A review of Koraly Dimitriadis' "The Mother must Die"

A required diasporic reading

A must read review by Dean Kalymniou

"What makes 'The Mother Must Die 'especially unsettling is its dismantling of the very category of “Greekness.” Dimitriadis refuses a monolithic interpretation. She allows the cracks in the façade to show. Some characters whose heritage claims “mainland Greece” speak with Cypriot inflections. Others who are Cypriot occupy a liminal space: neither wholly integrated into the mythic “Greekness” that the mother guards, nor comfortable in assimilation. That displacement reveals that “being Greek” is not an essence but a contested construction. Language shifts, dialects merge, identity becomes layered. In the diaspora, Greekness becomes something inherited conditional on compliance, cultural performance and silence. That conditionality is often forgotten in public mythology. Dimitriadis refuses the forgetting. She inserts confusion, friction and hybridity, allowing identity to fold in on itself, to fracture, to reassemble. In doing so she manifests a sense of belonging can be claimed, declined, modified, or rejected. It becomes unstable and alive."

December 7, 2025