Louis de Bernieres on loving Greece
A slow week here. Too hot to do anything except sit in an air-conditioned room and browse news archives. Which is where I found an article written by Louis de Bernieres and published in The Observer in March last year. De Bernieres talks about how Greece ‘wounds’ him. He’s referring to the Seferis poem - “Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me.”
My own relationship with Greece is one that has changed my life in ways that amount to much more than the fact that I got one novel out of it. It is a relationship that has involved both love and difficulty, exasperation and pleasure. Like most foreigners, I first went there as a tourist. I was 28, and it was with a woman who, unbeknown to me, was thinking of a way to leave me. We spent two weeks in a horrible part of Corfu, infested with horseflies, where the discos thumped all night and the dogs barked along with them.
…
On the last night my inamorata gave me the bad news. I learned that I was dumped, and, sitting on the edge of the bed as the dogs howled, we talked about what we really wanted from life. It was at that devastating moment of despair that the muse tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me of what I had known since I was 12. I said, ‘What I really want is to be a writer.’ My first published novel appeared seven years later.
He talks about “xenitia”, a word Greeks use to refer to the experience of the Diaspora, the migrants, the voluntary exile. This is what Seferis was referring to. The pain of Greece where living there or being away. De Bernieres relationship with Greece is one of love and hate. He dislikes the things I dislike - the pronounced nationalism, the xenophibia, the oppressive traditions of the modern Greeks dictated by Orthodoxy, the disappearance of the ancient philosophers.
And yet, when he isn’t in Greece - the “physical longing in the stomach.” The thought - “Why am I here when I could be there?” “This is chiefly how Greece wounds me; I live in a state of xenitia without even being Greek.”
Posted by By: kathryn | 
2006/06/27 | Books - Writing - Writers | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]
