Immi Grating arts Thanos Kalamidas To Daphne When I was twelve years old my father came into my room one evening and left four books on my desk. “Socrates’ Apology” translated into New Greek, the illustrated version of Marx’s “Communist Manifest”, a study of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and the Bible. And without explaining to me what these books were for, he told me that this was the beginning of a conversation that was going to last me a life time and these four books would be a good start. I suppose this is a good way to describe how I grew up. I grew up with a father who let me think, research and discover. He let me find my way without patro - nising or leading. He was just there like a companion in a great adventure. Then there is another story my father used to tell when people asked him about me. I must have been around eight when at school they showed us a documen- tary about human worms or something like that. The documentary explained that the worms were catastrophic for humans and mentioned that the way to catch worms was either through animals or ...by drinking water from a vase with flowers. This last bit obviously landed in my mind and on my return home I spent the next three hours watching a big vase with flowers that we had on a table next to the entrance of the house, where we left our keys and the post. After three hours, having considered it seriously, I decided it was time to act. So I drank the water from the vase. All of it! Then I spent a bit more time wait - ing and in the end I called my father, asking him to come home urgently and take me to the hospital because I had ...worms growing inside me and I was expecting to die soon. And that was me. Nothing much has changed. I need to try, I need to taste and the forbidden fruit is what always attracted me the most. And I know that this tasting and trying has led me into a lot of troubles and battles I hardly managed to win, but there is this tiny little thing in the end. At least I tried it and now I know. But the biggest adventure has always been the one my father started for me that day with those four books. It was this conversation that still goes on and oddly I’m waiting for the moment I will do exactly the same with my kid, intro - ducing her to the adventure of thinking and art. Like a prologue I always felt like an immigrant. I grew up hearing immigrant stories. From my mother’s side my grandmother was a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt and my grandfather was from the Greek minority in Constanti - nople, the only name for Istanbul for the Greeks who came from there in the early 20th century. From my father’s side things were no different. His father was an Athenian with roots in central Greece, while his mother had Prussian roots. Four countries, three continents. Stories of lost lands were part of my life and with the stories came the pain and mixture of cultures. The spice markets of Istanbul and the cafes of Alexandria all to- gether with the Athenian sky and the Prussian metal mixed in the imagi- nation of a little boy growing up in a middle class house in Athens. A few years ago I travelled to Athens after a long time, and I was dispirited to find the familiar corners, the small streets and smells from my past. There was nothing left. Just my memories and some faces that couldn’t recognize me. Back in the 1960s Athens was beautiful, it had far more character than Born immigrant the concrete city it has turned into nowadays, and there was no traffic and pollution. There were still neighbourhoods and alleys. The kids used to play in the alleys, freely learning social life without text messaging and videogames. There was football and there was hide and seek and in the evening we would all gather in a circle with the older ones telling us scary stories about monsters that lived in the dark corners and ghosts. Magic was not part of a film saga but it was something that could happen and the old man who never spoke to anybody in our imagination was a sor - cerer with invisible powers. And there was the American lady with the huge American car! In the corner of our street there was one house with a garden and an indoors parking place. That was something far out of any normality back then. She spoke really bad Greek and she used to wear multicoloured trousers and big silver sun-glasses. Americana. That’s how we all used to know her. There were a lot of stories about her house, but nobody in the neighbourhood had seen it inside which was another reason for stories. But the best part of all was her car. An old Cadillac, one of those mon- strous cars made in the fifties. It was inside the garage and it came out every Saturday when the Americana was going to where nobody knew. The streets were narrow and the big car was bigger than some parts of the street. It used to take her at least half an hour until the car was out of the parking space, on the street and ready to go. All of us, from six to ten- year-olds were running around trying to help her screaming, “left, left” or “stop, stop!” confusing her more and making her more nervous with the thought that we were all around and with a wrong move she could hit any of us. It never happened and despite her fears and agony we all had fun. Actually it was the highlight of our weekend and we were all waiting a whole week for the Americana to open her parking doors. One Sunday morning the Americana was watering her flowers in the front of her house, and as I was passing on my way to the playground for Sundays’ football, she called me. It actually shocked me and scared me that she even knew my name. I went near, trying to keep away some of the dark stories I had heard about her and her house. Of course in mo- ments like that your mind has a way of confusing stories by adding new elements to old ones. She told me to wait for a moment and then she stormed inside her house, leaving me numb and looking around for an escape. She came back outside holding a paper or something. She said something that I didn’t understand, apart from the words “your grand- mother” and “painting” and she gave me my first comic book! A real comic book. An issue of the original Superman I still have... somewhere in this chaos of printed memories I carry. I was six years old and I had just learned that beyond the five known dimensions there were a few more, some coming from reading and some coming from drawing. And despite the fact that I was growing up in a big capital with millions of people, my first metropolis was introduced to me by Superman and Clark Cane through the Americana. According to the stories my father used to tell, I started reading and writing early in my life. I suppose there is partly a fatherly exaggeration in that but the truth is that my first memories are accompanied with books and pencils. The strange thing was I loved black pencils and all my draw- ings used to be black and white. Most of the time I was drawing the pic - tures the books were giving me, and my illustrations varied from ancient Greek heroes to temples, from wild animals to saints. Yes saints. Growing up in the early sixties in Greece meant that the church was everywhere, from the morning pray at school to the small oil-lamps next to the icons in every single house. There was something in those ascetic faces that always attracted me. Hagiography is a very difficult form of art that follows a lot of tradi - tions even in mixing the colours. And despite the fear they might inspire, there is something full of sorrow inside them, including the choice of colours that always took me beyond techniques since I was a little kid. So my first paintings, at least the first ones I can remember, were of saints from the Greek Orthodox Church. I suppose this was also my first steps into spirituality. Spirituality is another issue that seemed to worry me from a young age. It was pretty confusing growing up with the Greek gods on one side – a happy bunch, jolly and full of human passions – and a very disciplined, authoritarian and occasionally revengeful God on the other side. In all that, was added the stories from my grandmother. Stories about war and peace. Alexandria used to be the pride of the intellectual Greeks in the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the best Greek poets and writers had started out in Alexandria. Alexandria had an aristocracy that later moved to Greece, bringing with them, apart from their riches, a very active intellectual social life. Adapting to the contemporary cosmopolitan Egyptian lifestyle in the beginning of the century, most of them spoke four or five languages fluently. Most of them had a good education, they were trained professionals and when they came to Greece most of them carried those advantages managed to incarnate even in the aristocratic parts of the Greek life, especially the ones who had managed to bring their riches. My grandmother, a great influence in my life and work, had everything of the above except the riches. She got married very young, just thirteen years old, trying to survive first immigration and the feeling of being an immigrant in the land that represented her roots and identified her. And she married another immigrant, another story full of sorrows, escapes, runs and lost identities. She was a woman who was born in the beginning of the century and went through all the events that marked the 20th century and Greece. Two world wars, a civil war and a few local. Hunger, devastation, and loss – it all happened to her. She lost her husband in her early twenties, and was left with five children trying to survive not only the loss and the needs, but also a reputation. You see my grandfather, the one from Istanbul was a communist and that was the worst possible sin anybody could commit after the civil war in Greece. Greece was trying to recover from the Nazi occupation that had cost the country nearly one fifth of the population. This was when the civil war started, dividing the country in two. The war lasted nearly five years, seeing brother killing brother, literally. And when the war was over with the communists, still peace didn’t come. Exiles, prisons and executions started. You see it was easier to put a stop to the weapons than the pas- sions. And the passions ran high. Even being related to a communist was a crime, and my grandmother had to go through this with a dead commu- nist husband. On the same time she had to support five children with my mother being the oldest. The woman lived through hell. And she survived all this and you can imagine the stories that survived with her. Stories from three countries and three continents. Stories with tears and blood. Her story accompanied me for most of my life and when my father died – I was just sixteen when this happened – I became her poor or- phan, who she embraced and cared for no matter where I was until the day she died. For most of my life, while living abroad I had to send her a report, illustrated with small drawings of all the things I had seen and all the places I had been. Sometimes these letters were like comics stories, with funny everyday anecdotes, trying to ease the pain she felt about me being away. But my father was the greatest influence of my childhood. I wouldn’t describe myself as a lonely kid, but I was one of those kids that had a double life. One life with other kids and family, where I was acting just like every other kid my age – and then there were the books and my white paper. There were never enough books for me and I was reading anything I could reach. From ancient mythology to Julius Verne. But this was not enough. When I was ten I discovered my aunt’s book collection. When my father saw me reading the “Catcher in the Rye”, he just smiled and didn’t say anything. When my aunt noticed the book missing from her shelf and realised I was reading it, she totally freaked out. The truth is that I didn’t understand everything but my imagination was strong enough to cover the gaps I had. Holden was a character that both scared me and challenged me. And on the same time I was reading another book, a church book from the Sunday school, about an orphan boy who was neglected by society but because he had Christ in his heart he found everything he dreamt off. I have to admit I liked Holden more, at least he was doing something more than praying and expecting somebody else to help him. My aunt was only a few years older than me and in the end I never saw her as an aunt, she always was the older sister I didn’t have. She was the one who taught me to dance swing and who took me with her to six- ties parties with the Beatles and the Shadows. She was my instructor to the rebellion and I was her excuse to go out for dates. We were going for a coffee or for ice cream, and magically a boy would appear to help her choose the best ice cream or coffee place. My father was always smiling. I was dancing with the Beatles, and he was playing Beethoven. I was trying to imitate Elvis and he was listening to Aznavour. My life was shared between my grandmother’s stories, my aunt’s rebellions, my fa- ther’s normality and my secret world of books and papers. I had a thing with those white papers and even now in my mid fifties I still have it. When I see an empty paper I have the feeling that I have to do something and fill it. It looks so sad empty. I don’t know how good my drawings were or when they started being good, but I do remember my grandmother looking with great astonish- ment at a portrait of John the Baptist I had drawn. First she thought I had just copied it from another picture, putting the white paper on the top of it, but then I showed her the picture that had inspired me and she realized that my picture had different proportions and it was black and white, rich in shadows. She kept that picture until her very last moment; next to her other icons in her private praying corner in her room with a small oil-lamp. During the same period I think I decided that the drawings needed some explanation, some kind of background. So for another sketch of a wolf, I accompanied it with a very small story; simple, naïve but it a begin - ning. And then more white papers were filled and more stories were writ - ten, longer and longer. Sometimes the stories were inspired from what I read; some others came from my grandmother but most of the time I made up stories in my mind while I isolated myself from the rest of the world. My father was always there watching me and smiling. Now, having a kid of my own I know that he knew exactly what I was doing. I know how it works and how a parent can read what his kid is after. Then it was my great secret. I was one of those students who easily picked up everything in the classroom and very rarely needed extra help. The only help I needed was access to more books. My father took care of it, introducing me to the fun of visiting a bookshop. The feeling of a book cover, the anticipation created by the cover picture and lettering, the characteristic smell of the leather covers, the turning of the pages. Visiting bookshops in the centre of Athens became entertainment that would last for hours. It was the Friday afternoon thing for us. Back then schools were open on Saturdays and even on Sundays when it was obligatory church-going; no weekends for us. The only real break was Sunday after the church, but nothing was open on Sundays. So Friday’s bookshop visit became a habit that we rarely missed. And of course after every visit my collection of books grew. Another thing that became a habit early in my childhood was chess. My father was a man of past generations, with principals that probably look very different and even weird nowadays. For him quality time with his son was sitting opposite each other with the chessboard in between, classic music in the background and the smoke of heavy aromatic tobacco all around. We played chess every single night at eight o’clock, right after dinner. He always tried to be on my level, slowly teaching me new moves or helping me to get better. I never won! Never! It didn’t matter how much I tried, after sometime I even found chess books with moves, I tried to copy some of them. I never won! But I took my revenge. When my father was away I played chess with myself, but I used totally different rules, where the pawns carried weapons and the bishops could shoot. And I always had the whites and I could always win. On the same time my country and my life were moving towards a new game where pawns and bishops could really shoot. The dictatorship had started. It’s getting more and more difficult nowadays to explain how it was living in a dictatorship. People in Europe have this strange image that dictatorships happen only in far away countries, countries lost in deserts with alien cultures and habits. Sometimes when I talk about my experi - ences I have the sense that people think that I am from a different era all together, a relic forgotten in this century. It’s only forty-five years ago. Furthermore, nobody can accept that atrocities that happen in far away countries, countries lost in deserts with alien cultures and habits would have ever happened in a European country. They did. And it was not only Greece. It was also Portugal and Spain. Early one morning in April 1967 military tanks crossed the roads of Athens, blocking all the main streets and soldiers occupied strategic tar- gets including ministries, offices and media. Hundreds of people were arrested and led to stadiums before the responsible of the military coup decided what they were going to do with them. Imprisonment and ex- ile awaited most of them; some disappeared, vanished into thin air, but Landing in a new reality that’s one of the mysteries history will solve one day in the future. There is one thing I always keep in mind when it comes to fascism; a thing pastor Martin Niemöller said about Nazism in Germany. “First they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” How true and that’s what happened in Greece, not only that morning of 1967 but for the next couple of years. The first day it was the known communists, politicians and unionists; then it was anybody who had any connection with the above people and soon it became everybody who dared even to think anything against the dictators. And people were afraid, very afraid. Nobody knew if and when their turn was coming. There were whole areas of Athens with families having fathers, mothers, brothers and uncles missing. And fear was in ev- ery single corner, everywhere you would turn. For days schools remained closed until new instructions came and all the media, controlled by the dictators were celebrating their victory against communism. The dream land for McCarthy. Everybody was a communist until proven innocent. Including my father. My father was not a communist. Actually the mere thought makes me laugh. He was a conservative man of a traditionally conservative family, with one fault only; he was a democrat. And democracy for him was a life principle and not just a word in the dictionary. Democracy was a lifestyle and of course he could not stay quiet and obedient. He couldn’t just shut his mouth, otherwise... In 1986 I saw a film. A film directed by Emir Kusturica with the title “When Father Was Away on Business”. The film describes the reality of a boy whose father goes into exile punished by the Tito regime in Yugosla- via. The boy was made to believe his mother’s story about father being “away on business.” Watching the film I felt tears in my eyes. Nobody told me that daddy was away for business, I followed my daddy for business. My life for the next seven years became totally surreal and on top of that I was becoming a teenager in an era that covered everything from May in Paris to Woodstock in USA. I was becoming a teenager and for the first time in my life I was an immigrant myself. While others were led to prisons and small rocky islands in the middle of the Aegean Sea, my father was heading abroad, leaving behind him accusations of treason to the regime. You see he didn’t even dare to use the word democracy; even they described themselves as the regime. The stories that reached us were nightmarish. Tortures beyond believe, treatments that would make even the Inquisition feel embarrassed. On the same time, in the name of the fight against communism, the West started recognizing the new Greek regime, pretending that it couldn’t see the tortures, the imprison- ments and the deaths. In the schools, Sophocles was forbidden in the ancient Greek lessons because of the mention of democracy in one sentence in the book. The spirit was blind patriotism, rewrite history to emphasize what is conve - nient for the unity of the nation. That’s what they called it. Our house had become a meeting place for democrats. There was no separation be - tween socialists, communists and conservatives. There were all Greeks, all democrats, all patriots and all in exile. I said that my life became schizophrenic. It was because I shared my life between living with my father in exile and living with my grandmother in Athens. My grandmother was scared, because her late husband had the wrong background and it didn’t matter that he had been dead for over twenty years. Like all those regimes, responsibility is collective. Two of her sons had already left Greece looking for a better future abroad. They knew that with this father in their past they had no future in Greece. My grandmother was still fighting and once again she was fighting for her survival. My father on the other side was fighting for his principles. And thank - fully he was not alone. The Swede Olof Palme, the German Willy Brandt and yes, the Finn Paavo Lipponen were only a few of the official Europe - ans who stood up against the dictatorship and tried to help in every pos- sible way. And they did help. Thanks to them and their pressure, people like the composer Mikis Theodorakis managed to escape prisons and ex- iles and go abroad. Gradually more and more voices united to help Greece. In the mean- time I continued reading, writing and drawing. And now I had access to more books and more languages. English, German and then French be- came the first three languages I learned. And I discovered that reading a book in its original language gives you much, much more. It doesn’t mat- ter how good the translator is, reading Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” in German is apocalyptic and there is no comparison to reading Dickens in English. And then there was Hemingway all the way to Jean Paul Sartre; and how odd this meant a return to Aristotle. It was the late sixties and the beginning of the seventies, and the world was discovering contemporary art. I discovered pop art and with Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Doors I found Dadaism. Through this, the four books my father gave me a few years earlier got a meaning. They gave me answers and arguments. And I started understanding what he had told me that day. They were just the beginning of a very long conver- sation. Every single page of Hitler’s book was a slap in the face. The man was making everything personal, blaming everybody else than himself for his failures. And the worst part was that I could see the fruits of his ideas in my own country. I was a victim of his ideology and even though I was thirsty to know my country he was not letting me from his grave. It was personal for him and it became personal for me. Every single page was a slap in the face for me that I had to return. And I returned it by bet- ter understanding my father. Understanding why he was where he was and why, understanding what principles mean. Oddly it was Hitler who strengthened my anti-fascist, my anti-racist and democratic principles. Principles that I have followed my entire life, no matter how much the choices cost me. Then it was Marx and the “Communist manifesto”. Perhaps it was my heart and my romantism that easier accepted the principles of a soci - ety of equality. A society ruled by principles and not laws. Pity for Marx and me, it only took one Stalin to wipe everything away. It was not the western propaganda that overwhelmed me; it was the people of Ber - lin, where I lived part of that period. They knew the other side, a lot of them had come from the other side and it was not the passion of the words that made the difference, but the passion of the acts. It was just like Greece that period. Staying with my grandmother meant that we had to be careful. It meant that we had to listen to the BBC late at night, really quiet with our ears to the old radio’s speaker and whisper the news among us. It meant that you didn’t trust the newspapers and the magazines. The only news you could trust were the news coming from the neighbour who had heard something. This was the period when I started painting on canvas. Pop art was big for me but it was not the style I worked with. Actually I did my first paint - ing one evening when I was really angry. The police had just arrested my aunt and my grandmother had gone to the police to get her out. Her crime was that she was out late and obviously for the regime’s lackeys, the police, this meant she was conspiring against the ...revolution. When they returned home my aunt was red in the face with one eye obviously swollen. Neither of them said a word but I knew. And I was so angry! For a long time I couldn’t do anything. I was just standing in the middle of the garden looking at the stars. So angry! And then I started painting. With a black charcoal I painted Christ on a big piece of canvas I rolled open on the concrete of the patio. It was a Christ on the cross but an angry Christ. A Christ who was not ready to forgive but a Christ who wanted to punish, a Christ who wanted revenge. An angry Christ who was ready to pull out the nails and let the thunder roll on everybody around him. The angrier I got, the angrier the Christ I was painting was becoming. The charcoal was making the shadows heavy around the form of the cross, taking the shape of an oncoming storm. And it was not just a storm, it was a cataclysm. And there, in the middle of a dark night with the anger thundering in my soul, I went one step fur- ther. With a small pocket knife I had, I drew a line in the palm of my right hand and let the blood flow freely. With my fingers I made tears, blood tears for my angry Christ. Breathing with difficulty I went to sleep that night and woke the next morning to the voices in the garden. If you remember I have already de- scribed the narrow street my grandmother lived in, with the American in the corner house. Opposite of my grandmother lived a carpenter who had his workshop on the ground floor and lived upstairs with his family. This man had a brother who was a monk, or at least that’s what I thought then – who occasionally visited him. That day the monk, his brother, my grandmother and my aunt were standing in my grandmother’s garden looking at my creation. I got out there quickly, expecting them to start complaining; screaming and I don’t know what else. But silence wel - comed me, making me worry a bit more. This was serious, I thought. The monk kneeled in front the picture and he said something I couldn’t hear. My grandmother nodded to me to be quiet and then the monk stood up and with a very bass voice – I had never heard his voice before – asked me if he could take my painting. My grandmother’s and my aunt’s look said it loudly, do it; but it wasn’t their looks that made me agree. That day something new was born inside me, a new realiza- tion. Whatever I feel when I create something, anger or pain, it finishes with my last act on it. Then it is not mine. I finished. I don’t know how to describe it but whatever I wanted to say with that angry Christ I had said it, I had heard it and it was over. The painting had no more meaning to me, it could go. And it did go. A few years after, I found out that the monk was not a simple monk but an abbot in a known and historic monastery. A long time after that he invited me to the monastery and the first thing he showed me was my painting in a very prominent place in the church of the monastery. He actually told me that this painting represents all the things he believed and that it strengthened his faith during a period he was in doubt. How odd it didn’t work like that with me. Seeing all this pain around me, being exiled from my own country, any faith I had was dying fast. And then came the events of the Polytechnic school in Athens. The students started a rebellion against the dictatorship, locking themselves inside the school in the centre of the capital. The news reached all of us and for three days until the tank broke the gate, the voices for democracy hunted us all. The voices in the illegal radio the students had built inside the Polytechnic reached us everywhere, tens of illegal radios and trans- mitters were employed to transform the voice. These voices will follow me for the rest of my life. It was 1973. November of 1973. Kids died that night in Athens, hundreds went to prison, tortured, raped, and humili- ated, asking for bread-education-freedom. That’s all they were asking for. Bread-education-freedom. And how sad it is that even today, forty years later, kids all around the world are asking for exactly the same thing. Something the society is obliged to give them. The events of the Polytechnic gradually led to the end of the dictator- ship. In July 1974 we returned to Greece. A Greece in shock, facing a new reality. Democracy had returned. Immigration was over for me and I was hoping for a normal life. That’s what I thought. In the beginning they told me that my father was seriously ill and I should hurry back home. But there was something in the way they said it. I knew. My friend, my companion, my guide, my mentor, my best friend was dead and I was alone. On the way home I had a piece of white paper I should fill and a small pen. And I drew an angel. An angel kneeling in front of a rock, holding a spear. I drew the same angel again and again. Hun- dreds of times. I did the angel kneeling and standing. Exactly the same angel, always carrying the same spear. The head was bent low and the wings folded in the back. No face to see. Just the shape hidden under a hood. My pain was unbelievable and I didn’t know how to scream.