Remembering Absence: The Sense of Life in Island Greece by Nicolas Argenti (review)

Nicolas Argenti conducted doctoral research in the Grassfields of Cameroon, and that led him to consider memories of violence, a subject on which he co-edited an insightful volume (Argenti and Schramm 2010). Then his surname caught up with him. He turned his attention to his family’s former homeland, Chios, the site of a horrific massacre in 1822. The argument of this book is that such an event does not settle in a receding past. Argenti makes the case for a particular “Aegean temporality,” a qualitative, tempestuous time (kairós, καιρός) of eternal returns as in the Orthodox refrain, nun kai aeí (νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ). The past remains accessible through intentional remembering, but it also bursts in via spontaneous reminiscences that overtake one in raptures of transcendence. Aegean temporality contrasts with standard Western time (khrónos, χρόνος), measured out quantitatively in units of seconds, days, and years held together by ideas of linearity and causation. For the denizens of Chios, everyday historical thought proceeds from the emotions and devotions of life in the present.

Argenti begins his journey (back) to Chios by reflecting on the photographs of family members dispersed around the globe that he saw as a child in his family home in Paris. After 1822, the island itself never again became a center of trade, and being in the diaspora would always contain an overtone of tragic loss. The pictures thus emitted melancholic signals beyond the comprehension of a child, but readily intelligible to adults. The 1822 massacre is the gravitational center of Chiot historicity, holding everything else in its orbit, yet so powerful that no one dares look straight at it. As Flaubert, quoted in the epigraph of this book, wrote: “Few will suspect how sad one had to be to undertake the resuscitation of Carthage.” Chiots live the aftermath of the massacre silently in a subliminal, collective tristesse. “We don’t remember the massacres,” people would say in response to Argenti’s inquries (18). “Ask us about the slaughter that is taking place now—then we will have something to talk about,” they continued, referring to the economic crisis besetting Greece at the time of Argenti’s research. In this solar system of tragedy, subsequent sufferings enter the gravitational pull of 1822, absorbing its energy, refracting its light, and relaying its message.

Perhaps the idea of trauma might capture the situation? Argenti rejects such a suggestion, believing that the term trauma threatens to pathologize the islanders. The trauma paradigm is rooted in a Western chrono-logic that assumes the past is over and can be left behind. Freud subscribed to this temporal ontology in his recommendation, for example, that proper mourning enables one to “move on” rather than dwell in pathological melancholy. Argenti contends that melancholia performs important existential work. In his words, periodic “topological transformations of collective memory” are not atavisms, but “a form of memory that is active, alive, and orientated to the future—the very opposite of anachronism” (93). The memory of trauma may indicate resilience rather than debilitating fixation (94). The Chiots are “mariners of time” (73), voyaging on the sea of their past, interpreting the present while anticipating the future.

In this book, Argenti presents a series of eclectic, well-observed case studies of people on Chios who bridge past and present in various ways. Fotis, the boat builder charged with sawing caiques in half to put them out of commission for fishermen seeking EU subsidies, expresses his horror at this new “crime against memory” (120). A joiner of planks to create the hulls that have insured the safety and livelihood of an island society, this articulator of tradition and memory is repelled by the disarticulation of the Chiot story. In another chapter, Argenti takes the reader to Anavatos, site of a legendary mass suicide when the villagers jumped over the side of the cliff rather than endure capture by the Ottomans in 1822. Today, an Asia Minor civic group...