Read an Excerpt
Wedded to the Land?
Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis
By Mary N. Layoun Duke University Press
Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-2545-1
Chapter One
National Homongeneity and Population Exchanges: Who Belongs Where? -Greece 1922
* * *
A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning; they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these particular cultures. -M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres
My maimed generation, ... we've been erased from the map "Sakatameni mou genia"
We've endured scorn, injustice and slaughter; take with you whatever we love and let's leave for other places, refugees wherever we go. "Chronia perifronimena"
The metal poles of the bus stop awning werehot and gritty to the touch, the sunlight on the pavement blinding. The bus bound for the center of Athens worked its laborious way up the incline toward the plaza where a small knot of people stood waiting. It was late; everyone was returning home at midday; the bus would be crowded. The piles of dusty newspapers, books, and pamphlets in the shadowy interior of the archival library spoke of a fierce battle over the meaning and consequences of the "Asia Minor Catastrophe." But for the still noticeable difference in accents and idiomatic expressions in the "refugee district" of Nea Smyrni in Athens, that battle seemed to fade in the bright midday light of late summer as everyone hurried home. Yet, as the alternately heated and resigned discussions of the old men who spent their mornings at the second-floor coffee bar of the Estia Neas Smyrnis (the Nea Smyrna Center) suggested, it was a battle never quite over, never quite forgotten. Nonetheless, official history was to claim for the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923 that was the end result of the Asia Minor Catastrophe the magnificent achievement of national homogeneity. But for the Greek mainland and for the Asia Minor refugees in the aftermath of the catastrophe, that ethnoreligious cum national homogeneity was still a violently wrought utopian-or dystopian-project. And the conflictual and still potentially unsettling implications of that project are visible not only in the dusty books and pamphlets and the old records of the Estia Neas Smyrnis's archives.
Above and just to the right of the main entrance to the Estia Neas Smyrnis, the figures of two women are fixed in a mural that is almost hidden in the upper reaches of the columned portico. One, in Greek village dress, her head covered with a scarf, clutches a small child in her arms as she looks back at a man who, also in village dress, kneels to load a cannon. A young girl-child clings to the woman's skirts, also looking back at the man. To the right of the woman and two children and with her back to them (and her side to us), is a second and apparently younger woman, with uncovered head, wearing a shapeless shift and clutching her empty (childless) arms to her chest; she sits on a boulder staring out across an expanse of water, the Aegean, at Smyrna in flames.
In this visual account, Greek irredentism-the megali idea or "great idea," originating in the aftermath of the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453-and its demise are marked, if passively, by and on the figures of these two women. The first woman and her children are witness to the military preparations of the man with his cannon; the second is witness to one of the grim results of such military action: the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In fact, the man loading a cannon and the mounted horseman to his left are a visual gloss on at least two moments of military action in modern Greek history: the 1821 War for Independence against the Ottoman Empire and the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War. The figures of the watchful young mother and her children mark the transition from one military action to the other. But, for the mural that runs the extent of the entrance portico of the Estia Neas Smyrnis as for "the great idea" itself, it is the Byzantine Empire that is a privileged, originary moment. That moment is emphasized visually in its location directly above the formal main entrance to the building-and prior to the figures of the two women. Thus, with the Byzantine Empire as a focal point and between its two historically consequent poles-"the great idea" and its denouement in the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922-is constructed the national space that is the focus of this chapter, that of the Asia Minor refugees and, retrospectively at least, of post-1922 Greece as a whole.
The Estia Neas Smyrnis itself is generated by the same two moments in diaspora and mainland Greek history, "the great idea" and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The cultural center was established by (the Onassis family), for, and as a tribute to, the Greeks of Asia Minor, refugees in Greece as a result of the Greco-Turkish War. Not surprisingly, the mural on the building's façade includes the prehistory that generated the building itself as it generated the district in which the Center is situated. For Nea Smyrni (New Smyrna) is not only a district of Athens, one of many in which the Asia Minor refugees were settled after 1922. It is also a citation of "old Smyrna," the coastal city of Smyrna/Izmir in present-day Turkey. But that old Smyrna, as the mural itself illustrates, is irrevocably distant and beyond reach, consumed in flames under the mournful gaze of the young refugee woman on the opposite shore of mainland Greece.
The mural of the Estia Neas Smyrnis as it renders the cultural configuration of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and of its aftermath for mainland Greece, for its indigenous citizens, and for the refugees who resettled there is a suggestive point of departure for the reconsideration of this particular historical moment of nationalism in crisis and for a more general national concern with assigning the people(s) of the nation to designated spaces and containing them therein. In the mural's ambiguous configuration of the national narrative, the figures of the two women are crucial markers for decisive moments in that narrative. Their figures are positioned as boundary markers in a national project of impossible containment. The situation of their bodies as boundary suggests, even invokes, the bodies of women as precisely that which will be overrun, violated, conquered. It is the literal and metaphoric functions of such gendered figures and the ways they crucially inform the shape and redirection of Greek national narratives on which I focus here. For the workings and aftermath of the Asia Minor Catastrophe are a suggestive elaboration of the problematic configuration of nation, gender, and culture outlined in more general terms in the introduction. That catastrophe and its aftermath exemplify the violence wrought in the name of national "belonging," the simultaneous coercion and persuasion in the redefinition and reassertion of the national project. It is perhaps an understatement to refer to it as the construction of a "fearful symmetry." But it is equally, in the very social and cultural disjunctures of nationalism in crisis, in the fierce contradictions of that fearful symmetry that critical perspectives on and perhaps even alternatives to the national project might be discernible.
The landing of Greek troops in Smyrna on 15 May 1919 that launched the latter-day attempt at coercive military performance of "the great idea" was the occasion of a triumphant proclamation by the prime minister of Greece at the time, Eleftherios Venizelos. Perhaps even then, and certainly in retrospect, that proclamation suggests some of the fierce contradictions and ambiguities that underlie the "Asia Minor expedition" (e mikrasiatiki ekstratia) and the nationalist ideological configuration that propelled it. Eyewitness accounts of the reading of Venizelos's proclamation (he himself was not present) tell of flower-strewn streets, rosewater in the air, tearful eyes, waving Greek flags. But, persuasive and powerful as Venizelos's statement was, it equally maps the crucial and ominous problems of official Greek politics of the day.
The opening of Venizelos's proclamation-"The fullness [or, fulfillment] of time has arrived"-resonates with biblical reference. In addition, and more to the immediate political point, Venizelos's opening line invokes "the great idea," itself a notion fraught with largely Byzantine images of Christian resurrection and salvation. The "great idea" was, more exactly, the quasi-mythological proposition that the lands and (Christian or Greek Orthodox) people of the Byzantine Empire, defeated by the Ottomans with the capture of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1453, would one day, in the "fullness of time," be "redeemed." Various associated folk stories and popular prophetic and apocalyptic beliefs told of divine intervention that would liberate the Orthodox/Christian community from Ottoman rule. But if the megali idea had been a variously fore-grounded element of popular culture from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, subsequent to the success of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire (1821-1828), "the great idea" was reconstructed as state policy of the newly formed Greek kingdom. From a rallying cry for national unity against Ottoman rule, it became the justification for the expansionist claims of the new Greek state. In the Greek National Assembly of 1844, on 15 January, Yiannis Kolletis effectively argued for "the great idea"-the term itself, though not the sentiment, one he purportedly coined-as official Greek government policy. Subsequently, "the great idea" became an increasingly contentious component of Greek political life. It is an irony of sorts that, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the expansionist aims of "the great idea" became increasingly the policy of the cosmopolitan, "liberal" politician Eleftherios Venizelos, the hero of the Cretan revolution against the Ottoman Empire, and his followers. The conservative royalist opposition insisted on a "small but honorable" Greece.
Apart from the mainland, though the Greeks of Asia Minor presumably consented to the goals of and their own incorporation into "the great idea," that consent was scarcely unambiguous or unremarked upon. The newspapers and journals of the Greek communities under Ottoman rule are full of debates about "the great idea" as (mainland) Greek state policy and its implications for Greeks of Asia Minor. But since at least the first decade of the twentieth century, the calculated and increasingly fierce policies directed against resident minority communities in the Ottoman Empire had their inevitable effect. Newspapers debated the wisdom and implications of "the great idea" for the Greeks, and Christians in general, of Asia Minor. But they also carried accounts of the forced deportations inland and the ethnic killings that were ever more frequent as the Ottoman rulers attempted to ensure their territorial control, their status as a modern state, and to cooperate with the advice, methods, and aims of the Germans in the region. In that context, the rhetorical and policy goal of the "redemption" of the land and (Greek) peoples of Asia Minor cast the Greeks of Asia Minor as the putative object of the irredentist scheme. By September 1922, however, and even earlier for some, for the Greeks of the mainland and the Asia Minor Greeks-become-refugees, the utter failure if not the inherent contradictions of "the great idea" was unavoidable. In the impoverished and constricted mainland Greek state, the Asia Minor Greeks now found themselves the objects of no little hostility and discrimination from those mainland Greeks who were presumably their ethnic and religious brothers. The rhetoric of an expansionist nationalism had ingloriously collapsed in on itself. And the first objects of that collapse were those who, only months earlier, had been the objects of that expansionist "redemption" itself.
It is in this context that the Asia Minor Greeks-turned-refugees in their "homeland" resituated themselves rhetorically and culturally, if not socially, in relation to the hegemony of the mainland Greek state. From within the post-1922 fiasco of "the great idea" and its irredentist scheme, and on the very terrain of that fiasco, the popular and literary culture of the Asia Minor refugees began to formulate a redefinition of the refugee as national-that is, Greek-subject. As the mural of the Estia Neas Smyrnis bears witness, that redefinition circles back around the frozen history of 1453 that is the pretext for "the great idea" to an ancient Ionian past.
In reiterating an ancient rather than a Byzantine or even Christian genealogy, refugee culture constructs a citizen-subject position for its constituents within the mainland Greek state as the "true"-though extraterritorial-historical origins of that state. It asserts itself and the refugees who embody it as the newly restored link with the classical Greek past, not coincidentally the same classical past that was so valorized by the Western European "great powers." To appreciate the implications of that gesture, we might circle back ourselves for a moment to the period before the defeat of the Greek bid for "redemption" of lost lands, to the moment when "the fullness of time" seemed to some at hand.
On 14 May 1919, amidst great nationalist fanfare and heady proclamations about "redeeming" the Byzantine Empire, a Greek army of twenty thousand men landed at the port city of Smyrna in Asia Minor under the protection of Allied warships. Their goal, specified by the Allied Peace Conference, was to "prevent the slaughter of the Christian population of Asia Minor." But of equal if not greater significance, according to Venizelo's proclamation of occupation, the Greek Army was to "ensure order" or, though this is nowhere stated explicitly in Venizelos's proclamation, to contain the rising Turkish national liberation movement and Italian expansionist claims in the region. For their services, the Greek state would be granted interim control of the Smyrna region and, potentially, further permanent territory by the Allies. The unabashed irredentism of Greece's ruling liberal politicians and their fervent desire to be a part, even if only a small part, of the imperial club of Europe appeared to be on the verge of consummation.
The decision to send Greek troops to the west coast of Asia Minor, though debated variously for many months, had been taken in much haste by the Great Powers-England, France, and the United States-and Greece. On 6 May 1919, scarcely two weeks prior to the actual landing of Greek troops, the so-called Council of Four met and reached their agreement. Subsequent to the 6 May decision, England's Lloyd George repeatedly urged Greece to invade immediately, before Italy, excluded from the Council of Four's agreement and with its own interests and claims in the region, discovered exactly what was afoot. But in addition to the Italian threat, there was some unease that France and the United States, suspicious of British plans for dominance in the Middle East, might waver in their support for the Greek invasion. In retrospect, such machinations seem unsurprising; in the first decades of the twentieth century, Greece's maneuver-a small and peripheral country invading another on behalf of the major imperial powers-was unwittingly paradigmatic.
Clearly, the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 and the catastrophe in which it culminated were not simply the result of a small regional war between two minor powers but had distinctly wider causes, implications, and goals. Even before World War I had officially ended in November 1918, France and England signed an agreement dividing between them the vast oil-rich territories of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and North Africa. At the same time in Asia Minor itself-in response to the growing misery of the countryside, the increasing political persecution by the Ottoman state of both the urban and the rural populations, and the imperialist schemes that Europe was implementing-a Turkish popular movement arose in opposition both to Ottoman rule and to European designs on the region. Leadership of the movement was quickly assumed by the young, educated, urban bourgeoisie, of whom one of the most able was Mustapha Kemal. Within days after the Greek occupying army landed in Smyrna and began its march inland, Kemal assumed control of the movement and began to organize its resistance to the invasion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wedded to the Land? by Mary N. Layoun Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
