ABSTRACT
In the opening stanza of his poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1984), Constantine Cavafy offers some powerful snapshots of a city in ‘crisis’: a city preparing for the arrival of the Barbarians. As the poem unfolds, we follow the rituals of this preparation in what appears to be a state of emergency since the daily repertoires of the city and its inhabitants have been dramatically altered. Cavafy carefully builds up a sense of anticipation while he offers glimpses of these preparatory rituals: for example, the senate stops legislating because the Barbarians will arrive and they will make their own laws; or, the orators stop their usual speeches because the Barbarians will arrive and they are bored of rhetoric. The poem concludes:
Night is here but the barbarians Have not come And some people arrived from the borders, And said that there are no longer any barbarians And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution
(Cavafy, 1984)
Cavafy’s poem provides a frame for some of the concerns running throughout this chapter, which follows the trajectories of a city in crisis and its constant, desperate search for Barbarians. In particular, this chapter offers glimpses of Athens undergoing its seventh consecutive year of austerity leading to unprecedented economic, social and political crises. Following Cavafy’s poem, crisis is seen as a continuous frame-breaking moment, a fluctuating state of ‘waiting for’ which dismantles the blueprints that govern everyday practices, imposing new borders between the Self and the Other and anticipating new orders for navigating daily encounters and performances of belonging. Cavafy’s evocation of waiting for the Barbarians provides a valuable sense of the loss of certainty that remains when ‘crisis’ exposes the constructs of nation and Others to be slippery. The poem also touches upon the concrete forms of systemic racism and mechanisms of Othering that represent social pathologies as the effects of a single cause: the presence (or even the threat of the presence) of the Other.
