“Immigrant’s lament”. The title already predisposes a familiar scene: The man who lives in foreign lands and is nostalgic for his homeland and his people.

Based on this scene, we can include the song in the relevant category “songs of emigration”, in the historical-social phenomenon of past or recent periods of extensive migrations due to economic, political, or religious reasons, and specifically in fact, with reference to the Greeks of Southern Italy. Then, the song “Immigrant’s lament” would be a respective subjective expression of that particular condition.

And that to which the title predisposed us, is confirmed by the content of the song, with the swallow, which the immigrants asks about his family, the hours he sits before the sea, the answer he doesn't get, everything comes effortlessly to agree with what we suspected from the start.

And the song can even remind us as well, the non-immigrants, of some kind of separation, some kind of alienation, some kind of “emigration”, to “express”, "symbolically", something about us and to move us.

These are what the song tells us, obviously, clearly, and distinctly. Yet the song speaks in another voice too. Only this second voice is quiet and gets lost in the clang of the prevalent meanings. Hearing the second voice, this subtle whisper, requires the appropriate readiness and the right practise, as it remains away from that for which we are prepared.

The words “immigrant’s lament” quietly whisper to us something which no longer concerns the particular case of emigration but concerns us, our essence - that we ourselves, each moment, both in our home and in our travels, both with people familiar to us or strangers, we are immigrants, which means we are on the road. And each place we stay and reside are stations. From nowhere to nowhere. Then “homeland” would be the road of all our roads.

Greece is travelling …

For the well tempered hearing of the essential, “Immigrant’s lament” is a word for the human being in its innermost essence.

And precisely because now the song concerns the human being in its innermost essence, i.e. it is a primordial word for the human being, it’s never reduced to something else, which would be “symbolized” and “expressed” by it. As primordial word, the song simply says. And, by saying, it names.

The first stanza calls a swallow, a pretty swallow. It calls it by its name, and by calling it, it brings it closer, it renders it present. How does the first stanza call the swallow? The swallow is the, as it said, “migratory bird” par excellence - this is how man classifies it. The swallow speaks of emigration. This is not just an occasional travel. True emigration, where one moves away from every place, is death, the nowhere, from which our roads come and are directed to. For this reason, in ancient Greek images the soul that leaves is depicted in the form of swallow. This way, the swallow is related to the immigrant. For this reason, he, as an immigrant, asks first about its place, from where it comes and goes to, for the sea which brings it. The place of the swallow is unknown to the immigrant.

And this again, shouldn’t be perceived as incidental - that if he had more knowledge of ornithology he would know where the swallows of that region come from. The question of the immigrant, "where from?", remains certainly unanswered. This is characteristic of everything that comes and goes. Everything just comes, without why, is given and concerns us.

So perhaps already here the swallow gives us a first sign of the manner in which we are immigrants in our essence - we come and go, as the poet Odysseas Elytis somewhere writes, from elsewhere, from something which is not a city or a village or a neighborhood. The place of our true origin belongs to the Abaton.

But the weather is good - not because of high barometric pressure. The good weather is where something is well timed, like for example a swallow and its world, when it comes and arrives in a song. This swallow has found its good time, which is always a musical time, and only for this it’s pretty.

The second stanza also calls the swallow. Now it names its colors, the white on the chest, the black on the wings, the color of the sea on its back. Yet, this is not the description of the swallow. The colors of this swallow, as they are named, emerge one after the other and compose a unique symphony.

The swallow, the pretty swallow, has the color of the sea - after all it is this sea which brings it. How could it accomplish that, if the swallow itself had not, in its essence, since always received and appropriated a sea?

The swallow has also the white and the black. These are not colors. The Greek word for white is λευκόν which relates to the words λεύσσω (look), λύχνος (lamp), λοῦσσον (pith of the fir-tree), is the clearly distinctive, the bright, the glowing, therefore, in principle the one which allows for the existence of every color. Then the black belongs to Hades, (literally: the place depleted from any seeing). Also, black is not a color. It’s the one which prohibits the existence of every color.

White and black are not random. They designate the dimension in which we reside, and whose ends are set by life and death. This dimension - now we can say: this fate which defines us, the living and the dead, comes, in the song, in the figure of the swallow. Life moves with the wings of death. The swallow - our fate.

The immigrant doesn’t know where is the swallow coming from. "Where from?", he asks. The “Where from?” refers to something distant. And the distant, for the immigrant, is only one: his homeland - in the song, and in the hearing of its first voice, the mother, the father, the neighborhood who haven’t seen him in a long time. The immigrant asks the swallow about all of them. And he is disappointed because it doesn't say anything to him, and cannot say anything to him, not because it has nothing to say, it would have a lot, but it is a bird and has no speech, and this is why it cannot speak to him.

and if only you could speak…

No, the swallow has no speech, like the one which the immigrant understands. Does this mean that the swallow has no speech at all? It only means that the swallow doesn’t speak in a manner that the immigrant understands as speech. It doesn't belong to the community established by ordinary communication. The swallow is an Other. The swallow speaks, says so much, but in a manner that doesn’t answer people’s questions. It’s just not appropriate for the swallow to reply. The swallow has only the first word because it speaks with signs, and the signs tell, and at the same time hide.

The immigrant is certainly disappointed he didn’t get an answer. Yet, he doesn’t leave. He sits before the sea and always looks at it. He has given up on the swallow taking over his affairs. His sight of the swallow becomes this very song, and he sings to the swallow, and has finally abandoned his questions, as the song is now a conversation with the swallow itself. He notices it. He no longer sees it as a way to find out something that concerns him and his affairs.

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water.

The verses close the last two stanzas, and actually they are repeated each time. The focus has shifted to the swallow itself. Now the song is singing the swallow itself.

So, if for a moment we also stop and surrender ourselves to the swallow, to what it means, then maybe wouldn’t the swallow itself have something to tell us? Could it be that the "nothing" it says doesn't come just out of frustration, it isn't just annihilation of human expectation? Could it be that the "nothing" it says would mark the beginning of a speaking by the swallow itself?

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water.

Does the swallow speak, maybe a little, as it is appropriate for signals, but in stunning manner? Where this speech is not any sort of answer to the immigrant, doesn’t speak his language, doesn’t speak in another language, doesn’t even speak in any language?

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water

What if that speech was a call? Not in the manner people call each other. However, what if it were a call? That would call the immigrant to abandon all which he asks, to let go of the fixation to the distant which he seeks in vain to force in proximity, thus being left alone and disappointed?

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water

And what if that call was a maelstrom which, by calling, carries away the immigrant, the stranger who lives in foreign lands, to another estrangement, which would be more about the abandonment of everything considered “human” - homeland and foreign lands, loss and separation, mourning and nostalgia?

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water

And what if the swallow speaks indeed? Calls towards a very different relation with things? Where there would be no question and answer, desire and frustration, and their accompanying pain would have been truly overcome? Where there wouldn’t even be any “thoughts”?

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water

Just that. Could then the call be calling towards that other place, where man comes from? Could man, as a human being, be incomparably more like an immigrant than any immigrant could imagine? Since estrangement belongs to his fate more than anything?

Maybe then the swallow, in the musical eyes, is indeed something like - the soul of man? His essence, which he so often and persistently ignores? Could α forgotten conversation be established this way between the song of the Greeks of Southern Italy and the poet who writes that "the soul is a stranger on earth"?

you lean a little, you go down a little

you touch a little upon the water

Maybe here traces emerge to the truly common world, in which we reside before any “together” and before any “apart”, infinitely familiar and infinitely strangers to each other?

Translation: Maria Soupou, Psychotherapist