Borders, Boundaries, and Bodies: Returning to Mykonos for the First Time in a Decade
As a bicultural woman who came from my sea captain father’s Mykonos, Greece to my Midwestern mother’s Joliet Illinois, I have never fit in, not in either place, or I have only now, ironically in Lincoln, Nebraska, begun to feel as though I have a place.
Over the years, I erected boundaries within myself to keep people from coming in; I was fearful of what they would find, because I did not truly know what was inside of me. I can say with confidence now, having done (though not completed) the work of the soul, that once I began giving people myself, in my cut-and-dried form, I began giving them and myself the greatest gift of all. I consider my exploration, devastation, and integration of boundaries throughout my work to ultimately be responsible for this major spiritual shift. I don’t worry about swearing when I teach, or sharing personal details, or even crying when a student tells me about how she cut herself deeply enough to bleed, but luckily, not deeply enough to die. In my personal relationships, I find myself stating what I want and not second-guessing myself as much. No longer do I give my power away, either with excessive apologies or self-deprecation.
Of course, there are many different systemic efforts which contribute to this personal feeling of fulfillment: from obtaining my PhD, experiencing a deep and gratifying love, to celebrating Lincoln in its unexpected kindness and warmth, all of these turning points have cultivated my newer, more purposeful self. I would also argue that, the exploration of boundaries throughout my work has also greatly assisted in pushing me, like a leaf, closer and closer to my ultimate destination which is as expansive and open as the sky and its prairie, or the Mediterranean Sea. Finally, my two disparate worlds, my ocean and my cornfields, have managed to impossibly come together. Finally, I feel as though the impossible borders between the two have met so that the ocean is lapping at the prairie’s shore. This has been, metaphorically, what has happened throughout the past five years spent translating from the Greek, writing my own work, and bringing them together.
Perhaps, then, this is the perfect time to write this final section. In short, both my translations and poetry have taught me, both aesthetically and personally, that boundaries are essential to my life. Boundaries, establishing and crossing them, have been the sole reason why I have finished graduate school relatively sane while teaching fifty students and taking three courses. Boundaries, moreover, are the reason why I managed to cross the border from Belize into Guatemala by myself, exhausted, strung-out, and completely heartbroken. Boundaries are the reason why, before crossing the border, I stayed up with a fellow named Ruddy, who by then had expressed both his love for armed robbery and for me: during that painful time in my life, when I had exited a six-year relationship, I was interested in erecting, testing, crossing and transgressing my own comfortable boundaries.
This leads me to why my translations and writing are alike. Whereas my writing engages physical boundaries— taking back power, feeling sufficient, understanding where the speaker begins and the world ends—my translations entailed testing and crossing into a very different boundary into an equally exotic terrain. Translating Dimitra, from the Greek, meant that I had to return, both physically, intellectually, and emotionally, to a place and a language that I felt previously and intentionally alienated from.
On the other hand, my translations required that I return to Greece to meet with Kotoula, a place where I felt a simultaneous longing, hatred, and nostalgia. Once I moved to Greece, at the age of five, my mother descended deeper into a hole of delusions and never resurfaced. She hated the constant strikes that left us without electricity. She hated the stray cats who screwed, yowled, and reproduced all day, every bit as much as she hated their kittens, both the bright-eyed newborns and the stillborn which she had to bury in the unyielding earth. It was throughout my time in Greece when my parents’ boundaries towards us and each other gradually dissolved; I could hear them screaming and fucking in the next room. During the day they would sit at the coffee table together, panicking over countless stacks of bills, unpredictable stocks, and rising school tuition. Meanwhile, as the boundaries dissolved between our roles as parents and children, the boundaries between my parents continued to heighten. My mother began to spiral further into her drinking and delusions. Pretty soon, she no longer even sat at our tiny coffee table to argue over bills with my father because she was sleeping until noon. Our father began to become distant and removed, like those times we would go swimming as a family at the beach, and I would watch him swim out so far into the distance, I would worry, rightly, that he would never come back.
Moving to the U.S. yielded even more problems which I will not go into here. All I will say is that the boundaries both continued to dissolve and grow. Understand, now, when I say that returning to Greece to meet with Kotoula, for the first time in ten years, posed as a massive discomfort. My return to Greece meant that I had to take down the boundaries that I had successfully constructed between my parents, my language, and my painful memories of my mother’s dissolution. Moreover, returning to Greece would make all of these instances palpable, more real. I could not crowd out the noises with rum. Now my pain was real. Similar to my poems, however, retuning to Greece meant that I could no longer deny the difficulty of tensions of growing up bicultural to two very different parents. In Greece, because I attended an American school, and because my mother refused to allow us to speak Greek in the house, I had adhered to her boundaries which she created for fear of losing us to a culture she had never completely fallen in love with. Therefore, I never fully assimilated to the Greek culture. As a kid, people said the same thing to me when, ten years later, I opened my mouth to speak my native language: “You have an accent,” they would say, rather disappointedly. When I moved to the U.S., on the other hand at thirteen years old, I was the Weird Greek Girl. As a result, I have always felt lost among the different places where I go, carrying two disparate and alienating, albeit defining heritages. I am a true mutt, in a very basic sense. And I have had to create my own boundaries in a effort for survival and preservation.
Thus, when I returned to Greece to meet Dimitra, my shock was inevitable. I was astounded to see how the financial crisis had impacted people. I was shocked, paradoxically, to find that my father’s home in Mykonos, had gone from an old black-clad Greek granny’s home which smelled like the coatroom of a Greek Orthodox church, to an upscale vacation rental with marble floors, new rooms, and high ceilings. I was even more shocked, still, to behold the island: the once Bohemian place where I could wander to small neighboring towns at night alone, where on the main drag, my friends and I would drink Sex on the Beach shots with equally Bohemian tourists from all over the world, had since become a five-star resort. Most all of, I was saddened to see immigrants from Syria and other struggling countries, along with the native Greeks, standing at the edge of a dangerous financial precipice. With a whopping 25% unemployment rate and the inability to withdraw more than 65 Euros from the bank, having seen the laments resounding throughout Dimitra’s poems manifesting first-hand was a heartbreaker and eye-opener at the same time. In that moment, I realized that if I wanted to successfully translate her work, I’d have to open my eyes and my heart and return, as Joseph Campbell’s hero does, back into the lair. I would have to cross an entirely different boundary, this time not escaping, but instead re-entering a country which was possessed deep personal, familiar, and sociopolitical tumult. As I beheld my aging parents, my financially struggling aunts, and a strange new Asian-inspired Greek food, I realized that, just as I was no longer the same person as I was at twenty-three when I last visited Greece, or at thirteen, for that matter, when I left, neither was anyone else. At the same time, certain people and things had changed for the better. I am also happy to report that most of the Greek islands, according to the natives, were not impacted as harshly by the financial crisis due to their vibrant tourist economy.
During my time back in Greece, a stark reality was apparent: there was no escaping across a border. With both of my parents together, while I stayed in their guest house, all of my boundaries dissolved, from my seemingly bisected Midwestern-Greek heritage to my own personal comfort—I was staying in a guest house, after all. I watched in horror as, at my favorite peaceful beach, a group of trust-fund millennials ordered a glass cooler the size of a fridge stocked with Dom Perignon, then proceeded to shake up the bottle and spray it all over each other like a fireman’s hose. I watched, aghast, as they jumped into the ocean with Rolexes still on their wrists. I opened my mouth to speak to the few natives who were left, and again, the response was the same: “You’ve got an accent,” they would say in a flat amazement.
Understand, then, when I sat down in Athens with Dimitra, meeting her face-to-face for the first time, after having translated pages and pages of her poems together via email for the past three years, that my translations were not a simple process. Understand that these translations would continue to inform my poems. I understood then and now more fully why I, in my poetry, translations, and life, am obsessed with setting and crossing boundaries. No emailing after five p.m., writing every morning, cross a boundary into Central American by myself. Return to a country that broke my heart, in so many ways, but like a steel umbilicus, will always remain attached to me.
Last spring, I was walking through UNL’s campus and heard a sound that was as familiar as a broken-in couch: two women were speaking loudly and unmistakably, in Greek. I summoned up my courage and struck up a conversation, mind you, in English. When they spoke to me in Greek, asking me basic questions, I froze, went silent, and answered in English. Suddenly, I was plagued by that familiar phrase: “You have an accent,” so rather than stumble into that moment of vulnerability, I went silent and then spoke in my literal mother’s tongue. During that moment, I felt a pull of longing that felt almost unnatural. So badly, I wanted to join their conversation. So much I wanted to just listen and eavesdrop all day. It is also worth noting, that whenever I am hurt or taken by surprise, I go silent. That feeling of helpless long for words was identical to that one I felt that day, wishing to join a conversation in a language that I once knew so well, but feeling my mind go blank. As I groped for the correct Greek words, I then realized how much I did not want to be looked at as a traitor, a freak, the moment I opened my mouth and my Midwest-drawl laced Greek would tumble out. I wanted to reunite with my language, then as I walked away realized, that in the middle of Lincoln Nebraska, I already had come back home. My translations and creative work were originated and produced here. That does not mean that I, as the ironically and seemingly fearless woman who crosses borders by herself, did not feel timorous. What I do also feel, though, is that translating my work and writing about my cultural disparity has allowed me to revisit my language and issues surrounding it. When I translate or when I write my own work, I am always uncomfortable; I am always crossing borders to reunite with language as though it is a lover. Nobody can keep my back; there is no conversation I cannot join.
Thinking consciously about both my translated and creative work has helped me to repair this sense of alienation. Ironically, in Lincoln Nebraska, where I certainly do not fit the mold of a native Nebraskan, I feel more at home within myself than ever, probably because I am self-aware, of how I do not fit, and because of this conscious disparity, have managed to fit in and find a home. What has ultimately happened, as a result of this work, is that I have become truer to myself in every capacity. I have also become truer to my boundaries and kinder in how I articulate them. In other words, my boundaries have come home, and they are comfortable, I no longer feel the need to put myself in potentially life-threatening situations or escape to crazy places, or to feel uneasy. There is no longer a need; I am home.
