Του Κανενός [No One’s]
Novella
Purple Squirrel (Athens, 2024)
After the refugee caravan’s long journey –through sand dunes and palm trees, burned villages and corpses– a girl who trusts no one with her name, believes she has finally reached Europe. However, upon falling from the wall, she finds herself in no man’s land: the dead zone of Nicosia.
The girl seeks a normal life, and in this futile effort, she is accompanied by Salifou, another captive of the dead zone, who dreams of his own distant paradise, and her antagonist Gabriel, a man striving to create his own place right there, on a land that can belong to no one.
All three are unauthorized immigrants, captives in a non-place, fighting against their confinement, where resignation and hope coexist, reality and dream, and the hours each of them spends in their own way under the same narrow strip of the sky.
As the story escalates, the only solution for the girl is to escape. Gabriel has now dug the soil, planted seeds, and watered the green sprouts, so that the non-place may enchant her, making her believe that she can finally find a true life there.
With first-person narration in the present tense, the reader experiences the story through the eyes of the heroine, who constantly oscillates between the innocence of a young girl and the abrupt transitions to adulthood. Her narrative, cloaked in the naivety of youth, is dense with symbols that allow for deeper interpretive levels of the story.
Tou Kanenos ultimately portrays the absurdity and futility of a contemporary geopolitical condition. Through the girl’s narrative, it explores the tragic irony of the endless search for identity which is closely linked to longing for a hospitable place, the human need for identification and the despair when this strife reaches a dead end.
From the back cover:
“On the great journey, passing by sand dunes and palm trees, burned villages and corpses, they would say: ‘Smell the sea in the air! We’re almost there! Can you smell the salt?’ And I would say: ‘Yes, I can smell it. I’m not afraid.’ Even though I couldn’t smell it. Even though I was afraid. I longed for the new place. But falling from the wall, I found myself, a nameless girl, suspended here, in a dead zone; in no one’s land.”
Three outcasts in a non-place – in the dead zone of Nicosia – struggle against their confinement, where resignation and hope coexist, reality and dream, and the hours each of them spends in their own way under the same narrow strip of the sky.