THE OTHER TYPE OF GREEK

 

You won’t find a more ostensibly “Greek” person in our community than Kerry. She is my main source of information as to the latest Greek songs. She never misses a concert by any visiting singer from Greece. Her arms are festooned with kombosxoinia and matia, and she wears a gold chain that bears her name in Greek: Καλλιόπη. While her workmates enthuse over the latest series on Neftlix, she yawns when I describe my delight at a newly discovered series on Ertflix, because she has seen them all, including the one millionth episode of Χαιρέτα μας τον Πλάτανο.

Kerry is an avid reader of Neos Kosmos and prides herself for being one of two people in her increasingly broad social circle who can and will read Cavafy in the original. Although wont to parade around the quadrangle draped in a Greek flag in her university years, nowadays she manifests her Greekness via the spoken word, which is crisp, clean and startingly Athenian, for she has perfected her accent through years of watching Ant1 Satellite Television. Her young son also speaks in the same incisive tones as he has been reared on a diet of Greek cartoons from Youtube.

When I caught up with Kerry earlier in the year in the environs of Oakleigh, she was frowning over a copy of Neos Kosmos.

“You know, with all this stuffing around with the Greek electoral laws, the Greek government is creating two classes of Greeks in Melbourne,” she scowled.

“You mean people who attend the Consulate General to vote KKE, and everyone else?” I enquired.

“No. Look at how the vote is defined: «Ψήφος Αποδήμων», “Voting for the Greeks Abroad.” But in actual fact, there is no voting for the Greeks Abroad. There are just voting rights for people who are enrolled in the electoral roll.”

“Which makes sense,” I hastened to opine. “We haven’t had unregistered voters participating in the electoral process since the time of the Junta.”

“No, it doesn’t, Kerry continued. “What it does, is suggest that to Greece, the only Greeks who are «απόδημοι» are those who are entitled to vote. “

I found this strange and ventured to say so. “According to the prevailing laws, all those who had a Greek ancestor,” have the right to citizenship.”

“You are referring to the term «ομογενής», which literally means of same kind, or alike,” Kerry pointed out. So in order to be deemed a Greek, we have to go through a process of homogenization and pasteurisation as if we are a milk product.”

I found this amusing and laughed out loud.

“It actually isn’t funny at all,” Kerry spat. Until such time as we submit ourselves to the torturous processes of Greek public servants and spend years trying to furnish useless documents to “prove” that we are homogenous, we aren’t really Greeks Abroad. And even if we are there are a myriad of qualifications before we can be deemed worthy of voting. That is what I’m trying to tell you. There are two types of Greeks in Melbourne. Those who are registered as Greek citizens – and these are the Greeks Abroad, and the rest of us, who have not or cannot. And my question to you, is this: Unless we undergo that process, what are we? Potential Greeks? Lapsed Greeks or Aussies with funny surnames? Because we sure as hell are not Greeks Abroad.”

Like me, Kerry’s parents arrived in Australia when they were very young. Like my own parents, her parents saw no reason to lodge a record of their marriage or their children’s births with the Consulate General of Greece because (a) they didn’t know they had to and (b) they had no intention of ever returning to live in Greece, so they would never have seen the need to do so.

Kerry too, has no intention of returning permanently to Greece but desperately wants to be considered a Greek formally, via the obtaining of citizenship. “I want to be a Greek,” she states. “A real Greek. One with a ταυτότητα, an identity card. We’ve spent all our lives trying to maintain the Greek language, the Greek identity. Yet they make it so bloody hard and you have to jump through so many bloody hoops to get it.”

Kerry’s desire to be a card-carrying Greek was inflamed the day that her friend’s grandmother obtained a Greek passport for her grandson, Trent, who doesn’t speak a word of Greek and has no connection to the Greek community. However, an avid soccer player, he was desirous of obtaining a European passport for the purposes of travelling to Spain and attending Real Madrid’s Soccer Academy, in the hopes of becoming the next Sergio Ramos. “Here people who know nothing about Greece get citizenship and we struggle from one proxeneio appointment to the other.”

Kerry’s conundrum is compounded by the fact that her parents, both deceased have left her no official documents from Greece attesting to their identity. “When I went to the proxeneio, I thought that everything was computerised and they could just look up the information. But nothing is computerised. They gave me a whole list of documents I need to provide and I have absolutely no idea how I can obtain them, even though my Greek is good. I asked them, if the process is this complicated, how do people whose Greek is poor manage with the process and they just shrugged their shoulders. They just told me to get a relative in the xorio to help me. I tried to explain to them that my parents left their village over seventy years ago and I don’t really have a relationship with any relatives that remained behind and no contact with the village but they didn’t provide any other alternatives. So now I have all these papers I need to provide, which in any other civilised country would be digitised, and which by the way are irrelevant and useless (Kerry is a public servant so if she says something is useless, it is invariably so) and what’s more no way of obtaining them.”

When I met up with Kerry on Saturday last at the same time and place and enquired as to how imminent the prospect of her Hellenisation was, she buried her head in her hands. “I’ve put a stop to it,” she snapped. “I get the feeling that they don’t really want us to be Greeks and they are merely making us jump through as many hoops as possible so we can eventually give up. It makes sense if you consider the Greek State to be a larger extension of the Greek community. Just as Greek brotherhoods try to restrict the membership as much as possible so that no one challenges their hegemony, so too does the Greek State pay lip service to “Global Hellenism” or whatever buzzword they use at the time while at the same time doing their utmost to keep us out.”

I found this rather far-fetched and said so. Granted Greece is a country whose bureaucracy is specifically designed to stop anything from ever happening but we should take pride in the fact that we do this better than anyone else in the world.  “If anything,” I ventured to say “you should be proud of the fact that you are being treated as equally badly by the Greek Public Service as any other Greek citizen. That is why they are all perennially angst-ridden and forgive me if I call your patriotic fervour into question if you deign to give up, faced with only with bureaucratic obstacles. What of your ancestors guarding Thermopylae or fighting at the Inn of Gravia? Where is your fighting spirit?”

“Neither Leonidas nor Odysseas Androutsos had to deal with Greek Consular Staff,” she lamented. “But that was not the clincher. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when they told me that even if I get my citizenship, the name on my identity card will not be Καλλιόπη Μανδαλοπούλου but ΚέρρυΜάνδαλ, because that is how my birth certificate appears in English. Apparently, they will not recognise the Greek version of my name as it appears in my baptism certificate, and the only way I can have my Greek name recognised by the Greek authorities is if I officially change my name and then provide half a forest of documents attesting to my new identity. Why would I want to go through the entire rigmarole of “becoming a Greek,” if my Greek identity is to emphasis a foreignness whose expunging is the purpose of my trying to become a Greek in the first place?”

“But your Australian name is just as much as part of your identity as your Greek name,” I observed. And why try to hide your Australian provenance? It is your Australianness that gives you value as a Greek and sets you apart from everyone else. Look at all those Greeks abroad historically whose names were a bit wonky: Averoff, Tsakaloff, Maria Menounos instead of Menounou.”

“What I want to know is why they go out of their way to emphasise difference instead of what brings us together. At the end of the day, our efforts to remain Greeks in Australia mean nothing to them.”

“Maybe because even though that foreignness is part and parcel of the apodemic condition, there is still room for it in the Greek national narrative,” I considered.

“Theorising is great but if you ever get your citizenship, you won’t be known as Κωνσταντίνος Καλυμνιός. To all Greeks henceforth you will be known as Ντιν Καλιμνίου. Thoughts?”

“Bugger that,” I replied and ordered another frappe.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 July 2023