Jennifer Ballengee

There are currently 65.3 million forcibly displaced people in the world—the highest number ever on record.  Over 20 million of these people are recognized by the United Nations as refugees of war. Millions of these people live in tents—fields of tents, small cities of tents, in official refugee camps run by UNHCR, government organizations, or non-profits, or in “unofficial” groups of tents by the side of the road, just outside of a port, gathered under a highway bridge, in an airport, on an abandoned Olympic soccer field.

 

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Tents are hardly a recent invention.  Archaeological evidence of the first known tent, found in Russia and made of mammoth-hide, dates to around 40,000 BCE. For nomadic people—as undoubtedly the Russian mammoth-tent dwellers were–tents provided a temporary and moveable shelter as they followed herds of animals or agricultural growth over the seasons. The Bible refers to the “people of the tent,” indicating nomadic peoples in general but also those in exile:  the Israelites lived in tents for the 40 years that they roamed in the wilderness.

Tents have served the military as well, providing shelter to armies moving from place to place or for those stuck outside the city walls during a siege.  Many of the climactic scenes of Homer’s Iliad take place not on the battlefield but rather in the shelter of Agamemnon’s or Achilles’ tents, where they would have lived for the duration of the ten years of the Trojan War.

 Since the end of the nineteenth century, however, the tent has evolved to meet a rather different purpose.  With the leisure time that emerged along with the industrial revolution, the tent became a means for those with a superfluity of time and money to leave the city and enjoy nature. So the tent became a choice: a form of temporary shelter that enabled city dwellers to “get back to nature”—a Romantic return to the primitive, a re-attachment to the land that remains simultaneously possessive (in a national, humanistic, or Romantic sense) and communal (in the shared campground of a state or national park).

 This new recreational tent comes in many styles and sizes. Walmart and Target megastores sell affordable tents that turn camping into a middle-class past-time, while specialty outdoor stores like REI or Eastern Mountain Sports sell tents with technological amenities costing anywhere from $100 to $1000.  As recreational camping went mainstream (according to KOA, around 13 million American households went camping in 2016), a luxury mode of camping called “glamping” has evolved, often using teepees or yurts to provide more substantial luxuries such as beds, jacuzzis, and catered meals. Camping not only transformed the tent into a fancy outdoor accessory but also created a surplus commodity for permanently housing millions of homeless and stateless people. 

Refugees in Larissa

 

Meet Sayeed, who lives in a tent in a refugee camp. He is 14 years old, from Kabul, Afghanistan. His parents pooled their money to send him away from home so that he wouldn’t be drafted into the army.  He made the journey from Kabul to Larissa, Greece, with a group of friends. But they are no longer here and he lives in a tent by himself in Larissa camp. The slogan on his t-shirt, from an American outdoors store, reads, “Chase the Adventure.”

The camp is about 20 minutes outside of Larissa village, in the midst of dried and irrigated fields, nothing around, a four-lane road, silent but for the occasional car speeding past.   The view of large yield sprinklers spraying water over the fields can easily be seen from upon a rise within the camp.  But inside the fence of the camp itself it is dusty and rocky and hot, and always there is the sun glaring down on the sand.  Men and children squat in the few small spots of shade, mostly grouped around a small bank of electrical outlets, charging their phones, trying to get a signal.

 While we are standing next to the empty food tent, a man approaches, holding a clear plastic grocery bag which contains within it a spider the size of a tarantula. He had caught it in his tent. The revelation of this creature draws over to us a small knot of people, including an elderly looking man with a full white beard, a shock of white hair and a lined face, but a healthy way of walking.  He takes us to his tent and shows us the body of a snake he had captured in there (he took it to the mayor of Larissa as evidence of living conditions in the camp) and a coffee can full of dead scorpions.  Then he and his wife invite us all into his tent. We take off our shoes, bend our heads under the canvas flap, pausing as our eyes adjust to the shade, and then sit cross legged on the dusty ground as he talks to us (through a translator) about being a healer but also about other aspects of his life in Afghanistan.

 There is a homemade swing in the tent, in the tent next to it, and in many of the tents we pass as we walk around the camp later:  determined constructions of spare rope, duct tape, old rags wrapped around sticks and hanging from the tent rafters. We pass several small children swinging idly back and forth in the shade of the tents as we move through the camp; a few smile and wave as we pass, but most of them stare boldly at us, as all children do, and we shift our gazes away.  Our looking feels like a violation. 

 All of the time in the healer’s tent the flies buzz around our heads.  Stacked next to the entrance is a low homemade stove and some dented pots, plastic bottles of water, a small jar of dish soap. Just inside the tent opening there is a pot full of potatoes waiting to be cooked.  A small bunch of wild thyme hangs from a rope at the entrance—not for cooking but for the good smell and, one of the Afghani men notes, to keep the snakes away.  The father of a little girl adds that they don’t sleep at night; or the wife will sleep a while and then wake the husband.  They take turns guarding the tent from snakes.   

After a while we leave the old man’s tent and follow a gravel path up a hill to the schoolhouse: two large tents joined together, one with a covered porch in front where children are gathered in front of a woman named Fotima, who is leading them in their studies. We stand outside listening as our translator tells us about the school, until she stops to hail a handsome Afghani man coming up the hill toward us:  the children’s German teacher, Guilan. He fled with his whole family from Afghanistan to Larissa, carrying with him—in addition to supplies–four heavy German textbooks, a large German dictionary and a satchel with all of his work papers in it, documents meant to help him get a job once he arrived in Germany. 

He talks to us about his journey.  His wife had hypothyroid problems and these worsened as they walked over the mountains toward Europe. At one moment, he says, he was sure she would die. At another point, as they were moving through the desert, he felt certain that his children were going to perish from thirst.  Then, when they crossed the sea from Turkey to Greece, the crowded boat seemed like it might capsize and he had the terrible thought that he would be responsible for the deaths of all his family.  He had left Afghanistan, he says, due to insecurity about his own safety and that of his wife; he’d been working for ten years for an NGO called World Vision and such work is dangerous there.  A colleague of his had been beheaded on his way home from work one day, he tells us, and he was afraid he would be the next to be killed.  He adds that, despite the scorpions and snakes and mosquitos and the awfulness of the place, he feels that he and his family are lucky, because they are at least safe from the Taliban.  He says he misses his books at home, particularly philosophy. He especially liked reading Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, he tells me.  He has been in the camp since March 19; he arrived in Greece March 12, after a month and a half of travelling; it is now mid-June, and he has yet to be registered or entered into the pre-registration process for asylum.  He says he wishes he had brought more books with him, so that he could at least be reading while stranded here in the camp, waiting. 

Despite all of the people crowded within the fence, the camp feels lonely and abandoned.  There are many children, most of whom do not seem particularly unhappy.  But as we are listening to the healer, I see in the adjacent tent a little girl idly kick her baby brother in the head as his mother changes his diaper.  As we walk past another group of tents later, I hear a boy cry out and I see that his brother is absently beating a rhythm on his head with a metal rake. One father worries aloud that his daughter, a very friendly little girl who looks to be about two or three, is late in speaking. She doesn’t have enough interaction with others, he worries.  Other than us and the doctors and a couple of other journalists, he adds, no outside people have interacted with them for the 80 days they have been there. The UNHCR people drive in, he tells us, drop off food and supplies, and leave, not really talking to them at all.

 Jennifer Ballengee, Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Humanities at Towson University, is the Mitten Professor of Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts.  She is the author of The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture (SUNY 2009). Her publications address questions of the body, politics, rhetoric, and representation. She is currently finishing a monograph on ruins, tragedy, and national ideology. She teaches courses in literary theory, mythology, rhetoric, Ancient Greek, and cultural studies.