“A Ḥarrāg’s Account”: Craftily Narrating and Navigating the EU’s Morphing Borderscape

Abstract

Neoliberal borders inconspicuously morph, now facilitating the free passage of goods and citizens from rich countries, now violently excluding irregular travelers departing from impoverished and repressive environments. In turn, unauthorized migrants demonstrate narrative and performative craft(iness) by tactically shapeshifting to fit themselves into the highly particular mold of a “worthy refugee.” The 2019 Arabic-language memoir Anthems of Salt, which chronicles its Algerian author’s attempt at clandestine migration to northern Europe via Turkey and Greece, provides a backdrop for recent scholarship on twenty-first-century borders and the so-called refugee crisis. A close reading of Ramdani’s account, in conjunction with examples from fieldwork as a volunteer for asylum aid organizations in Greece, provides a view of what is produced in the interaction between morphing borderscapes and shapeshifting migrants—namely, incarnations of the very essentialized images that states project onto their unwanted entrants. But candid border-crossing narratives like Ramdani’s are produced as well, revealing the many cross-territorial linkages through which borderlines slice. These linkages suggest the potential for alternative cartographies that challenge dominant notions of nation-statehood.