ΘΕ.ΦΥΛ.ΙΣ.

Η σελίδα αυτή σκοπό έχει να φιλοξενήσει πορτραίτα γυναικών δημιουργών, είτε Ελληνίδων μη-μεταφρασμένων ή ευρέως αναγνωρισμένων στο αγγλόφωνο κοινό, είτε αγγλόφωνων καλλιτεχνών και συγγραφέων που ασχολήθηκαν με την Ελλάδα, πάντα από μία φεμινιστική ή ενσυνείδητα έμφυλη οπτική.

Η φιλοτέχνηση των πορτραίτων αυτών ανήκει σ’ εσάς: σας καλούμε να υποβάλετε πρωτότυπο κείμενο 600-800 λέξεων για την αγαπημένη σας δημιουργό, προσφέροντας στο αναγνωστικό μας κοινό όχι μόνο μια πρώτη γνωριμία με την συγκεκριμένη προσωπικότητα, αλλά και τους βαθύτερους λόγους που αυτή σας κινεί το ενδιαφέρον και αποτελεί περίπτωση προς προβολή και περαιτέρω διερεύνηση μέσα στο πεδίο των σπουδών για το φύλο και την ισότητα. Στόχος μας δεν είναι ένα απλό βιογραφικό σημείωμα, αλλά μια βιωματική κατάθεση επαφής με το έργο της δημιουργού που θα φέρει το δικό σας προσωπικό στίγμα. Τα κείμενα που θα επιλέγονται από την Επιτροπή Διαχείρισης της ιστοσελίδας θα αναρτώνται σε αυτήν μέσα σε εύλογο χρονικό διάστημα.

Βιβλιογραφικές αναφορές στα κείμενά σας, όπου κρίνονται απαραίτητες, θα πρέπει να αναφέρονται παρενθετικά με όνομα συγγραφέα και αριθμό σελίδας (ή http όπου δεν υπάρχει αριθμός σελίδας) δίπλα στο σχετικό παράθεμα, π.χ. «Όπως λέει η Simone de Beauvoir (34), ‘.....’», ή « ‘.....’ (de Beauvoir 34)». Επίσης, στο τέλος του κειμένου, θα πρέπει να παρατίθεται αλφαβητικά οργανωμένη και πλήρης βιβλιογραφία ή φιλμογραφία των πηγών που χρησιμοποιήσατε, ή (και) εργογραφία της δημιουργού εάν το θέλετε. Η αναγραφή θα γίνεται με το βιβλιογραφικό σύστημα APA ή ΜLA.

Αν και το κάθε κείμενο θα υπογράφεται από το άτομο που το υπέβαλε, η Επιτροπή Διαχείρισης διαφυλάσσει το δικαίωμα επιμέλειας του επιλεγμένου κειμένου ώστε να ακολουθεί το ύφος και τους κανόνες που διέπουν την όλη ιστοσελίδα μας.

Σας ευχαριστούμε θερμά και περιμένουμε τα κείμενά σας στο cdokou[at]enl.uoa[dot]gr. 

Πορτραίτο του Μήνα

Portrait: Katerina Gogou (1940-93)

“I Siren, I pig, cedar, air, sky./ I had not one penny left, no home, no old dog to remember me and wait for me” (49): thus Gogou paints her portrait in My Name is Odyssey, the 6th of her seven slim books that established her as an inescapable personality in Greek letters before her suicide, or death by overdose, at the age of 53. Gogou’s life remains a paradox that even if one could categorize or explain away—several have tried in the past briefly, and in 2007 a very good critical biography appeared by Agape-Virginia Spyratou—one feels they shouldn’t, out of respect to the raw anti-conformism and the bloodiness of her struggle against the social demons of propriety, hypocrisy, capitalist middle-class numbness. After all, Gogou distrusts “Memory/ that viper/ with her hermaphrodite obese daughters/ the Arts—numbering seven” (Nostos, 11), as part of an established social code. Gogou spent a great part of her life as an actress and/or (co-) scriptwriter of minor but award-winning roles in various films, and half as the most uncompromisingly marginal, unaffiliated anarchist, drug-addicted poète maudite modern Greece had ever known, a “Greek Sarah Kane” as Stavros Spyropoulos calls her (13). Her poems are about being a human subject that experiences in the ultimate degree the evils of urban capitalism from the margin of her poverty, her political affiliations with Marxist anarchism in a world of right-wing backward conservativism, and her a-typical femininity in a brutally patriarchal world.

Although her attitude towards her fellow sufferers or strugglers (anarchists, junkies, prostitutes) is one of solidarity and extreme kindness, she however does not present herself as part of their world, united in misery: she suffers her marginality alone. The ones she appears to connect to more strongly are her mother and her child, for whom the façade of the unattached, a person so beaten as to become impervious to more bruising, breaks to reveal the loving, worrying, torn-apart woman who feels her responsibilities and attachments with a deep everyday genuineness. She writes in “note written the other day”: “MOMMY/ I leave you 200 drachmas to get string beans from the farmer’s market, the kind the poet speaks of because the other kind is too expensive and we can’t afford. Cook’ em with plenty of juice, so we can dunk. Have a key made for the kid too. She keeps losing them on the street. Put the one on a ribbon around her neck find one in azure color so that she doesn’t get sad… Put in a wine-glass some flowers I drew while you were sleeping. You’ll both like them.” (Distinct Felony, 39). The poem shows the earthly and complex understanding Gogou had of what it means to be a woman, subverting romantic clichés about femininity or love with the harsh necessities of existence that some times reverse the relationship of dependence between mother and child: “My home, as big as the opening of my daughter’s arms/ 4 years now homeless” (The Month of Frozen Grapes, 7). Each excerpt also demonstrating Gogou’s maverick poetic style, with its lack of formal phallogocentric structures and blending of genres, the use of everyday language or the harsh lingo of the margins, its conversational, sometimes even downright prosaic forms and tone (especially in her last collection, Nostos)—all brought together into poetry by the unmistakable rhythm of her phrase and the unerring directness and depth of her representations. It is no surprise that, while she lived, Gogou never became acknowledged, or even indulged, as a poet by the conservative establishment—she lived to please no one, not even the extreme Left which is always on the lookout for folk martyrs (Spyratou 37-40). As she says, “What I fear most of all/ is that I might become a ‘poet.’/That I might shut myself up in a room/ and gaze at the sea/ and forget./” or “that priests and academics/ might get me till it grows tiresome/ and I faggot up” (Distinct Felony, 44). So although her first book, Three Clicks Left, was translated in English by Jack Hirchman and published by Night Horn Books with great success, none of her poems ever appeared in a school anthology, or a popular canonical collection about modern Greek verse. Still, her books continue to sell by the dozens of editions and her impressive “return” in 2012 shows that healthy, unquiet elements in Greek society find in Gogou an authentic antidote to the cheap “lifestyle icons” that earmarked this nation’s systemic crisis—a crisis she had envisioned: “People jump from balconies waving their unemployment card. We’ve lived cowed for centuries of injustice. Centuries of loneliness.” The film Gia tin Apokatastasi tou Mavrou [For the Restitution of Black*], followed closely by the publication of a collection of critical texts on her, Katerina Gogou: Patision Street Up and Down, along with a CD of her poems made into songs, led to I Ran a Red Light, a 2013 play about Gogou’s tragic life/art, which was itself a timely prelude to the summer 2013 edition of a collection of fresh poems that, by her own request, had remained unpublished, Now Let’s See What You’ll Do. This fourfold comeback shows that Gogou continues to attract long after her death, haunting—as is often the poets’ fate—a wider world than she ever could manage to frequent with her living body.

By Christina Dokou

Bibliography:

Adamidou, Sophia. I Ran a Red Light. Athens: Jenny Karezi Theatre. January 2013. Dir. Korais Damatis. Starring: Jenny Kollia, Melina Vamvaka, Stelios Geranis, and Katerina Fotiadi. Play.

Boskoitis, Antonis. Katerina Gogou: Gia tin Apokatastasi tou Mavrou. Athens, 2012. Film.

Gogou, Katerina. 3 Clicks Left. Athens: Kastaniotis, 1978.

---. Distinct Felony. Athens: Kastaniotis, 1980.

---. The Wooden Coat. Athens: Kastaniotis, 1982.

---. Missing Persons. Athens: Kastaniotis, 1986.

---. The Month of Frozen Grapes. Athens: Kastaniotis, 1988.

---. My Name Is Odyssey. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2002.

---. Nostos. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2004.

---. Now Let’s See What You’ll Do. Athens: Kastaniotis, 2013.

Kordellas, Giorgos, and Angelos Sfakianakis, Patision Street Up and Down. Athens: Odos Panos, 2012.

Spyratou, Agape-Virginia. Katerina Gogou: Eros Thanatou. Athens: Vivliopelagos, 2007.

Spyropoulos, Stavros. “Tetoio atimo kokkino einai to kokkino todiko mas.” “Odos Vivliou”: Metro. 26-6-08. 13.

* “Black” is a Greek slang term for marijuana.