Role of the Outsider: Literary Representations of the 21st Century European Refugee Crisis in Contemporary Greek Literature.

During the suffocating and tormenting years since the beginning of the economic crisis that hit Greece in 2008, the unstable situation in the East created another issue that the country was inevitably to face; boats full of refugees appeared in the Mediterranean looking for a shelter in the Greek harbors and islands. Literature’s response to the matter was immediate, and this new issue needed to find its space in the already flourishing literature of the crisis commenting on the rise of extreme right in politics and the condition of the repressed citizens in Athens. My chapter tackles the literary representation of the refugees in a country that has forced its own citizens to the fringes during the years shaded by austerity measures, while a large part of its population had arrived in a similar manner a hundred years earlier, exiled after the disastrous Greco-Turkish war. I examine the refugee crisis within the economic crisis and demonstrate the ways they interact and impact each other, drawing on the representation of the outsiders and the concept of xenophobia. Central to this article are the short-story collection “Good Will Come from the Sea” (2014) by the award-winning writer Christos Ikonomou and the novel “Passage” (2017) by Konstantinos Tzamiotis which depicts the refugees’ experience after their arrival to Greece. In addition, the refugees’ adaptation to the city as well as the occurring xenophobia in Athens have been represented various times in city literature, e.g. in the novels “Garden in Flames” (2017) by Dimitris Nollas and “Kiss me When the Lions Appear” (2013) by Kyriakos Margaritis, which add different views to the commentary on the outsider’s experience on the fringes of Europe.