The Nost-algia of the Uprooted
Nassia Linardou
The Nost-algia of the Uprooted[1]
On the 24th of September 1922, after the defeat of the Greek army at Anatolia and the great fire of Smyrna, the Parisian weekly, The Little Illustrated Newspaper [Le petit journal illustré] published a lithograph on its front page. It shows the elements of the traumatic event which will remain forever engraved in Greek memory as The Catastrophe. It shows collapsed Greek soldiers, terrorised refugees carrying children and luggage at arm’s length and in the distance, the city on fire. In the lands of dying empires the mixed populations that lived there are separated in hatred and blood.
For the Greeks, three thousand years of uninterrupted presence in Ionia ended in carnage. Whereas Freud in his letter to Einstein concludes that “[…] whatever fosters the growth of civilisation works at the same time against war,”[2] the poet Georges Séféris, born in Smyrna in 1900, goes the other direction due to the shock of the sound and the fury of History. He wrote to his sister, “Smyrna, Greece, betrayal, slaughter, rapes, all the shame and contempt of civilised beings have stripped me of everything. […] I will not speak to you about art at this moment. There is something superior to art: the congenital unhappiness, the incessant, continuous rumour of the heart of the world, which grants no respite.”[3] His poetry will bear the trace of this trauma that violently forced the country to change its discourse and make its entry into modernity. It will be woven around the wound of The Catastrophe and will want to mitigate the irredeemable Nostos.
Uprooting [déracinement] has often been the metonymy used to qualify the misfortune that had struck more than 1,000,000 fugitives from Asia Minor, from the Euxinus Pontus[4] and Eastern Thrace, refugees in Helladic Greece at the beginning of the last century. “What helped me more than anything else,” wrote Séféris in 1966, “was my trusting attachment to a universe of the living and the dead, to their works, to their voices, to their rhythm […]. This allowed me to understand, when I saw again the land that gave birth to me, that man has roots and if he has been cut off from them, he will suffer in his flesh.”[5]
A diplomat posted to Ankara, Séféris decided at the age of fifty to return to his “homeland.” The return to his roots provokes a strong feeling of Unheimlichkeit: “a mixture of complete familiarity with the place and the feeling of total exclusion, of a definitive engulfment.”[6] He compares this “attraction to his land” to hunger, to the desire for love. In his Diary, he traces the work of separation from the cosmos of his childhood as a back-and-forth between exclusion and “physiological” familiarity. The separation is not without remains. Leaving Smyrna, a beloved city to which he will never return, he writes the following distressing sentence: “On my way out, I understood why Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked behind her.”[7] When the ideal of the Great Idea collapsed for the Greeks on the scene of History, Séféris “supported life”[8] by the strength of his poetry. As a sublimation of the trauma, poetry lodges a superb language for the uprooted, through which a place is found in the oïkoumène[9] of discourse.
Translation by Joanne Conway
Proofread by Caroline Heanue
Références
[1] In the original title of the article in French – La Nost-algie du déraciné – Nost makes reference to the Greek theme Nostos which in literature refers to the homecoming of an epic hero.
[2] Freud, S., “Why War?” SE XXIII, London, Hogarth Press, 1933, p. 215.
[3] Kohler, D., Georges Séféris, Lyon, La Manufacture, 1989, p. 51.
[4] [TN: Name for the Black Sea in Antiquity.]
[5] Séféris, G., Essais, t. ii, (1948-1971), Athènes, Ikaros, 1974, p. 176. [TN: Our translation from the French; original in Greek, translated into French by the author.]
[6] Séféris, G., Journal, t. v, (1945-1951), Athènes, Ikaros, 1973, p. 192-203. [TN: Our translation from the French; original in Greek, translated into French by the author.].
[7] Ibid., p. 203.
[8] Freud, S., “Our Attitude Towards Death. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” SE XIV, London, Hogarth, 1915, p. 299.
[9] [TN: An ancient Greek term for the known, the inhabited or habitable world/earth.]