By Dalia Al-Dujaili
“We’re all so tired of the bullshit going on around the world. Comedy is a way you can send strong messages to people without them feeling bored” says Jalal Joinda, who arrived at the Moria refugee camp from Afghanistan six years ago. By teaching stand-up comedy to other refugees in Greece, he’s empowering them to use their voices to express something other than tragedy.
This year, Counterpoints Arts collaborated with two organisations in Athens and Lesbos, Greece, to facilitate stand-up comedy workshops aimed at refugees and asylum seekers, but open to everyone. The Athens Comics Library organised the Greek capital’s programme of workshops, with producers Vasileia Vaxevani, Lida Tsene and Dina Ntziora. Whereas in Lesbos, Nepantla Border Cultures, headed by Miguel Selvelli, organised the island’s programme in the capital Mytilene. The workshops aimed to encourage joyful storytelling, alongside interaction with the local community in both Mytilene and Athens, practising English or Greek, and cross-community engagement.
Refugee Week was held in Greece this year for the first time, concurrent with the UK’s programme, organised by Counterpoints Arts from the 20th-26th June. In Athens and Lesbos, as well as other islands in Greece, arts events were celebrating the various forms of storytelling. In Lesbos, seven amateur comedians – a mix of refugees, migrants, volunteers on the island and NGO workers – took part in one workshop a day with Joinda for a week in June, culminating in a final gig at Mosaik Support Centre. “Refugees, they’re trouble makers,” begins Salim Nabi through the mic. “Take the NGO Refugee 4 Refugees. It makes you think… Why is it written like that? Well, they’re saying if you let one refugee in, suddenly, they become four refugees.” Nabi, once an Afghani refugee and now a Canadian resident, is one of the Lesbos workshop participants and he performs for his audience at the finale of the week-long series of workshops.
These workshops were directly inspired by Counterpoints’ No Direction Home comedy collective, who have had many successful UK workshops, tours and gigs. The most recent being the show at Southbank Centre which rounded up Refugee Week 2022, headlined by Fatiha El-Ghorri and Athena Kugblenu, and hosted by Ola Labib. Award-winning British comedian Tom Parry, who has helped deliver the No Direction Home programme since its inception in 2018, was brought on to mentor facilitators in Athens and Lesvos in teaching stand up comedy through a series of Zoom sessions in April and May. Parry led facilitators and guest participants alike through exercises such as explaining what we had for breakfast and, vitally, why we had it. It’s the ‘why’ that makes the story interesting Parry instructs, and as he often reminds us, “you don’t need to be funny, you just have to be interesting”.
Joinda echoes that “people think if you want to make others laugh, you need to know a lot of jokes already. But when you’re doing standup, you can put your own stories in”, something especially beneficial for refugees, says Joinda, previously a radio show host and popular media personality in Afghanistan, who fled the country in 2016 with his family following political hostility. The workshops in Lesvos ran for a week straight at Mosaik, culminating in a gig on Friday of seven comedians – a mix of refugees, migrants, volunteers on the island and NGO workers.
The significance of hosting the workshops on Lesbos is paramount. The island was formerly home to the Moria refugee camp, one of the largest in Europe, which burnt down in 2019. The island saw its population grow by 20,000 refugees, most of whom have now left for neighbouring countries. The sharp rise in the migrant population created both hostility towards, and increased empathy for, migrant communities on the island. Lesbos remains a hub for those working within migration sectors, and subsequently, a hub for migrant-oriented arts. But the image of refugees as either “trouble-makers” or “sob stories”, as Vaxevani says, still hangs heavy over migrants on the island and in Greece more generally. And this is not the only time in history that the island has acted as a passage for migrants; this year signifies the centenary of the Asia Minor disaster, which saw the end of the 3,000 year Hellenic presence in Asia Minor. Around 1.65 million orthodox refugees left for Greece and beyond.
Across the sea in Athens, the same workshops were running once a week for several weeks at Baytna Hub – a migrant-friendly daycare in a city with a markedly present migrant population. The workshops here are led by producer Vaxevani herself, who “could tell it was a healing part of some of the hardships [the migrants] been through”, because by using comedy, migrants were made to feel like they “have interesting stories to tell”, Vaxevani explains. Although two of the four Athens comedians – Arash and Majid – were young Afghani migrants, this year’s Refugee Week theme ‘Healing’ wasn’t “just for refugee communities”, Ntziora claims. The artists with migrant backgrounds were “desperate to express themselves in creative ways,” the producer says, so Ntziora insists that Refugee Week was not a “solidarity” festival, but a community arts festival. By involving migrants as organisers themselves, she hopes the festival will have created a two-way, collaborative storytelling events series, removing the one-way nature of previous migrant-oriented programmes in Greece.
Comedy in this instance forges a common ground between communities who, though have different lived experiences, are able to bond over the humour in the mundane everyday. Majid tells jokes about his annoying cousin with a crazy pet bird, and Arash compares his guitars to his first girlfriends. Arash, who also arrived to Greece in 2016, recalls that since participating in the online classes with Tom Parry, a “great experience” for him, he learnt what a ‘punchline’ is and where in the joke it lies. “Majid told us very openly that this is the first time somebody has asked him to tell a story about his life [in Afghanistan]” Vaxevani shares. “The conversation is always, ‘Oh, that poor immigrant or refugee, poor Afghan, poor Syrian’”, argues Vaxevani, but these amateur comedians are “real people, they have interesting stories, they’ve had whole, funny lives!” she continues.
If Nish Kumar, Romesh Ranganathan, Michaela Coel or Ramy Youssef’s successes are anything to go by, the landscape of comedy today is anything but your traditional pale, male, stale lineup. Sindhu Vee, Fatima El-Ghorri, Jenan Younis and Shappi Khorsandi are just a few more talents redefining what it means and looks like to be a stand-up comedian.
In the arts, the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is often met with a reserve and a fear of ‘siding’ oneself within the discourse. But in Greece, the No Direction Home comedy workshops hope to offer a new lens with which to view migrant communities and break down the conservatism surrounding the discourse.
Stay up to date on the No Direction Home UK gigs here.
