"Border fences don’t keep desperate people out, but they do turn them into spectacles of illegality." Taken March 2016. Fotomovimiento/Flickr. Some rights reserved.This extract is taken from an essay in Skin Deep magazine’s 6th print issue: The Spectacle, available from their website: www.skindeepmag.com
‘It’s prison,’ explains Omar* over dinner in one of Samos’s many tourist tavernas. Business is brisk tonight; ours is one of several long sets of conjoined tables where new flasks of the sweet local wine arrive before the old ones are even half-empty. The Palestinian-Syrian refugee has to raise his voice to make himself audible over the band playing Turkish folk music. Hunched over empty meze plates, he takes his registration papers from the chest pocket of his characteristically crisp shirt.
‘See this stamp? Samos only. Why? For nothing. No work, nothing. Ok, I wait for six months, eight months, fine. But my daughter wants to go to university, she must go. But we got to Samos and they tell us I must stay. After the 20th of March, everybody must stay. For what? I am a criminal? The EU throws money to keep us here.’
