Ep. 307 A Story We Tell Backward with Lauren Markham

Written By Cherie Marquez
Ep. 307 A Story We Tell Backward with Lauren Markham

This episode features a discussion with journalist and writer Lauren Markham about her new book A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. She explains why Greece interested her as a base for her writing about immigration, and how the border is used as a tool for autocracy. We also talk about the criminalization of migrants and refugees and what abolition in immigration could look like.

The Stacks Book Club selection for February is Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin. We will discuss the book on February 28th with Uché Blackstock.

 
 

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Traci Thomas 0:08
Welcome to The Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I’m your host Traci Thomas and today we welcome to The Stacks the award-winning author Lauren Markham. Lauren is here to talk about her new book A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. It follows the author’s quest to trace her own Greek heritage as well as a recent immigration through Greece and a fire that destroyed Europe’s largest refugee camp. This book about immigration quickly turns into a meditation on ancient history and mythology and the predictive power of migration stories. Lauren is also the author of a book that I absolutely loved The Far Away Brothers: To Uoung Migrants and The Making of an American Life. Today, Lauren and I get to talk about mythmaking how immigration activism is tied to abolition and the idea of a ghost book. Remember the stacks book club pick for February is Viral Justice how we grow the world we want by Rohan Benjamin, I will be discussing this book on Wednesday, February 28. With Dr. Uche Blackstock. Quick reminder, everything we talked about on each episode of the stacks can be found in the link in the show notes. Alright now it is time for my conversation with Lauren Markham.

Alright, everybody, I’m so excited. I am joined today by an author whose book whose first book I read in 2018, sort of randomly, I don’t even know how I found it. And I loved it. And I have been waiting sort of patiently for six years, maybe five and a half years to get this next book. The book is called A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. The author is Lauren Markham, and she is here. Lauren. Welcome to the Stacks.

Lauren Markham 2:40
Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here with you, Traci.

Traci Thomas 2:43
I’m thrilled to have you. I hope at the end, we’ll have a little bit of time to talk about your first book. But I do want to talk about your new book a map of future ruins. In about 30 seconds or so will you just tell folks what this book is about?

Lauren Markham 2:56
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a book about migration and belonging. And it centers around the story of a fire that destroyed the largest refugee camp in Europe, which is called Moriah, on the Greek island of Lesbos, and the six young Afghans that were fingered for that crime, in spite of very little evidence against them. So but the book is part reporting on contemporary borders and about that case, but it’s also part memoir of my own family’s migration story from Greece over a century ago. And and it’s an inquiry into the mythologies of Western civilization, and of people on the movement of borders more broadly.

Traci Thomas 3:31
Yeah, I mean, we’re going to talk about this because the book is working on a lot of different levels. And I want to dig into sort of like your thinking as a writer, but I think my first question for you has to do with the Greece of it all. Your family is Greek. They, on your dad’s side, they immigrated from Greece, and you kind of go back and you find them and are fine, like where you’re from, and all of that, but I’m kind of curious, like, the bigger picture, because you’re a, you’re a journalist who writes about immigration, we should say that like that is your professional work. And so this book is sort of like your professional world and your personal world coming together. And the question getting there. And then question is, what is it about Greece and immigration that may be us North Americans who don’t do this for work? Maybe like, don’t understand or aren’t thinking about, like, why is this an interesting place to write what you’ve written?

Lauren Markham 4:24
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So exactly. I write a lot about immigration and borders. And for most of my career until about 2019, I was really focused on I mean, I was writing about global immigration, but a lot of what I was writing about was immigration in the US context. So looking largely at our southern border, and, you know, the cascade of borders, south of our southern border that kind of lead up to our our southern border here in the US. But I started reporting on Greece because I had a feeling a hunch, a sort of like Spidey sense that there was something that I was mostly dismissing at the time. But I was sort of like, well, let me just follow my notes here, that there was like some interesting symmetry between what was happening in the US and what was happening in Europe, in terms of the very large number of people coming, and the very massive efforts of the governments. In our case, the US government, and in Europe, like many governments working together as the EU, to keep people from crossing the border, mostly refugees, and asylum seekers out, you know, increasingly at any cost. So I saw this symmetry between or possible symmetry between what was happening here and what was happening there. And I wanted to know more about that. But I also had this like interesting sense of like, this is this place, that’s a mythological place, in my mind, because it’s where my, you know, my family’s origin stories is narrated from right, like my family understands itself to be from this place that I’d never been. And we have this migration story from this place. And meanwhile, there are so many, many millions of people who are trying to get to Europe who are crossing very, very perilous crossings, like they do in the United States to get to Europe. And Greece is one of because Greece is on the edge of Europe, Greece is kind of a gateway into the European Union. So that was sort of where I say that is why Greece and sort of where I started, it was also of note to me, that Greece was this place where that is so you know, foundational. It’s, it’s it’s mythological standing. And it’s the role of it’s mythologies and mythologies that come from ancient Greece, are really critical and key within the West’s kind of the so called Western idea of itself. So it’s kind of interested in all of those things like this place, this place where my family comes from. It’s this place where all of these people are going there these symmetries to what’s happening in the United States. And it’s also this place that narrates itself as the origin of Western civilization, which in and of itself is a myth. Right?

Traci Thomas 6:58
Right. And your book is very interested in myths and mythmaking about Greece and about immigration and about like, I mean, America or or established places to where immigrants want to go and establish as a giant air quotes there. But I guess the question around mythmaking for me and the thing like as I was reading the book, you know, early in the book, you sort of talk about Ancient Greece, and like the Parthenon, which I have been to, like, tourists, yes, shout out, tourists out there. And you’re talking about how it wasn’t always white, like all of the ancient Greek stuff, had paint and stuff on it, colors. And that really messed with my brain, because so much of America’s visual mythology, if not also like the idea of democracy, and all of that is tied to these like Great White pillars, and this certain kind of architecture that harkens back to a certain place in a certain time. And from the beginning, you know, you’re sort of excavating, I guess, pun intended, what our country is founded on and like, what it means to be American, and what it means to support democracy and all of these things. And I guess, like, was that something that you was the midst of something that you knew and understood as you were going in? Or was that something that sort of revealed itself to you once you got in there and started, like, thinking about this project?

Lauren Markham 8:34
I would say both. Both are true. I was really interested, you know, most of the people coming to Greece, although not all, but many are coming via sea crossings. And and that’s true, many people are coming into Europe via the sea. And, you know, one of the most famous texts that many of us were forced to read probably a little bit too early, in my opinion, but in our in our lives is like the Odyssey, right? There’s this valiant hero traveling the seas, you know, and there’s this this sort of like, I mean, he’s an historical figure, but it’s also this, this mythology built around this historical figure, right of his homecoming. And it’s like, that’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to, he’s fleeing violence and experiencing all of these hardships, and he’s trying to get to safety and home. And so I was sort of interested in this idea of like, well, this is the landscape of the Odyssey. This is the landscape of journeys and journey, making the mythological, heroic journey. And when did the journey turn from like the territory of the hero into the territory of the rich or the rejected or you know, the Misbegotten or the disenfranchised? Right. And so I was sort of interested in that symmetry. Although, you know, I knew that wasn’t exactly enough to make a book out of but again, in the sort of early stages, I was interested in that. But what revealed itself the the layers of mythology and mythmaking kept revealing themselves to me over time, the more I researched this book and everything from What you’re talking about, like the mythology of whiteness, the myth of whiteness and ancient sculptures, right, this idea that like we see this classical and now neoclassical or contemporary classical images, and the way that’s understood Is this fair white Lester stone. Well, that’s, you know, that paint just flicked off, right? Like it was, in fact, incredibly colorable. But there’s also the myth of whiteness in general, like in terms of human whiteness, right, like a lot of white supremacist today use the ancient world as a touchstone for their idea and ideals of white supremacy. But in fact, whiteness didn’t exist as a concept. The great scholar, no urban painter writes beautifully about this, and I quote her in the book, you know, there was no idea of whiteness, there was no concept of whiteness in the ancient world. So that’s something that’s been created right in arrears. And that’s what a myth is, right? It’s something it’s a story we make backward. It’s a story we tell backward to make sense of the present, right? And some myths are much more pernicious than others. So yeah, I would say that, like I understood some like, there was some like interesting mythological things that were called elements of this book that were calling me from the beginning, but more and more uncovered themselves and revealed themselves over time.

Traci Thomas 11:11
Right. I want to talk about what you sort of just touched on also, the idea that like coming to a new place by sea, or like going somewhere in certain myths is, you know, to be is a hero’s journey, and to be allotted in this great thing. And now, we’re in a time and place where people who leave their home, to go to a new land to find a better world are criminalized. villainized dehumanized all the bad eyes. Yes. I want to know, I guess just like from your research and knowledge, was there ever a time since the great myths of the world where immigrants and refugees were welcomed contemporaneously? Like we know from American history, and like from your family history in this book, like, nobody liked the Greeks when they came, nobody like the Irish, nobody likes, you know, like, you name it. Anything, anybody who’s coming? We don’t like the Polish Mexicans, el Salvadorians. Like we hate you. Yeah. Has there ever been a time where immigrants were welcomed warmly from jump for longer than like, a few weeks by the locals? Because in your book, you did talk about how some Greek people were very welcoming to the refugees, but that quickly changed. So like, is there any time that it’s been nice?

Lauren Markham 12:28
Yeah. So I would say to your sort of last point there, you know, one of the great tragedies of what’s happened to refugees in contemporary Greece is that they were welcomed, largely, you know, by and large, with open arms. And, you know, various people in Greece were nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2015, for what they were doing to welcome refugees to their shores. And since then, the situation has curdled for all sorts of reasons that we can talk about talk about later. And there is a huge anti immigrant, there’s a huge, beautiful humanitarian solidarity movement, but there’s a massive anti immigrant upswell there. But to your question about, you know, throughout human history, I mean, I think there are times and places and, and sort of cultures past and present, and far past and present, and in the middle, where refugees had been more welcomed. But Ancient Greece is actually a place that we can look, I’m the writer, John Washington, who has a new book coming out soon about a case for open borders. He’s a fantastic immigration journalist, and he writes beautifully, about how, you know, asylum in ancient Greece was, was not just a political practice, but almost a spiritual idea, the idea that we must, you know, a SULI I mean, it means protected by the gods, that’s where asylum comes from. So one could come, there was a ritual where one would come in and come into the city state, and go to a particular place and wrap a branch around their arm, then that was, you know, their, their application for asylum. It was sort of like an application in its application and saying, you know, I need protection I need to be here. And that was a pretty time honored practice. So it’s interesting that, you know, this place that so many, you know, again, scare quotes here, but Western countries look to as the birthplace of civilization itself, and certainly of Western civilization. And these now Western countries are doing so much to try to keep refugees out are actually forgetting this, this this fundamental idea and ideal of ancient Greece and of democracy, which is that we want to protect our neighbors when they need protection and we want to offer this as practice.

Traci Thomas 14:39
Okay, well, you tease this earlier you said for many reasons, things have changed in Greece and the people who are welcoming folks with open arms you said we’ll get to that later. Well, let’s just get to it now what’s what happened? Like what what the fuck?

Lauren Markham 14:51
Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things. One is that people were out there welcome, right and situations were out there. Welcome. So you know, Truly grandmother’s in Greece, were walking down to the shore baking cookies and handing, you know, like and baking bread and giving what little they had to the refugees who were landing. Hundreds of Greeks and people from all over Europe came to, you know, especially islands like Lesbos and Chios and Samos, the hotspot islands on on, you know, which are kind of closest to Turkey. So, were many of the boats lands because of their geographic proximity to the border. And, you know, fishermen were halting their fishing operations and going out and truly like lifting people from the sea and saving them. And over time, resources become drained. That is, you know, a fisherman has to go back and fish and there is a sense that, you know, like, Okay, where is the help from outside it’s one thing an emergency, when something is happening for a couple of months for a year, we can call it an emergency, I think when people it when the same circumstance continues over years and years and years, which it has basically since 2015, with, you know, some ebbing and flowing, that ceases to feel to the people living there like an emergency and it feels like an abandonment to a lot of people they feel like, Okay, where is Germany here? Where are other, you know, more resource countries and EU in the EU coming to help us? Why is it that we are shouldering the work of caring for these people and managing this emergency? Right. So I think there’s that, but also like in the United States, and like in countries all over the world, immigrants and refugees have been used as a political football and a rallying cry for right wing populism, right? To say, vote for us, because look at look at what’s happening here. Look at all of these people. They’re not desperate refugees coming here. They’re people coming to steal your jobs and your livelihoods, and to take your homes and these are invaders, right. So the refugee, the profile of the refugee all over the world has been casted, as an invader. And Greece, you know, right wing leaders in Greece have capitalized upon that. And one another would also say that it’s important to remember and hold the context of the 2008 debt crisis and what that did to Greece. I mean, Greece is still still reeling from the effects of the 2008 debt crisis, that effectively the powers of Europe hitched Greece to an endless debt regime, right. So it’s one of the poorest countries in Europe. So you have people sort of saying like, Well, wait a second, we have Angela Merkel, we have the Germans, and the you know, like all these all these countries in Europe, that sort of created this crisis for us and make us one of the poorest countries in Europe. They are telling us what we have to do with the refugees for Europe, and sure they’re sending money here, but they decide how many refugees they take, and when they take them and who gets asylum and who doesn’t. We’re, you know, an island, the island of Lesbos is 90,000 people who live there, and right, and, you know, there have been 20,000 30,000 refugees on the island at any one given time, at certain points, like that does not feel to people living on Lesbos, like a an equitable shouldering of the care for refugees. So I think like some people are just furious at Europe for not the rest of Europe for not helping more. And I would also say that there are other countries, are there other people who are angry at the refugees themselves? For them coming at all?

Traci Thomas 18:28
Right. One of the things that I have become obsessed with in the years that I’ve been doing this podcast is abolition. It started as an interest in police and prison abolition. Since I have been reading in those spaces, I’ve realized it’s actually like a lot of other things, including, especially immigration and borders, and these detention centers and all of this stuff. And you don’t spend a ton of time on it in the book, because it’s really not the point of your book. But towards the end, you do sort of talk about like, what what can be done, or what can be done differently. You mentioned that, like detentions are $134 a day, per person. But other models, which are like a case management model costs only $4 a day per person. And I guess the bigger question for me, as I think about because one of the things that I love about abolition and the thinking is like what is possible? Like how am I limiting myself to thinking within these systems that are already broken? And what can we do that’s bigger or better? And so my question for you, and I don’t know if there’s an answer, but like, do we need borders?

Lauren Markham 19:35
I don’t think we need I certainly think we do not need borders in the way that we have them. Right. And I think that we do not need militarized borders, sure, that are such wicked terrible lines in the sand, right, that are mortified and treated as absolutes, right when they’re actually figments of the political and social imagination. I mean, again, I’ll plug I have not read it. But I really admire his writing, I’ll plug John Washington’s forthcoming book, which is, you know, a case against borders, because that’s like the project of that book. Right. But But what I will say is that the border has become a political tool, and a symbol, but a very like real symbol to send the very message I was just talking about with that, like the politicians are sending to the Greeks. And again, this, you know, echoes everywhere, including very, very, very any US American listener, right. Like we have heard this story. We hear this all the time, we’re hearing it right now with eminent Texas, right, like, and, you know, Florida and, you know, all sorts of political rhetoric of, we must seal our borders, if we don’t, they’re coming for us. If we don’t, this horrible, horrific thing will happen. And it creates a boogeyman out of anyone on the other side of the border, that creates an othering. And that is an incredibly effective political tool. One of the things that I’ve been writing and thinking about, and I write about it a little bit in the book, and I’ve been writing about it since is the way that not only are immigrants othered and turned into sort of rendered as criminals and invaders marauding invaders, right? These militant characters have malicious intent coming for you like it really is sort of like they’re like, you know, the zombie apocalypse is not like a totally unfair, like, corollary here, right? Like there are these, like, scary, terrifying people on the other side coming for us. And that is why we must do everything to protect the border. So we criminalized immigrants. And that’s exactly what happened to the six Afghans I write about in this in this case, that it’s like, okay, we, you know, this place burned down, someone needs to pay for it, these six will do. So we criminalize immigrants, and we decide that they can be I mean, to your point about abolition, we decide that they must be housed in prisons, right, that that’s what the tension is, it’s a prison. So we’re going to the immigrants come across, we’re going to put them in prison, even if they are fighting for a case to stay, and they have a case, you know, moving through courts, they can still be staying in prison. But we also are increasingly criminalizing the people helping them, right. And so the border is not only an effective tool, in any sort of fortification of the border on the mythology, the border is not only an effective tool in stripping rights and humanity, of people immigrating, but it’s also a wildly effective tool to get citizens and people living on this side of the border, right inside the border, to give up and see to their rights. And that is the major autocratic project, right, that we will all see rights in because the border and protecting it is so important. And we see that happening all the time. Right. And we see it happening increasingly, and that is like, you know, that’s what Stephen Miller has sort of laid out and Trump’s immigration plan, right.

Traci Thomas 22:51
And it should be said, I mean, you said it in the book very clearly. But for folks at home, like it’s not illegal to come to a country and seek asylum like that is fully legal. So the idea that people are being imprisoned for that behavior. And by behavior, I mean, doing a thing to save their lives and their families. I shouldn’t say behavior, because behavior sounds like I’ve been around 24 year olds, I guess. But that people are being criminalized for doing something that is been, you know, globally agreed on is within their human rights. That’s the part that’s like extra super duper fucked up. Because at least like, when you are criminalizing people for committing crimes, there’s some argument that if you believe in punishment, that they are deserving of punishment, because they’ve committed a crime. But in this case, you’re punishing people for doing something that is allegedly within their human rights, which makes it like extra super duper fun.

Lauren Markham 23:44
It’s within their rights under international law and US domestic law, right?

Traci Thomas 23:48
Like, it’s, it is part of our myth, right out of the American myth is this great mixing melting pot. We have all these cultures, America’s great because we’re a country of immigrants, like all of our national mythology, are a huge part of it is around this idea of send us your weary or whatever the fuck at Liberty. I don’t know. I don’t know, I’m not into the mess, but like, you can’t it’s like almost impossible to square all of that with what’s actually happening. Unless you’re like, well, America is full of shit, which some of us are okay, saying that. But if you’re if you’re not, like, yeah, it’s hard.

Lauren Markham 24:29
Well, I think that that’s, I mean, you’re hitting on exactly what sort of the initial compulsion to read this book and it continued preoccupation as I was writing it, which is this idea that my family sort of pulled and a lot of white US American families of like the Ellis Island era, hold on to and get to sort of hold this, this valiant story of, you know, someone came here and sacrificed and because of the opportunities they were afforded, and they’re bootstrapped the hard way work, we get to be who we are right. And we get to have our life thanks to them. And thanks to this, you know, so called American dream. And that is, frankly, like a wildly sanitized story. Like, again, a mythology, something we’ve created. You know, in retrospect, that’s a story we’ve told backwards, right to make sense of the present. And to make the present meaningful, we’ve told the story backward. Because the fact is, there are lots of scholars who write really beautifully about this, we sort of sanitized the Ellis Island experience, you know, um, it was actually really awful, it really horrible. And, you know, as I sort of write and ruminate about in the book, my great grandmother had four kids. And two of them, you know, one was my grandmother, and one was, my uncle Nikki, and the other two died really tragic, early deaths. So this story, even just like, within my own family, the story of like, everything’s great worked out great for us, because of the American dream. Like, it’s not true. It’s actually like 50% of, you know, my immigrant grandmother’s children, great grandmother’s children, you know, had very tragic lives. And, you know, one of the other preoccupations that the book was was holding was like so. So my family gets to have sort of that story and gets to tell the story backward. And yet contemporary immigrants are relegated to the space of the criminal and the invader and the, you know, the person crossing that line. So we have this wild double standard among white us Americans who kind of hold dear to the story of where they came from, while also either tacitly or actively supporting the exclusion of contemporary immigrants.

Traci Thomas 26:35
Yeah. Okay, I want to talk about the Moriah Sikhs, and because that’s a huge part of your book, in addition to the mythmaking, and all of that, which is a group while it’s six individual, Afghan, young men, some of them were minors, some of them were adults, some of them were both, according to the Greek, and Afghans who were convicted of setting this fire that burns down this Moria refugee camp, which is this huge camp on Lesbos and Greece. And the camp was, you know, from my understanding feels a lot like the southern border, and maybe Arizona or Texas, which is just like one of the most politically toxic places when it comes to the border. And just like, it’s where all the conversations are being had, about what’s going on, and what’s wrong, and what’s right, etc. And so this fire happens, these six young people are convicted, they’re blamed, they’re criminalized. And I don’t know, there’s not really a question, but I want to talk about it because it feels bad. It feels really bad.

Lauren Markham 27:51
Yep. It was, yes. No, I There are so many threads there. And I think that so effectively, what the fascinating thing to me about about Moriah was that it was this camp, and it’s widely known as human rights graveyard. And not only is it widely known as that there’s a huge to this day, and it’s like a burn down, you know, ruin. But to this day, on the concrete wall outside of it, it says Welcome to Europe, human rights graveyard, you know, on it, and these massive this massive graffiti, so it was widely known as this human rights graveyard. But no one on the left wanted it. None of the refugees wanted it. Because it was such an awful place. It was truly a place of like misery and squalor. It was completely neglected and completely abandoned. And it you know, many people I talked to a guy who worked at the UN and who was sort of like a career, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, like worker, you know, he’d worked all over the world, he’d worked in some of the worst refugee, you know, the most difficult, like, worst supported refugee camps in the world. And he was like, This is honestly one of the hardest because this is Europe. And this should be, but it shouldn’t be like this, you know what I mean? So it was this place of neglect. And it was this potent symbol for how refugees were being met and treated in Europe and the way that they were sort of relegated on these hotspot islands in Greece, because the rest of Europe wouldn’t take them right. Until they went through a process that could take years. And so there was this group of people that were growing and growing and growing and had very few resources. But the right hated it to write the right handed it because they’re like, get these people out of here. Like we don’t want these people on our island, like get these people out here in the left. And you know, refugee solidarity people like get these people out of here, because this is a human rights graveyard. And this is awful, and these camps shouldn’t exist in the first place. I will say and this is to like an earlier point that a really interesting thing happened to for me, you were sort of talking about the way when you were talking about abolition, this notion of like, the way we sort of sometimes make presumptions about the way things have to be because we are institutionalized in a way like in our minds, right like we are, we are stuck sometimes in our imaginations because the structures around us that sometimes when the structures are so heavy and oppressive, it’s sometimes hard to see outside of them. Right. I think that you’re so right about that with abolition. And that was fascinating for me to see. Because the thing about Mario is that it’s an awful place it you know, we’re talking rats like biting kids faces, you know, is infested with rats, like 500 people for a single toilet. Everyone living in tents, it would snow some years and people were just living in tents with no, you know, with no heat than they put, you know, little heaters or like cookstoves to warm and then the fire would break out, you know, it was just awful. But they could leave, right, they could actually take the bus into town or walk to the beach, and they could leave, and then come back, right like they could they it wasn’t it was an open air prison, but they could be the open air prison. And I remember being in Greece at first being like, Yeah, this is really bad, but like, at least they can leave, right? Because, you know, in the United States, like they can’t leave. And that spoke to me about just how like, I’ve been writing about immigration. And, you know, I wrote an op ed called, like, the cruelty of the US immigration system, like calling for it to be dismantled. And yet I was still institutionalized in my mind and the like, well, at least they can leave. That’s good. Right? You know what I mean? Because like, the the normal for me is that refugees are locked up, even though I know how awful and abnormal and how that needs to end. Right. So that’s one of the things that caught me to reading about Greece, because and to writing about an immigration context in deeply researching immigration context, outside of the US, which is that like, I feel like after my last book, like I’m, like, I have said what I have to say, and I’m saying it again, and again, and again. And I’m feeling stuck. I feeling like looping like I’m feeling like I’m a little bit losing my mind, because I’m just looping again and again. And it was really helpful to like, go somewhere else and learn about what’s happening there and be able to see these symmetries and be able to see the way my mind works in the places that I the grooves that I had gotten stuck in, and the grooves that we’ve all gotten stuck in. Right, right. So anyway, Moriah was instructed to me, so Moria, in September of 20, a massive fire broke out, and it quickly, you know, over the course of two days, basically incinerated the entire place like you know, to dust. There about 11,000 people living there at the time, it was built, by the way for 3500. And those people were all set on the run, they were on the streets for weeks, you know, when they tried to revolt and say get us off the streets, there’s not enough food or so you know, we’re we’re all like defecating in the streets, like there’s not enough sanitary, like, we have no house, we’re just in the streets after being displaced again, after being refugees, you know, being displaced here and there to the police tear gas. And it was just a complete emergency and failure on the part of the Greek government to do the right thing. But what they needed was fall people right, it was like this place has burned some this place burned down. We think it’s arson. These guys will do and, you know, I, I am the daughter of two criminal defense lawyers, I know that it is unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure for sure, for sure, for sure, for sure exactly what happened at the Moria fire. But I can tell you that there is absolutely no evidence that these young people, these six young people started the fire. And in fact, an incredible kind of digital research firm, called forensic architecture did a remarkable report on the fire and showed, you know, mapped the fire with the winds with the drought. And it showed that like, it was probably honestly in effect, the effect of drought and climate change. And just like a really, really, really hot summer with not a lot of water and massive overcrowding that caused this, you know, this fire to just leap and spread incredibly quickly. So it probably wasn’t even our sin at all. In any case, the Greek government needed a fall guy, right? This horrible thing had happened. They these six kids were fingered for the crime with very little evidence, and they’ve been in prison ever since September 2020.

Traci Thomas 33:58
You just mentioned something about yourself when you were talking about like, oh, at least they can leave and right hadn’t like, hit for you how like maybe desensitized and like how entrenched you were, after having seen so many things. And you talked about how even these like immigration court judges, like they are suffering from vicarious trauma, and that there’s just like so much trauma from obviously, first and foremost the people who are leaving their homes, fleeing, you know, going crossing perilous waters or you know, blistering deserts or whatever it is mountains, whatever it is to get to safety and to find a place where they can, you know, survive, but also that that has a huge trickle down effect and that it’s affecting the entire sort of immigration complex. And I’m wondering if you feel like as a person who’s who’s witnessing this, if they’re, if we’re focusing on off on the trauma? Or are we focusing too much on it? Or, you know, like, I just I’m really curious, because as a person who’s not there who doesn’t see it firsthand, I have my own opinions. But in reading your book, maybe they’ve changed. So I’m curious what you think of that?

Lauren Markham 35:16
That’s such a fascinating question. I mean, you know, my I worked at a high school for many years, right, like, coordinator for immigrant youth in Oakland, and I coordinated mental health services. And so my like, you know, there’s, there’s a part of me that’s like, we never focused enough on trauma and serving people who have been traumatized by these systems. But I will also say that, that the trauma is an effect. Right. And, and the effect of experiences and, you know, the the effects of trauma follow an experience and so much of the trauma related to immigration, once the border is cross has to do with the systems themselves, and even beforehand, right. And so I think, yes, of course, we must be focusing on the trauma. And I think that this question you’re raising, I mean, as you know, from reading the book, that this question of vicarious trauma and how numb many of us can become, to really horrific conditions experienced by others, like almost sometimes as a coping mechanism, right? Like the numbness it serves us, right? Because it helps, it helps us not feel very difficult things, which then is very adversely impacts solidarity efforts, right, and fighting for justice and what’s right. But for the people who have experienced trauma themselves, I mean, I would say, Absolutely, we need to be focusing on the effects of that, like, what is the effect for these six young Afghans of having left their homes in Afghanistan, largely because of the US intervention in Afghanistan, right? That has been going on for decades, they leave Afghanistan, they come to Greece, they’re stuck for over a year in this horrific refugee camp, then it burns down, then they get fingered for the crime. And even though they can prove that their children, they still get tried as adults, like they were not in the place where the fire started, doesn’t matter. They have a two day trial, they get put in jail. And you know, as one of them told me relatively recent, recently, actually, he’s like, I, if I ever get out of prison, I have to get out of Greece immediately, like this place has woken my heart. That’s what he said to me, this place has broken my heart, you know, like, and so the trauma that these young men have experiences is remarkable. But I think we want to focus not just on that trauma, but on the systems that caused it right, or that, that exacerbated it or perpetuated. And I think we sort of have to be holding both of those things simultaneously, if that makes sense.

Traci Thomas 37:41
Yeah. And I guess like, to this point of like, holding both of these truths, and like seeing refugees and immigrants, as full realize to human beings and not just people who have experienced trauma, or people who are like, whatever, you know, having living through hell, that you call us out in the book, you say that, like immigration stories, like both the writer and the reader are sort of cast as saviors. And like, we focus on a lot of the people around the actual immigrants, when we tell these stories, like the grandmothers who bring the cookies, or the crane operator guy, or the nice judge, or whatever that looks like. And I’m wondering, like, how can we tell better stories, because so much of this book is about how we tell stories? How can we tell better stories that are holistic around people as individuals, and they don’t become huddled masses, or whatever it says on the Statue of Liberty? I don’t know. The guy that she is saying things. But like, how? Because part of what is so crushing about what’s going on is the num sheer numbers of people, but also every person, every people is a person, right? Like, so. I don’t know. I just like how do we remove our own savior complexes from these stories both from as readers and writers?

Lauren Markham 39:24
Yeah, such beautiful questions. You’re such an amazing reader. I’m like, Oh my gosh, really read this book. I mean, I don’t mean like, did you actually do your homework? I’ve read like, you’re just such a brilliant reader. And insightful reader means so much. I’m the ideal reader. I that’s absolutely you know, I actually relatively late in this book writing process, and like, Oh, this is a book about storytelling and how we tell stories, you know, and, and the thing you’re saying about numbers, this is the paradox of writing. I think about any social issue. Do and you know, particularly immigration, which is you know, what I write a lot about, which is that the numbers and the scale is incredibly important. And yet an over focus on scale, can obscure detail and individuality and nuance, right? And so it’s like the journalists job is to make meaning of scale. But how do you make meaning of scale without blurring the contours of what you’re writing about. And, you know, I talk about this all the time. With with my writing students, part of the issue is like the sort of journalistic trope is, ah, I’m going to write about the crisis of unhoused people in San Francisco. So I’m going to find one person that I’m going to follow, right to make meaning of that and to like, so that people can see what it’s like to be an unhoused person in San Francisco. And again, I’ve written a story, you know, many stories like this. But the problem with that is that like, on the one hand, you are giving someone space on the page to be an individual. But on the other hand, you’re making that person carry an entire socio political dynamic on their shoulders as if, right. And that’s just like, that’s a little bit of the trap. And so I’m feel like I’m not answered pressing, but I’m mostly saying, yeah, it’s such an important question. One of the things when it comes to immigration stories that I’m particularly preoccupied with is we so often start immigration stories at the point of immigration, when actually like this, the even the decision to migrate starts way, way, way, way, way before the person gets to the border, right? Like, and the conditions that cause that person to migrate, started way, way, way before they decided to migrate or even imagined migrating and maybe even before they were born, right? So it’s like, so it’s kind of like, there’s like a scope that I’m interested in, like, how do we hold a breadth and scope and sort of understanding of causality like what were the conditions working upon this individual?

Traci Thomas 41:56
Right, did you? He blurbed, your book, but have you read Jonathan? Blitzers new one, everyone? Yes. On his here. So fantastic. Yeah, I’m like, I’m reading it, but I was reading it while I was reading your book, and I Oh, yeah, I gotta stop. I don’t know. I don’t know how it happened. I think I was like, reading his on audio. And then anyways, yeah. But he does a great job in that, yes, of going back really far. In fact, I like to tell his subjects stories to the point where as I’m, like, 30%, into the book, and I was like, Wait, is this guy going to the United States like what, like, legitimately, like, Hey, I’ve been with this guy for 30 years already. And like, we’re not even in, like, totally, he’s just like hanging out in Mexico for decades. So I think he does a really great job of that. And I that was something that stuck out to me, like kind of reading your books together. But then I had to pause because I can’t I couldn’t, I’m starting to like blur, you know?

Lauren Markham 42:49
Yeah. Yeah, of course. No, I mean, that’s like such a valiant project of his book is sort of showing all of the causalities that kind of played out. And all of the ways various elements of geopolitical decisions played out upon places in Central America, the countries in Central America that are now you know, have these like mass exodus is because we can’t look at any one historical moment, even if that moment is now in any kind of vacuum. Right? Right. I would also say to your question of sort of, like, you know, that, how do we tell better stories is, and this can sort of be trophy, but But it’s like, how do we allow the people to be more than just the experience? How do we how do we, as storytellers, make space for people to be people and exist beyond the bounds of the socio political dynamic? We are writing about? Do you know what I mean? And that’s been really, really important to me. I mean, I will say, like, with my first book, which is the far away brothers, I read about these identical twin brothers, I know you have twins, and identical twin brothers. And what was fascinating about them, to me, was so many things, but it was they had really different experiences of their own immigration stories. And you kind of couldn’t find two people who are more the same, you know, they’d spent, they were raised by the same people, they look exactly alike. Like they’d spent almost all of their waking and sleeping hours, like, you know, in very close proximity to each other. And yet, they experience the same events differently, like internal internally. So yeah, I mean, I don’t have a great answer, except for like, a real attempt to hold that question at the Red Hat center of everything we’re writing, right?

Traci Thomas 44:30
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I mean, that kind of question that I ask is usually not just for you and for me, but also listening, like to think about it a little bit, because there isn’t really a good answer. And I’m sure if I asked every person who’s ever written a thing about a person who’s ever immigrated, they’d have a different answer or if I asked every person who’s ever emigrated, you know, like that, totally. But that that is something that deserves our attention, like as we try to, like read and engage with what’s going on. Yeah. Um, and speaking of reading one of my as you met you, as you said before, so kindly, I’m the ideal reader, which I appreciate our love it. But one of the things I love reading is the acknowledgments of a book. tastic Oh, and I have two questions about your acknowledgments. One is, you mentioned Maggie Nelson’s idea of a ghost book. Yes. Can you explain what that is? I’ve never heard that before. And I’d love to know a little bit more.

Lauren Markham 45:27
Yes, the ghost texts, actually one of my student who’s like an incredible novelist, who is in one of my classes that I taught, brought this session to my attention. I was like, bow, yes. So Maggie Nelson said that a lot of her books have a kind of ghost book. And you know, a book that secretly or not so secretly, as the case may be, stands behind my book, not just as its news, but often as its literal stylistic, and our structural model. So it’s this idea that like, there’s a book that your book is in either direct conversation with on the page, or maybe even just like it is you’re in constant conversation in your mind with it as you’re writing. And so mine, I was like, I was so taken with that, because I was like, wait, I have one of those. I know exactly what she’s talking about, you know what I mean? It like hit me when I recognized what she what she was talking about. Because mine is a book by Svetlana BOIM called The Future of nostalgia, which is just a remarkable book, where she’s looking at this notion of nostalgia and has kind of an interesting framework for thinking about nostalgia. And she sort of, she has sort of two different kind of categories of nostalgia. One is more like sort of emotional and self conscious and sort of thinks longingly toward the past, but with an understanding that there’s a distance between past and present. And there’s some, you know, there’s a longing for a past and maybe a recognition that it might not exist in the way that we log for it. And then there’s something called restorative nostalgia, which is the much more the kind of nostalgia we see in like white supremacist movements and nationalistic movements that this kind of like, you know, make America great again, like there is this past moment, this past time, this past era, that we must return to. And then of course, that past never is real, that past never exists. But it’s it’s it’s a mythological past. And she writes about the way nostalgia plays out over the way cities are designed. And she’s just like a brilliant theorist. And I just read that book again, and again, and again. And it helped sharpen my thinking and helped expand my thinking. It was also suggested to me actually unstaged by the writer, Sasha him on Alexander Hamilton. And he was talking about this book, and I was like, I must go read it. And I read an excerpt that very night, and then immediately, you know, got my hands on the book. So I owe a lot to such a haven for bringing my ghost text to my attention.

Traci Thomas 47:50
I just love that so much. I love the idea of a ghost book or ghost texts, because one of the questions I always ask people is, what’s a book that like, what’s something that you would recommend or like, that your work is on conversation with? And a lot of times I’m asked that question people answer, but sometimes people are like, they have no idea. And that is very hard for me to fathom, because there’s so many times when I’m reading a book, and I’m like, this isn’t conversation with this thing. Sometimes I’m like, okay, maybe they’ve never read it. But sometimes I’m like, I know you’ve read, I know, you this is in your brain somewhere. And like, maybe you’re not thinking of it in that way. But like, I am seeing the parallels. The other thing you say in your acknowledgments is that this book, a map of future ruins, owes everything to your life as a reader. And I want you to say more about that.

Lauren Markham 48:37
Yeah, I mean, I mean, it’s connected to exactly what you just said, you know, I took a picture of this like, massive stack of books that influenced this book. And that helped me both learn specific things fill holes, I talked about this with with students, this notion of like, as a writer, there are holes you have when you’re approaching a project. And I think this is true of fiction, that what little I read a fiction I’m hoping to write more. And it’s certainly true in nonfiction. Like, I didn’t know that much about the Greek debt crisis, for instance, you know what I mean, like, but then there are hungers. Like, I just wanted to learn more about the Oracle, like maybe there was something there. I just wanted to learn more about that. So I read an excellent book called The Oracle by William Brode, a New York Times reporter, which is like super fantastic. And so like, I there was the stack of books that were attending to both my holes and my hungers, and they’re sort of like, these are things I need to learn in order to like, be able to write this book to understand the things that people are telling me, but also to, like, further attend to my hungers, and just these things that I’m kind of interested in learning and these rabbit holes I want to follow to see, you know, what’s there. But it’s also true that this book is a little bit more discursive than then my first book, it’s much more of a weaving together of ideas and storylines. And it was a little bit terrifying to do that because It just harder structurally to do. And it took a little bit of courage to deviate from, like, what I had done before and to kind of take that leap into like, maybe, maybe these things go together I feel like they do in my heart. can I convince other people that that this holds together? And I think the only way I could amass that courage is by reading, you know, and just reading books.

Traci Thomas 50:28
So, yeah, well, I don’t have to ask you the question of what books you would recommend that are in conversation with your work, because you’ve already given us some, so we’ll just pretend like I asked, but it’s on the record. But I do have to ask you about how you write, where are you? How many hours a day, how often snacks and beverages you do mention in the book that you drink tea, I clocked because I am a tea girly. So I need to know about how you drink your tea. What kind of tea you drink if you drink it while you write. I know you mentioned being in the backyard writing. So just set the scene for us.

Lauren Markham 51:02
Yes, absolutely. Um, I love this question. So I recently just moved so my setup is different and a little bit more chaotic. But I my partner and I lived in a 600 square foot house until very recently, and we also have a kid and a cat. And we had a tiny little backyard in Berkeley. So we blessedly right before the pandemic, we built a little hut in the backyard. And that’s where I wrote and it was this beautiful I actually had a dream once that I was like, I just like really kind of incredible extent, like one of those dreams that you were like something else was going on, there was sort of like I was accessing some, like higher, I don’t know, higher insight. And I just dreamed that I like had this office within a redwood and that’s where I was like creating all I was a painter for some reason that this dream. But in fact, this little like this little office that we built was this magical little cabin super tiny, you know, like, you know, maybe like 60 square feet that was made of these this like salvage Redwood that we found. So it was this beautiful space that our friend Dylan built for me and I wrote this book almost entirely there during the pandemic. I have to write with tea. I’m a black tea drinker. Write up or milk and sugar. You know, it’s rarely sugar sometimes milk like my Earl Grey tea, it’s kind of like have to do I wake up in the morning like which tea is it today? Earl Grey tea? Earl Grey tea always wants milk but I’ve actually been drinking this tea that I got in Greece that has this mastic- It’s black tea, but it’s called Mastika or Mastik. It’s like a sort of like a bay leafy, kind of minty kind of deal that’s infused into the tea. It’s really good. And that that that wants to know milk. And I will say I wish that I was like a more ritualized writer in the sense that like, I wish that I was like, I wake up and then I do this and these are my best times a day but I have to say my writing is like a bit catch as catch can, you know I have a couple of other jobs, I have a kid, you know, and so I’m trying to sort of like carve out particular times I am trying to write a novel and I’m trying to be like, every Friday morning, that’s what I do for an hour just to like, see what comes out of that. But I have to say when I find time is when I write and I try to carve that time out but it’s not necessarily ritualized.

Traci Thomas 53:14
Right. Do you do snacks?

Lauren Markham 53:16
Totally. Dark chocolate. I have dark Yep, yeah, that’s my main snack and my main like that.

Traci Thomas 53:23
I find dark chocolate to be kind of disgusting.

Lauren Markham 53:26
Even though you’re a black tea drinker.

Traci Thomas 53:29
Milk and sugar in my tea. Tea comes out very cloudy. I love it. It’s kind of like a tinted milk.

Lauren Markham 53:38
Are you like a Earl Grey-

Traci Thomas 53:40
Black tea, Earl Grey breakfast, but I will sometimes drink like a chai from a tea bag. Not like a concentrate latte. Yeah, but there I’ve gotten like embarrassingly snobby about my tea. Just be like I used to drink like whatever they had at Starbucks. I’m like, This is great. Now I went to Starbucks a few weeks ago and got tea and was like, I can’t drink this garbage. I have gone too far. Like when I have friends who travel if they’re going to like Europe or Caroline all the way back to my mom was in London. She bought me back this like Black Rose from Fortnum and Mason that is like the best he ever and I ration it out another friend was in London and bought me this black tea from sketch the like oh like high tea place. It’s so good.

Lauren Markham 54:30
What was the rose tea because Rebecca Solnit got me this like truly came in a treasure box. It was like called Akbar i think, this rose tea and I just finished it and I need to like find it again.

Traci Thomas 54:42
I will send you my two rose teas because I have a Parisian rose tea and then a British rose.

Lauren Markham 54:47
Oh my gosh, I need to know next time I’m curious if you like this mastik too. So I’m gonna get you some next time I go back.

Traci Thomas 54:55
Literally anybody who drinks tea on the show. I ended up having a full- like I ended up sending Jesmyn Ward, like, a box of my favorite teas, like a sampler of my favorite teas. She likes a black tea also. There’s few of us because there’s a lot of like green tea or like herbal tea and I’m not interested in those teas.

Lauren Markham 55:12
No. We’re a crew. We’re a team. It’s a family.

Traci Thomas 55:19
You Me and Jesmyn, right? And also, Crystal Hana Kim.

Lauren Markham 55:24
Oh, really good to know that.

Traci Thomas 55:27
I used to be like her and reuse the tea and the tea bag over and over. But now I need a stronger concentrate for all my milk.

Lauren Markham 55:34
Same. Like, the second brew. It just doesn’t do it for me.

Traci Thomas 55:39
I’ve started just really just splurging and just a fresh tea bag; I just need a fresh tea bag.

Lauren Markham 55:46
Totally. Yeah. Love the tea fam.

Traci Thomas 55:49
Yes. I’m so glad to have this. When I saw it in the book I was like page 249, like make a note. Okay, another thing that I’m passionate about is being a terrible speller. So what is a word that you can never spell correctly on the first try?

Lauren Markham 56:05
Oh my god. No word.

Traci Thomas 56:07
Are you a terrible speller as well?

Lauren Markham 56:08
Oh my god. I’m a terrible speller. Especially I have a problem with double I put double T’s or double M’s where like, they don’t make this like commitment.

Traci Thomas 56:16
Yes, commitment. I can’t. How about the ee’s on Committee? I don’t know.

Lauren Markham 56:22
It’s so weird that I’m just like, I know, they got two at the end. At the end. I don’t know the other ones like the double T’s and the double M ‘s and the like, I can’t Yeah, I mean, I’m truly a terrible speller. Towel. Does it have two L’s? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I think it might like I couldn’t see it. Either way. I was like, I don’t see it. I don’t see the word.

Traci Thomas 56:41
I can’t see it. And I and once I learn it, I can I can’t retain it recommendation. Like a month or two ago, I smelled recommendation correctly on the first try. And I was like, What did I do? But I do haven’t done it since.

Lauren Markham 56:53
But then it’s like, every you know, everything’s got spellcheck. So it’s like I don’t have to learn at this point. I’m 40. You know what I mean?

Traci Thomas 56:58
Like, recently started taking notes in my own books, which I used to I used to just take notes on my phone. Like, what if my children and like, like, I died? And like 50 years? They’re like, they’re gonna be like, what does that say?

Lauren Markham 57:13
I think it’ll just be endearing.

Traci Thomas 57:14
I hope so. ‘It’s a note; it’s an acronym. Don’t worry.’ So we’re like, so out of time. So I just have one more question for you. Which is if you can have one person dead or alive read this book, who would you want it to be?

Lauren Markham 57:29
Oh my God. You know, I mean, I have to say, is this a cop out? Like, I would be so interested in what Svetlana Boym to say about this book or like not even had to say I think I would just be like, so honored to know it, like reached her hands. And unfortunately, she passed a few years back in March, I guess, and what like a beautiful, just sort of, I don’t know, owed to her. But I think I’d say like Svetlana one just because I would want to like say, you know, this, this book is, thanks. In large part.

Traci Thomas 58:00
I know that it’s not a cop out. Every answer is allowed on this one. Okay, great people, you can get A Map of Future Ruins Now wherever you get your books, I will let you know that I read 80% of this book off the page. But I did listen to about five chapters via audio just to get a sense. It’s not Lauren who reads them. But your audio book Narrator does a really good job. And I was like, I could believe this is Lauren. Like I felt like she really nailed it. So for my audio book people, stamp of approval. for my eye readers, stamp of approval. Get the book wherever you get your books. Lauren, thank you so much for being here.

Lauren Markham 58:43
Thank you so much, Traci. This was such a joy. You are just such a brilliant reader and community advocate and person and thank goodness for you.

Traci Thomas 58:53
You can come back anytime you want to give me compliments. Everyone else we will see you in the stacks.

Alright, y’all, that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Lauren Markham for being my guest. I’d also like to say thank you to Shailyn Tavella for helping to make this conversation possible. Remember, the stacks book club pick for February is viral justice how we grow the world we want by Ruha Benjamin. We will be discussing that book on Wednesday, February 28th with Dr. Uche Blackstock. If you love the stacks and you want inside access to it, head over to patreon.com/thestacks and join the stacks pack. Make sure you’re subscribed to the stacks wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you’re listening through Apple podcasts, be sure to leave us a rating and a review. For more from the stacks follow us on social media at the stacks pod on Instagram threads and tik tok at the stacks pod underscore on Twitter and check out our website the stacks podcast.com Today’s episode of the stacks was edited by Cristian Duenas with production assistance from Lauren Tyree. Our graphic designer is Robin McWright The stacks is created and produced by me Traci Thomas.

Cherie Marquez https://www.cmediacollective.com/
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