REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES: GREECE: Day Six

Blue purple acacia tree flowers carpet the sidewalks around downtown Athens. Bitter oranges hung temptingly (too bad you can't eat them). Jasmin bushes spread their aroma as I walk by on the narrow sidewalks trying to avoid bumping into an open window or a car's side mirror. Most everything seems narrow here. Sometimes even downright claustrophobic. Like my mother's neighborhood. If I stretch my arms long enough from the balcony I can touch the little boy playing on his balcony across the street. Most of us walk on the street instead, running the risk of being hit by a car or motorcycle. I don't like to walk in the middle of the street. Mother insists it is the only way to go.

In the afternoon Maria takes me to another neighborhood near downtown with zig-zag streets and old, peeling buildings with old fabric shops and new, trendy cafes. Anything old is new again. Some try to rehab, remodel, make old, abandoned spaces habitable again. One large space is referred to as "the chickens place." I think the owner raises chickens but no, there are large paper-mache colorful chickens hanging from the ceiling. Underneath the chickens large tables accomodate customers reading, drinking, working on their computers. Huge paper-mache chickens!

Later we go to a large cafe behind a bookstore and enjoy a respite from the walk. Many of these spots open cafes and bars in the back, away from the noise and fumes of the streets. A variety of plants add to the spirit of "green" that they try to develop. Except, of course, for the cigarettes. Everyone smokes. Everywhere. Inside and out. So much for rules and regulations! And the pedestrians have no right of way. Cross the street at your own risk. And the roaring of motorcycles wakes me up in the middle of the night. But I complain too much probably. I don't know. What do you think?

REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES: GREECE: Day Five

The Acropolis Museum is very white. And expansive. Marble everywhere and, where the marble is missing, cast to reproduce what was stolen or broken. The Parthenon's friezes and pediments, the sculptures, were all painted bright colors: blue, red, purple, yellow. They are now all white. It is impressive and slightly challenging to walk into the museum because the ground (the floor?) is glass over ruins that have been left semi-excavated. Mom gets dizzy on the transparent floor and holds on to my arm. Worth a visit folks! Come. But I must quote the immortal words of Paul's mother after her visit to Athens: "too many steps and everything is broken." Love that!

The evening is another surprise today: first a magnificently quiet film from Argentina called "The Acacia Trees." Absolutely delightful, poignant, left me speechless. Maria and I went to the Palas Cinema in Pangrati to see it. The Palas was built in 1925 and nothing has changed since then. It's like walking into a time warp. And at intermission - because movies here have intermission - we go to the "cafe/smoking room/WC" and buy chocolate cookies. A glass plate with slices of cake seems to have been there since 1925. The owner - a man in his 80s - knows everything about films and brings independent and artsy films to this corner of Athens. Unfortunately there are only five people in the audience. More Athenians should patronize this theater. Our initial plan was to see the film in the Summer theatre: on the roof, outdoors. But that showing starts at 10:45 pm. These Athenians never sleep.

After the movie we head to Syllabi Cafe and Bookstore in a narrow street. We are the only customers at this pretty place, small, with books and excellent music. The owner - Philipos - plays tango music for me and then brings out his guitar to sing a song for someone that Maria and he know. What an enchanting melody! Maria calls the woman for whom the song was written and we all listen. The woman by the way lives in Crete. (An interesting love story between a married priest and a young woman.) (I think they had to go to Crete after that.) Philipos is a sweet man who knows his books and his music. I must return some morning to sip coffee and read. Maria reminds me that there are some kind people here too and some quaint places to visit.

She's right: I must get out of the house and explore. Explore. After all - what kind of travel writer am I if I don't explore?

REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES: Greece: Day Four

Monday is cloudy again.  Isn't Greece supposed to be sunny all the time?  Another quandary. 

I sleep late as usual here.  The hours are turned upside down.  Noon is morning, evening is afternoon.  No matter.  When in Rome...(or is it when in Athens?)

Today I venture out on my own: going to meet Maria for a long stroll in the center.  I am proud to say that I buy the trolley tickets, get off on the right corner (both times), and find my place.  Athens is not an easy city to navigate, especially downtown and some of the neighborhoods: very narrow streets with even narrower sidewalks that are either broken or populated by motorcycles, trash bins, construction sites, cats, and even cars sometimes. No matter. The bitter orange trees are delightful to see as are the acacia trees with their bright blue/purple flowers.  Legend has it that when the Germans occupied Athens during the war they went crazy eating the oranges.  Note: they are not edible.  Go figure those Germans...

Maria takes me to a cafe behind the Numismatic Museum where quiet reigns.  It reminds of the cafe in the Museo de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires.  We talk for a long time about our lives before setting off for a walk towards Exarhia.  We stop at the Goethe Institute, a fantastic bookstore/cafe called Free Thinking Zone where the owner tells me that John Cass from The Chicago Tribune had written a nice article about her store a few months ago.  Exarhia is an old neighborhood filled with graffiti and young people dreaming about a better future.  We walk by a small square where junkies are shooting up (seriously - in the open) next to the Law School.  After a few more sights we settle in Alexandrino Cafe for a beer and bruschetta.  We make plans for the next day's visit to the Acropolis Museum.  On the way back to the trolley stop another group of junkies starts fighting and chasing each other (right in front of the university).  No matter.  We watch and keep walking. 

REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES:Greece: Day Three

I scan the news online, I look at my FB page, I see the turmoil in Chicago: heads split open, thousands of marchers on Michigan Avenue, I want to be there too. But - alas - I am here.

In the morning Mom and I go to St. Lazarus Square for a cappuccino and the newspaper. A fountain stands in the center of the square surrounded by cafes and restaurants. Finally a sunny and warm day brings everyone out this Sunday. Where is the crisis?

Transistor Bistro's party is a delightful surprise. Katerina plays an eclectic selection of tunes from Lila Downs to Mozart and from Rufus Wainwright to Bee Gees. New and old friends come by. My friend Evelyn and her husband appear suddenly behind me. OMG! I met Evelyn in 1971 when I first arrived in Chicago. That's a long time! She moved back to Greece in the 80s which means I only see her sporadically. Mom doesn't even recognize them. Who are they? she says. Mom, I say, it's Zach and Evelyn. They look familiar she says. Finally she figures it out. We laugh.

Maria, Samantha, Chrisa, my cousin Andoni with his family help me feel welcome. We talk (more like scream since the music is kinda-loud), we drink sangria, white wine, beer. I eat bruschetta and mom orders linguini. We dance some, more people arrive (not for me). Where is the crisis?

The discotheque in an old section of Athens attracts 20 somethings who drink and smoke (a prominently NO SMOKING sign displayed above the bar notwithstanding). Graffiti decorates the walls all around the cafe, impossibly narrow streets parked with cars (how do people drive and park here is a total mystery). Where is the crisis?

Around 11:30 pm we take a taxi, come home. I go to sleep around 1 in the morning. I am not used to these hours. I am not used to getting up at 10 in the morning. Hours are turned upside down here. Yet people are out trying to enjoy every minute. I will too.

REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES: GREECE: Day Two

The rain subsides but the clouds remain.  Not an ideal environment for my psyche.  I need sun.  Can't sleep well yet.  Must be the change, the jet lag, whatever...

I take a walk to withdraw some Euros from the ATM.  Streets are narrow in this corner of Athens.  Crowded with cars, motorcycles, I can hardly walk by.  Shop signs scream SALE, EVERYTHING 20% OFF.  Many shops vacant, empty, dusty.  Signs of trouble are evident.  I find an ATM near a spot where African men sell bags and purses on the sidewalk.  Cafes filled with men and women smoking (smoking has been banned for a few years) and drinking coffee this Saturday morning.  I make way back home without much dillydallying lest my mother worry I am lost.

Noisy.  I can hear people talking in the apartments across the street, next door.  Motorcycles, dogs, trucks selling or buying with megaphones.  It's a miracle anyone sleeps here.  A woman's plaintive cries from next door upsets me but my mother assures me she's ok. 

In the evening I go to a restaurant in Exarhia - a funky neighborhood - with my cousin Katerina.  Rififi is the name of restaurant and I tell the waiter that was the first movie I saw when I was about 5 or 6.  We eat stuffed mushrooms, green salad, feta cheese covered in honey and sesame seeds, drink white wine.  And we talk and talk.  She tells me her woes and dreams.  I offer support and encouragement.  I come home after midnight. 

The hours here are confusing: midday meals are eaten around 1 or 2, afternoon is after 8, and night starts at 10.  Naps are obligatory.  I finally sleep well.

REPORT FROM THE TRENCHES: GREECE: Day One

It was raining when the plane landed in Athens yesterday.  Who knew it rained here!  I knew I should've brought my raincoat.  I was blamed for bringing the rain with me from Chicago, the USofA.  It was raining cats and dogs as a matter of fact but, never mind.  Fortunately Maria and John were waiting for me.  It's always heartening to see friendly faces when you arrive in a strange land.  They drove me to my mother's apartment and left.

It takes me a while to get comfortable and used to a new place (even if I have been here many times before).  The dark cloudy sky didn't help matters.  Weather affects me in a major way.  I need sun!  Warmth.  But, never mind.  I'm here and must adapt. 

Today is Saturday, the second day.  Yesterday's biggest accomplishment was getting the Internet going.  My cousin Katerina bought a USB stick to access the Internet and I spent a couple of hours figuring out how to do it and registering and logging in.  The Greek instructions didn't make matters easier.  But, never mind, I did it and here I am.  In the evening Maria, mom and I went to a nifty cafe called Aerostato.  Noisy, kind of smoky (even though you cannot smoke indoors) but fun nevertheless.  Yelled at each other for a couple of hours about politics, life, art (yelled because it was noisy, not because we were angry).  Drank wine, ate little sausages and cheese.  Came home.  Couldn't fall asleep for a long time even though I was exhausted.  But, never mind.  Here I am this morning.  My first blog from the trenches. 

EMERGENCY POEMS / POEMAS DE URGENCIA

Emergency Poems / Poemas de urgencia

Beatriz Badikian-Gartler

Neither here nor there I stand, one foot

on this side of the border, one on the other. Were

I to have three more feet, I'd easily place them on

three more lands. Neither here nor there, where

am I? And the people say: you are everywhere, multiple,

you are fortunate. But I respond: 'many' carries

the danger of becoming 'none.' Invisible I stand.

                I am Latina and an immigrant: born in Argentina and reared there by immigrant parents: Greek mother, Armenian father. From the moment I arrived in the United States at the age of nineteen, I have had to deal with the same questions day in and day out: "What do you feel more, Greek or Argentine?" "You're not really Latina, are you?" "What kind of name is Badikian? It doesn't sound Hispanic." "Argentines are not really Hispanic; they're very European, aren't they?" I have been forced to choose between nationalities, forced to explain the apparent contradictions of my background, and, when I have answered naturally that I'm Argentine, I have had to defend this self-definition. My explanation: my identity was formed in a Latin American country with all its cultural components: language, customs, foods, music, traditions, the small things that are crucial in the development of the larger constructs. My intellectual and cultural formation can be credited to such figures as Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Alfonsina Storni, and Julio Cortázar as well as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain, and Louisa May Alcott, among many others. I danced to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, listened to Mercedes Sosa and Astor Piazzolla, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. The late sixties was the heyday of civil rights and peace movements, revolutions and flower power, and Argentina was no exception to those worldwide events.  

                I remember October 1968, the one-year anniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, my last year in high school. That afternoon my classmates and I staged a pegada: surreptitiously affixing small stickers on desks, walls, and toilet stalls, celebrating his life and mourning his death: a courageous act given the military dictatorship had just been installed a year earlier. After about an hour, when the administrators found the stickers, they immediately stopped all classes and gathered the entire school in the yard. The principal demanded that those responsible step forward. We stood for a long time in silence. No one moved. Finally, they gave up and sent us all home for the day. Everyone knew who had done the audacious deed but no one said anything. We were a bold and radical group of girls. I learned from them how to stand up to injustice, how to take a risk for the benefit of society, how to defy authority when that authority is oppressive .

                I am also a poet. I have always been a poet and always will be. Over the years I have heard the same question: why write? Why poetry? Mining my memory for the answers I return to the beginning: to those high school years and beyond. 

                                                                ***

      1968: For the last five years I have been keeping a journal. Since I cannot afford to buy all the books I would like to own, I borrow them from friends and libraries and copy down my favorite poems in the notebook. Then I illustrate its margins with drawings of peace signs and flowers, and photographs from newspapers and magazines depicting hippies, anti-war demonstrations, race riots, and rock concerts. When I am lonely or bored I read these poems out loud in my room in front of the mirror. Such a simple pleasure! And when I eventually write my own poems, these other verses flood my mind and spill themselves in bits and pieces on the paper.  

      

          I am going to Academias Pitman to learn how to type. It is December, summer in Buenos Aires and I have just graduated from high school. At this point, my mother believes it will be useful to know typing. "You can always be a secretary if you can't get into college," she says, enrolling me in a three-month class to learn "the blind method."

                Academias Pitman is a secretarial school where young women learn shorthand, bookkeeping, typing, and other useful skills. On the first day of class we are given a handbook with instructions and told to take our seats at a long wooden table where manual typewriters are placed every few feet. Eventually I come to enjoy being in this big room where, surrounded by other young women, I learn how to type on big, bulky machines, black and silver, with keys that stand high. I type each letter for several pages before going on to the next one. The "a"s and "z"s and "q"s make the little finger on my left hand hurt. But I persevere. 

                After a few weeks father brings home a used typewriter for me to practice on. When 1969 rolls around I write my first poem on the typewriter: "Poema No. 1."

                I am sitting at the kitchen table, next to a long wall of windows, typing. It is very hot in that room because the sun shines in all day and air conditioners are a foreign luxury. I am so focused on what I'm doing however, that I barely feel the heat. In this way I spend my summer afternoons practicing typing and writing poems. After "Poema No. 1" comes "Poema No. 2," then "Poema No. 3," and so on. I keep the poems in a manila folder, certain that no one will ever read them. They are one page in length, as long as the sheets of paper I have: my self-imposed limit. They describe the world around me, my house, my neighbors, but mostly, how I feel and what I want out of life. At eighteen everything should be possible yet my poems speak of loneliness, alienation, an existential sadness difficult to explain. They also speak about flowers and trees, the stars and the moon, music, and love, and about other poems. 

                In the warm kitchen my fingers press down hard on the typewriter keys while Mother sits outside, on the stoop, with the neighbors, trying to catch a cool breeze. Father is not at home. Most days he comes late in the evening and leaves early in the morning. On the rare occasions when he is home, he sits in the bedroom watching television, the oscillating fan murmuring noisily. He doesn't like to mingle with our neighbors and their chatty gossip. My poems include everybody: Father's moods, Mother's complaints, the neighbors' funny ways. I fancy myself a chronicler of this place and this time: the end of 1968, the beginning of 1969, Buenos Aires, the world. 

           It is March, 1969. Typing class has ended. It is time to find a job. "College can wait," mother says. In the mornings I fill out applications, take typing tests, and go to interviews. In the afternoons I come home, to the kitchen no longer unbearably warm, and write poems until suppertime. Less than a year later we leave Buenos Aires. Against my own wishes I have to follow my parents to the United States, put on hold my plans to attend college and study philosophy and literature. "We'll work hard for a few years, save our money, and then return," father promises. 

                                                                         ***

        1970: Shortly after arriving in Chicago I go to work at Western Electric as a wiring technician. Fresh out of high school in Buenos Aires, working in a factory on the southwest side of Chicago was the last thing I ever expected to be doing at nineteen years of age. I'm supposed to be attending the University of Buenos Aires and studying literature and philosophy. Instead I spend eight hours a day, five days a week, inside a gigantic warehouse where the only natural light barely squeezes through small, square windows near the ceiling. Holding a wiring gun all day and firing tiny coils into the insides of telephones in that vast, dark place is not the life I have imagined for myself, the life of the poet, the life of the student and scholar. That life seems so far away at this moment. And it seems impossible to attain. Ever. 

        It takes me almost ten years to gather the courage to say to myself and to my parents that I don't want to work full time anymore, that I want to go to college. I enter the University of Illinois at Chicago in the winter quarter of 1977. Life is beginning to change.

                                                                  ***

                1979: In June the first issue of La Voz is published at the Centro Cultural Latino Americano Rafael Cintron Ortiz at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The editorial on the first page explains: "it is . . . amazing that the Latino population of this university, having obtained recognition after long struggles and created cultural and study centers, does not possess publications that could allow them to reach other ethnic and Latino [sic] sectors, to express their points of view, problems, plans and objectives." Jorge Gilbert, a Chilean professor, is the center's first coordinator and publisher of La Voz, a typed and mimeographed newsletter that includes articles on Mexican oil, the crisis in Nicaragua, the struggle in Vieques, undocumented workers in the U.S., the Middle East crisis, and many other issues. It also contains poetry by Ernesto Cardenal, Socorro Loza, Nicolas Guillen, and me. 

        From 1979 to 1980 I work at the Latin American Studies Program as a secretary while attending classes at the university. In this way I meet Gilbert, who advocates the creation of a publication. Together and with the assistance of students and other faculty members we publish, first La Voz, and the following year Ecos, a printed Latin American literary journal. The title of the publication is my idea, after the name of a similar publication in my high school in Buenos Aires. This slim volume of twenty-three photocopied, stapled pages is the beginning of several years of publication of this journal that eventually is taken over by Carlos Cumpián and MARCH/Abrazo Press.

                                                                          ***

        1981: In the fall I make the momentous decision to "become a poet." I decide that writing will be my mission in life, my job, my contribution to the world. I credit the artist Judy Chicago with the impetus for this resolution. 

        Chicago's monumental art work "The Dinner Party" is being exhibited in Chicago. Volunteers are needed to guide people through the maze of artifacts, to talk about the diverse sections of the exhibit, to offer information and to clean up at the end of each day. I join the collective of women (and some men) who work at the exhibit and, in the process, I learn about women's history. I learn so many things I never knew before, things I was never taught in school. Amazed at the beautiful artwork that Judy Chicago and her staff have produced, I decide that I want to do something too. I want to contribute in some way to society, to leave a legacy for the future. But how? I don't know how to throw a pot or to weave. I can't paint very well nor embroider. But I can write. As a matter of fact, I have been writing for over ten years. That's it! I decide to be a writer, a poet, and to take myself seriously. 

                                                                     ***

        1982: I join a writing workshop led by Sandra Cisneros and Reggie Young. The workshop, called "City Songs," meets every Saturday at Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center on Milwaukee Avenue and Damen sometime between noon and four in the afternoon. Every week a different guest writer visits us and talks about writing, poetry, publishing, and leaves us a writing assignment to be workshopped the following week. Some of the guest writers are David Hernández, Carlos Cumpián, Salima Rivera, William Bradford, and Sterling Plumpp. The small grant Cisneros and Young received is used to pay a small honorarium to the guest writers and to purchase copies of an anthology of poetry for the students. The workshop ends with two final readings on April 24, one in the afternoon at Ruiz Belvis and another in the evening at Cross Currents. Some of the readers that evening are Sandra Cisneros, Reggie Young, Salima Rivera, Joe Roarty, Margarita Lopez Flores, Gregorio Huerta, Yolanda Santiago, and Lalo Cervantes.

        After the workshop ends some of us keep meeting to work on our writing and to socialize. Also, we're invited to read around the city for diverse groups and causes that need to raise funds: Central American human rights, Latino student groups. In this manner, we form a core group that eventually becomes the group that organizes the Galeria Quique readings and later publishes Emergency Tacos. We often read at a bar in Wicker Park called Get Me High Lounge. These readings are the seed that eventually blossom into the Poetry Slam in Uptown hosted by Marc Smith.

        Galeria Quique or Kiki is a monthly gathering of writers, painters, musicians and the general public in Enrique Cisneros's loft in Printers Row in 1983-84, just as the area is becoming trendy. The first gathering takes place on December 3 with a reading by Cisneros, Cortez, Cumpián, Niño, and me as well as music with guitarist Carlos Cisneros. 

That summer I resign from my full time job as housing counselor and go to work typing, filing, bookkeeping for José González, a visual artist instrumental in the creation and development of the Latino art scene in Chicago, having founded MARCH, the Movimiento Artistico Chicano. In later years, the organization develops into MARCH/Abrazo Press under the direction of Carlos Cumpián, a publishing house that publishes my first chapbook Akewa is a Woman in 1983.

                                                                       ***

        1987-1994: After seven years I return to the University of Illinois at Chicago to pursue a graduate degree in writing. I read, write, publish. I also teach composition and writing in English. My presence and ability in a language that clearly isn't my native tongue reinforces the principle to the students that you can do it too, no matter how foreign and difficult this language feels right now. Non-native speakers, especially Latino/a students, identify with me, finding a sense of comfort and safety that encourages learning. Native speakers also learn to abandon preconceived notions of foreigners, immigrants, those of us who speak with an accent. When I teach African-American literature, the black students who often make up the majority of the class, if not the entirety, see me as an ally who can speak about these writings with knowledge and affection, who is (in their own words) one of us. As Henry Louis Gates said, it is more important to identify with the other than to single out the other's identity. 

        

        As my doctoral dissertation I produce a book-length collection of poems: Mapmaker. The collection includes poems in Spanish, old poems, new poems. It is the culmination of twenty years of writing. It includes a prologue poem by Sandra Cisneros. A few years later I reissue this collection with a few new poems: Mapmaker Revisited: New and Selected Poems. This book takes me places. It becomes my signature, my presentation, my identification card. I have achieved a milestone in my writing career. I can legitimately call myself a poet. And I am also a professor now, a doctor in literature. Yet life in Chicago as a Latina does not change that drastically, that quickly.

                                                                 ***

                1997: I walk into a fancy boutique in my neighborhood to browse. As I see a wallet that interests me, I ask the young female clerk if it comes in other colors. I speak in grammatically-correct English, albeit with an accent that signals me as a non-native. Her response is "sí" (yes). At first I am confused. I expect her to answer me in English and the word see doesn't fit the question. Soon I realize she is speaking to me in Spanish, not to mention loudly. I am immediately uncomfortable, having been singled out in this manner. All eyes in the shop turn to me. When I question her, she claims that she sensed I spoke Spanish. When I wonder if she does that to every customer, she answers, "Sure." I ask to hear it in other tongues but she confesses, "You got me, I lied." As I am paying for my purchase the clerk proclaims that her favorite music is salsa and names half a dozen musical groups I never heard of. I try to change the conversation to the sweet smelling candles on the counter and the beautiful silver clocks in the window but she relentlessly returns to the topic confiding that she has just bought a Julio Iglesias tape. I can't wait to leave, to stop being targeted. On my way out, she notices my feet and says, "They're small: what size are they? Five?" When I respond, "Seven," she can't believe it. As I am walking home I realize that I felt obligated to buy something not to be thought of as cheap or poor. I realize I have internalized her stereotypes, her prejudices. I haven't been able to step into that shop since that incident. 

                                                                        ***

        1998: I stand in front of the post office window to ask a question. The clerk insists in answering "sí" to all my questions although I ask them in English. Then he wants to know where I am from. When I answer Argentina, his response is "Oh! The land of Crocodile Dundee." I correct him, explaining that Crocodile Dundee is from Australia, not Argentina. As I leave the post office I think: "he is not only prejudiced but also ignorant. What a deadly combination!" This experience drives home the concept that prejudice is a form of ignorance. It is not the lack of knowledge that concerns me here, but the unwillingness to learn and to accept others as they are without emphasizing our differences. 

                                                                  ***

        2000: During a day-long workshop at a recent academic convention I sit among twenty colleagues, teachers of writing and literature in English. Once more I am the only one with an accent, the only one who did not grow up nor go to school in the U.S. I am perceived as different and told so in subtle ways. My accent draws attention as does my personal writing during the workshop exercises. For a short time I am celebrated and exoticised; then, for the rest of the day, my comments and suggestions are politely ignored. I am invisible once again.

                                                                     ***

        Forty years later I am still writing poems. Some are longer than one page, some shorter, most of them in English now, poems that speak of this new world I live in: Chicago, the United States, the end of the century. And, although they sound and look different, a certain melancholia still envelops them, a sadness understandable to those familiar with the nostalgia for a home left behind. I realize that writing poems is like having a friend who never leaves you, a friend who is always there when you need her. That is how I started to write and why.