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Summary
Summary
"This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we've been told--and told ourselves--in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we've come to understand as order." --Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West's idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp--not activists, not the country's growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.
Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don't just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Markham (The Far Away Brothers) blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and unflinching account of Moria, an overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos that burned to the ground in September 2020. Sent by a magazine to investigate the 2021 conviction of six Afghans charged with the Moria arson, Markham depicts the trial as biased and unjust (it lasted only 7 hours) and delves into the backgrounds of the convicted youths (three of the six convicts were minors), particularly Ali Sayed, whose grueling journey to Lesbos she traces from Afghanistan. Into this heart-wrenching drama (which includes international efforts to establish credible forensic evidence of the convicts' innocence for their forthcoming appeal), Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece's twin crises of immigration and emigration (she notes that "a million refugees had arrived in Greece by sea alone in recent years," even as more than half a million Greek nationals had emigrated since 2008 due to dismal economic conditions); the mass expulsion of Greeks from Turkey 100 years ago, many of whom also arrived as refugees in Lesbos; the story of her family's roots as American immigrants from Greece; and the evolution of the U.S. immigration system from the "indignities of Ellis Island" to the present-day asylum process, which incarcerates tens of thousands every day. Interspersed throughout are powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed. (Feb.)
Booklist Review
Markham (The Far Away Brothers, 2019) relied on her experience reporting on immigration stories around the world for this hybrid memoir juxtaposing her personal history with the ongoing social and political upheaval that accompanied the last decade's arrival of refugees in Greece. Shifting from coverage of the 2020 fire at the Moria refugee camp, which resulted in the dubious arrest and conviction of four young Afghan men, she writes of her own visits to the region, her family's Greek roots, and the turbulent local context for the immigrants that encompasses the camp and other areas directly impacted by asylum seekers. Her investigation into Moria grounds the narrative as Markham moves back and forth in history while considering long-held myths about Greece's position in Western civilization and how the country's storied past looms over its present. Ultimately, the notion of borders themselves is challenged as it clashes with the vast history of human movement. A personal, illuminating, and thought-provoking narrative.