Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Italy will likely soon pass a law that offers incentives for
supermarkets, bars and restaurants to donate their unsold food rather
than throwing it out. Italy’s proposed law is in the same vein as a historic law passed in France in February that made it a crime for supermarkets to throw away food. Abiding by the law comes with some big benefits for Italian markets and restaurants.
I’ve noticed this revisionist Greek myth is common wherein Persephone loves Hades and eats the pomegranate seeds in order to evade her overbearing mother, and that’s all well and good. You know, sometimes I’m in the mood for it and sometimes I’m not. But hear this: as long as we’re doing this, why is no one wondering whether Aphrodite might really love Hephaestus?
Think about it. All the gods in their immortal splendor are lining up to marry her, doing everything in their power to impress her, the goddess of love and beauty, and she choses…that guy. A god in technical terms only, a social reject who’s ugly and malformed and um, no fun. Always slaving away in his workshop when everyone else is quaffing nectar and having their eternal beach party up on Mount Olympus. They can’t believe she’d give up all of them for that.
So, because the gods do not take rejection well (looking at you Apollo), eventually they start to say to each other, well, we all know Zeus made her do it anyway. He’s gotta feel guilty for throwing Hephaestus off Mount Olympus that one time. And it quickly becomes thatpoorgirl, stuck in that workshop full of sweat and dirt and cyclopses when she could have had one of us. Because of course they’ve got love all figured out; it’s entirely technical and dependent on who’s the most charming and good-looking and not at all variable and strange and notoriously unpredictable, right?
Meanwhile Ares, only the most arrogant and brainless of the crew, can’t take a hint and is still showing up wherever Aphrodite goes trying to hit on her, so eventually she and Hephaestus decide to rig up an elaborate mechanical trap for him, using her as bait. When all the gods have laughed at him for getting caught he huffily attempts to regain his dignity by telling them, whatever, guys, you want to know the truth, I was meeting her for an assignation. And they all kind of know he’s full of it but they just accept it as the unvarnished truth from thereon in, because they’d love to believe she’d cheat on Hephaestus with Ares. They’d love it. Come on, Aphrodite, get off your high horse and admit you’re just as shallow as the rest of us.
So they talk, but Aphrodite doesn’t really care about their collective jealousy because she dotes on her misshapen genius of a husband with his sooty hands and his sweaty brow who always takes her seriously and is always so hard at work inventing astonishing new things to make her happy, and she loves the volcano they live in with its internal pressures so conducive to the formation of precious stones and its passages lit with glowing lava that so gorgeously offsets her cheekbones, and all the cyclopses worship her because even with one eye apiece they’ve still got more depth perception than most men do where she’s concerned. True it is that as a couple the two develop a reputation for not getting out much, because all those Olympian parties bore them to death and they’d rather spend time with each other (poor Aphrodite, she’s such a vivacious young thing and her husband is so grasping and insecure that he won’t let her go out and have fun), but they do all right.
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Ok, ok, wait, but it doesn’t end there. Because Aphrodite features pretty heavily in the story of Eros and Psyche. She’s painted as the villain, her jealousy causing her to send her son to curse the girl, but that’s just not true. She knows what it’s like to be clamored over for your beauty, knows the lies that are spread, the way it sets you up as a target and discredits your mind. Aphrodite hears the mortals whisper that this human girl rivals her in beauty, and one day she gets around to seeing what the fuss is about.
She finds Psyche’s home all but besieged by suitors, but she notices the girl isn’t falling for their flattery, that she is still kind, no matter who she’s dealing with. She sees a bit of herself in this girl who aches to be spoken to, not at, and who wants most of all to be heard.
When she sends her son to the girl, she is less than truthful about her motivations. She knows if she tells him she hopes he will fall for this mortal girl it will make things awkward for him, that true love must be discovered on its own and cannot be forced. When he comes away from the encounter with her name on his lips, searching for excuses to talk to her again, Aphrodite whispers into the soothsayer’s ear to tell Psyche’s father that she is loved by a god. Frees her from the hoards of shallow admirers and gives her son the opportunity he needs to see her again.
When a year of late-night conversations fails to convince her son that it’s time to reveal himself to his beloved, she puts a bug in Psysche’s ear to ask for her sisters to visit, whispers in their ears to convince Psyche to take matters into her own hands, ensures the two can finally meet face to face. She is saddened when Eros flees, believing Psyche had betrayed him.
The four tasks Psyche must overcome to be reunited with her son aren’t laid forth out of spite, but rather to help the girl find herself. Aphrodite knows this girl hasn’t had a choice in the path her life has taken up until this point. Knows that everything was in the hands of her father, and of Aphrodite herself. She wants to make sure Psyche means it, wants Psyche to know what she’s getting into when dealing with the Olympians. Wants, most of all, for Psyche to question her own motivations, fully evaluate the situation, and then make her own choice.
Her frustration at the Olympians aiding the girl isn’t because she hates being tricked. No, she wants Psyche to break out of her shell, wants her to have the option to decide this isn’t worth it and walk away.
When the final task ends in Psyche laying unconscious on the roadway, Aphrodite searches the girl’s heart and knows her intentions are true. Knows she is ready to join the family. She kicks Eros out of the house to ensure he would find Psyche, to ensure he would come to his senses and forgive her, realize that he had been unfair to her and to ask her forgiveness in turn.
They say Aphrodite was sour about the whole ordeal until her granddaughter was born, but the truth was she hadn’t stopped smiling from the moment her son had first come home, whispering the girls name in reverence.
One day in 2010, the woman with the red fingernails received the first call. She was standing in her kitchen when her white cellphone rang. The display showed “00888” — the first five digits of an unknown number. When the woman answered, she was assaulted by shrieks. Four hundred and twenty-five Eritreans were drifting in the Mediterranean. The ship was leaking; water was creeping up the walls.
One of the passengers had the telephone number of Meron Estefanos and entered the 13 digits into a satellite cellphone, the one that people smugglers give refugees for emergencies. Estefanos’ telephone began to ring. It was a nightmare, she recalls. “This panic, the people screaming into the receiver: ‘We’re dying, our life is in your hands. Do something!’” Today, the 40-year old woman with the red fingernails is sitting on a plastic chair in her kitchen, the same place she received the call five years ago. “At that time I hardly knew how to handle the situation. First I called the Italian authorities. They told me: ‘Call Malta!’ I called up Malta. They told me: ‘Call Italy!’” Seven hours passed until the 425 people knew they would survive, she recounts. The Italian Coast Guard rescued them.
For Estefanos, it was the beginning of a long acquaintance with the ominous numerical sequence 00888, which indicates a call from a satellite mobile on the Mediterranean.
Since the incident in 2010, which was well-publicized in the Eritrean community, many of those who flee Eritrea make sure to carry with them one thing in particular: the 13-digit telephone number of Meron Estefanos.
Estefanos left Eritrea as a child, not as a refugee, but on a comfortable plane ride to Stockholm, where her father had found work. That was 28 years ago. However, torture, repression and poverty in her homeland produce an endless stream of refugees. The shrill echo of it resounds daily through her mobile phone in faraway Stockholm.
This year alone, she says, she has already received more than 50 calls from boats in the Mediterranean. In so doing, she has likely saved the lives of more than 16,000 Eritreans — a fact Estefanos doesn’t mention in the conversation. She is not interested in such calculations, she says.
“Meron, is it you? Help us, we’re drifting on the sea, the ship’s engine broke down!” “Go to the compass right away and pass on the co-ordinates.” “I can’t read the compass!” “Describe to me which numbers you see on it.” Meron Estefanos presses the stop button. It is one of many recordings of calls from the Mediterranean stored on her white cellphone.
The phone is lying on the table in her small kitchen. Every few minutes it vibrates: Al Jazeera from Qatar. A journalist from America. Then an Eritrean pastor from Switzerland. “Sorry, I have to take that call, it is because of IS,” Estefanos excuses herself and disappears to her balcony. ‘You stupid, stupid telephone’
Recently, the terrorist militia Islamic State kidnapped 87 Eritreans in Libya. Fourteen succeeded in freeing themselves. With the cellphone pressed to her ear, Estefanos is discussing with the pastor how they can bring the 14 refugees to safety. “What,” she asks when she returns to the kitchen, “would probably be happening in Western TV stations if the IS kidnapped 87 Swedes?” The question still hangs unanswered when her phone rings again. “You stupid, stupid telephone,” her six-year-old son recently hissed as it rang once again. He is right, admits the single mother (she also has a 14-year-old son). Her commitment to the refugees is hard on the family. “But, if I can save so many lives with only one call?”
Estefanos’s day job is with Radio Erena, a Paris-based station. Her kitchen in Stockholm serves as the studio: There she sits every Thursday at midday with a headset and a notebook for the program “Voices of Eritrean Refugees.” While Estefanos speaks into the microphone, 5,000 kilometres away thousands of people listen to their radios in Eritrea. They do it secretly, because the Eritrean regime is trying to prohibit Radio Erena broadcasts.
Eritrea — approximately half the size of the United Kingdom — is often dubbed “the North Korea of Africa.” The secretive country on the Horn of Africa, which gained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, is ruled by President Isaias Afwerki with “ruthless repression” and human rights violations “on a scope and scale seldom witnessed elsewhere,” as the UN concluded in its current report.
About 5,000 Eritreans are fleeing every month, despite knowing they can be shot to death on the border by their own army for treason. If they make it to neighbouring Sudan and further on to Libya, the next round of Russian roulette awaits them: the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. And here the circle closes with Estefanos and her white cellphone. But sometimes the circle closes earlier.
Around four years ago, news broke in the Western media that human smugglers were kidnapping people — mainly Eritreans — on their way to Europe, holding them in camps in the Sinai Desert in Egypt. The kidnappers were torturing the refugees to extort ransom money from their relatives. Estefanos negotiates with the people smugglers on the telephone, helps organize ransom money and consoles desperate relatives. Her power to convince on the telephone is her weapon. Often, Estefanos says, the horror stories take her breath way.
“In the torture camps in Sinai,” she explains, “the people smugglers used a particularly cruel technique. First they squeezed out the telephone number of the refugees’ families. Then they called them up to demand the ransom money. The deceitful thing about it: While they were on the phone, they were torturing the refugees so that their screams could be heard by their relatives on the other end of the line.”
She vows to haul to court every human trafficker who makes money this way. She collects evidence, records telephone calls and keeps lists of the ransom sums.
“If you kill a cat in Sweden, you end up in prison. Meanwhile I hear stories of refugees who are being tortured every hour. And the whole world is just watching.” This sentence was uttered by Estefanos in an award-wining 2013 Israeli documentary about the torture camps in Sinai. How many people smugglers has she brought to court since then? “None,” she says. “But the day of righteousness will come.”
Let’s all take a moment to appreciate how weirdly hot the current North American heads of state are. No matter who wins in November, this Axis of Fineness will be shattered.
