The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom

Chapter 3. The Greek National Identity as the Father’s Testament

79 chaPTer 3 The greek national identity as the father’s Testament Even the most exclusive ethnoreligious, gender, or racial policies tend to demonstrate relative tolerance of inassimilable bodies at a time when the community experiences a period of peace or prosperity. However, the process of the establishment of authority in a community in crisis, or the (re)definition of the very concept of community, is the pivotal point that creates conditions in which violent exclusion of element(s) failing a full absorption by the uniform “common spirit” becomes the norm. As I discuss in the introduction, I define a crisis as any point in the existence of a community at which it increases calls for a greater collective unity, but also for a definition and defense of its cultural specificities and uniqueness. Due to the perception of an imminent threat (real or projected) to the preservation of values or the community’s very existence, a crisis is likewise the time of the reintroduction of “traditional” social norms (forgotten by new generations, thence the threat to community’s very sustenance), as well as of active social vigilantism , monitoring the imposition of discipline on the rest of the population. In psychoanalysis a crisis is conceptualized as the “traumatic kernel,” which is that part of any individual or collective experience that stands 80 The greek national identity as the father’s Testament outside of language and cognitive knowledge. It is also the segment of experience that cannot be theorized, historicized, or rationally comprehended and that survives in the domain of the metacognitive or emotional. Since it never undergoes the process of recognition, it carries the potential to return and cause more disturbance and trauma. The traumatic kernel is also that part of collective national history that is never really historicized and that continues to exist behind what frequently looks like a conspiracy of silence. Finally, the silence that surrounds historiographic accounts of such events may be caused no less by the trauma suffered by the individual subject/ community than by the trauma and horror inflicted on another by that same subject of history. In this chapter I discuss two novels that treat historical events as such traumatic kernels and constant reminders of the instability inherent in the Greek national identity. With recurrent episodes of conquests, ethnic cleansing , rape, and mass murder, the very core of the Greek historical narrative becomes an eternal repetition and accumulation of always already lived tragedies . The novels are situated in two specific historical periods that redefined Greek ethnoreligious communal mythology but also the country’s collective national, political, and social identity. These junctures are the period of liberation from Ottoman colonization in the nineteenth century and the expulsion of the Orthodox population from Turkey in 1922, or the “Asia Minor Catastrophe,” as Greek historiography commonly refers to it. Rhea Galanaki ’s Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina nel cuore (1989) and Eugenia Fakinou’s The Seventh Garment (1983) are concerned with protagonists whose acceptance both by the community and by their own families is precluded on multiple counts at points of historical trauma and social transformation. Communal mythology in both texts originates in the law of the father’s name, which is not a given but rather a privilege that must be deserved. The father’s name, his law, and the right to inhabit a specific political space are necessary prerequisites for the individual’s identification with the entire community, but at the same time represent the organizational structure of the family as a microcosmic community. The family is foregrounded as the “truth of society—its organic, authentic form.”1 Moreover, in its role as the foundation and the model for a larger communal structure, the family treats its members to similar or identical mechanisms of subjection to communal laws and identification, as does the broader community. For this reason the uneasy subject whose integration with family-community defined in such restrictive terms is precluded chooses suicide as both the ultimate act of selferadication and also as a strategy that effectively undermines the exclusivity of the communal identity. The greek national identity as the father’s Testament 81 Both novels employ myth as their narrative strategies, with variable levels of success. Galanaki’s Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina nel cuore comprises three parts—“Myth,” “History,” and “Epilogue.” “Myth” renders the events leading to the captivity of the protagonist, Emmanuel, as a boy and his...