The name is absent

19

themes that shape newcomer narratives: a moment of plummeting realization that life
away from home would be vastly different from what was expected; entrapment; a desire
to escape; and a longing for safety unobtainable at the current location.

In exploring this undocumented migrant oral tradition more closely it is useful to
consider the connection between the individual and Greece more closely, in other words,
to consider the conceptual role ‘place’ serves in these narrative accounts. Beyond literal
significance, ‘place’ can be taken to provide reference, that is, to describe the motion of
the individual: conceptually, the collection of‘places’ makes space and time (Bal 1997;
Mikkonen 2007). Thus the relationship between individual and place is both
fleeting∕transitional and collectively constitutive of an experience of movement. Place is
also central to understanding causality in these travel narratives. In descriptions of place
after place and the events that occurred in each, narrators link particular experiences with
particular sites which, combined with the lack of agency in these stories, makes
movement tantamount to fate. In other words, according to undocumented migrant
narratives, the experience of travelling which in itself is part of a kind of predefined
trajectory (modem manifest destiny?) subjects the traveler to a series of untoward,
uncontrollable experiences culminating in their arrival.

However, something very interesting occurs to undocumented migrant narratives
once these people have lived in Athens for some time: although their arrival stories do
not change, reference to place is substituted with descriptions of tasks and practices in
stories of everyday life thereafter. Perhaps not unexpectedly, these stories are often
difficult to follow as they assume a great deal Ofknowledge about local social networks
and economies. Moreover, they seem to lack a sense of concreteness, which can easily

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