The Re in Refuge

The re in refuge is a collection of linked essays that investigate ideas of refuge, broadly defined, from the intimacies of romance to the promises of the nation-state. Written over the span of a decade, the collection shapes experiences and events that interrogate their larger political and social contexts. The emerging European refugee crisis, yet to become headline news, frames the opening essays, with stories of those lost in their passage across the Mediterranean. In 2014, Italy and the United Kingdom end funding for naval rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and the influx of refugees into Greece reconfigures some of Athens’ neighborhoods. A once-abandoned school building becomes a squat where Kalfopoulou and other volunteers engage with refugee communities that include families from Afghanistan, Syria, and Kurdistan. As Kalfopoulou notes in “The Parts Don’t Add Up,” a visual essay, “embedded in the word refugee is refuge,” suggesting that the vectors of shelter have as much to do with what one carries of culture and place as they are about a tangible home.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Lyrical, evocative, and heartbreaking. These powerful essays are equal parts pleasure and pain, like pressing into a sacred wound.”—Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed?

“Reading The re in refuge, I recalled Bauman’s ‘nowadays we are all on the move.’ But we move in different ways, with different costs, destinations, belongings, languages, meanings, homelands, Gods, genders, dolls, wounds, papers, losses. Kalfopoulou’s home country, Greece, becomes a crossroad of all the differences that are shaping our century—a touristic destination, a place of economic downfall and authoritarian rise, the ‘gate’ of refugees to Europe. Adrianne Kalfopoulou writes about well-known subjects—traveling and refugees—with moving originality. She invites the ‘you’ of the reader to pay attention to what the ‘I’ might not see.”—Gazmend Kapllani, author of A Short Border Handbook and Wrongland

“Remembering and re-membering the ghosts from wars and exiles past in the vivid lives of those with whom she lives and works, Adrianne Kalfopoulou has woven a cradle and rocks it with a lilting song of wonder and lament. This is an epic narrative telling of the horrors and the wholeness in our times, a fugue returning again and again in theme and variations to the way belonging is an event, a fleeting encounter, a movement of the heart. A refuge.”—Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair: Refugee Integration through Languages and Arts, University of Glasgow