We’re Levantines … hold your head up high and say, ‘Yes, I am. What of it? Byzantine and Ottoman…’
We’re Levantines … hold your head up high and say, ‘Yes, I am. What of it? Byzantine and Ottoman…’
These are the words of Lev- ent effendi, a dignified out-of-work teacher, a ‘Turk’ who turns out to have been born to a Greek family in Smyrna in 1922, rescued and raised by Muslim foster parents. ‘Why are you filling his head with this nonsense? This is dangerous talk for a child,’ Kakmi’s mother observes with uncharacteristic restraint. The boy’s primary school teacher, a ‘tall-as-a-poplar woman’ sent from the mainland, tells him, ‘Because you’re not a Turk, may the bread you eat be poisonous.’ Life was made impossible and, in 1970, the family left for Australia. To the nine-year-old child, it was a calamity.
Demetri Kakmi was born into a Greek community on the Turkish island of Bozcaada, formerly Tenedos, near the mouth of the Dardanelles. His superb account of childhood is sandwiched between anticipation and accomplishment of a return visit, 30 years later.
The Muslim call to prayer floats above the rooftop … I find it difficult to ignore so beautiful a song. ‘Mama’, I say, deliberately adopting the lilting whine she hates, ‘has the Greek God lost his voice?’
Then she ‘utters such a jaw-dropping blasphemy against the Muslim god that had someone heard her, she would have been stoned to death.’ The Greeks are not allowed to ring their church bells; their worship is furtive. Yet Dmetri has known the blacksmith, a Turk who greets the day in Greek, all his life, and loves him. Likewise Osil, the grocer, a Greek-speaking Turk from Mytilini. Dmetri’s best friend, Refik, is a Turk, but the two cannot be seen together outside school. It is the Turkish café-owner who tells a woman that she is not welcome after she rages that he should not play Greek music. That she is a Turkish-Albanian whose family were murdered by Greeks cannot be allowed to matter in such a volatile situation. She is ‘ill-mannered’.
The tensions provoke domestic violence in a society where it is already habitual. Dmetri’s father is an illiterate fisherman; his mother, who lived for a time in Istanbul and has some education, was forced into the marriage. The first intimation that he hits her comes just after she has said to her daughter, Electra, ‘stop crying or I’ll give you something to really cry about.’ She reminds Dmetri of a filmstar, despite a swollen lip and
a purple ridge that runs down the left side of her face. Her expression dares me to say something. My eyes turn away, shamed. She has misbehaved again.
The children perpetuate the violence, only half understanding the horrors that inform it.
Kakmi’s precise prose recaptures the immediacy of childhood experience with rare agility. Alongside lyricism that seems to mourn the loss of something integrated, of childhood itself, there are implacable savageries: between Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims, tradition and modernity, husbands and wives. All conflicts are reflected in the ‘madwoman’ who ‘claims to be’ the author’s mother, especially that between family and autonomy — autonomy in love. For returning as an adult, Kakmi discovers secrets that mock any tempting notion that his childhood was an idyll. While the reader cannot doubt that a culture, as well as childhood, has been lost, there remains some hope that something terrible has been overcome, and therefore something gained.
I read this memoir again after a gap of a couple of months and found it just as beautiful and shocking the second time around. It is wise, superbly crafted, ravishing. It would usually be tempting fate to say that a book is destined to be a classic (out of print within the year, forgotten), but the fact that Eland have chosen to publish it already marks it as something exceptional, and they will keep it in print.
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