You Animal Machine: (The Golden Greek)

By Eleni Sikelianos

“This experimental memoir” tells the story of a woman “whose experiences as an American immigrant . . . encompass issues of identity and belonging” (Chicago Tribune). This is the tale of Melena, five times married, mother of three, burlesque dancer, and “the toughest, hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails.” Located in history and memory, her life cracks open questions of identity at the heart of an American immigrant woman’s experience and becomes an argument that no existence is ever truly marginal. “Melena strikes a playful and sharp figure in her leopard print costume. Sikelianos never lets go of the fantasy of the image, but she also explores her grandmother’s underlying grit. Fans of her previous work will be sure to enjoy Sikelianos’s atypical memoir.” —Publishers Weekly “A wonderfully strange and inventive book by a professor and poet who combines various forms into an unclassifiable whole . . . The writing pulsates with such life force, reckless and a little giddy, as the author surveys her family’s female history, the immigration of Greeks to America . . . This is writing and reading as adventure, where every page can bring a different sort of revelation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Sikelianos’ portrait includes poems, unusual typography, & photographs that would not look out of place in a W.G. Sebald novel.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781566893640

Book preview

THIS BOOK IS PART OF A LONGER FAMILY HISTORY, a circulatory system that encompasses morphine and heroin addicts, refugees, Ionian counts, one of the richest families in the United States who exhausted their fortune attempting to revive the ancient Greek theater, Lithuanian Jews, a half-dozen musicians, a painter, several poets (one a Nobel nominee) and lesbians, opium-runners, forgers, waitresses, tavern entertainers, a burlesque dancer called Melena the Leopard Girl (one of her many stage names), and a dwarf (one of her five husbands), all landed, eventually, on the coasts of our American homeland. It begins in lands and times we do not know—on the amber plains of Anatolia, under the golden light of Attica, in the shadows of the Black Forest, with ship-farers and wags—and snakes through the early reaches of recorded history on this continent, runs through Greek hash dens, Bohemian Europe and America, and crashes right into the average story of all those happy family plans gone awry.

I see the lines of our ancestors laid out in filaments looping here and there, bifurcating, disappearing; there are breaks in the thread and dead-ends into the dark where this or that sister took a boat from Greece and was lost forever from the fold; men and women who found each other or for reasons of circumstance were thrust into each others’ arms, radiating out along the great line in pairs; for however much they loved each other or same or other sexes or lived apart, always in this long arrow stretching back to our first humans hunting in the bush somewhere on a far continent in an inscrutable time, it was and is a man and a woman, two by two, each representing a small electrical hyphen of human intelligence and endeavor illuminating the path that leads to me sitting here—; men and women, each with eyes lit up for at least one moment in their lives; loving each other in the dark before the advent of writing; or a brief encounter, maybe forced, that led to the continuation of a line; these packets of genes waiting, and that uncontrollable animal urge toward making things—love, babies; the ranks moving forward and forward, branching, fucking, splitting, until they reach the edges of history; and forward, farther, till they hit the periphery of family lore.

Thus begins the tale before human time but in human terms, and stretches far beyond us into a future we cannot imagine, except, perhaps, that it will not contain us as walking libraries. It matters that there are holes in a family history that can never be filled, that there are secrets and mysteries, migrations and invasions and murky blood-lines. In this way we speak of human history.

The first portion of the tale was about my father, Jon.

This portion of the tale is about the other side: my grandmother, the Leopard Girl, the Golden Greek.

These stories were always in the room with us, vapory house gods seeping up from the carpet, flitting around the cupboards and corners, sparking off fingertips like flammable ice, an aura crackling and chuckling around the skin; our lares familiars, our deep inhabitants.

Story is not the right word. History is too vague. This is a net of family giftings, woven in darkly luminous filaments, the shirt daubed with Nessus’s blood that scorches the skin, wounding the susceptibilities. But what is the key that turns the lock of the poison dress? Who is us? (Me and my mother.)

Three dreams:

We’re driving through large rolling hills in a big soft sloppy light toward the origin of family history. In this version, beautifully built barns straddle the road and we drive right through them, airy modern masterpieces open to and cleansing the heart and mind.

What was that wolf chasing the sheep running up the grassy hillside, and I’m watching from the left of the scene saying to my daughter, Look at that wolf! It’s hunting a sheep! Being the watcher and also the place I’m watching from is what’s important.

M: I do not dream I am dismembered.

I never dream I am dismembered.

NAMES AND ALIASES

Helene Pappamarkou (birth certificate)

Eleni (her father called her)

Elaine (her mother called her)

Elayne (her mother called her)

Elaine (at death)

The Golden Greek (stage name)

Marco the Cat Girl (stage name)

Melena the Leopard Girl (stage name)

Melanie the Snake Dancer ( )

Melanie the Mexican Mobster ( )

Marko, the exciting uncensored dance delineator

Melaine Marko, exotic

Elaine Marko, sultry exotic

(secret name)

(secret name)

Yagureté (true carnivorous beast)

what is her girl name (maiden)

what is her girl name (maiden)

The Feral Child

THAT WOMAN in the leopard suit practically walked out of a burning city and into the hands of the Mafia; but it was her father who leapt into the harbor from a town in flames. The heat from the blaze was so great that even the ships docked a few miles out had to back off. Cargo falling into the sea: boxes, pianos, and overloaded donkeys tumbling from the wharves through the clear green water. The slow cascade of a weighted body through liquid, the bubbles kissing the body then rising, making their escape to the surface to join their kind in oxygen.

A Red Cross boat stuffed with the living tumbled across the ocean circa 1922, and on it was Yiannis Pappamarkou, soon to become John Diamond. To leave your birthplace by force and find yourself in foreign lands; to set sail from the shores of the Aegean, from the sunlit regions of the Tigris and Euphrates, from Kurdistan or Armenia; to set forth from Paradise, the suburbs of Smyrna, and arrive in a land frozen at the heart. In the great Exchange of Populations, when the Greeks failed to take back Constantinople and reestablish Alexander’s empire, 1,222,849 people set out, each with a box, bag, trunk, or with nothing, and made their way to a motherland most had never seen. They walked through the mud and dust, through fires and knots of armed soldiers, to set up roofs of tarred felt, huts built of planks and oil cans and burlap bags in fields at the outskirts of towns or leaning against warehouses or on the hillsides that form a ring around Athens. Some were housed in schools, churches, army camps; others found homes in the town’s theater, one family to a box, the mezzanine brimming with trunks and laundry lines strung up for privacy. Some never arrived, but died of fever or flu, TB, malaria, went blind with trachoma, were taken prisoner, or were otherwise annihilated along the way. They were crowded onto boats till one could not sit but had to stand on the open deck for days, without food, unable to sleep or piss or shit in private, crawling with lice, blistered by noontime sun, arriving in Athens in stinking rags. In some republics, history has taught us, the stranger is a stain, and that stain’s disappearance is beneficial to the state.

The Greeks call it the Great Catastrophe, the Armenians the Great Calamity; the Assyrians call it the Year of the Sword. Someone invented the word genocide to describe it. In those years, an Ottoman officer could buy a Greek girl and take her home permanently for about eighty cents.

In the great, gray port of Piraeus, where the big brightly lit ships come in and pull out at all hours of the day and night, the old Greek rembetes were living it up in the tekes, carefully placing coals into the narghilés, sucking up the hash smoke and beginning their songs. The refugees arrived with wailings embroidered in a whole new Eastern grief, and a cacophony started up, syncopated by the sheep-bladder drum.

It was the days of the three-stringed bouzouki, before the big crackdowns, when men still knew how to really play the santouri, when it cost money to break plates, but not a