Ancient Wandering and Permanent Temporariness

Abstract

To move towards an understanding of displacement from within, and the forms of its overcoming, the following chapter brings into dialogue the ancient experience of wandering and the 21st century condition of permanent temporariness. It explores whether these are the same or different phenomena, and whether the latter is a uniquely modern experience. In particular, it is interested in the turning points that lead to the defiance of the condition and its regime. It traces modes of existence that subvert the liminal state and allow for possibilities of living beyond the present moment through returns and futures that are part of everyday practices, even if they are splintered. Such actions, it is argued, allow for the repositioning of the self in relation to the world, and thus the exposition of cracks within the status quo. The investigation confronts experiences that appear to be uniquely those of the present day—such as non-arrival and forced immobility. In its exploration it engages current responses to de-placement by those who have experience of the condition first hand. It is a dialogue between the work of such creators as the architects Petti and Hilal, the poets Qasmiyeh and Husseini, and the community builders of Dandara, with ancient discourses of the outcast that are found in Euripides’ Medea, the experience of Xenophon and such philosophers as Diogenes the Cynic. In so doing, it seeks to expose the way seemingly exceptional forms of politics and existence, instead, reveal themselves as society’s ‘systemic edge’.

“What is important to clarify is that the condition of permanent temporariness is imposed on us. It is a regime that exists today, and is manifested of course in refugee camps as an extreme, but is diffused into many other spheres with all sorts of precarities. After recognizing that the condition of permanent temporariness is not a choice, the question then becomes how to challenge it, how to overcome its regime. The answer cannot be permanency. It is unbearable when you don’t have access to rights that citizens nominally have, and the path to permanent citizen becomes the only way to obtain these rights. But we know that this is an illusion, and unachievable promise: first, because the very system of the nation state and citizenship is collapsing; and second, because the “integration” it requires suppresses individual qualities, and is never fully achieved for many categories of people—they will never be accepted as equal. So, what is left if we don’t want to succumb to the regime of permanent temporariness and see neither permanence nor temporariness as salvation?”

From Permanent Temporariness by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti.1

1. Introduction

Permanent temporariness was bared to me not as a concept but as a lived experience while I was hosted as a guest by scholars, artists, architects and other creators in contexts of displacement when invited to think together within and beyond the refugee camp about the challenges expressed in Sandi and Alessandro’s emphatic statement above. What I brought with me to the table were stories from the ancient world, and it is the enquiries made of that distant world which also interested my hosts and helped drive our search. We used ancient discourse to expose and inform problematics of space and time in the now. Our joint hopes were that it would be a site for alternative imaginaries, defying the fixation on impossibility and crisis, without diminishing the searing reality of present-day precarity and violence, which my hosts and others who have been forcibly displaced endure. By exploring the condition across the longue durée, our aim was to understand the possibilities of challenging it and the extent to which its nature was part of the world and its past, rather than an exception to it. It is a way of thinking not about endings but turning-points that allow for a repositioning of the self in relation to the world. Wandering became an ever more present subject within these exchanges, as did the questions about its relationship to permanent temporariness within and beyond the camp.

The paper that follows is the beginning of an investigation into this relationship, presented as a continuation of the dialogue with my hosts, and particularly those who are the Catalyst contributors for this volume: especially Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Yousif Qasmiyeh, Beatriz Ribeiro, Fernando Oelze and Orlando Soares Lopes of Dandara.2 Their work and experience from within displacement is my starting point, and the motivation for my choice of ancient perspectives to focus on. These ancient contexts, as I outline below, are not intended to be ‘inspirational’ or comparable, but ones that allow for diverse approaches to understanding the relationship between the condition of forced wandering and that of permanent temporariness,3 and to address such questions as: What convergences might there be in the way they are borne, narrated, resisted and operationalised? Is each a reference to the same phenomenon by different names but thousands of years apart? Or is permanent temporariness today something that is beyond wandering? Is it a uniquely current-day experience, resulting from the geo-political configuration, which creates conditions deemed exceptional and yet are endured and challenged by people whose collective absence from their countries would form an emptiness larger than any one of Europe’s nations? The intention is not to ignore the vast wealth of knowledge in theoretical discourse, but to foreground the condition of wandering and permanent temporariness from within its experience by those who not only witnessed it, but felt it on their being.4 It draws on diverse forms of testimony of individual and collective agency, and especially that expressed through art practice, making no claims to representation, but rather to the spectrum of possible understanding and confrontation across lives.

The ancient testimonies will be taken from the surviving corpus of the Mediterranean region of the last five hundred years BC, in particular from the ancient Greek world of competing city-states of the 5th–3rd centuries. The exploration will primarily draw on three ancient perspectives of forced wandering: within Euripides’ Greek tragedy Medea, Xenophon’s historical narrative of the march of the ten thousand mercenaries, and the accounts of exiled philosophers such as Diogenes the Cynic of Sinope. These ancient contexts do more than reveal ways in which forced displacement and the protracted condition of temporariness engenders precarity, trauma and violence across time. Their testimonies portray crucial turning-points—transitions, triggered by the recognition that one’s seemingly temporary state of wandering has become permanent. This knowledge serves as a form of resistance and subversion, driving that re-positioning of the self in relation to one’s predicament and the world. Such a release changes the role of the observer and thus, directs the lens away from that which is considered exceptional onto the ‘cracks’ in the status quo—the configuration of states and citizenships. It allows for a move against the waiting for a resolution from a world that excludes, and its imposed suspension of existence ‘in the meantime’, towards a resolution on one’s own terms.

Each of the three ancient contexts in dialogue with the Catalyst contributors provide an opportunity to consider stages that relate to such turning-points, the potential of their outcomes to subvert the condition, as well as to allow for challenge and the emergence of alternatives to the status quo. Medea encapsulates the individual character at the pinnacle of such a moment of turning within herself, on the realisation that no change will come from the outside. Xenophon’s reflections present the build up towards multiple turning points within a collective struggle, which result in intermittent, everyday subversions of the wandering state that, despite it, allow for ways of being political. In the case of the wandering philosophers and that of Diogenes the Cynic in particular, the focus shifts to the nature of existence that follows such a turning-point, depicting modes of repositioning that critique polis-society and advocate for cosmopolitan ideals.

Bringing the world of ancient wandering into the context of the 21st century, and vice versa, is not to draw comparison across the chronological distance as much as to allow for strange clashes to emerge.5 In working across any historical divide, there are necessarily limitations. The nature of the ancient sources from this early period means that the experience of wandering is largely mediated through an elite male (re-)envisioning of it,6 and it will not be possible within the scope of this paper to address the full richness of the evidence concerning such issues as gender and class.7 But, these narratives, in combination with our fragmentary historical sources,8 do allow for a perspective of the condition beyond the protagonists themselves that not only give insight into the realities of destitution and precarity but also into the forms of their overcoming. Furthermore, whether presented as first-hand historical experience and testimony, or from the realm of myth and fiction, there had to be authenticity to the sentiments expressed for ancient audiences to relate to these works. The voices presented do not speak for all, but in their diverse perspectives as individuals and groups, they give insight into what is conceivable within and beyond such states of endurance.

Concerning the relation of this material to the present day, there is no equivalent historical testimony from the ancient world to that of the contemporary figure of the refugee, nor are there spaces comparable to the intergenerational refugee camps of today, as I came to realise through investigations on hospitality and agency in displacement (Isayev 2017b, 2018). This does not mean that we should not draw on ancient sources, but rather that the scope of our categories needs to be flexible and that they have their limits. The sections that follow in Part 1 will provide a setting for modes of understanding the experience that underlies the terminology, both historic and current, before proceeding to engage these in dialogue in Part 2 to expose the possibilities for challenge and subversion of the condition/s they represent. Part 1 will first address the disparity and convergences of outcast time and its spaces, zeroing in on the im/possibility of home and futures between non-arrival and non-return, before a more detailed discussion of the emergence of terminologies of wandering and permanent temporariness.

Part I

2. Outcast Time and Its Spaces

Today, for many forcibly displaced people, the condition of permanent temporariness ensues from the convergent necessity of a movement out-of and the impossibility of a movement in-to any place. The resulting short-term strategies of marginalisation and containment, such as the refugee camp—constructed with the anticipation of its rapid cessation—have increasingly become a regime of precarity and exclusion stretching into perpetuity. The situation exposes an immediate divergence between the chronological settings of antiquity and today. In the ancient world, barring the place one was exiled from, rarely was it impossible to physically move into a place, nor were there spatiotemporal containers equivalent to today’s camps. While other sociopolitical boundaries existed, there were no bordering regimes of the kind engineered by today’s territorially bounded nation-states. This critical difference of territoriality, as the basis for determining citizenship, rights and protection was a fundamental point already addressed by Arendt (1943) when considering the predicament of refugees of the past and in our own time, and which Gray (2018) reflects on in this volume. In the ancient world, space, citizenship and belonging were more relationally conceived (Isayev 2017a). Circumscribed territory that could be mapped as absolute space was primarily reserved for private holdings. The ancient cities may have had walls but they did not act as physical barriers to civilian movement in times of peace as national borders do today. Neither did they encompass all the land that was used by the community of that city-state—polis. Unlike today, therefore, the space of exclusion was much smaller than that of possible inclusion. The exception was if a person committed such a heinous blood crime that s/he was hounded and prevented from sheltering in any community. Another key distinction is that one of the biggest drivers of displacement in these past societies was enslavement. A phenomenon that is situated differently within societal structures to that of modern slavery, incarceration and detention, which would require its own in-depth investigation and that is beyond the scope of this paper. Hence, the focus here will be more narrowly on the experience of (free) people who were forcibly displaced due to exile or expulsion rather than enslavement. It is such social borders, as those between slave and free or citizen and non-citizen, which were most difficult to cross, rather than those that were delimited in space.

Ancient land that comes closest to being imbued with that almost magical property of the nation-state belonged to the sanctuaries of the gods.9 These religious sites were inviolable, and hence those seeking asylum could find brief reprieve there under divine protection. Our most extensive depictions of how they operated appear in Greek tragedies, such as Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women and Euripides’ Children of Heracles, who cast their suppliant protagonists—primarily women and children10—not as pitiful victims but in defiant roles with strong voices. The tragedians chose the predicament of those who are displaced as sites of discourse on sovereignty and the balance of power between the demos (people) and their leaders.11 What we know of historical seekers of asylum at sanctuaries, is that their stays were short, as such sites had little capacity to hold large groups of people awaiting a response to pleas for asylum (Isayev 2017b, 2018). Decisions were made quickly either to host or not. A negative decision could lead to death, enslavement, dispersal or a moving on to try pleading at the threshold of another community. However, we hear of few instances where groups ended up in such protracted conditions for extended periods of time, even if a return to their place of origin may have not been possible.12 The circumstances within these sanctuaries were not such as to engender the kind of states of forced immobility as are prevalent most extremely in today’s detention centres and camps.

The different spatialities mean that ancient exiles, unlike refugees and asylum seekers today, had more opportunities for finding refuge elsewhere and avoiding the extremes of privation. This is despite the fact that ongoing barriers to becoming full members of a community may have remained and thus the accompanying limitations on modes of inhabiting and continuing precarity. There were constraints on how the city itself was used, and restrictions, for example, on non-citizens entering such public arenas as the Agora. While the extent to which this would have been enforced is questionable, it shows that there were attempts for space to be reserved for the inner group of civic members (Gottesman 2014, pp. 26–43). The better known status of the metic in Athens, which was held by a substantial portion of its population, designated those who were resident aliens, but without citizenship and without the right of land ownership. It provided certain privileges to adult male metics, yet still meant perpetual instability due to exclusion from full rights and protection.13 Such constraints on membership and inclusion contributed to the disorientation and de-centering associated with ancient wandering, meaning that finding other places to inhabit did not necessarily bring reprieve to the loss of home and a sense of belonging.14 Wandering in ancient narratives is applied, therefore, not only to describe the state of those who are constantly on the move, but also to those living in one place—a host-city for example—but who have not yet arrived at, or returned to, a state of settledness and belonging. In this sense, we may find affinities in the way that permanent temporariness can also be used to capture both of these states, but with a stark difference. We struggle to find in the ancient context the kind of spatial constraint and suspension of movement, which create a uniquely devastating state of in-betweenness for those forced to endure today’s regime of permanent temporariness.

• In-Betweenness

Many have pointed to the hypocrisy of a system that does not allow for spaces and existence to be defined outside the confined units of the nation-state, while complicit and fully aware of millions of people whose lives are made in-between. The sculptural work Stateless Nation by Hilal and Petti (2018, pp. 75–87)—consisting of a series of Palestinian passports, each several metres high, situated in-between the National Pavilions of the 2003 Venice Biennale—encapsulates this in-betweenness, while questioning the liminality of those having to endure it. In capturing this state, the artists further articulate the possibilities for its rejection: “To the regime of “temporariness” (the condition of spatial and temporal transience in the camps), we never opposed a project of permanence or citizenship. We chose instead to embrace destabilization,” (Hilal and Petti 2018, p. 42). To embrace and to operationalise a condition that is meant to debilitate is a form of its rejection. The in-betweenness itself can be made into more than an absence of settledness. To this we can add the challenge that Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2017, p. 732) pose to the dichotomy between homeland and host-state. In their research on Palestinian spaces of activism and uprising, they trace the way such spaces—as Palestinian refugee camps, Arab host-states and Arab countries—become part of broader Palestinian identity: “because Palestinianness is shaped not only through attachment to place, but also through particular experiences that are associated with Palestinian identity”. The temporal in-betweenness is an aspect of this particular identity-shaping experience—a striving to find a mode of living in the ‘meantime’—a ‘meantime’ that can take over a whole lifetime, or even several life-times, becoming a perpetual deferral in a kind of suspended present, which can stretch from one generation to the next.15 It creates an existence seemingly beyond history, where histories are nationally defined, while futures constantly recede. But, how to resist the denial of presence in the now, the past and future? This is a question that we will return to time and again in the second part of this paper. The investigations of the poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (2019b) address this from within the extremes of this condition—the way it infuses and disorients to make one feel perpetually never present, never there. Perhaps most explicitly in the final stanza of his poem, Time, published in this volume:

Where is time?

And what happened to the wind to take them with her

Where is time at this time?

When it remains

When it dies

When it does not return even after a while

Listen

(They listen)

Listen to what is coming

Beyond what is called silence

Listen

(They listen)

Let time go back to where it was

The journey shall begin.

 

And in the opening, introducing At the Feast of Asylum (Qasmiyeh 2016b):

“[Man] is the being who has to grasp his being” (Levinas 2000, p. 25). But what or who do refugees, or placeless people, grasp? When within what is now deemed normality, their bodies lie bare and afloat only to announce their coming but never their presence. From afar, they might think of time, a place, and above all gods, not knowing whether it is time for them to ascend, descend, or stay still. In the end, they never arrive.

For clarity’s sake, I talk on behalf of no one, let alone myself, my brothers-in-asylum and my only mother. Here, a stone’s throw away, languages, or murmurs, are a mere coincidence and so are faces (more or less). They meet (or even contest one another) to claim the body, the body that is “a swelling” (Nancy 2013, p. 29).

In these fragments, asylum, refugeeness, nonarrival, my mother, her cracked heels in particular, death, time and the body march together, notwithstanding with heavy feet, toward one thing: “the shadow of the place”.

• Between Non-Return and Non-Arrival

In-betweenness, which we will see is distinct from experiences of de-centering, takes a different form in the ancient world. Its topographies of wandering are inevitably shaped by its particular geo-political system. The only kind of person whose presence in an ancient state could be classed as being ‘illegal’ in peacetime is one who had been specifically exiled from it, usually by decree, as, for example, Xenophon. As such, in the ancient context, it was primarily the exile’s home-state that perpetrated the individual’s ongoing condition of wandering by preventing the possibility of return. It is this fact of the displacement being forced that is of importance for the purposes of this investigation, rather than its specific triggers, which differ significantly across the cases considered here and which are beyond the scope of the paper. From the surviving evidence, we know most about circumstances relating to exile and civic discord that forces opponents to leave and hope for a more stable moment in which to return, often petitioning from abroad.16 Such a collective expulsion can lead to what have been termed poleis-in exile, as we will see below. An arrival at another city, even inclusion in its community, however, was not necessarily enough for wandering to be brought to an end. Even if one was no longer technically on a journey or stateless, in the absence of return, the exile continued. Medea’s situation, as that of Xenophon’s mercenaries, exposes a particularly complex relationship between their wandering state and their home. The focal-point of their suffering is that of non-return, a fixation on what is being moved away from—as in Xenophon’s unreachable home—rather than the host destination.17

In current contexts of displacement, we would ask then: has the point of focus shifted to non-arrival? For the millions of men, women and children who continue to be forcibly displaced in the 21st century, by wars, discriminatory ideologies and climate change, a state of wandering—including forced immobility—continues, not only due to the inability to return, but the inability to find anywhere that is more than a refuge from imminent violence or death. The survival experience of individuals who, seeking asylum, were taken to Moria Refugee Camp on arrival in Lesvos, shows that these sites may not even be a haven from such physical threat.18 Where reluctant asylum is given, also outside refugee camps, it is often limited and temporary, focusing on the necessities of bodily survival, with little prospect of a meaningful life beyond it. Instead it places restrictions on making one’s own livelihood, thus enforcing states of dependence, which are resisted. This is despite the awareness that possibilities for return are either non-existent or will be a long time coming. Still, there are crucial instances where the site of origin that is unreachable remains the focus of responsibility. The non-return endures as an unhealable trauma for the expelled Palestinian people, who have now for generations continued to lobby and fight for the right to return. Qasmiyeh (2014) provides an approach to this experience at eye-level in Thresholds: 19

‘Non-arrival—after Derrida’

The moment I arrive, I want to come back. I never knew why reaching a place has always meant the end of my place. Whether I walk, travel by bus or train, or fly, I would only be there to mark the occasion of coming back. Non-arrival, I suppose, can also be another occasion.

The discourses of non-return and non-arrival converge in the Camp, a temporary solution whose ending seems impossible to foresee. It is especially acute for people in camps who have been forcibly disenfranchised and/or have no country of origin. The Camp is absent, for example, in the UNHCR durable solutions to refugee status: repatriation, resettlement and local integration (Black and Koser 1999; Turner 2016, p. 142). This is particularly incongruous in relation to the case of Palestinian refugees, for whom, as Ramadan (2013, p. 66) articulates, these traditional solutions are inaccessible.20 Whether striving for a return or arrival, as these are persistently deferred and the confidence in them recedes, so permanent temporariness takes hold. A perseverance that allows strength and meaning of belonging to exist within such a condition comes with a necessary reformulating of home and return. Hilal and Petti (2018, pp. 44–45), from their experience of Refugee Camps in Palestine, outline the mechanisms of this in their discourse with practitioners and educators in Bahia, Brazil, during their joint project The Tree School, which began in 2015:

Petti: “There isn’t a single return, but many possible returns. Our task is to reopen the imagination on how returns could take place. It should not be understood as a messianic event, but rather as a multiplication of acts of profanation of borders and separations….it is about, for example, a series of gestures that carry in themselves the meaning of free and self-determined acts…”

Hilal: “In Bahia they told us: ‘Every time I plant a baobab in Brazil, I feel like I’m going back to Africa’. Thresholds are necessary for identification. Borders mark differences and safeguard one’s own identity and story, but the threshold is a mobile space to inhabit together while inventing rules and codes”.

In their reconfiguration of the return there is also a reimagining of the future, which allows for it to be brought within grasp, breaking free of its hegemonic hold by outside powers. In response to Weizman’s observation about battling against a receding future, and the immediacy of their built architectural creations, Petti provides the following reflection on futural discourse (Hilal and Petti 2018, pp. 141–42):

“I’m against this discourse about the future, because we’ve found a much more effective way to think political transformation than messianic Marxism. We understood decolonization as an endless struggle, one that is happening right now, right here. There are already fragments of futures in the present. You imagine something, and at the same time live it. It is liberating to understand political transformation without being trapped in the idea that one day everything will be solved and we will all live happily. The work that we have been doing in refugee camps is already the future; it is already something that deals with people that live outside the nation state. Working within and against the condition of permanent temporariness means opposing two fronts at the same time: the perpetuation of the status quo, that imposes an unbearable condition of precarity on people, and normalization, trying to put all the broken pieces of the nation state back into its box”.

The possible extent of such reimagining of futures and return, whether as splintered and embedded in multiple daily acts, or through other modes of being, is what we will probe by drawing on the ancient discourse of wandering.

3. Terminological Contexts

• Wandering

The settings between ancient and modern described above, attempt to expose the nature of the condition that is encapsulated in the terms of ‘wandering’ and ‘permanent temporariness’, neither of which are stable. Their meanings change over time, and depending on context, the condition they describe has affinities with others, captured by terms such as exile, expulsion, apolis (without polis-city, community), atimia (without society, disenfranchised),21 statelessness, liminality, precarity, displacement and de-placement.22 In ancient Greek, wandering is most commonly expressed by planaomai and alaomai, and in Latin by errare. The Latin puts greater emphasis on a movement that errs, that is, misses the mark. Still, of the variety of ways that wandering has been understood in ancient contexts, at its core is a movement outward, or away from, which is ongoing and divergent.23 It is not only physical but can also refer to a physical and a mental state—as in wandering of the mind or madness. Key to understanding the position of wandering in society, and the importance of the outcast’s gaze in the ancient Greek context, which will be the main focus of this study, are the works of Montiglio (2005), Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture, Garland (2014), Wandering Greeks, as well as Gray’s (2015) embedding of exilic discourse within his exploration of Stasis and Stability. They demonstrate the wide range of causes that could lead to a wandering state, historical and imagined: crime, ideological or political confrontation, civic unrest, threats to personal well-being or externally triggered conquest and destruction of one’s place of home.

More generally in ancient contexts, wandering is associated with disorientation, de-centering, unsettledness and non-belonging, which affects a subject who is simultaneously the actor and the one being acted upon. The potential for agency persists, and with it the possibility for challenging one’s state from within. This is especially evident in Greek writings, which express wandering in the middle passive voice, thus allowing for agency to remain ambiguous and multiple (Montiglio 2005, p. 26). This is materialised in the myth of Io, the maiden driven into seemingly ceaseless wandering by a gadfly, at the behest of jealous gods who turned her into a heifer. Io is presented as a figure of sympathy in Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound (562–95), and, just as many other wanderers of ancient narratives, she is used to embody the extremes of misery. But, she is not only that—rarely are wanderers depicted as mere pitiful victims. Rather, their predicament is used to explore possibilities for subversion from the margins of society, questioning their own marginality in the process. Aeschylus’ dramatic exploration, just as Euripides’ Medea, forms a critique of the world that compels these figures to their state in the first place. Diogenes the Cynic is to have famously rebuked the unsolicited pity of Alexander the Great by telling the great general to “move out of his light”.24 Ancient testimonies of such sociopolitical outcasts—as exiled philosophers, objectors, prophets or women refusing forced marriage—critique the world that compels these figures to their state in the first place. Their actions transform the sufferings of privation, humiliation and vulnerability into rallying calls for alternative forms of social existence.

Wandering has a particular role in the lives of ancient philosophers and to some extent also poets. It is associated with gaining knowledge, which for the infamous 4th century exiled philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, begins with a movement out.25 For the Stoics and Neoplatonists (representing philosophical schools), wandering was an expression of the life journey with its unexpected turns, the homo viator—itinerant man—was central to their philosophies. Within Stoicism the journey of life is presented as an ongoing movement towards a destination, wisdom, whose nature is clear but which is, in practice, never reached and whose temporal end (death) has no special significance. While drawing on aspects of Cynicism, the Stoics did not glamorise homelessness and non-belonging as they were committed to engagement in family and community life, though combined with an independent, reflective perspective.26 The Neoplatonists take a different approach in their perception of man being perpetually in transit on earth, as the true home is elsewhere. For them wandering is portrayed as paradoxically imbued with both helplessness and higher power simultaneously. By the time of the Roman Imperial period, the relations and tensions between polis and cosmos (the world/universe) find their expression in exile-writing. In this empire setting exilic language is harnessed to express issues of cultural identity—an era labelled the Second Sophistic (Johnston 2019; Whitmarsh 2001). Such exilic texts present different perspectives on the condition; novels such as the 3rd century CE romance Aethiopica convey less a spirit of cosmopolitanism than of disorientation, anxiety and flight (Montiglio 2005, pp. 223–26).

A sophisticated discourse has developed on the way ancient wandering and especially its key aspects of exclusion and privation are operationalised or misused. For the ancient wandering philosopher, it was not only the mobility itself, or rather the separation from home, that was important for reaching profound knowledge and understanding, but also the ability to endure hardship, privation and exclusion, which become almost a precondition for the role. Such experience is believed to afford a perspective that can only be achieved from the outside, both physically and outside of protection and membership, thus giving weight and authenticity to their expounded philosophies and societal critique. Well into Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, phases of wandering and poverty, often forced, continued to be perceived as essential experiences for bishops, monks and other clergy.27 To present these observations here in the context of hosts and readers who today may be experiencing the severity and extremes that such a condition brings is in no way to negate the reality of that lived experience. It is by no means to indulge a wandering state, but to recognise that such a framing, as we will see, has arisen as a form of resistance itself by displaced people who were also philosophers and poets.

Qasmiyeh’s 21st century poetic voice is of a world carved out in crucially different ways to that of the ancient philosopher. What Qasmiyeh’s methods share with this ancient figure is in the way their perspective becomes a kind of subversion by consciously reversing the lens so as to have the outcast in the role of the observer rather than the observed, as here presented from the collection Thresholds (Qasmiyeh 2014).

‘Anthropologists’

• I know some of them. Some of them are friends but the majority are enemies. Upon the doorstep you observe what they observe with a lot of care. You look at them the way they look at you, curiously and obliquely. You suddenly develop a fear of imitating them whilst they imitate you. You worry about relapsing into one of your minds while sharing mundane details with them. Sometimes I dream of devouring all of them, and just once with no witnesses or written testimonies.
• All of us wanted to greet her. Even my illiterate mother who never spoke a word of English said: Welcome! After spending hours with us, in the same room, she left with a jar of homemade pickles and three full cassettes with our voices.

Subversion comes from owning one’s state without accepting it. The exiled philosopher is the historical figure who most directly confronts, even critically embraces his condition. In his predicament, wandering is instrumentalised to make bare the cracks within society, to challenge its myth-making and to become a proposition for alternative ways of being. Charted across diverse treatises (and audio cassettes), the outcast voice seeks to convey the experience beyond mere physical privation that such a wandering state engenders.28 Through murmurs, bold speech and screams—impossible to unhear—it lays bare the effects on the de-centred body in space, the difficulty of its presencing, the suspension of time, and with it, of home and the future itself. In its reverberation, the voice reveals itself as belonging to one who is not separate from, but of the world, which attempts to exclude and silence.

• Permanent Temporariness

Wandering is a term that is rarely used today by people in reference to their own displacement, nor by those who consider themselves external to it, to describe the condition of others. Perhaps it is too romanticising for the visceral and painful experience of forced migration and flight29, or is it that such a term conveys unceasing movement and restlessness that drives it, while people who are displaced today are often forced into immobility. This forced sedentism is not just due to the suspension of a functional civic status, but physical confinement within boundaries—either of nation-states, camps or detention centres. Such lives have been increasingly designated as being in a state of permanent temporariness, as indicated by the recent use of this term (as recent as a decade ago), in relation to people who have been forcibly displaced. Therefore, I include here a brief summary of the trajectory of its application and its elaboration in English language publications over the last decades.

Initially, in scholarly literature, the term was not applied to articulate the experience of people who are forcibly displaced but to that of migrant workers. Designating their condition as one of permanent temporariness allowed scholars to highlight the unsettledness and precarity of their lives, disciplined by temporary contracts, which may not be renewed.30 The use of such terminology is intended as a critique of employment conditions that are favourable to the State, which profits from a productive sector of its inhabitants to whom it does not owe equal rights, benefits or protection, resulting in a regime designed to limit their inclusion in the host society. The condition for such migrant workers, often on low-pay, most of which is sent home as remittance, means that their real lives and futures are still to be lived ‘elsewhere’, while their present is a transient moment before a return. The ‘moment’ however, extends across a whole lifetime. This combination of being static and the controlling power of a temporary status is what Bailey and others term ‘permanent temporariness’, in reference to Salvadoran temporary migrants in the US.31 Their study, importantly, also reveals strategies of resistance to temporality’s disciplining power over bodies, families and the social field, which include: visibility and pursuing forms of permanence beyond those denied by the host-state through education, marriage and a refusal to leave. These mechanisms are also foregrounded in other studies that investigate the condition in the context of migrant workers, including those that become internally marginalised.32

There is a wide spectrum of difference between the situation of migrant workers and people who are forcibly displaced, especially people whose displacement is in refugee camps. One is about non-inclusion in a society while having the free will to return, while the other is about severely compromised mobility and the impossibility of return. Where there are convergences, both within the diverse groups of migrant workers and between them and people who are forcibly displaced, is a shared unsettledness and ongoing precarity, enforced by regimes that keep lives in a state of suspension and in-betweenness. The term ‘permanent temporariness’, by capturing these aspects of the condition, has come to be increasingly used to articulate the experience of those who have been exiled and forcibly displaced.33 Whether it is endured in host-communities, which continuously delay decisions on status and membership with an impending risk of deportation, or in camps from one generation to the next, it describes the condition of people whose recourse to temporary solutions in a moment of crisis have been enforced as permanent states of being. Displacement has led to de-placement. Qasmiyeh’s (2019a) writings reveal the incomprehensibility of what such a state entails in relation to refugee camps, in There it is: the camp that is yet to be born:

Find me a place whose meaning is that of its absence.

Find me a place where nothing is not exactly nothing but its equivalent.

 

The severed anticipation of a return or incorporation into a host-society has resulted in a group of people who are deemed to be seemingly beyond incorporation. It is in reference to such exclusion that we find some of the earliest uses of the term in the context of displacement, as for example by Yiftachel (2009, pp. 343–44) in his analysis of the marginalisation of the Bedouins in the Negev of Palestine/Israel. Increasingly, it has been employed in relation to multi-generational displacement contexts and especially refugee camps.34 A critical discourse has developed around the conceptualisation of the condition that is increasingly referred to as permanent temporariness—characterised by alienation, non-belonging and the endless postponement of justice and equality, along with everyday struggles that result from job precarity and lack of access to public services. To recognise this is not to relegate lives under such circumstances to indefinite liminality or to a state of suspension in a temporal stagnation.35 Applied to more specific circumstances, the issue, as articulated by Ramsay (2017, p. 517) is that “approaching the displacement of refugees uncritically as a liminal condition implies a linearity of experience whereby resettlement, by virtue of providing refugees with a recognized national identity, then resolves the ‘problem’ of their displacement”.36 Although the protraction of life in displacement means that daily lives are unable to be directed towards a predictable future, still as Ramadan, among others, has shown, “the lives of refugees are not totalistically reducible to the times and spaces of the present tense” (Ramadan 2013; Ramsay 2017, p. 518). Rather, it is precisely the hardship that persists as part of the daily rhythm, and the recognition of its presence, that motivates new future imaginaries.37 These allow people to work towards futures other than those subscribed to by nation-state actors, or the limiting solutions of humanitarian regimes.38

These critical observations are dependent on knowledge shared by those who have direct experience of challenging and living beyond such limiting solutions of external regimes. Shared through multiple acts, including that of poetry and the artistic practice of Hilal and Petti, which is dedicated to exposing the condition from within the refugee camp. Here, I draw directly on their statements and their Catalyst contribution for this volume, which forms part of a wider work on Permanent Temporariness (an excerpt from which introduces this chapter).39 Emerging in the 2000s, from what came to be known as DAAR (De-colonising Architecture), their earliest interventions are explorations and actions “within and against the condition of permanent temporariness that permeates contemporary forms of life” (Hilal and Petti 2018, back-cover). One such work is the life-size Concrete Tent positioned in the liminal space of the Dheisheh refugee Camp in the West Bank, Palestine. It is one of the sites where the conversations leading up to this chapter began, when a group of us came together in 2015 to re-think place, heritage and belonging through ancient counter-cartographies.40 In reflecting on the creation of the Concrete Tent, Petti states that “permanent temporariness is a critique of the actual condition, but also the physical and conceptual terrain from which to challenge the status quo by opposing both normalization (becoming a citizen) and the perpetuation of temporariness (remaining refugees)” (Hilal and Petti 2018, p. 60).

Through this and other works they counter the perceived uniqueness of the refugee camps in the Palestinian context and the association of such conditions primarily with refugees. While they emphatically point to the disempowered condition of exile, they also expose how the experience of the camp shapes both inhabitants, the ones inside and those outside the camp: “Our task for the future is to understand the camp not as an isolated condition, but as an extreme manifestation of a form of government—of temporariness—now being extended across the globe”.41 Repositioning the camp in relation to the world, therefore, creates a continuum between the diverse ways that lives are lived; it also refuses to negate time under such conditions as life, and for it to be seen only as suspension (Hilal and Petti 2018, concepts—exile):

Rather than being in a constant state of postponement—delaying action until a particular time has come—exile can be mobilized as an operational tool to transgress borders and forced dislocation…a political community of exile is built around the common condition of non-belonging, of displacement from the familiar. As a political identity, exile opposes the status quo, confronts a dogmatic belief in the nation state, and refuses to normalize the permanent state of exception in which we live. Exile demands to be thought as a radical, new foundation for civic space.

Through their practice-based interventions they challenge dominant collective narratives. They re-appropriate the camp and its history, conceptually and practically, leading to the production of new political imaginaries and with them the formation of civic spaces.42 The momentum of these actions encapsulates a transformative moment, in which a recognition of one’s condition is coupled with a refusal to succumb to its inevitabilities. It is this repositioning of the self which we go on to explore in the ancient discourse on wandering.

Part II

4. Medea beyond Wandering

Of the many ancient myths that centre on wandering in the Greco-Roman canon, we open not with Homer’s Odyssey,43 nor Vergil’s Aeneid,44 but with the story of Medea and her exile in consequence of her aiding Jason and his companions, the Argonauts, in their quest for the Golden Fleece. The myth, already noted in Homer’s Odyssey (12.70), exists in multiple versions that explore diverse episodes either during the return voyage of the Argo, their ship that set off from Iolcus, or the events that followed. Of the retellings that survive, the Argonautica, written by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC provides one of the most complete narratives of the voyage in four books.45 Yet, it is Euripides’ dramatisation of one episode in the wake of that journey, his tragedy, Medea, which has left the most deep and lasting impact over the millennia.46 Despite being awarded 3rd place when it was first performed in Athens in 431 BC, it has had numerous revivals, imitations and representations, including Ennius’ version of the play in the early 2nd century BC, Medea Exul, one of the earliest writings of the Latin corpus that still remain.47 Medea has been read as an exploration of the wider experience of being a phugas-refugee (Kasimis 2020), and that of being a metic woman in 5th century BC Athens (Kennedy 2014, p. 49).48 The ongoing popularity of the story may be due to the shocking and uncompromising version that Euripides created, which draws in the audience not only to behold but to viscerally experience the struggle for agency from within a position of victimhood.

The divergent trajectories of the myth’s two main protagonists, Jason and Medea, provide an entry point for examining the way wandering and permanent temporariness interlink and diverge. The tragedy of Medea encapsulates the meaning of non-arrival, the effects of the ensuing intolerable condition and the endurance it demands. Yet it does more than reel from this state. It calls for it to be recognised and accepted, but without being surrendered to. This is what Medea takes as its challenge by claiming rights and demanding justice. Thus, by forcing the recognition that her state, and the severe acts of violence she is driven to, are of the world’s making, she exposes the cracks in the status quo—the society which the audience of the tragedy inhabits. Medea disdains and pities those who give mere sympathy, while consigning her state to one of exception, without the possibility of incorporation, settledness, rights and protection. It may be surprising that Medea is presented as a character deserving our sympathy at all,49 but not if we recognise the tragedy’s appeal to understanding the right of her claims and severe acts, from within the constraints of her condition, brought on by the self-serving interests and ambitions of gods and men.

• Non-Arrival

Euripides’ Medea centres on the protagonist in the wake of her estrangement from her Colchian home and family, following the return of the Argonauts to Greece, and now as Jason’s wife recently arrived in Corinth.50 It is here that Jason chooses to take another bride, the daughter of the Corinthian king Creon, thus spurring on the action of the play. Although the characters are all members of elite royal households, their predicament crosses class lines, which are not in themselves given attention by the playwright. The ancient audience would know Medea’s condition was the result of divine intervention, forcing her to fall in love with Jason while she was still a maiden, which leads her to defy her father, murder her brother and commit further blood-crimes in aid of helping Jason to gain the Golden Fleece and power. Acts, which despite their violence and uncompromising horror, are portrayed as being driven by gods and men through Medea, rather than by her, making her, too, their victim deserving pity. Still, she later owns them as fatal errors that have left her apolis—without community.51 Any prospect of a new home recedes as Jason’s promise of marriage and protection are a long time coming, and eventually broken. Euripides’ Medea asserts she was carried off as booty (Medea 253–58). Both of the main characters are on journeys, some of which intertwine. Yet, Jason’s wandering with the Argonauts, despite the obstacles, has a foreseen trajectory for return in a way that Medea’s cannot. Her coming to Greece is a non-arrival. While she continues to move from one community to another, neither settledness nor inclusion or protection are available to her. At times she is able to find a haven and habitation, but not a home. A combination of a lack of home and the threat of ensuing helplessness is captured by the play’s Chorus of Corinthian women, in their fear of such a state of absence (Euripides, Medea 642–54):

“O fatherland, O house, may I never be bereft of my city, never have a life of helplessness, a cruel life, most pitiable of woes! In death, O in death may I be brought low ere that, bringing my life’s daylight to an end! Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land”.

Medea’s condition is characterised by moments of hope and brief pause before she again finds herself in a state of wandering, which becomes perpetual. Even when Jason is in need of refuge, which he and Medea seek together in Corinth, he is not presented as an outcast. This is not only because within the logic of the myth Jason is Greek while Medea is barbarian, but as Euripides’ play reveals, her condition is also due to the societal constraints of her sex.52 It increasingly becomes questionable which terminology is appropriate to express her state beyond wandering, as it is neither wholly that of anti-hero nor victim.

As scholars have recognized, it is notable that Euripides’ framing of Medea is in the familiar terms of honour (τιμή-timé), resolve and action—even if subverted—which are usually reserved for Greek male heroes. For the tragedian Sophocles, the heroic characters such as Achilles and Ajax encapsulate its meaning.53 Medea is furthermore consistently characterised as clever, even by her enemies, but not in the guise of some foreign barbarian sorceress.54 In the opening scene of the tragedy the nurse, the first to speak, presents Medea as “an exile loved by the citizens to whose land she had come, and lending to Jason himself all her support” (Euripides, Medea 13–15).55 In Euripides play it is only Jason who refers to Medea as barbarian, negating her agency by assigning her actions to a woman scorned, neither acknowledging what she has done for him, nor taking any responsibility for his own role as oath-breaker. Rather, Jason dares to present as an act of generosity, his persuasion of Creon to allow Medea to remain in Corinth, while he takes the king’s daughter as a new bride. In an act of twisted logic Jason tries to position himself as a model Greek upholding the laws: “you now live among Greeks and not barbarians, and you understand justice and the rule of law, with no concession to force” (Euripides, Medea 536–40). Yet the women of the Chorus, although Corinthians, do not subscribe to such a characterisation. Instead, they sympathise with Medea’s wronged state, acknowledging the inability (or unwillingness), of those in power to bring about change.56 They are accepting of her judgement of Jason and reasons for her decision to act, if not the culminating violent deeds themselves.57

• Claiming Rights

The tragic action that engulfs Euripides’ play is triggered by Jason’s primary act of betrayal—the taking of a new bride in Corinth. For Medea, Jason’s broken oath and with it the collusion of Corinth’s royal house, which sends her into further exile (Euripides Medea, 70–73), confirms that she can no longer hope for others to act faithfully, nor for the dishonour and injustices wrought upon her to be addressed. In the context of the play, we would not expect a direct reference to rights and citizenship, the possibilities and meanings of which are discussed more directly by Gray (2018) in this volume. Still, there is engagement in the tragedy with the wider discourse of justice and with what today may be referred to as claiming rights, through her appeals to promises made by oath (Euripides, Medea 17–25):58

“Poor Medea, finding herself thus dishonoured, calls loudly on his oaths, invokes the mighty assurance of his sworn right hand, and calls the gods to witness the unjust return she is getting from Jason”.

Claiming rights, as articulated by Isin and Nielsen, entails ‘responsibilizing’ the self, that is, making oneself responsible for, and capable of, taking action.59 It is this that we can ascribe to Medea who both recognises and challenges the societal limits forced upon her as a woman and an outsider, with no home to return to for protection and under threat of imminent exile. In her powerful speech to the Corinthian women’s Chorus on the position of their sex in society, she emphasises their differences, despite their shared experiences of existing in a male dominated sphere (Euripides, Medea 253–58):

“…your story and mine are not the same: you have a city and a father’s house, the enjoyment of life and the company of friends, while I, without relatives or city, am suffering outrage from my husband. I was carried off as booty from a foreign land and have no mother, no brother, no kinsman to shelter me from this calamity”.

 

Medea’s recognition that no external forces will bring a change to her state is a juncture that forces a turning within herself and reliance on her own devices. Euripides presents her as choosing allies, negotiating and dictating terms in the way she supplicates Aegeus the king of Athens, who swears an oath to give her protection, although prior to knowing the severity of her predicament (Euripides, Medea 708–60).60 Most tragically, the Medea of Euripides resigns herself to committing irreparable acts that bring new agony to Jason and herself. Her grief-stricken murders lead not only to the death of Jason’s new bride, by the gift of poisoned robes which consume Creon as well, but in this tragic account also to Medea’s reluctant killing of her children.61 Yet it is not out of blind rage that her revenge is formulated. Euripides chose to capture the searing pain that leads to Medea’s resolve in carrying out her plan through a monologue that presents a divided self, voicing the impossibility of a continued existence within such constraints and the consequences of their rupture. The play ends with Medea triumphant in the chariot of her grandfather, the sun-god Helios, in the role of deus ex-machina—god from the machine, a dramatic technique reserved for a divine entrance that puts a stop to the action on stage.62 Her final lines to Jason are the closest there is to an expression of hope for some justice, though in the hands of gods not men: “What god or power above will listen to you, who broke your oath and deceived a stranger?” (Euripides, Medea 1391–92). Medea’s refusal to succumb to the inevitable conclusion of living in an oppressed state does not come with the illusion that there will be reprieve or a transformation of the system within which she exists. Her condition is instead used by Euripides to expose the cracks in society. The venerated polis-society of his own day, encapsulated in the Greek Corinth of the tragedy, he reveals not as the epitome of civilisation—which Jason contrasts with Medea’s estranged barbarian homeland—but as corrupt and oppressive.63

• Reversing the Lens

Through the eyes of an outcast, Euripides’ Medea unsettles the world that positions itself as the norm. It has captured imaginations through centuries, not least because of the conflicting sympathies that its anti-hero engenders. A woman scorned seeking revenge is but a superficial reading of the forces at play that drive the actions of such a character as Medea. Building on the more sympathetic reactions to these tragedies of an exiled outsider, perpetually rejected, are the feminist readings from the twentieth century onwards. These emphasise her determination to make home and take control of a life that seems no longer her own; they show how her actions subvert and critique the status quo of a patriarchal society.64 Agamben, in his challenging work, Homo Sacer, articulates such a position in relation to modern refugees, who “represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state… above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis,” (Agamben [1995] 1998, p. 131). Looking through the lens of exile and refugeehood unsettles the status quo, as Bashir and Goldberg (2014, p. 92) note in their work on Israel/Palestine: “An empathetic view of the refugee disrupts the validity of the foundations of the political order that created her in the first place and now abandons her to her fate”. In particular, the existence of the refugee camp and lives lived within it, act as a magnifying glass for the global forces of social change. Its role is akin to what Sassen refers to as the ‘systemic edge’: “the extreme character of conditions at the edge makes visible larger trends that are less extreme and hence more difficult to capture” (Sassen 2014, p. 211).65 This interdependence between one who is expelled and the other who is incorporated, which we will return to towards the end of the paper, is foregrounded by Qasmiyeh. Cracks appear in his poetry, and explicitly in these excerpts from In mourning the refugee, we mourn God’s intention in the absolute (Qasmiyeh 2018):

How can there be a camp apropos a world?

We repeat the repeated so we can see our features more clearly, the face as it is, the cracks in their transcendental rawness and for once we might consent to what we will never see.

…

The eternal in the camp is the crack. “The crack also invites”.

The essential role of the outsider in making the inside visible and coherent, has been increasingly highlighted in critical investigations.66 Yet, Qasmiyeh takes this further, in his words introducing the poem, The Jungle, he reveals the continuum that brings into question the inside–outside dichotomy itself (Qasmiyeh 2016a):

As we write about the Self, the image of the refugee always floats nearby. It floats palpably and metonymically, as both its own entity and marker. At this moment in time, the refugee has become the conceit of bare survival, the naked survivor whose corpus is no longer a corpus, but its non-elliptical sacrifice. Thus, in writing alone, the refugee can stare at his body (properly) as it disintegrates only to record his own fading and the world’s.

The camp is more than an exposition of the fissures in the status quo, it is also a mode of challenge and a reaching to alternative futures beyond it (Hilal and Petti 2018, p. 52):

A great lesson in this sense can be learned from refugee camps, in opposing permanency while at the same time creating a space for a life in common, one that exists beyond the idea of a nation state. These are not utopian places, but places of endless struggle for justice and equality. The very existence of Palestinian camps is a reminder of the violent power of exclusion inherent within, and an existential threat to, nation states. It is a crack in the regime that shows both its limitations and its possible overcoming.

 

The limitations of the regime signal others inherent within the system of sovereign states, beyond refugeehood. Some of these are addressed by Greene (2018) in his scrutiny of permanent states of emergency, and the extent to which state power can be constrained by law. Within Euripides’ Medea, we are confronted with the way society’s cracks are exposed by the victims of the concessions it makes to a dysfunctional justice. Medea encapsulates a condition characterised by constant precarity, lacking a path into a different future within the constraints of a world-order she seemingly inhabits in a liminal way, and outside of its history. In this sense it perhaps comes closest to that of permanent temporariness. Although she endures her predicament, she does not accept it, but finds ways to act against it, forcing the recognition of her state not as exceptional to the world-order, but part of its making.

5. Xenophon’s Anabasis of Splintered Returns

The finality and starkness of the acts of resistance and challenge which engulf Medea are the prerogative of myth. In historical contexts, the means of endurance and overcoming are more elusive, multiple and protracted. We recognise them in Xenophon’s Anabasis, a narrative of exile rather than refugeehood. Yet, it still speaks to refugeehood in the way that it exposes possible modes of politicalness beyond the polis-state, and in its recourse to splintered futures and returns. Such mechanisms are also recognisable in the experience of those enduring the condition of permanent temporariness. In his autobiographical narrative, Xenophon recounts the march of ten thousand mercenaries gathered by Cyrus the younger in 401 BC for what culminated in a failed campaign against the Persian Empire. Cyrus’s death on campaign left his troops hundreds of miles into Persia, leaderless and purposeless. Xenophon, who was one of Cyrus’s recruits, depicts, from personal experience, the men’s condition on their long and tortuous wandering route homeward.67 It should be noted that, although the focus is on the men, as in most narratives concerning mercenaries, these vast military groups often had extensive entourages that could incorporate not just servants and traders, but also entertainers, courtesans and the mercenaries’ families.68

On the initial realisation of their desperate state, surrounded by enemies, abandoned by some of their number and without access to provisions or means by which to keep going (Xenophon, Anabasis 3.1), “[they] lay down wherever they each chanced to be, unable to sleep for grief and longing for their native states and parents, their wives and children, whom they thought they should never see again. Such was the state of mind in which they all lay down to rest”. The initial succumbing to their state leads to ongoing debate of whether to find a means to stay where they are or to harness energies in seeking a return (Xenophon, Anabasis 3.2). In making decisions, they incrementally begin to resemble a polity as they proceed to carve out a route back, with assemblies, councils and elected leaders, with Xenophon among those chosen (Xenophon, Anabasis 3.2–3). This, they continue through their protracted state away from home—what we might refer to as unceasing collective strandedness. Xenophon also charts the underlying tensions resulting from diverse individual aspirations for life-trajectories, seeking to overcome a condition, which increasingly resembles that of permanent temporariness.

The stress on group identity in displacement is a key interest of the Anabasis, which brings into question the possible nature of polity ‘in the meantime’. This is most poignantly expressed in an early speech put in the mouth of the Spartan leader Clearchus (Xenophon, Anabasis 1.3):

“For I consider that you are to me both fatherland and friends and allies; with you I think I shall be honoured wherever I may be, bereft of you I do not think I shall be able either to aid a friend or to ward off a foe. Be sure, therefore, that wherever you go, I shall go also”.

Their diverse practices extended into aspects of life beyond mere inner organisation, and affected external perception and recognition of them as a single body: they receive ambassadors and even organise games and processions.69 Still, this was not a replacement for a home-polity but a means of reaching it. After months of wandering, forcing their way or negotiating for passage and provisions through desert and mountains of eastern Anatolia, a moment of hope comes as they catch sight of the Black Sea (Xenophon, Anabasis 4.7). It is not unlike the experience conveyed by storytellers of the mythical wandering Argonauts, that moment when all routes are visible and thoughts turn to home (Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 2.541-6). At the sea, the mercenaries glimpse the possibility of a return, which fuses a common vision. Their joyous Greek cry of Thalatta Thalatta—The sea! The sea!—captures the energy to persevere towards all that is longed for just when it seems to be fading (Xenophon, Anabasis 4.7.24).70 This powerful exhalation has made its way into the works of writers over millennia, employed for emotional effect by the Romantics,71 and subverted by those who, like Joyce, recognised the darker qualities of the moment intended by Xenophon.72 It is not a reflection on false hope but rather a questioning of the attainability of the sought after homecoming. It is a challenge to the possibility of any single and definitive or—to borrow Petti’s phrase—‘messianic’ moment of return (Hilal and Petti 2018, pp. 44–45).

The sought-after arrival comes in and out of focus throughout the Anabasis, at times appearing only as an illusion, testing the men’s resolve to persevere. In part, this was due to the sheer necessity of provisions required to keep such a large group alive, while traversing the vast physical distance, across others’ lands, where one’s very presence signalled threat and aggression. Yet, beyond overcoming the needs of survival, there was a further obstacle to a return. These men may have had no welcome waiting at the longed-for place of home, as many of those on campaign were expelled from their native Greek cities. The exiles included the makeshift leaders themselves, such as the Spartan Clearchus (Xenophon, Anabasis 1.1, 2.6) and even the Athenian Xenophon (Xenophon, Anabasis 5.3.6-7). It is well known that exiles often made up the troops of the prolific mercenary armies of the 4th century BC. They were perceived not only as a threat by those they fought, but also by fellow compatriots in their home regions, with good reason.73 This is captured a generation later by the Greek orator and rhetorician Isocrates, in his Philippus (346 BC), advising Philip to employ the roaming mercenaries to bring the Persian Empire to heel, and then by settling them in foreign land, thus also keeping them away from Greece:

“If we do not stop these men from banding together, by providing sufficient livelihood for them, they will grow before we know it into so great a multitude as to be a terror no less to the Hellenes [Greeks] than to the barbarians. But we pay no heed to them; nay, we shut our eyes to the fact that a terrible menace which threatens us all alike is waxing day by day. It is therefore the duty of a man who is high-minded, who is a lover of Hellas, who has a broader vision than the rest of the world, to employ these bands in a war against the barbarians, to strip from that empire all the territory … to deliver these homeless wanderers from the ills by which they are afflicted and which they inflict upon others, to collect them into cities, and with these cities to fix the boundary of Hellas, making of them buffer states to shield us all”.74

 

Such attitudes to mercenaries would have been familiar, and although there is little interest in them shown in the Anabasis, the notion of home is constantly scrutinised. Continuously there are halting pauses towards it to reconsider the best way to proceed, whether separately, jointly or alternatively cease seeking a route back altogether. At a poignant moment at Calpe Harbour, those with a determination for return even refused “to encamp on the spot which might become a city,” (Xenophon, Anabasis 6.4) in case this would forever block their path homeward. Unlike in myths and tales of Odyssean nostoi—on the circuitous journeys home—for many of the men on the march, this was not the outcome. Instead, they continued in their state of wandering, interspersed with hopeful moments when they dared to project into future memory retellings of the expedition and heroic acts.75 Yet, for many, these only added to the realisation of loss, becoming ungraspable opportunities for settlement or return.76 If there is resolution in the Anabasis, at best it is splintered, as is made explicit in the final book of the narrative. It recounts how some mercenaries do manage to make their way back to their native cities, others find new places on the march to call home and settle, while many make the journey itself a kind of home on the move, especially those who go on to join other mercenary campaigns (Xenophon, Anabasis 7.2):

“As for the troops, to return home was what they also desired. As time wore on, however, many of the soldiers either sold their arms up and down the country and set sail for home in any way they could, or else mingled with the people of the neighbouring Greek cities. And Anaxibius was glad to hear the news that the army was breaking up; for he thought that if this process went on, Pharnabazus would be very greatly pleased”.

Xenophon himself returned to Greece in 394 BC, continuing to fight as a mercenary under the Spartans, while still exiled from Athens. In his first-hand narration, he captures how such circumstances lead to a re-imagining of home, futures and the meaning of return, not as a celebratory moment of collective arrival, but through multiple and diverse acts of inhabiting.

• Polity in Strandednesss

Through Xenophon’s historical, if moralising, reflections, we witness wandering transition into a state of permanent temporariness. A singular common return that might have been the vision in the cry of Thalatta Thalatta, or the unity presented by Clearchus, is exposed as but an apparition. As Ma (2004, pp. 335–36) observes, in analysing the problematics of homecoming in the narrative, resolution and return are constantly deferred:

“the whole story ends with no real escape, but only a starting over again. The Anabasis is about repetition: nested structures of obstacle and escape towards other obstacles. … the constant movement is corrosive of certainty; it subverts certainty about where one is going, except into a succession of trials where survival and loss are present in equal measure.… [For Xenophon himself] one escape from danger leads to another situation where return is impossible; one exile leads to another”.

This summary captures the impact of an unceasing strandedness endured by Xenophon, the men on the march and, by extension, could potentially be applied to Medea. However, it allows no space for resistance to such a condition except seemingly an acceptance of the fate it brings with it. This, as we saw, is not the case in Medea, where the recognition (rather than acceptance) of such a state, allows for agency and subversion—even if that does not in itself bring reprieve. In Xenophon’s Anabasis, we witness it in the way the mercenaries reform to re-create the polis through practice—they elect leaders, bring fellow soldiers to justice, hold assemblies and make collective decisions. It fits what has been referred to as the ‘Nakonian’—non-territorial—conception of polis as a collection of people and practices (Gray 2015, pp. 372–73). Here may be a polis on the move that seeks to overcome the impossibility of its existence in a moment of transience, even if it too is ravaged by conflict where the ideal dissipates, leading again to fragmentation.77 The resolution, or ‘escape’, as Ma refers to it, is also reframed—the story is also one of encounter and communication.

If there cannot be a single moment of return, then it is to be found in diverse and daily acts—as Hilal and Petti also recognise in the Camp— through remembrance and a striving for unity, within which are also practices of the common (Ma 2004, p. 331). Through these, the mercenaries’ actions as (if?) a demos—the free-citizen populus—destabilise the importance placed on the ideals of rootedness of the polis identity and, in Athens especially, the exclusivity of its citizen body. As we will see, this approach also has an affinity with that subscribed to by such exiled philosophers as Diogenes. It does not just extend the possibilities inherent in the lived experience of citizenship, which is more flexible than its idealised form, as Gray’s (2018) paper in this volume showcases.78 A flexibility that could also be marginalising of certain citizen groups, as Jewell’s (2019) paper in this volume demonstrates. Instead, there is an inadvertent enactment of the cosmopolitan ideal, as embodied within the very diversity of the ten thousand,79 and with it, a reimagining not only of home but also of the good citizen, even if they are apolis—without a state, or outside it.

The trigger for such practices in a state of unsettlement may be a coping mechanism, as suggested by Baragwanath, for whom the account of the march is as much about creating home as what is lost (Baragwanath 2019, p. 111). Xenophon’s dream narrative about his ancestral home—oikos (τὴν πατρῴαν οἰκίαν)—can be read as part of such foregrounding of homemaking (Xenophon, Anabasis 3.1.11). Yet, it is no substitute for the longed-for home, but rather an exposition of the limits and fragility of the basis on which the societal archetype of fixity is constructed. Ideals of a fixed home-state are brought into tension with the reality of being unsettled and an outcast, whose belonging and allegiance are tenuous and untethered. Xenophon, in his other work, Memorabilia—a collection of Socratic dialogues—reflects on the condition of being an outcast and the extent to which it could be a choice. In it, as a response given to questions by Socrates regarding the ruler and the ruled, Aristippus states: “I do not restrict myself within a community (politeia), but am a guest-stranger (xenos) everywhere” (Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.13).80 This is read as a rejection of politics,81 with a persistent questioning of the glamorization of the wandering state, which we return to below. The Anabasis depicts possibilities for making home even if the longed for one is not in reach, a home that does not deny the striving for a return, but allows for a meaningful existence in the meantime, through splintered futures embedded in daily acts.

6. Defiance of the Wandering Philosopher

The diverse experiences of wandering ancient philosophers, whether glamorised or used to illustrate the depths of human misery, provide insight into how such a condition can be owned, which allows for challenge, subversion and the repositioning of the self in relation to the world. Here we will consider this in relation to cosmopolitanism and the modes of being political notwithstanding the polis. It is about pushing the boundaries of possibility for agency from within the condition, and the rejection of the victim label, while still holding to account those responsible for victimisation, and society more broadly. Of the ancient exilic figures, the Cynic, Diogenes, embodies the archetype of the wandering Hellenistic philosopher. We know of him and his views not from his own writings, but through reports of his teachings from others. Outcast from Sinope on the Black Sea, he ends up in exile in Athens and, eventually, in Corinth. From the multiple apocryphal stories of him, many recorded in the writings of a much later biographer Diogenes Laertius, two in particular demonstrate his approach to his circumstances. The first is using a pithos (large wine storage jar) as his abode, showcasing the severe privation that his condition engenders. The second—in defiance of such an existence of base survival—is his haughty response to Alexander the Great who stood in front of him casting his shadow, and asked if there is anything he can do—Diogenes the Cynic allegedly replied that he “can move out of his light” (Diogenes Laertius 6.38).82 The statement is a refusal to be defined by victimhood and dependence. Describing his own condition, the Cynic is said to have appealed to the words of tragedy as: “Citiless (apolis), homeless (aoikos), without a country (patridos), a beggar, a wanderer (planeteis), living life day by day” (Diogenes Laertius 6.38). It was not by choice that Diogenes ended up in this state—he was forcibly expelled from his home of Sinope—yet he makes it into a chosen role. He inverts his position: “‘The Sinopians condemned you to banishment from Pontus,’ Diogenes the Cynic replied: ‘But I condemned them to stay there’” (Diogenes Laertius 6.49; Plutarch On Exile 602a; [Diogenes letters 1.1]). His privation may perpetually increase, but what he claims to gain is freedom, both from bodily wants and from being under the authority of others. We need to recognise that such a defiant stance, even when associated with one who is often ridiculed for extreme life-ways, is cast against the severe suffering and exclusion that is tangible in every aspect of daily life. While Diogenes’ condition may appear as willful stubbornness to onlookers, it is rather an exposition of their own complicity arising from their trapped state of tolerance of the status quo.

• Cosmopolitanism as Subversion

The Cynic Diogenes’ challenges are not directed at negating his own condition, nor are they appeals to authorities with the expectation of bringing about a change to his circumstances. In this sense they differ somewhat from the consolations on exile written by such later philosophers as Teles, Musonius and Seneca. Diogenes’ reproaches, in his position as an outsider, demonstrate to the polis-society the extreme consequences of its exclusionary framework and show how these are at odds with ways of being in the world. Such a premise has affinities with the way Medea’s actions are presented by Euripides, yet with Diogenes, there is a move beyond exposition, towards the possibility for alternative modes of being. In repositioning himself and the polis, like many of the exiled philosophers, Diogenes formulates a discourse that draws on cosmopolitan ideals,83 which also act as an antidote to a wandering state that becomes permanent. ‘Kosmopolites’ was Diogenes’ response on being asked where he came from, literally translated as ‘I am a citizen of the cosmos (world)’: a cosmopolitan (Diogenes Laertius 6.63).84 The notion could be differently expressed. For example, we may find affinities with Aristippus’s reflection on his own condition of being a xenos (guest-stranger) everywhere, intending the further meaning that he has freedom from power, being neither ruler nor ruled (as reported by Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.13).85 The intent, however, within each expression is not the same. Cosmopolitan ideals are at the root of both statements, as is an underlying abstention from politics, but where they differ is in their association with what is alien. Aristippus’s foreignness—or untetheredness—is not an instrument of freedom as it is for Diogenes, but an expression of inner poverty and dependence rather than self-sufficiency (Rappe 2000, p. 295; Montiglio 2005, p. 187).

The fluidity of the meaning and practices associated with ancient cosmopolitan ideals, which were expansive and inclusive, allow for its mobilisation in such a discourse of subversion. They can be read negatively as undermining the authority of particular poleis, or positively as a universal community in fellowship, whether as citizens or otherwise.86 This is encompassed in Diogenes expression that “the only true commonwealth (government) is one which extends to the universe” (Diogenes Laertius 6.72). It was not just that one should have the right to access and be part of the cosmos, but, especially for Diogenes, that no single polis deserved his special affection, thus challenging notions of a single site of belonging. In Hellenistic Athens, this vigorous discourse led to the setting up of the Cynic and Stoic Schools. Within these schools, the exhortations of another exiled philosopher, Zeno of Kition, founder of Stoicism, could be interpreted as critiquing his fellow expatriates in Athens for recreating polis structures, instead of taking the opportunity of their migrant state to work towards a cosmopolitan ideal, as he himself was doing (Diogenes Laertius 7.33).87 Zeno’s appeal draws on an exile’s outside perspective, which, by turning the lens onto the ‘inside’, allows for a privileged position of seeing the whole and thus affords opportunities for critical analysis and reflection on the very foundations of the polis. The engagement of cosmopolitan ideals does more than critique. It, too, breaks down the insider–outsider dichotomy and reconfigures the state of the exile as one that is not an exception to, but rather part of the world that attempts to expel. Sassen’s (2014, p. 211) ‘systemic edge’ is another way it can be read, which as noted above refers, to the extreme nature of conditions on the perimeter that exposes widespread trends, which appear more moderate, and thus less palpable.

7. Politicalness Notwithstanding the Polis

Cosmopolitanism as presented within Cynic and Stoic discourse, questions the exclusivity of the relationship between citizenship and politicalness. Gray’s paper in this volume addresses this most directly by bringing together diverse forms of ancient outcast and exile sociability, which combine elements of polis and cosmopolis in harnessing citizenship and institutional structures (Gray 2018, p. 15):

“These outsider philosophers devised the ideal of a literal ‘cosmopolis’ or world city, the natural home of all wise and virtuous men, who recognise that territorial and status distinctions are arbitrary and contrary to nature. To this way of thinking, no-one can become an exile merely through physical expulsion; true ‘citizenship’ depends on recognising nature’s requirements of justice and virtue, and recognising one’s affinity (across space and time) with like-minded people”.

These were not only intellectual consolations for one’s excluded state, but could lead to cosmopolitan associations, some of which formed in collaboration with local citizen allies. They are both a subversion of the polis and also a refusal to be alienated from it, or rather what it represents—the possibility of politicalness (Gray 2015, p. 294).

Ancient exiles orchestrated opportunities for being heard on one’s own terms, the extremes of which are exemplified by Diogenes the Cynic. These are a form of claiming rights, in choosing how to communicate, when and with whom, as in selecting one’s own allies, or creating alternative platforms to the ones available to the citizen at home. Below we will see how this is harnessed today, through the acts of The Black School and Dandara. In the ancient context of collective action, this is exemplified through the endeavours of the so-called poleis-in-exile.88 The Plateans represent one version of this during their first period of refuge in Athens, where they continued to have assemblies, and in the end had spent a long enough period to intermarry and create local links.89 The collective resistance of the Athenian fleet is another example. The men of the fleet refused to succumb to the oligarchic coup, which had overthrown the democratic government in Athens in 411 BC during the Peloponnesian war. Instead, they had stationed themselves in Samos as though they were a polis-in-exile. Their organising efforts and role have many affinities to those described by Xenophon in relation to the ten thousand mercenaries on the march. The Athenian fleet too, while in Samos, held assemblies and chose leaders and received ambassadors from other poleis, such as Argos, and even from the so-called Four Hundered—the oligarchs against whom they took their stance. Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War, reports on their perception of themselves: that it was not they who had revolted from the polis, but rather the polis had revolted from them (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 8.76 and esp. 8.76.4).

We know of another example of collective action, directly from the people of Entella in Sicily, in the account of their plight inscribed on bronze plaques, which they raised after their eventual return.90 These Entellans were driven from their home after the Carthaginian takeover of their city in the 3rd century BC. The plaques record decrees of thanks and honours to all the poleis which helped them continue their existence during what they refer to in these texts as their wandering—eplanometha. Within this story of a successful return is another which captures the fragile balance between forced dependence and autonomy, which the Entellans embody in their ability to survive as a collective and to maintain dignity by ‘choosing’ allies to draw on. We may note that, as outlined at the start of this paper, the different nature of the ancient geo-political context means that in today’s nation-state world, the ‘choosing’ of allies is more difficult, with often little choice of where, physically, refuge may be negotiated. A further complication, which is beyond the scope of this paper, is who is allowed to take part in the negotiation and articulate its terms—to what extent does the agency of the asylum seeker or the excluded become veiled.91

The balance between dependence and autonomy also concerns the experience of people who, in today’s society, are technically part of the civic community, but are treated as if they are outsiders. One case in point is The Black School, based in Harlem New York, USA,92 which in its aims has affinities with those of Campus in Camps in Palestine.93 The Black School uses art practice to propose radical alternatives to the current systems of injustices, using those endured by its own community as a starting point for wider societal change.

“Building on the principles of the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights movement and The Black Panther Party’s Liberation Schools during the Black Power movement, The Black School will use a socially engaged proactive practice to educate Black/PoC students and allies on how to become radical agents of social and political change”.94

Embedded in their statement are turning points on which they build to bring about change, including an explicit reference to ‘allies’. They choose who these are and the form of their alliance and solidarity.95 This recognition of the need for support, or rather joint-action, is acknowledged from a position of power rather than dependence.

Another case is that of Dandara, presented as a Catalyst in this volume (Ribeiro et al. 2017). It exemplifies the possibilities for being political, despite exclusion—as encapsulated in the ancient term apolis, in the way Diogenes uses it in reference to his condition. The community that came to call itself Dandara arose from an intersection of internally displaced people, such as those from the ‘Landless Peasant Movement’, coming together in the thousands to occupy a disused site in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and demand to be recognised as a community. Orlando Soares Lopes, one of its elders—while pointing to the celebrations around us—described how they had succeeded in resisting eviction physically and through lobbying municipal authorities with the support of chosen allies, such as student groups, urban planners and lawyers. He also stressed that it was the women who protected the neighbourhood while the men were working away from home. Refusing to concede the status of illegal outcast, they continued to build houses, churches, lay streets and be part of society by insisting, for example, that their children be accepted into local schools. One of these young people showed me around the neighbourhood (with such street names as Rua dos Palestinos), and took the opportunity to practice his French, since I spoke no Portuguese. During the eight years of daily threats of eviction, the people of Dandara did not wait to be accepted; they persisted in creating their own people’s assemblies, choosing leaders and making their own policies. Their actions refute any sense that to allow or disallow politicalness, was in the gift of governing authorities, whose policies were responsible for people being forced into states of wandering and privation in the first place.

In Dandara we witness the moment after a turning-point, the coming together and drawing on one’s own strength, choosing allies and deciding to continue to exist according to self-determined rules, even while still in a position of unsettledness. Here, it became possible to challenge the imposed regime of permanent temporariness, resulting from internal displacement, within which disparate groups and individuals had existed, even before the threat of eviction was paused, with the right to remain on the occupied site. For the ancient context which we have been drawing on—a world without nation-states—the term ‘internal displacement’ would have little meaning. However, if we consider the case more broadly as that of a marginalised or an excluded group that seeks equal access to resources, protection and livelihood, challenging its marginalisation, then we can draw affinities with the ancient cases considered here. In drawing strength from the case of Dandara, it must be recognised that the community was one of internally displaced citizens. Had they been non-citizens, what means would they have had to draw on, and on which allies, to counteract the risks of increased precarity, internment or deportation?

It is arguable that the politicalness expressed in the case of Dandara, just as that articulated by other Catalyst contributors, and within the ancient contexts presented here, challenge the categorisation of their actions as a politics of exception.96 Such a framing does recognise that groups and individuals can be political actors and create alternative forms of meaningful sociability outside of polis norms. However, by exceptionalising these actions, there is a danger of further consigning such actions to the fringes beyond society, rather than seeing them as being something that, although born of exceptional circumstances, is part of society and extends possibilities of being political. Arendt ([1951] 1968) had dedicated a life’s work to exploring the im/possibilities of being political despite not having functional citizenship. Gray’s paper engages directly with these issues, and Arendt’s assertion “that refugees should become an ‘avant-garde’ of their societies, crafting new ways of approaching life in common which would transcend the failed nation-state model, without lurching to the other extreme of purely formal cosmopolitanism”.97 Malkki’s work, drawing on her research conducted with Hutu refugees from Burundi living in Tanzania, continues to challenge the depoliticised space within which the refugee exists as a pure victim, showing the consequences of the inadvertent construction of the refugee as an “ahistorical, universal humanitarian subject” by the international institutions and the humanitarian regime. She argues that “in universalizing particular displaced people into “refugees”—in abstracting their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts—humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees” (Malkki 1996, p. 378).

The diverse forms of being political have been intensely scrutinised in relation to today’s Camp context, with debates spurred on by the work of Schmitt ([1950] 2003) and its development by Agamben (2003). The exceptionalism that they ascribe to the Camp in their work, has prompted numerous reactions. That discourse, which is captured in the dialogue between Gray’s (2018) and Boano’s (2019) papers in this volume, is indicative of a more profound understanding of such contexts, but also of the transformation in the nature of camps over these last decades. The new perspectives on, of and from within the camp bring into question the analytical capacity of Agamben’s influential conceptualisation of the camp as a space of exception.98 At the core of these new understandings of the nature of camps and camp-like institutions is the way that the camp is a space of human agency for those who inhabit them despite their exceptionalism. These expose the variety of interactions and social relations within the camp and between the camp and its surrounding settlements, the city and the state, even as a kind of intersection of ‘cosmopolitan roads’, as Agier refers to them (2014, p. 19). They articulate the strategies that people who inhabit them develop in their everyday lives to claim rights and membership. Sigona draws on such findings in his ethnographic research in Italian ‘nomad camps’ for Roma refugees (in the 2000s), and brings them together with Isin’s (2002) work on the relationship between citizenship and being political, in proposing the concept of ‘campzenship’ (Sigona 2015, p. 1):

“to capture the specific and situated form of membership produced in and by the camp, the complex and ambivalent relationship of its inhabitants with the camp and the ways the camp shapes the relationship of its inhabitants with the state and their capacity and modes of being political”.

These new understandings are about recognising the camp for the life that has been lived in it over generations, while still challenging tawtin—normalization. They are a way of owning and subverting the camp’s regime of permanent temporariness, by positioning the camp as part of a continuum of forms of settlement and sociability that look to the future (Hilal and Petti 2018, p. 33):

“Today, refugees are re-inventing social and political practices that improve their everyday lives without undermining the exceptionality of the camp. Camps have become semiautonomous zones where different social, political, and spatial structures have emerged; a fragment of a city yet to come”.

While not the same, it is a perspective that has affinities with ancient uses of cosmopolitanism and apolis politicalness as a way to reposition and subvert the privation of a wandering condition.

8. Conclusions

The aim of this exploration was to better understand the condition of permanent temporariness and the possibilities for its challenge in displacement. It sought to do this in extending the time frame of the discourse, by investigating what past experiences of wandering may bring to addressing such urgent questions as the one posed by Sandi and Alessandro at the start of this paper (Hilal and Petti 2018, p. 52):

“So, what is left if we don’t want to succumb to the regime of permanent temporariness and see neither permanence nor temporariness as salvation?”

The ancient contexts addressed here, while not comparable to that found within the 21st century world of nation-states—especially in regard to its forced immobility and exclusionary spatial practices—have, at their core, actors for whom this question too would have been meaningful. It is this which allows us to bring them together in dialogue, by foregrounding ways that such challenges have been addressed. The investigation has drawn on research and practice conducted by people who have experience of the condition from within and in particular that of the camp, along with surviving ancient accounts from such positions, to gain an exceptional perspective through a redirected lens. These testimonies provide powerful examples of how people who have been forced into states of wandering and permanent temporariness can subvert their condition, even if the outcomes for most are still unknown or unknowable. The ability to even begin to confront such a state, it has been argued, requires first its recognition for what it is—an externally imposed regime that forces one to endure a state meant as a temporary coping mechanism of survival in response to calamity, beyond a single moment, into perpetuity. The searing pain of such recognition, which we witness in Euripides’ Medea and within Qasmiyeh’s poetry, can be a turning point—a repositioning of the self in relation to the world.

The witness statements presented here are critical explorations of modes in which meaningful lives can exist within conditions of precarity and exclusion, while not negating the struggle for incorporation or return. They represent a delicate balance between refusing imposed victimhood, but without exempting or obscuring the victimisation and forced precarity. More than that, they expose the ‘cracks’ in the status quo and challenge the exceptionality of their state, instead revealing it as society’s ‘systemic edge’.99 As the case of Dandara shows, this can be as much the prerogative of those who are marginalised within civic society as those without. A repositioning of the self in relation to the world is the turning-point from which a different existence emerges, even if external forces prevent a change in the condition itself. But what does it take to reach such a point of turning? Is it always a possibility? And how is endurance to be seen in light of it? This paper does not address these questions directly.

As a way into an answer, I draw on the following observations from Feldman’s (2015) critical and sensitive analysis of the situation in the refugee camps of Lebanon, where there is no political resolution in sight. The underpinning question of her inquiry is whether endurance is a politics of precarity. She focuses on the discourse around mental health between the refugees and the MSF workers whose project seeks to address the chronic conditions resulting from everyday stresses of life in the camps, through professional therapeutic interventions. There are wider issues here concerning the humanitarian regime’s focus on the suffering body and consolation and, increasingly, resilience,100 as well as the danger of undermining strategies of coping that have been developed by the refugees themselves that are expressed through such terms as sumud—meaning steadfastness, the ability to suffer and yet persist (Feldman 2015, p. 443). “At the limits of the humanitarian imaginary, these projects seek to enable people to find different ways of imagining their existence: not changing their conditions, but living differently with them” (Feldman 2015, p. 430). The line that runs through the generations of people who inhabit the camp is endurance. For Feldman this way of moving forward implies optimism, in conditions that enforce suspension disallowing the possibility of thriving and future, making endurance itself a political act.

It may appear that the cases focused on here, ancient and modern, largely do not bring reprieve through an externally transformed world. What change there is, for those who are forced to endure the privations of wandering and permanent temporariness, seems driven from within themselves, whether through collective action, or by transforming visions of home and finding ways into splintered returns and futures, rather than having them remain perpetually out of grasp. This is despite finding ways to be heard on their own terms and to enlist allies. Perhaps it is that such external transformations may be difficult to capture in relation to individual experiences due to their disparate nature and slow rate of change. Yet, to resign to such an outlook is to deny the appeals of our witnesses for, and their exposition of, the interconnectedness of the cosmos to which all have access. They go further by providing models for alternatives, such as those considered in the discourse on cosmopolitanism and politicalness. More starkly, as only those who have gone out into the world can know and alert us, they warn that without a change in the status quo, that which is deemed a state of exception will seep in to become the norm.

This paper has tried to understand, by looking through the redirected lens, the nature of endurance within unceasing wandering and permanent temporariness. Without a definitive resolution as to whether one is the extension of the other, it has highlighted variance and explored convergence in the experience of the two conditions, as well as possibilities across time for their overcoming. In this initial investigation, already there are signals that the regime of permanent temporariness in the current age has more sophisticated barriers to its cessation, ones that perpetuate the condition across generations. Such longevity is not apparent in the ancient context outside of enslavement. The ancient fixation on the place of exile, rather than of potential refuge and new sites of inhabiting, is the result of vastly greater possibilities for the existence of the latter. The prospects for return, however, are precious few in both contexts. That is why they both share the suffering of non-return, yet, permanent temporariness is further characterised by non-arrival. Such non-arrival exposes another paradoxical feature of the current world system—forced immobility—a kind of tethering and enclosure that is difficult to find among the world of the ancient poleis for those who were deemed free. Given this paradox and the interventions in this volume that engage and challenge the Humanities, the question is: Where do we go from here with this knowledge? How do we enlist the humanities to bring it back to the level of the human? The recognition of these wider trends does not in itself capture the ongoing struggle, with its colours and sounds, its own future imaginaries—which are allowed to roam only to be pulled back, and yet are not abandoned. Its complexity is rather revealed through the dialogues with the individual testimonies recorded here, and in the response by Aref, a young poet-philosopher, to a question about a photograph he sent on Whatsapp 17 November 2019 from Athens, Greece, where he had been several months, after years in the Lesvos refugee camps of Moria and Pikpa:101

Lena: Is that a spaceship? Have you given up on this planet?

Aref: It’s a library, but yeah I haven’t found my way in this planet yet, everyday I run after something new. I’m lost in fake happiness, in vanished dreams, acting like knowing everything yet naive, scared of lost future and being towed away from myself by giant truck of personality-ness to seek out the face in front of lost faces.

It seems every thing is staged the time and the place.

Only the actor is unconscious of the scenario.