LIVING IN TWO COUNTRIES, TWO CULTURES
GILLIAN BOURAS
I have been told that women always start the presentation of academic papers with an apology, men with a joke. So I'm really sorry I haven't got a joke. But perhaps you may smile as I did when I once read a comment by Australian novelist Brian Castro. Reporting from Hong Kong years ago, he wrote that the advertisement 'Coke adds life,' became in Chinese 'Coke reincarnates your ancestors.' (1) Literal translation ought to be easy, but is not. It also interests me that the word 'translation' has several meanings, one of them being the removal of the relics of a saint from one place to another.
My three sons are far from being saintly, alas, but they still know a great deal about all sorts of translation. The first two were born in Melbourne, and came to live in the Peloponnese when they were (almost) eight and six years old. The youngest was born in Athens. (All claim that I exploit them, so that I live in daily dread of receiving a hefty bill.) The eldest, 31-year-old Dimitrios, now lives in St Kilda, Melbourne, but when he was twenty-four he had spent precisely twelve years of his life in Australia and twelve in Greece. I think of him as a Greek Australian. My second son, 29-year-old Nikolaos, a Sergeant Major marine commando in the Greek Special Forces, is currently serving at a NATO base in Germany. I think of him as a temporarily transplanted Australian Greek. Baby Alexander, 22, is an Australian Greek who has never lived anywhere else but in Greece. He has nearly completed his studies in Kozani, in Macedonia, and is now back living in his ancestral village.
The boys' father, a native of Messenia, in the Peloponnese, was part of the great wave of Greek migration to the Australia of the 1960s, while I am an Anglo-Celt Australian. I did not leave the island continent until I was thirty; I emigrated unexpectedly but definitely in 1980, when I was thirty-five.
In the Conference Brochure, Professor Hampel writes: 'General and professional ethical standards are in one respect universal but in another subject to cultural differences.' (2) How absolutely true. In multi-cultural Australia, the great task is to negotiate, to pick a way across an area that often resembles a minefield. Greece is still largely mono-cultural, but for an outsider like me, Greek culture was, and remains, a very different one from the one in which I was raised. (I am aware, however, that my Australian generation is a vanishing one.) When it comes to cultures, the navigating, negotiating task involves, at the very least, the processes of comparison and contrast.
When I was young, the accepted wisdom was that comparisons were odious; as an adult I have learned, often quite painfully, that comparisons, particularly between cultures and countries, make people miserable, for the process so often leads to a sense of frightful isolation and alienation, to a desolate gap in the psyche. Yet we are all engaged in comparing and contrasting, simply in order to process information and to shape experience: sound teaching and learning practice, after all, involves working from the known to the unknown. And then perhaps we can move beyond this process.
It is an axiom that we all bring our own individual baggage of preconceptions and emotional truths to any one situation. I am the Nonconformist product of a pioneering tradition, one that has, on the whole, a nomadic sensibility and leads an invented life. Australians tend to make responses up as they go along, stressing mobility, flexibility and individuality. The great Protestant tradition of the individual (Here I stand; I can do no other) has always been important in our cultural history.
But because the main enemy in pioneering Australia was the environment, Australians, while being individual, also had to trust and rely on strangers, for these were the people who were going to fight the fire and help them through the drought. To this day, this very openness remains a means of survival, except perhaps in Europe, where it is suspect, and thought of as naiviete. Europeans often fail to see that openness is a strategy like any other.
In the Peloponnese, which is still overwhelmingly an agricultural area, a settled and received way of life was the norm until very recently. In peasant communities there are set situations and set responses to them, a continuity and an emphasis on family as a means of survival. The main threat was not from the environment, though it was and is harsh, because successive generations learned to manage it, but from invaders like the Turks, the Venetians and bands of brigands. For complex historical reasons, villages still operate a complex system of 'in' and 'out' groups, and even now there is a suspicion of the outsider, who, in anthropological terms, is both dangerous and in danger.
In traditional society, there is often a moral and ethical clash between the needs and demands of the individual and those of the family/community: I have certainly found this to be so. This is not a politically correct paper; whereas we in so-called Western society have learned to our cost that a gentleman's word is no longer his bond, Greek pragmatism holds that only a fool would ever have accepted this as a rule for living anyway, for in traditional society the end almost always justifies the means. Family members may well protect a 'black sheep,' for example, rather than have shame brought into the open or honour thus impugned.
At the same time, a great deal of social and family pressure can be brought to bear on people who want to bend the rules: arranged marriages still take place, for example. And when it comes to marriage, the romantic dyad of the West very seldom exists; it is the family that is all-important, with sons being very much valued.
The Orthodox Church continues to be a vital part of Greek culture: being Orthodox is quite simply part of being Greek, and Orthodoxy was supremely important in keeping the light of Hellenism alive during nearly four hundred years of Turkish occupation. Community, solidarity and conformity are highly valued, and if schoolchildren today do not wish to make their confession or take communion, there are consequences, while every Greek communist I have ever known has had his children baptised and always goes to church at Easter, Christmas and on important name-days.
I am a writer, not an academic, so that I naturally turn to other writers for enlightenment. The woman who called herself Henry Handel Richardson is one of Australia's greatest writers. Yet another is Dimitris Tsaloumas. But the latter, while a long-time resident of Melbourne, was born on Leros, while the former relocated to Germany and then to Britain, returning only once to Australia in order to refresh her memory while working on her mighty work, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.
The protagonist Richard Mahony is one of those uncomfortable persons who has the sensibilities of the nomad and the settler jostling for space within the one psyche: he is an idealist seeking certainty and is forever comparing England with Australia. The result is a deep and crippling discontent, and it is the inability to balance these tensions that eventually kills him. It is his wife Mary who sees the likenesses between people, but when she tells her husband that people are the same the world over, Mahony vehemently exclaims, 'No, by God, they're not...' (3)
In a very fine poem, The Approval, Tsaloumas also makes comparisons and draws contrasts.
... in the heart of Australia
no woodworms have dug labyrinths in which
the Sirens' songs can find themselves a nest,
Instead the mastery belongs to such vast deserts that
A skin filled tight with water won't suffice
your crossing. No camels here, no comforts. Only
you, alone, where fevers crack the earth
and, prone, the skeletons snort as the crow
laughs into the mirror of the heat,
and you become blind to your homeland's faults,
and the labours of your loneliness are wasted. (4)
I have been making comparisons between Australia and Greece since 1980, and consider myself a reverse example of the person Tsaloumas is addressing in this poem. I certainly know what it is to be alone, to be a stranger in a strange land. I can only hope there is not too much waste involved in the labours of my loneliness.
There have certainly been many labours involved in the raising of my sons, as is the case in most families, and it interests me now to look back and reflect that my desire to raise cross-cultural children was almost an instinctive drive, one necessary for my own survival. I can still remember my heart breaking, quietly but definitely, when my elder sons started speaking Greek to each other: they had been in the country six months to the day. And my proudest achievement as an educator is the fact that Greek-born Alexander could read and write English before he started school in the village. My parents visited for long holidays, and in my turn I scrimped and saved so that I could take the children to Australia. Peripatetic Australian friends were always dropping in, and the supply of books, photographs, magazines and newspaper cuttings seemed never-ending. The rules of cricket are still up on the wall, a boomerang, a bull-roarer and a cork-trimmed hat are still very much in evidence, with the result that one friend said the house was so Australian that the only thing missing was an embalmed pavlova.
Like Richard Mahony. I, too, was an idealist seeking certainty, but eventually I had to give up the search, put on new pairs of boots and spurs and light out for another territory. At this point it seems to me that I have developed and created my own country, that of the mind, which has its own boundaries, its own potentiality for exploration, its own laws: a kind of compulsory illusion. The best of both worlds, along with a great deal of wandering and pondering, has contributed to this particular geography.
And what of my sons? There has always been a great deal of concern about cross-cultural children, who are often perceived as being tense, unhappy, maladjusted and not easily integrated individually or socially, and I have had and expressed this concern myself: the word disintegration took on a whole new meaning. My eldest son, who bore the brunt of what he calls 'this two countries business,' found adjustment difficult for a long time, but in the last two years seems to have found what he wants in Melbourne.
In 1993, Richard Shweder, then the Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago wrote a very interesting essay, in which he pointed out that when opposite sensibilities are jostling for space within the one psyche, that psyche will always be uncomfortable. (5) (Richard Mahony is the fictional evidence for this hypothesis.)
My children have all the oppositions I have mentioned, I suppose, yet it seems to me that they have these tensions now so internalised that the discomfort is of a minimal nature: their nomadic sensibility is inbuilt, enabling them to see both their cultures as subjects, rather than as objects, while I, I simply have to make do with bi-lingual dreams.
Shweder wrote that a settled sensibility tends to emphasise power play, separateness and secrecy. By its very definition, the nomadic sensibility is more fluid, and prefers blurred outlines, the shifting and slithering between or among situations, and knows that, to quote Shweder,' there is more than one cultural logic out of which to fashion a life.' (6)
The monocultural person and the migrant demand progress of a material sort, and are Aristotle's historian, concentrating on the past. The cross-cultural person may not do as well materially, but in a sense he cheats boredom, death and anxiety: rather than the linear continuum, he has a pendulum swing built in, and is Aristotle's poet, narrating that which could happen.
The cross-cultural person can, in a sense, walk through the walls of custom, expectation and all the constructs, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, which are part of being mono-cultural. Even quite young children can view life from multiple perspectives, a fact that should be borne in mind in multi-cultural Australia.
My youngest son was eleven when he visited London for the first time. He had never seen a squirrel before, and so was caught halfway between fear and excitement as one cheeky little creature ran up his leg. But he rallied quickly. 'Smaller than your average possum, Mum?' he asked. The graft had taken, and he had made a translation from one animal to another, from one hemisphere to another, and from one culture to another in the space of one short sentence.
Four years later, on Australia Day, I was trying to photograph my Australian flag, which was drooping sadly from a makeshift broom-handle pole. Alexander came down the front steps on his way to school.
'Do you think I'm mad?' I asked. He neither broke step nor drew breath, but merely said, in his laconic manner: 'As a cut snake.'
The moral of this story is that I may well be mad, but my cross-cultural children most assuredly are not. And I like to think there will be a corner of the Peloponnese that will be forever Australia.
NOTES
1. Quoted by Capp, Fiona, in The First of Heat, in The Australian Book Review, No. 183, August 1996, p.55.
2. The Greek Conference 2004, p.3.
3. Richardson, Henry Handel, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Penguin Classics, England1990, p.325.
4. Tsaloumas, Dimitris, The Approval, The Observatory, University of Queensland Press, 1984, p.163. (Translated by Philip Grundy.)
5. Shweder, Richard A., 'Why Do Men Barbecue?' and Other Postmodern Ironies of Growing Up in the Decade of Ethnicity. Daedalus, Winter 1993, 122:1
6. Ibid. p.305.
Copyright 2004. Greek Legal and Medical Conference