Guest Post, Adrianne Kalfopoulou: Patching the Cloth

Athens Graffiti Art

“Violence does not promote causes, neither history, nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction; but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention.” Hannah Arendt

“Maybe you should work against the moment,” he said to me when I spoke of writing a post that would go up on 9/11. I happened to be reading Hannah Arendt’s ON VIOLENCE.

I picked up Arendt’s essay in the midst of this summer’s dire news; bombings in Gaza; the Ebola virus; ISIS. Arendt seems especially contemporary: “Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination….” This was written in the late 60s during student take-overs in American universities and the Vietnam War. Her premise, that power and violence are opposites, that violence will turn into terror (rather than power) when “having destroyed all power” it “does not abdicate but on the contrary remains in full control.”

I was getting my American passport renewed and stood a few minutes waiting to enter the embassy in the full glare of the August sun that glanced off wide marble steps. The embassy’s newly renovated and expanded buildings spoke very clearly of power and its being “expansionist by nature.” The buildings surrounded by high barred metal fences are couched in an oasis of olive trees and nicely mowed grass knolls inside very carefully monitored gateways. As I waited inside there was a running story of Amelia Earhart on the plasma screen. That sense of expanse, of freedom dramatized too by the clips of Earhart’s pioneering voyages and courage created a stark contrast between the inner sanctum of the bordered space and the world outside of it.

I am privileged to be a dual national, but I experienced a visual split between my worlds. “Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities;” writes Arendt “what it does need is legitimacy.” And legitimacy is a consequence of support. She explains “the current equation of obedience and support” is “misleading and confusing.” Support is what we offer each other in recognition of our common vulnerabilities.

I live in Athens, Greece, and it has been over 4 years now of crisis-ridden moments, and tragedy too. Work against the moment. A man in the midst of August’s sweltering humidity was singing in the street, a worker whose voice rose above the drill as he sang, in Greek, I will melt for you, for you I will melt my heart… It was a sweltering day; it had been a sweltering summer.

Delphi Frieze

 

“Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together….” I have a torn linen shirt I am fond of and want to patch, but the nature of the tear means I need a particular weave to iron against the cloth so it might blend in. Next to the post office is a fabric shop run by an elderly couple. The husband of the wife who runs it is always there; he’s had a throat operation and can’t speak though he picks out merchandise for customers. I show her the tear and she gives me a patch telling me to feel the rough side of it, to make sure to iron it so the rough side would heat against the frayed cloth. She doesn’t want any money. I want to leave her 2 euros, she vigorously shakes her head, placing the inch or two of cloth in a tiny plastic envelope and telling me again to make sure I don’t confuse the two sides of the cloth.

«Καλο Μινα» she says, “Good Month” a wish given the first of every month in Greece. It is September 1. Later that day I buy a salad at the bakery next to work, the cashier asks if I’d like bread, I point to a dark brown bun, she says, “these are good too” and adds a lighter crusted bun, saying it’s on them, maybe I’ll prefer it. “To act with deliberate speed goes against the grain of rage and violence,” Arendt writes. “The faculty of action” is for Arendt the essence of the political subject. Work against the moment…

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” W.H. Auden

Guest Post, Adrianne Kalfopoulou: Literary Antidotes & Monster Epidemics

This week’s post comes from Issue 9 contributor Adrianna Kalfopoulou. Adrianne has had her work appear in print and online journals including Hotel Amerika, World Literature Today, ROOM magazine, The Broome Street Review, Web Del Sol, VPR (Valparaiso Poetry Review) and Fogged Clarity. She lives and teaches in Athens Greece, and is on the faculty of the creative writing program at NYU. Her most recent book publication is Passion Maps (Red Hen Press), a poetry collection.

I recently attended the EAAS (European Association of American Studies) conference in Izmir (or Smyrna, to the Greeks). I love these large gatherings of writers and thinkers which provide opportunities for sudden influxes of ideas and energy. The conference, hosted every two years in a European city, seemed atypical and enriched by the fact that we were in Izmir, not-quite Europe, or more precisely Anatolia that bridges East and West. This city and its bay was potent with resonance, as much for its location as for the conference theme — “The Health of the Nation” (March 30-April 2, 2012) at Ege University. Discussions of the health of the nation, or nations, in this particular part of the world took on particular immediacy. What constitutes “health,” ironically, found papers focused on the various symptoms of disease, and dis-ease, beginning with the opening keynote lecture given by Ayşe Lahur Kirtunç who spoke of Turkey today and focused on discourses of fear. From the media’s ongoing barrage of catastrophe documentation to dystopias of vulnerability and anxiety, Kirtunç’s talk was a brave mapping of the various threats to our physical and psychic wellbeing. While, in her words, “we have devised technologies to listen to chipmunks, dolphins, whales…we still have difficulty listening to each other.”

The effort to really listen to one another, as she described it, undermines the polarization of ideologies as much as the reductionist ways we view “Otherness;” it was a theme that wove through many of the conference presentations. “Fear is a powerful emotional tool which helps escalate conflict” Kirtunç said, it has us “falling into the trenches of prejudice….” Marc Priewe, from the University of Portsdam, Germany, gave a talk titled “Of Words and Wounds: Textualizing Illness in Colonial America” that spoke to a not dissimilar theme in his discussion of the smallpox pandemic in Puritan America. He spoke of Native American kinship networks that were destroyed by the introduction of the European disease and incited a cultural battle that ensued between “native healing rituals… and the Puritans’ providential views” which rationalized that the disease was God’s way showing the settlers that that God, in John Winthrop’s words, had “decreased them with our increase.” Though implicated in the disease-ridden Indians’ pandemic, the settlers reinforced the disparities and differences between themselves and the natives as a means of justifying their colonizing project. It seems so much easier to fall prey to what Kirtunç called “political demonology” – maybe there’s always been the need to “create a monster” as an excuse to slay it, but whose monster is it in the end – and how much more giddy and Odyssean to find in those others, or Others, not just the Cyclops, but Arete (Queen of Phaeacia in The Odyssey, and in Greek, “virtue”). Literature gives us the opportunity for the kinds of listening that makes for bonds rather than monsters. And Kirtunç’s talk ended on that note, with a tribute to contemporary Turkish artists, cartoonists, actors, and writers among whom was Turkey’s controversial Nobel Laureate Orphan Pamuk which she pointedly said she was not going to talk about because “I have a very old mother, and an idiosyncratic cat I need to take care of….”

I found myself, too, oddly careful of my spoken Greek, after all this was Smyrna, the town and population that burned in 1922 when Kemalist troops massacred the indigenous Greek population. It is a traumatic chapter in 20th century Greek history, one still referred to as the “Smyrna Catastrophe.” But the story like so much history is complicated. One of my daughter’s college roommates in the U.S. is from Turkey, and her parents insisted I visit them while I was visiting. On the last day of the conference they drove me to their coastal town outside the city. It was another surprise, as there in “Urla” was the Greek poet and Nobel Laureate George Seferis’ house. He was born there in 1900. There was a plaque and the Turkish and Greek flags above the entrance. In his book Mythistorema (“story” in Greek) the speaker addresses an angel, and in section 7 of the poem titled “South Wind,” he tells us:

After the bitter bread of exile,
at night if we remain in front of the white walls,
your voice approaches us like the hope of fire;
and again this wind hones
a razor against our nerves.
Each of us writes you the same thing
and each falls silent in the other’s presence,
watching, each of us, the same world separately

George Seferis, The Collected Poems (Princeton UP, 1967)

Translated by Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard