Trauma & Art

Places

Images and narratives of places

“As my body continues its journey. My thoughts return to days gone by.” Gustave Flaubert (cited in My Indies by Katia Antonopoulou)

“The suspended time of the journey, which I like so much, because detached as it is, it seems to me as if it does not belong to the general sum, as if it were a bonus let’s say, like the thirteenth salary, will soon end.” Katia Antonopoulou

“Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas, and is therefore comparable to pictures, which are also a system of signs expressing ideas.” From the Bald Soprano / 1954 by Eugene Ionesco

“[The] temporal lobe [is] one of the four major divisions of each of the two brain  hemispheres (left and right), located to the side of each hemisphere. The  temporal lobe is involved in, among other things, recognizing and remembering objects, places, and people, and in language processing.” Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing (Oxford Landmark Science) (p. 463)

Today’s post contains five drawings of Athens, Ioannina, Alonissos and Astypalaia, two islands that I visited in the 80s. A memory from those summers concerns the widely-travelled writer Katia Antonopoulou in the shop that she kept with her husband at the time, on a coastal road, if my memory serves me correctly, in Astypalaia. During those years, I read her book My Indies. The book resembles “a breathless conversation……. a journey through a thousand paths and a painting of the myriad faces of India…. a journey through place, time and the psyches of people…” (Kostas Stamatiou, 17/07/1988). The author herself writes in the book’s preface “…we will be together for 308 pages from Kalamata and Metaxochori to my Indies and back from where I began…”.

Her narrative begins:

“When I was a little girl, I would go to the train station in Kalamata to watch the trains leave for the unknown and magical Athens and dream of leaving, I never imagined that many years later I would take the train from Metaxochori in Larissa to end up in the Indies. But also that evening when I walked along the Kalamata pier holding my mother’s hand and asking her, “Mom, where are these people going?”, showing her a boat full of people poorly dressed with little luggage, her telling me, immigrants, my child, going to Australia. Nor did I imagine that one day I would go to Australia, married to Jim, who is an Australian and whom I met on Hydra. But did we both imagine that we would one day live in a small village in Thessaly, Metaxochori, he from Melbourne, Australia, and I from Kalamata, in the Peloponnese?”

Actor Michalis Syriopoulos reads an excerpt titled Alonissos, the Other Island from Jacques Lacarrière’s “Greek Summer”: https://www.lifo.gr/podcasts/anagnoseis/alonnisos-allo-nisi

Lacarrière made his first trip to Greece in 1947, and his last in the autumn of 1966.

Widely read poems about Greece with references to different time periods of the past.

Extract from the poem, A Word for Summer, by George Seferis (Autumn, 1936):

….. And yet I once loved Syngrou Avenue
the double rocking of the wide road
that would leave us miraculously by the sea,
the everlasting sea, to be cleansed of our sins;
I have loved a few unknown people
suddenly met at the day’s end
talking to themselves like captains of sunken armadas,
a sign that the world is wide.
And yet I have loved these very roads, these columns;
no matter if I was born on the other shore near
rushes and reeds, islands  // that had water wells in the sand that a rower
might quench his thirst, no matter if I was born
by the sea, which I wind and unwind in my fingers
when I am weary– I no longer know where I was born……

The poem, In the manner of G. S, by George Seferis resembles a tour of places in interwar Greece, which refers to history, and feelings of alienation, stagnation, inaction.

Excerpts:

Wherever I travel Greece wounds me.
On Pelion among the chestnut trees the Centaur’s shirt
slipped through the leaves to fold around my body
as I climbed the slope and the sea followed me
climbing  too like mercury in a thermometer  //  till we found the mountain waters.
On Santorini touching islands that were sinking
hearing a pipe play somewhere on the pumice stone
my hand was nailed to the gunwale by an arrow shot suddenly
from the confines of a vanished youth.
At Mycenae I raised the great stones and the treasures of the house of Atreus
and slept with them at the hotel “Beautiful Helen of Menelaus”……………
On Spetses, Poros, and Mykonos the barcaroles sickened me………………

Meanwhile Greece goes on travelling, always travelling………………..
and if we see “the Aegean flower with corpses”
it will be with those who tried to catch the big ship by swimming after it
those who got bored waiting for the ships that cannot move
the ELSI, the SAMOTHRAKI, the AMVRAKIKOS.

The ships hoot now that dusk falls on Piraeus, hoot and hoot, but no capstan moves, no chain gleams wet in the vanishing light,
the captain stands like a stone in white and gold.

Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,
curtains of mountains, archipelagos, naked granite.
They call the one ship that sails AGONY 937.

In his poem Greece you know… Michalis Ganas subtly refers to a line from one of George Seferis’ better known poems, posted above, Wherever I travel Greece wounds me…, and the years of the junta

You can listen to the poem read in Greek and English by Joshua Barley at: https://www.bsa.ac.uk/videos/michalis-ganas-greece-you-know-read-by-joshua-barley/

Finally, a few words about a tiny book by journalist Xenia Kounalaki, Antisemitism in Greece, which contains the speech she delivered at an event of the Jewish community of Ioannina in collaboration with the Region of Epirus and the Municipality of Ioannina on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust. Kounalaki tries to briefly record how political parties, the Church, Justice, school and the history lesson that tends to bypass “the unpleasant episodes and shameful footnotes” in the path of the Greek nation, the media, pop culture and Greek public opinion, perceive and negotiate these traumatic events and how they ultimately contribute to the dissemination or strengthening of antisemitism. As causes of this phenomenon, Kounalakis also mentions the circulation of conspiracy stories.

She begins her speech by telling us how her interest in the Holocaust was born, without her having any Jewish relatives or friends. Two defining experiences that helped her cultivate such reflexes were watching a documentary at school and reading Anne Frank’s Diary. She writes: “…what shocked me was my identification with the heroes, the thought that some children my age, just forty years earlier, were not playing carefree in their schoolyards, but were hiding in warehouses so that the Nazis would not arrest them and send them to camps…”.

The book points out that “In Greece, comparisons are constantly multiplying, the use of symbols is increasing, and sketches that relativize the Holocaust are increasing. In other words, we are doing the exact opposite of what, for example, Jorge Sembrun does, who, many years after the event, in 1963, writes “The Great Journey” trying to understand what has happened, or Claude Lanzmann, in the emblematic documentary “Shoah”, who talks about the Holocaust through silent single shots with natural sound: we chatter about the Holocaust, we compare the debt crisis with the Holocaust, us with the Jews………….. We constantly refer to the Holocaust, without really talking about it.”

Places

Words and images

“For time is the longest distance between two places.” Tennessee Williams

“….. prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and  intimate, “big” history and private experience.” From The Years by Annie Ernaux

In this post I have included four new drawings of places. Part of this current art project includes reading, poems, stories, articles, things related to the artwork in obvious or less visible ways. Narratives and images are often in some kind of relationship, even though they may seem unlinked, parallel activities. Also, sometimes one thing leads to another, and I end up finding something interesting to read, albeit unexpected. Today I will be referring to some of the things I’ve been reading recently, all written by women, all including themes of loss, loss of parents. Man overboard and Ηοw beautiful life is written by the Greek writers Ersi Sotiropoulou and Maria Laina, respectively, and La Place and A Woman’s Story written by French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022. I discovered Ernaux’s books by chance at a local book store. La Place caught my attention because of its title. This then lead to my getting acquainted with more of her work. In this post I will be focusing on A Woman’s Story, and her Nobel Banquet Speech I Will Write To Avenge My People.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her speech I Will Write To Avenge My People begins with Ernaux describing how in trying to find the right sentence to give her the freedom and confidence to speak that evening, a phrase she had written in her diary when she was young appeared: “It instantly appears. In all its clarity and violence. Lapidary. Irrefutable. Written in my diary sixty years ago. ‘I will write to avenge my people’…” She was at the time twenty-two, studying literature, mostly with the children of the local bourgeoisie, proudly and naively believing “that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success.”

Ernaux tells us that initially literature was a sort of continent which she unconsciously set in opposition to her social environment. She thought that with her writing she could transfigure reality, but being married with two children, a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, brought her further and further away from writing and her promise to avenge her people. Her father’s death, a job teaching students from working class backgrounds and the 1968 protest movements were the factors, she says, that brought her back: “through byroads that were unforeseen and proximate to the world of my origins, to my ‘people’, and gave my desire to write a quality of secret and absolute urgency”.

She understood she had to delve into repressed memories and bring light to bear on how her people lived, adding that those who “as immigrants, no longer speak their parents’ language, and those who, as class defectors, no longer have quite the same language, think and express themselves with other words, face additional hurdles.” She realized she had to break with ‘writing well and beautiful sentences’ and “to root out, display and understand the rift running through [her]”.

Ernaux tells us that her first book in 1974 mapped out the social and feminist realm that she would situate her writing. Through reflecting on life she would inevitably also reflect on writing, on how writing reinforces or disrupts the accepted, interiorized representations of things and beings. With her fourth book she adopted a neutral, objective, “flat” kind of writing, where the violence was no longer displayed, it came from the facts themselves and not the writing.

Towards the end of the speech Ernaux writes: “In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and / or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

La Place and A Woman’s Story

In her books,  La Place and  A Woman’s Story, which Ernaux wrote after her father and mother’s deaths, she chronicles a generation, and the process of breaking away from her class and surroundings, through her education and then through her move into the middle-class literary world, which felt like a kind of betrayal. She examines this breakage, and also, considers the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, and what it means to contain a life within the pages of a book.

La Place              (My own translation of the Greek translation)

“He didn’t belong anywhere, he didn’t belong anywhere, he just paid his annual membership to the trade association. At his funeral, the vicar spoke of “an honest, hard-working life”, “of a man who never harmed anyone”.

“When I read Proust or Mauriac, I cannot believe that they are writing about the time when my father was a child. In his case, it was probably the Middle Ages.”

“Obsessive idea: What will others say about us (neighbors, customers, everyone).”

A Woman’s Story

Ernaux claims that this book isn’t a biography or a novel, “maybe a cross between literature, sociology and history.” She adds that when she thinks of facets of her mother’s personality, she tries to relate them to her story and historical and social background because history and social background contain and, to a great extent, shape a person’s life. She searches for explanations As the writer talks about her mother and the web of people she was linked to, we also encounter the ‘big’ history events and social norms and circumstances, and the opportunities that were not available to her mother and those of her social milieu:

“It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time…….. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has recently appeared in my dreams….. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.”

“She could have become a school mistress, but her parents wouldn’t let her leave the village. Parting with one’s family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, ‘ambition’ refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.) ………In those days, nobody ‘pushed’ their children, they had to ‘have it in them’. School was merely a phase one went through before earning a living. One could miss school; it wasn’t the end of the world. But not Mass.”

“There were the black years of the economic crisis, the strikes, Léon Blum (‘the first man to be on the side of the workers’), the social reforms and the late-night parties in the café. There were the visits from her relatives….”

“The store lay in the Valley, where nineteenth-century cotton mills ruled people’s lives from infancy to death.”

“Under the Occupation, life in the Valley centred on their shop and the hope of getting fresh supplies. She tried to feed everyone, especially large families, because her natural pride encouraged her to be kind and helpful to others…….”

“In 1945, they left the Valley, where the foggy climate made me cough and stunted my growth, and moved back to Yvetot. Life in the post-war period was more difficult than during the war. Food was still rationed and those who had ‘cashed in on the black market’ were slowly emerging.”

The most poignant part of the book is about the last years of her mother’s life when she was ill. Ernaux’s frequent short sentences convey so much:

“And here her story stops for there was no longer a place for her in society.”

“Most of the patients there are women.”

“The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.”

“I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.”

Man overboard by Ersi Sotiropoulou

Here in Greece her mother is dying and in the Arctic icebergs are melting:

“Only you and I are listening now. There is no one else. / a crackling of invisible crystals / of frost flakes breaking away. / Breathless we hear / The creak becoming a buzz / The roar of an approaching plane / Not from the air. / This mineral buzz as / a piece is detached from the mother.”

Ηοw beautiful life is by Maria Laina

“Mainly written art, the one that is written and then you look at it again, and that is  torture  because in the meantime it has changed, and you have changed…..”