ON RACISM AND HERITAGE IN DAUGHTER OF ODYSSEUS (2)

The joys of heritage, of being human!

ON RACISM AND HERITAGE IN DAUGHTER OF ODYSSEUS
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PART TWO


1. Introduction:

‘At least I’m not a wog….’;

‘You Greeks killed yourselves through intermarriage…’ (snicker, snicker);

‘You look African…You have black blood…’ (snicker snicker);

‘The Greeks today are mongrels. We Germans are the real Greeks,’ 

‘Are you white?’ (says the young lad with malice – not that I care either way);
‘Dirty fucking wog…’ (with a spit);

‘When we white nationalists take over Europe, we will take the best of the Greek women for ourselves…’ (Greeks not being ‘white’ of course);

Or

Imagine a man in his forties degrading you in public – literally yelling in your direction - pointing out some ‘ethnic feature’; his goal is to dehumanise you, ostracise you from the wider society and make you feel ugly, worthless and inferior. All this for revenge. Of course, this man perceives himself to be superior and of pure blood.

Or

You must be Jewish because of your ‘features’ and therefore, must be degraded, mocked and belittled.

‘Are you Jewish…?’

‘Even wogs have big noses…’ 
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Ah, what is this you ask? Just a taste of what I have had to experience as a Greek woman in Australia.
But it continues; this merry circle of hate and malice continues and grows and now flourishes insidiously.
Ethnic division and hatred, tensions and hostility, nasty stereotypes and spite are, not surprisingly, very noticeable on social media.  The reason is obvious:  it is through social media that people express their true feelings – when their mask of civility and fake political correctness is discarded; hiding behind a screen, people can state how they really feel. And it’s often not pretty.
Of course, there is the hostility towards Islam, there are the Black Lives Matter movements, the growth of White Nationalism, the horrific treatment of the Palestinians. There is snickering and slander and resentment and diabolical hatred.
There is the rise of populism in Europe, followed by violence and the rise of the ‘right’ due to (forced) multiculturalism.  There is fear and anger and confusion.
One has to look at the hatred towards Donald Trump as reflective of ‘white supremacy’ to see how this issue causes unbelievable anger.
There are notions of ‘The Great Replacement;’ Europeans who fear they will become minorities in their ancestral lands.  There are feelings of revenge and ‘karma is a bitch’ by those who have suffered from colonialism.
‘The British are becoming a minority in many parts of Britain,’ say the white nationalist with alarm.
‘They get what they deserve. It is karma,’ says an Indian with a sense of vengeance.
I am beginning to think that humanity is more divided than ever.

2. We need to belong:

We learn very early on that, in the midst of depression, Christine feels alienated from the land she was born in. Perhaps it is her depression that accentuates this feeling; perhaps it was always going to happen.
Perhaps the longing for roots and heritage and knowing the mysterious past is just too intrinsic within each of us and Christine becomes deeply attuned to this. After all, to quote the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis:

THE CRY IS not yours. It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart.

You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them; when you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts…
(The Saviours of God)
 
Kazantzakis paints a spectacular image of an individual who is not isolated, not stranded and drifting here and there and nowhere; no, this individual contains the blood and flesh and memories and desires and sins of their ancestors.
Kazantzakis’ writings here influence greatly the determination of Christine; indeed, I draw a lot of inspiration from them. His image of her ancestors crying to her to – Finish our work! Finish our work! – is thrilling – so is his concept that we are to enrich the ancestral body and bring to it new hopes and ideas and fresh sorrows.
We saw in Part One of this blog series (http://www.vasilikim.com/blog/on-racism-and-heritage-in-daughter-of-odysseus) that Christine longs for something more than what this alien land of Australia can offer her. With its alien spirits and wandering ancestors and strange spirituality:
 
She came to the same conclusion as before: this land meant nothing to her. She twitched with an overwhelming desire to burst into tears. She could not relate to this land; she did not look upon it and feel the divine speaking through her, feel the spirit of her ancestors crying out to her. Yet she wanted to.
The physical and spiritual pain overwhelmed her, as if she were undergoing a spiritual transformation, an initiation into a new world to which she had to prove worthy.
She longed more than anything to gaze upon crystal blue waters infused with myths and holiness—waters that healed her, which soothed her soul and her shattered nerves. She wanted to hear voices—sweet, gentle voices singing a song of her ancestors long gone. Lily-like voices resounding around her, leading her towards a beautiful land in the far horizon.
But instead of a song, there was silence.
 (Daughter of Odysseus: Ithaka Calling)

3. Hate: 

Christine’s sense of alienation might lie in deep existential philosophising and the spirit of her ancestors crying within her, as Kazantzakis says:  Your visible body is the living men, women, and children of your own race. Yet it is her experience as an ethnic woman in a land of Anglo-Saxons that, no doubt, causes this alienation and despair to intensify to harrowing degrees. That creates a sense of desperation within because she knows, she knows this is not how she should be living, how she should be treated.
Christine, with her uniqueness and exotic beauty and dreams and aspirations and intelligence and compassion, Christine in all her faults, deserves to feel human…
 
She felt fresh, alive, and even desirable. Desirable and employable. Perhaps she did have potential and that here was the start she needed: the new beginning, her exit from the Tomb—the Cocoon—or whatever it is that contained her.
At that instant, she had transformed. She was no longer betrayed, broken and bitter Christine.
She was a nymph of old, revelling in the Resurrection of the Dead. She was the Spring Goddess Chloris, bedecked in sparkling gold, illuminating a world shrouded in shadows and bringing with her a world of colour and light.
A butterfly brushed her arm. A swallow flittered before her. The sky winked with joy as trees blossomed.
A carpet of flowers lay before her feet. Stretching her arms above her, she dove into the cascade of velvety petals, disappearing forever.
 (Daughter of Odysseus: Ithaka Calling) 
 
An image of optimistic joy. Things start to look up for the young Christine as we see her leave her new employer and walk down the central heart of her city of Adelaide.
Alas, her sense of hope and bliss soon dissipate because of black words spoken from a black heart full of mystifying hate and rage:
 
‘Watch where you’re fuckin’ going!’
The voice was rough, jarring, and hateful. It shattered the illusion that was her comforting joy a few seconds ago.
‘Dirty fuckin’ wog,’ the man raged, spitting at her to emphasise his disgust. ‘Dirty fuckin’ wog,’ he repeated, just in case she had not heard him. With that, he marched away, leaving behind him a trail of crushing words, syllables, and letters.
A young man with white blond hair and pasty white skin that ached for the kiss of sunlight, that ached for life and beauty. He slouched away, snarling as he turned to look at her one more time.
He left his wounded victim where he found her, as people looked at her as if she were an exhibit at a zoo, laughing, smirking and pitying.
‘Dirty fucking wog.’
The words ricocheted off the stones and the fountains and even the Malls Balls in the distance, declaring to all--
You are the Other.  You are less than human.
 (Daughter of Odysseus: Ithaka Calling) 

 
Only someone who has experienced such hate and dehumanisation in public (but in private as well) can truly understand how traumatic this was for Christine.  For it was not just the words, as vile as they were; it was the gesture of spitting, it was the private snickering and the looks of pity. It was a public declaration to all that Christine was not one of ‘them’, let alone human.
The spitting was a form of violence in itself, perhaps worse than punching or kicking a victim:

“Spitting in someone's face is probably considered one of the worst things you can do. It's obviously a form of violence, very confrontational, perhaps the most violent you can be against someone without actually hitting them.”                             
 (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2003/nov/06/newsstory.sport1)
 
The young man, however, achieves his sadistic goal:

The sea of petals disappeared; she was now drowning in murky waters, drifting towards a monstrous whirlpool. She was being dragged down to the netherworld, where there was no light, no hope.
She walked faster, head bowed and knees trembling. Pretending, pretending she could not see or hear. She longed to run back to Chic Boutique, into the arms of Spiros. There, he would hold her, and she would sink into the black satin shirt. He would whisper in her ears, tell her she was desirable, beautiful, as he lifted her top and caressed her breasts. He would make love to her and take her to another realm of existence. Away, away from this world she hated. A world where she did not belong, a world that made her feel ugly, useless, unloved.
Alarmed by her libidinous train of thought, Christine pushed Spiros out of her mind. And as she crossed the road and made her way towards her bus stop, she became filled with unspeakable fury, by a desperate and frenzied urge to thrust her fists into that young man’s face, into all their faces. She was not dirty—or a wog, for that matter.
Wog. The ethnic slur that Greeks, Italians and other Mediterranean Europeans tolerated from the first moment they entered this country.
Western Oriental Gentlemen.
Dirty, greasy, subhuman. Christine had been called far worse in the past, but this attack distressed her terribly.
Could such intolerance, such hate still exist for fellow Europeans in this country?
Christine reflected on how much she resented this country. She wouldn’t care if she left it, for it was not her country; it was the country of the British race that claimed it, colonised it and reduced the original inhabitants to strangers in their own land.
Who in their arrogance did not see that they too were now being colonised.
It was not her country, but what was? For that matter, who was she? Who was Christine? Who was she in the eyes of the stranger who derided her for bumping into him down a busy mall?
 (Daughter of Odysseus: Ithaka Calling) 

4. She heeds the call:

Despite incidences such as these, despite the attempts to strip her of her dignity and reduce her to a sick, twisted racial stereotype with the wrong colour hair and eyes and skin, the wrong nose and who knows what else – despite all of this – Christine retains her sense of humanity and most of all – her longing…
To understand herself within the context of her people’s history and humanity.  To not give in to the hate around her and disappear, assimilate and, in turn, betray the ancestors clutching at her with cries she simply cannot ignore:

IT IS NOT enough to hear the tumult of ancestors within you. It is not enough to feel them battling at the threshold of your mind. All rush to clutch your warm brain and to climb once more into the light of day.
(The Saviours of God) 

And so the journey, the search for home and hearth and heritage begins; the need to give flesh and substance to the ancestors that came before you and to continue their work. To be a beautiful leaf on the ‘great tree’ of your people and to flourish as you always intended.
 
So here I am. Ready to fly to Greece—true to the wandering spirit of my ancestors, who roamed the world in search of truth and wisdom—in search of new knowledge, in search of a home abandoned a long time ago…
Such restlessness—such desire within me.
I must pay heed to the restless spirit within me, as expressed in the great Odysseus, and make my way home.
(Daughter of Odysseus: Ithaka Calling) 

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