Interdiasporic linkages–Diasporic Poetry–Representing Diaspora

The following is an essay I drafted for two purposes: extend a gesture of appreciation to those Greek/Australian civic friends who shared ideas and books with me; and honor Helen Nickas for her pioneering publishing and translation activism. In the process I have realized the potential for elaborating on the essay further. Due to pressing obligations the development has to wait. But I feel compelled to publish this early version as a token of appreciation.

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My recent visit to Australia and encounter with Greek Melbourne gifted me with a remarkable experience: time shared in conversation with scholars, poets, journalists, intellectuals, educators, and community cultural activists among other exciting interlocutors. The exchange of ideas and stories (but also jokes) in cafes or walks invariably concluded with a material gift, books, sometimes authored by the person I met, other times their favorites. I counted more than fifty in what inevitably turned out a densely heavy packing for my return.

Now neatly shelved in a special section marked “Greek/Australian” in my library, these gifts serve as material testimonies of a most powerful structure of feeling generated in this inter-diasporic, Greek/American––Greek/Australian, encounter: the profound consciousness of diasporic spaces as spaces of homing.

Where else but amidst diasporic people can one meaningfully connect (discuss, debate, dialogue, drive a point home) around questions concerning biculturalism and bilingualism, the experience of betweenness, being a simultaneous insider and outsider, feeling inclusion and exclusion, feeling one way here and another one there?

I now viscerally recognize the following passage, which I came across while reading Greek/Australian authors in preparation for the trip, as one capturing––or, better, bringing home––the experience of belonging to diasporic spaces:

"In a letter to the photographer Frederic Brenner, Jacques Derrida noted that “the diaspora is at home outside its home, it remains outside its home at home, at home at the other’s”" (in N. Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 74)

My encounter with Greek/Australia expanded the cultural field of my affiliations, enlarging my being and feeling diasporic. If the experience of inhabiting diaspora commonly engages at least two worlds, I now can count three, placing myself within a demanding constellation of linkages along the feelings and activities which animate it. In this configuration, the scale of labor to keep the linkages going requires demanding labor to keep the connections in motion.

Gifts signal the beginning of social relations, and the prospect for meaningful relations calls for cultivation of civic friendships. In addition to my intra-diasporic civic friendships, I will be cultivating my inter-diasporic affiliations via a number of routes. One will involve small and middle-scale activities and projects, sharing poems, narrative excerpts, and artistic creations I extract from my Greek Australian gifts and texts, contributing thoughts and commentary.

A Greek/Australian Literary Archive

I start with a book published by Owl Publishing, a pioneering initiative founded in 1992 by literary educator, scholar and translator Helen Nickas. Its title is “Re-telling the Tale: Poetry and Prose by Greek Australian Women Writers" (Με δικά μας λόγια: Ελληνίδες συγγραφείς της Αυστραλίας) [A bilingual edition]. Edited by Helen Nickas and Konstandina Dounis, Melbourne, 1994).

I will be sharing two poems from this collection, connecting the texts with broader questions we face about inhabiting––but also, crucially, representing––diaspora.

The first is an extract from a poem entitled “The Place” (Ο Τόπος) by Antigone Kefala (1931-2022) whom we lost recently.

We travelled in old ships
with small decaying hearts
rode on the giant beast
uncertain
remembered other voyages
and the black depths
each day we feasted on the past
friends watching over
the furniture of generations
dolphins no longer followed us
we were in alien waters.

Migration, a process of movement across space, is starkly charted here as a process of cultural distancing. The immediate, intimate presence of home is turning into a past, former feelings of the familiar now being inhabited differently; the subject resorts to memory as the deep link with the receding worlds of social intimacy; an all-consuming mental and psychic preoccupation, “each day we feasted on the past.”

The migrant Self eye-witnesses its unfolding removal from social networks left to guard long ancestral continuities––intergenerational memories––while the migrant’s journey is marking a moment of rupture from that social world, the beginnings of discontinuity...

friends watching over
the furniture of generations

φίλοι φύλαγαν
αποσκευές γενεών

(μετάφραση Ελένη Νίκα)

And then at some point in this movement a threshold is crossed, the new terrain now visibly devoid of the playfulness of dolphins, a novel structure of feeling taking over in the experience of entering an uncharted landscape; moving into a new status, a foreigner.

What futures lie ahead? What their features would be? What kinds of lives will be build, what dreams realized? This excerpt of the poem raises a poignant question, I believe, for all of us who are into the very serious business of bringing these processes into representation. How do we do justice to the enormous complexities of the dramatic transformation attached to the migrant journey, how do we narrate these processes in an ethically and politically responsible manner?

The second poem I am sharing is entitled “Equilibrium” (Ισορροπία), originally published in O Logos, by Irini Pappas, a Melbourne-born actor, poet, prose writer and translator.

I am the yield of alien soil.
Born here, in Australia,
I’ve learnt all I know of Greece
from others’ lips.

     What do you want from me?
     Why do you seek, insistently,
     to classify me?

It’s time you understood
that I have not just one
but two allegiances.
Neither to one am I pledged totally
nor fully to the other.

My life is rich,
richer than yours twice over
because I’ve found my niche in both.

No-one can deny me
this gift, the ability to live
within the one society
and the other
comfortably.

We, who were born here
are quite another,
quite a separate race,
and we fit into no-one’s pattern
but our own.

“Equilibrium” asserts a position. The narrative persona––a bicultural Self connected with histories of migration––defiantly objects any demands that would impose a singular identity on her person. She is poised to confront anyone who would seek to reduce her identity into a seamless cultural whole––a national subject.

This is not simply the multicultural Self resisting external definitions. The poem’s last stanza clearly shifts the point of view from the personal I to the collective We, the “tribe” [“tribe” being the meaning I attach to the poet’s classification “race,” race being the ascribed classification by social discourse], connecting it with a pattern and its internal self-constituted arrangements.

The poem acknowledges a set of modalities––cultural betweenness, multiple allegiances, the negotiations required for a meaningful life, the pressures to conform to a singular identity––a space many theorists today call diasporic.

On Diasporic Literature and the Representation of Diaspora

“The Place” and “Equilibrium” reflect on two different experiences, speak to two historical moments, evoke two subject positions. Poetry is certainly not the kind of writing we turn for historical and cultural facts. But undoubtedly the poems above register truths connected with well-documented situations associated with the migrant condition.

The former dramatizes the migrants’ monumental encounter with a new place, the enormous scale of the ensuing challenges and transitions. The latter articulates major contours of diasporic subjectivities. Read next to each other the poems operate across an intergenerational terrain––the voice of a migrant entering alien soil and the voice of a next generation migrant being “the yield of alien soil.” The voices speak to two distinct historical experiences, two distinct ways of engaging with the old and the new world. They point to truths which history, ethnography, and autobiography have amply illuminated.

Why am I foregrounding the poems? What good does it do for us to “think with them” in relation to each other thirty years after their publication? What can they possibly tell us other than asserting truths already widely known?

The timing of these poems’ publication matters a great deal in recognizing their value. It was in the 1990s when they were put into circulation, a period marked by a broader, major shift in the social sciences and the humanities. Along with poets and fiction writers, it was a time when historians, anthropologists, as well as literary and cultural studies scholars were increasingly displaying interest in migrant and diasporic subjectivities. In the United States, this paradigm shift flourished in the academic world (books, new journals, and curricula) as well as the cultural life (poetry, literature, autobiography, biography, commentary) of the country. It also registered in Greek America, producing eminent academic and literary texts. Let us call this turn in Australia, United States and elsewhere a “diasporic historical moment.”

I will briefly identify two interwoven threads permeating this diasporic moment: First, in recognizing the enormous emotional and cultural impact of migration on its participants (as “The Place” does), practitioners were calling for attentive, affective, and cognitive engagement with the topic. Theoretical sophistication and deep knowledge were necessary for representing migrancy responsibly. Second, in moving away from national(ist) renderings of diasporic people (as “Equilibrium” does), scholars were not merely opening new conceptual grounds for understanding diasporic belonging but were also linking scholarship with ethical and political considerations. Cultural producers (academics, authors, film makers) were called to do justice to the complexity of migrant experiences, explicitly resisting ideologies which sought to contain it.

The “Place” and “Equilibrium” then were pioneering Greek/Australian literary participants, among others, in a broader cultural movement. In Greek America, this mode of a text, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize a few years later. In the inter-diasporic Greek Australian and Greek American terrain, literary texts were revising conventional understandings of diasporic belonging.

But, during the same decade, at least in Greek America, this literary diasporic intervention was relegated to the margins if not wholesale silenced in a range of dominant identity narratives. In the interest of producing one-dimensional portrayals of the group, official narratives and popular culture imposed an easily digestible uniformity on ethnic and diasporic spaces. Greek Americans were portrayed as either an extension of the nation or their difference domesticated along a static set of values (church going, family oriented, bearers of an essential philotimo, successful); a cookie cutter, or acceptable difference, as it is called. The intellectual labor necessary to capture the complexity of the phenomenon was never practiced; several high-profile projects representing the group were intellectually lazy projects. What the poetic personas of “The Place” alerted us, and of “Equilibrium” resisted, where utterly sidelined. The exact opposite became the norm, powerful interests imposing their reductive classifications in their representation of this group. Important literary insights were tossed away, a historical opportunity for a sophisticated representation of Greek Americans was lost. This, let us note, with only a tiny number of academics and intellectuals bringing public attention to this symbolic violence.

It is in this context that I foreground “The Place” and “Equilibrium”––and via these texts, poetry and literature broadly––as sites of probing migrant and diasporic subjectivities in a manner which resists convenient cultural reductions.

I cannot help but contemplate the “what if” question: what if Greek American society had foregrounded the paradigm of the historical diasporic moment? What if its institutions had invested in its broad circulation in schools, universities, the public sphere? Possibly, we would not be now wasting resources, in 2023, asserting the truths of the diasporic moment, an ethic and politics now accepted in the world of educated Americans and many ethnic and racial groups.

I approach the “Greek Australian” section in my library, a heritage gifted to me. I touch the spine of each book, a gesture establishing a tactile connection with a tiny sample of diaspora’s literary archive. What do we owe to this archive? What is our responsibility as individuals, as institutions? How do we proceed at a time when literary diasporic production intensifies and only a handful of professionals are available to discuss it, reflect on it, identify the ideas it places in public for our contemplation? We need not only literature and poetry but also its analysis to position ourselves to grapple with an increasingly complex present and emergent realities we cannot yet articulate, let alone see...

Yiorgos Anagnostou
Columbus, Ohio
November 2023