Living in the diaspora and speaking “the language of the heartbeat”: what does it mean to be Greek away from Greece?

Having invented philosophy, democracy, theater, geometry, cynicism, love and the Olympics, it is likely that no people like the Greek knows better than another that talent and genius become scandalous phenomena for all those who are obliged to live by appearances. Now the Greeks see this as part of the stigma of having laid for themselves a good part of the foundations of Western civilization from at least the third millennium BC (when the “pre-Hellenic world” that was to give form to the great Greek civilization), a stigma which, based on everything that happened in Greece after the fascinating splendor of its Antiquity, led to different forms of punishment and fear.

The translator and writer Theodore Kallifatides, born in Greece in 1938 and based in Sweden since 1964, explains it very well by Mothers and sons when, during his visit to Athens, where his 92-year-old brother and mother live, he writes that the Greeks have always been afraid of their neighbors. “Sometimes Bulgarians, sometimes Turks, sometimes Albanians. In addition, the Americans did what they wanted with our country, and the British tried, where possible, to do the same. The Greeks felt under siege, and perhaps sometimes rightly so. “

This is why, among his many narrative and stylistic virtues around the story of a man determined to find a new meaning in his relationship with his mother, Mothers and sons is also another typically Greek little treatise on how to question and understand one of the most repeated consequences of the harsh socio-political conditions of modern Greece: life in the diaspora, that is, life which begins after the need to leave everything, including the language, to build an existence in other countries above the endemic fear of wars, dictatorships (Greece was ruled by the army until 1974) and cyclical economic crises.

Exodus and dignity

One of the clearest postcards of what continues to push many Greeks into exile today is offered by Greece’s former finance minister between January and July 2015, Yanis Varoufakis. His work during the renegotiation of the external debt before the authorities of the European Union, recounted in the book Adults in the room, undressed among other details than the clean Christine Lagarde, then director of the International Monetary Fund, admitted that the financial targets proposed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund to help Greece “could not really work”, even though he, threatened Lagarde, ” he had to accept them anyway, since his credibility would depend on it ”.

Regardless of what was happening in the upper echelons of power, the truth is that the extremely high levels of unemployment, the adjustment of wages and the loss of social benefits achieved in 2010 and 2014 in Greece (the same years as the ” “European troika called” recovery “) not only triggered one of the most serious crises in the European Union, but also caused a deepening of the out-migration of the youngest, so that the stable population of 10 million d inhabitants continue to decline. But Varoufakis also recounts, when in 2012, in the midst of an economic collapse, an art exhibition in Athens presented one hundred black metal boxes with different words chosen from a massive consultation on “which word would the Greeks choose?” to define what they wanted? to preserve ”, the most chosen was not“ work ”,“ pensions ”or“ savings ”, but“ dignity ”.

For his part, based in a place as far removed from the Greek spirit, climate and way of life as Sweden, for Kallifatides the question of this original belonging, his “dignity” as Greek, is presented under the figures of his mother (“My mother is my true homeland”) and his father, who left him before his death, a long letter in which he recounted the details of his life, marked, like almost any other Greek past and present, by the ordeals of violence, poverty and injustice, if any, during World Wars I and II. Mothers and sons is in itself more than a gesture in favor of the ancient Homeric motive of coming home, as Kallifatides not only delves into his family roots, but writes his book in Greek, his mother tongue, despite the fact that for most of his life his literary language was Swedish.

The misfortune of being Greek

When visiting Athens, what it means to be Greek becomes as mysterious as deciphering any other nationality. However, “why I left my country is something that hasn’t stopped haunting me. You left and you were saved, relatives and friends tell me. I lost the right to speak on Greek subjects, ”complains Kallifatides. And this is how his voice reaches the authentic traumatic core of almost all the exiles, the fear of finally belonging to nothing: you acquire when you return ”.

Sometimes serious and sometimes ironic, the comparisons between what it means to live in Sweden and Greece are repeated throughout the book. “My problem,” explains Kallifatides, “is that I understand both the Greek and the Swedish way of doing things. Both have their good sides. The Greeks are the children of their mother and the Swedes are the children of their society. I am unable to choose between them, and that creates my existential discomfort ”. However, among Greek writers there is no other Nikos Dimou to push this “existential malaise” to its most scathing conclusions. Born in Athens in 1935, the title of Dimou’s best-known book, reissued many times since its original publication in 1975, is as explicit as it gets: The misfortune of being Greek.

“Those who give recipes for happiness,” writes Dimou, “generally seek to modify or diminish desires, because it is not easy to influence reality. Of course, the fewer desires we have, the less risk we run of running away from frustration and suffering ”. So, continues Dimou in the tone of the great philosophers, what must be accepted is that the human being is the animal who always wants more than he can achieve. The unsuitable animal. In other words, “we could define the human being as the being who carries unhappiness within him, which is innate to him”. And it is for all this that “the Greeks of today, by their history, their heritage and their character, present a greater gap between desire and reality than ordinary people.”

In Sweden there is little irony and in Greece there is a lot

Being the culture that invented, among other things, tragedy, the intention to grab anything less than human predisposition to unhappiness can only be read as another grandiose sign of typical Greek irony. “In Sweden lack of humor is considered serious and in Greece lack of seriousness is considered humor. In Sweden we have little irony and in Greece we have a lot, ”writes Kallifatides. Dimou, for his part, exhibits it with arguments like this: “The Greeks strive, in all areas, to be disconnected from reality. And then they feel unhappy to be out of touch with reality. (And then they feel happy … to be unhappy) ”.

Constituted by their “verbal masochism”, reinforced by “the crisis and the conflict” and in particular materialized by “the propensity to bitch and to complain”, understanding the Greeks through the gaze of Dimou can indeed help to understand the uprooted distress of the diaspora. “The more proud we are of our ancestors (without knowing them)”, writes Dimou, “the more uncomfortable we feel for ourselves”. Faced with the heavy burden of the ancient Greek heritage, the only solution is therefore to forget it or overcome it. Otherwise, it happens that the Greeks are divided among those who “felt the horrible weight of their heritage” and suffered from the inhuman level of perfection of speech and form of the ancients, those who know this heritage through hearsay and not. They understand it (although they boast to third parties) and the unconscious, which heard of the ancients in myths and legends, equated with folk tales.

At this stage, the harmonious coexistence of two writers as contemporary and at the same time complementary as Theodore Kallifatides Yes Nikos Dimou understand what we are talking about when we talk about Greece. “Greek is the language of my heart”, says the author of Mothers and sons. “Take Greece into your heart and you will have a heart attack,” says the author of The misfortune of being Greek.

Love letter between a son and a mother

But beyond what it means to live outside Greece (“no, infidelity is not considered a crime in Sweden, and no, all Swedes are not queers”, specifies the writer to his curious Hellenic compatriots), Mothers and sons is, finally, an autobiography which at best effortlessly approaches the tone of any of Emmanuel Carrere. This is why the son’s transparent love for his mother suddenly turns to the inevitable professional selfishness of the writer waiting for the construction of a character. “How will this affect me?” How will that affect her when she finds out that I’m spying on her? “Asks Kallifatides as soon as he arrives in Athens and settles into his mother’s apartment, who keeps blaming him for the exile.

However, as the story progresses between the author’s introspection, the memory always on the verge of tears of his mother, and the stoic testimony of a father who has died for several decades, which is imperative is not a predictable and opportunistic exhibitionism of frustrations. or intimacies, but the sensitive proof that a mother “allows us to always carry a principle in us”. Kallifatides is not naive in presenting his story from this perspective of discretion, and for this reason he maintains that while there is a popular theory which says that what really characterizes a person are their secrets, “to describe the sub- floor of a house is not the truest way to describe the house ”.

Due to the unique tone and look of this son in dialogue with his mother, it is not difficult to remember at certain points in the letter that the mother of Víctor Shtrum, the central protagonist of Life and fate, the great novel by Vassili grossman, she sent her son to her shortly before she was assassinated by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who had occupied Ukraine in 1941. “Vitia, I have always been alone. I spent sleepless nights crying with sadness. But no one knew. I was consoled at the idea that one day I would tell you my life story. I will tell you why your father and I separated, why all these long years I lived alone. But my destiny is to end my life alone, without having shared it with you. Sometimes I thought that I shouldn’t live far from you, that I loved you too much, that this love gave me the right to live my old age with you. Sometimes I thought I shouldn’t be living with you, that I loved you too much. Remember that your mother’s love will always be with you, on happy days and sad days no one will ever have the power to kill you. Live, live, live always … “

KEEP READING