Remembering Absence: The Sense of Life in Island Greece

By Nicolas Argenti

A journey through an Aegean island community’s history of massacre, occupation, famine, and financial meltdown—and its effects on culture and memory.

Drawing on research conducted on Chios during the sovereign debt crisis that struck Greece in 2010, Nicolas Argenti follows the lives of individuals who symbolize the transformations affecting this Aegean island. As witnesses to the crisis speak of their lives, however, their current anxieties and frustrations are expressed in terms of past crises that have shaped the dramatic history of Chios, including the German occupation in World War II and the ensuing famine, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey of 1922–23, and the Massacres of 1822 that decimated the island at the outset of the Greek War of Independence. The complex temporality that emerges in these accounts is ensconced in a cultural context of commemorative ritual, ecstatic visions, an annual rocket war, and other embodied practices that contribute to forms of memory production that question the assumptions of the trauma discourse, revealing the islanders of Chios to be active in forging their place in time in a manner that blurs the boundaries between historiography, memory, religion, and myth.

A member of the Chiot diaspora, Argenti makes use of unpublished correspondence from survivors of the Massacres of 1822 and their descendants and reflects on oral family histories and silences in which the island represents an enigmatic but palpable absence. As he explores the ways in which a body of memory and a cultural experience of temporality came to be dislocated and shared between two populations, his return to Chios marks an encounter in which the traditional roles of ethnographer and participant come to be dispersed and intertwined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253040688

Book preview

REMEMBERING ABSENCE

NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE

Michael Herzfeld, Melissa L. Caldwell, and Deborah Reed-Danahay, editors

REMEMBERING ABSENCE

The Sense of Life in Island Greece

Nicolas Argenti

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2019 by Nicolas Argenti

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-253-04065-7 (hdbk.)

ISBN 978-0-253-04066-4 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-253-04067-1 (web PDF)

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In memoriam

Barbara Argenti (1932–2012)

No more of the old security.

It was sea and islands now.

C. S. LEWIS, SURPRISED BY JOY

and for her grandchildren,

Chiara, Quentin, Lalla Lee, Virginia, Eleanor, and Loukis

Voice of the Lord upon the waters,

There is an island.

GEORGE SEFERIS, SALAMIS IN CYPRUS, LOGBOOK III

Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour entreprendre de ressusciter Carthage! C’est là une Thébaïde où le dégoût de la vie moderne m’a poussé.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, LETTER TO ERNEST FEYDEAU

CONTENTS

Preface

Note on Transliteration

Remembering Absence

1The Light of Certain Stars: From Memory to Historical Simultaneity

2Full Fathom Five: On the Temporal Dimensions of Exodus

3Crisis and Famine: Sovereign Debt, Political Violence, and Oneiric Revelation

4The Love of Flowers: Catastrophe in the Aegean

5Emptiness of Anavatos: Exile, Commemoration, and Melancholia

6Ruins of Kidianta: Dwelling, Oblivion, and Resurrection

7The Abbess of Nea Moni: The Contemporaneity of Divine Vision

8Life in the Tomb: Rocket Warriors of Vrontados

9The Darksome Line: Aegean Temporality

Reference List

Index

PREFACE

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea sorrow.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

THIS WORK SETS OUT THE FINDINGS OF RESEARCH carried out over the course of a series of trips to the Aegean island of Chios between 2010 and 2015. Originally envisaged as an inquiry into collective memories of the massacres of 1822 that divided the island into an emigrant diaspora and a local population, the project was designed to examine that fork in the island’s fate from both perspectives. This volume focuses for the most part on the results of my research with the latter of these two groups. As often happens in the course of ethnographic research, the project was overtaken by events; in this case, the sovereign debt crisis took hold of the Greek economy and people faced life-changing transformations in their standard of living, governance, future prospects, and identity. Having been conceived in the framework and language of memory studies, the research thus stumbled into a hybrid landscape of resurgent memories, current concerns, and anxieties about the future. Because these temporal domains were inevitably presented by those to whom I spoke not as distinct categories but as inextricably intertwined fields of experience, the research took me beyond the memory paradigm within which my work had heretofore found its footing, forcing me to grapple with more fundamental questions about the nature and experience of time itself. Exceptional as the current circumstances facing Greece and southern Europe may now seem, this work does not seek to present a society in crisis or to delineate an ethnography of exception but to examine how the warp and weft of past, present, and future have been part and parcel of an island community’s experience on a long-standing basis. Far from constituting a symptom of crisis, this imbricated temporality represents a means of placing the present in a wider temporal context, suggesting a form of simultaneity that has been a feature of Aegean and wider Mediterranean culture for centuries.

A study of the forced movements of people across Anatolia and the Aegean will inevitably raise questions regarding contemporary events, and the reader may wonder how a description of the island of Chios—especially one that focuses on the descendants of people who were cast on its shores or banished from them in the ceaseless revolution of the centuries—could fail to take account of the influx of refugees now fleeing the latest conflict in the Middle East, those who congregate on the Erythrean Peninsula of Turkey’s Aegean coast before daily setting out in small and perilously overcrowded boats and attempting to cross that sea of sorrow in the hope of finding asylum in this southern outpost of the European Union.¹ So many times in the past have people been driven across these narrow straits that the islands of the Aegean are nothing if not the result of the mass movement of people across space and time, collectively presenting a fulcrum in the contact between Eastern and Western cultures and societies. What ethnography, then, would ignore the present crisis in seeking to depict a contemporary society born of just such crises? What monograph would describe an island of immigrants and emigrants, exiles and refugees, without accounting for the new diaspora washing ashore as I write these words?

The question can be answered empirically and epistemologically. Practically speaking, this research was conducted before the war in Syria had begun to send significant numbers of that nation’s citizens across the border to Turkey and thence into the Aegean. During the conduct of this research, crossings regularly occurred of refugees to Chios, and they are mentioned in the chapters that follow insofar as they concerned and affected local people, but the large-scale humanitarian crisis associated with the current conflict had not yet begun. This monograph therefore covers a period anterior to these events.

The epistemological dimension of the question raises issues central to this book. While the current influx of people to Chios presents evident superficial continuities with critical events in the history of the island, it is also different in important ways: for one thing, the last mass movement of people to Chios was of Greek-speaking Orthodox coreligionists forced to leave Asia Minor under the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Many of them settled permanently on the island, and the vast majority of them remained in Greece. The current influx of people, mostly Arab-speaking Syrian Muslims, bear little cultural or historical affinity with contemporary local Chiots, are not the product of a legally ratified movement of people, and do not intend to stay in Greece, let alone in Chios. Moreover, their indeterminate legal status precludes them from integrating in local society, from which they are by and large physically separated by enclosure in makeshift camps. Both in terms of local perception and of the migrants’ own experience, therefore, the migrants are presently in Chios, but they are not part of the present of Chiot society.

The tragedy of this displacement not only in space but also from the present is what constitutes the belatedness of crisis: It may be that, in time, some members of this refugee movement will settle in Chios or on neighboring islands and become part of local society. It may be that Chiots will one day incorporate memories of the current crisis into their sense of identity as they have past crises, and it may be that the refugees, going on to form diasporic societies in other parts of the world or in a future reconstituted state of Syria, will incorporate their flight and their passage through the Aegean into their transgenerational collective memories. Because such futures have not yet come to be, and because the present of the current crisis has as yet no past and no place in collective memory, it is not meaningfully part of contemporary Chiot society, and how it will one day come to inform local culture is as yet undetermined. So we can say, with Michel de Certeau, that ‘only the passing of an epoch allows us to express what had made it live, as if it had had to die to become a book’ ([1980] 1990, 286–87, my trans.).

With respect to Chios itself, this belatedness of the economic crisis forces us to recognize that it is no longer sufficient to supplement the ethnographic present with accounts of history on the one hand or of memory on the other but that we must ask more fundamentally what history or memory might be—both in the ethnographies we produce and in the ways we then attempt to analyze the data we have gathered. Is historiographical research a disinterested heuristic method by which means we dispassionately place contemporary societies in the linear chronology of their passage through time or a Procrustean bed on which we unintentionally amputate the temporal dimensions of the cultures we would scrutinize? Might people have ways of engaging with the past that are not reducible to current methods of historical analysis? Might folk models of the past, oral traditions, religious practices, and other forms of collective memory amount to more than an amateurish bricolage, a mesmeric lantern show of the past with which the poor and the marginalized—doubly excluded from a history to which they are always already peripheral and that they lack the means to record—must make do? And might the notion of collective memory in turn not be the only epistemological alternative to the Western historical tradition but just another culturally specific western folk concept—the extroverted, Orientalizing counterpart to the introverted gaze of history—masquerading as an analytical model?

The annales school in the historical tradition and the focus on oral history in anthropology (exemplified in the approach developed by Jan Vansina; see Vansina 1985) did a lot to overcome colonial prejudice against local historiographies, but this study seeks to go beyond finding in lay accounts and oral traditions a good approximation of the Western nineteenth-century ideal of the interlocuteur valable and the accumulation of positivist linear chronological representations. In the end one cannot sidestep the fact that questions regarding the relationship between memory and history lead in turn to questions regarding the human relation to time itself, and the participants who speak in the pages to come offer not bucolic almanacs and gazetteers of past events or quaint commentaries on current ones—so much field data on which the analyst can perform the alchemical transformation of academic exegesis—but deeply challenging insights into the nature of temporal experience, complete with their own epistemologies, exegeses, and forms of embedded analysis.

I have therefore not assumed in this work that there is one universal form of temporality (ours) that other cultures, using their rustic and homespun methods, grasp with more or less exactitude. On the contrary, my passage to Chios brought me to wonder whether the sense of being-in-time particular to a place or culture might not fundamentally challenge the monolithic model of chronological succession to which post-Enlightenment rationalism has restricted itself, introducing us to worlds the richness and complexity of which can only be understood sui generis, in the temporal dimensions of their own existence. I have therefore tried in my own Aegean crossing to jettison as much as possible temporal categories associated with northern European models of time, with which I was laden on my departure, replacing them not only in my descriptive accounts but also in my analyses, with models deployed by my research participants—for how could one make sense of radically alternative temporal models by means of exegeses founded in ethnocentric conceptions so at odds with them? As Henri Bergson ([1896] 1939, 150) put it in his magisterial critique of memory, one may as well look for darkness beneath the light.

For leading me over the threshold of this unsuspected mundum luminis, I must begin by acknowledging my debt to all those people in Chios, too many to name, who participated in my research, facilitated my work, guided me in my inquiries, provided access to essential resources, or offered friendship, support, and inspiration. In particular, I must single out the support of my research assistant Catherine Paidoussi. For help with translations of nineteenth-century texts, I am indebted to Eleftheria Zei and Thiresia Choremi and, for advice on transliteration in this work, to Prof. Michael Herzfeld. (Any errors are my own responsibility.) To the photographers Stratis Vogiatzis and Thekla Malamou, who so generously shared their work with me for this publication, I express my deepest gratitude. I am also grateful to Theodora Kotsaka, Mayor Emmanouil Vournous, and to Anna Haziri and all the staff of the Koraïs Library, who so liberally provided their time, expertise, and friendship throughout the research. Those who remain unnamed are no less in my thoughts. Because the diaspora that left Chios in the nineteenth century continues to inform local identity, and because the members of that diaspora have never ceased to be informed by the sense of a common origin, a monograph on Chios could not be written about one without the other. To this end, I am indebted to all those in the diaspora who first encouraged me to undertake this research and who provided access to family archival material, ideas, feedback, and support in myriad other ways. For access to resources, I am particularly grateful to Michael and Parker Agelasto; John, Lorenzo, and Tristan Argenti; David Calvocoressi; Sir David and Jacky Ralli; Paul and Stephen Rodocanachi; and Dominic and Alix Vlasto.

Finally, my thanks are due to the late and much-lamented Peter Loizos, my mentor at the outset of this research project; to the Economic and Social Research Council, which funded the fellowship that resulted in this monograph; to Maria Katasanaki and the National Gallery Athens; to the Orientalist Museum Doha and to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boston for permission to reproduce artworks; to Smokestack Books for permission to reproduce lines from Yiannis Ritsos’s poem Epitaphios; and to the CS Lewis Company Ltd. for permission to reproduce a line from Surprised by Joy.²

Notes

1. For studies of the refugee crisis in neighboring Lesbos, see Heath Cabot (2014, 2016a, 2016b), Sarah Green (2010), and Evthymios Papataxiarchis (2014, 2016a, 2016b).

2. Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1955.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

IN ORDER TO MAKE G REEK TERMS EASY TO read for a non-Greek speaker but still as close as possible to the original Greek pronunciation, I have transliterated them as much as I could phonetically using only letters from the Roman alphabet. Diacritical marks show where the stress lies in a word. These follow the monotonic accentuation convention. Diacritics have not been used in the transcription of Byzantine and ancient Greek words and phrases. Place and personal names are not marked with stress marks either, as these are habitually transliterated without them. Previously established transliterations of these names and of proper nouns in general have not been changed. Greek references in the bibliography have been provided in the original Greek, in roman transliteration, and in English translation.

Key to transcription and rough guide to pronunciation:

REMEMBERING ABSENCE

REMEMBERING ABSENCE

The Terror of History and the Myth of Eternal Return

It is one of the paradoxes of anthropology that in having sent its neophytes to places conceived of as the most distant to work with peoples imagined as the most remote, the discipline’s apotheosis has always been thought to lie in the discovery of truths that are universal in their humanity. In an irony that would not have been lost on Michel de Montaigne as he contemplated the news of the discovery of the Americas five centuries ago, we have traveled to the ends of the earth to find ourselves. Never have I been so conscious of this reflexive effect of the ethnographic encounter as in writing this book. My research career did not begin in Greece but in Cameroon, where I conducted my doctoral research in the early 1990s and continued to work for the next twenty years. Interested in the relationships between material culture and political systems, I happened on the kingdoms of the Grassfields, where the elaboration of every aspect of the arts—from the architecture of the royal palaces and warriors’ society lodges to the masking groups of the lineage elders; from the embroidered gowns, leopard-skin belts, ivory bangles, and feathered headdresses of the notables to the mellifluous xylophone music to which they processed on occasions of state; or from the scarifications of the elderly queen mothers to the decorations of their calabashes and clay pots—seemed to have been equaled only by the elaboration of hierarchical systems in these sometimes Byzantine, sometimes Delphic courts.

But questions regarding the links between the arts and politics in the Kingdom of Oku, where I settled and lived, gradually gave way to others. This had in part to do with my ever-increasing awareness of the complexity of the social world into which I was gradually being initiated, but also with another process less often remarked on in the literature. Following the usual run of academic obligations that ensued upon my return from the field, there would be a ten-year hiatus between my original research and my securing a grant that would provide the time to write a monograph on Oku. In the intervening time, ethnographic experiences that had been near to hand and immediate had become memories, and something about this transformation of knowledge into reminiscence changed the way that I understood the Grassfields. No longer an ethnographic present, and still less an account of a historical stage in a teleological process of state development, my years in Oku had become wedded to an ever-receding epoch in the life of the kingdom, an era that in its flight from the present called forth deeper recesses of history that I had not been able to witness. As I thought back on the Grassfields years, it was not the data of my research on the masked dances that stood out most clearly to me but the lacunae of what had not been said that remained.

If the masks could become memories for me, so too must they be for those fathers of the masks (bamkum) who called them forth from their sanctuaries in the forest—the realm of the spirits who exist outside of diurnal time—luring them, with the xylophone music the masks could not resist, into the compound courtyard to have them commemorate the dead of the lineage with their unforgettable displays of beauty and power. What did the taciturn, tongue-tied masks stand for? What unmentioned, silent worlds did they embody? What primordial events had given birth to the silent and timeless forest spirits they incarnated? What was the source of the admiration, devotion, and fear they elicited in those who beheld them? Time, I realized, had been at work here too, lending to the masks a temporal depth to which my synchronic gaze had been blind. Even as they danced, the masks had always already been a form of memory, embodying the unspeakable truths of the slave trade to which no one ever alluded explicitly. Just as the mask had an open secret, that it was performed by a dancer and was not a sylvan spirit, so too it encrypted a deeper enigma: that in its terrifying transformation of the body of the dancer it marked the primordial impact—in illo tempore, in illud tempus (Eliade [1954] 2005, 28, 29)—on the kingdom’s social body of the slave trade that had for centuries decimated the Grassfields (N. Argenti 2007).

With the passage of the years, and the return of the masks to my memory as a resurgent past, I came to see how they had always marked the resurrection of a still more distant time—in their reappearance, denuded of their sensuous immediacy and untethered from any unitary or monolithic present, the masks revealed the memorial quality they had always possessed: even when they had first performed before my eyes, they had always been memories. As I wrote about them a decade later, I became aware of something in myself that found it natural that silent objects and embodied practices could bear witness to a distant, intergenerational transmission of the past through time and that one could live with the silent memory of an episode of political violence that remained everywhere and always unsaid. Growing up in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, I cannot remember when I first became aware of the fact that I did not entirely share the unproblematically monolithic national identity of my school friends or that my father’s family had originated in Chios, the Aegean island they had to flee in 1822 during the massacres immortalized in the 1824 tableau by Eugene Delacroix that hung in the Louvre. On the tables of our flat near the Trocadero park, faded aquarelle miniatures set in ornate silver-gilt frames blackened by the centuries depicted men and women in mesmerizingly rich oriental costumes that owed more to Anatolia than to Athens: Their parti-colored silk tunics were trimmed with marten fur and tied around the waist with Persian shawls. The men wore the iconic kalpáki—inverted conical headdresses of black felt or astrakhan lamb akin to those of the Byzantine Phanariot nobility but of such imposingly gigantic proportions that early travelers to the island would never fail to comment on them in tones of wonderment (Philip Argenti 1953, 130–33)—while brass roundels honored ephebic martyrs of the revolution, immortalized in flowing, open-necked shirts as they clasped olive branches or oak leaf wreaths in Renaissance attitudes of Byronic heroism.

All of these, I would gradually become aware, commemorated ancestors lost, sold or hanged in the cataclysm or before, during the unraveling of three centuries of Ottoman suzerainty over the island. Around and about on the high shelves and enclosed recesses of our apartment—the dimness, silence, and undisturbed scent of which always seemed to mark out the separate temporal dimension in which a lost world had come to rest—Alexandrian inlaid coffers, black-lacquered cedar boxes from Odessa, their lids painted with mesmeric winter scenes of onion-domed churches, fur-coated hunters stalking wolves, or blizzard-shrouded horse-drawn sleds, and heavy leather-bound Edwardian albums of sepia photos taken in Bombay and Calcutta (their denizens having replaced the kalpáki with top hats) seemed to commemorate the years of wandering after the event. As most of the inscriptions accompanying these were in classicized, katharévousa Greek, however, all I was left with were the gnomic images of these silent witnesses to an unfathomable past, about which my father—whose face bore an uncanny resemblance to the mustachioed men in the fading cameos—never spoke.¹

Since an unacknowledged, unremembered upheaval of this sort and the way that it shapes generations of survivors and their interrelations with one another and the world at large cannot ever be summed up in a monolithic, unitary manner, it would not be accurate to say that the mute material culture of my childhood provided random pieces to a puzzle that I gradually put together as I grew up. Rather, it was as if from the moment of my birth I had stood in a darkened glade on the edge of a clearing and that every breath I took had been suffused with the pollen floating from the open meadow but that this dust had nevertheless been invisible to me until, in brief effulgences of light, when the sun would break through the clouds to spread a slanting ray into the obscurity of the grove, the ever-changing constellations of particles would suddenly sparkle for a moment. As the sun, struggling through the crepuscular dimness of the bower, reveals an evanescent, suspended universe shrouded by the full light of day, so does silence bear witness to the floating world of unspoken remembrance. First horizon of my memory, ultima Thule of my consciousness, Chios was nonetheless close at hand and familiar in my childhood. In the Byzantine eyes of my aunts, in the nocturnal polyglot moirologies of visiting relatives blending with the smoke of my father’s Montecristo cigars as I fell asleep at night (the sedative balm of which evoked in the undulations of my departing consciousness the fabled insular hideaway of Dumas’s eponymous chronicle of lost time and crossed fates), in the twilit world of adult sociality and of children’s drifting reverie in which visiting cousins—thrice removed by generation, by distance, and by the haphazard accrual of new national identities—paid homage in sibilant nocturnal susurrations to the ancestral homes of the long exile (Scio, Sira, Smyrna, Istanbul, Alexandria, Odessa, Galati, Trieste, Marseilles, Livorno), Chios was at once as present and taken for granted as my skin, as painfully absent as a phantom limb.

Audible just beyond the threshold of the bedroom door that remained ajar to a moonlit landscape of somnolent reconstructions, juxtapositions, and suggestions in which all that had been lost to daylight became palpable again, this evanescent constellation seemed nevertheless always to have to be reconstituted from tatters and fragments scattered, as if by some great originary cataclysm, to the farthest reaches of the universe, the images of which—by the time they reached my startled dreaming eye—marked a sidereal record of events that had occurred eons ago, light years away, and that could only be known now from the background radiation that warmed the faces of my scattered family members with the same tawny glow and lit their umber-tinted, henna-lidded eyes with a single phosphorescence.

And yet in a diurnal reversal of the diffusion of our family, my somnambulant wanderings would allow me to traverse the half-closed door and reenter the sibylline world of my gathered Hellenic elders, which seemed now to have been transformed into some anterior version of itself as the rising smoke that enshrouded the acanthus-crowned columns of our Second Empire drawing room and the reflections of the familiar faces in the iconic Byzantine triptychs of their turbaned forefathers combined with the speaking-in-tongues of aunts and uncles whose incessant peregrinations had caused languages to agglutinate to them like the barnacles on some ageless migratory leviathan. Having often learned their idioms in the boarding schools of countries they had left behind as young adults, they tended to speak faultless but esoterically antiquated versions of all the languages they knew—but though they were often effortlessly fluent in all of them, it was as if they felt at home in none, and it was always with a slight sense of irony that they would turn the oddities of an expression or the flavor of a mot juste about in their mouths, raising the dark shrouds of their Levantine eyebrows incredulously for their cousins to understand that it was with amused alienation that they wore each lexicon, like a slightly ill-fitting coat they might have borrowed for the evening. And because these peripatetic exiles spoke versions of languages learned in distant childhoods, they would inevitably become sources of mild wonderment to native speakers they later encountered, who would feel as if they might be speaking to long-deceased ancestors of theirs, watching a prewar black-and-white film or listening to wax cylinder recordings of Edwardian poets. And, in their turn, my migratory elders would often attest to a sense of bafflement that they no longer understood the people who were meant to embody the national essence of a language and that they—despite their exilic status—should have become akin to those denizens of the inaccessible islands off the eastern coast of the United States that linguists once sought out to study the last vestiges of Creole or of Elizabethan English, the past of the language having been preserved in far-flung insular communities when it had long since been forgotten in the metropolis.

Listening to them in their collective isolation in the past ages of the languages they resurrected, one felt transported in time, everything happening as if the movement in space of the Chiot diaspora had thrown them into a temporal exile from which they could only see the world at a distance, remaining forevermore baffled by the passage of the generations and the dépaysement of the relentless social transformations that they perceived only dimly, through the depths of their unhomeliness—as a moribund cetacean, having reached the nadir of its doomed antediluvian lineage, might the passing sheets of rain on the noisy surface of the tenebrous Cimmerian void.

On these nights, in the midst of these soirées, it would seem to me that I was sleepwalking through time, leaving behind my mundane, waking world and its thin enshrouding haze of pallid sunlight to wade haphazardly through the thicker medium of our submerged past. Floating down into the lost Atlantis that our drawing room had become in the moment of its mysterious metamorphosis, I would find myself drifting back past the neoclassical colonnade. Into the offertory vases at the base of each column, my mother—whose diaphanous evening gown still silently drifts behind her so slowly in my remembrance that it seems to detach her from time itself—had not forgotten to place the votive oblation of her beloved white asphodels. Beyond that threshold, through the swirling incense of tobacco, perfume, Greek coffee, and liqueurs, I would emerge into a tight-knit circle of chairs and divans from which rose an impassioned hum of incantatory recollections so concentrated, entrancing, and hypnotic that it seemed for all the world to have been intended as a collective holocaustic offering at the temple of our familial memory. As these evenings came to an end with our own departure from Paris, themselves turning with the passage of the years into recollections of another era, and the family members who had peopled them disappeared one by one, the hierophantic quality that seemed to have suffused that epoch would only be accentuated by the chiaroscuro dappling of its ever-increasing submergence, which seemed with each new generation to expose that sinking world of souvenance to an ever more rarefied and numinous illumination.

And just as—more strongly still than the objects in the room—a gesture, a facial expression, a turn of phrase, a form of pronunciation, or the habit of borrowing an expression from another language to express an emotion unknown to the one being spoken would unite the individuals who had gathered for a moment from the distant extremities of our scattered diaspora, so too did these unconscious mannerisms and embodied practices seem to connect my aunts and uncles to their forefathers across the generations. In this way, time, at the height of these conclaves, was no longer the imperishable Platonic form of all that perishes but seemed itself to have died momentarily, succumbing to the implacable force of an evanescent but immutable gesture, an atavistic politesse, an inherited smile, or the serendipitous resuscitation of a long-forgotten toponymic or genealogical connection, each of which transcended the individuals hosting them that night and that generation, as if our brief lives were but a thought or a memory within the soul of some greater parthenogenetic organism, of the presence of which, like so many leaves blown from their tree by an autumnal wind, or the ghostly forms of murmurations of starlings seeking their roosts in the ebbing light, we were only ever partly conscious.²

When I came to study them years later, I hope that I did not unduly project my own personal experience into the memorial qualities of the masquerades of the Grassfields but that their temporal dimension became perceptible to me due to the fact that I too belonged to a community who lived with an embodied past in the absence of discursive history, one in which the course of time was not compartmentalized and distanced from the present but in its entirety always there—always with us. Writing the monograph on the Grassfields a decade after my residence there thus became a means of bringing to consciousness the memorial processes that had always obscurely guided my research: to recognize the silences of the past that live within us, the illusory nature of the unilineal conception of time that we commonly think distances us uniformly from historical epochs, and the ways that our too hastily buried ancestors survive in us while we, who cannot remember their lives, repeat their remorse in our own rites and reveries—evincing an inverse relation between our consciousness of what we remember and our repetition of it, as if, in Benjamin’s words, we had been expected on this earth (1950, sec. 2; cf. Deleuze 1968, 25; Freud 1914; Derrida 1976).³ Once these truths began to dawn on me, it became self-evident that the next step should be to seek the source from which they sprang, to return from the sunlit Grassfields to the edge of the primordial grove and to seek out the slanting rays of light that shone from the clearing I had found to illuminate the air I had always breathed: the penumbral cosmogony of my unremembered, ever-present past.

A Mediterranean Macondo

My first arrival in Oku had coincided with the enthronement of a new king (or fon) as a result of which I had been witness to months of pageantry, performance, and esoteric rituals at the palace not seen since the last royal installation in 1956. In a strange echo of this serendipitous experience, my first fieldwork in Chios coincided with the enthronement (enthrónisis) of the new bishop on the island. Soon after my arrival in November 2011, Fr. Markos—a Chiot by birth and the grandson of an erudite eponymous local priest—arrived from Athens at the local airport with his entourage to attend the ceremonies in the town square and the service in the Cathedral that would mark his official investiture. In anticipation of the event, I had gone to the square and now stood ready with the members of the island’s official marching band at the spot by the road where his convoy was expected to arrive. Standing to attention in their smart dark uniforms adorned with red piping, they formed a corridor through which the bishop would process after alighting from his car, and beyond the serried ranks of trumpet, tuba, and clarinet players stood more uniformed representatives of the island’s official organizations of scouts, nurses, firemen, police, navy, army, and clergy together with a scattering of children in traditional costumes, all holding back a tide of citizens who had turned out to hear the speeches of the gathered officials and to receive the blessings of the new bishop.

After some delay and confusion, with the episcopal cortège still nowhere to be seen, a rumor began to spread that the bishop had not come to the square as planned but had turned off on the way, driving down to the medieval fortress by the harbor. Originally built by the Genoese who first conquered the island and ran it as a trading company known as the Maóna in the thirteenth century, the fortress had been garrisoned by Ottoman forces since the cession of the island to the Sublime Porte in 1566,⁴ for whom the moated ramparts would enclose barracks, baths, bastion, mosque, cemetery, and dungeon for the next four centuries. Realizing with more ethnographic instinct than I that such a break with protocol was more likely to be worth recording than the official ceremony, my research assistant grabbed me by the arm and sprinted with me through the crowd down the hill to the portcullis, where we were confronted by a police officer barring entry to the gate and refusing to reveal anything other than that an event was taking place from which the public was barred. Not one to be lightly dismissed, my assistant pleaded with and cajoled the officer, convincing him that it was precisely for this reason that I had come all the way from London. As he hesitated, I was pulled full tilt down the precarious wooden gangway that bridged the standing water of the derelict moat and through the sepulchral twilight of the labyrinthine, tunneled entrance of the fortress rampart.

Once inside the bastion’s walls, we came across a small group of clergy standing by the fortified door to the medieval dungeon. Known to this day as the dark prison (skotiní filakí), it had been the site of the captivity of the heads of the island’s leading families and de facto rulers, the dhimoyérondes, in the months leading up to the massacre in the spring of 1822.⁵ The Ottoman garrison, uneasy in the rising tide of nationalist sentiment sweeping the region, had incarcerated them as surety that the island would not join the Greek rebellion. The patriarchs had willingly accepted the restriction of their freedom, certain as they were that they and the other islanders had no interest in rising up against the Ottoman authorities with whom they had been on very good terms for centuries. This did not, however, prevent a flotilla of agent provocateurs from sailing over from the neighboring island of Samos one night to incite a rebellion on the island. Once the ill-fated uprising had taken place and the Ottoman navy had laid siege to Chios to put it down, the systematic massacres that would take place over the coming months were compounded on the sixth of May by the public hanging in the town square outside the fort of the sixty-eight elders being held in the prison (Philip Argenti 1932, xxvii; Fustel de Coulanges [1856] 1857, 159–62; Vlasto [1840] 1913; Zolotas 1921–28). One of those men was my fourth great-grandfather, Leonidas Pandely Argenti. Another was his brother, who bore my exact name, Nicolas Pandely Argenti. In the massacres that followed, their cousin, the monk Fr. Anthimos Argenti, grandson of the Orthodox theologian Eustratios Argenti (Eustratios the Elder), was killed in the monastery of Moni Moundon that the family had helped to found on the island along with the convent of Zartoulida and to which generations of Argentides had retired as hesychasts and abbots (Sarou 1938; Vlasto 1913, 94; Ware 1964, 59–61; Moundon Codex B in Zolotas 1921–28, 1b:278, 3b:287–322). Another cousin of theirs, John Argenti (my brother’s name) had been hanged in Constantinople together with the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory on April 10, 1821, at the outset of the Greek uprising.

Upon seeing me arrive at the door and recognizing who I was, one of the men standing outside clasped me wordlessly by the arm and pushed me into the cell. As I entered the dim chamber, I first smelled the incense, then saw the candle burning on the makeshift altar, and then became conscious of the chanting and the prayers echoing in the vaulted hall. When my eyes got used to the dimness, I perceived through the myrrh-scented veil of smoke an archimandrite holding a prayer book open in front of him from which the bishop was reading and intoning elegies. In what seemed like an instant, the prayers and the dirges were over, the altar was hurriedly packed away, and the small party of clergy were making their way out of the prison and back to the town square. As they filed out, however, the bishop tarried a moment, making a pretense of adjusting his cassock, and then walked to the wall of the cell with his silver-tipped staff in hand, kissed its cold stone, crossed himself, passed through the door, and was gone. Alone now in the darkened cell, with only the smell of the incense and the memory of the chanting echoing in the empty chamber, I felt that with that kiss some part of me that I had only dimly realized had been missing since my birth had suddenly been returned, the ache of the phantom limb finally assuaged. In the miniscule chapels that dot the mastic groves and the flower-strewn olive terraces of the island, the feeling would return to me periodically afterward—a sense of the in-grafting of some essence that had been torn out before I