FROM EXILE TO ECHO: JOHN CATAPODI AND THE EARLIEST GREEK FOOTPRINT IN AUSTRALIA

 

In the vast, unrelenting tapestry of Empire, its weft composed of dominion, its warp of human exile, there are names that emerge fleetingly, like fireflies in the dusk, bearing with them the ineffable burden of ancestry, displacement, and the forgotten. Among these, the figure of John Catapodi, a convict transported to the penal colony of New South Wales in the waning years of the 18th century, stands as a solemn and dignified threshold. He is the first documented individual of Greek descent to set foot upon Australian soil.

It was the indefatigable Kostas Tsoumbakos who first alerted me to the existence of John Catapodi. In doing so, he not only revealed a buried life but shifted our understanding of Greek beginnings in this land. For while the seven sailors who arrived in the 1820s, long cited as our founding fathers, were all born in Greece and certainly deserve remembrance, John Catapodi precedes them by several decades. He is the earliest known person of Greek origin to arrive in Australia, placing our presence here almost at the very commencement of white settlement itself.

John Catapodi was born in London in 1777, amidst the cacophonous ferment of a capital city pulsing with mercantile ambition, political anxiety, and nascent industrial upheaval. Though no extant baptismal record affirms the precise moment of his nativity, genealogical consensus converges upon his parentage. He was the son of Peter Catapodi, a Greek émigré also known, whether for concealment or convenience, by the anglicised alias Peter Brown, and Elizabeth Gundry, a woman of English extraction.

The surname Catapodi, a rare and phonetically Hellenic construction, is not merely a linguistic curiosity but a testament to origin. It encodes within it the peregrinations of a man, Peter Catapodi, who is reputed to have been born circa 1749 in Greece. Though documentary verification of his birthplace remains elusive, as is so often the case with Mediterranean itinerants in the pre-modern diaspora, genealogical repositories, oral traditions, and the orthographic texture of the name itself point convincingly to the Ionian Islands, Peloponnese, or possibly Asia Minor, as likely ancestral homelands. It was from such regions, often ravaged by Ottoman exactions and economic precarity, that men like Peter, merchants or mariners perhaps, found themselves entangled in the commercial vortex of 18th-century London.

Peter Catapodi's life in London was marked by a series of legal entanglements that paint a complex picture of a man navigating the challenges of immigrant life in a bustling metropolis. In 1791, records from the London Lives database indicate that both Peter and his son John were detained on suspicion of involvement in multiple robberies and forgeries. Peter, described as a 38-year-old coal merchant born in Greece, was held for bail but not immediately tried.

Further legal troubles followed. In December 1797, Peter was indicted at the Old Bailey alongside Sarah Best, also known as Sarah Brown or Sarah Catapodi, for the theft of a cotton counterpane from a lodging house. While Sarah was found guilty and sentenced to transportation, Peter was acquitted.

These incidents suggest that Peter's life in London was fraught with challenges, possibly stemming from the difficulties faced by immigrants in 18th-century England. His associations and the legal troubles he encountered provide a backdrop to the environment in which his son, John, came of age.

It was into this uneasy inheritance that young John Catapodi entered. By the tender age of 18, he found himself ensnared within the unforgiving claws of English criminal justice. In April 1795, he was arraigned at the Middlesex Gaol Delivery, one of the most formidable criminal courts of the realm. The charge levelled against him was grand larceny, the theft of goods above a certain value. It was an offence which, though devoid of physical violence, carried with it the gravest of penal consequences in an epoch when property was sacrosanct and mercy arbitrary.

The verdict was swift and unyielding. John Catapodi was sentenced to transportation for life, a fate meted out with almost mechanical regularity to thousands of the poor and marginalised. It was a sentence not of death but of disappearance. To be transported was to be erased from the social body, cast across the globe as both penance and warning. In the absence of capacity to reform, the Empire exiled.

While awaiting his passage to oblivion, Catapodi was confined to a prison hulk, likely moored in the fetid estuaries of the Thames. These hulks, decaying naval vessels reconstituted as floating gaols, were infamous for their pestilential overcrowding, disease, and despair. It was within these liminal vessels that the condemned awaited the convict transports that would redefine their lives and extinguish their pasts.

Eventually, Catapodi was embarked aboard the convict transport Ganges, which departed Portsmouth in late 1796 under the command of Captain Thomas Patrickson. This vessel, bearing 203 male convicts, formed part of the Fourth Fleet, one of several waves of penal shipment dispatched to the colony of New South Wales. The journey, lasting six gruelling months, was marked by deprivation mitigated only by comparison to earlier voyages, which had been far more ruinous in loss of life.

The Ganges arrived in Port Jackson on 2 June 1797, at a time when the colony remained in its infancy, precarious and beset by logistical hardship. It was into this brittle framework that John Catapodi was absorbed, a shadow among many, indentured to imperial necessity. His name was duly inscribed in the Convict Indents, recording his age, sentence, and place of conviction. And yet, in this act of administrative recordkeeping, a subtle miracle occurred. The first individual of Greek descent had arrived in Australia, an unheralded but momentous ethnocultural threshold.

That this genesis of Hellenism in Australia should be marked not by learned pedagogue, prosperous merchant, or diplomat, but by a convict, has occasioned discomfort within certain strands of the Greek-Australian historiographic tradition. In particular, Michael P. Tsounis, in his pivotal work “The Greeks in Australia” (1971), expresses unease at the notion of a Greek convict antecedent. With his scholarly emphasis on the upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, and piously Orthodox migrant of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tsounis perceived the convict association as incongruent with the mythos of diasporic respectability.

Yet to disavow John Catapodi is to misapprehend both the nature of penal transportation and the broader dialectic of diaspora. Exile, hardship, and the transgressive are not anomalous to diasporic experience but intrinsic to it. To be Hellenic in the world has never been a purely triumphal narrative. It is also a tale of survival, improvisation, and navigation through foreign legal, economic, and political systems.

Moreover, the instinct to erase convict ancestry speaks more to bourgeois insecurity than historical accuracy. The transported poor, Greek, Irish, English or otherwise, were not morally lesser beings, but victims of systemic inequalities, whose very marginality now offers an authentic counterpoint to triumphalist ethnic historiography.

In John Catapodi, we are not confronted with shame, but with truth, a migrant story unembellished, unadorned by gold thread or incense, and all the more meaningful for its rawness. Rather than a threat to ethnic dignity, he stands as a mirror, reminding us that before there were bishops and benefactors, there were labourers and outcasts.

The records of Catapodi’s existence in New South Wales are sparse and mute. There is no indication that he married, produced offspring, acquired land, or received pardon. No petitions bear his name. One may surmise that he, like so many others of his station, was consigned to assigned labour, perhaps in the construction of roads, the felling of timber, or agricultural toil under the sun of a land that bore little resemblance to his father's Mediterranean homeland.

John Catapodi died in 1801, at the age of 24. The cause of death is unrecorded, but in an era when disease, exhaustion, and malnourishment claimed convicts indiscriminately, we are left with little room for conjecture beyond the obvious. It is believed that he was buried at St. Philip’s Church of England, one of the earliest ecclesiastical institutions in Sydney on 8 July 1801.”

No stone marks his final resting place. The cemeteries of early Sydney, much like the lives they received, were transitory and often paved over in later decades. And yet, within this anonymous interment lies a singular legacy.

It is through Caroline Catapodi, born in London in 1797, that the tenuous thread of this lineage is preserved. Caroline was the daughter of Sarah Best, a woman with whom Peter Catapodi, John’s father, is believed to have formed a later union. Some accounts suggest that Colin Reculist, a forger executed in 1796, may have been her biological father. Nevertheless, the enduring use of the Catapodi surname, and Peter’s apparent role in her upbringing, strongly support the hypothesis that he accepted paternity.

Caroline later migrated to New South Wales, and in 1813 married John Kennedy, a free settler. It is through her marriage and progeny that the Catapodi name took root in Australia, not through John, who died childless, but through a half-sister whose presence in the colony extended the Hellenic thread through generations of colonial settlers.

John Catapodi’s life was brief, brutal, and largely undocumented, but it is no less significant for its obscurity. As the first person of Greek origin to arrive in Australia, his life suggests that histories are not just made by founders, generals, and merchants. They are also made the punished, the forgotten, and the exiled.

In John’s sparse records, one hears the echo of a diaspora before diaspora, a quiet invocation of a Hellenism dislocated, not by choice, but by fate and imperial decree. That his story should resurface more than two centuries later is itself an act of historical redemption, a reminder that in the margins of ledgers and the interstices of punishment, identity endures.

He stands at the origin point of a Greek-Australian presence that would one day build churches, newspapers, associations, and memorials. But it began, improbably, with a convict, a stolen name, and an unmarked grave.

And there is no shame in that, only the deep dignity of truth reclaimed.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 August 2025

PREMATURE CELEBRATION? A REFLECTION ON GREEK LANGUAGE EDUCATION

 In diasporic Greek communities across the globe, and particularly in Australia, the existence of Greek language schools is often heralded as a cultural triumph. We commemorate anniversaries, issue proclamations of pride, and publicly commend ourselves for maintaining institutions whose presence is treated as evidence of success. On Greek National Day, we line the streets with students in traditional costume, parading them before cameras and community dignitaries as though they were living ornaments. We feature them in promotional videos, in school calendars, and at commemorative events, standing in formation, mouthing slogans they scarcely understand. These children are summoned to perform Hellenism like gargoyles adorning a building whose inner structure is crumbling. Yet, behind this façade of celebration lies a reality that is deeply troubling. We are failing to produce speakers of the Greek language.

Greek, once the vital bridge between generations, increasingly functions as a ceremonial relic rather than a living, dynamic form of communication. The essential question is not how many schools we have, but whether those schools are achieving their core purpose.

Beyond the State-imposed curriculum for the VCE and the Certificate of Attainment in Greek, which is relevant solely for the purposes of the Greek state, and despite the existence of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, there is being applied consistent or comprehensive mechanism for evaluating the quality of instruction in our Greek language schools across the board There is no unified national curriculum framework, no independently accredited system for measuring student proficiency, and no formal assessment of whether language schools are meeting meaningful benchmarks in reading, writing, listening, or speaking. Nevertheless, we continue to cite the number of operational programs, campuses, or enrolments as though they were valid indicators of success.

In Victoria, the situation is particularly acute. Enrolments in Greek language programs have reached their lowest recorded levels, a trend confirmed by annual reports from educational bodies and census data. According to figures from the Modern Greek Teachers’ Association of Victoria, participation in formal Greek language education has declined steadily over the last two decades. Some programs have diminished to the point of being nominal. Yet the more revealing reality is that even where enrolments remain nominally healthy, the linguistic outcomes remain dismally low.

It is increasingly common to encounter students who, after many years of language schooling, are unable to hold a basic conversation in Greek. They may be able to recite prayers or sing patriotic songs, but they cannot compose a coherent sentence or read a paragraph without assistance. In terms of applied linguistics, these students are failing to reach functional literacy: a threshold level of competence required to use the language in everyday contexts. The institutions that produce such outcomes are not fulfilling their educational mandate.

The Greek language is more than a means of communication. It is widely regarded, both in scholarly discourse and community consciousness, as an essential component of Greek identity. The formation of the modern Greek state relied heavily on the symbolic power of a linguistic tradition that stretched from Homer through the Byzantines to the vernacular of the people. In the diaspora, language has served not merely as a tool of heritage but as a living symbol of continuity with the homeland.

Benedict Anderson’s theory of “imagined communities” offers a valuable lens for understanding this dynamic. National and ethnic identity is not merely inherited but constructed through ritual, narrative, and language. In diaspora, where assimilation pressures are constant, language becomes the most tangible link to historical imagination. Once lost, the imagined community loses coherence.

Sociolinguist Joshua Fishman supports this view. In his work on reversing language shift, he contends that heritage language loss is often the first step toward cultural assimilation. When intergenerational transmission ceases, a community forfeits its strongest means of preserving distinctiveness. In multicultural societies like Australia, where English dominates all spheres, language shift is not abstract. It is the very process by which communities are absorbed, leaving only symbolic traces behind.

If language is, as Percy Shelley suggested, the soul of a people, then what are we to make of a system of our own making, that leaves our children unable to speak with their grandparents, read the liturgy of their Church, or understand the stories of their ancestors, let alone use it as a viable medium of communication amongst their peers?

Where communal investment is concerned, it is not enough to rely on sentiment. We must turn to reasoned analysis. One of the most basic tools of policy evaluation is cost-benefit analysis. What returns are we, as an ethno-linguistic community, receiving for the time, money, and energy being expended on Greek language education?

Substantial resources are poured each year into the maintenance of Greek language schools in Australia. These include government subsidies, community grants, parental contributions, and the unpaid labour of volunteers. If the outcome of these efforts is not the development of Greek speakers, what precisely is being achieved?

It must be said that language education offers more than fluency alone. It can promote cultural belonging, foster intergenerational connection, and strengthen community cohesion. These are real and important goods. However, they do not excuse the failure to achieve basic linguistic competence. A language program that does not produce language ability may provide ritual or symbolic functions, but may also operate as a vehicle for reputational gain and self-congratulation, or pure profit, which cannot be said to fulfil the purpose of education.

Our community has become too reliant on vanity metrics. We count schools and classes and events. We celebrate longevity. We print programmes and have a savvy media presence. We inflate the impression of success not to inform but to impress. Yet none of this tells us whether students are learning. When we confuse structure for substance, we mislead ourselves and waste precious time.

Another often-overlooked factor is the lack of sustained parental engagement. Greek language schools are frequently treated as convenient childcare or symbolic gestures rather than serious educational commitments. Many parents show little interest in curriculum or teaching methods, nor do they foster a supportive home environment. Some even pass on their own negative experiences of Greek school, predisposing their children to disengagement and compounding the challenges of language acquisition with inherited educational trauma. In this way, children inherit not only the challenge of acquiring a language in hostile terrain but also the unprocessed hysteria of a prior generation’s supposed educational wounds.

It is time to consider whether we have, however unintentionally, institutionalised a system that is no longer fit for purpose. Have our Greek schools ceased to be genuine sites of cultural transmission and become instead platforms for organisational posturing and self-promotion? Have we allowed our educational structures to be co-opted by individuals and institutions whose primary concern is influence rather than instruction? Are we maintaining schools not to teach Greek, but to maintain our own standing within the communal ecosystem?

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital sheds light on this phenomenon. In communities such as ours, where cultural institutions hold high social value, proximity to them becomes a form of prestige. To be involved in language education is to be associated with the defence of heritage. This association can then be converted into other forms of power: social, political, or institutional. The language school becomes less an educational space and more a theatre of legitimacy.

The situation calls for something more rigorous than symbolic affirmation. We must replace rhetorical pride with measurable accountability. The relevant question is whether our institutions function in order to succeed in sustaining a living tradition.

A genuine renewal of Greek language education in the diaspora will require decisive, systemic transformation grounded in evidence-based practice and sustained by cultural will. A national curriculum should be developed collaboratively by educators, linguists, and community stakeholders, one that is informed by contemporary paedagogical research, aligned with international best practice, and structured to accommodate the diverse learning needs of students across varying levels of proficiency and age groups. This curriculum must embrace the full linguistic spectrum: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, within real-world communicative contexts. Clear developmental benchmarks for each stage of learning must be established, allowing students, teachers, and parents to understand the trajectory of linguistic acquisition.

Yet such a curriculum can only flourish within a community in which students are not sidelined by would-be power-brokers but are empowered to participate meaningfully. It is in active community interaction that language acquires relevance; and we must ask whether our patriarchal, antiquated institutional structures, often riddled with conflict, bullying, and ineptness, are environments in which students can exist, let alone serve as the living field upon which Greek can grow, evolve, and speak to their experience.

Furthermore, community engagement must transcend passive consumption and become an active, reciprocal dialogue. Institutions must communicate transparently with families and stakeholders, articulating curricular aims, outlining expected outcomes, and offering regular progress updates. A public database of school performance, anonymised for privacy, could serve as a means of benchmarking quality, identifying areas for improvement, and fostering accountability. That is, if our community is genuinely interested in outcomes rather than optics.

Finally, Greek language education should be embedded within a broader cultural framework. Language does not exist in isolation, and its survival is intimately linked to engagement with literature, history, music, theatre, and contemporary Hellenic thought. Schools should incorporate interdisciplinary programming to situate language learning within the lived experience of identity.

Such a program of renewal cannot be achieved through superficial change. It requires vision, coordination, and the moral courage to abandon ineffective habits in favour of meaningful reform. Most of all it requires the Greeks of Australia, not only their institutions, but the individuals themselves to accept this as a priority rather than just mouth platitudes. Only through such a holistic reimagining can we transform our language schools from vessels of nostalgic ritual into engines of authentic cultural continuity. If this is beyond our powers or abilities, we at least must accept this and move on to something more constructive.

Yet the Greek language is one of the most precious inheritances of our culture. It links us to a vast literary, theological, and historical tradition. It is the language of Homer, of the Gospels, of Seferis and Elytis. It is not a museum piece. It is a living expression of who we are, which is why we can no longer confuse visibility with vitality, form with function, or cling to the presence of schools while neglecting their outcomes. No longer can we romanticise participation while ignoring performance, nor elevate symbolism above effectiveness.

To continue along this path is not an oversight. It is a dereliction of responsibility. The time has come to reflect critically on what we have built, to acknowledge where we have failed, and to begin the difficult work of renewal.

Language does not survive through sentiment alone. It survives through structure, discipline, creativity, and commitment. Only by embracing these qualities can we reclaim the purpose of Greek language education and ensure that it becomes not just a legacy, but a living inheritance for generations to come.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 16 August 2025

THE WOMAN IN THE WELL: QUEER MYTH, INDIGENOUS MEMORY AND THE AMBIGUITY OF RESURRECTION

 Dmetri Kakmi’s The Woman in the Well is not merely a novel. It is a cosmogony forged in fragments, a Gothic theogony of the antipodes. It gathers mythic sediments from Arabic folklore, Biblical and Qur’anic intertexts, Aboriginal songlines, and diasporic memory, then reconfigures them into a narrative that is as much sacrament as it is subversion. At its haunted centre stands a well, an ancient void, an Ur-womb that sings with history, hunger, and the unfinished business of colonised land.

At the surface of this well stands Magnolia Din-Olden, a queer Afghan-Aboriginal woman who embodies not just intersectionality but contradiction. She is not chosen, not holy, not martyred. She is a witness who resists. Her journey unfolds through layered, nested narratives that evoke the form of Arabian Nights, interspersed with visions, ancestral voices, and mythic apparitions. Her story does not follow a Christian arc of fall and redemption but spirals, circling around a chthonic feminine divinity: Alila, a reimagined goddess who demands blood not for expiation, but for remembering.

The novel’s density can be challenging. Its intertextual references, to the Seven Sleepers, to Arabian Nights, to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to Aboriginal songlines, are not always explained. But this opacity is deliberate. It enacts a refusal to translate, to render sacred knowledge into settler-legible forms. The reader, like Magnolia, must enter the well without guarantee of return.

Kakmi’s most charged act of mythopoesis is his reworking of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a story shared across Christianity and the Middle East, in which a group of pious youths are preserved by God in a miraculous sleep to awaken in a future more just and faithful. In Kakmi’s version, the seven boys do not sleep; they die. They are sacrificially slaughtered to feed the appetite of Alila and are resurrected three days later. The timing is deliberate, recalling Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. But the resemblance is destabilising, not reassuring.

Their story echoes the Samaritan woman at the well who encounters Jesus in the Gospel of John, but in The Woman in the Well, the Christ-figure is unrecognisable. Jesus does not offer living water but becomes an instrument of Alila, an ancient sacrificial goddess. Alila is not simply a fictional deity. She is a re-imagining of the erased goddesses of pre-Abrahamic systems, reanimated through syncretism and horror. A distorted echo of Alilat or Allat of pre-Islamic Arabia, Alila functions as a suppressed feminine divine returned in monstrous form: demanding not submission, but sacrifice. In her, Kakmi reclaims the repressed matriarchal spiritual archive, invoking what feminist theologian Mary Daly might call the “original Womb of Being,” a cosmic memory of woman as sacred force.

In this reconfiguration, Jesus is not divine but derivative. He is an agent, a messenger, a conduit. His authority is undermined, not out of blasphemy, but to unseat the presumption that divinity is singular, masculine, and immutable. This is a theological subversion of extraordinary force, and it draws its strength not from iconoclasm but from intertextual critique. As the boys seek water, as the woman emerges from the well, as Alila demands her due, the reader is invited to consider whether the foundations of Western spiritual narrative: sacrifice, salvation, patriarchy, can ever be unmade without horror.

 

The boys’ resurrection does not redeem a world, nor does it inaugurate a kingdom of heaven. It is an echo of Christian myth hollowed out and filled with dread. The sacrifice is not an act of divine mercy but a tribute to a goddess whose power is unaligned with either good or evil. This gesture unsettles the reader. If the boys consent to die, does that render the sacrifice holy? If they rise again, is it rebirth or repetition? Kakmi leaves these questions unanswered, inviting us instead to dwell in the unease. The result is what Derrida might call a “hauntology,” a structure of absence that evokes a lost presence, the ghost of salvation without its certainty.

Magnolia’s own death and return are not analogous. Her brush with death does not follow any salvific logic. There is no divine witness, no ascending light, no absolution. She re-emerges not sanctified but altered, as one who has survived contact with that which cannot be named. This contrast is sharp: the boys’ resurrection, though miraculous in form, is ethically ambivalent; Magnolia’s resurrection is not a miracle, but an assertion of agency and defiance. In her, Kakmi gives us a subject who refuses the economy of sacrifice altogether.

This sacrificial ambiguity reveals Kakmi’s broader project: a deliberate destabilisation of cosmogonic certainty. His universe does not pivot around a moral axis. Instead, it is populated by echoes; of suppressed goddesses, misremembered prophets, haunted lands. The divine, in this world, is plural, unstable, sometimes monstrous. Alila, the goddess of the well, is both origin and hunger, maternal and terrifying. A distorted echo of the pre-Islamic Arabian goddess Alilat, she has been banished from official theologies, surviving only in shadow and dream. Kakmi reanimates her not as an object of worship but as an embodied memory of what has been repressed: feminine sovereignty, cyclical time, sacrificial continuity.

In reintroducing a female deity into a cosmology dominated by patriarchal systems, Kakmi does not simply reverse the gendered binary. He exposes its artificiality. Alila is not a corrective. Instead she is a challenge. Her demand for sacrifice is not a moral failure, but a theological provocation: if sacrifice is holy when offered to a father-god, why is it obscene when demanded by a mother-goddess? What is salvific about death, and when does resurrection cease to be redemptive?

These questions are sharpened through the lens of queer theory. Magnolia, as a lesbian of mixed Afghan-Aboriginal heritage, resists heteronormative and colonial expectations of what it means to suffer, to believe, and to return. Her queerness is not a subplot but the epistemological key to the novel. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, queerness is not only an identity but a temporal horizon, a way of imagining futures outside linear progress and reproductive logic. Magnolia's refusal to participate in Alila’s cycle of sacrifice is a queering of mythic structure itself.

Such an interpretation is further supported by Judith Butler’s concept of performativity: Magnolia disrupts the expected script. She neither becomes a martyr nor a saviour. She remains defiant, fractured, and alive. Her identity is not a means to revelation, but a challenge to the notion that revelation is a coherent or desirable endpoint.

Meanwhile, Kakmi’s own subject position, as a Greek from Turkey, an indigenous Anatolian expelled and resettled in settler-colonial Australia, infuses the novel with a profound understanding of diasporic indigeneity. He does not appropriate Aboriginal spirituality but listens to it, allowing its cosmology to braid itself with Islamic, Christian, and Hellenic fragments. The land itself becomes a text, ancient and animate. The well is both womb and tomb, both site of first water and site of burial.

The Central Australian landscape is thus not a backdrop. It is a participant. Its desert winds carry memories. Its silences vibrate with ancestral knowledge. Kakmi presents the land not through the lens of Romantic awe but with the reverence due to Country in Aboriginal ontologies. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson has argued, whiteness in Australia constructs the land as inert, as a resource or stage for settler mythology. Kakmi resists this: the land in The Woman in the Well is sacred, responsive, sovereign.

Alila, too, can be read through the framework of Indigenous feminist theory. She is not merely monstrous; she is mnemonic. Her violence is not senseless; it is historical. Her hunger mirrors the systemic appetites of colonial and patriarchal theologies that have, for centuries, demanded Indigenous sacrifice in the name of progress or salvation. She is a being shaped by suppression, a feminine counter-mythology that carries within her the debris of aborted cosmologies. Like the land, she remembers.

This memory does not lead to healing. Kakmi’s cosmology offers no comfort. His is a theology of ambivalence. Sacrifice is not inherently redemptive. Resurrection is not inherently good. The divine is not inherently just. These are not failures of faith, but revelations of its limitations. In refusing to impose closure, Kakmi aligns his narrative with postcolonial Gothic traditions, wherein the spectres of empire, erasure, and return are never fully exorcised.

Language itself performs this instability. Kakmi’s prose is lyrical, incantatory, sometimes overwhelming in its symbolic density. Events are not narrated so much as invoked. Time folds in on itself. The structure of the novel mimics the oral, cyclical traditions of both Indigenous and Islamic storytelling, where meaning accumulates through return, rather than through linear progression. The narrative form, then, is also theological. It enacts a refusal of Western epistemology and its tidy eschatologies.

One of the most important interventions The Woman in the Well makes is into the myth of Australian multiculturalism. As Kakmi has remarked, multiculturalism in Australia often functions as a façade: a display of tolerance that conceals the continued centrality of whiteness and Christian hegemony. In this novel, Islamic, Aboriginal, and queer spiritualities do not supplement the narrative; instead, they drive it. Magnolia is not a guest in a white story. She is the story. Her blood, her memories, and her resistance make the myth live again.

Yet even she cannot escape the pull of the well. Her near-death experience, her refusal to become another of Alila’s offerings, is not a triumph, but a kind of survival-in-fragment. There is no apotheosis. She lives, but she does not transcend. She does not find clarity, only continuance. In this, Kakmi offers a powerful alternative to the Western demand for narrative resolution. Magnolia becomes not a saint but a witness: one who has looked into the well and heard the voices, and chosen to remember them without pretending to redeem them.

Through her, through Alila, through the seven boys who die and rise and die again in the reader’s conscience, Kakmi creates a mythic grammar for a world without closure. His is a world where resurrection may not be salvific, where sacrifice may be both willing and wrong, where the divine may demand too much and offer too little.

If we listen closely, Kakmi seems to say, we might still hear the echo of the seven boys. We might hear the woman’s breath. We might even recognise ourselves in the figure of Jesus: not triumphant, but ashamed. And in the darkness below, beneath the surface of the water, something ancient stirs. It is not salvation we find there, but truth. And that, in the world of The Woman in the Well, is far more terrifying.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 9 August 2025

SAINT MARINA: A REDEMPTIVE CRITIQUE OF THE PATRIARCHY

Saint Marina of Antioch in Pisidia, like many women canonised in the Christian tradition, offers a compelling yet theologically intricate narrative of sanctity forged through suffering. Her hagiography, marked by trials within the domestic sphere and culminating in spiritual victory, echoes the narrative arc of countless female saints in Orthodox martyrology. Within that tradition, women are frequently portrayed as enduring unimaginable pain with quiet fortitude, their suffering elevated to a divine witness of Christ. Yet while such depictions intend to honour, they often risk subsuming female agency under the ideal of passive obedience. A reading of Saint Marina's life informed by feminist theory does not diminish her sanctity; rather, it deepens our understanding of how holiness is framed within cultural and theological matrices that can both affirm and constrain.

The Orthodox Church venerates a great cloud of female martyrs, Saints Agathi, Paraskevi, Catherine, and Thekla being but a few examples, whose witness is marked not only by physical suffering but by an unwavering commitment to spiritual truth, often in defiance of patriarchal authority. These women are lauded for their chastity, their silence, and their resistance to forced marriage or sexual domination, virtues valourised within a theological framework but also deeply gendered in their expression. In this context, Saint Marina's life assumes its place within a tradition that, while exalting women, frequently links their holiness to their capacity to suffer virtuously within structures that deny them power.

According to tradition, Saint Marina was disowned by her pagan priest father after revealing her Christian faith and was later subjected to violent persecution by Olybrius, the Roman governor who demanded her submission. Olybrius' violence was not merely personal but systemic, expressing the imperial logic that demands conformity from all, especially women whose bodies and wills must be governed. Far from being a mere antagonist, he becomes emblematic of the coercive machinery of state patriarchy, a juridical and ideological apparatus enforcing submission through fear, shame, and the erasure of spiritual identity. His role mirrors the broader structures of domination that Orthodox theology critiques in its understanding of fallen human authority. Feminist theorist Silvia Federici has demonstrated how the family and the state both function as sites for the disciplining of female bodies and the reproduction of social hierarchies. The seemingly institutional context of Marina's ordeal thus reflects, in Orthodox terms, the disordered cosmos, a world in which the imago Dei is obscured by the will to control and possess. Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies is also relevant here, clarifying how institutional power generates and channels emotion to maintain its grip. In Orthodox language, such impulses are understood as passions, disordered desires that enslave and deform the person. Against this, Marina's composure and refusal constitute a radical spiritual autonomy, an ascetic unmasking of false power, and a refusal to concede the truth of her being.

Here, Michel Foucault's insights into disciplinary power offer additional depth. Olybrius functions not only as an instrument of coercion but also as a regulator of the body, attempting to produce a subject who conforms to imperial expectations. Marina's resistance can thus be viewed as a disruption of what Foucault deems “biopower,” a refusal to allow her body and belief to be managed by systems of surveillance and control. Her torture is not merely punitive but disciplinary, seeking to inscribe docility upon her flesh. Yet her refusal renders her body an ungovernable space, one that transcends the logic of imperial control and asserts the primacy of the soul.

This refusal also invites reflection through the lens of Luce Irigaray’s theory of the symbolic feminine. Irigaray critiques the way Western metaphysics has historically constructed woman as the mute mirror of man, existing only as a reflection of male desire or theological projection. In such symbolic economies, the female saint is often the vessel of virtues defined externally—chastity, silence, endurance—while her own voice and symbolic richness are suppressed. Saint Marina disrupts this dynamic by reclaiming her suffering body as a site of divine agency. Her actions refuse containment within a phallic logic of meaning, and instead open space for a theological poetics where the feminine is not the passive recipient of grace but the active icon of its mystery. In this light, Marina becomes not merely a spiritual symbol, but an eruption of the Real into a patriarchal symbolic order that cannot fully account for her.

To engage Saint Marina's life through a feminist theological lens is not to desacralise it. It is instead to reframe sanctity as an active, even resistant, posture. Orthodox theology understands martyrdom more as a witness (μαρτυρία) to truth than a celebration of pain. However, the aesthetics of hagiography can often blur this distinction, especially in the case of women. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's notion of kyriarchy, a system of overlapping oppressions, speaks to how Christian discourse can idealise female suffering in ways that reinforce submission. Within Orthodox iconography and hymnography, female martyrs are often shown serene, silent, composed, symbols of triumph over the passions, but also, at times, symbols of femininity framed through male expectation. The challenge is to read through these representations, not against them, to recover the depth of the spiritual struggle they veil.

Saint Marina's silence, interpreted historically as humility and endurance, recalls similar traits ascribed to other female martyrs in Orthodox liturgical texts. Yet, as Audre Lorde reminds us, silence is often a strategic response to structures that disallow women full speech. Judith Butler's concept of normative performativity also illuminates how religious femininity is reproduced through the repetition of docility. Orthodox theology, however, offers resources for resisting such flattening. The Fathers of the Philokalia, for instance, speak not of docility but of nepsis, or watchfulness, as the essence of ascetic discipline. Saint Marina's silence may thus be reinterpreted not as mute submission, but as neptic resistance, a spiritual act of self-possession amid assault.

Orthodox martyrology is deeply invested in the idea that suffering, when united to Christ, becomes redemptive. Yet it also warns against mistaking suffering itself for sanctity. Saint Maximus the Confessor insists that virtue lies not in the endurance of pain but in the alignment of the soul with divine love. When viewed this way, Saint Marina's perseverance reveals not a glorification of abuse, but a refusal to allow suffering to define her. Her inner life, marked by prayer, self-restraint, and resolve, becomes, as Walter Mignolo posits, an act of epistemic disobedience, a reclaiming of spiritual agency within a system that sought her erasure. Her story, like that of so many female saints, shows how holiness can be lived under such erasure, yet never extinguished.

Orthodox theology has long honoured women saints as bearers of divine light. Yet it has also idealised a particular image of female sanctity, virginal, modest, obedient, and long suffering. This typology, while spiritually profound, can become reductive if not critically examined. A feminist hagiography would not abandon these categories, but would interrogate how they are used. What does it mean, for instance, to call Saint Marina pure, when her purity was forged through relentless suffering? What does it mean to call her humble, if humility becomes indistinguishable from voicelessness? These questions do not dismantle Orthodox theology; they refine it, pressing it to make visible the moral and spiritual dimensions of power.

Crucially, Saint Marina is not only a passive sufferer. The iconic moment in her hagiography, her beating of the devil, upends the image of female saint as mere victim. Within Orthodox tradition, this episode is understood as a triumph of spiritual authority, a proof of divine grace operative in the weak made strong. The depiction of Marina lashing the demon in her prison cell stands as a striking counter narrative to the litany of silent martyrs. She is not only preserved from corruption; she becomes its destroyer. Within a feminist framework, this image assumes revolutionary significance, the abused girl becoming exorcist, the voiceless becoming judge. In Orthodox eschatology, the saints are said to judge the world. In that sense, Marina's action prefigures a moment when truth confronts deception and justice is made manifest.

Rather than venerating her pain in abstraction, we might celebrate Saint Marina's spiritual defiance. Like Saint Barbara, who challenged paternal tyranny, or Saint Catherine, who refuted the philosophers, Marina emerges as a counter patriarchal witness. Her sanctity is not the absence of protest, but its sublimation into spiritual clarity. For Orthodox theology, which understands salvation as the restoration of personhood in the image and likeness of God, this reading is not alien. On the contrary, it fulfils the Gospel's proclamation, to set the captives free and bind the broken hearted. Saint Marina's sanctity lies in her refusal to become what her abusers desired, a cipher of shame. Instead, she becomes a sign of transfigured being, a living icon of divine resistance.

In the Orthodox liturgical calendar, Saint Marina is remembered among the great virgin martyrs, yet her story is not always considered with the theological depth it deserves. Too often, it becomes a sentimental moral tale, useful for inculcating piety, but shorn of its ethical weight. A critical theological engagement would read her life as a parable of unjust suffering overcome, not endured for its own sake. In doing so, Orthodoxy honours not only Marina's sanctity, but also her struggle, and in turn, affirms the ongoing struggle of those, especially women, whose pain remains sanctified but unspoken.

Saint Marina thus occupies a liminal space in the Christian imagination, holy, yet neglected; venerated, yet misread. Reclaiming her story through the dual lenses of Orthodox theology and feminist critique allows for a more faithful accounting of her life. It invites us to see in her not only a model of virtue, but a companion in resistance, as a saint who, though canonised in silence, now speaks with a voice forged in fire. Her memory calls not merely for endurance, but for transformation. And in that call, we find the truest promise of Orthodox theology, not to baptise injustice, but instead, to redeem the world.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 2 August 2025