Gift-giving as Exilic Baggage


I always think about what I am going to bring back to people when I leave the country, which for me is Greece, and find
myself spending long minutes mulling over the duty-free cigarillos in modish packets of trendy colors in the Gatwick
airport. There are also the butter biscuits in round pastel tins, hard to come by, or not available in Athens, where I’ve
been living. For my boyfriend, who loves whiskey, I mull over the ads of whiskies cured in cherry casks as the polite
young man at the till directs me to brands with a smoky after-taste, or a bourbon tang. I wonder what this visceral
need to bring a gift (but not just any gift) to friends and relatives means to me as I brave the shame of being looked
upon as provincial, an out-of-towner crudely consuming everything hard to come by in their own culture.

I am in Edinburgh to teach a summer course and find myself walking up and down South Clark street thinking whiskey,
jams, books from Blackwell’s, instead of student papers, handouts, and assignments. Ian Rankin’s newest novel for my
mother, a skirt from the corner Indian shop for my daughter, something from the line-up of whiskies for my guy,
though this will be harder to bring back since there is now a 20 pound weight limit and thanks to the newest terrorist
bomb invention we can no longer carry on liquids. I sit listening with the students and other tutors to lecturers in their
shorts or jeans and T-shirts (one eating a carrot through a talk on Beckett), who flamboyantly or not-so-flamboyantly,
lead us down labyrinths of ideas; the talk on Alasdair Gray’s LANARK especially seductive, full of alinear Blakeian
paradoxes, phrases like “I started making maps when I was small showing place, resources, where the enemy and
where love lay. I did not know time adds to land.” Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road expecting to be led home, I
follow these talks on lapsed ideals of failed romanticism, the catastrophe of European modernity, Paul Muldoon’s
doubleness of historical moments, and keep scribbling notes of what I’d like to buy. I hear someone say we are now
living the moment of the postmodern, at a crossroad between desire and the self’s many-splintered presences.  

One of the self’s many-splintered presences is me absurdly refusing to spend 2 pounds to get my laundry done (hand
washing underwear and thin tops in the dorm sink, then hanging them discreetly from the window ledge). I use the
saved pounds to mail out the Rankin novel to my mother, and add it to my drinking tab as I sit with other tutors and
students having a pint in the bar at Pollack Halls. Yet each day, after tutorials and seminars, I go back to the room and
think of what small things I am going to bring back to whom, what sale items I’ll afford for myself. My colleagues all live
in the city, they go back to their own washing machines, and bedrooms. It occurs to me that this gift-giving obsession
has something to do with not being in familiar surroundings, a need to bridge the chill of finding oneself, splintered or
not, without context, in a room I consciously domesticate: buy soap, a nail file, scissors to cut the price tags off the
GAP baby clothes I just bought for my godson. I hear the sound of gulls through the open window; see the blue span
of Scottish sky, the air feels and smells like December in Greece. Here, mid-August, the stores are already displaying
‘Back-to-School’ racks of shoes and clothing. I go downstairs to buy a phone card from the reception desk. Today’s
lecture was on the post-modern condition: “Caffeine-free diet coke” says the lecturer “is the perfect symbol of post-
modernity, it has nothing in it of its original essence.” This absence of original essence threatens disaporic subjects; far
flung immigrants send packages home from across continents, boxes of medicine, clothing, canned foods, to let those
they’ve left know they are still there, connected, though oceans and countries apart.  

I’ve come to Edinburgh for a month, though it’s my third year working in the summer program, and though I’ll be going
back to Greece shortly, I feel this same need to reinforce contact with friends I hardly see when I’m in Athens. Yet as
the lecturer points out, contact is suddenly more available to us, even if only in virtual forms; we carry our cell phones,
blackberries, check or send emails, our lives dependent on these communications.

At Kay’s Bar on India Street, Allyson, Tom, Raj and I meet up for drinks. We haven’t seen each other for a year, and in
Raj’s case it’s been two since we all worked in the program that first summer. A grainy black and white photograph
hangs above one of the tables and shows the tiny building that’s now the bar; some decades ago it was a liquor
warehouse. Everything in the photograph looks depressed, and the black and white tones only add to the gritty look of
the streets and buildings. Now India Street is expensive; Allyson and Tom who came to Edinburgh from Arizona talk
about their luck at getting the apartment when they did. Edinburgh has become pricy; banks and other multinational
companies have set up headquarters on George and Princes streets. Raj came back from India to take a part time job
at the University. Both he and Allyson did their doctorates in the English department, and have made Edinburgh their
home. I bring them pistachios and Greek olives from Athens.

As the days pass, my loneliness takes on the sounds around me, of the American high school theater groups for
example, who have come for the Edinburgh fringe festival, filling up the cafeteria and bar area, and spreading through
the dormitories. Raj and Allyson treat their occasional meals in the cafeteria, and visits to the dorms, like an outing. Like
me they’ve come for the program, but unlike me they go back to lives in close proximity to this one; I am guessing they
are more familiar with all that’s happening in the city. Allyson says her young daughter has started to talk with a Scots
accent, “not green Mum, grrreeen,” she insists, and Allyson laughs, imitating her. One of the younger tutors is from
Aberdeen, makes a joke about the Pope drinking whiskey every night, “It’s why they carry him on a seat everywhere.”
Raj explains India’s allure for corporations, says it’s becoming gradually controlled by multinational companies because
the culture teaches “extreme competence and extreme obedience.” I say that’s happening everywhere. He says the case
in India is particular, “You have a post-colonial educational system that teaches competence and a caste system that
teaches obedience, so you’ve got exactly what corporations are after.” Raj adds, ‘They’re not going to be producing
any Chomskys or Gandhis with that combination.”

I hate the cafeteria food except for the boiled mushrooms and baked tomatoes at breakfast. My body’s in shock from
the sudden onslaught of fat, sausages and cheese-smothered dishes of cauliflower and broccoli; but the weather is cool
and we all walk to the morning lectures; it takes anywhere from twelve to fifteen minutes to get to the David Hume
Tower from Pollock Halls, so I think our bodies must need the extra energy. I always pass Peckhams and get a coffee. It’
s a gourmet shop with the perfect dose of caffeine in their lattes. I stare at rows of luscious jams, the organic ones on
the top shelf, Cherry drinks on another, and spices like fresh coriander impossible to find in Athens for sale near the
counter. I think of all that I enjoy in Edinburgh like scones and Strongbow cider, how we drink pints of it with Arthur’s
Seat looming above us in the near distance when we sit on the terrace of the Centro bar; the aquamarine of the
Scottish hills as intoxicating as the drinks in those last-of-the-white-nights evenings. In Greece Strongbow cider comes
bottled in one of the supermarkets, but never has the same effect. In Athens it’s “just” exotic, special for its having
traveled. In Scotland I appreciate the cider completely, the way I might enjoy ouzo in the midst of a summer island
afternoon.

The white nights of Scottish whiskies or the Greek island ouzos have geographical locations that inspire specific desires.
There are beautiful hand-carved rings a woman sells in a stall outside the museum on Princes Street; she tells me she
makes them herself when she’s in Africa. I then find myself going into a BOOTS pharmacy, the banality of toiletries
intrigue me in ways they never do when I’m in Athens – the pumice stone comes in a plastic zip lock bag I could use for
carrying change, needles or safety pins. Then I go to the Indian shop again where I pick up a carved wooden hair clip for
one of my daughter’s friends; there are necklaces woven out of dyed yarns. One is a deep burgundy, the color of nail
polish, the #17 I happily found in BOOTS. I was looking for a bottle of the same High Gloss color I bought last year.

                                                                     ~~~

It is the end of the program, and one of the more mature students, a woman from Spain who came on a scholarship,
reads her poem at the farewell party. She speaks of her gratitude, rhymes the lines, and refers to Edwin Morgan’s
poetry, someone she had never heard of until she came to Edinburgh. She talks of how the city embraced her, taught
her that it was never too late to live her life for herself. The poem ends with her making her way back to Spain, the life
that did not allow her to feel like she was in fact living it, but here, she says, she learned how to own it.
I will go back too, and leave Raj and Allyson behind, the clutch of students I’ve become familiar with as we sat through
our tutorials under Arthur’s Seat, and talked of their poems and stories. Sweet Molly from Ohio who calls herself a
country girl but isn’t, who told me about the cute rich guy who came to visit one of the other students in the program,
who could afford to fly over from the States for his friend’s birthday. And when the girls, including Molly, asked the
friend why he had not offered to buy them a round of drinks, he said “because none of you are pretty enough.” I made
a face, murmuring “What a prick.” Molly said she didn’t see the point in saying anything, and left. Molly who tells me she’
s going to go on to the highlands on her own, and spend a week there before heading back to Ohio. Then there’s Jane.
There’s always a Jane. No matter what you do or say, the Janes never feel you have given enough; those I’ve met are
usually mature, demanding, and bravely idiosyncratic. Last year’s Jane went religiously to the gym early every morning;
she was determined to write her novel about a girl of color who comes to work as a servant: she gets lost at the
Paddington station, survives her despair, and finally, over a lifetime, achieves a kind of survival. The voice was wooden
and forced, “with too much of an agenda” I’d explained. This year’s Jane is a teacher from somewhere in the American
south who announced several times to the class that she’d earned her doctorate, that her husband was, or is, the
smartest person she has ever known. She periodically slipped in pages of work-in-progress for me to make comments
on though I explained everyone had a page limit, and everyone had to have a chance to read their work to the class.
Sometimes the tension was palpable as I tried to coax the shyer students, and tame the fiercer ones. I could feel the
odd guilt-by-association for a few of my students’ roads not taken; the Janes that made the Mollys so refreshing. Molly
tells me how much she loves Shakespeare. She tells me her parents are farmers in Ohio, talks about the state university
she attends, its reputation for being a party place, and how she transferred because there wasn’t much to do on
weekends besides party and get drunk. Now she goes to the university’s branch in Columbus. She initially applied to go
to China, but the study abroad program was cancelled.

We have come together from so many different corners. I came, initially, because I needed the work, plus it was an
opportunity to see Edinburgh during the summer festival and meet new people. Allyson, Tom, Raj, Sophie (who I met
this year). Yet I’m the only one of this year’s tutors leaving the city I came to visit. As I pack, I keeping thinking I have
to keep under the twenty-pound weight limit that Easy Jet is so strict about. I start thinking of what I’m going to leave
behind, the umbrella I bought for two pounds? The tube of body scrub, a face lotion in a heavy glass jar? I’m trimming
tiny grams. It’s the books, my boyfriend’s whiskey (finally got the cherry-cask brand), GAP clothes on sale (two pairs of
pants and three shirts, plus some baby clothes). Sometime after midnight I’m satisfied I’ve cleared the small dorm
room, managed to fit in the gifts, put several of the books in my carry-on.

                                                                     ~~~

The airport is crowded. Salesmen and women are hawking perfumes, 3 for 15 pounds, PIMS and wines and Malt
whiskies are on display. I’m crestfallen to see the whiskey I bought my boyfriend is 39.77 pounds at the airport; I’d paid
52 on Princes Street. Books. Biscuits. Celebrities’ lives plastered in camera-brushed perfection over the glossies. The
students were mumbling about their baggage weight last night at the farewell party, wondering if they had managed to
put all their things into their one bag. The sun is out today, not always a given in Scotland, and in the airport shuttle
bus I listen to an American couple; the woman repeating, “That was exciting,” “That was so exciting, next year we’ll see
more.” Her husband, or partner, stayed strangely non-responsive.  I am anxious about my possible overweight, and
stare at rows of brick buildings, the closed pubs and cafés.  I have kept 15 pounds in cash, hoping it will cover the extra
weight in luggage.

At the Easy Jet counter I’m told I’m 4 pounds over the allowance, “That will be 24 pounds for the overweight baggage”
says the woman. I tell the Easy Jet employee I think that’s expensive, 5 pounds per pound. She nods, “if you have any
room in your carryon…” I tell her I already have 6 books in my carryon. “It’s the terms you’ve agreed to,” she says, not
unfriendly. I nod, ask if I’ll have to pay again at Gatwick. She says “Yes” since I have to check-in again. I say last year,
coming back from the same program in Edinburgh, the gentleman at the counter at Gatwick let me know that he wasn’t
going charge me since I had already paid out of Edinburgh. She gives me a receipt for the 24 pounds.

I get a text message from Maria, one of the students in the program and a friend, who is returning to Athens on
another flight. She says she needs an extra suitcase. Lufthansa won’t let her on with the overweight of the one
suitcase she has squeezed 3 bottles of whiskey into, 12 paperbacks, some clothes she bought, and 3 Plexiglas Warhol
prints she bought from the Warhol exhibit. I remember her charging the bottles on her credit card as I was considering
which whiskey to finally buy. She was happily imagining her whiskey-connoisseur friends enjoying the rare Scottish
malts in Athens, far from the distilleries that produced them. The next text message says no shops sell suitcases at the
Edinburgh airport; Maria’s stuffed the bottles into her carryon bag and checked that in, on top of paying 70 pounds in
overweight baggage. She adds, “They’ll be totally crushed. Fuck them.” I send a message that makes no sense,
something about the airlines and corporations taking advantage of everyone’s paranoia; I am hoping she hasn’t gone
through the 70 pounds on her credit card, and the 70 pounds in overweight luggage, for nothing.

I keep passing duty-free shops selling all kinds of malts, jams, biscuits. Accessorize still has their bathing suits out
despite the Back-to-school ads; everything’s nicely displayed, aimed at attracting the casual shopper. I almost succumb
to buying another malt whiskey advertised for its “perfect match” with cigars. Then realize there’s no physical way I’m
going to squeeze in, or force, a whiskey bottle amidst the 6 paperbacks in my carryon. I think of Claire Colebrook’s
lecture, her reference to rampant consumerism as an act of mastering what’s mastering us: our appetites directed to
the “so much of it” consumed despite the debt, and the paradoxical fact of owning the position of owing, of fulfilling
(affirming?) those manufactured desires and appetites. “Did You Know You Can Fly with Everything You Buy?” an
anonymous speaker announces over the airport PA system. Colebrook’s theorizing had found its context. I was furious,
thinking of Maria’s whiskey bottles in their cardboard cylinder boxes shattered under the weight of all the other bags full
of everything we couldn’t fly with, other people’s bottles and gifts and possessions.  Then the patronizing addition to
the ad, as if the ad experts had predicted the reaction of consumers like me: “You Can Buy As Much As You Like And
We’ll Look After It Till You Come Back.” I remembered the Sri Lankan family I saw at Kennedy airport after a Christmas
visit to the States; the huge sacks of duck-taped belongings, stacked precariously on top of each other. They were
being deported with no option for returning. They stood shell shocked, a group of 6 or 8 people, 2 elderly women and 3
young children, speechless, their elbows slumped over the counter as one of the men in the group spoke to an airline
teller in low modulated sentences. It was upsetting to watch, the family with their obviously too-quickly packed things,
too poor or ill-prepared to put their belongings into bags that would protect them.

On the flight to Gatwick, for that hour or so, I’m thinking of what kind of luck I’m going to have with the Easy Jet teller
there. My credit card is already burdened and it’s not going to be until the end of September before I see another
paycheck. At Gatwick I take my bags to Departures, find a red-haired woman at a counter and ask when the Easy Jet
check-in for the flight to Athens will start. She says I can check-in since its 2 hours before flight time. I notice the
freckles sprinkled around her nose and cheeks like powered cinnamon, her somewhat bland expression when I give her
my ticket with the 24 pounds receipt for the overweight. After I put the bag on the scale, she says matter-of-factly,
“You’re overweight.” I tell her I know, and try to sound neutral.

“I was told that perhaps the overweight charge might be waived since I just paid it in Edinburgh.” She seems to pause,
looking at the receipt. “There was a gentleman last year,” I continue, that didn’t make me pay a second time…I’ve just
come from the book festival in Edinburgh, and I’m a teacher…I always seem to come back with too many books.” She
takes her time, then nods, says she’ll make a call to her manager. Now I’m tense. The manager of course says I have to
pay. Another 24 pounds, a total of 48 pounds for my overweight gifts, not quite Maria’s 70, but a debt I didn’t expect
to have. I feel myself getting angry; feel like the cinnamon-freckled woman is being deliberately indifferent. I tell her she
might have been more understanding, since “48 pounds is obviously a lot of money for anyone traveling on a budget
airline.” I begin to cry. She becomes defensive, says she did me a favor by calling her manager, and did I want her to
put her job on the line? I answer that calling her manager was stupid. After all did she know any managers who did
anything but follow policy when consulted by their staff on a policy issue, let alone being asked this question over the
phone?  “Are you suggesting that we don’t follow our policies?” Her cinnamon freckles had spread into an even blush
over her nose and cheeks.

“I’m suggesting you don’t have any ability to take initiative when policy may not make all the sense in the world…and if it
wasn’t for all the damn paranoia…” I didn’t get any further because her mouth clamped into a clearly pissed-off look as
she announced she was calling her manager to report a passenger harassing her. I pulled off my heavy 24 pound bag
from the scale, and began to roll it quickly away, my heart pounding, thinking faster than I was walking that I had made
a mess, that I was now going to be arrested by some airport security officer who would be following every policy in the
manual. I realized I was looking for an ATM, at least to have the cash handy if there was still a chance to pay the charge
and check-in for my flight.  I am terrified the cinnamon-freckled teller has me tagged and now I won’t be allowed to
check-in. I eventually walk the whole floor, make my way back to another Easy Jet check-in line, when I realize I have to
hurry because time’s running out. There’s a father and daughter in front of me comfortably chatting. I find myself
smiling, desperate to be considered “Like anyone else”; my eye catches a security guard at the desk of the check-in
desk I’m in line for. He’s wearing one of those fluorescent orange jackets, has a word with the teller who nods and (I’m
almost positive) looks my way. He gives the guard a commiserating smile. I keep listening to the father-daughter
conversation in front of me; they’re discussing someone who is waiting for them, and I feel like a prisoner who yearns
to be a part of the banalities of ordinary life again as they listen to someone’s dinner plans. I almost can’t stand the
tension. Perhaps the teller has been given instructions not to check me in from the management or will require that I
report to someone.

I’m finally standing at the counter, hand over my ticket and passport, half expect the teller to apologetically tell me I will
have to take my ticket and passport to so and so. “I’m a bit overweight” I begin cautiously. He smiles and nods, looks
tired. Checks the scale and says “4 pounds overweight.” I ask if I can pay in cash; he nods again and says I’ll have to
go across the room to another desk to pay the overweight, but won’t have to wait in line again to get my ticket.  “It
gets expensive,” I say.

He nods again, says “Yes, I know,” hesitates, looks me in the eye and adds, “I’m being monitored.” I vaguely nod,
suddenly grateful for the empathy that breaks through the pat answers, cross the room to the payment desk, and see
the daughter of the father-daughter couple in line too. The Easy Jet woman behind the desk is chatting with an elderly
couple; the woman looks travel-weary and resigned. The Easy Jet employee seems to be taking her time. I’m getting
anxious about making the flight. There is also the line to get through at security where we take off our shoes, declare
we aren’t carrying anything dangerous, have our bags opened and rummaged through, have any liquids confiscated.

The daughter of the father-daughter couple looks at me and smiles, “You’re overweight too?” I nod, tell her 4 pounds.
She says they’re 2 pounds over. I tell her this is the second time this morning I’m paying, say I’d just paid 24 pounds
out of Edinburgh a couple of hours ago. She looks genuinely surprised. “That’s so unfair!” she blurts; I shake my head
relieved to hear the indignation, and remember Sophie’s “Enforced emotional cruelty.” I wrote down the phrase during
our chat at the book festival in Charlotte Square. Sophie talked of the requirements in schools now, of the fact that
teachers had to get permission from parents or guardians for everything. The saddest part of it was when young kids
cried in school and needed comforting, but could not be properly comforted because teachers were not allowed to touch
them. I find this difficult to believe as I come from a culture where people are always pushed against one another in
crowded spaces, where the idea of privacy is almost nonexistent; in Athens we are always bodies touching or almost
touching. Sophie and I compare our separate worlds. Sophie says it would be unheard of in Scotland for a public service
administrator to inquire into anything other than the question at hand, the idea of asking for background information
just for the sake of asking, to get to know someone more personally, would be considered inappropriate.

“The problem in the UK” she says, “is that everyone’s worried about being legally vulnerable…”

“For helping out a kid?”

Sophie is describing a scene in a school playground, a child who has scraped her knees. “The teacher will take her to the
infirmary or the office, ask her to sit in a chair and be patient, keep the door open, and call the parent.”

“No hug?”

Sophie half smiles, “You can’t do anything before you call the parent or guardian. You can’t even put your arm around
the child.” Sophie shakes her head again, “Everything’s become potential abuse. Now I’m shaking my head.
“And people wonder where all the violence comes from…”

“It will take someone counter-suing for enforced emotional cruelty” Sophie says. I hand over the money for the
overweight baggage. The teller thanks me for having the exact change. I run back to the other side to get my ticket
thinking of the gentleman at the counter last year who had waived the second payment, that sweet, sweet man I
thought, wherever you are, bless you.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou

Books by Adrianne Kalfopoulou