Stella Pierides

A Tale of  Two Passions

It is often said that life is stranger than fiction. Fair enough, I wouldn’t argue with this. Here I wish to point out two cases where fiction, narrative, or stories influence life. Admittedly, this is not any story, but the story based on the Passion.

Kazantzakis, perhaps best known for having written that other passionate character, Zorba the Greek, published his version of the Passion, Christ Recrucified, in 1948. It is a novel set in a Greek village in Asia Minor during the Ottoman Empire. The villagers are given a free hand in the running of their village affairs as long as they keep quiet, and the Agha (the local Ottoman governor), who likes to enjoy life’s little pleasures, happy.

Trouble, and the plot, comes to the village with the sudden arrival of a group of refugees led by their priest – their village was destroyed by the Turks in the fermenting tensions between Greece and the crumbling Empire. The locals don’t want the refugees in their village, but turn a blind eye, initially, to their camping on a barren mountainside just outside the village.

It is Easter Week approaching, and the village elders are preoccupied with allocating the roles of the Passion story to the locals: who will be “Judas,” “Christ,” or “Mary Magdalene?” Once the preparations for the Holy Week are underway, the chosen actors begin to identify with their allocated characters; they become more saintly, with the exception of “Judas” who becomes treacherous. The novel then takes off, with the actors coming in between the newly arrived refugees and their needs for food and shelter, and the resenting and increasingly intolerant locals. It has a terrific climax, wonderful psychological portraits both of individuals and social groups; it is one of my favourite Greek novels.

Well, in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, in the foothills of the Alps, another Passion Play has been performed for centuries. In the year 1633, the village suffering from the plague, struck a deal with God: they would perform the Passion Play every ten years if God, in return, kept them free from the plague. Both sides seem to have kept their bargain – though the villagers did not hold the metaphorical plague of the World War II against God – and the play goes on. This year, 2010, sees the 41st performance.

The village performs the Play wholeheartedly, with villagers living and growing up with the preparations and performances all through their lives. Their aspirations, dreams and competition for the main roles achieve the status of basic needs. However, only those born and bred there, or those who have lived for at least twenty years in the village, are allowed to take part. Over two thousand locals (half the village) are involved in the performances that last the whole summer, from May to October, performing to an audience of over four thousand people daily! The rest are involved in the catering for and accommodating of the thousands of visitors in a small village.

Now the reason I brought these two together here, the novel by Kazantzakis and the performances of the Passion Play in real life Oberammergau, is more than that they share the same basic story; more important than the fact (and my need to brag about it) that I will be going to see the Play this year; more than the influence that Kazantzakis’ novel had on the background to my own novel, Alexandria’s 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree. It is how in both, Kazantzakis’ novel and the village of the Passion Play, a similar psychological phenomenon seems to be taking place. The actors tend to become more like the characters of the Passion story. The villages tend to show similarities with the folk of the original story.

In Oberammergau, one of the locals cast as Virgin Mary, I read, refused to marry afterwards; one of the “Jesuses” kept ‘blessing people’ long after the performance was over. One of the actors playing this year’s “Jesus” is reportedly tempted to defer to the actors who played previously “Jesus” and let them mount the donkey entering Jerusalem. There is also the story of King Ludwig II, making presents of silver spoons to the actors of the performance he attended, with the exception of “Judas,” to whom he gave a tin spoon. As for the village politics, they are reported to be tinged with the sometimes polarizing passions of the original story.

In the Kazantzakis novel, a similar but more pronounced process seems to be taking place. The main characters of the Play take on the qualities of those they portray. The actor Judas behaves like “Judas,” the local prostitute starts behaving like “Mary Magdalene,” similarly “apostle Peter” and “Christ.” The villagers and the mob equally seem to become caught in a web that almost dictates a necessity of action that follows the Passion. It is as if a need arises for the Play to become embodied and concretely played out in the village of the novel.

It is this unsettling echo between the two depictions I wish to highlight. Even on the side of the spectator, newspaper articles about the Oberammergau Play, inchluding the Spiegel online,  attract our attention by reporting that one of this year’s chosen inhabitants to portray “Jesus” is a psychologist; “Mary Magdalene” a Lufthansa flight attendant. This points to an expectation in ourselves to weld together the roles in the Passion Play with the Oberammergau locals playing them. When they do not fit – after all who would have thought of Christ been played by a psychologist? – a sense of discrepancy, perhaps a sense of the Uncanny arises.

An interesting analogy may be found in the discrepancy between what one wants to say and the way one expresses it through language, which is smaller in one’s native language than in a second/adopted language. While in the first case the metaphor of “bathing in language” is appropriate, in the second – when the gap between what one wishes to say and the way it is said is too wide – the expression “like bathing in a ski-suit” has been used by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming. A shift from the latter, uncanny experience to the more comfortable one of having the appropriate linguistic tools (the “bathing suit”) to express oneself is accomplishable through practice. In real-life Oberammergau, the endless rehearsals, revisions and reworking of the text, the advice sought and given, ensure that the fit between the Passion and its performance improves with each passing decade.

Kazantzakis’ novel, of course, has the advantage of setting this theme of the actor, the role and reality on a fictional stage. On this stage, the actors no longer simply perform but rather re-enact – as if the role fitted them like a glove. Better still, as if there were no distance between the narrative of the Play, the specific role, and the self. Or, as if: “World and dream are one,” as a boy in the novel sings to the Agha.

But then perhaps I am making too much of this: after all, one of the Oberammergau inhabitants who played Christ in the year 2000 performance is now, in the year 2010, playing Judas!

I went for a walk to the Dragonfly Sanctuary in the Lee Valley Park,  near Waltham Abbey, in the outskirts of London. Peaceful and dreamy, idyllic… though a different note entered my mind when I read the information provided about dragonflies: the lower lip technique of the dragonfly nymphs catching their prey, the cannibalism as a way of regulating population…
Reflecting on my experience, I wrote this poem which can be read both as a perfect idyll, with the dragonflies resting within a sssssh soundscape of silence; and as the calm before the next rush of the dragonfly for its prey.

The poem was published in escarp,  a text-message-based review of super-brief literature (www.escarp.org).

Anuradha Vijayakrishnan’s poem “Suicide Note” was published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

This poem is a suicide note addressed to a number of unusual addressees, leaving the content of the note to the reader’s imagination. It puzzled and haunted me for the last few weeks: its exquisite, lyrical tone, its mysteries and the ways it brings nature alive through its lines.

A Critical analysis by Tammy Ho Laiming and Jarno Jakonen appeared recently in A Cup of Fine Cha. I thoroughly enjoyed reading both, poem and analysis, and kept them with me for weeks, chewing on words, mulling over the subtle allusions.

Tammy Ho Laiming and Jarno Jakonen’s analysis of the poem, as well as the comments, provide a beautiful and multi-faceted context to the poem. There is whole list of addressees in this “Suicide Note”: “frog, cicadas, rain clouds, gardens, worms, grass, deer, curtains, noise, lights, glass trails, heart, hands, ink, bruises, rivers, summers, monsoons and thunderbolts,” which the analysis and the comments fully and thoroughly explore.

I have nothing to add, except one question: Where are the people? Where are the relationships with people? The nature described in the poem is giving, generous – though providing what is usually offered by humans: warmth is offered by glow worms, for instance. And as if to emphasize the point, neighbours and strangers appear only impersonally as in “the shining lights of the neighbours and their last ashen cigarettes.”

So, for me, there is so much loneliness and sadness in the persona pouring out every time nature stands in for the human touch: friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, or even kind strangers. What could be more indicative of sadness, and indeed despair, than the need to use “broken glass trails that will show the way to strangers”?

From this perspective, what if, in a well-encrypted way, we are led to ask: does the poem take the line of praising nature instead of criticizing fatal failings of the human heart?

Memories of home, of childhood, of life events and life losses are human universals. They belong to the scenario beautifully described in the myth of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden – as well as rendered in the rich, painterly iconography of this story. One might say that this story serves as one of the archetypal scenarios framing our thinking.

With this in mind, how are we to conceive of experiences and memories of losing a home, family, country, culture through war and forced displacement? A pressing question, for there are so many groups in this predicament all over the world now. Arguably, the real losses and trauma suffered by those forcibly and traumatically expelled fracture the symbolizing processes, reducing the facility to employ them in creating meaning in everyday life. As a result, these experiences may acquire a different mental status, require different resources and be put to different uses by our conscious and unconscious minds.

Frequently, memories of such losses remain hidden, out of reach of linguistic elaboration for years – or even generations, as seen in families of holocaust survivors.

Sometimes, memories of the home lost, as well as of the traumatic circumstances of the expulsion, have been used as building blocks to construct or reinforce a sense of identity and community. This is illustrated in Alice James’ perceptive article, “Memories of Anatolia: generating Greek refugee identity.”

James studied the construction of the refugee identity of the Greeks of Anatolia who fled Mikra Asia, the western part of Anatolia in 1922. Up to that time, more than a million, perhaps a million and a half of Christian Ottoman Greeks had lived there, in Greek settlements going back millennia. However, after a disastrous series of wars in the Balkans and between Ottoman Turkey and Greece in particular which resulted in the catastrophic defeat of the Greeks, the surviving Christians of Anatolia were forced to flee from their homes. Many perished. Most of the survivors fled to Greece where they settled – though a significant number went to other countries and even other continents.

For those who settled in Greece, the country became their new home, even if they spoke little or no Greek. They encountered acts of kindness and generosity as well as negligence, and animosity. As a result, many of those who had survived the war and persecution in Anatolia, died. James refers to a League of Nations source that quotes mortality rates among the new arrivals reaching 45% at one point. Survivors grouped together and developed ways of coping with the losses they had suffered and the difficulties they encountered in their new country.

Concentrating on the refugees of Chios, the largest island closest to Smyrna, James quotes a refugee describing their situation, “like the leaves from the trees when the wind takes them away and they blow right and left without knowing where they are going.”

James notes that “The refugees were no longer attached to their land, and only by producing a group identity could they feel grounded.” This identity was produced through processes that helped translate the experiences and generate a distinct identity as Mikrasiates; all these processes helped recall and often show concretely the difference between the earlier wealth of the life in Anatolia that was lost, and the deprivation that followed the expulsion and refugeedom.

Efforts concentrated on continuing or preserving traditions and customs. Chief amongst these were those associated with the Greek Christian-Orthodox religion, which had been a pillar of their identity under the Ottoman rule. Christian Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on ritual and custom (such as celebrating Saints’ days, associated with the name days of those sharing Saint’s name), provided a continuity between the past, present and future generations.

Referring to Hirschon’s study of a refugee community in the Kokkinia district of Athens, near Piraeus, James points out the importance of memory for identity formation. Museums and collections or archives of memorabilia, photographs, and film were used by the Greeks from Anatolia to generate an image of themselves in Greece, as a distinct group, the Mikrasiates. By holding on to personal and cultural belongings and heritage, such as the Byzantine heritage, photographs, song, music and other memory devices, the story of the refugees’ lives, traditions as well as their loss is not forgotten, but incorporated in the process of identity formation, and bestowed upon future generations.

Beyond the communities studied by James and Hirschon, it would be interesting to think about how identity formation works in situations in which such uses of memory are discouraged, or non-existent: for example, the situation of those Greeks who fled, in the aftermath of the Civil War, to communist countries vis-à-vis those who managed to stay behind; the situation of the Muslims of Crete who went to nation-building Turkey after the treaty of Lausanne as compared to those Muslims who stayed on in Northern Greece, and others. It would also be of interest to think about other factors and processes involved in generating refugee identity, and their interaction with memory.

Please feel free to add your comments, impressions, views on these themes in the comments box below.

PS Some of these themes of loss, strategies of survival, and the vicissitudes of identity formation, I touch upon in my forthcoming novel “Alexandrias 40: Under the Lemon Tree.”