BORDERS Piro Rexhepi
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Borders Piro Rexhepi it is a fine summer evening and i am with my parents in lake Prespa, Macedonia while Muslimgauze’s ali Zarin is playing in the background. the tranquillity of the season belies the tension in our midst. news of refugees being rounded up in Greece, hunted on the Bulgarian borders or stuck at the Macedonian ones crowds our thoughts. We watch intently as Deutsche Welle maps the movement of people in transit to Europe via a new route at the Greek-albanian border. a few days later we watch the turkish coup unfold on television as mass protests continue in skopje against the government and more images of syrian children captivated in terror appear on tV. My parents switch through channels nervously and settle for their new favourite indian soap opera: ‘Diya aur Baati hum’. they can’t watch or talk about the refugees, too close to home, too many memories, too much pain. later, i drive to salonika to meet my friend saffo who i met at a failed queer collective, ambitiously and somewhat appropriately named the Balkan Queer initiative – for it remained just that, an initiative. Disappointed with the anti-racist festival we had attended earlier in the month, we hoped to go to the no Borders Camp together; an initiative to summon the precarious commons into togetherness and think of ways to confront Eu borders in the face of refugee pleas on all sides. Greece, or as saffo likes to call it, the former Ottoman Province known as yunanistan FOPOy (a pun on Greece’s persistence that Macedonia be called the Former yugoslav republic of Macedonia FyrOM), seems to be boiling too. We join a group of demonstrators on Via Egnatia attempting to re-take salonika’s theatre academy. local activists, syrian refugees, European anarcho-tourists, all surround the building and then wait, using the moment to meet, reflect, watch, exchange. CritiCal MusliM 21, january–MarCh 2017 45 46 PiRo RexhePi We talk about homonationalism, transphobia in the queer community and what is to be done about the incorporation of queer political formations into the Eu enlargement project in the Balkans. saffo insists that the discourse needs to be decentred from Europe. that it is imperative to talk to ourselves instead of wasting energy persuading the European ga[y]ze that all people in the Balkans, including the refugees, roma and Muslims, are human too. Our friend Velina joins us from Bulgaria. More conversations about the Bulgarian law criminalising radical islam proposed by the far right Patriotic Front and adopted in parliament the previous month; of European vigilantes arriving at the Bulgarian borders to defend ‘Europe’ from refugees. We talk about the possibilities and limitations of novi levi Perspektivi in sofia to ‘do something.’ We conclude that they are too small and fragmented, like all leftist movements in the Balkans. Being in Greece reminds us of syriza, the once promising leftist alternative, now in power and for the previous two weeks gathering up refugees around Greece, evicting them from migrant squats set up with the help of local Greeks and ultimately deporting them to turkey. saffo tells us about a protest she attended, against the evictions and deportations of refugees, that took place in front of the syriza offices which saw members of the syriza Political Party show up to protest against syriza the government. all the while syriza the government has been facing Eu pressure to start expelling refugees after the Eu reached a deal with turkey for their containment there. Paradoxically, the coup in turkey, with its entire terrifying unfurling and the consequences, gives us a glimpse of hope that the Eu-turkey trading deal with refugee bodies may now have to wait. We move through ano Poli, the old turkish quarter in the upper town of salonika, commenting on the old Ottoman mosques, türbes and hamams – and the mayor’s recent decision to preserve and transform them into tourist sites for the new turkish travelling middle classes with a taste for Ottoman nostalgia. after we pay our respects to the Musa Baba türbe in terpsithea square, we end up at Egli yeni hamam turned into a hipster café and order our overpriced turkish coffees. We agree that we too suffer a little from Ottoman melancholy but pretend to be less sentimental about it. svetlana Boy, media artist, novelist and harvard professor, has warned us of the dangerous seductions of nostalgia. after a long discussion on turbofolk, turkish pop and failed attempts to sing rembetiko, urban Greek BoRdeRs 47 music, we agree that aziz is the shining star of the queer Balkan turbofolk scene and that we are all a little sad that in his last video ‘habibi’, he looks more like a gay bear than a gender queer turbofolker. Velina tells us how aziz was ostracised on Bulgarian national tV for calling his latest song ‘habibi’, for it sounding too arabic and not Bulgarian enough and for promoting arabisation in Bulgarian culture. Eventually we find ourselves at a queer squat in ano Poli with nasta and sofia who have been providing assistance to refugees. Wanting to get away from the heat in salonika, we drive to Western thrace, Drama, Xanthi and Kavala, the birthplace of Mohamed ali of Egypt and the only part of Greece with a Muslim minority that survived the population exchange of 1924. saffo tells me that a Kosovar queer is joining us. it happens to be astrit ismaili whose work i have written about but never met in person. as we walk through the streets of Kavala, astrit dances through a quiet restaurant with live music. Everyone joins in, we get free raki from the owner and go our way. in a silent moment after the dance and the raki, astrit reminds us ‘we are all the same people’. Driving through Muslim villages of Western thrace, we witness the continued coercion of the Greek state that can be felt in a way that cannot be articulated. We decide to leave Greece and head to Kosovo with astrit for Dokufest, a film festival in Prizren that has become a favourite with the Balkan hipster crowd and their admirers. anxieties rise as we cross the borders. Driving from Greece into Macedonia, we follow the same Balkan route refugees travelled through, but are no longer able to, as the Greek state has rounded up most of them and Macedonia has closed its borders. We fight over music in the car. i want akhlaq ahmed and Bülent Ersoy. he wants Dua lipa, Era istrefi and Beyoncé. When we reach the Macedonia/ Kosovo border crossing at Blace, astrit remembers being stuck here with his parents as a refugee during the Kosovo war in the summer of 1999. We travel in silence after crossing the border. astrit has been away for year in amsterdam. Driving through Kosovo, he points out the obscure and bizarre postwar architecture or the freedom of architectural expression in post-war Kosovo as he calls it. We talk about our mutual friend lorik Berisha, a queer urban legend in Prishtina who loved brooches and died too young. i press astrit about his piece trashformations. he resists the discussion, knowing my critique of his work doesn’t bode 48 PiRo RexhePi well with some aspects of his performance, such as his wearing of a pink hijab in it, that i find problematic. in trashformations, he questions the limits of defined and codified subjects and rights. he opens the possibility of trashforming those rights in the context and circumstances in which subjectivity is embodied and where bodies can take different shapes and forms. to illustrate the limits of confined rights, he wraps himself in adhesive tape symbolising the restricting nature of codified rights, their impossibility and the borders they create between bodies, communities, genders, classes and temporalities. the taping of his body to the walls of the studio suggests the binding nature of these rights to certain material and discursive realities that limit our ability to physically move and see and be beyond them. he points out during his performance that one needs a visa to pass through these borders and ‘if you don’t have one, you go to jail,’ further illustrating how these borders sustain the biopolitics of who lives and dies, who passes and who does not. as we drive across three nations, we discuss the moment he throws money at the audience, to bring attention to the various economies that sustain and profit from drawing and maintaining borders. reminding the audience that he does not want to be a victim and that he is not one, he questions the ‘war is over’ discourse in Kosovo as fictitious as his war is still ongoing. Finally, pulling out an Eu flag as a symbol of the ultimate blinding and binding ideology that the Eu has come to represent in post-war Kosovo, astrit remarks that when he looks at the Eu flag he does not see the stars and the sky. nonetheless, he argues, ‘we still have to use the things we don’t like.’ Questioning the promise and premise of what is the Eu, he shoves the Eu flag in his mouth and throws it up into a garbage bag, symbolically trashing it in a hope of trashforming Eu sanctified borders and the violence that sustains them. We discuss his work in the context of the humanitarian missions in Kosovo after the war, particularly the EulEX (European rule of law) Mission and how they have frequently exploited the issues of gender and sexual rights in the legitimisation of their continued presence even after the declaration of independence in 2007.