The Vanished by Marijam Didžgalvytė

Marijam's piece is taken from Lumpen 15: Migration and Class, available now: https://www.theclassworkproject.com/product-page/lumpen-15-migration

The Leftovers - an American TV series that ran from 2014 to 2017 and pretty much cleaned up at the awards seasons during those years - had a fantastical premise: 2 percent of the population suddenly vanished. One in every fifty people, gone. Some of the remaining weren’t as affected - what are the odds? - perhaps they knew someone at school who had disappeared. But Nora Durst (played by Carrie Coon, of The White Lotus fame) lost her entire family: her husband and two children. The show’s three seasons trace the grotesque, absurd, and often unhinged ways the remaining 98 percent of people process the loss. All the ways grief twists reality, the variety of ways it drives people mad.The show is deeply spiritual, otherworldly even, but still, the human tragedy it portrays is nothing compared to a mass exodus that received no such cultural treatment. In the decade between the mid-2000s and the 2010s, around 20 percent - one in five - of Lithuania’s population left in search of economic survival.I was one of them. A bright kid who grew up in a bohemian, poor but sexy family with theatre critic parents. In 2008 I packed my 17-year-old’s belongings, said goodbye to my burgeoning, adorable little life as a brooding activist and ska-punk singer, and joined my mum in East London with 12 other Eastern European migrants in a tiny terraced house, where she moved to work in a clothing factory for pennies.Every time I’d go back to Lithuania for one occasion or another, my dissonance to the country that I had left behind became wider. Not only is this mass migration treated as some natural disaster, not to be spoken of, just something to contend with. Even my beloved comrades and friends from my teenage years would perceive me as some “from abroad” kind of girl. Yes, there was, especially amongst our circles, a layer of the golden youth who went abroad for uni, but they should have known it was my story.When anybody questions my materialist views, it’s impossible not to respond that I wish I wouldn’t have to be as focussed on any of it myself, it just happens to be that my existence is fundamentally tied to my existence in the class relations. Migration, which tore me away from my community and thrusted me into another one - London anarcho-squatter scene - is all tied to class. My parents’ anxieties, my own awkward shuffle across the class spectrum of activist spaces - all of it, class. Lithuania losing nearly a third of its population since independence from the Soviet Union? That too. It is hard to become anything else, but an Anarchist, when the state that you were born into -  leaves you with little else than sustained self-esteem, daddy rejected me issues. But because it’s about class, it’s left unspoken, unexplored.We are the lost generation. The children who look longingly and with deep seated jealousy at peers our own age in the countries where we were born, unbothered by the bouts of neuroticism that poverty and manoeuvring to a new country and its ways of being, one as strange as the UK not least, we never chose this. Ours is a generation not vanished, but dislocated. Not mourned, but ignored. Minds and lives lost, but only in shy and private mundane tragedies.I keep wondering: what would the reaction be if 15 million Brits fled the UK? Or even the actual third of the population of Ukraine - 12 million people. Europe and the rest of the world have to deal with a tiny two million people, and it’s a war we’re talking about.Meanwhile Lithuania - now under the teat  of EU (not NATO’s any more, eh?), polluted with up-and-coming fin-tech nonsense, and other unicorn hopefuls, a burgeoning landlord class, privatised and proud - would rather depopulate itself out of existence than admit foreigners (oh, the irony!) or guarantee a decent standard of living for any hope of those who would entertain a return. The property bubble is so brutal, my apartment in central Copenhagen is somehow cheaper than a similar flat in not-even-central Kaunas - my hometown and Lithuania’s second-biggest city.This might all sound a bit regional, but I suspect it’s familiar to many. Especially to those from the post-Soviet sphere.“Be realistic - demand the impossible,” the Situationists taught me. So every time I feel insecure about my accent, or feel stupid for not understanding some custom or code in the places I’m meant to assimilate into - even with all the privileges whiteness affords me - I remind myself: it wasn’t my fault.Soon enough, Poland and the Baltics will smugly boast that their standard of living has overtaken the UK’s. But I demand the nations that traded a temporary feeling of shame for generations lost to acknowledge their violence. The UK was perhaps a strict, inattentive step-parent, but still a better one than my birth one.I demand an apology. From the politicians. From those who engineered the 2008 crisis and placed its weight on the working class. From those who shaped a generation into economic migrants, forced to justify our displacement with productivity or shame. No one wants this - not the Lithuanians who left, nor the migrants from the Global South now stuck at the Belarusian border trying to enter Lithuania.To my fellow working-class writers contributing to this brilliant magazine, to the migrants among us, to all the readers - let’s never take our eyes off the ones in power. Let’s do it with gall, inspiration, and unity.The traumas of poverty and migration aren’t natural disasters, as much as they’d like us to believe. They’re not some quasi-religious, extra-terrestrial incursions like in The Leftovers. Because, unlike in The Leftovers, we’re still here. The vanished are just… somewhere else. Unseen, unsupported, undocumented by art, maligned. An inconvenience. Citizens of nowhere.No Emmy for that.

Marijam Didžgalvytė is a Lithuanian-Tatar writer. Her debut book Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World is out now with Verso Books.