Now in bookstores from Voland: *Quattro testimonianze sul fiume Erinnio* by Angela Dimitrakaki—a book that raises a great many questions, which the author has generously answered. 😉
The novel is structured around the concept of a written “testimony.” Right from the opening lines, a strong sense of surrender emerges (“I surrendered, I laid down my arms”). Why did you choose the format of an epistolary/testimonial account to narrate this specific moment of transition for the protagonists, and how did you work on the individual voices to convey the complexity of someone looking back with bitterness after so many years?
The novel is narrated in the early 2000s through the voices of four adult women. They have been tracked down and approached by an anthropology student who is researching contemporary urban legends. She has come up an eerie story, documented in the press of the 1980s, about a part of Athens that was not affluent at all, a working-class district on the outskirts that is sometimes mentioned as the ‘neighbourhood of hell’.
I chose the epistolary mode and also the oral narration – one woman says she can’t write letters and so sends a recording. So, the story is made up by different kinds of language that correspond to a letter, a live dialogue, a monologue as oral speech (my favourite). I wanted a vibrant story and also something quite realistic, which is why I made each woman talk or write in first person. I needed the realism of these witnessing voices because the story as such – the story these witnesses put together – is quite crazy, magical, irrational and otherworldly. I needed the realism of the ‘testimonies’ to counter the absurdity and extraordinariness of the events.
It’s true that the first woman, the one who writes the first letter, says this thing, that she ‘surrendered’. It’s not said with bitterness, however. It is a recognition of limits and possibly a defeat that was brought on her. Huge forces have kept her back – maybe the magnetic attraction of the event she is trying to talk about. She left that neighbourhood of hell for a while, but then came back, and in writing the letter she understands she was trapped. Maybe in writing the letter she will find the courage to flee.
I think all four voices offer a particular illumination of their former teenage existence as some kind of landscape they can re-enter or not. Overall, in my other novels too, there is at least one character who thinks about space as having real and surreal properties – both are political. In the novel I am writing now, a young boy remarks: ‘I’m aware there exist neighbourhoods where a child feels free to walk out of, and other neighbourhoods which are like prisons. What kind of neighbourhood is mine?’ I think the women in the novel you read ask a similar question: where did we live as young girls and why? Can we ever know what happened to us there?
- Ioanna, Katerina, Sofia, and Rahil grow up in the suburbs, dress in black, listen to punk music, and declare war on their families. In what way did the punk culture of those years represent not just a style or an aesthetic provocation for this generation of Greek girls, but a true political stance and the only possible language to express their discontent and rejection of social conventions?
Well, like in other cities in other countries, in Athens punk wasn’t exactly popular and it was always part of a subculture that was both nihilistic and loud in its misery. It was very attractive to some youth, and certainly to girls in the early 1980s. I think in terms of style, there was a punk-goth mix which said a massive ‘fuck off’ to becoming a good citizen, especially as it was obvious that the capitalist state (including the social-democratic state that was in fact also capitalist) was getting worse and worse.
The 1980s was the end of an era, and young people did not know it then, but many could sense it was all going to hell. When I wrote the novel, I knew the 1980s was the end of an era. After that, the digital takeover would start, and anyone who tried to say ‘no’ would be punished, would become a ‘left-behind’. People would be forced into the digital condition, which meant endless surveillance, a huge trap. The girls see the change. The girls in the novel wear all this black stuff and represent a cultural requiem that was felt across the so-called West. They are not at all sure if the world that’s coming their way has any point. They reject social convention, but what they sense about social reality goes beyond that. They mention that the junta (1967-1974) is like it’s forgotten and the nice things promised to society afterwards are simply not going to happen. Did the junta end? What the fuck is going on? That was the question.
The girls become aggressive. They constantly try to protect ‘their’ world. But they can’t. Because in the 1980s people were told there was no alternative.
- The text references the socialist government’s electoral promise to restore and “unearth” the rivers of the Attica basin to improve the citizens’ quality of life. The failure of this river project becomes a mirror for the state’s unfulfilled promises. To what extent does this story reflect the betrayal of the political utopias of a Greece that dreamed of a breakthrough and a different future, only to wake up disillusioned?
In this case, Greece had a socialist government that was exactly of this kind of courageous yet lukewarm social-democratic mentality: the kind of left that thinks it can change people’s lives by promising small things. Ducks in parks. More democratic art. Admittedly, this is what the left was allowed to do. And the novel is not an indictment of the actual political party that governed in the 1980s. The novel uses Greek history to say a far bigger story, that of the betrayal of working-class people by half-assed social-democratic parties. They always make these wild promises and all of these promises have to do with the ‘quality of life’. And things remain the same. Eventually they ‘ll get worse. This is a larger story than Greece in the 1980s. We all know the story.
By the way, the girls in the novel try to protect their childhood and their spaces from what they see are false promises. I want to stress the difference – at first sight – between Britain and Greece during the 1980s. Britain, the UK, had Margaret Thatcher. She was the epitome of right-wingness and neoliberalism, and in to destroy the old industries and bring in finance. Greece had a social-democratic government, and a charismatic leader (Andreas Papandreou), which to an extent was a victory for the people. It was a political relief. It was good for kids at school, especially girls, as society became more progressive. But on a level far above a small marginal country or even a former empire, a decision about the course of history had been made, and so today you find the dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism in both countries. Both countries attack the poor, attack the migrants, and social stupidity is rife. So, bad things such as disillusionment would not stay within one country.
- The novel explores that thin line where youthful rebellion must reckon with reality, individual choices, and tragic fates, such as Rahil’s. From both a narrative and social perspective, does the end of innocence for these four girls also coincide with the end of an era for Greek society as a whole?
I am not sure there is an end of innocence. The issue was not that youthful rebellion must land on a reality that says ‘obey the master’. I don’t believe that. Only dehumanised humans live their lives in such conditions that they give up the prospect of rising up – yes, I know that a myriad media have successfully supressed this prospect and have generated hypnotic addictions. I think on some novel the girls keep missing chances. They individualise their stories. As they grow up, they are pulled in different directions and the fabric of teenage friendship becomes threadbare. But we don’t know what will happen to them.
For me, the voice that has lost its innocence is that of their History teacher, who was also a feminist. She was the one who excited the girls’ imagination. And what happened to her? What did she do with her life? There was no feminist revolution in the end. I was very much interested in negotiating the two generations in the novel. The History teacher was very real. You found these amazing women then, full of political energy. The second wave, the generation of my mother and of my teachers. I think I felt they were the ones who were fundamentally victimised by the state which absorbed their political dreams. There were many women like this in Italy – Italian feminism has been so important. We also had such a movement in Greece. I sometimes shudder when I think of what the system did to these women. I feel really angry about this.
- As an author, you have always been deeply involved in the European debate on gender issues and feminism. In this novel, the girls’ bodies, the way they inhabit urban spaces and the outskirts of Athens, and their very anger take on a powerful political significance. What were the main challenges in translating this physicality and urgency into literature without falling into sociological rhetoric?
There was no struggle. I like everyday language. It’s unpretentious. But ultimately it is the story that decides the language. I don’t know if I can convey here the power that a story has on the writer, to begin with. You wake up thinking through the characters, or just one character. At least, I do. The character is not just this person who lives an everyday life and uses the same ten words. There is a lot more going on. The girls never say they have any connection with feminism. The History teacher does. The girls refuse to do the quiet suffering. There ought to be a language for that refusal. That is my ‘task’, to find this language, which can range from the funny to the visceral. This is language that has internalised history and does not know it. It thinks it is free.
