Page - 204 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

204 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe ship, apparently too fast. And there have been reports of commandos that bring refugees, inclu- ding unaccompanied minors, back to Turkey even after they have set foot clearly on Greek soil, in open infringement of the principle of non-refoulement. These actions may constitute state crimes that should be investigated and denounced as such. My focus here though will not be on the problem of accountability for these deeds but rather on the cultural and symbolic dimensi- ons of what is happening in the North Aegean in terms of the symbolic and material creation of the division between culture and nature, particularly as a zone of exposure to bare life. Based on the ancient Greek terms for “life,” Giorgio Agamben (1998) distinguishes between the qualified life of a citizen with rights (bios) and the bare life or mere biological existence (zoe). In keeping with these concepts, I claim that illegalized migrants are taken beyond the threshold of animalization, left alone with their biological subsistence, deprived of the rights proper to the qualified life of the citizen. Downgraded to what this author characterizes as homo sacer, this figure may be killed without the act of killing being considered a crime. “Bare life” is neither zoe nor bios, but the form of life produced “in a zone of indistinction between the two” (Vaughan- Williams 2009, 735). A person who has fallen into this zone is an existence without civil value, exposed to a death without cultural, legal or religious inscription. for Agamben, however, the condition of “bare life” implies an abandonment or an exposure to the power of the sovereign. In the cases I present here, however, these abandonments and exposures are extended to the force of the elements, a zone of “mere biological survival,” in direct contact with environmental or physiological processes. Push back operations force unwanted migrants to navigate adrift and increase their exposure to “nature,” therefore performing an operation that is highly political, but that appears as deprived of historicity or agency. In the coast area of Ayvalik there are 22 islands that belong to Turkey. Most are small, uninhabited and empty. I heard accounts of both patrol forces and traffickers abandoning refu- gees on these islands. Turkish fishermen report having seen such refugees often, either on their inflatable boats or running around those deserted islands. When fishermen see them, they alert the police so that they can be rescued. It is not clear whether the Turkish Gendarmes always find them. Traffickers are believed to have started to avoid the long way to Lesbos and leave the immigrants on these islands or some remote part of the Turkish coast, telling them that it’s Greece. In the morning they would find out they are not in Europe and they have nothing to eat or drink. fishermen tell stories of desperate migrants burning grass on the islands to attract attention. They told me of a breastfeeding mother who had nourished her whole group with her milk. One Afghan refugee who had been pushed back twice to the Turkish coast said his groups spent two days lost there, without a dry place to sleep, eating fruits they found in the trees, from which they all became sick to the stomach, before they could contact their “agent”. Such scenes evoke an archaic exposure to the wilderness; a state of vulnerability that the modern dreams of progress had promised to emancipate humans from. The project of a world where scientific knowledge and technology would free us from the constraints of nature collap- ses before such accounts. Refugees are displaced precisely into the realm of survival in the wild, a condition from which Europeans of the Enlightenment thought humanity would be forever redeemed. Island of the flowers. Island of the Sun. Island of the Naked. Even their names evoke the nakedness of existence and its continuity to nature.