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In search and denial of metaphor

Published by Roxani
 
The queue for the ferry to the Isle of May was a lesson in the hierarchy of outdoor gear. The couple standing in front of Malachy and me spent the twenty minutes before boarding arranging and rearranging waterproof layers, quietly squabbling about whether they had packed the right things. Ahead of them, a man in a tweed face mask played with the settings of his telephoto lens. Four more people with telephoto lenses were waiting to board the ferry. Another couple brought a drone. Behind us, the required two meters apart, stood a man with not one but two tripods protruding from his bag.

 

The Isle of May is 8 kilometers to the east of mainland Scotland, and it is a national nature reserve. From April to October, weather and pandemic permitting, it is possible to take a ferry across the Firth of Forth and spend three hours observing the seabirds that migrate here to nest. Walking on the island takes place on well-trodden, designated paths, in part to discourage off-trail wandering that might endanger nesting birds. In theory, this setup should not require a parade of outdoor gear, but I’m slowly learning that for some, kit is a form of social status and thus requires display.

Our trip there took place on Greek Easter. This was my first Easter since my mother’s death, a loss that conferred upon me the status of being the keeper of the memories: the lone survivor in the immediate family who remembers how we used to mark time. In some ways, this Easter was a celebration drained of ritual, the recurrent sanitizing of hands notwithstanding. When I recounted to Malachy my conversation with a relative who had expressed concern that I was spending Easter “alone in a foreign country”, he asked if she felt reassured by the fact that I was not, in fact, alone. We were together.

It is hard to translate that the togetherness Greek traditions require steamrolls the intimacy of a couple. A celebration requires several cousins, a grumpy aunt or six, a fight about the order of food preparation, and someone being force-fed someone else’s specialty roast potatoes despite insisting that it is not possible to eat any more, not even one bite. The rituals I remember come with at least one broken dish (complete with one of said aunts muttering that the spell of the evil eye is broken too), and the obsessive recounting of every Easter that came before this one, definitively deciding that everything was better at an undefined ‘then.’

In lieu of lamb on a spit, we packed bread rolls for our picnic lunch on the Isle of May. Though our jeans and unimpressive boots were no match for our fellow passengers’ level of preparedness, the binoculars around our necks were our most obvious contribution to the hierarchy of gear. This was our first time seeing the sea since January, and I was determined to really see it, even if peering through binoculars at cresting waves made me a little seasick.

On water or dry land, I am still learning how to see through binoculars. The motions are not seamless. It takes effort to spot a bird with my own eyes and then direct the binoculars to the right place. It takes a smoothness that I have not yet developed to slowly scan the sky so I can follow a bird’s movement, wingbeat by wingbeat. My motions are too abrupt, flinging from branch to sky like a toddler trying to take a photograph, only capturing a blur of life. Perhaps because of this lack of grace, I prefer to look through binoculars before I have spotted something I’d like to see. On land, I scan a tree methodically, top to bottom, left to right, like a lifeguard scans the surface of the water.

In many ways, I am new to seabirds too. The guillemots, puffins, kittiwakes, Arctic terns, razorbills, and great skuas that flock to Scotland in the summer are different than the seabirds I knew growing up in Greece. Some, like puffins, I recognized because their cuteness has become a passport to universal fame. Others I’ve learned through reading, observation, and the gentle accompaniment of humans who know much more than I do about birds. Through following the enthusiasm of a 6-year-old girl (who is the daughter and granddaughter of birders, and therefore far more confident than me when it comes to such pronouncements), I now know that guillemot chicks are known as “jumplings.” They emerge from their eggs at nest sites on top of cliffs and, due to their underdeveloped wings at the time they leave the nest, they have to jump down the cliffside to the ocean.

The first time I watched the jumplings make this journey, I could only peek through my fingers. A celebration of the tenacity of new life sits too close to a tumble towards death. Anyone who has sat through a David Attenborough documentary recognizes this theme: The triumphant music gives way to the poignant tune, as Attenborough reminds the viewers sniffling at a dead flamingo that the natural world moves in cycles of violence and birth. I know not to weigh down a bird with all the metaphors it did not ask to carry. Sometimes it is just life and death, not a metaphor for hope or rebirth. Sometimes a puffin is just a puffin.

If I were looking for an Easter metaphor, a spring metaphor, or any sign of the renewal of life, the Isle of May would provide. The skipper on the ferry told a hopeful story. The guillemots have paired off, he announced, and so have the razorbills, and some of them are sitting on eggs. You’ll see eider ducks nesting, he said, and the island delivered on this promise. Cautious to resist metaphor, I was still moved by the loudness of life. The cliffs were noisy with bird chatter, drowning out the sound of the sea below. Rock surfaces that had at some point been black were now white, gleaming with layers of bird poo. I had never considered poo as a marker of time, as material evidence of migrations past.

Alongside signs of this raucous life, the Isle of May is dotted with evidence of death. There are bones everywhere: skulls with teeth still attached, stray beaks, bones that once supported wings. The entrances of the puffin burrows are littered with decomposing rabbits. The tiny bones disorient my sense of scale such that I can’t tell whether a leg bone used to belong to a rabbit or a cow.

More than the hopefulness of an egg on a nest, it is the co-existence of the promise of new life and the visible reminders of the materiality of death that I find moving. In this year of no funerals, many of us did not get to see the lifeless bodies of our loved ones. Many years before her death, my mother had insisted she had wanted to be cremated. At the time, this was neither legal nor common in Greece. “You’ll have to send me to the Balkans,” she said, telling me about a TV program that sang the praises of funeral homes in Bulgaria that would accept the responsibility of cremating dead Greeks.

I did not tell my mother that we, too, were in the Balkans. I also did not know then that I would have benefitted from her having a burial–or at least a funeral. I did not know that until I did not get to have it. The confirmation of casting eyes on a dead body, of recognizing that life as linked to this life, to your life, is necessary for the living. Wandering through grass dotted with the remains of feather and bone, I wished for something more than scattered ashes. I wanted the certainty of cold skin still on bone.

On the day that would have been my mother’s funeral in Greece, Malachy and I walked through Glen Finglas, just at the edge of the permissible perimeter of travel from our house in Scotland during that phase of the pandemic. In the face of death without the familiar rituals, I felt a need to reimagine how to honor a life and its ending. We looked at mosses and marveled at lichens. We saw the first of the migrating fieldfares arriving from Scandinavia to spend the winter in Scotland. Multiple times during the walk, we remarked on the light.

Since then, both bird migration and subtle botanical shifts in the garden have been ways to mark time. I have rarely known with certainty this year what day it is, or where I am. The answer, invariably, is always here, here, here. Here in a Microsoft Teams window, nodding a little too eagerly, so that my students feel less alone. Here in Track Changes, commenting on their sentences as a form of accompaniment. Here, on the same sofa, receiving news of death, graduation, becoming a professor. Here, remarking on the light.

When I do not know if it is Tuesday or May, where we are in the pandemic, where I am in my own grief, bulbs emerging from the ground, the song of the first skylark, the arrival of the seabirds anchor me in place and time. This is not because of some illusion that “nature is healing,” either itself or me. I am keenly aware of the devastation humans have caused to other creatures, and of the ferocity with which other living beings treat one another. While I do not doubt that it is possible to find what feels like relief when spending time in the company of puffins, I hesitate to assign ‘nature’ the role of addressing my wounds or lifting my weight. Mostly, I am grateful that bulbs and buds and migrating birds provide a companion clock by which to mark time when the clocks on which I more readily rely become unreliable.

Bodies recognize an attempt at deception. Forest as funeral; marveling as memorial–they are fair, alliterative attempts at ritual. But ritual also requires community, repetition, shared memory. The pandemic has made those inaccessible, and the replacements I have invented are no more satisfying than artificial sweeteners’ attempts to pass as sugar. That leaves me on the Isle of May, laughing at myself for envying the surviving rabbits for having such visible, tangible evidence of the remains of their dead kin. That leaves me standing on a cliffside, holding on to beauty, letting it seep into me, no longer as a conscious attempt to honor the life that ended, but as a compass with which to orient the lives that persist.

We eat our picnic lunch on one side of the cliff, with two men pointing their telephoto lenses in our direction from the opposite side. We are not the subjects of interest; humans rarely are when in the proximity of puffins. One of the men makes wild gestures and loud noises in the hope that the puffins fly in the direction of the lens. This infuriates me. How dare he disturb the birds for the sake of arranging his photograph! By the time we have moved on to our biscuits, the men have set their drone loose over the guillemots sitting on their eggs. Anger and superiority rise up in me. I look for order – where are the rangers, the ornithologists, the caretakers! I consider yelling out, waving my arms to ruin the picture, but realize I, too, would be scaring the birds on this side of the cliff. So we move on, keep walking, keep pointing our fingers and binoculars at seabirds. Those men, and us, in simultaneous search and denial of metaphor.

* * *

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Endings

Published by Roxani

My days in Colombia begin by walking to the cafe around the corner from my house. Sinfully for the standards of this country,  I am not a coffee drinker. I request for my drink to be as diluted with milk as the barista can handle without judgment. He has asked me every morning, without fail: “Leche normal?” With normal milk?

As a feminist who is accustomed to interrogating what counts as normal and who gets to accord normalcy, I was initially taken aback by this designation of milk.

Thinking I perhaps had not fully appreciated my options, the barista continued: “2%? Soy? Light?”

“Oh. Whole milk, please,” I replied.

In subsequent days, the conversation would repeat itself. “Normal milk?,” he; “Whole milk,” I, in hopeful delusion that coffee shop corrections are their own tiny revolutions.

I have been returning there for most days this year. Now, when I walk in the door, I am greeted with jubilant familiarity. “Roxani! Your drink, yes? Lots of milk! Normal milk.” I nod complicitly and issue no corrections.

* * *

“Today, Greece takes a new step towards normality.”

These were the words of Pierre Moscovici, EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs on August 20, 2018.

The occasion that merited this pronouncement was the conclusion of a bailout program that has dictated the terms of the Greek economy for eight years.

I greeted the news from Colombia, coffee with normal milk in hand. Nearly two years earlier, the then President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, stood in front of the United Nations and stated: “I want to announce with all the force of my voice and my heart that the war in Colombia has ended.”

I wonder where normalcy comes from (a tweet in Brussels) and what the authority on it looks like (a white man in a suit). What is ending today in Greece? What has allegedly ended in Colombia? What is this ‘normal’ to which we are all allegedly returning?

* * *

The “Day of the Little Candles” is the unofficial start of the Christmas season in Colombia. From the overnight bus to the Meta region, between scenes of explosions from the Jackie Chan movie blaring overhead, I catch glimpses of candles melting by the front doors of houses. When I emerge on the other side, I am greeted by dawn mosquitoes and a tiny plastic cup of cafe tinto. No milk.

I board a vehicle to the zone of combatants who are transitioning out of an armed group. When I arrive, the ground is dotted with melted candle wax and beer caps formed in the shape of a heart.

The zone is called “transitional zone of normalization.” In its short existence since the peace accord was signed, the program for combatants formally disarming has had many names, and so have the geographies that correspond to it. These spaces have been called, variously, zones of “reinsertion,” “reintegration,” “reincorporation.”

Though the nouns themselves change, the politics hide in the prefix: “re.” What is the “re” available to these former combatants in a life marked by ruptures? They lived through the rupture of joining an armed group, the ruptures of a war, the often ignored ruptures of leaving an armed group that, for some, supplied not only a livelihood, but also a sense of protection, politics, community, and self.

Perhaps normalization is the honest term, after all. It renders effort visible–the effort of making something normal — even as it conveniently sidesteps the question of what normalcy might be.

* * *

Things that have become normal, an incomplete list.

Waking up in the middle of the night to a screaming or sobbing phone call from a family member, telling you that your childhood home was burglarized. Calling the police to report the incident and being able to hear the officer shrug over the phone. “You see, madam, people are desperate here.”

You are a madam now.

Normalization: The imagined straight line from despair to violence.

Things that have become normal: You avoid the postman. He only ever brings bills and bills bring arguments. You avoid the electricity bill in particular because that is what the extra taxes are slapped onto. Normalization: Greeks eating dinner in the dark.

Your money tracking software wants to know if you sent a payment in error. “Roxani, this is your third wire transfer this month,” it says in digitized compassionate concern.

Normalization: Your entire salary flies to Greece before it ever touches the ground in your own life. The only one surprised by this is your digital money tracking software.

* * *

There is something about these occasions that triggers a reaction akin to the day after a birthday, a wedding, a divorce. I look in the mirror and wonder if I look older. More married? Less married? Bureaucracies pronounce people as being on the other side of a milestone. They accord identities and separate time: Before joining an armed group, during the war, after demobilization. Before the financial crisis. During the austerity measures. After the bailout. Before marriage, after marriage, after the end of marriage.

Much of the dissonance of a life in transition emerges in the moments when one’s own notion of self and time does not match the prepositions.

* * *

I am sitting with “Maria” in her prefabricated accommodation in the transition zone for former combatants. The walls do not go all the way up to meet the tin roof. When the wind blows, it rains dust on Maria’s bed.

She tells me that she misses living in the jungle. “Not the war, not the weapon. The jungle.”

I ask whether that is a possibility for her, for her life ‘after.’ “Could you go back to the jungle to live? Once your… process here is complete?” Everyone seems to use the word ‘process’ in Colombia to refer to any bureaucracy related to the war, but there is something uncomfortable about it, like using “journey” as a euphemism for a difficult pregnancy or a recovery from cancer. “Could you go back after your demobilization is complete?,” I try again.

Maria’s face contracts. “I am not demobilized,” she tells me, raising her voice. “Demobilization is a castration. I am disarmed and will stay disarmed. But, in my heart, in my politics, I am still a guerrillera.”

What does it mean to still be a guerrillera in a world that has pronounced the war over, that has done so on a premise of relegating guerrilleras to the past, that requires that side of oneself to be ‘normalized’? For Maria, it means a refusal to live separately from herself.

* * *

“Soldiers get to be veterans. Veterans for life. I am a victim for life.”

I am talking to “Antonio,” after having accompanied him to a capacity building workshop. “Capacity building” is almost an allergen in Colombia during the period after the peace accords were signed. As a different interlocutor told me, “workshops are an epidemic.” The language of pathogens circulates freely during the-time-of-not-war-not-peace.

During the workshop, a state bureaucrat told Antonio and fellow victims of the armed conflict that “the war is over,” that “there will not be any more victims, not even one.” There was a lot of talk of superación, of overcoming — not just the harms of the war, but also “the condition of victim.”

To Antonio, this suggestion is offensive because it disregards — and erases — the violence that lives on in his community, in his home, in his body, in the very bureaucratic agency in which our conversation is taking place.

“I am a victim for life,” in this case, is not a passive surrender. It is an act of agency — a declaration of resistance to the pronouncement of time as having moved on in ways that do not correspond to the truth in people’s bodies.

* * *

In defiance of all I have learned, I checked my bills in Greece today. I looked in the mirror to see if something would feel different now that an institution has pronounced an era of hardship to have ended, now that another white man in a suit has welcomed us to “normality.”

My supplemental tax is still in place. The phone calls from home, cries for help to an imagined “golden immigrant,” have not stopped coming. Even from a world away, it feels like there is still dust raining on a bed.

Echoes

Published by Roxani

It is the end of another day of research  in Colombia and I am visiting one of the many entities with a mandate to serve victims of the armed conflict.

By now, I have mastered the choreography of entry. I show a security guard my identity document and inform him whom I am there to visit. An assistant takes a blurry, black-and-white photo of me and prints it onto a sticky badge.

“Sixth floor, Víctimas.”

Victims, in this case, is a place, a topography. It is also shorthand by which to refer to the bureaucrats who inhabit it. The subjects of their attention–individuals whom the state recognizes as registered victims of the armed conflict–shape how the subjects of my attention–state officials who tend to them–are known, grouped, and described.

I pass through a full body scanner, as though at an airport. Whether it beeps or not, I am waved through. My white, female body is not coded as a threat in these spaces. I wear a lanyard around my neck to signal I am a visitor. The tag at the bottom of it suggests I should not be left unaccompanied. Beware the unaccompanied researcher.

I take a seat in the waiting room as a video of smiling women harvesting coffee plays in the background. When it concludes, a tagline announces a new Colombia. The video plays three times on loop as I wait. Colombia is born anew each time.

My interviewee arrives and warmly apologizes for the delay as he escorts me to a windowless conference room. I pull a voice recorder, notebook, and business card out of my bag and explain that I am researching the production of victimhood as a status during transitions from violence — not only through acts of violence, but also through acts of bureaucratic affirmation.

He smiles. “So, you want to talk to bureaucrats.”

The university ethics board that must review all research of this type has approved two research protocols for me: One for victims of the conflict, and one for officials interacting with them as part of the Colombian bureaucracy. This classification system is based on the same limited premise as trigger warnings: You can know what hurts. You can sort pain and identities into buckets: the victims, the bureaucrats.

Acknowledging that lives touched by violence are less tidy than the interview sorting system suggests, I begin each interview broadly: “How did you start doing this work?”

Responses vary: Many of my interlocutors vividly remember media coverage of massacres during their youth. Others name a relative who was displaced in a different part of Colombia. Yet others recall a particularly enthusiastic professor in university. For a minority, bureaucratic idealism brought them here, to the seat across mine.

“How did you start doing this work?,” I ask on this day too.

“On the eve of my 13th birthday, my father, who was a life-long human rights defender, was assassinated.”

I swallow. This has happened before, this mixing of protocols. For the purposes of the ethics board, am I talking to a victim or a bureaucrat? Months earlier, I resolved not to attempt to settle these dilemmas alone, shuffling labels around quietly in my head, assigning categories.

“Do you identify as a victim?”

Over the next two hours, the conversation stretches my Spanish reflexive pronouns to their frontier: “I see myself as . . . ” “They see me as . . .” We meander through an I, a we, and a they that are constantly changing, through institutional acronyms and Wittgenstein, liberation theology, and hierarchies of pain.

Months later, at an academic conference, a colleague remarks that my interlocutors seem unusually articulate. This exposes less about ‘them’ and more about ‘us.’ We expect subject-verb-object victimhood. Poetry is not how we imagine suffering or impunity to speak.

As we wrap up our conversation, my interviewee’s colleagues pop in to the conference room to say goodnight. I behave as though I am at a restaurant in which the servers are starting to stack chairs and turn the lights down. I am still learning to take up space in my own research, still learning the difference between acknowledging research as an intervention and treating myself as an imposition.

“Do you have any questions for me?”

“Yes, actually.”

This, too, is common: the words that come as I make my way to the door, recorder off, notebook safely in my bag.

“Whom did you lose?”

I am taken aback. I deflect and ask my interviewee if it’s been his experience that people who research these topics have experienced loss.

“No, not always. But you have.”

Much training in interviewing is an exercise in distance. I join many feminist colleagues in rejecting this unidirectional gaze of research. I am not a neutral, objective observer, clinically parachuting into the lives of others to examine them as though under a microscope. My own vocabularies of grief have informed the questions I ask and methods I use to answer them in ways that are not quite suitable for the Qualifications and Prior Experience section of scholarly grant applications: “I speak fluent Spanish and loss.”

In this moment, though, I mumble through my Spanish. I cannot discipline both language and grief in the same breath.

“So?” My interviewee, too, knows how to hold the silences. A woman is mopping the floor outside the office.

I research hierarchies of loss and now I tiptoe in a minefield of them. I struggle to acknowledge my own history of sudden loss without suggesting that it is the same as or comparable to the losses inflicted by violence.

“My father,” I say. “When I was younger.” I am embarrassed at my own vagueness.

“I am very sorry,” he says. “I could tell.” We stand at the edge of the conference room, waiting for the recently mopped hallway to dry. The scent of lemon Chlorox follows me out.

Later, I send my standard thank you note. He replies with a single photo.

Across the image, a neon caption from a museum exhibit: “Every search contains a loss.”

* * *

I am on a layover in Cambridge, MA between intervals of research, paying a visit to Porter Square Books.

The view of a mall parking lot is unremarkable in many senses, but in my life, a return to this vista is one of the ways in which I have marked time. I have sat by this window as I did the reading for my PhD exams. I wrote wedding vows here. I signed divorce papers. I have whisper-told the story of my life to a friend at the next stool and overheard the baristas debating their favorite Fiona Apple songs.

One of the bookstore regulars is sitting next to me today. Being a regular requires presence and I forfeited that title by leaving to make a home elsewhere. I long for an identity that acknowledges my commitment to returning without erasing the fact that I no longer keep these seats warm.

He is a man in his 70s who has dedicated himself to learning languages by dictionary. Today he is learning German and Italian. “A noun is a noun in English. End of story. In German, they have cases. You know trouble when you see the dative.”

I smile, recalling my own fraught relationship with the Spanish subjunctive over the years.

The man continues to talk in my direction: at me, but also to me. “You read all these books already, didn’t you? I always knew girls are smarter than boys. My daughter-in-law tells me you can’t call them ‘girls’ these days. What book are you on today? Number three? Four?”

I put my book down. He talks to me about his old friend from high school who used to work on a nuclear submarine. He comments on the hot chocolate. “They don’t make hot chocolate like they used to!”

There is a chatty loneliness to him. I see it when he talks about his dentist, “the happiest dentist. You haven’t met a dentist this happy.” In this type of narrative arc, I recognize my father near the end of his life: the stories getting bigger with each retelling, the world getting a little smaller.

I ask why he is learning Italian and he declares that he needs to order wine properly in Montepulciano before the end of his life. “I like sweet wine, but I told my son, he can’t go telling anybody that. In Italy, if you are a man and you like sweet wine, you are a wimp. I like sweet wine, but never can you tell anyone until I die.”

He goes to his car to retrieve paper. When he returns, a pad declares in motivational all caps that Today Is The Day. Beneath it, a declension of nouns.

As I pack to leave, he asks where my book is. I point to my bag, indicating I have already purchased it. “No, no, your book,” he gestures towards the bookstore. “You’re writing, writing, writing. I see you writing for years. Where’s the book? Now listen to me: I want to hold this book before I die. Put something in the dative case in it so I know you heard me. Maybe in the epilogue.”

I look to the other side of me, where a man is scribbling into a gratitude journal, a daily practice of listing thankfulness. I look away. I swim in narratives of loss all day, but an accidental glance into another’s thankfulness feels like an intrusion.

* * *

The passenger in the middle seat on this flight out of Colombia is stuffing all his belongings in the overhead bin. Before he sits down, he pulls out an orange and pink envelope, sealed by a felt fabric heart, also pink.

He does not open the envelope until we are airborne. I have always wondered about the classification system that sorts lovers into those who rip open these letters before their body has fully cooled from the goodbye hug versus those who follow instructions and wait until the air. An obedience born out of superstition or, perhaps, fidelity.

He pulls out a paper scented so heavily that I can smell it in the next seat. I used to love scented stationery as a child, when my friends and I would gift it to each other at birthday parties. I would stash it into a desk drawer until I found an occasion that felt worthy of its use. When I return to my childhood home now, that drawer smells of all the words that never came.

At the top of the letter in bubbly letters, also in pink (and possibly visible from space): “Four months of the most perfect love. ” I look away, the man reads on. He turns the page. There is a bright red lipstick kiss on the bottom.

When I would go to summer camp, my mother would use the scented paper from my stuffed drawer to send me letters. There is no privacy at camp: every package is scrutinized for potentially shareable candy, every letter for news from beyond tent hill. My camp friends knew my mother by the red lipstick kiss that would close each correspondence.

My mother was never particularly interested in make-up, except when it came to detecting prohibited shimmer on my cheeks as a teenager, even when the blush package swore it was “a natural look.” Her own routine consisted of two big orange blotches on the cheeks, dark eyes, a groan about crow’s feet, bright red lips.

On a road trip a few years ago, I convinced myself I could be the kind of woman who ‘effortlessly’ wears red lipstick. I tried it again at a wedding and again when I read a book about French women and elegant childbirth.

Every time I smacked my lips together to dab the color, I could hear my mother, looking in the mirror on the morning of my father’s funeral, applying a red tint to her lips. “Otherwise, I look like a corpse.”

Every time the plane hits a pocket of turbulence, the passenger in the middle seat looks at the wing. I know that intersection of nervous flyer and budding romance. Everyone munches pretzels around you while all you can think is let this plane not crash so I can live this love.

He spends the rest of the flight sniffle-crying while he looks at photos of a woman on his phone. I spend the rest of mine secularly praying that he can continue to be this moved by love as he ages.

Before landing, he asks me a question about the US immigration forms. I look over at his. We are born on the same day, thirteen years apart.

Becoming

Published by Roxani

There is no simple verb equivalent for the verb ‘become’ in Spanish.

There are varieties of becoming, all expressed in the reflexive verb form.

My textbook treats physical and emotional changes as temporary, worthy of the verb form ponerse, accompanied by an adjective. Se puso bravo al leer la carta. He became angry when he read the letter.

Spanish treats anger as fleeting and effortless. It distinguishes it from changes that require more intentionality, such as becoming a professional, achieving a certain social status, or building a friendship. Llegamos a ser amigas. We arrived at being friends, literally translated. Se hizo rico. He made himself rich.

I appreciate the honesty of literality — the way in which the precise verb form does not hide the effort.

The textbook continues: For more profound changes, we use the verb volverse. Se volvieron muy arrogantes. They became very arrogant. Literally translated, the non-reflexive volver means to return.

Peculiarly (or appropriately), volverse is also the verb form reserved for insanity: Me volví loca. Anger is allowed to be fleetingly temporary in Spanish; madness, however, is profoundly lasting.

*

The first fluency I lose when I do not soak in a language every day is intimacy. I become stiffly polite, reverting to the formal ‘you’: σας in Greek, usted in Spanish.

The words for oppression and bureaucracies, on the other hand, are the last to abandon me. Seat me in a Colombian bar and the language of enforced disappearance occupies space more readily than the words of leisure. My mother tongue is not exempt from these partitions. I have lived primarily outside of Greece for thirteen years now. Put me on the phone with a hospital administrator there and the words fall out of my mouth as though I had never left. The language for bureaucracies of caregiving lives in a different part of my body than the words that elude me.

It feels ethically irresponsible to intervene in people’s lives with questions about violence and victimhood without being able to readily supply the words for contentment. In an attempt to correct for this imbalance of articulable emotions, I planted myself in a Spanish ‘literature and culture’ class. Twelve years older than the next oldest student, mine was the outsized body in kindergarten.

Week 1: Revisiting the past tenses. The past continuous: for actions that unfold in the background, alongside others, with no noticeable event or interruption. The tense for the dull ache of grief.

Week 2: The subjunctive, the grammar form of my nightmares. Reserved for preferences, wishes, hopes, and dreams. A decade ago, I would rephrase all my Spanish sentences to deliberately avoid using the subjunctive. A dreamless, hopeless phrase was preferable to imperfection.

I sit mutely for the first half hour of each session, arranging prepositions in my head as though they are pieces of furniture that need to be positioned just so if one is to not scratch the walls. My classmates, on the other hand, speak with reckless abandon. They dream–without the subjunctive, but also without the shame that accompanies its absence.

On Week 3, I find myself wishing I had learned shamelessness younger.

Week 4: Reflexive verbs. Dormirse: to fall asleep. Dormir: to sleep. An asterisk in the textbook notes, in smaller font, that some verbs primarily or exclusively exist in their reflexive form. Divorciarse: to get divorced.

I write my in-class essay that week on the topic of amnesties after atrocities. The following week, the professor asks me why I am in the class at all. Mira, ya tú hablas español. 

Sometimes it is easier to find the reflexive words for divorce in another tongue.

My week 5 flashcard holds translations for the following words: to march in formation, to shoot a firearm, to lock someone up, a rifle, the breeze. The first four terms had been familiar. Once the breeze entered my life in Spanish, I knew it was time to set myself free.

*

Ρω, μήπως βλέπεις τίποτα ουρές; 

My father was an unrepentant smoker. I learned at a young age that this was a habit of his that I was meant to cover up, to shield him from the wrath of my mother. It took years for me to learn that she, too, selectively shielded him all the way to the grave. When my third grade teacher gave my class the lecture on the deathly effects of nicotine, I came home with posters portraying black lungs and insisted that they be hung in the living room. My father could not live with the irony of resisting the willfulness of the daughter he had raised to persist.

By the time I came home from school the following afternoon, the posters were gone. My mother shrugged apologetically, saying the washing machine had tragically overflowed. A flood had washed everything out.

My own complicity in my father’s smoking took the form of accompanying him on walks. When I was very little, he would teach me the names of bushes and birds. When we branched out to mammals, I became fascinated with skunks, noticeable by their tails. Every night, we would wander outside for him to smoke and me to look for skunks.

Ro, do you see any tails? 

My father was a fan of flashcards and repetition. My mother’s frugality was essential for curtailing his commitment to my learning. I started squeezing more than one word onto each card. By the time I was applying to universities, it became apparent that the fluency in flora and fauna that he had imparted on me during his life had been limited to Greek. This was especially vexing given that the required standardized tests for admission to US universities seemed to be obsessed with vocabulary for animals and their young. “A calf is a baby cow,” read my English flashcards. Thanks to my mother’s sense of economy, each flashcard became a small farm.

A decade and a half and many exams later, I am a doctoral candidate. Rarely am I quizzed anymore on my knowledge of the English name for a female sheep. Yet, somehow, this summer has brought with it a lamentation for language that is not my own. I do not have the words for the birds that wake me up at dawn. I know them intimately, yet know not how to speak of them.

This is the summer I grew attached to moss. I walk through the same woods over and over and over until they feel like mine, until I am preemptively nostalgic at the thought of leaving them for Colombia, for different moss and different words for it. I become uncomfortable at the idea of my woods, at the transformation of familiarity into a possessive pronoun. The more nostalgic I get, the harder gravity seems to pull me. I spend many days crouching next to ‘my mosses’, sharing them with friends who humor me, hoping they will teach me the words for them in English. A friend peels a strand of moss off the forest and I gasp as though I have witnessed a violation. For her, intimacy lies in touching the moss, carrying it in a pocket, transplanting it into a community of other happy plants miles away. For me, moss has to stay in this forest as an anchor for all the words I have yet to learn.

*

There is a disorientation to seeing the tails without inhaling his cigarette smoke.

On this, my last summer in this home, I become attuned to the seasonality I could not initially name. The peonies give way to the black-eyed Susans that bow to the more majestic sunflowers. By the time the hydrangeas bloom, the first leaves have turned and I preemptively miss the crisp air of the fall I will not inhabit. The bunnies get particularly bold sometime between the appearance of the peonies and the black-eyed Susans entering full bloom.

These are not bunny tails.

I take a few steps back in anticipation of being sprayed, but I also suspect these are not skunks.

One tail emerges, then another.

On the last day of Spanish class, I come home to raccoons kissing in the storm drain.

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Spectacles of death

Published by Roxani

Afghanistan, April 2017

What most struck me about the first American wedding in which I participated in 2004 was the proliferation of acronyms. There was a MOH and DH and MOB, and I could not for the life of me figure out why one would abbreviate their life partner to sound like an express postal service or their mother to sound like an all-caps mafia. Thirteen years of US-based weddings later, I have learned that wedding acronyms are the shorthand of an insider: a signal to others that you are fluent in the esoteric language of performative partnership.

When the news alerts started flashing that the US had dropped the MOAB in Afghanistan, images of satin-clad Maids of Honor parachuting out of fighter jets urgently clutching bouquets flooded my imagination. Warfare shorthand is not unlike wedding-industrial complex shorthand: it signals insiderness. A MOAB is the mother of all bombs, and within hours, the acronym rolls off tongues, like we grew up saying it. News agencies struggle to decide whether to put ‘mother of all bombs’ between quotes, as though without the punctuation, anyone could be misled to believe in a matriarchy of ammunition.

What does the appropriation of the language of motherhood do to acts of violence? How does cloaking violence in the veneer of maternity obscure its ends and sanitize its means?

I did not yet speak English when feminist scholar Carol Cohn wrote “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” I did not yet know that Cohn’s analysis of the use of gendered language towards ‘technostrategic’ militarized ends would influence my views on feminism, militarism, and notions of critical citizenship. Cohn notes:

What hit me first was the elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words.

What realities of dropping the Mother of All Bombs into Afghanistan does the language of motherhood and its catchy militarized acronym hide? And how does the insistence on a language of specialization and the preservation of an insider/outsider culture–“oh, you don’t understand, this is just the term, this is how we speak, nothing to it”–preserve our distancing from violence?

Cohn continues her analysis of defense intellectuals by pointing out the sexualized imagery of warfare. She writes, “both the military itself and the arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest.” In support of this claim, she scans magazine advertisements for weapons and discourses on weapons systems. In support of this claim, I look around with discomfort to discover that even those who criticize the decision-making process behind the use of the Mother of all Bombs remain a little in awe that it exists and that it, too, is American. I recognize a sense of pride that the biggest missile is ‘ours’, that we have won the locker room contest in a world that is seemingly full of locker room talk, even if this locker room becomes our undoing.

When I articulate my own discomfort at the euphemisms that render violence less legible, I am reassured that it is ‘just’ an expression. Alas, I have learned to pay attention to the ‘just’ that justifies all transgressions. ‘Just’ words, ‘just’ an expression, I was ‘just’ saying: Ever the minimizer of harm. To me, feminism means paying attention to words, to discourse — and to how discourse not only reflects meaning, but also makes it.

Feminism also means paying attention to essentializing discourses of a peaceful femininity. In the same way that I am skeptical about ‘just,’ feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe has taught me to be skeptical about ‘naturally.’ Mothers are not naturally peaceful. They are not naturally nurturing. They are not naturally antithetical to bombs. Arguing that the framing of MOAB is unjust because femininity is naturally peaceable and world harmony emanates from our wombs walks us back to that same essentialist dead end from which we seek to escape.

Where does that leave us? It leaves us paying close attention to who uses the discourse and imagery of motherhood (and its seductive-but-not-linear-or-natural association with innocence and peace) and to what ends. It leaves us resisting the acronym. It leaves us looking at the belly of a plane birthing a militarized phallus and remembering to ask what happens at the other end — what happens when our jingoistic pride at size has subsided and when the camera has stopped rolling.

*

Syria, April 2017

The camera did not stop rolling in Syria for a while. Grief sears itself into memory: whether its yours, or that of others. Whether it is Aylan washed up on a Turkish shore in 2016 or the father holding his two dying children during the chemical attack in Syria in April 2017, recalling those images tastes like death and outrage and paralysis and indignation. Our indignation–like our compassion–is stratified. As Miriam Ticktin writes:

“Appearances matter in whether we feel sympathy or not. […] Innocence is about purity, vulnerability and naivety; it carries the desire to protect and take responsibility for those who–in their want of knowledge–cannot take care of themselves. Innocence establishes a hierarchical relationship between those who care and those who are cared for.”

I watched the videos too. The image of the father clutching his dying children has escorted me through my day. In watching them,I have wondered about consent and death. When, in the scale of mass atrocity, did the death of those children start to belong to us? When did we become entitled to witnessing this man’s grief? What is it that allows–or even compels–us to stare at a child as she takes her last breath? At some point in the arc of this war and its narration, childhood stopped being private and intimate, and so did death. It became viewable and, through its viewing, iconic.

We can argue that violence itself is public and performative and ruptures social bonds — and its documentation merely captures the rupture, rather than causing or reinforcing it. We can argue that documentation is a duty and an act of resistance. As James Dawes writes in Evil Men:

The argument that we must bear witness to atrocity, that we must tell the story, is the core of the catechism of the human rights movement. We gather testimony, we investigate and detail war crimes, because we are morally bound to do so.

Or we can, following Timothy Pachirat, interrogate the politics of sight to argue that there is a more “nuanced relation between sight and sequestration than simple binaries between visible/invisible, plain/hidden, and open/confined can accommodate. Even when intended as a tactic of social and political transformation, the act of making the hidden visible may be equally likely to generate other, more effective ways of confining it.” Pachirat goes on to quote Susan Sontag:

“The gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering. Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched or ignored by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped — and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores this.”

How confident are we that we will be on the right side of these politics of sight? Are we confident enough to blur the lines of consent and to capture the last breaths of fellow humans? What is that precise moment at which those bodies slipped over to history, transcending the private lives from which they emerged to become public spectacle? What hopes did they carry with them during this transformation? And did those of us who viewed the video have that same confidence and sense of duty to carry those hopes?

*

Greece, April 2017

After two days of violent hallucinations, my brother was lucid for a few moments.

Language matters, for bombs and brothers alike.

I have struggled to describe him. My father was married three times and had a child from each marriage. Technically, we are half-siblings to each other. In actuality, until recently, the three of us have led peacefully divergent lives–a distance bred by geography, a remarkable age difference, and the different family circumstances into which we each landed as our respective mothers navigated life. When I heard that my eldest brother was acutely ill and entering his final days, I did what I do in the face of transatlantic death: I got on a plane.

When I informed colleagues and friends, I found myself reassuring them. Yes, my brother is dying, but he is not that kind of brother, we did not grow up together, we were not close, and no, don’t worry, I am fine. All of Greece trades in Easter metaphors this time of spring, and my statements felt like the denial of Peter, like a callous act of minimization of familial bonds and pain alike. I found myself managing expectations in the way those who are fluent in grief often do, with an added complexity: The appearance of a layer of family that some of my loved ones had not heard much about overrepresented a kinship I had not ever fully experienced. It did not necessarily allay my solitude or make me feel like less of an orphan. It merely expanded the pool of grief into which I could swim.

I was hubristic about my own fluency in grief. I knew that, in the languages of loss, I already spoke sudden death, and wartime death, and protracted loss, and illness (and the less physical, but nonetheless grievable losses: displacement, divorce, immigration). I expected them to prepare me for sitting by a hospital bed and saying goodbye.

To some extent, they did. I know how to speak to nurses and doctors and navigate morbid bureaucracy. I know what to ask, in which tone, what to argue about, what to release. I know how to speak to someone who cannot quite hear over the machinery breathing air into him.

I did not know how to sit next to someone who is dying and knows it — who does not slip out of this world suddenly, in a few breaths, or even protractedly but without consciousness.

I read three books in the hospital and do not remember a single word out of any of them. I picked an argument with a doctor about the patriarchy. I ate a lot of Kinder Buenos that tasted like the griefs of a younger self. But mostly, I stared.

I stared at the alternating pressure mattress, meant to prevent bedsores. I stared at the bag of food and the tubes linking it to my brother. I stared at his bones, counting each bone in his foot, each tiny component of every toe. “He gets 2,600 calories a day,” the doctor reassured me. “But the cancer eats everything, you see.” I stared at the herpes outbreak all over his head, a function of protracted hospitalization and a weak immune system. It was at once his most harmless and visible injury.

When he opens his eyes, the nurses say “all three of you — what is it with these eyes! Was it your dad? Is that where they came from?” As the days pass and liquid builds up in his lungs, he coughs more and more. I blink at him and reassure him back to sleep. I continue to stare with an almost ethnographic fascination, guilty at my own voyeurism in the face of the process of dying.

On the third day of my being there, the day my brother was lucid, the physical therapist paid us a visit. He speaks to patients with formality, with none of the casual familiarity I have seen in my life in the US. “Mr. Krystallis! Mr. Krystallis, can you hear me?” I have not heard anyone calling for Mr. Krystallis since our father was alive. “Mr. Krystallis, I am going to call for two nurses and get you to stand for a minute. It will be good for you.”

The tubes get unhooked, the portable oxygen unit appears, as do two of the tallest men I have seen in Greece. “Yes, basketball player,” one of them tells me, without my asking. They lift my brother from the bed. His clothes drape, he seems disoriented at gravity, at his feet touching the floor, at touch itself. “Take a picture, take a picture, we are standing!,” one of the men tells me. “Take a picture for your other brother to show him!,” our private nurse prompts me.

I am staring at every bone. Both my brother and I are acutely aware that we are participating in the spectacle of dying: he, the reluctant performer; I, the reluctant audience. I raise my phone to take a photo, but do not have the heart to capture his face. The resulting image depicts the lined hospital floor, the white uniform of the basketball-player-turned-nurse, and all the visible bones in my brother’s lower legs.

When everyone asks to see it after my brother is back in bed, I apologize. “It is blurry, it seems.” “Blurry?!,” the nurse reacts in disappointment. “It is okay, we will take one tomorrow,” she reassures me. Both she and I know that will not happen.

The photo, in all its clarity, still sits in my phone, sandwiched between images of every jacaranda tree on the verge of blossoming in Athens that week.

 

Estranged tongues

Published by Roxani

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A woman is dropping her young daughters off at the port. She stops them halfway up the steps of the boat to plant a loud kiss on their cheeks. “You look like sisters!,” the captain tells her, gesturing to the girls. Greek flattery tastes like the perfume of the first boy you loved — you recognize the scent instantly and you find yourself missing it for a split second, even if the love itself tasted bitter. “Take care of my girls,” the woman says to the captain. A man helps the girls with the luggage — “only because you are so pretty.” “You’re pretty too,” he tells me. When I don’t respond, he turns to another crew member and says, “Ξένη είναι.” She’s foreign.

I balk at my own foreignness. I didn’t clap when the plane landed. When my luggage didn’t show up, I stood a few meters from the claim desk, anticipating order, hesitant to mob it. When an American man (you always know who the Americans are) starts yelling at the employee that “this” “would never happen in America,” I feel instantly Greeker. Willfully so. And when I finally approach the desk and the employee tells me that she’s not sure where my stuff is or when it will resurface or what I can do, I treat it as my national duty to forgive the chaos. Maybe it comes with the affection and the warmth. As I walk to the taxi line, I wonder how many of the everyday miseries of life in my homeland were born out of our affectionate forgiveness of chaos.

When I say καλησπέρα, the taxi driver registers his own surprise at my Greek voice. It catches me by surprise too. It comes from a different place within me than my English words do. Once the driver registers me as Greek, we partake in the familiar choreography: where you grew up, what school you went to, how you likely share a second cousin. “You’re fancy out there in America.” I don’t argue; it is a lesson in both the relativity of privilege and in the invisibility of losses.

“How did your dad let such a girl leave the country?!” I tell him the story of how my father insisted that I dream of a life outside of Greece, even when such a dream was premature and incongruent. This is a story of urging, not of permission. The driver tells me about his children: a 9-year-old who wants to be a police officer and a 13-year-old who wants to play ping pong in the Olympics. “She’s quite good, you know!”

As we zoom from the Athens airport to the port, the city is denser than I remember it. It had always been denser than I recall, I suspect. My memory did the filtering.

The driver asks what brought me here and I briefly mention my work with refugees. I can feel myself rushing through it. “I don’t suppose you’re one of those… what do you call them — ‘solidarity people’, are you? Do you want this country to be overrun by Muslims who oppress us?”

I recognize this moment: it marks the choice between nodding and willing the drive to end, or assembling the harsh consonants to point out the true direction of oppression. My Greek words fail me. “They are fleeing war,” is all I can muster.

“Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m a neo-Nazi or something. I’m just a patriot,” he offers. I say very little, but notice the ‘just’ that normalizes all sins. A week prior, I was sitting in an ethnography workshop, discussing whether these affective responses — the nod, the non-committal empathetic mmmm — are a tacit signal of approval when others spew hate. Can you nod when interviewing a war criminal? A racist? When is the “right time” to engage in “the right way?” Thirty hours of travel across continents later, I have forgotten what the answer would look like without the quotes. In my own passive silences, I see a shameful endorsement.

“So, don’t tell me you Americans over there will elect a WOMAN for president.”

I hesitate in narrating this story. I suffer from my own type of nostalgia washing over everything: I want Greeks to be my hospitable, kind Greeks. The Greeks who change the ticket for the boat you missed for free because they know it wasn’t your fault and you’re human and they’re human too, and they wouldn’t make you fight with an automated answering machine yelling “Representative!” to yourself until you can find a live person to book your ticket. My heart knows there is no such thing as “the Greeks”, that it would be its own kind of single story that flattens textures and inequalities and humanity. And yet I feel I ought to be an ambassador for my homeland, which inspires a protectiveness and hesitation: if I’m going to tell stories about it, I should at least paint a fresh coat of something over the misogyny.

Can you be an ambassador for a place and showcase its kind beauty without denying its fraughtness?

“So, don’t tell me you Americans will elect a WOMAN for president.”

There are plenty of Americans, too, who think it’s absurd that a woman might just be capable of being president. We have a way of other-izing sexism. When I explain that I work on gender and violence in war, it is often met with “it’s awful what they do to people over there.” Ambiguity lingers over the they and the there.

“Ehhh! Hillary girl! I can see it on your face,” the taxi driver says. I think of all the violence that has been justified in the name of seeing politics on people’s faces. I wish for words. None of them come in Greek. All my fighting words are those of other tongues. I have fought all my battles elsewhere; it is elsewhere that I have learned how to fight. The word “patriarchy” is a Greek word, from the root for a ruling father. And yet when I utter it in Greek, it feels clumsy in my mouth, foreign to the context.

Three weeks after I exit this taxi, I will be sitting at a bar by a fountain near one of Athens’ main avenues. A Greek man will ask me if I really do think misogyny–another Greek word –is still a problem in Greece. Somehow, I will be at home in my life again: the type of home that you recognize because here you are, on a Saturday evening, discussing misogyny with wine. That night, I will find the words. Subject-verb-object. I will forgive myself for mismatching the tenses, and for translating into my mother tongue from an adopted stepmother of a language.

Naming ghosts of patriarchy and misogyny is a feminist project to which I have committed my life with little hesitation or regard for propriety (ever the fear raised to caution people away from uttering powerful words). Except, somewhere along the way, I became more comfortable exporting this project to other domains rather than finding the words for it in my homeland. The same can be said for tolerating all other manners of abuse–racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, xenophobia–for which the words felt foreign or the battles felt like they were someone else’s to fight. Is that not a form of complicity in oppression, disguised under the banner of foreignness?

Perhaps we can train tongues to embrace the clumsiness. Perhaps patriarchy becomes less strange to the ear the more we utter it. Like ghosts, inequalities need to be named if they are ever to be dispelled.

I rode back to the airport a few weeks later, this time traveling from Athens, Greece to Bogotá, Colombia. The driver wished me καλή επιστροφή — a safe and good return. He assumed Greece to be my home, the place to return to. Perhaps a few weeks of finding the words helped me shed some layers of foreignness. By the time I left, I was more legible as a Greek. I am under no illusion that the naming, of patriarchy or xenophobia, is enough by itself. I know that the politics of sight and speech, the acts of rendering visible and of uttering, can themselves be fraught. But I also know that my notion of citizenship in this world–a feminist, immigrant notion of citizenship–requires that I not let the words become elusive. That I find those chipping away at the patriarchy and xenophobia in my native tongue, and that I let them teach me how to string sentences together again. That I learn how to say “entitlement” in Greek. That I be more honest about the false and convenient divisions I have created within myself about where my work lives, where I am from, and where my life’s chosen battles take place. And that I return to fight them.

Our fragmented selves

Published by Roxani

Fragments of ice, Iceland

Fragments of ice on a thawing lake near Myvatn, Iceland

I remember the first time I saw my elementary school teacher in the grocery store.

I was about 7 years old, and my instinct was to hide behind my mother. In my mind, my teacher and I belonged in the same frame only in the classroom. I never imagined it was possible for her to have a life outside the school walls. This was not a judgment on her; it had simply never occurred to me to picture her life in other settings. Childhood enables that comfortable separation: a perfect compartmentalization.

During my first semester of college, I enrolled in Introduction to Philosophy. The experience reeked of first-semester-of-college-ness: there was something naively hopeful and beautiful (and so very cliché) about expecting that Intro to Philosophy may hold the key to the dilemmas of my future. I hadn’t yet realized that professors rarely bore the full burden of education at my university — not for the undergraduates anyway, and not most professors. They did lecture, but the responsibility for drilling the material in and making it accessible and grading and writing letters of recommendation and supporting dreams of futures primarily fell on PhD students whose livelihood depended on the role. When I visited the office of the Teaching Fellow for Intro to Philosophy, I was struck by how lived in it felt, as though the trappings of the class occupied more space than I would have imagined. More than a decade later, and now a PhD candidate myself, I recognize that it was not Intro to Philosophy that was taking up space: that office housed the Teaching Fellow’s research and all the anxiety that accompanies it. I now know the space these swallow.

Surrounded by papers and books turned upside down and more books with Post-it notes peeking out of them, the Teaching Fellow appeared to be in his natural habitat. Three weeks later, I saw him at the university gym. It was jarring that he was there (in retrospect, it was more jarring that I was). Nearly a decade after the instinct to hide behind my mother at the grocery store, lives still appeared to live in compartments in my head. I did not imagine bodies that move and run and sweat to be the same bodies that teach and grade and bookmark pages for their research.

This recurred throughout university, throughout life: A professor invites you to dinner at their house and you are surprised to see them in their daily life clothes, chopping tomatoes, making easy conversation with their spouse. You run into a work colleague at CVS and you both have a split second of non-recognition, as though you are embarrassed for the otherwise benign yogurt in your carts. You attend the wedding of a coworker, and you enjoy the surprise that comes with the stories of her living in ways with which you have not yet interacted. The person whose desk is next to yours is an ice climber. The woman with whom you trudged through northern Uganda documenting human rights abuses is a scrapbooker.

The expectation (illusion?) of privacy, coupled with an attachment to propriety, has made it easy to separate lives, even within one self. There is a professional self, a professional voice, and we put them on like an outfit. There is a body that runs and moves and makes love and gets sick. There is a heart that aches and rejoices and a voice that teaches and asks questions. There are hands that type love letters, and they are the same-but-different hands as those that write the essays, or the ones that write academic articles, or the ones that cook. These selves inhabit the same body. It’s all one body and, for those of us who aspire to a semblance of authentic coherence, one self too. And yet, they seem to be imagined and treated as comfortably severable and separate: fragments of a self. Blending the compartments is jarring. Our imaginations struggle to stretch in that direction, even when our hearts do.

***

Once I appreciated that compartmentalization takes effort–like patriarchy, like militarization, like all the -isms and -ations and -archies that appear effortless but actually require lots of invisible-seeming effort to be sustainable– I also cherished it. It felt like a privilege to be able to wear only part of a self to an occasion, as though an invisible cloak could drape the rest. When the rest of you is grieving acutely, it feels like a treat to show up and teach. Just teach. Just teach what you are supposed to teach. You do not need to bring your whole self to the classroom. You can write an academic article, and you do not need to show up whole on the page. Your job today is to document cases of gender-based violence, household to household. You show up to it. Your heart stays elsewhere.

There is a dehumanizing convenience to fragmented selves — for you, for others. Your inconvenient desires, aches, dreams can reside elsewhere. And–here is the dehumanizing part of it–you can also meet others where they are, or where they are showing you to be, without curiosity (or empathy) for what lies beyond.

As it is wont to do, grief exposes the farce. Grief, ever the honesty-maker. I failed at keeping the compartments airtight. Loss flooded everything, and with it came a sense of unexpected relief. I grieved in class, I grieved at birthday parties and graduation and through my first year of work. “I grieved in the beaches and on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets…” Through the first years of leading a more coherent, if monochromatic, existence, I felt compelled to comfort the people I subjected to it. I felt I owed them an apology for not putting away that which is meant to reside somewhere private, at an undefined, unimagined elsewhere. As time passed, I realized that the poet Mary Oliver is right: “tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” I was slowly becoming a container for others’ stories of honest pain and loss, from the loss of family members to the loss of a love or a particular vision of the future. I slid from ‘failing at compartmentalization’ to not valorizing it anymore, to actively resisting it.

When the rest of my palate began reemerging from under clouds of grief, the repertoire of stories I began to collect became more colorful. I have started to fill my life with people whose singing self lives alongside their climbing self alongside their report-writing self alongside their badass achievements and darker days. This coherence of self, and my community’s willingness to show it, does not make them less professional. I do not respect them less — only more. I do not feel jarred by seeing a fuller version of their life. These are whole humans, dedicated to showing the world a wider spectrum of themselves with less regard for the compartments in which we are each supposed to dress ourselves. We have not completely burned the compartments; we still retreat into them when we need to. Not everyone wants to wear their failing marriage or sick parent or financial portfolio to work every day. But we know we can shed them, and we know we would choose to, and somehow, that makes life slightly more human and livable.

And yet.

***

During the mandatory career counseling program in my first year of graduate school, we had a peer reviewing session for each other’s resumes. Catch an errant comma for a friend, and good professional karma will come your way. We did not know each other yet then, so it was more about the errant comma than the gentle encouragements to sell yourself better on the page. My resume peer review buddy was going through his checklist:

“Do you have a website or a blog?”

I said yes with hesitation. The blog belonged to a different self.

“Is it professional?,” he asked in the same tone.

My intuition was to vigorously shake my head no. Is it professional? Do I write about my professional life here? Only in crumbs, only as context for the larger story. The stories I encounter in my ‘professional hat’ rarely belong to me, and this has rarely felt like the appropriate space to share them directly. Do I write in a professional manner? If professional is intended as the opposite of personal, then no. There is grief, and love, and a whole lot of “I” statements about a wholer self than we expect to show up at a workplace. Is “is it professional” even the question that feels true?

“Let’s leave it off then. Better safe than sorry,” my peer review buddy offers, and I agree.

***

As our career counselor reminded us, “in this day and age…”, your resume is not the only piece of information about you. You exist “on the internet” — yet another space, another self. Leaving this site off my resume felt like an illusionary choice. It is not like an employer can hire a self insulated from grief and migration and love and hope. At best, my choice served as a quiet signal to the resume reader that I did not feel this space to be germane to my professional self. Yet, that reader permeates the words I write here. More acutely, that reader permeates the words I do not write.

Imagine an abstract audience of people you do not know for long enough and you will never write another word. My assumptions and aspirations of a whole, coherent, authentic self collapse in abstraction and anonymity. So on a good day, you try to show up as yourself, as the body that sweats and loves and aches from typing for too long, to your friends and community. On an excellent day, you try to bring that whole self to the world too, the world you do not know, the world that does not know you.

But the latter days are rare for me, and I cannot help but notice the silencing–the quiet, persistent, almost invisible but very present self-silencing that unfolds. In the past few months, I have begun many sentences to friends with “one day, remind me to write about……” The ellipses–the public ellipses–are often deeply personal. They more accurately reflect my lived experience than many words I have put on public pages. And in their truthful intimacy, they feel illegitimate for public viewing, much as I feel a yearning to tell their story. Perhaps it takes a type of courage I lack: a courage to be a writer, a public truth-teller, or at least a more public teller of what one imagines to be her own truth and, on a good day, that truth resonates outside herself too.

In one of my worlds, in a world that feels increasingly narrow and oppressive, but true and relevant nonetheless, the same person does not write academically about atrocities and personally about her love life. [In the more oppressive iteration of this, she does not even write academically about vastly different subjects, for she–like a lifestyle blog, ironically–needs a ‘cohesive brand’ and a ‘focus’ and a curated corner of atrocities to make her own.] The same person does not publicly share thoughts about her personal (and political, feminists would remind us) and ‘high politics’ (with those same feminists again reminding us about the status-making quotation marks and the designations of ‘high’ and ‘low’). I am those feminists, I have to remind myself.

Feminism provides one of the more consistent voices in my life: it is a self I wear unabashedly at work and at home, in public and in private, a self I rarely feel compelled to package, even when it is inconvenient. Writing, on the other hand, is easy to stow. The words get filed away until other, more ‘proper words’ come by, more suitable for public consumption. Less brave words, or at least less jarring. Or those words get filed away until they are forgotten, until they no longer bubble up with the urgency to be written down and shared. The act of writing down itself feels separate from the sharing. They satisfy different yearnings of documentation and truth-telling and memory-making and community and coherence.

Most of my words these days get filed away. I still live them, as coherently and authentically as I know how to live. I share some of them over tea and wine, others over tears and emails and endless streams of WhatsApp. But the truthful public words have recently evaded me–not because I do not know what they are or how to string them next to each other, but because I do not have the courage in this moment to ignore the world of fragmented selves in which we live. Nor can I ignore a few other truths that have emerged: It seems that this fragmentation of the self, the delineation of the compartments, makes me–us, I would venture, in a brave moment–lonelier. And it also seems that words that want to be uttered but are stifled, in the invisible-making passive voice, do not go quietly. They remind you they are there. They demand that you grow some courage and find a way to let them out. Or, at the very least, that you grieve for them.

Call You By Your Name

Published by Roxani

(With thanks to Andre Aciman, for a variation of the title.) 

“Very healthy, we believe you. A girl, though? Impossible! This family only has boys.”

That was, allegedly, my parents’ reaction upon learning a very healthy baby girl would enter their world. My mother took great pride in that being the last time the label ‘baby’ was attached to me. “You were Roxani from the womb,” she insisted.

This is the story of a name and, inevitably, of the stories we tell ourselves.

Many Greeks name their children after the grandparents, a game that invites the kind of social gymnastics that need a flowchart to explain: Which set of grandparents goes first? Do the living or the dead ones have priority? What about if you have multiple children? Or just one? What about your siblings’ children? What if–gasp–you don’t like your parents’ or in-laws’ names? What if–further gasp–you just want to name your children something other than what their grandparents are called?

Ρωξάνη. For a little baby (fine, a huge, 10-pound baby), my grandmother’s majestic name felt outsized. For a mumbling toddler, Roxani was both impossible to pronounce and write. The hard x, the rare omega in the middle of the word. Ro-cha-mi was the best I could muster, with a hard ch-, like challah. This misfortune was especially critical given that, right around the time I was chubbily mumbling my own name, the most (in)famous celebrity criminal in Greece, known for serially escaping from jail, was named Vangelis Rochamis. “What’s your name, sweetie?,” my mother’s friends would ask, with that tone that betrays setting children up for a performance. “Rochami!!!,” I would shout, and they would all giggle.

In case you are curious, two decades later, I can pronounce my name properly and Vangelis Rochamis was caught, escaped, caught again, escaped again, served a jail sentence, got married, and is now the proud owner of a seaside tavern. And yes, much of what you need to know about Greece is captured in that sentence.

***

Part of my big fat Greek education involved reiterating year after year the feats of our ancestors– and, like most educational curricula in the world to this day, obscuring those blemished aspects of history from which we could all stand to learn. There was a steady rotation: the Athenians, the Peloponnesians, the Spartans, the Persians and their wars, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans,  the Macedonians. The journeys and conquests of Alexander the Great held a special fascination, particularly because there were two points of connection between me and Alexander the Great (neither of which involves a direct lineage, I hate to disappoint): He married a woman named Roxanne and we lived on 100 Alexander the Great Street growing up. When my history teacher asked us if anyone knew who Roxanne was, I confidently raised my hand and declared that “she was the wife of 100 Alexander the Great Street.”

***

When I consider my life’s many blessings, my parents’ insistence that I learn fluent English, despite–or perhaps because of–their own linguistic limitations, ranks near the top. I always did like our English as a Second Language class in school and would regularly jump ahead to chapters the teacher hadn’t yet taught: participles, the past imperfect tense, the passive voice. Since our teacher was Greek, my ear had no natural feel for the English language. The closest I came to recognizing its sounds was when my mother and our neighbor Mrs. Iro watched the subtitled The Young and the Restless every day. In the background, I would repeat words I had heard in the thickest accent possible, which mostly consisted of my repeating “alright, alright” as one of the huffier characters did with some regularity, and feeling very sophisticated for it.

In the fifth grade, we were graced with a new English teacher. She was an American woman who had married a Greek and moved to Thessaloniki. When she was making our name tags, she informed me that Roxani in English was Roxanne. Within the blink of an eye, I had gained an extra ‘n.’ When she pronounced my name, it rhymed with pain: Rox-ay-nne.

I was skeptical at first, but she introduced me to Nancy Drew, phrasal verbs (“put off” is different than “put up” and certainly different than “put out” — lifelong knowledge here!), and to Maya Angelou, so I trusted her. My Roxanne alter ego was born.

***

Had my parents known that Sting (and Moulin Rouge and the musical Chicago) would make Roxanne famous, I like to think they would have reconsidered. Had they known they were setting me up for a lifetime of people bursting out into a song upon meeting me–a song about putting on the red light, no less–I like to think they would have named me after the other grandmother. Alas, my cousin Neni, 54 days older than me, beat me to the name game.

By the time I went to college, Roxani had been left behind. I was fully Roxanne by then, until one day my roommate beckoned: “Rooooox, do you want to watch an episode of something with me?” My father had an aversion to nicknames and never called me anything short of my full name: Roxani. On a good day, I was poulaki mou, paidaki mou, or kori mou — my little bird, my little child, my daughter. Diminutives in Greek end in -aki, making any word instantly cuter and tinier, particularly when followed by a possessive mou. Roxanaki mou, however, was never uttered.

“Rooooox!”, was a shock, then. “Can I call you Roxy?” was almost always followed by an abrupt “no, that’s a dog name.” I have had a series of other nicknames, from Mpoumpou to Buttons, but my shortened name never did stick.

***

“Señora Rossan!” I was neither a señora nor, to my knowledge, Rossan, but I felt compelled to turn around. “Fíjese, señora Rossan… Lo que pasa es…” I heard those words a lot in Colombia, filled with hedging, and explanation and the gap between imagination and reality bridged by every sentence that began with “well, the thing is…” The x in my name was not only unattainable for my childhood self but also for some of my Colombian colleagues. Señora Rossan was there to stay. She now rolls off my tongue such that, when ordering coffee in Mexico recently and the waiter asked for my name, my  Rossan produced an incredulous co-traveler, who for a minute did not recognize his travel companion.

***

When I enrolled in graduate school, things began to change. The registrar insisted that my email address and placard match the spelling of my name on my passport. For the first time since grade school, my name in the classroom was Roxani again. I couldn’t quite correct my professors; Roxani was my name, after all, so I began to lead a bit of a double life. I introduced myself as Roxanne — the only name I had ever called myself in English, and a name most everyone could pronounce. Roxani was reserved for Greece — for childhood, parents, and a different self.

The deeper my roots in the United States became, the more the bureaucracy expanded. Taxes, leases, and immigration documents all demanded a resurgence of the legal name to which I was born, not the English name and spelling I was bequeathed in the fifth grade. When my then partner became acquainted with my homeland, he quickly grew fond of adding an -aki suffix to every Greek word he knew: souvlaki mou, Roxanaki mou.

In the summer of 2014, I found myself on my Greek balcony anew, in the throes of one more round of immigration-related agonizing. I was Roxani for a whole summer, the longest period I have lived by that name as an adult. When I returned to the U.S., it seemed some of the aura of home had stayed with me: “Can I call you Roxani?,” a new colleague asked me, with the kind of warm forthrightness I hadn’t encountered when it came to my foreignness before.

Over the winter holidays, Niki gifted me Richard Romanus’ Act III, a boundlessly charming memoir about his family’s choice to retire on the Greek island of Skiathos. I devoured the book with the awe one experiences when an outsider writes about her country in a way that captures its soul. It is easy to write about Greece’s sun and sea, but thoughtful love for place, the kind that paints a portrait you recognize and nod enthusiastically as you watch it be sketched, is rarer. As I read, I couldn’t help but note that the protagonists’ names were all indisputably Greek: Katerina, Matula, Spiros. This realization made Roxanne feel especially incongruent. Somewhere between the book and my graduate school email address, between my new colleagues and the immigration forms, somewhere between Skiathos, Thessaloniki, Boston and all the journeys in between, I had a yearning to be Roxani in my story again.

In your country’s shoes

Published by Roxani

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“I have a question for you… Why do all the Greek girls here wear those shoes that could kill cockroaches?”

I was 17, and part of the Greek National Debate Team contingent that competed in the World Schools Debating Championships. I am not sure which is more astounding: that I ever recovered from that level of … coolness, or that to this date, I look back on that experience with the kind of sincere, boundless gratitude that faux teenage coolness could never inspire.

Our team had just managed an upset victory in a debate against Scotland, a country which had for years produced debate powerhouses (Yes, “debate powerhouses.” Ceaseless coolness, I tell you.) When it dawned on us that our team full of vividly gesturing English-as-a-Second-Language debaters just might beat the polished Scots, I remember thinking back to all those subtitled movies about underdogs that Greek TV loved to broadcast on Sunday afternoons: the Jamaican bobsledding team that wins in the Winter Olympics, Herbie the Beetle that beats the much cooler cars. As it turns out, you have no real sense of heroic magnitude at the age of 17.

After the judges congratulated us on our unlikely win, we were standing on a train platform in Stuttgart with the rest of our delirious, shocked team and our coaches, when the question arose from a fellow debater: “Why do all Greek girls wear those shoes that can kill cockroaches?” If you zoomed out, you would have seen my teammate in an enormous coat and black, pointy-toed boots. My coach Eirianna stood next to her in black kitten heels, with a hint of fishnets peeking out from underneath her jeans. My other coach Effie wore an identical pair and Helen, my English teacher, stood next to her in – you guessed it – her own pair of black pointy-toed heels. I was in a white cream suit– my first ever suit, in fact –coupled with a pink pashmina and black suede heels. Our unprecedented good fortune continued through multiple rounds of debating and, when it became apparent that we would reach the quarter-finals, my teammate’s mother got on a plane from Greece to Stuttgart to cheer us on, arriving with a case of champagne and her own pair of black heels. My male teammates had their own lucky dressing rituals before each day’s debate, though, disappointingly for the purposes of this story, they didn’t involve black pointy-toed heels.

“Why do all Greek girls wear those shoes that can kill cockroaches?”

None of us had an answer. Unlike other debate teams, we had neither a uniform nor a dress code. “It’s just what you wear at home” was, I think, the best we could muster.

***

What I learned from Effie and Eirianna and Helen can be summarized as follows:

There is no such thing as “arguing like a girl.”

Notice your voice — its sound, its pace, its impact.

If you have a question–a good question, the kind of question that bubbles up to be asked- do not hold it back. Especially do not hold it back out of shyness.

When you are nervous, you do not breathe. The whole room can hear you not breathing. To this day, Elijah will sometimes point out to me in the middle of an argument that he can hear the absence of a breath.

You can be kind and opinionated. Your opinions, the forcefulness with which you argue them, your desire to be an excellent debater, a compelling speaker, a person who wins the argument needn’t come at the expense of kindness. If you have to be unkind to win an argument, you are probably not being smart enough.

Do not retreat before you finish your sentence. You sometimes let your sentences trail off, as though you are debating apologetically. Lose the question mark, the lilt at the end. End in a period, in a firm step.

When a boy comes to the hotel lobby of the debating competition with a rose, let him talk to you about the PSATs, his love of Napoleon, or how you look like Alicia Silverstone — even if you don’t. Even if you’re an awkward teen too. He might just teach you a thing or two about love.

Also: Iron everything. Wear sunscreen in the winter. Baby blue and forest green go together, even if it looks like they don’t. Wear a pink dress to a debate round, even when you’re scared of being The Girl in a Pink Dress. And, when in doubt, pointy-toed heels.

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***

My sartorial education began long before I joined the debate team. My hometown, Thessaloniki, has a reputation of “I will not even take the trash out in my house clothes.” What are house clothes, you ask? Sweatpants, leggings-that-are-not-pants, pajamas, all of which are acceptable within your own home domain, and not a step outside of it. Relatedly: Are you wearing sneakers? You had best be en route to or from wherever you exercise. That grace period expires approximately half an hour after the sweat has dried. If you cannot wear your house clothes out, surely you can wear your Outside Clothes in the house, no? Trick question! You would never have been able to slip past my mother and get on the bed–or worse, in it– without changing back to house clothes.

The rules continue, and they are arbitrary, strict and generous in stereotyping: “You never wear a skirt and heels in the winter without hose – that’s what Americans do.” In the age before opaque tights and Brooklyn hipsters, thin black tights were the only way to go. Never skin-toned — because whose skin tone do those flesh-colored tights really match? — and never white. Those are for children’s birthday parties. Women’s dress shoes all came with a long pointy toe. The only exception to this rule was if your feet were above a certain size: “above 39, pointy toes makes it look like you are wearing flippers, not shoes!”

***

Translating sartorial expectations is an exercise in puzzled indignation and marvel alike. During my first year of college, I gaped at people in plaid pajamas in our 8 AM class and at friends crawling into bed in their jeans. I have never met a Greek abroad who hasn’t encountered the “oh, what are you dressed up for?” when they leave the house on a random Tuesday. To this date, my freshman year roommate–who remains one of my very closest friends and who has witnessed an array of memorable moments–claims her most striking memory of me back then involves ironing pashminas at my desk.

The welcome packet for Harvard “strongly recommended” the purchase of a warm winter coat. I dutifully pack the ivory peacoat that came with that first debate suit, and the pashminas that went with it. As my first New England fall unfolded, my classmates trotted out their own ‘uniforms’: seas of North Face jackets and Columbia thermal sweaters. After the first snow, the coats got puffier. Our radiator stopped working, prompting my roommate to prepare for bed every night as one would for an expedition to the Arctic: hat, gloves, three pairs of socks. That was the winter when I learned what the “wind chill” is and that, when in doubt, the “feels like…” temperature is the one to note. Weather.com tells you it is 12 degrees Fahrenheit, but feels like 3? Always cite the more dramatic one, even though the scale means nothing to you. When it got so cold that the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales began to converge, we called Campus Facilities once again to fix our radiator. “The cold builds character!,” we were told.

Through that winter, and the four that came after it, I insisted on my own character-building ivory coat. A kind boyfriend tried to convince me of the value of a Practical Jacket and even went so far as to attempt to purchase one for me to no avail. When he said practical, I heard ugly.

I was a migrant. I began understanding Fahrenheit temperatures. I became fluent in the wind chill. I bought flannel sheets and toe warmers to stick in my (pointy-toed) boots. I even bought a single sweatshirt, which I wore to the annual iconic football rivalry (and not a step beyond). But the coat? I couldn’t abandon the ivory coat. It felt as though Greece was watching, and would take note of my leaving her behind.

***

Recounting these memories as a feminist who tries to be conscious of the construction, production, and (dis)approval of particular iterations of femininity, I am dismayed. In fact, many of my recollections of Greece don’t hold up to feminist or class-conscious scrutiny. Why is it that there was an unspoken standard of women’s presentation? Who created it, how, and what role did we as women play in its construction? To what extent was our active deliberation on what to wear itself an act of choice and feminist agency versus a mechanism of oppression and exclusion?

Even then, I knew that debate judges — often older, white men — would approach our coaches and comment on the length of my skirt or the pinkness of my pashmina. I also knew that the same comments, be they playful, derogatory, judgmental, inappropriate, or all of the above, rarely surfaced with regard to my male teammates’ appearance. Girls’ dress is “distracting,” boys’  is, at worst, “disheveled.” I remember the first flash of quiet rage when someone called my speech about capital punishment “cute,” confounding the content with the petite girl in the pink dress from whom it emanated. I remember wanting to be noticed for Not My Dress, but also learning that rendering my dress or appearance invisible was shifting responsibility away from the listener who ought to pay attention and towards myself, perceiving a need to obscure any hint of ‘distracting femininity.’ I didn’t have the words for this then, but I know now that hearing my speech be dubbed ‘cute’ was a formative moment for my budding feminist consciousness. Ultimately, I am sure that narrow and gendered conceptions of femininity guided the rulebook for Girls From Thessaloniki — and yet, I still uphold many of those expectations to this day, an ocean away from home, not out of gendered conformity, but out of nostalgia, out of a memory of what my self looks like and how she came to be.

***

Ten years later. -29 Celsius (yes, with the wind chill). Leggings, and over them pants, for leggings are not pants. My favorite summer T-shirt, which smells like Thessaloniki and the soap in my drawers. Three layers over it. A hat, because Elijah has finally convinced me that “most heat escapes from your head.” A puffy green jacket. And Practical Shoes. My ivory coat still hangs in the closet, with a tiny bar of almond soap in the pocket. This one I learned from my mother: always scent the drawers, and the coats.

As I walk to work, I am amazed that people here had been this warm in weather this cold for this long. I partake in New England winter rituals now. When I look down at my feet, I can’t help but feel that on the day I walked down my stairs in round-toed, brown, functional snow boots, Greece became a little more foreign to me. Or I to it.

Our honest places

Published by Roxani
It is the smell that catches you first.
You open the front door gently, a skill you learned when you were 15 and tried to glide into your house without anyone noticing you are wearing blush. You didn’t know then that mothers can detect makeup on their daughters with infrared vision, even if the teen magazines swear that it’s a “natural neutral look.” But you did know just how to turn the key so the door doesn’t squeak and which tiles to step on so you do not wake up the whole house. This is how you still enter your childhood home, even though your cheeks can shimmer without inspection.It is always the smell. It does not emanate from the people. It is steeped in the place. You have left and returned here before, but you always somehow forget about the smell.

It escorts you from room to room. You feel larger than life and play Alice in Wonderland with the objects of your childhood. Were the shelves always quite so low? Were the curtains always quite so… pink? You were as tall when you left this home at the age of 17 as you are now, but everything feels miniscule.

You notice how carefully curated your lives here had been. Your mother had always loved the details. You open a drawer and it is filled to the brim with tablecloths. Each one of them is gleaming white and smells like soap, because she always hid soap between them. It was her fragrant curating. Your grandmother had hand-stitched designs onto the fabric in the era in which tablecloths were part of a woman’s dowry. Your mother had asked you once to take them with you. You didn’t know if you should tell her that you don’t quite have a dinner table — one that would be worthy of the hand-stitched grape patterns and soapy smell, anyway. Or that sometimes you do not eat dinner at a table at all. You just wave her off for now, but ten years later, you are filling your return luggage with tablecloths full of grapes and soap. You will find a table worthy of them and you will eat dinner at it. You are an adult now, filled with the nostos of your revisited childhood.

All those years of change and migration and grief and a robbery later, and everything still feels like it belongs in space — like it was placed there deliberately, with care, and with thought, probably because it was. The blue and white lanterns sit on the balcony where you had last left them, with unburnt candles waiting to be lit. Homes keep us honest, one of your wisest colleagues had said.

The balcony is your honest place. It is the view to which you remember waking up every day. You will return to America and you will instantly miss having a balcony onto which to step barefoot and stare at the sea. You will miss the mother too, who would have told you to not dare climb back into the clean sheets with those now dirty feet. It did not matter that neither was the balcony dirty nor were your feet. You wouldn’t dare.

It is on this balcony that you memorized IB Biology for your high school exams and that you read every Nancy Drew book that made you want to become a curious, mystery-solving girl with auburn hair, even when you didn’t know what ‘auburn’ meant.

You sat here on the summer days when the beach felt too far — call these #Greekchildhoodproblems of the most privileged kind. You dangled your legs over the railing. At 4 PM, like clockwork, those legs would be attacked by mosquitoes. Your mother would soon emerge holding what Greeks call a “tiny snake,” named for its coiled form. The mosquito-repelling aroma it emits is one of your smells of summer. Every Greek balcony has a ‘tiny snake’ of its own and the smoke it releases shares Greek summer with us, with the mosquitoes who love us, and the cicadas that interrupt our afternoon naps. Home is where the cicadas are.

On this balcony you had kissed a boy who had flown across the world to see you. You took a teary photo together — on film — when he left. Many years and loves later, you dragged another boy onto the rocking chair. It didn’t matter that it was Christmas morning, that it was not ‘balcony season’, that the shiny new Kindles you had brought with you felt like incongruent balcony reading, or that you were each wrapped in a bathrobe, two scarves, and three blankets to be able to tolerate the balcony at all. He loves you. He needs to sit at your honest place.

You still feel that not having brought him here in the summer is robbing him from some of the honesty.

Your honest place is conducive to many emotions: nostalgia, remembrance, hope, grief, anticipation, celebration. There is a noted absence: worry. Where did you learn how to worry? How did you get so good at it?

What is it about our honest places that keeps the worry away?

You have weathered all the storms here. Here is where you learned resolution, relief or loss. Here is where you learned that potatoes and feta and melitzanosalata are the food that will remain palatable even when you are too worried to eat. When in doubt, add wine. In severe crisis, add tsipouro. Here is where you learned what comes after worry. Here is where all the “after’s” have dawned. A place that holds all the memories of afters is inhospitable to worry.

No longer a native in the city’s eyes, you are a guest here now. Luckily for you, in Greece, “guest” is a term of art. “Guest” comes with glasses of wine refilled, and food shoved down throats, and a bed made for you by your friend, with instructions on how to close the balcony door if there are too many mosquitoes. It comes with questions about the life you now lead, questions based more on how others imagine “America” or the conflict zones you’ve called home. The reality rarely registers and is rarely the subject of truly curious inquiry. You trade imaginations.

You grit your teeth when someone comments on your weight, your vacant uterus, your unadorned engagement ring finger. You are appalled when you realize you don’t quite know how to explain “gender analysis” in Greek. Surely in a language so rich in words, there must be a term for it, but for now, it eludes you. You end up telling people you work on ‘women’s issues,’ even though you once had a 45-minute conversation with a border officer who thought “gender and conflict” means “women and war.” It mattered to you then, standing at an international border as the passport holder of a different land, to explain that gender does not ‘just’ refer to women and not all conflict necessarily looks like war.

Here, though, on your own turf, you shy away from the fight. Embarrassingly, you lack both the words and the stamina. You remind yourself how many feminist battles and social movements alike were born in the home and find it cowardly and condescending alike that you don’t feel like these, here, are yours to fight. You vow to find the words for “gender analysis” next time. What would Cynthia Enloe say if she were Greek? In the meantime, for good measure, you point out every narrowly conceived idea of masculinity on a TV ad. “Πολύ ξενέρωτες οι γκόμενες εκεί που ζείτε,” reacts one of your guy friends when you do that. Just like gender analysis, you can’t translate that.

By the last week, you are no longer a guest. You are at home here. This is where you belong, next to the soap-fragranced tablecloths and the macho commercials and the glasses that get refilled because the recession robbed Greeks off many things, but not of their hospitality.
You move easily between the rooms.
Everything is right-sized.
You no longer bruise your calves by bumping into furniture at night (or, as an aunt notes, “maybe you’re just not as anemic with all the meat we’ve fed you!”).
You know just what time the mosquitoes will appear and when the hot water will run out in the shower.

You have amassed enough intimacy, enough familiarity, enough memory to tackle the basement. The trove of all Memory. In one of your favorite poems, titled “The Plural form,”  Kiki Dimoula had the following to say about memory:

Memory:

noun, proper name for sorrows,

singular in number,

singular only, 

and indeclinable.

Memory, memory, memory. 

 

You open the door and remember that when you were little, you thought the basement is where burglars come from. How could you ever be Nancy Drew after fearing burglars for so many years? You open the door to the basement regardless. You are assaulted by the smell: cigarettes, books. You hadn’t been here in years, perhaps since the day after your father died.

You leaf through the books. His chemistry manuals, her Simone de Beauvoir. Your copy of Love in the Time of Cholera — that first one, the one that taught you how to read, really read–if not how to love.

Next to the books, you find the cards that you used to send your parents from camp and those little wooden boats that you used to “buy” them as gifts from summer vacation. You feel compelled to pack it all up and bring it with you, along with the tablecloths and the balcony, but you also want to leave it as is, undisturbed. A moment in time.

You are part of this moment now. You are here, at home, in your honest place. And yet you find yourself watching these weeks unfold as though you have floated up above your body and are observing your life from the ceiling. You’ve lost your narrative “I,” ever so present in your stories and you are instead observing — at once the storyteller and the interlocutor.

***

This is not a full story. If homes are our honest places, part of their honesty lies in being able to hold a piece for ourselves. Like all stories of memory, it is marked equally by its absences, by its silences and erasures.

You will soon find yourself at a border again, carrying more luggage than you have ever traveled with. You ask yourself how ‘people’ can travel like this. You are carrying a briki and a frappe maker because somehow you cannot leave the country without at least four different nationally-appropriate modes to make coffee in the morning. You tried to pack the memories and the silences. And a tsoureki too, because everything becomes more surreal at a border when you are holding what amounts to a nationalist, nostalgic pie.

You are here. Again.

You will walk out of this front door and instantly miss the Aegean.

You start your day with tsoureki. You make frappe. Your mornings are consumed in recreating.

You unpack, you hope the smell of all the books you hauled back can linger a little longer.

You must find a dinner table.