A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging

by Lauren Markham

Overview

“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
 
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
     In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.
Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593545591
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	574,573
File size:	705 KB

About the Author

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. She has been working with migrants for two decades and has written about migration and other social issues in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/18/2023

Journalist Markham (The Far Away Brothers) blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and unflinching account of Moria, an overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos that burned to the ground in September 2020. Sent by a magazine to investigate the 2021 conviction of six Afghans charged with the Moria arson, Markham depicts the trial as biased and unjust (it lasted only 7 hours) and delves into the backgrounds of the convicted youths (three of the six convicts were minors), particularly Ali Sayed, whose grueling journey to Lesbos she traces from Afghanistan. Into this heart-wrenching drama (which includes international efforts to establish credible forensic evidence of the convicts’ innocence for their forthcoming appeal), Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece’s twin crises of immigration and emigration (she notes that “a million refugees had arrived in Greece by sea alone in recent years,” even as more than half a million Greek nationals had emigrated since 2008 due to dismal economic conditions); the mass expulsion of Greeks from Turkey 100 years ago, many of whom also arrived as refugees in Lesbos; the story of her family’s roots as American immigrants from Greece; and the evolution of the U.S. immigration system from the “indignities of Ellis Island” to the present-day asylum process, which incarcerates tens of thousands every day. Interspersed throughout are powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for A Map of Future Ruins:

“An expansive meditation on the roles of myth and politics in the stories we construct about our origins.” —New York Times

“Strange and intriguing. . . . Markham’s approach suggests that. . . . sometimes, rather than asking migrants to explain themselves, we, in the countries they are trying so desperately to reach, should be trying a little harder to explain ourselves.” —Washington Post

“A feat of reconstructive reportage, poetically written.”—The Atlantic

“Stunning. . . .  the most expansive contribution to border literature I have yet to read. . . . As projects go, it is the intellectual equivalent of a minefield—but Markham proves admiringly nimble on her Converse-clad feet.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] finely woven meditation on ‘belonging, exclusion, and whiteness.’” —The New Yorker

“A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Blends memoir, history, and reportage in a wide-ranging and unflinching account. . . . Into this heart-wrenching drama. . . . Markham interweaves ruminations on Greece’s twin crises of immigration and emigration. . . . Interspersed throughout are powerful ruminations on ancient Greece as the birthplace of classical Western ideals and the myth-making process inherent to all migration stories. Readers will be thoroughly engrossed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“In this brilliant, timely meditation, Markham explores how the stories we tell about borders and who belongs can harden our hearts or help to open them. The threads she follows weave a tapestry as moving as it is illuminating.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
 
“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

“A masterpiece of narrative journalism. A Map of Future Ruins is a story of two crises: the current refugee crisis affecting the Greek islands and the long-overlooked identity crisis within White America, whose preoccupation with ‘Western culture’ as an origin myth she traces both expansively and intimately.” —Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness and The Memory of Love
 
“Pushes beyond the news to interrogate the collective myths we tell ourselves about community, belonging, and the lives of immigrants.” —Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

“Luminous and expansive ... Markham shows us what we most urgently need to see.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree and The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“Meticulous and exuberant, this is a journalist’s wayfinding journey to map a truthful account of the current refugee crisis.” –Thi Bui, author of The Best We Could Do
 
“A masterful, multilayered story by a writer with a sharp, questioning mind and a big heart.”  —Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight and King Leopold’s Ghost

From the Publisher

★ 2023-11-03
A journalist’s self-aware exploration of borders and the myths used to draw them.

Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers, has spent two decades reporting from some of the world’s most chaotic borders, telling the stories of those left at their mercy. In her latest book, she takes a heartbreaking account—of a fire that decimated a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and the Afghan youth falsely accused of setting it—and winds it together with her family’s history of immigrating from Greece, as well as commentary on the entanglement of human migration and existence itself. The author chronicles her interviews with residents of the camp, the legal team for the accused, the Greek residents who surrounded them with varying degrees of hospitality and sympathy, and members of her own family. She also draws from the insight and wisdom of Soviet refugee Svetlana Boym. Greece’s position in the Western imagination—reflected in its myths and its influences on Western thought and even whiteness—and its often misrepresented history, create a thought-provoking and frustratingly circular backdrop for Markham’s endeavor, one often ignored or obscured in even the most probing media coverage. Many of the narrative threads could justify being their own book, and the author’s tight prose, character-driven storytelling, and humility clearly demonstrate the desperation at the heart of forced migration. She effectively calls out the callousness of the creators of, investors in, and patrollers of borders. Markham’s refreshingly self-conscious rumination on the project of a journalist, as well as her understanding of both the potential pitfalls and possible impact of her empathetic text, reinforce her interrogation of the “stories humans have created to make sense of our existence,” the maps we have drawn to depict those stories, and the elusive nature of truth.

A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.

Kirkus Reviews