk about any aspect of the haunting experiences of his or her demotion in terms that would even remotely recognize the demotion. Narratives of “sufferings of the soul,” xenophobia in Greece, and ethnic discrimination proliferated,

1

Gazeta e Athinës, Friday, 22 February 2002, p.23.

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Fig. 15.1 “We are all the same. All Albanians”

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and they did capture the emigrants’ emotional turmoil. In certain instances, I felt that emigrants’ talking about their turmoil actually exacerbated their turmoil. Yet the discursive scape of emigration seemed to conceptually restrict the representation of the emigrants’ lived experiences to statements that accorded only with the emigrants’ imaginary of the world hierarchy. A series of narrative strategies had emerged to fit what was individually experienced with what was socially imagined. The emigrants’ negative experiences of the present, for example, and their experientially downward social trajectories, were talked about in ways that rearticulated and even reinforced their views of the world hierarchy and the logic of international advancement. In a common twist, to make sense of various hardships in Greece an emigrant would not question Greece’s superiority over Albania, but would emphasize instead Greece’s relatively low position among the desirable countries of the world. Various narratives would point not only to Albania’s inferiority vis-à-vis a number of other countries of the world, but also to Greece’s inferiority to them. This pattern was not limited to talk about one’s own experiences in Greece; it permeated the discursive scape of emigration. Speaking of the “wrong course” that Albania had taken in the last decade, a former student who had participated in the popular protests that incited Albania’s political changes in the early 1990s captured the widely shared, albeit typically implicit, sentiment that Greece was perhaps the least of Europe. Then the demonstrations came, and students walked through the Student City. Everybody shouted, “Make Albania like all of Europe!” What an expression! How much there is to the world! They had no idea. What do you mean, imbeciles? Make Albania like Greece? Because Greece is Europe too! Or make Albania like Switzerland? Which Europe?2

In other narratives, hardships and sufferings in Greece were portrayed in light of the enumeration of various tangible aspects of the emigrants’ existence in Greece, which apparently proved that Greece was not as good or as advanced a country as America or as various other countries in Europe were commonly imagined to be. The way things often sounded, and they were made to sound so without any sense of contradiction, the emigrants suffered in Greece because Greece was not one of the countries where emigrants were imagined to be fulfilled. A former teacher of physics once spoke memorably about the injustices of the subjection in emigration of intellectual superiority to economic inferiority, all the while reinforcing those very views of the world hierarchy that apparently had driven the emigration. As was commonly done, he even extended the social imaginary of the world hierarchy to the embodiment by the people or “citizens” of various countries of the qualities or degrees of nobility that “their” respective countries territorialized in the world order: The boss was talking with a friend one day, when I heard him say, “The day has come for the Albanian to give us orders.” I asked, “What are you talking about?” He said, “In the new airport in Greece, the head of one department is Albanian.” “How is this possible?” I 2 This sentiment could also be seen as part of the larger questioning, within Greece, of the extent of Greece’s being part of Europe, on which Michael Herzfeld has written with extraordinary insight (e.g., Herzfeld 1987; 1997). Indeed, rather than limited to the emigrants, the imaginary of the world hierarchy might be widely shared within and beyond Greece.

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asked. “Yes,” he said, “and it is not just that he is an Albanian, but he is to give orders to the others who are Greeks.” I tried to follow up on this and asked people, and I found out that it was true. I found out from an Albanian who works at the airport. This other Albanian had been the chief engineer in a big state enterprise in Albania. He had helped in the building of the airport just like all the other Albanians, by pushing a wheelbarrow. But he knew a few foreign languages, and during a conversation between the Greek and the German who directed the work—because it was the German who actually built that airport—they were talking about figuring out the blueprint for an electrical scheme. The Albanian interferes and says, “May I give it a try too?” The Greek laughs, for he knew that this one was an Albanian. The German says, “Who are you?” They were speaking German. “I am an Albanian,” he said. “All right,” said the German, “you can try.” It may have been just good luck, but he figured out the blueprint in a rather accurate way. Meanwhile a friend calls the Albanian, for the wheelbarrow was waiting for him. The German caught him by the hand and said, “No, you are not going there. From today on you will be working with me.” Let’s not make this story longer. When the airport was completed, the selection of the persons who would work there was made through a competition, which was run by the German. And the competition was won by this Albanian. Now the Greeks would not see him as someone very capable at the head of their department; they would see him as just an Albanian giving them orders! This shows you how much the Albanians are esteemed in the Greek opinion! And I said to the Greek, “Can you tell me, did this Albanian win his job by exerting violence, or through an open competition?” “No,” he said, “he won it in competition.” “Then,” I said, “it is not that you Greeks gave him the job. The German gave him the job. The German does not look at what is written in the passport, but he figures out who has the best mind, and who has the knowledge that will be best for the work.”

At other times, various emigrants would appear to forcefully subject their lived experiences to their social imaginary. As recounted earlier in this ethnography, to establish Greece’s superiority over Albania, many emphasized those aspects of their everyday experience that made Greece appear better than Albania, while suppressing those aspects of their emigrant existence in Greece that would suggest the opposite—for example by talking much about the array of consumer goods that emigration made available, while typically being silent about their generally deteriorating housing conditions. In another example, countering the “fully undeserved name” that Albanians had in Greece with heightened emotion, a former teacher of history described the condition of emigration in a way which most emigrants would have agreed with wholeheartedly. She said, in effect, that while emigrants were aware that being in Greece was not as good as being in America, what justified enduring the emigration was that, “at least,” Greece was Europe: Emigrants know that stealing does not get one anywhere. But tell me, please tell me, how many of the emigrants have stolen? Let those who know the figures answer this question! All of what we have, we have earned with our own sweat! In Greece, we do not have the conditions you have in America. Working conditions are severe for the emigrant. The working conditions in Greece can be worse even than in Albania, at least for the emigrants. You must know, Greece is not America. In Greece, the emigrant works hard. But at least Greece is Europe. And emigrants know that what we have, we have earned it with our own sweat. With the sweat of our brow! The sons of the mothers have toiled! And they are proud! Nobody has made Greece a present to the Albanians! They have earned Greece by themselves.

For all an emigrant’s woes, and despite his or her actual past in Albania, Greece thus had to be better than Albania. Even when it did not feel so, Greece was still part of Europe. And as part of that larger reality that was imagined to be undisputedly better

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than Albania, not as a lived experience, Greece was to justify the Albanian emigration; an emigrant could be proud for having “earned” his or her being in Greece. Sheer subjection of experience to the imaginary, thus: Despite one’s demotion, one had to recognize that advancement had actually happened. On the other hand, the rawness of this discursive subjection indicated struggle— struggle within an individual emigrant as well as within the cohort of the emigrants. At the conceptual level, it must have been an ongoing struggle for the emigrants’ experiences of Greece to be made sense of within the context of the social imaginary of international advancement. The social imaginary apparently prevailed. The vision of the world hierarchy had driven the emigration and, at the discursive level at least, it also dominated experience in the struggle to sustain the emigration. The emigrants’ lived experiences had failed to put forth an alternative to the vision that Greece was better than Albania and, more broadly, to the social imaginary of the world hierarchy. Yet the lived experiences in Greece resisted incorporation into the emigrants’ imaginary of the world hierarchy. As the narratives recounted here attest, those experiences had also had some victory; at the very least, they had gained implicit recognition.

The Roots of Action The conceptual struggle between the emigrants’ visions of the world hierarchy and the visions of the world that could be alternatively drawn from their experiences in Greece revealed itself not only in their discourses. This struggle profoundly shaped the emigrants’ conceptualization of their very strategies for carrying on. In another restatement of the logic of emigration as advancement in the world order, the natural desires for alleviation of one’s everyday hardships were often articulated as desires for leaving Greece for countries imagined as better. But did the emigrants’ imaginary of international advancement continue to actually drive action? While the emigrants’ visions of the better countries in Europe would have suggested that, after being in Greece, the emigrants would attempt to migrate further towards those other countries, actual efforts to move elsewhere within Europe were negligible. This fact was recognized, but spoken about in ways consistent with the logic of emigration as international advancement. Virtually every emigrant I met shared the sense that, instead of pursuing further emigration within Europe, “all emigrants,” indeed “all Albanians,” had their eyes on the even bigger prize—they participated in the American Lottery “every year.” They all enter [an application in] the American Lottery. All the emigrants you see here. All Albanians.... We mail the applications for my sister-in-law also, because they are in Albania, and she is concerned. My sister-in-law gives herself many worries. She wants to be sure that the application arrives in America all right. One never knows with the Albanian Post. It’s just luck. She gets [the application] ready—she does it with a lawyer, because they

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have a law office in the ground floor of their apartment building,3 —and she sends it to me on the Athens bus. Then she calls me on the phone. “Did you receive it?” “We received it, we received it.” Every year, September comes, and I ask her, “Will we win this year?” We enter it every year, but we have had no luck. It’s luck. A lot of emigrants get it. We entered it last year again.. . . I’ll throw a wedding4 if we win it. Where is there [another country] like America!

None of the emigrants I met, however, said that he or she was prepared to go to America illegally. This could have been out of practical considerations—why share with an outsider what could potentially be used with negative consequences?—but it was spoken about in accordance with the visions of the world as an international hierarchy. A former army officer articulated his disinclination “to enter” America illegally in terms of America’s superiority over Greece. With a stolen passport you put your head at risk, especially if you are trying to reach America. America is good, but their laws are not like in Greece. If they catch you breaking the law, it is not like here, it is not forgive and go away till you do it again. Here in Greece you have the law, and the law tells you what to do. The law is before you. And you try to avoid the law. In America, the law is behind you. You do what you want. Nobody tells you what to do. But you watch out for yourself! If you break the law, then the law comes after you. And it catches you! A false passport is punished heavily! I, personally, prefer a legal way. My family enters the Lottery. If we have the good fortune to go to America, with the Lottery, with original papers, good. If not, we will make do like all the others. Like we make do now. Our fate. We are not going to pay money for another illegal emigration.

Again, this should not necessarily suggest that awe of the law, even America’s law, was universal. A good many emigrants appeared to know personally one or another individual who had paid his or her way to America or was contemplating the available ways for doing so. In those circumstances, another aspect of the imaginary of the world hierarchy was restated: The rumors about those “who dealt with passports” or “papers” quantified somehow the relative rankings of various countries of the world and their consequent desirability as destinations for “emigration.” It was said, for example, that an emigrant could be sent to America—“guaranteed”—via Brazil, Mexico, or other Latin American routes, for sums starting at about eight thousand US dollars. Being smuggled to another country in Europe, on the other hand, started at about twelve hundred US dollars. The lower prices for being smuggled to Europe reflected not so much the geographic proximity to Greece of the other European countries, as they did those countries’ relative desirability as destinations for emigration: Though significantly lower than the prices for being smuggled to America, the prices for a number of the countries of Europe could be spoken about as high or “not worth it.” A student who helped part-time at the offices of a multinational real estate agency, and whom I knew to be trying to find a “legal” way for emigrating to America, reasoned that:

3 During the 1990s, the ground floors of many apartment buildings in the city of Tirana were turned into premises for bars, shops, and a range of small service businesses, including law and notary offices. 4 Idiom expressing the magnitude of joy.

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Italy is not worth spending all that money to get there. What am I going to do there? Italy is not very different from Greece. It is a little better, but not so much.. . .

While failing to drive further emigration, the social imaginary of international advancement thus maintained symbolic supremacy. Like this student, a number of emigrants who did not try to move elsewhere within Europe did, on the other hand, both—symbolically—participate in the American Lottery as well as downplay the degree of superiority over Greece of certain other European countries. Since all the other countries of the European Union5 were imagined to be better than Greece, however, and since their higher standing could not but be recognized, this amounted to a delicate argument. Visions of things rooted in the emigrants’ experiences of their emigration also sought recognition as drivers of action. In terms explicitly drawn from experience, various emigrants felt compelled to justify their not trying to leave Greece for “Europe” the way they had left Albania for Greece, as the logic of international advancement would have required them to. It was mentioned oftentimes, for example, that one needed to invest heavily in the effort for further emigration—not only money but also a great deal of human effort for the purpose of “adjusting” to “another country” or “stabilizing” in another country. In the words of a former administrator in the executive committee of a small southern Albania town, [w]e are not going to become emigrants again. A second-time emigrant! That requires a young age. We have gotten old. Greece has aged us. Emigration has aged us.

But while the social imagination of international advancement had apparently not succeeded in driving further emigration, the experiences of emigration did not prevail at the symbolic level. This former clerk appeared to mean what he was saying, and I could not imagine any reason for him not to want to tell the truth. Yet his words were embroiled in contradictions. Plausibly, the effort of settling in a new country would be demanding. But was it not what settling in Greece had also required? Moreover, at the time we met, this former clerk was only in his fifties, had already gained experience in settling abroad by having done it once, and, in another context, had confirmed that, “just like everybody,” each member of his family participated regularly in the American Lottery. So where did action come from? Did imagination drive action? Or did experience? If the emigrants’ experiences of their world were to drive their action, a good number of them would have most likely returned to Albania. If, on the other hand, their social imaginary of the world hierarchy were to drive their action, the emigrants would have made real attempts to leave Greece—for America, of course, and, if that were unaffordable, for one or another country in Europe. I asked a former official from Albania’s Ministry of Education why, instead of or in addition to participating in the American Lottery, which he did “as a family,” did he not attempt to go to Germany, where, I had been told, a distant cousin of his wife had settled several

5 At the time, no formerly socialist Eastern European countries were members of the European Union.

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years ago. He expressed a similar experience-position to justify why he did not undertake the kind of action that the social imaginary which he shared would have required. The toll of settling abroad was high; his children could somehow be happy even in Greece: It is a great hardship to start again. To take the children out of school. My children have learned Greek excellently. They are both extraordinary. They have Greek friends. In Germany they would have to learn German.. . . My daughter, and I am not trying to brag here, but my daughter now occupies a position of dignity in her own social group. I mean people respect her because she is exemplary. She is exemplary in the moral sense that we mean in Albania. I have proof of this. One day my daughter was a little ill. She did not go to school that day. In the afternoon, after school hours, twenty [Greek] girls from her school came to visit my daughter! Of course we had not expected anyone at all to visit. And each of them had brought something. They were all serious girls, girls who respected my daughter; and they did not show either by their faces or by the way they spoke that they were just going to the home of an Albanian. On the contrary. They were going to the home of a friend. In this sense, my daughter is happy here.

Was it not difficult to make sense of why, even though one did regularly participate in the American Lottery in order to advance in the world order, one made no effort to emigrate to Germany or to any other country in Europe, which in the same view of the world would also have amounted to advancement? In other words, the inner struggle had not ceased. The social imaginary of the world hierarchy presented a clear urge to action: leave Greece for Germany. The experience of emigration countered this urge. Since being in Greece had failed to bring about advancement, experience suggested, further emigration would perhaps not bring about advancement either. But since experience could not put forth a vision of the world that would counter that of the emigrants’ social imaginary to the point of urging a return to Albania, the solution was to remain in Greece and to make the best out of it. This was what the majority of the emigrants did. Yet at the level of one’s visions of the world, the social imaginary of the world hierarchy was not challenged. While in Greece, emigrants massively participated in the American Lottery. And this former education official had to justify why he remained in Greece. Moreover, as a result of this ongoing inner struggle of envisioning the world and acting in it, this former official’s reasoning did convey what could be—unfairly—perceived as an air of manipulation. Emigration was mired in such a continuous though perhaps not conscious inner conceptual struggle. At the symbolic level, the social imaginary dominated experience. In turn, the lived experience compelled one to reconsider one’s view of the world. Here, social imagination clearly prevailed. In a number of conversations, the real reason for not trying to migrate further in Europe had been presented in terms of one aspect that Europe and Greece had in common. Although better than Greece in numerous ways, the countries of Europe might resemble Greece with respect to how they treated “the Albanians.” Adding yet another layer of meaning, and another indication as to the complications of one’s inner struggle, a former agronomist claimed that this could even be seen as not the fault of those countries: Europe needs orderly documents. Nobody employs you without papers. It is not like here.. . . They do not accept Albanians any more, like those of the embassies. Those who went there,

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they went there. That is no more now. Albanians have gained themselves a bad name. Everywhere. We all suffer from that bad name.

The Albanians of Greece This left only one country—America—as worthy of at least the desire for further emigration. Judging from the emigrants I met, participation in the American Lottery must have been universal. Yet only a very few would win it. Neither about to return to Albania nor willing to try some other country in Europe, the vast majority of the emigrants would remain in Greece. And as their remaining in Greece reflected the upper hand of experience in the struggle between the imaginary and experience, so too it engaged the logic of the emigrants’ social imaginary of a hierarchical world. Two main strategies had crystallized to improve the emigrants’ condition in Greece. While at first appearing opposed to each other, at a more profound level they both addressed the emigrants’ reputation in Greece in ways that assumed the counterpart to the vision of territorialized fulfillment—the embodiment in people of countries’ qualities. The first and most obvious way for an emigrant to avoid the disadvantages of being an Albanian in Greece was to de-emphasize or outright deny one’s being an Albanian. It was a topic of seemingly endless talk that a substantial number of emigrants tried to downplay “their origins” in everyday life by “trying” to act “not like Albanians.” Not all the forms of this strategy received the same degree of social approval. It was generally accepted, for example, to lower one’s voice in public places when conversing in Albanian, or even to switch to Greek; indeed a good number would volunteer that they often acted that way. On the other hand, the “extreme attempts” of taking part in the radio shows that denounced Albania’s official position with regard to its Greek minority were widely condemned. One emigrant, himself an ethnic Greek from Albania’s “minority,” questioned the very rationale for such “shameful acts,” and said that rather than helping ethnic Greeks, they hurt all emigrants by “throwing fuel into the fire” and by serving Greek “chauvinism.” While those emigrants who tried to deny their ethnic identity were typically denounced from Albanian nationalistic positions, the blame for their actions could at times be assigned to the larger condition that had “coerced” them to “behave that way.” Typically, that larger condition was “Greek xenophobia.” But not always. In the account of a former hydraulic engineer, the “deeper reason” for the denial of Albanianness in everyday life was Albania’s state socialism. They pretend they are Greeks. But Greeks themselves do not do this, they do not turn against their own country. Yes, Greeks too have emigrated. But they have worked for their country. Don’t Albanians love the soil that gave birth to them? Is this because of the propaganda? Because there was propaganda for the Party instead of for the country? Is that why Albanians now do not care for their country?

Widespread as it appeared to be, formally joining the Greek Orthodox Church met with strong though typically not explicit disapproval. Many referred to it as “change of religion,” even though it is hard to see how the emigrants belonged to any religion

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before coming to Greece.6 A former teacher of biology was ambiguous about who was to be blamed for the “abuse of religion” that dismayed her—the Albanians who pretended they were Christians when they were not, or “the Greek state” that treated preferentially those who could show themselves to be members of Albania’s Greek minority. These things make me suffer. Why change religion? On television, Albanians speak against Albanians. We, the Christians, have [been issued] three-year cards. The supposedly VorioEpiriots. But not the others. This is an abuse of religion.

More common than the change of religion or the explicit pretense of Orthodox roots was the “change of names” to suggest Orthodox backgrounds.7 Especially at the beginning of emigration, upon arriving in Greece, numerous emigrants had picked for themselves names from the stock of Orthodox names they had been familiar with in Albania. A substantial number must have not taken their new names very seriously: while known by their self-selected names to Greeks, they had kept their Albanian given names among themselves. A few, however, were said to have gone as far as to change their family records in Albania to their new names. One former civil engineer had found an easy compromise: In Greece I say that my name is Gheorgeos. That sounds like Jorgo in Albanian. In Albania my name is Gjergji. It is the same name—it is an international name. My parents gave me an international name; they did not call me something nobody could understand. In America my name would be George. Or in Canada. If I were in Italy, I would have said Giovanni. An international name translates into all languages.. . . I can say I am Gheorgeos without really having changed my name.. . . But even if I had changed my name, I would not be ashamed. Why be ashamed? People have always changed their names. Emigrants are in Greece to stay now, so why should it be a shame for them to take up Greek names?

A number of emigrants were said to speak only Greek to their children. For their “children’s sake,” so that their children would not be exposed to the Albanian language, they also avoided other Albanians. My cousin does not speak Albanian to her daughter. The daughter is about eight years old now, eight or nine. They brought her to Greece as an infant, two or three months after she was born. My cousin herself is very good with her family in Albania. She keeps the contacts, she always calls, she sends packages, always she sends packages. But her daughter, she says, she wants to cut off from Albania. When her daughter was beginning to speak, years ago—my cousin has told this to me herself—they would sometimes hear her say a word in Albanian. A small child, you know, would have heard the word from her parents, would have repeated what her parents said.. . . They corrected her. They said that word to her in Greek. They do not even speak Albanian to each other when their daughter is around. Husband and wife, they speak Greek! Poor child. I pity her.

6 During the last two decades of state socialism, all religious activity was outlawed in Albania, affecting especially those who were born after the early 1960s. 7 Albania’s socialist state had discouraged the usage of religious—“backward”—first names, and new parents were encouraged to name their children by authentic “Albanian” names. New names were invented, and, especially in Albania’s major urban areas, a continuing tradition was developed of being purposefully non-traditional with names.

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Even though only rarely did one admit to not speaking Albanian to his or her children, a few expressed understanding of the practice: “Cutting off” the ties one had with “the Albanians” was imagined to somehow make possible a life for the children that the parents could not have for themselves. In the words of a former teacher of literature who expressed uneasiness about the adult emigrants who had changed their names, [t]he children who are born here can have Greek names. I accept it for the children who are born here. I would even say, they should have Greek names. They are emigrants, they have come to Greece, and seek to be part of Greece. They will go to school, they will live with Greek children.

Yet those who “pretended” to be Greek themselves were often scolded. A former journalist told of an “ex-friend” of his who, through ways that he had managed to keep from the light, had obtained Greek citizenship for himself and for all of his family. I asked him, “Did you get it?” “Finally,” he said. “Finally we did. Now we can be like all other Greeks.” Shame! To say that with his own mouth! Is he an Albanian, or what is he?

In any event, not all could successfully pass for not being Albanians, and even those who could, could not do so all of the time. The second strategy for improving the lot of the emigrants in Greece headed in the opposite direction. Instead of ridding oneself of the designation of Albanians, a number of emigrants sought to improve the name of the Albanians by addressing with words and deeds what were perceived to be the roots of the negative reputation of the Albanians. Those especially who could not help being recognized as Albanians in their everyday existence reacted to the injustice of the emigrants’ inequality with Greeks by attempting to reverse the negative ethnic “stereotype.” My impression was that this strategy resonated with a vast majority of the emigrants. Indignant at “those who deny their own country,” several former intellectuals whose professions bound them to the Albanian language, wore their Albanianness with pride. Asserting the virtues of “our nation” perhaps far more strongly than they would have otherwise, they often expressed a sense of moral superiority in being Albanian. I think that Albanians here work very hard. Not only do they not steal and kill, and not only do they not commit crimes; Albanians are superior to Greeks, morally speaking. Albanians undergo hardships that cannot be described. The Greek television shows how bad some other foreign emigrants live. What pleases me, as an Albanian, is that I have never seen an Albanian family come on Greek television to show how bad they live. This has to do with our vitality as a people. When an Albanian comes, the others do not let him sleep in those shelters we see on television as examples of the bad life of [other, not Albanian] emigrants in Greece.

Though this pride in being an Albanian could clearly be seen as a reaction to the discrimination directed against them, often the terms in which it was articulated did not differ from those of the “racism” or “xenophobia” that the emigrants sought to oppose. Just for being Albanians, for example, and despite their economic inferiority, the Albanians were actually superior to the Greeks. In moments of

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exaltation, the good school performance of the Albanian children in America could serve as the most immediate proof of such superiority: Even to America the good name of the Albanians has reached! Not the bad name, the good name! I read it yesterday in the paper, and I was filled with pride. That one little Albanian pupil in elementary school, a pupil from Albanian parents, from parents who went there with the Lottery, has been declared the best pupil of New York! I am saying it to you just like it was written in the paper. This honors us! This achievement honors us all!

Or: When my girlfriend enrolled in the American college, all my mother’s friends, her Greek friends, were surprised. They were congratulating her, but also thinking to themselves, “How can this be possible?”—that my girlfriend enrolled in the American college. Because they had daughters themselves, and their daughters did not enroll in the American college, because it was too hard for them. One of my mother’s friends had a daughter who went to the American college for one year, and then she switched to a Greek school, because she could not take it. But Albanians work hard. Albanian students study hard. It is painful to Greeks to see that.

In everyday situations, many emigrants made conscious efforts to act “like it is apt for an Albanian.” A number reacted to the practice of “some other emigrants” who switched to Greek in public places by regularly speaking Albanian in high-end stores. Several of those who worked for the butchers in the street markets around the Omonia Square, and who had apparently gained enough say in their jobs to do so, solicited the patronage of emigrants by sale signs in Albanian. Prices were advertised in Albanian also in one of the travel agencies on the Syntagma Square, where an emigrant with postdoctoral research experience was in charge of the operations. Many participated in “the Albanian cultural life,” for example by attending concerts that featured Albanian artists invited from Albania and from the United States, or by purchasing and reading Albanian books, which were sold at certain international book fairs in Athens as well as at a kiosk in the Omonia Square. A good number of former poets, journalists, and teachers wrote in Greece books in Albanian. Indeed, enough such books must have been selling for one emigrant to start an Albanian bookstore in Athens in the year 2002. In accordance with the terms of their imaginary of the world hierarchy, this strategy for improving their lot in Greece had to emphasize the emigrants’ “national feeling.” This should not be mistaken for a longing for Albania, however; emigrants had no desire to return to or be in Albania. Elevating the relative position of Albania in the global order, and elevating thus their own position as Albanians, aimed at improving the emigrants’ condition in Greece. A youth I knew, from occasionally visiting the bar of an anti-racist political group that sought, among other things, to promote “a better image of Albanians” in Greece, had articulated on several occasions his desire for greater “unification” among the Albanians and expressed his frustration with the “apathy” of the emigrants. When I asked him whether he would consider going to Albania in the future, to live there, he replied: I have lived in Greece . . . for 11 years. My parents brought me here when I was 12. I have gone to school here. Yes, I am an Albanian. But I belong in Greece. I do not live in Albania. I should have my right to be an Albanian here.. . . I should have my right as an Albanian of Greece.

Chapter 16

Portrait of Genci K., Student, Waiter

Two years after emigrating to Greece, Genci K., now 26, enrolled at “the” American college in Athens to study political science. He desires to enroll also in “the correspondence curriculum” of the University of Tirana’s School of Law; this will depend “entirely” on whether he will be granted admission. Genci also wants to eventually bring his younger brother to Greece. To pay for his own education, and to support his parents and his brother in Albania, Genci waits tables at a café in downtown Athens for about 60 hours a week. During the week, studying and working do not leave him with much time to sleep. Mondays, however, when he has no classes and has also arranged not to work, Genci “can sleep the whole day.” Ideally, he would have wanted not to be an emigrant any longer. Ideally, Genci would have been in America or in “some country in Europe.” There he could pull his brother too, and their parents could also occasionally visit them.

Reflecting on Things He Never Thought of Before The first time one of the professors of the American college invited him out for a beer, Genci K. was full of emotions. He felt his life was taking the most important “turn” right in front of his eyes. He did not know how to express things. He had never been invited for a drink by a professor before. That would be unimaginable in Albania; there a professor would never invite a student for a drink. It is unimaginable in Greece too, especially if you are an Albanian. But the professor who invited Genci for a drink was an American. A Greek-American woman in her mid thirties, Genci’s professor was born in the United States to parents “who were Greek emigrants” and had come to Athens to teach for a few years. Genci cannot forget that evening at a seaside café in Piraeus. He cannot forget it because that evening he wanted “to say everything.” He thinks he said perhaps more things than what “a normal person” should say in such a situation. For drinking a beer out is leisure, is it not? The reason why Genci did not quite know how to behave was that that evening he felt in a way that he had “never felt before.” One can say he lost his control. He talked practically the whole time, telling his American professor “all about Albania.” He reflects that he even 185

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“got entangled” in trying to explain things that he had never questioned. That happened when Genci realized that a particular thing he said sounded strange to his American professor. Genci would then try to explain it to her, but as he began to explain things he had never thought much about, he started to reflect on those things for himself. A few times, he thinks, he even “lost his thread.” For example, he told the American professor about the long hours he worked at the café to finance his education. That was all right. But when he told her that he sometimes sent money to his parents in Albania, she appeared so surprised that Genci felt he had to remark that that did not happen every month. It would have been somehow embarrassing to admit that he did send money home every month he could do so. But as he explained that sending money home was a matter of pride among the emigrants, and that in Albania people took meticulous notice of how much each family seemed to receive from abroad, it began dawning upon Genci that this was virtually “unbelievable” to his American professor. As Genci noticed which of the things he was saying surprised his American professor the most, he started also to realize how different his life experience was from hers. Their growing mutual understanding meant thus also a growing of the distance between them. And as the things Genci said became clearer to his professor, they grew questionable in Genci’s own eyes. As he explained the sending of money to Albania, for example, Genci felt, “like never before,” how impeding or even “oppressing” it was to be supporting his parents financially while he was in his mid twenties and had to pay for his own college education. He felt that this obligation was what established distance between him and his professor. He remembers that, at one point, he had to gulp down the whole glass of beer almost at once: he had only had a sip or two in the beginning of the evening, but had then forgotten his drink as he talked practically without stopping. After they ordered a second beer, Genci managed not to speak as much.

To Become Somebody In Albania, Genci had wanted to study law. But in the year he graduated from high school “thousands” of others wanted to study law too.1 Genci remembers how it was said that the university did not have “the resources” to admit them all. So the admissions’ contest for the School of Law was made difficult. Difficulty was one thing. What made the School of Law “unachievable” for many of those who wanted it was the “injustice” and “corruption” that characterizes Albania. After the contest had taken place, “every week” the Ministry of Education came up with “endless lists” of the ex-politically persecuted whom the School had to admit regardless of their grades and regardless of their results in the contest. “Nothing against” the ex-politically persecuted; for “some of them” Genci even

1 In Albania the study of law is an undergraduate curriculum to which students are admitted upon graduation from high school.

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Fig. 16.1 Joyous pride: Selling Albanian music and shirts of Albania’s national soccer team in Piraeus

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feels genuinely sorry. He would not even have mentioned this were it not for the “reality” that “most” of those who were added through such lists had never been persecuted; they were actually people who had “connections” or who could afford the bribes. In Albania, “interventions” are needed for everything. Genci’s family could not really afford to bribe. But after the involvement of a cousin from his mother’s side, Genci was granted admission to the School of Engineering. In the eyes of his parents, Genci was given a chance; he could now study to become a hydraulic engineer. Genci did not like becoming a hydraulic engineer, however. To please his parents, he did enroll. But he never showed up for classes, “not a single time.” Instead, Genci began waiting tables at a café nearby the School of Law, where “the kids” hung out “before, during, and after” their classes. Law students were “a crowd,” Genci means to say. They displayed no interest in their studies and seemed not to know what they wanted to do with their lives. To Genci, they all appeared “very immature.” In truth, they were “disappointing.” Even though their behaviors did not deter him from wanting to study law, Genci made up his mind that he no longer wanted to have a life like theirs. Unlike them, he wanted to “become somebody.” After a few months at the café next to the School of Law, Genci decided that if studying law were not possible for him in Albania, he would pursue it elsewhere. That is why he emigrated to Greece. From the beginning, studying was the thing on his mind. Genci knows “very well” that in Greece he is an emigrant “just like all other emigrants.” Still he feels different from most of them. One thing that makes Genci different is precisely the fact that he emigrated from Albania with the school in mind. Many emigrants have university degrees from Albania, but in Greece they are “not making anything” out of their lives. Genci, on the other hand, left Albania because he wanted to get an education. He did emigrate for a better life too, but not for the better life that other emigrants mean when they say “a better life.” To other emigrants a better life means “more clothes and a color television.” Genci, on the other hand, wants to gain a “modern” and “Western” education.

“Self-Realized” Two years have passed since that first evening when Genci had a beer with his American professor. In these two years their friendship has grown. They have had drinks on two or three other occasions by now, and once his professor even came to see the café where Genci works. Yet Genci still feels he lacks the words to describe that first time when his professor invited him for a drink. It was an immense “achievement,” that drink two years ago. Even though Genci cannot quite say what was achieved. He did not achieve anything. Not anything material, that is. He was not given 50,000 drachmae [$136] in hand. But the sensation was that something much greater had happened. Somehow Genci felt that in that evening his life took a turn right in front of his eyes. In a way that is

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difficult to express, Genci felt “liberated.” It may be more accurate to say that he felt “self-realized.” Not that the realization of the self happened in that moment. In fact, it still has to happen. Genci still has to make someone out of himself. But it was at that time that, for the first time in Greece, and perhaps for the first time in his life, Genci K. could think “things” were “possible” for him too. What exactly does Genci want to make out of his life? He struggles with this question while he works his long shifts from Tuesday through Sunday every week. Genci is not disturbed by the two television monitors on the walls where “people,” whom he is reluctant to call “customers,” since they often do not order anything, follow horse races. The monitors are on all day; when there are no horse races to follow, they are switched to other television channels. Genci has grown so used to the noise that he almost needs the “atmosphere of the café” to concentrate on his own thoughts. School is the most immediate step for “making it.” In the space of his first evening out with his American professor, school was the one thing that felt possible as it never had before. Genci gained confidence that he was going to make it fine through the American college. That he was sitting in that seaside café in Piraeus with one of his American professors somehow “guaranteed” that. That evening he could also see more clearly the very difference between his present as “a student of the American college” in Athens and his past in Tirana, where he could not become a law student. There was a difference also between his having become a student in Greece and “other situations” he had had in Greece earlier. Being a student at the American college now defined who Genci was. It felt almost as if he were “not an emigrant” any longer. From one point of view, little had changed. In Albania Genci had waited tables as he did in Greece. And in Albania too he could call himself a student, for he was formally enrolled in the School of Engineering. But in Albania Genci considered himself to be a waiter. Even though in Greece he puts in more hours waiting tables than he did in Albania, after enrolling at the American College, Genci considers himself to be a student. First a student, then an emigrant. These were the kinds of “differences” that became tangible to Genci that first time his American professor took him out for a drink. That evening Genci had also felt that “making it” included things of which he was “not aware yet.” They all felt good, they all felt like things that Genci wanted to achieve, although he did not yet know what they were.

Differences Between People Genci has virtually no time for anything other than work and study, and he has become aware that “this kind of life” carries consequences. For example, Genci and his girlfriend broke up recently. It was an “emotional” event, and it caused Genci to begin wondering even more than before where the differences between people come from.

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Genci’s girlfriend had come to Greece with her family when she was only ten or eleven years old and had “grown up” in Greece. So although she was a student just like Genci, she was “different” from him. Was it because Genci grew up in Albania while she grew up in Greece? Also, unlike Genci, his ex-girlfriend did not have to pay for her education; her parents paid for her. Genci cannot say he did not like his ex-girlfriend’s parents. They spoke Albanian at home and they upheld “all the Albanian values.” But it did bother him “a bit” that they upheld those values “perhaps too much.” Apparently, they wanted their daughter to get engaged “since the very beginning,” when Genci and his ex-girlfriend did not yet know each other well. Fortunately though, they had never quite put it like that to Genci, perhaps because “in Albania” parents ask only for the engagement of their son and expect to be asked for the engagement of their daughter. Genci “still” respects his ex-girlfriend’s parents, however. For even though they seemed uncomfortable with the fact that Genci and their daughter were in a relationship without being engaged, they did not “create” many problems. Genci thinks that it was because of their “Albanian values” that it had also been difficult for the parents of his ex-girlfriend to understand their separation. They might have even thought that, working in the café, Genci would have started an affair. In fact, there was no affair. The reason for breaking up was that, the closer to each other Genci and his ex-girlfriend had tried to get, the more they became aware of how they actually differed from each other. The differences between people can be numerous. They could also be summed up as Genci’s own “being different.” Genci’s ex-girlfriend was “not different.” When Genci thinks about it, she was not really different from the other girls whose parents pay for their schooling in Greece, “including the Greek girls.” She wanted to go to the movies and to pubs and do all the kinds of things that college girls do. Genci, on the other hand, could not afford to take time off from his work or from his studying or from his sleep. She could also hardly understand why Genci needed to study in the few hours he was awake and not in class and not working in the café. Even though she said that she understood Genci’s “obligation” towards his parents in Albania, she did not seem to like it that he worked that many hours. “What was the point of it?” That was exactly why they had parted ways. Genci wonders what makes people different from each other. Was it the fact that he had grown up in Albania and she in Greece? Or was it because he had to partially provide for his parents, whereas his ex-girlfriend was provided for by her parents? Or was there something else, which he “cannot express”?

The Good Things Life Once Had After almost four years in Greece, Genci is often “depressed” by “the lack of opportunities,” and he wishes he were an emigrant elsewhere in the world. He has “no connections” in Albania. His parents, that is, do not know people who can “make interventions.” Things in Albania have also changed. For Genci, returning

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to Albania is not something to think about. Yet Genci knows that, “as an emigrant,” he cannot do much in Greece either. Even with a degree from the American college. Not to mention that his degree will be in political science. After almost four years in Greece, Genci regrets not having taken “the risk of the sea” and gone to Italy instead of coming to Greece. The risk might have been great indeed, but in Italy, “the emigrant can become a different person.” In Italy Genci would have “certainly” become a different person from the one he is in Greece. Those who went to Italy with the first boats in 1991 were “categorized” once they arrived. Genci knows this from a neighbor who went to Italy and was then returned to Albania. In Italy emigrants were put in a stadium and were interviewed. And they were treated in accordance with what they had said. They were not treated “as a crowd.” In Greece, on the other hand, even though Albanians cross the border individually or in small groups, they are treated as a crowd. There are days when Genci wants to have back the life his family once had in Albania, the happiness family life once had. But he wants to have that happiness outside of Albania. Genci wants to have back the good things that that life had. But he also wants to have the things that that life had only made desirable—or “necessary.” That is why Genci remains in Greece, and that is why he wants to also “pull” his brother to Greece. Although Genci’s brother has done all right in high school, he apparently “lacks the motivation” to make it in life. In this sense Genci’s brother is not so very different from Genci’s ex-girlfriend. Although Genci’s brother grew up in Albania, not in Greece, Genci remains convinced that the lack of motivation has to do with the way one grows up. Unlike Genci, his brother went to high school in “the years of the chaos” in Albania. That may be why he is not motivated to do things. “The experience” Genci has gained over the years of working at the café, and the experiences of studying at the American college, have made him realize how much studying means to him. Ultimately, Genci wants to “get out of Greece”; he does not want to be an emigrant any longer. Could he become a full-time student without needing to work? Could he do that in another country? Genci believes that being in another country, especially in America, would have made a great difference. That is why Genci will try again to be admitted to the School of Law in Albania. He knows people who have been admitted to the correspondence curriculum; they study by themselves and go to the school only once a year, when they need to take their examinations. Genci could study like that while he works and lives in Athens. A degree in law could combine well with his anticipated degree in political science. To study in America, or even in some country “in Europe,” having “two degrees” is better than having only one. And once Genci makes it to another country as a student, he will perhaps be able to pull his brother there also. It will be even better than pulling his brother to Greece. On occasion, their parents too can visit them.

Chapter 17

Socioglobal Articulations and Imaginaries

Seeking to throw some light onto why a growing number of people from a range of social strata in countries virtually all over the world cross international borders for lives at the bottom, this study found that a social imaginary of the world as a hierarchy of countries lay at the roots of both “the emigration” and emigrants’ conceptualizing of their experiences, as well as their strategies for carrying on. Plausibly, while greater quantities of money cannot account for the willed pursuit of social demotion involved in much contemporary international migration, the desire to advance from a location envisioned as relatively low in the world hierarchy towards one envisioned as higher perhaps could. But to what extent can one ethnography aid us in understanding a global phenomenon? Is the imaginary of a hierarchical world not a peculiarity of the Albanians of Greece? This book concludes that the emigrants’ social imaginary of a world hierarchy is, at its heart, an articulation of what we usually think of as “the social” in terms of what we usually think of as “the international.” The conceptualization of immigrants as domestic aliens can be seen as another such articulation. Yet other articulations of the social in terms of the international might underlie other contemporary instances of international migration—instances of tangible and at the same time imagined mobility in the socioglobal scape.

The Necessity for International Advancement in 1980s Albania The question confronting an ethnography that ventures to contemplate a world beyond its empirical scope is that of a case’s—any case’s—uniqueness. How can an ethnography of the Albanians of Greece help us understand contemporary international migration originating in countries other than Albania and headed towards countries other than Greece? Is the social imaginary of a world hierarchy outlined in the previous pages not simply a cultural reality tightly bound in space as well as in time? All along, this ethnography’s discursive mapping has implicitly suggested that the origins of “the emigration” are to be traced back to the profoundly social tensions that tore apart Albania’s state socialism. I have so far referred to the emigrants’ vision of the world hierarchy as a social imaginary in the sense that it was shared and 192

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characterized emigrants’ present in Greece. But emigrants’ social imaginary was social in another way as well. The narrative accounts of the objective superiority of Greece recounted earlier in this ethnography implicitly suggest that the country emigrants left behind was imploding under tensions bred by the state’s enforcement of utter equality among the individual members of the society. The first indication of the disconnect between the emigrants’ explicit stance on Albania’s one-time poverty, and the social reality implied by their words, slinked behind the very materiality of the material deprivations emigrants described. To illustrate their “knowledge” about emigration as mobility towards “a better” country by showing how Greece was materially superior to Albania, emigrants brought up various “objective” considerations. Yet, virtually all of them somehow portrayed Greece’s superiority not simply as a matter of temporary location of the tangibles they spoke about, but rather as an inalienable feature of Greece. The “material objects” whose shortage or absence in one-time Albania emigrants enlisted to illustrate the country’s poverty were items of not simply material use. In the context of their time and place, the electric appliances that many emigrants recounted as once unattainable, or the memorably colorful pieces of clothing remembered as forever in shortage, were essentially luxury items that could not be desired simply for their utility. Even when emigrants spoke of the one-time scarcity of food, they emphasized variety, taste, color, and freshness, but never the calories. The one-time Albania that emerges out of emigrants’ discourses was defined not as much by poverty as by a poverty of tangible markers for individual distinction. While one-time Albania “provided” sufficient food for no one to go hungry, the prized meats and dairy products were hard to come by and the variety of foodstuffs available left much to be desired. While “every Albanian” had enough clothes not to feel the cold, virtually all the clothes were cut from a limited number of fabrics and in an even narrower range of styles. Even the shortage of television sets, automatic washing machines, and refrigerators, which emigrants recalled with unceasing emotion, could hardly have meant material deprivation. The utility of these electric appliances in 1970s or 1980s Albania was limited—one could not but be overwhelmed by state propaganda even without owning a television set; most people would not have had so many clothes that washing by hand would have been a tremendous burden; and while calories were not lacking, most households would typically not have had excesses of fresh supplies or leftovers that needed refrigeration. Earlier in the ethnography, I recounted how emigrants typically spoke of the impossibility of owning these massively-desired objects in the context of their own positions as individuals in one-time Albania’s society—another indication of the role of televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators as markers of social distinction. One-time Albania’s material “objects of everyday life”—the planned economy’s counterpart of the West’s consumer goods—were virtually all produced in the country under strict ideological rules so as to not lend themselves to marking individual differences. Against the background of the sparseness and uniformity that characterized Albania’s household interiors, television sets, automatic washing machines, and refrigerators were virtually the only objects either entirely made abroad or assembled out of parts made abroad. Constantly in shortage, and requiring

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“authorization” vouchers to purchase, these three massively-desired items even more marked one’s standing as an “individual.” That the awarding of a voucher for purchasing a washing machine or a refrigerator, for example, was still talked about in terms of a “deserving” engineer versus a “not-deserving” junior worker well over a decade after the fact, also reveals how “the logic of things” was violated in one-time Albania. By being given the authorization to purchase a washing machine, for example, a young and uneducated worker depicted as inappropriately favored by her political networks—sometimes referred to as “shoulders” or “elbows”—was seen to bypass a senior and hard-working engineer. That a person’s education continued to figure prominently in such contemplations of their earlier proper social position bespeaks the function of higher education as the only avenue for pursuing distinction in one-time Albania. While the socialist state had made the first eight years of education compulsory, and secondary school could generally be pursued by all but the politically persecuted, a university education was not for all. University admissions were “distributed” by local executive committees because the central planning of the economy limited enrollment in the country’s handful of higher education institutions to only as many students as the state intended to have appropriate jobs for upon their graduation four or five years after. Prior to enrollment, one’s “profession” was also allocated “from above” and academic degrees read as job titles—a university student graduated as a “teacher of literature,” for example, or as an “electric engineer” rather than as a bachelor or a master of arts or philosophy or science. Although the jobs assigned to those with higher education were typically less physically demanding than the majority of jobs, and certainly carried more prestige, income differentials among the populace were kept at strict minimums, and Albania’s “intellectuals” had to overcome immense practical hurdles to obtain the material objects that would somehow tangibly mark their distinct standing. Yet, the highly educated apparently also expected to be relatively more successful in owning one or more of the period’s most-desired objects. It appears that, until the late 1970s, those who completed university studies could entertain reasonable hopes for owning a television set, as well as a refrigerator and a washing machine. “After the break with China,” however, the country’s economy entered a downward spiral, and the objects that marked the limited distinction one could expect through pursuit of higher education appear to have grown increasingly scarce. Certain narratives indicate that, by the 1980s, a teacher or engineer could often no longer be able to tangibly mark his or her individual achievements or aspirations for individual distinction. Just as completion of a higher education by a great number of those who left the country in the 1990s shows that would-be emigrants were among the most successful of Albania’s people in their pursuit of social distinction, the fact that the vast majority of the country’s highly educated either emigrated, attempted to emigrate, or considered emigration reveals the sheer magnitude of dissatisfaction with the routes available for upward mobility in late-1980s Albania. At one point, the ever-exacerbating shortage of objects that could mark one’s “individuality,” or one’s “difference,” must have made the ideologically-inspired prohibition of expression

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of differences between individuals be experienced as the inescapable reality. And, because state socialism had grown synonymous with Albania as a country by the late 1980s, a social consensus must have emerged that the individual distinction made impossible by the socialist state was not possible in Albania. It is this social experience of Albania as an embodiment of utter equality among individuals, which in light of perceived individual differences and desires for individual distinction appears to have amounted to an embodiment of grave injustice, that lies deep down at the roots of emigrants’ vision of fulfillment and moral order as territorialized in faraway countries. In the dominant social imaginary of 1980s Albania, the conceptual domain inhabited by individuals perceived as different and by their doings—or what we normally think of as “the social”—would have begun to overlap with the conceptual domain of the world’s countries and their pasts, presents, and other attributes—or what we think of as “the international.” The discursive scape of emigration generally portrayed the various countries of the world in relation to the Albanians who had emigrated there. But experiential knowledge of the outside world was virtually absent in 1970s and 1980s Albania, so what can be called “economic facts” about Greece or any other country in the West could have not played much of a role in enticing the would-be emigrants. In 1980s Albania, the material abundance on the other side of the country’s borders, as well as the larger reality of the West, could only have been figments of a social imaginary. Before any Albanian had emigrated to prove that the world beyond Albania’s borders was “better”—indeed, that it existed,—the West must have already been a lively social imaginary of justice, moral order, and fulfillment, all territorialized beyond one’s geographic location and reach. In 1980s Albania, the West must have been an imaginary of the opposite of one’s lived existence, and a space where things were actually just “as things ought to be.” Because electric appliances and other intensely-desired objects continued to become ever more scarce throughout the 1980s, their qualities must have commanded growing attention, with the minute details of such items and their differences growing into powerful symbolic markers of differences in the social sense. The keen awareness that these desired objects were produced outside of Albania would have been one of the several complementary and simultaneous ways in which social distinction would have initially been associated with the world on the other side of Albania’s borders1 . In light of the impossibility of advancement as an intrinsic feature of the combination of things that to the would-be emigrants were Albania, and in light of the possibilities for individual distinction that certain objects suggested, the imagined availability of objects in the West could articulate Albania’s social tensions in terms of the international order. The overlap between what we normally think of as the social, with what we think of as the international, must have therefore crystallized in

1 Other links can also be established, ranging from the few objects that made their way from the foreign world into Albania with drivers of the state trucking company, to the accounts, in the propaganda, of the activity of 19th century nationalist intellectuals of the Albanian Renaissance. Such links fall beyond the scope of this chapter, however.

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the envisioning of the constellation of countries generally thought of as “the West” as, specifically, territories of social advancement. The differences among themselves that the individual members of a society perceive and pursue, but which in one-time Albania could not be symbolically marked, and which found articulation in the imagination of the outside world, could apparently also resonate well with the vilification of the foreign world by the propaganda of state socialism. For the individuals who suffered the impossibility of having their individuality recognized, the state’s unwitting suggestions of difference in the international arena must have only reinforced the imagination of the possibility of social mobility on the other side of Albania’s borders. By depicting Albania as a uniquely blissful country in a world of countries embodying various kinds of moral corruption and misery, the state’s propaganda suggested that the countries of the world were different from each other. Differences between individuals could not be expressed in Albania, many must have (perhaps unknowingly) reflected—but, for once, was state propaganda not right about Albania being uniquely different from the other countries of the world? In short, it was the impossibility of attaining recognized “individuality” or social distinction, rather than material poverty, that necessitated international advancement in late-1980s Albania. The emigration was, in essence, a massive enactment of the articulation of social tensions through visions of the international, an on-the-ground and through-the-international-borders linking of desires for personal advancement in the social realm with the spaces where things were imagined to be as things ought to be. Emigrants crossed the borders not so much “for a morsel of bread,” as for tangibly marking who they were and for becoming who they saw themselves to be.

The Impossibility of International Advancement in Contemporary Greece But was the social imaginary of the world hierarchy not bound to the unique historical circumstance of late-1980s Albania? Was it a social, if not cultural, peculiarity of the last years of Albania’s state socialism? How can such an articulation of the social in terms of the international help us understand any of a great number of other instances of the contemporary international migration? My fieldwork among the emigrants showed that an imaginary of a world hierarchy, though differently accentuated, articulated other social tensions in contemporary Greece. A brief ethnographic detour is in order. At one point towards the end of my stay in Athens, a freelance writer and a butcher’s aide recounted to me his effort to obtain a tourist visa for Italy: When the consul asked why I was so curious to see Rome, I said that I really wanted to be abroad. At least once. “What do you mean?” the consul said, “You are abroad!” But I said, “there are many Albanians in Greece,” I said. “This is not abroad.” We were speaking in Greek, all the time. He understood that I was making a joke, you know, and he started

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smiling. “Greece is home for me,” I said. “I have never actually been abroad.” “That’s why I want to see Rome,” I said. “I want to see the world for once.”

This was told tongue-in-cheek and it made an art out of the discursive subjection of lived experience to the social imaginary. Yet, the equation of the emigration experience in Greece with that of never having left Albania felt bitter. Given that emigrants needed little prompting to endlessly repeat that Greece and Albania were incomparably different, which recognizable aspects of Albania and of Greece were exaggerated in the irony of the two countries’ equation? One could see the core of the exaggeration in Greece’s low ranking among the desirable countries of the world. Without explicitly mentioning the many hardships of emigration, the writer and butcher’s aide had hinted at them in a way that any emigrant would understand by proposing, in effect, that Greece was so far below Italy in the world order that it could be mistaken for Albania. Accordingly, when viewed from Italy’s higher ground, the international advancement of the emigrants moving from Albania to Greece could be dwarfed to the point of inexistence. But there was more. The ironic equation of the emigrant experience of Greece to that of never having left Albania also resonated with a sentiment that permeated a number of remarks about there being “many Albanians” in Greece. In an introduction to the city I received from an emigrant shortly after my arrival in Athens, Athens could easily be mistaken for Tirana or for Durrës, if one were to judge from those one saw on downtown streets: There are cousins here, all over the place. If you see somebody you knew from Albania in the street, you hurry. You don’t stop, especially on the Omonia Square! You do not have time to stop for all of them. They do not have time either. . . . Perhaps you will see them soon. You ask in passing, they reply in passing. It may be that there are as many Albanians in Athens as there are in Tirana! Or in Durrës.

Other emigrants would justify their regret of the ubiquitous presence of “the Albanians” in Greece by explaining the difficulties involved in finding or keeping jobs, which they attributed to the sheer size of the emigrant population. A former teacher from a prominent urban high school, who had left Albania in the early 1990s but had moved to Athens only one year before we met, complained especially about the overwhelming presence of emigrants in the city of Athens: [A]ll Albania has emigrated to Greece, the entire people. We came late to Athens. Those who came early were lucky. . . They found jobs. . . stabilized. There are no more jobs now. Everywhere one goes, [the employers say] “go away, another Albanian.” There is no work for all these emigrants.

Below the surface of such commentaries, the presence of “Albanians everywhere” pointed at their “same position” in Greece. It appeared to be bitterly regretted that, as emigrants, all the Albanians in Greece were “equal” to each other. On a first level, such equality was a legal matter: virtually all emigrants had entered Greece without proper permits and virtually all of them remained largely undocumented or under-documented. Before the law, they were equally “illegal.” Given that they had lived and labored in Greece for over a decade, however, emigrants’ legal status amounted to equality in inequality: without the proper rights to be or work in Greece, emigrants were all unequal to the majority of Greeks—the state’s citizens.

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This infelicitous equality in inequality carried more than simply legal meanings. The emigrant existence was one of “sameness” in a much broader sense. Partly as a consequence of their shared legal circumstance, virtually all individual emigrants could only find employment within a same narrow range of unskilled or low-skilled manual jobs in construction or services—especially domestic—that could, in practice, be had “without papers.” The numerous and profound consequences of this were experienced as injustice. This happens only to the emigrants. Where else have you seen that—where the engineer and the worker get the same pay? Where the engineer works as a worker because he does not have the papers?

Predictably, the intellectuals were hurt the most by this. Because their previous education and work experiences could not be put into gainful application in Greece, they were forced into overall equality to those who did not share their backgrounds of diligence in school and in the pursuit of social distinction. The way many emigrants spoke—and not only those who were considered intellectuals—it was “not right” that many former intellectuals, particularly medical doctors, engineers, and members of professions for which language was not considered essential were, in effect, “kept” from realizing “their potential.” In the words of a former teacher who worked mostly as a domestic cleaner, [m]y sister bought a home in Greece. For twenty-three million [$62,800]. Bravo! I cannot buy a home here. I will return to Albania when I cannot work any longer. For my pension. I am a widow, I only have one income here. My sister works, and her husband works, too. They are both young. They can also work harder than I can, because they are used to it. They have both been in a[n agricultural] cooperative before. They were very poor in Albania. They earned 70 lek [$0.93] per day in the cooperative, or 30 lek [$0.40], perhaps. 30 lek per day, or whatever the standard pay in the cooperative was. Now they have an apartment, and they have also bought a car. My sister does not have much schooling. But, here, the one who can work hardest with their hands wins. Schooling does not matter. We are all the same here. My sister, who did not go to high school, is equal to me, who completed the university. Here we are the same. . . [pause]. . . although we are not quite the same. We are not the same, because I cannot afford to buy a home.

Clearly, the range of jobs in which emigrants were employed and employable provided no opportunities for much economic advancement let alone social advancement. While in Greece most emigrants eventually had come to possess the objects they lacked in 1980s Albania, the objects they did possess could not easily objectify social distinction. Compared to each other, emigrants now owned tangibles of the same value range, while at the same time their tangibles generally cost less than those that other members of Greek society could and did have. An emigrant’s regret about the overwhelming presence of “the Albanians” in Greece therefore implied his or her regret at the unjust equality with “that mass” of unequal others into which emigration bound his or her existence. One former university professor expressed his perception of being in the same position with all the rest of the emigrants in terms of general helplessness: In emigration, it is not in your hands any more. Any needs you have, you raise your hands up. We were spoiled in Albania. The cousin would come to Tirana and say “Do you know such and such on the executive committee?” There were only a few faces [on the executive

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committee]. We had seen them once, we had seen them another time, and then another time. We knew a few people. We would go around and think of who were the cousins of the such and such, we would find them, we would have a cup of coffee. . . We would be able to say a good word. . . For the one who was in trouble. In Greece I know only my efendiko. I know a good family. I cannot help anyone. I cannot even help myself. There is no door to knock on.

Although the power for manipulating the bureaucracy that this former university professor once had in Albania might sound like an entitlement of his former social position, this former professor had once had to earn his former social position. In other words, the sameness that emigration enforced among all the emigrants was unjust in that emigration negated the kind of social advancement that one had once achieved through individual effort. This, then, was the profound, though not immediately visible, truth that the writer and butcher’s aide had captured: Emigrants’ sameness among themselves, forced upon them by their being emigrants in Greece, equated the emigrant experience to that of the Albania that they had left behind. The mockery of the sameness between the two “incomparably different” countries was a proxy for the condition of despairing sameness that emigration enforced upon “unequal individuals,” as another former professor once described the emigrants, who were all equally emigrants in Greece. Similar to the equality enforced upon virtually all Albanians by Albania’s state socialism, the equality enforced upon virtually all emigrants by their condition in Greece was essentially a matter of a society’s structure. Albania’s one-time state had sought to ultimately eradicate the “classes” that its political ideology identified in “the capitalist world.” In Greece’s present-day “capitalism” too emigrants were all—and unjustly—made equal to each other. Virtually all of them were members of what the ideologues of Albania’s socialism would have identified as “a class”—the Albanians of Greece were a cohort of de facto stateless and, consequently, unskilled and low-skilled manual and domestic workers. Unlike in one-time Albania, however, where social position was to be understood in explicitly Marxist terms of “class,” even in instances when other concepts might have been more apt, emigrants’ shared social position in Greece was conceptualized and spoken about as ethnicity or nationality. A social cohort of undocumented workers though they were, in their everyday the emigrants were identified as “Albanians.” And this is just another articulation of the social in terms of the international— employing the international in a metaphor for the social, the condition of emigration turned ethnic identity into a denominator of the sameness within a stratum of the domestic order. Many perceived the impossibility of “escaping” “the bad name of the Albanians” as the worst consequence of emigrants’ numerical prominence and visibility in Greece. None of those I spoke with could see himself or herself responsible for the deeds that allegedly lay at the roots of “the reputation” of the Albanians. In fact, most emigrants denounced, on their own moral grounds, “the notorious deeds” that “the name” attributed to them. Yet, “the bad name” was virtually inescapable: Some bosses do not make a difference between those who commit crimes and the honest emigrants. All are “Albanians.” This is scorn for the honest person, scorn for the honest work. “Albanian” has become an insult in Greece. Why? Those who commit crimes should

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be punished. This is known. But why do you scorn the other emigrants, who work hard, whose sweat flows?

The sense that the bad reputation of the Albanians was not a consequence of one’s actions as an individual was reflected in the widespread views that the bad reputation had “been created” for the emigrants by the media. Yet, whether representative of their actions or not, being identified as an “Albanian” seemed to make one individual emigrant’s existence thinkable only as essentially the same to that of all the other emigrants. The reason for the emigrants’ permanent employment outside of the legal labor market, and for the injustice of their legal exclusion, seemed to be the prevailing understanding of social membership in terms of ethnicity. A former vice principal of a high school in a town near Tirana—who had gone through several manual jobs in Greece and, at the time we met, was looking for new work—appeared seriously concerned about the potential explosiveness of the post-adolescence of his son in the context of this negative reputation. We are seen askance here, as second rate citizens, yes. Because there are Albanians everywhere. Don’t you think that the children would not notice this! My son is 22 years old. . . He works in a collective with people, and I notice that every time something happens, the Greeks blame “the Albanian.” The way my son dresses—and let me say that he does not dress in any extravagant way at all—impresses the Greeks. And they say that my son has learned this style in Greece. They tell him that he was civilized in Greece. Which is so very far from the truth. They say to him, “Albanians learned these things in Greece.” Do you not think this is a way of looking down upon him? Why should my son be treated as all other Albanians?

Though conceptualized as foreigners of a certain kind, emigrants were de facto members of the society as much as anyone else in Greece. The designation “Albanian,” therefore, did not mean true outsiders but rather something like internal outsiders, or domestic aliens. And this peculiar position of the emigrants as Albanians in Greece amounts to another articulation of social tensions in terms of the world order. Occupying the lower strata of the intranational hierarchy, members of an ethnic or national group—one particular kind of the larger category of an immigrant-attracting society’s domestic aliens—come to domestically embody the location of “their country” or “their nation” in the international hierarchy. The vision of people as belonging to both alien nations and to specific positions or locations in the domestic social order is the counterpart of the global geography of fulfillment imagined in 1980s Albania. Just as Greece and Albania were imagined to be certain kinds of places in 1980s Albania, so are “Greeks” and “Albanians” imagined to be certain kinds of people in contemporary Greece. And while the tensions intrinsic to Albania’s state socialism in the late 1980s were articulated through visions of the international, the tensions surrounding the recognition of a range of human and social and legal rights are articulated in contemporary Greece through visions of a hierarchy of nations. In essence, both the envisioning of social advancement in international terms in late-1980s Albania and the “international” conceptualization of domestic order in contemporary Greece are articulations of the social in terms of the international. Rather than a cultural peculiarity of “Greeks,” this articulation of the social in terms of the international was a feature of contemporary Greek society. Even though

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emigrants suffered from the negative consequences of such imagined embodiment of national qualities by individuals, they fully participated in the practice. A student at one of the American colleges in Athens once commented that [t]he teachers in the high school, who were Greeks, also treated us differently. I mean, they treated us differently from the way the people in the street treat us. The Greek teachers are more open to all the students, including the Albanian students. But the American professors—I am talking generally—the American professors are much more open. I am on very good terms with my Art History professor. She was born in America. She treats me like a friend. We’d . . . have deep conversations. . . She’d tell me about America. Everybody in America looks after his own business. You can be black, you can be white, you can be Albanian, you can be Greek. . . Everybody is the same. If you are in school, all that counts if you are in school in America, is how hard you work. If you work hard, you make it.

Indeed, so deeply embedded in social life was the conceptualization of society in terms of the international order that, instead of claiming membership in contemporary Greece’s de facto multiethnic society, many emigrants stayed absorbed in their “national pride” and “traditions.” For it was as members of contemporary Greek society that emigrants strove to embody their Albanianness, the social stratum to which their social imaginary of the domestic society assigned them. While talking about the fact that emigrants were virtually all employed in the same range of manual jobs, I asked a former teacher of Marxism and philosophy, who worked “in homes” in Greece, whether emigration was a class problem. “No,” she said, [e]migration is a national problem. It is a problem for all. Since all Albanians want [to emigrate]. It is not a problem for me only. So it is not a class problem. We are all the same, workers. We are the same. I, with a university degree, am like my brother, who has no schooling. The one who works harder makes more money. But we are all the same. All Albanians.

In the end, it was “national belonging” that precluded an emigrant from changing his or her position in a society’s domestic order. While individual advancement may appear feasible in a world imagined in terms of a hierarchy of countries, the identification of domestic social cohorts in international terms implies that, despite having crossed international borders, no individual can transcend the location of her or his nation in the domestic hierarchy of nations. “Emigration” thus turned out to be an accurate descriptor for the condition of the Albanians of Greece. Used instead of “immigration,” “emigration” expressed the desire for escape from a state in which social advancement was impossible as much as the outcome of inescapability.

The Socioglobal Embroiled as it was in mutual articulations of the social in terms of the international, and of the global in terms of the social, “the emigration” reveals the existence of perceived social structures of global reach and of global structures for and of individual action. These can jointly be called “the socioglobal.”

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An ethnography of the Albanians of Greece simply lacks the empirical grounds for claiming that socioglobal articulations and imaginaries such as those sketched here are present in other countries or societies from where international migrants come or towards which they go. Could we not imagine, however, that other people in other places of the world we see as increasingly “globalizing” might be drawn to visions of the global to articulate various intricacies of their geographically distant or even culturally distinct forms of social existence? Do the tensions of the injustice of equality identified in the ethnic conceptualization of social cohorts not hint at the roots of the explosiveness in various cohorts of domestic aliens elsewhere in contemporary Europe? Do they not hint at how immigration in Europe differs from that in the United States—at least the way we have come to know the latter so far? To the extent that the reality of the Albanians of Greece can be considered part of a world that reaches beyond their geographic location, the socioglobal might be a socioglobal reality.

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Index

1960s, 2, 18, 19, 148, 182 1970s, 2, 5, 7, 18, 54, 131, 141, 142, 148, 165, 193, 194 1980s, 6, 7, 18–20, 30, 52, 54, 57, 62, 63, 67, 115, 121, 127, 129, 131, 146, 149, 192–198, 200 1990, 6, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 70, 74, 78, 79, 91, 96, 133, 163, 165 1990s, 2–5, 10, 11, 12, 19–22, 40, 43, 78, 86, 91, 98, 107, 121, 129, 131, 175, 178, 195, 196 1991, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 57, 78, 95, 97, 110, 124, 142, 191 1992, 18, 21, 44, 50, 53, 95, 121, 142, 143 1997, 2, 11, 12, 17, 78, 79, 96, 98, 119, 125, 130–133 2000, 2, 10, 12, 13, 16, 21, 24, 31, 40, 75, 95, 97 2002, 2, 10, 16, 21, 22, 31, 40, 96, 104, 122, 154, 173, 184 2003, 2, 11, 21, 42, 128, 136 2004, 10, 12, 21, 22, 31, 103 Adriatic Sea, 15, 17, 23 African, 8, 19 Albania agriculture, 19, 54, 62, 68, 198 antennas, 59 arms, 96, 132, 133 See also Gun bank, see Bank of Albania corruption, 91, 96, 115, 133–138, 186, 196 economy, 18, 21, 54, 60, 115, 128, 142, 193, 194 embassy in Athens, 114, 115 embassy in Peking, 154 exodus, 14, 17–20 Gross Domestic Product, 21 herding, 54 Ministry of Education, 14, 96, 122, 179, 186

new rich, 133, 136–138, 145 People’s Socialist Republic, 13, 19 pride, 70, 110, 157, 183, 184, 201 protection of the person, 91, 112, 132, 133, 137 pyramid schemes, 98 religion, 110, 182 state, 13, 14, 16–22, 30, 33, 37, 42, 54, 58–60, 63, 65, 67, 79, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 102, 104, 106, 109, 110, 112–115, 122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132–134, 136, 138, 142, 143, 154, 166, 181, 182, 192–196, 199–201 usury firms, 78, 79, 96, 119, 125, 130, 131, 133, 139 Albanian language, 11, 29, 40, 58, 122, 139, 154, 181, 182, 183, 184, 190 Albanian Telegraphic Agency, 17, 22 Alia, Ramiz, 142 America, United States of, 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 19, 22, 30, 33, 53, 70, 76, 77, 97, 149, 150, 151, 153–163, 169, 171, 173, 175–182, 184–186, 188, 189, 191, 201, 202 American Lottery, 22, 150, 158, 159, 163, 169, 171, 177, 179, 180, 181 Armenian, 1 Associated Press, 1, 16, 17 Asylum, 14, 17, 151, 154, 165, 172, 173 Atheism, 169 Athens airport, 97, 103, 175, 176 garbage, 47 neighborhood markets, 28 Omonia Square, 26, 92, 111, 117, 162, 164, 168, 184, 197 Plaka, 91 Syntagma Square, 162, 163, 184 Australia, 2, 113 Austria, 155, 157 207

208 Bach, Robert, 7 Baker, 45, 162, 168, 169 Balkans, 89 Bananas, 57, 142 Bangladesh, 13 Bank of Albania, 42 Bari, 11, 18 Barjaba, Kosta, 127 Bartletti, Don, 2 Basch, Linda, 6 BBC, 3 Beale, Lewis, 1 Beans, 54, 166 Beef, 131 Beijing, see Peking Belgium, 153 Berisha, Sali, 119 Blood, 103, 108, 114, 131, 132, 136 Boas, Franz, 5 Bohannan, Paul, 5, 8 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9 Brain, 124, 131, 156 Brazil/Brazilian, 6, 7, 178 Bread, 45, 54, 57, 92, 119, 129, 132, 138, 145, 163, 166, 168, 196 Brettell, Caroline, 5, 6 Bribe, 129, 137, 158, 188 Britain, 3 See also England, United Kingdom Broom operations, 158 Bulgaria/Bulgarian, 19, 28, 89, 105, 114 Burkina Faso, 13 Burton, Mike, 8 Burundi, 12, 13 Business, 40, 75, 77, 92, 97, 108, 114, 125, 139, 155, 178, 201 Butcher, 56, 131, 142, 184, 196, 197, 199 Butter, 54, 115, 166, 168 Café/coffee shop, 1, 26, 31, 40, 57, 92, 103, 110, 121, 125, 126, 130, 136, 149, 150, 153, 185, 186, 188–191 Calavita, Kitty, 17 Çamëria, 89 Canada, 2, 19, 155, 156, 182 Candy, 1, 111 Capitalism, 5, 7, 8, 31, 53, 70, 72, 75, 92, 93, 137, 160, 199 Car, 19, 21, 44, 45, 65, 68, 76, 83, 91, 115, 133, 136, 137, 145, 154, 155, 167, 198 Castles, Stephen, 2 Cattle, 19, 21 Chavez, Leo, 2, 5 Cheese, 54, 115, 130, 145, 166, 168 Chicago, 150

Index Chicken, 19, 21, 53, 54, 130, 136, 142 Child/children, 7, 17, 24, 37, 45, 48, 50, 51, 54, 59, 61, 64, 75, 79, 97, 105, 106, 110, 113, 114, 130, 133, 137, 139, 144, 149, 150, 162, 167, 180, 182–184, 200 China/Chinese, 1, 13, 18, 70, 72, 121, 131, 154, 166, 194 Christian, 182 Citizen, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22, 89, 95, 98, 100, 107, 108, 132, 154, 158, 175, 197, 200 Citizenship, 89, 183 Clinton, Bill, 150 Coca Cola, 64, 162 Coffee, 30, 70, 71, 138, 141, 162, 199 Colonial, 7 Communism/communist, 19, 20, 73, 74, 91, 124, 154 Communist Party of Albania, 19, 58 See also Party of Labor of Albania, Socialist Party of Albania Complain/complaint, 31, 85, 92, 109, 113, 114, 119, 130, 131, 197 Congo, 13 Connecticut, 1 Construction/constructor, 24, 30, 34, 50, 61, 70, 76, 92, 95, 98, 99, 103, 112, 114, 121, 124, 125, 138, 143, 150, 157, 162, 168, 169, 171, 173, 198 Consume/consumption, 9, 54, 60, 63, 64, 65, 117, 119, 129, 133, 138 Consumer goods, 117, 176, 193 Costantinou, Marianne, 1 Council of Europe, 18, 21 Cow, 53, 54 Criminal/criminality, 24, 87, 89, 90, 93, 103, 108, 111, 132, 133, 158 Criminalization, 27 Cuba/Cuban, 14, 19 Czech, 1 Czechoslovakia/Czechoslovak, 17, 19, 20, 70 Daily News, 1 Della Rocca, Roberto, 18 Democratic Front of Albania, 59, 61 Democratic Party of Albania, 95, 96 Denmark, 58, 151, 153, 155 Deport/deportation, 22, 108, 163 Dervishi, Zyhdi, 12 Detroit, 150 DeWind, Josh, 4 Di Leonardo, Micaela, 5 Dirty Pretty Things, 3 Discourse, 2, 3, 20, 38, 80, 85, 161, 172, 177, 182, 193

Index Discrimination, 30, 31, 34, 74, 85, 88–90, 93, 94, 101–105, 109, 127, 151, 158, 159, 173, 183 Discursive scape, 25, 38–40, 52, 59, 64, 78, 106, 175, 195 Disposable income, 8, 119, 139 See also Income Divorce, 48, 167 Domestic (cleaning/employment/service/ servant/servitude/work), 2, 24, 36, 37, 38, 44, 61, 80, 110, 112, 121, 139, 141, 173, 198, 199 Domestic alien, 192, 200, 202 Donkey meat, 131 Drachmae, 26, 29, 40, 42, 48, 50, 52, 57, 71, 72, 75, 76, 96, 97, 106, 111, 150, 168, 169, 188 Durrës, 14, 17, 18, 21, 43–45, 50, 57, 62, 74, 76, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 165, 197 East/Eastern Europe/European, 11, 19, 79, 110, 162, 165, 179 Eastern Block, 19, 165 Economic advantage, 2–10, 78, 101, 106, 119 Economic disadvantage, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 111, 119, 127 Economic model, 6, 161 Economic system, 5, 7, 8 Education, 25, 29, 34, 68, 81, 83, 87, 88, 124, 126, 162, 167, 180, 185, 186, 188, 190, 194, 198 Efendiko, 155, 199 Egg, 36, 37, 53, 57, 78 Egypt, 13 Electricity, 20, 47, 52, 55, 114, 128–130 “Embassies”/“embassy Albanians”/“embassy people”, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 33, 35, 107, 112, 154, 180 England, 26, 81, 159, 172, 173 See also Britain, United Kingdom English language, 17, 22, 42, 43, 60, 144, 150, 157, 158, 163 Epirus, 87, 89 Espiritu, Yen, 6 Estonia, 12 Ethiopian, 1 Ethnic/ethnicity, 12, 16, 24, 30, 31, 48, 83–85, 88, 89, 101–105, 109, 121, 122, 126, 127, 144, 151, 158, 173, 181, 183, 199–202 Euro, 42, 81, 114, 115, 135 Europe/European, 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 17, 22, 26, 33, 42, 45, 81, 105, 112, 113, 129, 151, 155,

209 157, 158, 162, 163, 165, 175, 176, 177, 178–181, 185, 191, 202 European Union, 1, 2, 16, 28, 108, 112, 134, 179 Everyday, 8, 9, 13, 28, 31, 36, 38, 40, 52, 53, 59, 60, 63, 68, 79, 80, 83, 86, 88, 101, 104, 107, 137, 153, 154, 176, 177, 181, 183, 184, 193, 199 EVGA, 130 Famine, 9 Fascist Italy, see Italy Fast-food, 26, 129 Federal Republic of Germany, see Germany Fieldwork, ethnographic, 10, 11, 17, 21, 25, 31, 35, 38, 40, 89, 101, 103, 104, 106, 128, 196 Fiji, 12 Filiates, 16 Finland, 105 Firearms, 133, 173 Fischer, Bernd, 16, 19 Fish, 53, 54, 130 Flour, 132, 166 Foner, Nancy, 5, 6 Food, 1, 6, 16, 47, 48, 53–57, 75, 105, 106, 121, 122, 124, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 143, 146, 162, 166, 168, 193 food poisoning, 130 food spoiling/spoiled food, 105, 106, 130 Forced migration, 9 France/French, 14, 17, 19, 26, 28, 30, 72, 81 Frears, Stephen, 3 Free market, 2, 21, 93, 110 Fruit, 28, 36, 145, 166 Fuga, Artan, 12 Garbage, 47 Gazeta e Athinës, 11, 29, 154, 172, 173 Gedeshi, Ilir, 12 German Democratic Republic, 19 Germany, 14, 19, 33, 110, 112, 136, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 179, 180 Glick Schiller, Nina, 5, 6 Greece/Greek economy, 24, 28, 29, 51, 75, 92, 93, 103, 108, 110 experience with immigration, 112 green card, 111, 119 language, 29, 30, 36, 40, 42, 44, 48, 81, 83, 87, 89, 98, 122, 124, 126, 144, 168, 169, 180, 181, 182, 184, 196 “law of war” with Albania, 16 law, 108, 109, 111, 178, 197

210 Greece/Greek (cont.) legalization of immigrants, 22, 31, 109, 112 Metaxas regime, 89 names, 11, 169, 182, 183 rights, 113, 197 See also Human rights state, 97, 107, 112, 113, 114, 182 workers, 101 Greenhouse, Steven, 1 Greenspan, Alan, 9 Guam, 12 Guinness Book of Records, 172 Gun, 102, 131, 132, 133 Guyana, 12 Gypsies, 158 Habermas, Jürgen, 2, 7 Happiness/happy, 34, 47, 70, 75, 76, 109, 111, 143, 144, 146, 149–151, 153, 165, 166, 180, 191 See also Unhappiness/unhappy Harvey, David, 9 Heat/heating, 20, 37, 47, 50–52, 68, 130 Hein, Christopher, 16, 17 Herzfeld, Michael, 175 Hierarchical/hierarchy, 10, 109, 149, 153–156, 159–173, 175, 177–181, 184, 192, 196, 200, 201 Hollifield, James, 6 Hong Kong, 149 Hoxha, Enver, 20, 21, 124, 142, 149, 154, 165 Hua, Vanessa, 1 Human/humanity, 3, 8, 12, 39, 42, 68, 69, 80, 91, 98, 102, 107, 110, 112, 114, 132, 135, 151, 156, 158, 159, 179 inhumanity, 133, 136 Humanitarian, 18 Human mobility, 3, 107 Human rights, 87, 89, 106, 107, 112, 200 Hungary, 19 Ice cream, 129, 130 Illegal/illegally/illegality, 18, 24, 86, 95, 96, 98, 106–114, 136, 158, 178, 197 Imagine/imagination/imaginary/unimaginable, 3, 13, 31, 33, 39, 47, 50, 54, 81, 93, 94, 119, 124, 135, 144, 145, 150, 151, 156, 158, 161, 163, 172–181, 183–185, 192, 193, 195–202 Income, 4, 7, 34, 36, 54, 60, 70, 73, 96, 108, 142, 198 Income differentials, 3, 6, 8, 9, 101, 194 India, 13 Indonesia, 13

Index Injustice, 21, 34, 61, 81, 83, 93, 94, 101–106, 109, 112, 136, 138, 159, 175, 183, 186, 195, 198, 200, 202 Insult, 81, 85, 86, 101–103, 105, 132, 199 Insurance, 95, 97, 104, 109, 151 International Labour Organization (ILO), 2 International law/legal framework, 107 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2, 11, 16 Ioánnina, 43, 84, 97, 155 Iran, 13 Islam/Islamic, 24, 54 Italian language, 93 Italy/Italian, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16–19, 20–22, 24, 36, 37, 71, 74, 76, 89, 98, 119, 134, 135, 142, 151, 154, 155, 179, 182, 191, 196, 197 Fascist Italy, 16, 19, 74, 89 Martelli Law, 17 Jacquemet, Marco, 40 Jamaica, 11 Jamieson, Alison, 24 Justice, 90–94, 157–159, 195 See also Injustice Kadare, Ismail, 14 Kalashnikov, 131, 133 Karydis, Vassilis, 24 Kazakhstan, 12, 13 Kongshaug, Nils, 12 Kosova/Kosovar, 58, 159 refugees, 151, 159 Labor, 1, 2, 4, 7–9, 11, 22, 24, 25, 54, 64, 67, 68, 75, 76, 80, 81, 90, 92, 94, 98, 101, 103–110, 112, 152, 173, 197, 200 Labor market, 2, 4, 90, 107, 109, 200 Lana, see Tirana Latin America/Latin American, 19, 178 Law, 90, 107–111, 134, 151, 156, 159, 178, 182, 185, 186, 188, 191, 197 Lek, 29, 40, 42, 52, 60, 75, 96, 117, 132, 133, 135–138, 144, 145, 150, 198 Leninism, see Marxism-Leninism Levitt, Peggy, 5 Lexis-Nexis, 22 London, 3, 172 Los Angeles Times, 2 “Lotteries”, 60, 61, 63 See also American Lottery Luck/lucky/unlucky, 14, 35, 81, 102, 131, 150, 158, 163, 171, 176, 177, 178, 197

Index McDonald’s, 162, 163 Mahler, Sarah, 5 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 5 Malkki, Liisa, 5 Marcus, George, 5, 40 Margarine, 129 Margolis, Maxine, 6, 7 Martelli, Claudio, 17 Marx, Karl, 9, 75, 76 Marxism-Leninism, 29, 93, 104, 105, 111, 142, 199, 201 Massey, Douglas, 4 Mead, Margaret, 5 Meat, 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 105, 106, 129, 131, 136, 142, 169, 193 See also Beef, Chicken, Donkey meat, Pork Mercedes, 21, 115, 133, 134, 136, 138 Mexico, 2, 13, 178 Mexico-US border, 2 Migration News, 24, 31 Migration studies, 4 Migration theory/theories, 3–9, 25 Milk, 36, 53, 115, 130, 146, 148 Miller, Mark, 2 Misery, 44, 51, 137, 196 Misja, Vladimir, 11, 18, 19, 22 Mitsotakis, Konstandinos, 16 Money, 3–9, 28, 29, 34, 36, 44, 45, 50, 52, 53, 57, 60, 61, 67, 71–75, 83–85, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95–98, 104–106, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 124–126, 129–139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 156, 157, 159, 163, 168, 169, 178, 179, 186, 192, 201 Mount Mourgana, 16 Narration/narrative, 33, 39, 40, 43, 53, 55, 58, 64, 80, 81, 83, 85, 92, 94, 101, 105, 106, 128, 134, 149–151, 155–157, 173, 175, 177, 193, 194 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 159 Neoclassical economics, 4, 5, 8 New Guinea, 5 Newman, Katherine, 6 New rich, the, see Albania New York City, 1, 6, 7, 184 Nigerian, 3 North Korea, 154, 173 Ohio, 157 Oil, 54, 134, 142, 146, 166 Olympic games, 103 Omonia Square, see Athens Ong, Aihwa, 6

211 Order, 10, 53, 57, 58, 62, 83, 107, 112, 113, 155, 156, 160, 161, 172, 173, 175, 177, 180, 184, 195, 197, 199–201 Orthodox Church, 24, 110, 181, 182 Ortner, Sherry, 101 Otranto, 18, 23 Pajo, Erind, 11, 19, 21, 136 Pakistan, 13 Pangalos, Theodoros, 24 Parrenas, Rhacel, 6 Party of Labor of Albania, 19, 21, 79, 96, 112, 121, 122, 124–126, 142, 165, 167 Central Committee, 121, 165 delegations, 20, 72, 166 lever organizations, 59, 61, 68 Political Bureau, 136 Passport, 14, 16, 100, 115, 123, 176, 178 Peking, 154 Perlmutter, Ted, 17 Philippines, 13, 28 Pie, 105, 142 Piore, Michael, 4 Piraeus, 43, 49, 123, 150, 185, 187, 189 Poland/Pole/Polish, 17, 20, 89, 114 Polanyi, Karl, 8 Police, 14, 16–20, 74, 86, 88, 91, 129, 137, 151, 154, 158, 163, 166, 168 Political, 3, 9, 11, 12, 17–22, 28, 31, 53, 59, 61, 63, 79, 91, 92, 95, 96, 131, 133, 136, 141, 142, 162, 169, 175, 184–186, 191, 194, 199 Political asylum, see Asylum Politicians, 28, 51, 74, 113–115, 127, 128, 133, 134, 137 Pollo, Stefanaq, 18 Pork, 54 Portes, Alejandro, 4, 7 Postcolonial, 7 Power interruptions/shortage, see Electricity Prison, 132, 165 Professional Unions of Albania, 61–63 Property rights, 89 Protection of the person, see Albania Protestant ethic, 9 Pulitzer prize, 2 Puto, Arben, 18 Pyramid schemes, see Albania Qofte, 142 Queues, 36, 54, 55, 115, 121, 124, 146, 148 Quinn, Naomi, 101

212 Racism/racist, 84–90, 93, 101–106, 113, 151, 158, 183, 184 Refrigerator, 37, 55, 57, 60–63, 66–68, 79, 124, 127, 130, 138, 166, 193, 194 Refugee/refugees, 3, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 79, 151, 159 Religion/religious, 24, 87, 110, 111, 169, 181, 182 See also Albania Remittances/“sending money”, 6, 8, 9, 44, 106, 117–120 Repatriation, 12, 18 Restaurant, 1, 2, 29, 31, 35, 48, 50, 51, 91, 125, 130, 143, 150, 162, 163 Reuters, 17 Rice, 54 Romania/Romanian, 19, 89, 97 Rosaldo, Renato, 5 Rumbaut, Ruben, 4 Russia/Russian, 1, 9, 28, 53, 89, 108, 114, 157, 166 Sahlins, Marshall, 8 Samoa, 12 San Francisco, 1 Sardines, 54, 57 Sassen, Saskia, 2, 7 Scandinavia, 151, 153 Scarce/scarcity, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 146, 193, 194, 195 Second World War, 19, 29, 42, 58, 59, 73, 89, 92 Sesame seeds, 168 Sheep, 19, 21, 29, 53, 137 Shkodër, 15, 43, 130 Sigurimi, 166, 167 Silj, Alessandro, 24 Simmel, Georg, 9 Small, Cathy, 6 Smuggle/smuggler/smuggling, 11, 12, 20, 86, 97, 98, 159, 178 Socialism/socialist, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18–22, 29–33, 37, 42, 53, 54, 58–60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72, 74–76, 89–91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 102, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131, 135–137, 142, 146, 149, 166, 179, 181, 182, 192, 194–196, 199, 200 Socialist Party of Albania, 96, 98 See also Communist Party of Albania, Party of Labor of Albania Social rights, 200 Socioglobal, 1, 9, 10, 192, 201, 202 Somalia, 172, 173 South Korea, 154, 173

Index Souvlakia, 129, 156 Soviet Union, 18, 19, 53 Spain, 154, 155 Stalin, Joseph, 19 Stalker, Peter, 1, 11 Stephanopoulos, Costis, 24 Strauss, Claudia, 101 Student City, see Tirana Sudan, 13 Suffer/suffering, 8, 33–38, 50, 51, 60, 63, 78–94, 98, 101–103, 114, 127, 137, 151, 173, 175, 181, 182, 196, 201 Sugar, 54, 57, 130, 132, 146 Supermarket, 47, 64, 129, 135, 144, 155 Suriname, 12 Sweat, 92, 114, 135, 138, 166, 176, 200 Sweater, 55 Sweatshop, 2 Sweden, 157 Switzerland, 105, 154, 157, 175 Syntagma Square, see Athens Szanton Blanc, Cristina, 6 Tajikistan, 12, 13 Taxes, 74, 75, 104, 114 Television, 55, 57, 59–63, 67, 68, 86–88, 124, 127, 138, 144, 148, 166, 182, 183, 188, 189, 193, 194 The New York Times, 1 Theories of migration, see Migration theory/theories The Record, 16 The San Francisco Chronicle, 1 Thessaloníki, 23, 24, 36, 43–45, 50, 51, 73, 76 Third World, 20 Timor-Leste, 12 Tirana, 13, 16, 17, 19–22, 37, 43, 44, 58, 65, 67, 70, 71, 81, 92, 95, 97, 105, 109, 112, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124–126, 128–130, 135–137, 139, 141, 142, 148, 150, 163, 165, 167, 169, 178, 185, 189, 197, 198, 200 Block, the, 136 Lana stream, 130 Scanderbeg Square, 14 Student City, 20, 21, 58, 175 Toronto Star, 16, 17 Trahana, 166 Transnational/transnationalism, 1, 5, 6 Tsuda, Takeyuki, 6 Turkey, 117 Ukraine/Ukrainian, 13, 89 “Uncle”, 149, 167 See also Hoxha, Enver

Index Unhappiness/unhappy, 62, 78–80, 102, 109, 114 See also Happiness/happy Union for the Scientific Study of Population Problems, 4 United Kingdom, 19 See also Britain, England United Nations/UN, 2, 12, 13, 15, 23, 106, 107 United Nations Development Programme/ UNDP, 24 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees/UNHCR, 18 United Nations Population Division, 2, 12, 13 United States, see America, United States of United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 1–2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 106, 107 University of Tirana, 20, 70, 81, 112, 142, 185 Usury firms, see Albania Veblen, Thorstein, 9 Vegetable, 28, 36 Vietnam/Vietnamese, 1, 14, 19, 70, 72 Violence/violent, 81, 108, 131, 132, 133, 176 Visum/visa, 17, 22, 45, 74, 97, 112, 143, 150, 169, 196 Vlora/Vlorë, 11, 15, 18, 23, 43, 132, 137 Vorio-Epiriot, 87, 89, 182 Voucher, 54, 115, 121, 124, 194 Wage/wages, 2, 4, 7, 8, 54, 60, 80, 81, 86, 103, 105, 108–110, 112 Waiter, 29, 31, 35, 37, 136, 185, 189 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 7 Wal-Mart, 1

213 Walton, John, 7 Washing machine, 55, 60–63, 67, 68, 124, 166, 193, 194 Water, 1, 17, 20, 54, 68, 71, 84, 128, 130, 144 Wealth, 3, 5, 9, 21, 26, 29–31, 34, 35, 47, 74, 75, 91, 124, 133, 134, 136, 138, 157, 159, 165 Weber, Max, 9 West, the/western/western countries/western world, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 19, 21, 22, 151, 153, 154, 193, 195, 196 Western capitalism, see Capitalism West Germany, see Germany Wolf, Eric, 5 Work/working, 7, 9, 28–31, 33–36, 44, 45, 48, 50–52, 55, 57, 58, 60–62, 67–76, 79–85, 88, 89, 92–98, 100, 102–109, 111, 113–115, 119–122, 124–128, 134–139, 141–146, 148, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 162, 165, 167–169, 173, 176, 181, 183–186, 188–191, 194, 197–201 See also Labor Work center, 61, 65, 67 World Bank, 21 World Trade Center, 162, 171 Xenophobia, 84–90, 103, 104, 173, 181, 183 Yogurt, 115 Young/youth, 12, 29, 64, 65, 76, 81, 103, 119, 122, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 141, 142, 146, 157, 184 Yugoslavia/Yugoslav Federation, 18, 19, 59 Zog, Ahmet (King Zog I), 74