important questions such as “What is a narrative? What is a story? Why am I using these
terms and why are they important to me?” will be asked and addressed. This chapter could be utilized as a transition to the following two chapters which will be purely autoethnographic, even as they are also “theoretical”. Chapter 5 involves an exploration of the ideological forces that shaped my sexual desire within the social/political/cultural context of Greece. This narrative will be enriched with theories and explanations
pertaining to the ways sexual desire and pleasure are conceptualized and experienced in Greece. Chapter 6 continues in an autoethnographic register and explores the issues of lust, promiscuity, violence, and intimacy. More specifically, this chapter will investigate what my sexual promiscuity as well as the avoidance of and quest for sexual/romantic intimacy have meant to me in the midst of the social/cultural/political contexts I have found myself in. The main purpose of this chapter will be to explore the connection between the constitution of my sexual desire and my (in)ability to feel intimate to people I am sexually attracted to. Chapter 7 will attempt an integration of the theories explored in chapter 3 and my autoethnographic stories through posing and reflecting on the following questions: After having worked through a number of theories and autoethnographic stories, what am I left with? What am I offering to the academy?
Finally, Chapter 8 concludes with suggestions for future research, gaps and omissions (even limitations) in this study, and final thoughts to be shared with you, my dearest Poet, and the readers of this dissertation.
Conclusion: Back to the Poet, Back to Greece
Now that this introductory chapter and, consequently, my invocation to you, Poet, are coming to an end, I feel I owe you an apology. My sense is that I haven’t found a way to strike a balance between my literary voice and the academic one. If I could, I would
have already abandoned my academic voice altogether; it sounds utterly pretentious to me. However, as you already know, this is an academic dissertation and I have to keep up appearances. As a result, I am afraid the text of this dissertation is destined to read
awkwardly split, as if it originates from two different persons. What I just mentioned, though, may not be totally untrue. If you remember my previous discussion on identity, its multiplicity as well as its ever-evolving nature, perhaps it is our (human beings’) destiny to always sound awkwardly split. I understand, of course, that your artistry may have been more capable of transforming this awkwardness into high art than my humble writing skills could ever be. Be merciful, though, Poet. As opposed to you, I am writing in a language other than my own and my audience does not necessarily consist of poetry lovers. In any case, please accept my apologies.
It has just struck me, however, that there may be one more reason that warrants an apology to you. I have promised to clarify the nature of help I will need from you and, instead of that, I am happily chattering! So…do you remember Mendelsohn claiming that you were a poet-historian and that you “[saw] history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye” (2012, p. xxi)? This is exactly what I want you to help me with. In other words, I would like you to show me the way to love and deeply delve into my personal history and, at the same time, look at my personal ways of loving and sexually desiring through a historian’s perspective. Please, Poet, provide me with all the necessary tools to oscillate between these two positions without being fully absorbed by any of the two. I wish to write a balanced autoethnographic dissertation, able to stimulate both hearts and minds. Without your help, though, without this kind of help, I am afraid failure is what awaits me.
I forgot. You have been dead for almost 82 years…and you have made it clear enough that, without some basic knowledge of Greece’s modern history, the history of the country in which I was shaped to sexually desire, you can be of no help at all. After all, you silently remind me, your poems on sexual love and desire have always been connected to their cultural and historical surroundings. How could my sexual desire be detached from its own specific surroundings?
You are absolutely right, Poet. And I am more than willing to spend some time concisely recounting to you what has happened in Greece during the last 100 years.
Seeing that some of my readers may be completely unfamiliar with Greece’s modern history, though, allow me to begin from an earlier point: that is, the Greek Declaration of Independence in 1821 and the beginning of modern Greece in 1830, after having been subject to the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries. My reference to this period does not aspire to provide a plethora of historical details that would be irrelevant to the goals of this dissertation. My intention, instead, is to shed some light on the construction of modern Greeks’ identity.
Cultural anthropologist Neni Panourgia writes: “For [Western Europeans] modern Greece usually exists only as the symptomatic site of Greek antiquity” (2009, p. 212).
The way I understand this phrase is that modern Greece cannot exist unless it is firmly and irrevocably connected to its glorious ancient past. Panourgia goes on to explain that, when the Great Powers of that era (Great Britain, France, Russia) supported the Greek Declaration of Independence and the establishment of a Greek state (taking into
consideration, of course, their own political and financial interests), they demanded that the Greeks confirm their Greek essence (1995). In other words, Western Europeans
implicitly (and rather romantically) required that the then Greek population prove that a) despite 400 years of Ottoman rule, they shared a line of cultural continuity with ancient Greeks and were ready to swiftly modernize themselves and follow on the footsteps of Western Europeans or, b) in case they did not share a cultural continuity with Ancient Greeks anymore, they were at least capable enough to imitate, absorb and incorporate Western Europeans’ customs and traditions.
Then, it becomes evident that, despite the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural heterogeneity characterizing the then Greek population, a unified, sovereign, Greek identity had to be constructed. Heterogeneity should be sacrificed on the altar of a Greek essence revolving around the Greek language, the commonly shared ethnic (modern defined through ancient) Greek heritage, and Greek Orthodoxy. It was a matter of life and death; a fixed, changeless, singular, Greek identity was in urgent need of being
constructed, essentialized, and confirmed, otherwise independence would be in peril.
Anything beyond what was conventionally considered to be Greek was deemed to be alien; non-Greek.
It is my strong belief as a Greek national that the circumstances under which modern Greece and its ethnic identity were established and consolidated have given birth to social and psychological characteristics and anxieties that still cast their long shadow on the present. For example, as Neni Panourgia (1995) says, the Greek population in 1830 was completely unprepared to follow on the Western Europeans’ footsteps.
Nevertheless, they tried to imitate them based on a fragile sense of ancient Greek identity that helped them perceive themselves as being of equal worth and stature. This was, of course, an illusory, psychologically overcompensating self-perception given that Greece
had been isolated from the rest of Europe for almost 400 years and, consequently, detached from the scientific, social, philosophical, and artistic advancements brought forth during the periods of the Renaissance and the European Enlightenment.
If I now focus on the Greek society as it is today, I personally discern the same ambivalence towards the Western Europeans. We always want to imitate them and be like them but, the moment we adopt their lifestyle, we feel as if something is forced on us and we react. It is as if our fragile sense of ethnic identity feels snubbed and fatally threatened by Western Europeans. At the same time, during the last 25 years Greece has welcomed thousands of migrants from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia, and Africa.
Our psychological predispositions along with the latest social and financial problems have intensified ethnic nationalisms in Greece, nationalisms which masquerade the agonizing questions always asked by modern Greeks since their independence: “Who are we? Do we belong to Western Europe; the Balkans; Russia; Turkey; or the Middle East?
What does the Greek identity consist of? Is there such a thing as a Greek identity? If yes, what should it include or exclude? What is our relationship to ancient Greece; the
Byzantium; the Ottoman Empire; the European Union? Have we ever achieved a
somewhat secure sense of Greek identity? If yes, why do we always make sure to keep it fixed and intact instead of allowing its volatility to come forth and connect with other identities? What are we afraid of?”
In my view, what we Greeks are mostly afraid of is the absence of any sense of consolidated Greek identity; the realization that we have based our dreams and self-conceptions on something inexistent. This is why, again in my view, Greece has been plagued by so much violence and political oppression during much of the 20th Century.
We have been so irreversibly haunted by the question “Who are we?” and so desperately afraid of the answer; so frightened at the prospect of a fragile sovereignty and so fearful we might discover more attributes that keep us apart than unite us. We have tried to appease these anxiety-provoking questions through the imposition of totalitarian regimes and, at the same time, we have undergone a number of national tragedies.
You had been wondering, Poet, about the history of modern Greece ever since you died in 1933. There has been a lot of pain and division…Neni Panourgia (2009) has explained everything in the most eloquent way in her book Dangerous Citizens. I will follow her timeline. In 1936 a dictatorship was imposed in Greece by a general called Ioannis Metaxas. His authoritarian regime, apart from seizing and maintaining political power, was also interested “in form(ulat)ing whatever it was that he understood as ‘the Greek psyche’ and ‘the Greek mind.’ He held that [. . .] psyche and mind ought to constitute a monolithic, monadic, singular articulation of an imaginary shared by all
‘Greeks,’ an imaginary that started in Greek antiquity, extended through Rome, and developed into the Byzantine Empire” (p. 34). Metaxas’s dictatorship lasted until 1941;
that is, the year when Germany invaded Greece and the Nazi Occupation began. It lasted almost 4 years and left Greece and Europe in a state of utter devastation. Panourgia (2009) writes:
On October 12, 1944, the Germans left Athens. A few days later they crossed the borders and dispersed into the chaos of the collapsing Reich.
Greece was left with 250,000 dead from famine, 15,700 dead from the Italian war, 8,000 dead from the week-long German invasion, 3,000 dead from the German bombings, 50,000 dead from Allied bombings, 40,000 dead from the Bulgarian forces, 30,000 dead from German and Italian retaliation to acts of resistance, 4,000 military deaths abroad, 1,000 dead in the merchant marine, 60,000 disappeared Jews. In a country of fewer than eight million, there were 415,300 dead between October 28, 1940 and October 12, 1944 (p. 62).
But the nightmare was not over for Greece, Poet. As soon as the Germans left, a civil war started between the Greek Government Army, supported by the United
Kingdom and the United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece, supported by the Greek Communist Party (Panourgia, 2009). I will spare you the political and military details of the war and simply tell you that it lasted for almost 3 years (1946-1949) and involved, once more, a question on Greek identity: “Where do we belong to? Should we follow the West or the Soviet Union? Are we capitalists or communists?” The Greek Government Army won; the Democratic Army of Greece surrendered; Greece became a member state of NATO and was firmly tied to the West. The country and its people, though, came out of the civil war even more devastated and split into opposing factions.
Allow me, Poet, to quote extensively from Panourgia (2009) because she describes the post-civil war situation in Greece in words I could never think of in English.
We know the terrible effects of a combination of civil war, concentration camps, and oppressive and authoritarian governments on the everyday lives of citizens. We know of the dismantled families, the maimed
relationships, the broken bodies, the poverty, the devastated infrastructure.
A civil war, however, has lasting effects that are not so immediately apparent. It produces psychopathologies, mistrust, and resentment in addition to economic and political devastation. There is nothing “civil” in the civil war. In such a war, siblings fight against each other, children are tortured in front of their parents, parents are killed in front of their
children. When it ends, no one can get up, dust off his clothes, and shake hands. The effects are lived for generations, long after the war has ended and decades after the winners and losers have settled down (curiously comfortably) in their respective positions. The Greek paradigm acquires particular importance here, because in Greece, though the civil war ended in 1949, its effects are only now being discussed (pp. 31-32).
It is true, Poet. We Greeks are still tormented by the devastating effects of the Nazi Occupation and the civil war that followed. Before I jump to the present and describe how, though, I would like to stick to the post-civil war Greece a little longer
because important political events took place then. Let me remind you, once more, that we (the Greeks) are always preoccupied with the question of our ethnic identity; its purity is very important to us and anyone “scheming” against it automatically becomes our enemy. Post-civil war Greece, as Neni Panourgia (2009) argues, easily found its enemies:
Communists and, generally, supporters of the Left (the defeated of the civil war) were transformed into political and social scapegoats (enemies of the Greek state) in need of
“reeducation and rehabilitation” (p. 9).Vast numbers of “returning and captured soldiers of the Democratic Army, their families, friends, relatives, and fellow villagers” (p. 85) were transferred to concentration camps that had been established in isolated, dry, arid islands of the Aegean Sea like Makronisos and Yaros by democratically elected
governments. These concentration camps were in full operation from 1947 to 1958 and the “reeducation” taking place in them consisted of well-planned and brutally executed tortures that aimed at converting the camp prisoners into repentant ex-Communists.
But, my dearest Poet, as you may be suspecting, the political nightmare of Greece was not over yet. One more military dictatorship was imposed in Greece on the 21st of April, 1967 that lasted till the 24th of July, 1974. Again, I will spare you the details, the rumors, and the potential reasons behind the imposition of this dictatorship. After all, I am not a historian. I can tell you, though, that the same story was repeated: the
concentration camps in Makronisos and Yaros reopened; supporters of the Left were arrested and transferred to the islands for “reeducation”; the art of torturing reached new heights; opposition newspapers were shut down; and extensive censorship was imposed on all forms of art. Brilliant!
I was born on the 7th of April, 1976, Poet. You could easily claim that my
generation has been very lucky. After all, Greece has been steadily democratic since 1974 and a member state of the European Union since 1981 (our membership in the Eurozone, of course, is still in jeopardy but this is a different story…). The time when “half of the [Greek] population [had] been in the prisons and the camps [. . .] simply because of their political thoughts” (Panourgia, 2009, p. 133) is—hopefully—irreversibly gone. Yet, although I have never experienced any form of political oppression and persecution like millions of my compatriots in the past, I have been brought up within a social and cultural environment that still tries to come to terms with its wounds. I fully agree with Panourgia (2009) who, as mentioned before, claims that the trauma inflicted on the Greek population by the Nazi Occupation, the civil war and, in general, the political oppression in Greece has passed down from generation to generation. I have experienced and
participated in my father’s dread over the prospect of having nothing to eat. In addition, I know how it feels to be a member of a deeply divided society in which supporters of the Right and the Left have been cultivating distinct, fixed, political identities and treating each other as deadly enemies. As a matter of fact, I would like to argue that Greece’s inability to successfully overcome its current financial crisis stems from its inability to face its past and present wounds and divisions. We prefer to pretend that everything is all right instead of experiencing our mourning. We desire to remain faithful to our beloved
“Right, Left, and Greek identities” instead of following and adjusting to a world that is rapidly changing. We wish to adhere to our “I know better!” convictions instead of admitting to ourselves how traumatized, insecure, angry, and depressed we feel behind
our jolly façades. Whoever claims that the effects of political oppression in Greece ended with the oppression itself, they are deluding themselves…
This last discussion on Greece’s history during the last 80 years has just reminded me of something that Papanikolaou (2014) has recently claimed about you, Poet. More specifically, he argues that your homosexuality has always caused a considerable degree of anxiety to those Greek literary critics espousing somewhat ethnocentric and
nationalistic ideas. Your homosexuality, he explains, induced you to engage into the
“ethics of the vulnerable self” and, therefore, point to the contingency and historicity of sexual desire. However, this accomplishment laid the groundwork for also showing that the supposedly stable Greek identity was (is), in reality, not stable at all but, instead, highly contingent and historicized as well.
I presume you would not feel surprised if I told you that, in recounting my sexual desire in this dissertation, I would also like to challenge the hypothetical stability of the Greek identity. In a way, this would, perhaps, represent my triumphant revenge against a country, a homeland, my homeland, which has never missed an opportunity to remind me that I am too fat, too sluggish, too soft, too flabby, and too gay to earn a place in the Greek pantheon. And, as you already know, I want you by my side. Will you please help me? Have I provided you with enough information about the modern history of Greece or do you need some more?
…Silent. You remain silent. You are always so silent and I can’t stand it anymore! Say something, for God’s sake! Don’t ignore me like that! Do you have any fucking intention of helping me or not?? You make me feel like I did at the beginning of my invocation to you! Weak, small, defenseless, powerless, futile…Give me a sign…a
reason that it’s worth writing this fucking dissertation!! Give me some hope!! I won’t be
reason that it’s worth writing this fucking dissertation!! Give me some hope!! I won’t be