Eulogising our silences: An anatomy of a good Greek girl
Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, gives a sceptical account of the phoenix, a bird who re-births itself through fire:
‘They tell a story of what this bird does, which does not seem to me to be credible: that he comes all the way from Arabia, and brings the parent bird, all plastered over with myrrh, to the temple of the Sun, and there buries the body.’
There was a writing exercise that was taught by Bill Manhire at his writing school at Victoria University that gained such notoriety that it became a book: Spectacular Babies: New Writing. In the ‘spectacular babies’ exercise, the writer must provide a descriptive word for a baby:
The adored baby. The rebellious baby. The despicable baby. The exiled baby. The spectacular baby.
It’s a perfect starting exercise for a room full of anxious writers. As the descriptors tumble out, weird narratives are born. All of a sudden, the babies are writing, and getting out of their own way.
I am a good Greek girl, and historically, I have been silenced.
If we read oppression not as a single act but as a site housing the collision of many oppressions, the good Greek girl sits at an apex of intersectional violences. Oppression itself is both systemic and personal, and also causational, which makes people think about it as a join-the-dots game, one that can be won:
X is Māori. X is oppressed by the Crown. X educates and decolonises herself. X is now healed, free to speak, empowered.
The good Greek girl exists in relation to her family. She is of her family, a moving part. Her family rejects her. She is now free to speak.
But the reality experienced by those of us who have lived these intersections of oppression is radically different. Oppression is not a winnable game. The escaped Greek girl is free to speak, provided that she has the courage; provided that she has weathered getting kicked out of the family in the first place.
The process of learning to speak, of unlearning oppressions, is a game where we move backwards and forwards in time. Just when we think we have progressed we discover another internalised barrier. This happened to me recently, accepting a literary prize awarded by a Greek association in Melbourne. I stood to speak, and the emotions I thought I had resolved around my language loss crowded into my mouth.
These people wanted to hear what I had to say. But my Greek wasn’t fluent enough to speak to ‘real’ Greeks, and it seemed inappropriate to address them in English. I couldn’t perform myself adequately. I couldn’t be their spokesperson. My mouth went dry, and I couldn’t speak. What kind of Greek writer, said my internal voice, can’t speak well enough to address their people in their own language?
The Greeks of Melbourne waited as I stumbled through some half-Greek-half-English acceptance speech. They clapped, quizzically. I staggered away, thinking, I thought I had dealt with all that shit, thinking, I’m less far along than I had hoped.
The healing of such compulsive thoughts and the dismantling of such false absolutes as ‘real’ Greek is a thing that takes time. Often we think we have stepped forwards, only to regress. Oppressions do not operate in a linear way. They are multifaceted, inherent and epigenetic. Which is not to say they are unhealable. Rather But that for some of us the journey is more multi-layered than it is for others. And just as oppressions do not operate on a straightforward continuum, they are also not the sum of who we are, or certain predictors of who we can be. It’s in our natures as humans to imagine more, to create more, to be better.
A drachma coin from Modern Greece in 1973, depicting a phoenix rising. Modern Greeks regarded the phoenix as being symbolic of Greece's rise to statehood after domination by the Ottoman Turks for nearly 400 years.
Also, having a strong cultural identity is not a negative thing. I was doubly privileged to be born Greek in Aotearoa. I recently read a friend’s thesis about Pākehā identity. At the heart of Pākehā identity, they argue, is an uncomfortable absence, evidenced by gestures toward defining a the ‘self’ as something to do with Marmite, fish and chips, sports and the land. Such grasping was not my inheritance. I told my friend that my formative experiences were, instead, marked by a too-much-ness. We were white, but at home we were Greek, so Greek, judgmentally Greek, Greek with notions of superiority over the empty-seeming Pākehātanga that surrounded us. And my culture gave me a place to firmly stand. I have been empowered by my Greek culture to speak louder than others, while simultaneously, being silenced by it.
Our oppressions are also not signifiers in a competition of otherness. When we unpack notions like oppression we often elide more complex realities. I once thought feminism would save the world. It took some uncomfortable learning for me to understand that my feminism was culturally specific, that an amorphous white feminism oppresses Māori and trans people, for example. I’m Pākehā, in a white body granted the safety and privilege that Aotearoa affords me. I am also ‘other’.
Any disruption of silences must move backwards and forwards in time. I started out a good Greek girl from Lyall Bay, Wellington, and I am now a good Greek girl again. But my circling back has taken me through many iterations, some of them painful, many of them private, most of them unvoiced. If I apply Manhire’s exercise to myself I can see that my ‘Greekness’ has always been qualified, by how closely I adhered to what a Greek girl is meant to say and do, and by how well I was performing Greekness for the outside world.
The adored Greek girl. The rebellious Greek girl. The despicable Greek girl. The exiled Greek girl. The spectacular Greek girl.
Any writer who doesn’t identify as simply Pākehā knows that we are working in prepared spaces. Our writing is taken as instructive, a product useful in the great white project of knowing the ‘other’. I was a good Greek in my writing, because I put in the baklava. But the baklava was what we ate. It was the pavlova that was foreign, considered an unnatural feat of engineering. In this I was complicit in occluding other, more uncomfortable stories: stories about how Greek women are oppressed, for example, by a religion that maintains a not-so-subtle virgin/whore complex, or how they are controlled by the very families that ‘protect’ them, or how physical abuse was so embedded in our culture that my grandfather was considered remarkable because ‘he never raised his hand’ to his wife.
I have graduated from ‘good’. I had to reinscribe a personal semiotics of identity. Which is to say, I am a good Greek girl now because I say that I am good, and anyone who thinks differently can fuck off.
The adored Greek girl
Greek girls are taught to be good. Greek girls are expected to obey. Greek girls are expected to respect their elders.
Orthodoxy and the village culture my family were born from are wrapped in superstition and misogynistic beliefs. As a Greek Orthodox girl you’re not allowed to cross your legs in church; it’s somehow read as sexual. You shouldn’t take communion if you are bleeding. My grandmother was taught not to take a bath when she had her period, or she’d go blind. But this old stuff was laughed off by my modern mother. However the pressure I felt to behave, to be polite to the elders, to serve them, all of that was deeply inscribed: the strict rules of Greek purity and propriety.
When my mother got married at eighteen I’m fairly sure it was so she was could move out of her parents’ house and have sex. As a teenager I lived with a boyfriend in a flat, unmarried. I was the first of us to do this, and I remember the weird spaces my grandmother left around the subject in conversation, the telling silences.
Then there is the intersection of abuse both inherited and existent in my generation. My great-grandmother got pregnant out of wedlock. She was young, and the baby was taken away. All my life I have thought of her: a young woman in a village on an island in Greece, shunned, perhaps abused. No one knows who the father was, or where the baby is. I know that she was silenced. After her, every generation including mine has encountered some form of violence. No one talks about this though, as if this shame is to be borne by us alone. I no longer think it is good to carry such weights quietly.
The rebellious Greek girl
My mother married someone who was not Greek. He was descendent of English migrants, a Naval Commander, and he personified the English ‘stiff upper lip’. We didn’t get along.
When we escaped from this situation, I did everything ‘wrong’. I took risks. I went out at night and walked alone. I jumped off balconies and was the first person to swing on dangerous rope swings. I did everything you wouldn’t want your daughter to do.
Eventually I landed on white people’s feminism and decolonisation. It felt like an anchoring. But I found I didn’t fit into discourses of biculturalism in a comfortable way. My mother’s generation had been beaten alongside Māori at school for not speaking English. When I brought this up in decol workshops the response was generally uncomfortable silence. Everyone had thought about how Pākehā oppressed Māori; no one at that time had thought about how Pākehā had also oppressed Pākehā who weren’t white enough. The notion of myself as Tau Iwi made sense. I learned new terminologies around abuse, power and control. I volunteered with Rape Crisis and organised Reclaim the Night.
But when I invited the women in my family to such events, they didn’t come. Were they embarrassed by the language? Were they not the sort to go to protests? Who knows? The important thing is that our paths had diverged. I was never to be the lawyer or accountant they had hoped me to be.
The despicable Greek girl
From Koraly Dimitriadis’ book Love and Fuck
Families sometimes break for good reasons. As I became a parent myself, my family and I grew further apart. I realised it wasn’t my non-conformity that was at the root of this. It was the various manifestations of abuse that are carried by generations of women in my family, the fallouts of guilt and shame.
I also began to publish despicable stories. If I write about a Greek girl having brutal sex, the character will be equated with me. Good Greek girls aren’t meant to write about sex. Our communities are so small that we are identifiable. And we represent our communities to others.
There’s a stereotype of Greek women as feisty, sexual and hot-tempered. The main character in my novel Aukati has rough sex, throws rocks at people, and yells. I knew Pākehā would read her attributes as specifically Greek; that in writing Alexia I was complicit in exoticising Greekness. But Alexia did what she wanted to do. I didn’t represent us to white society merely as welcoming hosts and good cooks. I put in the baklava, but I also put in the screaming.
The exiled Greek girl
In Melbourne, wogs call themselves wogs. The word has been reclaimed as a positive term where it was once a racial slur. There are around 400,000 Greeks in Melbourne, compared to 2000 in Wellington. When I moved to Melbourne five years ago, it felt like coming home. Coming home, in exile.
The Greek band Bandidas of Melbourne, pictured here with Koraly Dimitriadis (right). From left to right: Pascal Latra, Kitty San Pedro, (Apollonia Xylouri) and DJ Randy Lipz XXX (Eleni Tzaros). Picture Sourced from The Neos Kosmos.
Ξενιτιά, or xenitia, is a guiding idea in Greek diasporic culture. Ξενιτιά is defined as nostalgia, or as a yearning for home. But the nostalgia is complicated: it is a feeling of longing for things that maybe didn’t exist in the first place. In Melbourne my xenitia was so strong that it almost functioned as a location. I was a New Zealander in Australia; a Greek in Melbourne; a daughter in exile. But how crucial was my family, really, in the story of my identity?
This is how last names work in Greek: I was born with the name Arathimos. But as a woman, the correct form of my name is Arathimou. The suffix ‘mou’ denotes ownership. It means that I am of the Arathimos’; that I belong to them. Men do not belong. They own. There is no correct way to be a Greek woman, and not belong to your family. It’s a grammatical impossibility.
But Melbourne allowed me to understand that there is no correct way to be Greek. Because of the larger population and the broader cultural demographics, diasporic Greeks in Australia are not all one thing. They write provocative books. They are queer. They are anarchists. They have varying language skills. They aren’t all Orthodox. There are no ‘real’ Greeks.
In exile, I found a way to be Greek. It felt like remembering. It felt like a laying down of shame.
The spectacular Greek girl
Eurpides, in the 4th century BC, writes of παρρησία, parrhesia. This means literally ‘to speak everything’, or to speak the truth to power. Παρρησία implies speaking the truth boldly, even if personal risks are involved. The good Greek girl is so embedded in her family that she may not speak. She may not complain. She may not complicate her history. And if she steps outside of her family, in the language she learned to speak from birth, she may not even exist.
I exist.
Herodotus’ phoenix, one that he doesn’t quite believe in himself, flies every five hundred years from Arabia to Egypt, to the Temple of the Sun. There it buries the body of the parent bird, ‘all plastered over with myrrh’, and gives birth to itself anew. The parent is transmuted into the new self. Very Greekly, rather oedipally, the phoenixes’ rising is conditional on the death of its parent. In this myth though, it is not violence that frees the bird. Instead the body of the former self is laid down gently, ritually, in the temple.
In eulogising our silences we may have the urge to explicate, to overturn, to yell, to ignite. But we do not have to murder the old. We may lay it to rest respectfully, watching the bright flames, reciting our commemorative liturgia.
And then, the phoenix rises.
The adored Greek girl. The rebellious Greek girl. The despicable Greek girl. The exiled Greek girl.The spectacular Greek girl.
