In 2006, Ourania Staveri (1928–2009) published The Tormenting Triangle of the Exiled Women: Chios, Trikeri, Makronisi, recounting her imprisonment and subsequent internal exile on islands during and after the Greek Civil War. In 1968, illegal Junta escapee theatrical actress and director Kitty Arseni (1935–2013) wrote Bouboulinas 18, a testimony of her detainment in the Subdirectorate of the General Police in central Athens in 1967 during the period of the Junta, which was first published in Greek in 1975 and also translated into Italian and Danish. Staveri’s and Arseni’s life narrations of political persecution testify to some of Greek history’s ‘unjustifiable’ events, which partake of the excess of ‘extreme evil done to others, rupturing the human bond’ (Ricoeur 2006, 464). Neni Panourgia notes that
in Greece, though the civil war ended in 1949, its effects are only now being discussed. The case of Greece gives us the texture of the longue durée of this particular historical experience, sitting, as it does, on the cusp of cultural and political memory.
(2009, 32)
The lengthy efforts to silence, manipulate or reconcile the traumatic effects of the civil conflict on Greek post-war society and memory formulate a national history founded on a struggle between oblivion and remembrance: a recent study by the Department of Psychology at Panteio University of Athens points at the Civil War and the Junta as the two main ‘events of social oblivion’ related to the ‘organisational beginnings of the historical past of Greece’ (Madoglou 2010, 215–32). Both women authors published their memories in different moments of the Metapolitefsi, which has been marked by reconciliation with a lengthy and severe civil conflict that had permeated all spheres of civic life. The period began with the definitive re-establishment of parliamentary democracy, following the fall of the Greek Junta in 1974, and its duration and effects in Greek politics and society are still debated (see volume’s introduction).
Addressing the two written recollections, the chapter resonates with the work of Marc Augé, whose ‘duty to forget’, reserved for victims or witnesses of traumatic historical events, signifies a duty ‘to survive the memory, to escape, as far as they are concerned, from the everlasting presence of an incommunicable experience’ (2004, 87). As a healing strategy, oblivion presents a break with the past, which makes possible the positive engagement with the continuation of life. As such, remembrance does not signify a repetition but instead a critical return to a trauma from the present moment towards vigilance as
the actualization of remembrance, the effort to imagine in the present what might resemble the past, or better (but only the survivors could do it and their numbers are decreasing every day), to remember the past as a present, to return to it to find the hideous shape of the unspeakable again in the banalities of ordinary mediocrity.
(ibid., 88)
The retrospective character of recollection as the arduous selection of past impressions whose significance in the present may reflect but also affect the subject’s self-knowledge (Ricoeur 2006, 29–30) pertains to the temporality inherent in processes of becoming subject. According to the Deleuzean definition, ‘subjectivity’ rests on the continuous transformation of the subject in a ‘struggle’ to resist authority and the symbolic delimitations of an identity within the collective realm (Voglis 2004, 25). Recollections of political incarceration return to the body’s ‘invariably public dimension … a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine’ that also ‘implies mortality, vulnerability, agency’ (Butler 2004, 26) to recount experiences of extreme physical/psychological violence that transformed and determined the narrators’ political subjectivity. As minority remembrances written from the multiple margins of the nation of being women, politicised and left-wingers (Stefatos 2012, 68), the two books signify processes of becoming subject which manifest the immanent ambivalence between ‘the language of those who write of [the nation] and the lives of those who live it’ at both linguistic and rhetorical levels (Bhabha 2002, 2–3). Homi Bhabha suggests that writing the nation through ‘the obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture’ renders this locality ‘more around temporality than about historicity’, drawing attention to the performativity of ordinary language when spoken by particular historical subjects and how this subverts normalising models of identity (ibid., 292, emphasis in original). Judith Butler, reading Simone de Beauvoir, notes that ‘subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female’ (1990, 11).
Under this light, the chapter explores the embodied female subject, politicised in its persecution, as gender referent emerging in Arseni’s and Staveri’s writings to observe how this renders the texts diverse reflective platforms of left-wing memory produced during the Metapolitefsi. How do the women’s recollections of exile and detention manifest and renegotiate established political identifications permeated by gender models in the respective periods they write about? How do their manners of expressing bodily and emotional suffering signify diverse strategies towards forgetting and remembering violent incarceration – reflective of individual history – that trace their political identity at the time of publication? The chapter proposes the memory of the incarcerated gendered body as a further means of categorisation for the political memory of the Greek Left.
The first section of the chapter contextualises political persecution from the Greek Civil War to the Junta, as a means of historically enacting the ideological division between the Left as abject political identity and complementary notions of canonical national belonging. The analysis of Staveri’s and Arseni’s texts in the second section is divided in three parts. The first part engages with incidents which threaten the loss of the sense of self or others’ to look at how these articulate conflicting identities, spatial limits and temporal rhythms of incarceration. The second part concentrates on performances of subverting and intimating the spaces of exile and detention to make possible their inhabitation. The third part observes manners of narrative emotional evocation, especially in terms of how this reflects gender according to various codes of ‘honour and shame’ between the two texts, and produces distinctive temporal textures of recollection.
A priming of history
Rooted in the interwar years, climaxing during the Civil War, normalised in the ‘stone years’1 and peaking during the Junta, the detention and imprisonment of left-wingers responded to historical shifts in the definition and role of the Left in Greek politics and the broader imaginary of the nation. The 1871 institution of ‘displacement’ (ektopisis), against animal thievery, drug-dealing or use, but also against political dissent, ‘was a means by which successive Greek governments dealt with people who were perceived as “public dangers” ’ (Kenna 2001, 6). The 1929 Idionimon Law defined the dissemination of Communism as an exceptional crime against national integrity and connected punishment to physical dislocation on remote sites far away from dissidents’ supportive familial and social networks. Margaret Kenna’s work on pre-war collectives and communes formed to organise internal exile, describes the few women political exiles of the period charged ‘for their involvement in trade union activities and left-wing politics’ (ibid., 2), whose exit from the domestic into the public sphere of political involvement subverted traditional gender structures. Women participated on equal terms in divided labour and leisure activities, while obeying strict rules on sexual relations between detainees or locals, officially set by the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Appearing solely in written narrations by their male comrades, women prisoners’ behaviour is sometimes portrayed as ‘hysterical’ or otherwise typical of women ‘to accommodate their own and their readers’ assumptions about the general characteristics of women’ (ibid., 29). Exile marked motherly and marital roles with physical distance and the dilemma between denouncing political faith or their family or even life itself, such that ‘there seems to be no possibility of deriving an idea of women exiles as ordinary members of the commune. To be in the commune at all they must have been anything but ordinary’ (Kenna 2001, 29).
The Civil War,2 following Greek liberation from Axis occupation, manifested pre-war political cleavages between conservatives, Socialists and Communists, and materialised from complex and changing power alignments between the infant government and ideologically diverse militant groups that had formed during the resistance. Policing and control over both rural and urban regions by these forces, after or despite governmental appointment, targeted entire communities or individual collaborators with the Nazi conquerors, in certain instances masking the resolution of ethnic divisions – e.g. Albanian and Macedonian minorities – with violent means (Mazower 2000). Ideological rifts placed at stake the sociopolitical models and polity that would dominate the country’s reconstruction (Mazower 2000, 24, Voglis 2004, 80) in a context of an increasingly militarised administration of justice that ‘set the framework for an ever more bloody judicial repression that formed part of Greek life for the next twenty-five years’ (Mazower 2000, 38). The changing economical dependence of urban and rural regions on foreign support affected the ideological affiliation of individuals who had fought together during the resistance, causing their separation into opposing camps or their non-militant involvement in the Civil War (Margaritis 2001, 205–12). Warfare between the Communist Greek Democratic Army (DSE) and the governmental National Army during the second phase of the civil conflict from 1946 to 1949 penetrated all aspects of social life especially in rural areas, and intensified political persecution in the cities. Enlistment or partisanship with the DSE deeply affected not only male and female fighters but also their families, children and communities with severe losses, separation and exile as political refugees3 (Van Boeschoten 2000).
International affairs urged Greece to remain outside the USSR’s sphere of influence; the devastated country was immediately granted material support by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), while the British Police and Prisons Mission collaborated with the Athens government towards restoring law and order (Voglis 2004, 83–4). Immediate post-war intervention by the British was soon followed by the more decisive American one: under the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan funding received by the Greek government helped consolidate the dogma of ‘nation-mindedness’ (ethnikofrosini) via financing both military and wider social strategies and reconstruction towards the defeat of the DSE (Margaritis 2001, 438–47; see also Christofis, this volume). Carrying on from pre-war legal definitions of ‘dangerous citizens’, the period’s legislation vaguely distinguished between penal and political crimes, so that political prisoners were rendered an ‘undefined subject’ (Voglis 2004, 83). Incarceration of Communists or suspected leftists in internal exile intensified during the Civil War and expanded with new prison camps on desert islands or near peripheral towns. The notorious Organization of Corrective Institutions of Makronisos (OAM) was consolidated via parliamentary resolution in 1949, aiming at the ‘detoxification’ of Communist fighters. The first unarmed soldier prisoners arrived in the camp in 1947, later followed by civilians, women and children, who were subjected to extreme physical and psychological torture as a means to ‘recover’ from Communism by signing its written denouncement in ‘declarations of repentance’.4 Aestheticised in parliamentary rhetoric via medical metaphors – infected by ‘red poison’ or ‘psychic microbe’ (Bournazos 2000, 123) – the disfigurement of prisoners in Makronisos, Youra and elsewhere, at the limit of human/non-human existence (Panourgia 2009; Machairas 1999, 64–5), enacted and naturalised Communists as abject citizens. Internal exile structured the non-law-abiding political identity around leftist dissidents’ dispossession of ethinikofrosini, rendering it key for inclusion as Greek patriots in the Motherland; the inevitability of this repossession justified indefinite detention measures.
Governmental negation to declare the end of the Civil War until 1962, granted a continuous ‘state of emergency’ which allowed the suspension of normal juridical rules (Agamben 1998, 18–23; 2005, 1) and the instrumental use of a ‘para-constitutional’ legal corpus of anti-Communist measures. The 1952 constitution defined the subject of the citizen by permeating ‘law-obedience’ (nomimofrosini) with such transcendental objects of tradition as ‘national conscience’, ‘the ideological directions of Hellenic-Christian civilization’ etc. (Constitution of 1952, Article 100, Paragraph 1, cited in Alivizatos 1986, author’s translation), counterbalanced with any ‘ideologies aiming at the overthrow of the existing polity or social regime by violent means’ (ibid., Paragraph 2). Reflecting the Left’s influence in domestic politics as well as the Cold War international ideological divide (Liakos 2001), political incarceration during these ‘stone years’ continued with fluctuations in numbers and severity (Gritzonas 2001, 122; Gavriilidou 2004, 73–6); meanwhile, detainees who had been granted indefinite leave from exile camps remained under close surveillance. As Eleni Paschaloudi notes, the ‘Greek political and social reality in the period 1950–1967 was determined by the clashes of the 1940s decade and its result’ (2008, 273). Generally, public life, professional and academic participation and even routine exchanges with state administration remained bound to a legal corpus against political volition regardless of its actualisation (Alivizatos 1986, 566–78); ‘loyalty certificates’ (pistopoiitika koinonikon fronimaton) signed by local authorities confirmed the applicant’s or their relatives’ non-involvement with Communism and the absence of a relevant police file.
Severe torture and imprisonment practices w...
