Agency in a quake in time: a study of jokes about the future among Pakistani migrant youth

ABSTRACT

This article explores agency through humour and time amongst a group of Pakistani young men who reside, or recently resided, in a refugee shelter for unaccompanied minors in Athens, Greece. It asks how their jokes about alternate futures might challenge the slow, structural violence which places these young men on the margins of society in terms of work, space, and temporality. Despite a lack of anthropological work on humour, particularly amongst migrant communities, this article takes up humour as an analytical tool due to its pervasive presence in the shelter and its challenge to the discourse of victimhood of migrant children. I ultimately argue that conventional theories about the role of humour fail to fully account for the temporalities that these jokes around futurity evoke. This article also sheds light on the various constructs of time at play within the lives of these young men and how these are disrupted in the moment of the joke. It asks what modalities of agency emerge during these jokes when we employ Deleuze’s non-linear syntheses of time and seeks, ultimately, to look beyond conventional assumptions of youth agency and structural inequality, and to question the premises upon which such conventions are built.

KEYWORDS:

• Pakistani diaspora
• youth migration
• agency
• futurity
• humour

Introduction

Conducting fieldwork with young men from Pakistan living in a refugee shelter for unaccompanied minors in Athens, Greece, was, for me, an emotional as much as an intellectual endeavour. I first began visiting the NGO-run shelter at the centre of this paper from 2017 to 2018 to provide educational activities, and returned for a month-long field visit in July 2019 to spend two hours a day observing and chatting with its residents. I returned to the setting with memories of the space, of the individuals I had met, of the stories they had told me. While this research is based solely on participant observation and while I will narrow my ethnographic exposition to focus on six young men specifically, I have informally spoken to around 30 individuals of Pakistani origin since I began visiting Athens in 2017. Almost all of the young men whom I had known when I previously visited had moved away in the year between my visits. Most had turned 18 and moved to other parts of Greece for work whilst some had crossed the border to Italy illegally and a couple had been legally united with family in Europe. Irtaza, however, was still living there when I arrived, and he seemed proud to introduce me to his new group of friends. He and five of these friends became my interlocutors. Irtaza was 18 when this research began whilst Azlan, Arish, Adnan, Meerab and Muhammad were between 15 and 17 years old. All were from Gujrat, Gujranwala, Mandi Bahauddin or Sialkot in Pakistan’s Punjab province; cities with high levels of illegal migration to Europe (Aksel et al. 2015, 27; Butt 2018). Every boy travelled to Greece over land via the Iran to Turkey route using human smugglers while their parents/guardians remained in Pakistan. Throughout this article, I will refer to the site as the ‘shelter’ and have changed all names and personal details to protect the identity of those involved.

Towards the middle of my month-long field visit, Irtaza moved into an independent flat and began informal work, cleaning and painting houses. Despite telling me many times that he shouldn’t keep returning to the shelter now that he is 18, he still visited the shelter for around an hour every day. During one such visit, while I was sitting at the dining table with a social worker and an interpreter who worked for the shelter was smoking on the balcony nearby, he cracked a joke which had all four of us laughing together. Irtaza was telling the social worker about his new job, describing how he liked his boss but that he worked long hours for a pittance of a salary. Getting up to leave, he added that, after a few weeks, he would perhaps have made a lot of money and would become the King of Greece. He said that the first thing he would do was deport the interpreter sitting on the balcony. Whilst we laughed and the interpreter began to mock-protest, Irtaza walked confidently out of the room and I was left wondering what to make of this joke which had united the three of us in humour and an imaginary of a topsy-turvy world where the hierarchies were upended. The comedy emerged from our common knowledge of his marginalized position and the outrageous notion that the roles could be reversed so absolutely that he could become the ruler of a country from which, he told me, he could one day be deported.

Kuipers writes ‘a joke is a joke only if it is repeated: only at the moment of repetition does a joke become a joke, a “social event” instead of an individual creation’ (2006, 6). Indeed, this was far from the first time I had heard a joke where the future was re-imagined amongst the group, and it was repeated in various formulations, the most common being the refrain that a few of the group might hide in my suitcase during my journey back to England. Outside of the joking context, however, conversations about the future were starkly different. Meerab talked gravely about how dangerous the journey to cross the border between Greece and Italy might be. Muhammad told me that well-paid work was hard to find, that bosses were often cruel, that he was always tired but that he had to work to send money home at the end of the month. During a community meeting, held weekly between shelter staff and its residents, the young men were asked to share their future goals. Muhammad scoffed and responded that he only hoped he might be alive tomorrow and could not think beyond that. What are we to make of these young mens’ resistance to discussions of the future and their simultaneous, elaborate entry into imagining it in the world of jokes? In the case of Muhammad, these two approaches to the future were expressed in the same hour, marking an incongruence that became commonplace during my fieldwork. It raised two apparently contradictory approaches to a question often posed in migration literature: ‘what future is being imagined in these places of distancing and exception … ?’ (Agier 2018, 13).

I will first illustrate the ways that Pakistani immigrant youth reside on the margins of power and thus are victims of structural and slow violence. I will then examine instances of these jokes about alternate futures in the context of theories about the functions of humour. Rather than dismissing these jokes as the anxiety of the oppressed, I appeal to the rejection of the linearity of time popularized by Bergson and Deleuze to explore how these young men exercise agency during futurity jokes. First, however, I will consider where this fits in the landscape of literature on youth, agency, futurity and temporality.

Youth agency, humour and time

As we saw with the global outcry to the image of Alan Kurdi washed up on the shore near Bodrum in Turkey, child migrants are commonly depicted in humanitarian literature and the media as embodying the plight of the victimized refugee; but regularly in the arms of mothers and often the very young. Malkki suggests that children have become the ideal representation of the refugee because they embody a ‘powerless being with no connections to history, traditions, culture or nationality’ (Malkki 1995, 11). This image of child as victim is echoed in the little academic work that exists on lone migrant children, mostly in the disciplines of social work, psychology and health (e.g. Ní Raghallaigh 2014; Jensen et al. 2015). Such literature abounds with terms like ‘neglect’, ‘hardship’ and ‘difficulties’, inadvertently denying agency to the individuals concerned, and relying heavily on interviews which, as I will discuss, is problematic. In light of the independence developed by many of my interlocutors in journeying to Europe alone and their own perceptions of themselves as young men rather than children, distinct categories of the vulnerable child and the self-sufficient adults are blurred, as I argue that we need to move beyond seeing youth as powerless victims and instead consider where their agency might lie.

While there has been a substantial amount of literature on the agency and activism of refugees in camps (Bhimji 2016, 2019; Rygiel 2012; Sanyal 2011), this work focuses on temporal agency rather than centring space in its analysis and argues for the agentive nature of everyday discourse between interlocutors rather than foregrounding more explicitly activist activities. I follow such scholarship, however, where it pushes against the assumed exceptionalism of spaces such as camps and shelters in that they reduce those within to ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998, 8). As others have pointed out (Sigona 2015; Turner 2015), such a reduction leaves little room for the agency and resistance which confronts one in any sustained ethnographic encounter. This paper considers agency as the action that is possible within a given context (Vigh 2008, 11), as ‘a sense of boundary-crossing creativity’ (Mavroudi, Page, and Christou 2017, 14), as a subversion of repeatedly performed norms (Butler 1993; Butler 1997; Butler 1999) and as ‘becoming’ according to Deleuze. Whilst literature on youth agency often highlights the themes of joking and fun (Dyson 2014; Krishnan 2015) and Goldstein’s (2003) ethnography of a Brazilian favela focuses on the preponderance of humour in a space of marginalization, I want to go beyond the accounts of humour sketched out in these ethnographies by exploring the temporal aspects of my interlocutors’ jokes about the future.

A key temporal theme in scholarship on asylum-seekers and migrants has been waiting and the uncertainty this gives rise to (Conlon 2011; Mountz 2011; Robertson and Runganaikaloo 2014). I will explore the constraints on the lives of my interlocutors which ostensibly confine them to such a limbo as well as building on a body of literature on time which foregrounds the complexity of time perceptions in anthropological analysis (Bear 2014; Gell 1992; Munn 1992) to explore temporal interruption during jokes. Recent work on time employs notions developed by Bergson and Deleuze, including Hodges (2008) who endorses Deleuze’s concept of duration ‘as a candidate for the temporal ontology of a modern self-reflexive social science’ (Hodges 2008, 40) and Nielsen whose ethnography focuses on illegal squatters in Maputo, Mozambique, who ‘engage with futures that will never follow the present’ (Nielsen 2014, 178). Moroşanu and Ringel’s (2016) volume on temporal agency also focuses on ways to outmanoeuvre the future, which they refer to as ‘time-tricking’. This article contributes to these explorations of temporal agency and non-linear conceptualizations of temporalities.

There are also parallels between these jokes and the artistic and theoretical movement known as Afrofuturism, even if the fantastical jokes narrated by these young men emerge from a very different context and consciousness. Afrofuturism, a current of black diasporic pop culture, draws on technology and Afrodiasporic experiences to creatively explore alternative futures, pasts and presents (Dery 1994; Mayer 2000; Yaszek 2006). Afrofuturism similarly affords a safe and creative exploration of ‘the possibility of new and better futures’ (Yaszek 2006, 59) and prompts ‘speculations and fantasies [to] arise which move ceaselessly back and forth through time and space’ (Mayer 2000, 557). Much as critics of Afrofuturist work have done, my analysis attends to the way alternative approaches to the future can allow an agentive liberation from the trappings of violent pasts and presents.

Field site, positionality and methodology

In 2020, there were 53 shelters for unaccompanied minors in Greece (EKKA 2020). All house children who arrived in the country without immediate family or kin (with the exception of brothers) and who were referred to the shelter by the National Centre for Social Solidarity or EKKA. The shelters provide accommodation, food and a social worker for each child in their care. The shelter where my interlocutors lived also ensured schooling and pastoral support with a psychologist, lawyer and interpreters. The space was inhabited by children of several different nationalities including Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and Palestinians. Most individuals arrived in Greece a few months or years before and would remain at the site until they reached 18 years old. Rather than a traditional ethnography bounded by the physical space of the shelter and its residents and staff, my focus was on a friendship group who had nationality (Pakistani), religion (Sunni Islam) and language (Urdu, with some Punjabi words and phrases) in common. My decision to focus on Pakistani young men specifically was because this demographic made up 22% of the recorded (and almost certainly underestimated) 5,379 unaccompanied minors in Greece (EKKA 2020) and yet I was not aware of any other research focussed on this group.

On a Tuesday evening early in my fieldwork, a theatre group were preparing to perform for the shelter residents and the boys were settling themselves on plastic chairs. As latecomers assembled in front of the performance space, Arish rove between the audience members shouting ‘chocolate! chocolate!’ with a plastic bucket filled with plums and nectarines perched on his shoulder. Everyone erupted with laughter and I got the sense that I had arrived in a community of ‘laughing people’ (Bakhtin 1984, 474). In focussing on this humour, I try to avoid the discourse common amongst refugee advocacy groups where alleged migrant voices become one-dimensional and decontextualized to suit the agenda of the organization (Cabot 2016, 604–605). Despite hearing shocking details about the treatment of these young men at the hands of authorities and human traffickers, my decision not to focus on these stories of migration is partly due to my discomfort with asking how my interlocutors got there and why, with its implicit judgements of morality and pity and appeal to constant justification, and partly because, when prompted to tell their stories of migration, I had the strong impression that ‘the words had the frozen slide quality to them, which showed their burned and numbed relation to life’ (Das 2007, 11). Just as Das felt that scholarly accounts of Partition seemed ghost-written, I was haunted by the idea that my words could never express even a part of the harrowing conditions of travelling from Pakistan to Greece.

Due to the vulnerable position of those in the study, I had to carefully consider the potential psychological impacts of conducting this fieldwork. The individuals involved in this research had usually undergone several interviews with police, lawyers and social workers regarding their presence in Greece. In my experience, such exchanges often led to mistrust of those interviewing or taking notes and the development of certain tropes and stories perceived as ‘desirable’ in order to further asylum claims. Most young men in the shelter told me that they found interview situations stressful and thus, for ethical reasons, I refrained from recreating them as far as possible.

This does not of course prohibit biases and inequalities. My relationship with my interlocutors was inherently unequal, not only because I am legally an adult but because I am a white, British, female student from England, a desirable destination for many of my interlocutors. My ability to come and go freely from England, demonstrated by my return to the shelter after a long absence, provides merely one example of our inequalities as lived. This led me to reflect on whether the agency I perceived amongst my interlocutors was simply a reflection of my own guilt or desire for freedoms vis-à-vis this group. By closely analysing agency theoretically, I seek to at least partly overcome such charges.

While there were many female, European and student volunteers and staff members at the shelter, my behaviour was unusual due to my expressed desire to ‘hang’ out with a group of young Pakistani residents rather than take a formal role of responsibility. With downcast eyes, Adnan told me that I was the first girl he had spoken to in Urdu since his arrival in Greece. As the weeks passed by, I heard many stories about girls in Europe and Pakistan, from Meerab who told me he had 130 girlfriends across the world, to Azlan who daringly asked, in a community meeting, whether the shelter could organize one girl for every boy. After such jokes, my interlocutors were often keen to clarify that they considered me to be ‘their sister’ and during my final week, Azlan announced that I had become a boy due to spending so much time with the group. Whilst this elicited much laughter, I was secretly pleased at this joke in its suggestion that the boundaries of gender had been somewhat broken, and that I was firmly considered in a non-romantic sense by the group. Whilst the emergence of friendships is common in fieldwork, my feelings swung between concern that my behaviour might be misconstrued and worry that I was subconsciously stereotyping my interlocutors by considering them to be preoccupied with my gender. These anxieties led me to reflect on assumptions about gender inherent in my social and academic world that I might be projecting onto my interlocutors. Thus, whilst masculinity is not an explicit focus of this research, gendered logics may have played into practices of humour and bilateral perceptions.

One limitation was the short time of one month which I spent in the setting. I often felt that I was only managing to capture snatches of information and could not allow the complexity of a situation to crystallize fully over time. This process was made even more challenging by my occasional difficulties in communication due to my lack of complete fluency in Urdu, particularly in the Punjabi-influenced slang used by my interlocutors. The limitations of language were somewhat transcended due to our joint efforts at communicating in a mixture of Greek, Urdu and English, and I found that betraying a lack of understanding of certain words and phrases allowed for natural explanation and humorous reactions to moments of confusion. It is of course possible that my interlocutors evaded questions about the future due to their lack of trust in me. However, I also witnessed them evading ‘serious’ explorations of the future when one of the young men themselves began a conversation about the future with the others, as well as when more long-standing shelter staff and volunteers posed such questions. Consistently, the only time an imagination of the future was accessed was through what I call ‘jokes’. I introduced myself to the young men as a researcher, who was formerly a youth worker, and I believe I gained trust quickly with the group due to Irtaza, who had known me for a year previously, and who had a lot of influence within the group. Irtaza referred to me, and introduced me as, a ‘friend’ or ‘dost’ and this is also how they regularly referred to each other. I follow them in using this term in this paper.

In addition to the disruption wrought by my presence and positionality, the shelter requested that I not take direct quotes from my interlocutors, which is why I include no direct quotes here, except where the same phrase was repeated by many people, which the shelter informed me was acceptable. Since I had to gain consent from and respect the parameters of the shelter staff for this work since they were the legal guardians of the young men, the lack of direct quotations is unfortunate since the inclusion of each young mans’ rather unique way of expressing themselves could have led to different impressions among readers and would, quite literally, allow them more agency. While this omission means that there is more weight given to my own interpretation, I have sought to remain as faithful to events and the spirit of my interlocutors as possible. As Das and Kleinman tell us, language provides ‘not only a message but also the subject to be projected outward’ (Das and Kleinman 2001, 22). The subject here is a very shadowy reflection of my interlocutors due to my inability to share their humour in their own words. Yet inevitably and even with the ability to quote directly, ethnography produces ‘fictions’ since they are always ‘something made’, ‘something fashioned’ (Geertz 1993, 15).

Slow, structural violence

Structural violence in the lives of these young men casts doubt on hopeful futures and seems to leave no room for agency. Galtung defines structural violence as inequality with no perpetrator but part of a structure of power (1969, 170–171). In its most extreme form, structural violence against migrants is both physical and symbolic because, not only do many migrants die or suffer injuries during border crossings from Pakistan to Greece but many bodies are never recovered nor formally identified, showing ‘the extent to which their bodies, in death, do not seem to matter to the rest of us’ (Ahmad 2009, 317). Rather than the fast violence of these brutal deaths, I characterize the workings of violence in the lives of these young men as slow violence which ‘derive[s] largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time’ (Nixon 2011, 6) and builds on Galtung’s understanding of structural violence by attending to ‘questions of time, movement, and change, however, gradual’ (Nixon 2011, 10). It is much more difficult to locate the workings of slow violence, like unrelenting labour, spatial and temporal relegation, when compared to acts of violence that occur in spectacular time. The notion of a migrant crisis for example, tends to revolve around the act of migration itself, conceived of as a temporally immediate event of fast violence. As Berlant reminds us, a ‘crisis’ is more of a judgement than a factual description as it implicitly appeals to heroic action and is an externally oriented temporality for events which can be facts of life in ordinary time for those at its locus (Berlant 2007, 760–761).

However, Vigh (2008) suggests that crisis need not always be experienced as a temporal rupture, instead suggesting that ‘social, political and existential crisis’ (7) can be experienced as a constant. Vigh’s conceptualization of chronic crisis as ‘a terrain of action and meaning rather than an aberration’ (Vigh 2008, 8), then, also speaks to the constant structural inequality felt by these young men and their ostensible lack of agency concerning their futures. While I argue that these young men do find a way to access agency via a ‘joking’ framework, I first want to examine the evidence for structural violence or chronic crisis in their lives from my interlocutors’ perspectives, beginning with the space in which they lived.

The shelter was located on a main road on the periphery of the city centre, surrounded by residential buildings with no sign or indication of its purpose from its exterior. It comprised several high-ceilinged rooms, with one to four bunkbeds to a room, two communal living spaces, a large balcony and the shelter offices, which were mainly occupied by staff. The shelter was located in one of the poorer areas of Athens. Irtaza and Meerab suggested that it was a place of depravity and illegality from which they would move away if they had the choice, indicating the perception of their locale as a space of economic and social marginalization. However, all my interlocutors called the shelter ‘ghar’ (‘home’) and most expressed preference for this space compared to the other state structures housing migrants with which they were familiar, such as camps, ‘safe zones’ dedicated to unaccompanied minors within accommodation sites, and detention centres which they referred to, in English, as ‘jail’. One similarity between all of these structures is that all those within are grouped together and placed there by the state based on their refugee or migrant status.

Ambivalent perceptions about place and space were echoed in discussions about Greece. My interlocutors talked cryptically about the problem of Greek ‘fascists’, ‘mafia’ or ‘bad people’. During a debate about Greece’s merits as a destination country, Muhammad won the argument by asserting that, based on information from his brother living in Germany, far more money could be made in every other European country. Physically, Greece occupies the edge of Europe and the marginalizing effect of being on this physical periphery is underscored by the impact of EU intervention, particularly when it comes to asylum law (Cabot 2014, 23–40). Cabot points out that the discourse among NGOs and in European media often characterizes the country as ‘backward and disorganized, with corrupt, arcane bureaucracies and violent police’ (32), using its alleged failures as an advocacy tool to encourage changes to asylum law on the European level but ultimately alienating Greece yet further. Dependencies on EU bodies to remain a member of the Union, on the IMF and the European Central Bank throughout the Greek government debt crisis of 2007/2008 and on European policy to respond to refugees and asylum seekers reaching Greek soil have reinforced its marginal position. Material and discursive factors interplay here to inform subjectivities of ambivalence around the possibility of a positive future in Greece.

For these young men, it was work in Greece’s informal economy which marked the near future, characterized by long hours, low wages and poor working conditions. Such plans were undergirded by ideals of masculinity, which position the man as provider and ‘breadwinner’, often for an extended family (Chowdhry 2019). Literature on the lives of Pakistani migrant men working in Europe (Ahmad 2009; Kukreja 2021) highlights the ways in which exploitative work can invoke values which are perceived as masculine: physical strength and endurance. Arish is the only young man who I spoke to with experience of work in seasonal agriculture, which employs mostly Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants as labourers in Greece. He worked on a family friend’s farm after his arrival but found the conditions so unendurable that he fled to Athens after a week. Media attention was brought to the plight of such workers in 2013 when a farm foreman in the Peloponnese area of Manolada started shooting at migrant workers because they complained about unpaid wages. This act of ‘fast’ violence emerged from the largely ignored slow violence of life as an undocumented migrant worker in Greece, which many media sources have described as ‘slave labour’ (Baboulias 2013; Smith 2014; Zakaria 2014). Even for those who are not yet working but on the cusp of adulthood like Adnan, Arish, Meerab and Azlan, their awareness of their imminent job prospects made it easy to understand their reluctance to seriously engage in dreams about the future.

Power over futures through granting or refusing asylum suggests that any European space where my interlocutors would inhere would be one manipulated by state power and thus on the margins and limits of the political order. When it comes to asylum claims, Pakistani young men tend to receive a very high number of rejections. In 2019, 72% of Pakistani childrens’ asylum claims were rejected compared to 31% of Afghan children and 10% of Syrian children (UNICEF 2019). For the young men in this research, this made the space of Europe more ‘hostile’ and their futures more uncertain than many of the young men of other nationalities with whom they lived. The disparity in treatment of nationalities reflects the dichotomy between economic migrants and refugees. All of my interlocutors would likely be considered economic migrants according to the UNHCR definition (UNHCR 2006, 14), even if binaries between the economic and political reflect the requirements of institutions (Fassin, Wilhelm-Solomon, and Segatti 2017, 163) rather than the multi – faceted motivations for migration from the perspectives of migrants themselves (Bhimji 2018).

Within the shelter, ‘the regularized rhythm of quotidian bureaucratic life’ (Mathur 2014, 151) was inescapable. Through the printing of individual timetables for each resident, and the repetition of the timings for school and excursions during community meetings and on posters displayed around the home, the shelter staff stressed the importance of respect for clock time. Amongst my interlocutors, frustration directed at the shelter tended to spring from these rules around dictated temporalities, such as the rule that friends from outside the shelter could only visit between 5 pm and 7 pm or that one had to return to the shelter by midnight to secure pocket money that week. Adnan told me that one of the worst things about living there was staff’s refusal to provide access to the kitchen outside stipulated mealtimes, meaning that his preference for staying up late and sleeping until the afternoon was thwarted by hunger pangs. I witnessed several rebellions to this shelter-dictated time including Muhammad turning up over an hour late to our consent-taking meeting, Adnan trying to persuade the cook to provide him with food before dinner time and Irtaza stalling the departure for an organized visit to the park to play cricket by claiming that the balls were lost, only for them to be found 20 minutes later in his own bag. Due to shelter staff’s exasperation at the lack of respect for ‘bureaucratic time’ amongst the shelter residents, one rule instigated shortly before my arrival was that excursions would leave at the time stipulated and there would be no waiting for latecomers. Based on conversations with staff, there were several ‘common sense’ reasons for the bureaucratic ‘keeping’ of time: to ensure the fair and organized allocation of resources such as lawyers, psychologists, food and education for each of the 30 young men in their care in light of a small staff team and various demands and expectations from beneficiaries, to provide clear boundaries for children who may have lived a life with little to no experience of institutionalized clock-time and to prepare these children for an independent life in Greece, where time-keeping was seen as a necessity for successful survival. Yet, from the perspective of some of my interlocutors, the dictates of ‘bureaucratic time’ and the ensuing ‘time battles’ were perceived as exercises in power, as shelter staff manipulated the boys’ movements in the name of order, and the young men, in turn, compelled staff to wait for them or force staff to break their own rules. These clashes and their mediations deserve a more detailed analysis of the bureaucratic workings of the shelter, but point to the emergence of agency in response to the dictates of externally imposed time constructs.

The functions of futurity jokes

These structural constraints of labour, space and time were miraculously overcome in jokes which re-imagined futures. This incongruity means that such jokes can be defined as black humour, a term first used by Breton (1966) to refer to comedy where laughter emerges from tragedy. The fact that these young men often refused to engage with me in serious questions about the future but delved so naturally into a humorous futurity where the constraints to their contemporary life dissolved with comic ease could suggest that the Freudian interpretation of jokes (1916) as a form of relief is also appropriate in this context. Another key focus of work on humour tends to be its social function. As Boxer and Cortés-Conde (1997) put it, ‘identity display (ID) and relational identity display/development (RID) can be the most important functions of joking’ (282). I will focus on two further examples to the vignette detailed in the introduction, to understand further the individual circumstances in which this humour is situated. In each, the ‘fantasy’ of the re-imagined future is dwelt on for a little longer than during quips about who might return to England with me or join the Pakistan cricket team tomorrow. This allows for a more expansive picture of the individuals’ imagined future, which I explore here in light of both Freudian and ‘relational identity’ theories of humour.

When Irtaza described himself as the King of Greece within the joke described above, I could not help but think of the ways that he did indeed exercise the sort of power over others’ movement that a King might – but only within the space of the shelter, a space that he ironically no longer formally occupied. A joke amongst myself and the interlocutors was that Irtaza was the ‘mālik’ of the friendship group, which they described as meaning ‘boss’ or ‘master’. It was Adnan, grinning, who poked fun at Irtaza by calling him this at first. But when I pursued the issue, Adnan protests that Irtaza is not their ‘mālik’ but simply a good friend. The relationship between Irtaza and the other boys, particularly Adnan, afforded Irtaza the highest status. The other boys fetched food from the kitchen for him, Adnan willingly lent Irtaza his smartphone and, if a trip outside the shelter to take a walk or play cricket was suggested, the other young men would usually only attend if Irtaza joined. Irtaza openly exercised his power by often dithering over whether or not he wanted to join an activity, and observing the group following his lead. There were some practical reasons for Irtaza’s leadership position: he spoke English more fluently than most of the other boys, regularly facilitating communication between his friends and outsiders (including me), and he had been at the shelter for the longest. His reference to himself as a King, then, reflected his status amongst his friendship group in the shelter and asserted this continued power despite his move to a new apartment.

However, we could also see the joke as a relief of anxiety around his audience’s potential perception of Irtaza as a pitiful figure. Whilst other young men were nearby, the key audience members for the joke were myself, a social worker and the targeted interpreter. Any potential commiserations around his new job were wrenched away as he swept us all into a common imaginary of his enviable royal future. The transformation of compassion into laughter could suggest that laughter functions as a sort of anaesthetic revealing ‘an absence of feeling – it has no greater foe than emotion’ (Bergson 1911, 4). I am reminded of McCullough’s (2008) description of laughter amongst an Australian Aboriginal community when one man performed a clumsy dance and another mimicked him mockingly. McCullough argues that shame around the other mans’ failure to perform an Aboriginal dance emerged from anxiety about the perception of the Aboriginal community before the White Other, which was eased and dissipated through communal laughter: ‘the laughter … was a defiant gesture to the onus of living under the perceptions of others’ (McCullough 2008, 283). This raises questions about whether this humour suggests an implicit acceptance of the cruel incongruity driving the impossibility of these young men genuinely having power over their futures.

When I asked what Muhammad would be doing that week, he responded that he would go back to Pakistan for two years and then come back to Greece again. Based on our conversations around his nostalgia for his village and family, there was a moment when I fully believed this to be a reality and I responded with ‘really?!’, ‘why?’, ‘how will you get back?’ He told me that he would simply take a flight so that he could spend time with his family because he had not seen them for a while and missed them. He said that he would go to see his parents first, then visit his friends, and that he would bring gifts for everyone from Greece. Muhammad had risked his life in order to reach Greece and was seeking asylum there; the notion that he would prefer to be in Pakistan was completely contrary to these practical actions and I never heard him express this desire outside of this joke. He did, however, regularly reminisce about life in Pakistan: he told me that he and his brother were local wrestling champions and that his mother made the best ‘nīmbū pānī’ (a version of lemonade spiced with salt and cumin). The clearest expression of his anxiety at being away from Pakistan and his family outside of the joking context was during a craft session. He asked for a piece of paper and a pen, and, paying no heed to the activity or its objectives, wrote a short paragraph in English about how much he missed his sister and mother, and glued it to the front of the wardrobe in his room. However, Muhammad also expressed pride in his ability to provide for his family, for taking up opportunities in Greece and for earning his own money. For example, he said that his sisters were now able to go to a fee-paying school thanks to his remittances, and that, unlike his friends, he never missed summer school despite his work schedule. He also regularly showed me his new purchases, including a pair of new sunglasses and a second-hand bicycle, asking me to guess how much each had cost and emphasizing that he had bought these things with his own money which his friends were unable to do. His friends often admired his purchases, suggesting that his spending power was considered a source of social capital within the group. His anxiety around being away from Pakistan seemed to be entangled in the opportunities offered by his working life in Greece.

Muhammad also expressed ambivalence at the difference between the way he and his friends spent their time. Muhammad left for his job at 5am in the morning, returning to the shelter at around 4pm, and going to the summer school arranged by the shelter from 5pm to 7pm. In contrast to this schedule, Adnan, Meerab, Arish and Azlan spent a lot of time ‘hanging out’ in squares close to the shelter, taking phone calls from family members, sleeping until late in the day and watching Bollywood movies on their phones. I detected both anxiety and judgement in Muhammad’s teasing accusation that all his friends did was eat, sleep and go to school ‘a little’. He used the term ‘timepass’ to describe his friend’s activities, which Jeffrey defines as ‘the notion of being surrounded by an expanse of featureless time’ (Jeffrey 2010, 470). When I asked the group what this term meant, there was a general consensus that it meant ‘enjoying’ which Muhammad agreed with, although he added that all his friends did was ‘enjoy’. This ambivalence was expressed in his imagining of a return to Pakistan. Whilst his appeal to gift-giving suggests the wealth and status of a returnee from a European country, and coheres with ‘classical accounts of the migration process’ (Ahmad 2009, 312), this joke speaks to both the possibilities and limitations that Muhammad perceived in his participation in the labour market.

During my fieldwork, several minor earthquakes impacted Athens, one of which was felt strongly in the city, causing minor structural damage to buildings. I was not at the shelter during this bigger tremor, but I was present the following week when shelter staff instructed us to evacuate the building as there had apparently been a small quake which could be followed by a larger one. We congregated on the street across the road from the shelter, and I sat on the kerbside while a spontaneous game of cricket went on behind me. Meerab took a seat next to me and asked me what might happen if the shelter building fell down. Without waiting for my response, he proceeded to allocate European countries to himself and the shelter residents in the case of the shelter’s collapse, while metaphorically blurring the buildings neighbouring the shelter structure with these European countries. He pointed at various buildings that we could see from our vantage point, explaining that he would move into the fancy apartment building across the road which he called Spain, and that Adnan would be allocated the abandoned and rubble-filled building, Italy, to the left. I struggled to follow his logic but found his excitement at the potential for momentous positive change based on the trembling of the earth strangely infectious. I told him how I would easily be able to visit everyone in their countries if they were all there together, and he laughed along, reassuring me that everyone would remain friends and spend time at each other’s houses, pointing out that his Spanish home would be particularly spacious. I laughed in response and was about to ask what furniture he might have in Spain, when the fantasy was quickly ended as a cricket ball rolled into the street and Meerab ran out to catch it. A shelter staff member cried out as a car slammed on its brakes and Meerab just about managed to cross the road with the ball safely in his hand before the car passed by.

One of Meerab’s close friends from the shelter made the illegal crossing to Italy during my first few days of fieldwork, and Meerab seemed quite preoccupied about whether, and when, he might leave Greece himself. He told me that his parents wanted him to leave because conditions in other European countries were supposed to be better, but that he did not want to leave his friends or his girlfriend behind. In a sense, he seemed far happier to engage in discussions about the future than any of the other young men, although our conversations tended to drift into fanciful humour rather than sensible discussions around what he might do, and I began to question whether he would really leave at all. I also wondered whether his constant joking about an imagined future in Europe might have been helping him to build up the momentum to make the difficult journey. After this minor earthquake and Meerab’s subsequent joke, I reflected on how he might have genuinely found the decision to leave easier if his present home had crumbled away and he had no choice but to flee.

Meerab was the youngest in the friendship group and treated as such. I once saw him bringing a jug of water from the shelter to Azlan and the others who were sitting in a nearby square and, at another time, he was instructed to source a cricket bat for everyone’s use. Yet he matched this treatment of inferiority with assertions of masculine power, telling me that he had started several fights with other boys and that he could beat up the others if he so wished. Whilst I cannot tell the extent to which such boasts were due to my presence, other boys in the group told me that Meerab ‘always’ made such empty threats of violence. Whilst Irtaza’s joke confirmed his position in the peer group as a leader, Meerab’s minor earthquake upended the hierarchy of the peer group towards one in his favour. He imaginatively transformed into the more powerful figure of his bravado as he took ownership of the best home on the block with his friends located in substandard accommodation around him. In contrast, Muhammad’s joke took him out of his peer group altogether and into a social world of his past, bringing with him the material benefits afforded by his labour yet without the time constraints such labour had imposed.

Often the logical conclusion to joking as anxiety relief or an expression of social identity is the dismissal of the agentive value of such jokes with refrains like ‘it’s just a coping mechanism’, ‘it’s escapism’ or ‘he’s just showing off’. But, as Michael Taussig puts it, ‘any explanation that uses function … tells us next to nothing about the metaphors and motifs that the cultures have elaborated in response to their new social condition’ (Taussig 1980, 15). Without denying the social and psychological functions of these jokes, I want to take seriously the motifs of alternative futures used by my interlocutors, by challenging our ‘common sense’ approach to time. Billig points out how Bergson’s idea of duration in time can be used to critique conventional theories of humour, which implicitly rely on a belief in a sudden change in ‘time’ during the joke, without being able to adequately account for what this might mean or when and how this might occur (Billig 2005, 109). As Billig puts it: ‘we imagine, even experience, a sudden disjunction in time. But each moment shades imperceptibly into the next’ (Billig 2005).

Agency in a quake in time

Bergson (1988) was the first to conceptualize time qualitatively, as events co-existing in a continuous multiplicity, rather than being understood spatially, like beads following each other on a string. This conceptualization of time as durational multiplicity was developed by Gilles Deleuze who claimed that past and future were dimensions of the living present, synthesized in retention and anticipation, rejecting our commonplace understanding of time as linear with the static present preceded by the past and followed by the future (Deleuze 1991, 1994). Deleuze set out his theory of time into a structure of three syntheses of which the third is the most relevant for our analysis of these jokes about imagined futures. In this third synthesis of time, Deleuze appeals to a cut or ‘caesura’ in time, encapsulated in Hamlet’s appeal to a ‘time out of joint’ (Deleuze 1994, 88). This cut brings a series of pasts, presents and future becomings together. Voss describes it thus: ‘the irrational cut indicates an intensive depth, an outside or virtual event, which breaks with the empirical continuation of space and time’ (Voss 2013, 212). These jokes become these cuts, or quakes in time if we are to follow Meerab’s metaphor, allowing for a break from the respect of linear time which holds my interlocutors in undesired jobs, spaces and futures. These structures are what ‘one leaves behind in order to “become”, that is, to create something new’ (Deleuze 1995, 171). In the example of Muhammad joking about returning to Pakistan, this collapsing of the past, present and future into one moment of fantasy is acute, since, in conventional terms, Muhammad’s past lies in Pakistan and, like most of my interlocutors, he envisaged a return to Pakistan at some point in the future. The fantasy alters the conventional temporalities of these pasts and futures into something totally non-linear in the tension of the joke, where past and future cannot be extricated from a present which flees the empirical.

Perhaps the most extreme example of the dissipation of the logics of chronological time in Deleuzian becoming was Meerab’s post-earthquake imaginings. The first step in Meerab’s joke, of the collapse of the shelter in the event of an earthquake, was well within the bounds of socially sanctioned chronology. Yet from that point on, there was no logical explanation for how those buildings within our eyeline might have become countries, nor did Meerab feel the need to create any new spatial or temporal logic to make meaning. The natural catastrophe to bring about the destruction of the shelter, the transformation of buildings into countries and the sudden easy movement for shelter residents to these countries came together in potentiality, leaving behind meaningful steps from past to present to future. Becoming, for Deleuze ‘divides itself infinitely in past and future and always eludes the present’ (Deleuze 1990, 5). The ‘common sense’ present of my interaction with Meerab involved the structural integrity of the shelter, the known difficulties of his access to other European countries and the new possibility of an imminent earthquake, all of which were somehow eluded and held in tension in the created world of the joke. We had together stepped away from the bounds of the living present and into a world where there was no clear sense of direction in either the movement of time or space. Meerab had pulled us away from the linear time of lived experience and into the creative, non-linear time of his joke.

Understood in this way, we can see modalities of agency arise at two levels. There is firstly agency in the decision to perform the joke. According to Butler’s theory of performativity and subjectivity (Butler 1993, 1997, 1999), recognition is required in order to become a subject and recognition itself requires gestures and acts related to a social norm. The ritualization of such performed norms creates an idea of an essential identity but there are pauses between rituals when the practice of agency through subversion is possible. Butler explores these subversions in the context of gender (2004) but her findings can also be applied to this setting:

if I have no desire to be recognized within a certain set of norms, then it follows that my sense of survival depends upon escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred … if I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. (Butler 2004, 3)

Whilst the expected performance or norm in the un-chosen social world of my interlocutors is to deny the possibility of a future, the joke provides a subversion of this expectation by imagining and verbalising a positive future. Such subversive structures dispute claims to ‘naturalness and originality’ (Butler 1993, 125). Clare, however, contests that Butler’s formulation of agency fails to account for temporalities and that ‘agency emerges in the process of becoming, not in the mysterious moments between beings’ (Clare 2009, 59).

This leads us to our second and more radical modality of agency, as a Deleuzian ‘becoming’ which emerges through a denial of the linearity of time which traps these young men in the situation of slow violence. The joke-teller, with his creative ability to obliterate the chronology of time in that moment, becomes the King of Greece, a person who can move so easily between countries that he only needs to decide which one or the young man who is totally at ease in his village, without the pressure to work long hours in Europe and send money back home. Through humour and its ‘quaking’ of time, the creativity of Irtaza, Muhammad and Meerab liberate the future from its present impossibility. In the ‘quake’ of the joke, these young men free themselves from external agents and their timelines, whether that be the shelter with its bureaucratic rhythms, or the labour market with its denial of ‘timepass’. They, thus, become free from the structures which inhibit their ability to imagine a positive, desirable and different future.

Conclusion

Through a consideration of the structural constraints in the lives of these young men, the conventional functions of jokes and an analysis of what happens to constructions of time in these instances of humour, I have shown how temporal agency can emerge through humorous fantasies about the future. Without denying the functional and social role of these jokes, the Deleuzian approach to time allows us to attend more fruitfully to the emergent tensions and temporal complexities in these instances of humour. In heralding the agency and creativity of these young men, I do not suggest that my interlocutors overcame all of the limits of slow violence. Such forms of becoming were only possible in the quakes made possible within the world of the joke, which cut it away from constraining labour patterns, spatial marginalization and temporal relegation. This means that it was a form of lateral agency, defined by Berlant as ‘inhabiting agency differently in small vacations from the will itself’ (Berlant 2007, 779). Whilst Krishnan (2015) employs this concept to explain the telling of rape jokes by women in Chennai’s hostels as opportunities for a pause in their projects of predictable, middle class life, I suggest that these jokes around the future allow for a freedom from the task of contending with pervasive structural inequities. This means that the modalities of agency which emerge through these jokes exist alongside the denials of agency we have seen when these young men are asked to seriously contemplate their futures; they allow for temporary ‘vacations from the will’ (Berlant 2007, 779) rather than sustained, revolutionary resistance. Berlant aptly describes these modalities of agency thus: ‘of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality; inconsistency without shattering; embodying alongside embodiment’ (Berlant 2007, 759).

The aim of this study was idiographic and my hope has been to challenge the discursive framing of unaccompanied minors as helpless victims, contribute to an understanding of the ways in which agency might be exercised in cases of acute structural inequity, and to question the constraints on our ability to see agency due to our tendency to think of time as linear, spatialized and progressive. As Pandian (2012) puts it: ‘time seemed to be unfolding as an orchestration of distant forces and flows, but people here were still actively engaging these powerful vectors of influence and consequence’ (Pandian 2012, 553) and, to go yet further, upturning these vectors of consequence through the temporal agency of laughter and jokes. My focus on temporalities in the lives of my interlocutors opens up questions about how the spatial and the temporal are intertwined and intersect as well as how approaches to the future might flex or be foreclosed in different contexts. May and Thrift (2001) remind us of the ‘unhelpful dualism moving around the foundational categories of Space and Time’ (May and Thrift 2001, 1) and, whilst this ethnography is grounded in the space of the shelter, further work could foreground space and movement to show how this is bound up with constructs of time and impinges on possibilities for agency. For example, the transformation of public spaces through cricket games and the incorporation of the imagined space of South Asia warrant further exploration. Comparisons and contrasts with humour and futuristic fantasies in different contexts, such as in the context of the Afrofuturist movement, could also be a fruitful way to tease out the way these agentive explorations of the future function as mechanisms for survival. Practices of humour amongst these young men also raise questions around masculinity, care and friendship, and the ways masculine accounts of power might be related to the sorts of jokes we have examined here. Whilst responses to such questions would require a longer study, this ethnography has tried to show that ‘critical voices and lines of flight are there, in the margins of power and knowledge, and our listening/reading/writing can pull them from the shadows cast by contemporary common sense’ (Biehl and Locke 2010, 335).

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Rachael Lindsay

Rachael Lindsay is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She holds an MSc. in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and is interested in the anthropology of childhood, temporality and South Asian migration. A longer version of this article won the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) Dissertation Prize 2020.