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In numerous publications over the last three decades, I have traced the rhizomatic aspects of international migration, with reference to themes of community and identity, the delineation of ethnocultural and intergenerational differences, political influences and practices in the control of heterogeneous populations and the struggle for economic and symbolic capital (Bottomley 1998 ; 1992). The metaphor of the `rhizome’ is useful, designating connections, heterogeneity, multiple entry points, and the recognition that movements of territorialization and reterritorialization are always `caught up in each other’ (Deleuze 1993 : 32). This rhizomatic imaginary is central to the work of the great Caribbean writer, Edouard Glissant, who described the Caribbean as “terre d’enracinement et d’errance” (Britton, 1990 : 23), including both linear and lateral connections, roots as well as routes. In Glissant’s work, the Caribbean is a multiple series of relationships, within which people negotiate specific aspects of identity and difference. His own writings explore, for example, the use of sound, rhythm and concrete images in Creole, creating ambiguities and resistance within a language imposed by the colonisers. My own research has developed within a framework that constantly interrelates countries of emigration and immigration and processes of intercultural communication - a framework described by one reviewer as “intellectually ancestral to the more recently developed theoretical framework of transnationalism” (Ho, 1999 : 435-439). In fact, transnational studies have paid particular attention to economic, political and national interests, noting the simultaneous growth of globalizing processes and “the need to reconceptualize the landscapes of group identity” (Basch, Glick Schiller, Szanton Blanc, 1994 : 49). Especially in the case of migrants, “transnational processes are located within the life experiences of individuals and families, making up the warp and woof of daily activities, concerns, fears and achievements” (ibid : 50). Transnational migration and diasporic activities are central to these landscapes, but the formation of group and individual identities is always a work in progress, cross-hatched by politics, policies, material social relations and what Edward Said has described as “contrapuntal histories”, that : “take into account all sorts of spatial or geographical and rhetorical practices – inflections, limits, constraints, intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions... all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography”(Said, 1993 : 386). In historical terms, of course, the nation state and ethnonationalisms are relatively recent, forged by compression and ideological reconstruction of polyethnic populations who are now being reconfigured in the transnational moment (Verdery, 1996). This often violent process draws on imagery, myth and history to reconstruct purified ethnic communities that include diasporic populations and demand allegiance to ethno-national ideals. There is a growing literature on what Benedict Anderson described as “long distance nationalism” which can promote a “citizenshipless participation” by emigrants and their offspring in an `imagined Heimat – now only fax-time away” (1992 : 13). But the nation-state model always required uniformity (identity as sameness) within a shared national imaginery that occluded difference, together with the narrative knowledges of the undifferentiated Other (Lyotard, 1959). In Greek, “History in general”, i.e. official History, is I istoria, whereas the stories of people are istories, usually including quarrels or differences of opinion, the recognition of alterity. These narratives readily surface in creative work, and clearly evoke recognition across a wide range of audiences, transcending formally designated ethnicities. Here I will focus on trans-ethnic creative work. My aim is to go beyond the delineation of a specific ethnic community “landscape” as represented in versions of ethno-nationalism (Istoria) to examine the istories interwoven within such a discourse. Moreover, I will argue that these istories, themes and topoi (places) have meaning for people beyond a specific ethnic community. I propose to use the over-used term `community’ in a different sense here, related to Victor Turner’s concept of communitas, whereby people recognize a shared humanity rather than role playing and boundary demarcation, and symbols may reflect not structure but forms of liminality and ambiguity (Turner, 1982). A similar version of communitas is present in the arts, religion and literature, as a kind of counterpoint to the structured dimensions of State politics and the imagined communities of ethnonationalisms. Communitas can link locality with the global while establishing interpersonal communication in situ by lifting the imagination beyond the confines of the present and identifying with some part of the experience of people formally defined as “different”. This statement is an over-simplification of a complex process, but my interest here is in the polyvocal and polythetic aspects of creative work that inform transcultural and transnational identification. In the Australian context, the ethnocultures of multiculturalism are increasingly otiose, as the population resolutely intermarries and reproduces heterogeneity. According to Australia’s foremost expert on such matters, Dr Charles Price, at least 60 % of Australians, the fastest growing category of the population, are of mixed ethnic origins (quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 7/1/2000). Racisms of various forms also persist, as demonstrated by the recent rise of the anti-Aboriginal, anti-“Asian” One Nation Party, whose program was supported by Australian-born and immigrants (Grant, 1997). Nevertheless, at the level of communitas, the proliferation of shared experience is both luminous and illuminating. The celebration of folkloric multiculturalism continues for various reasons, but creative work increasingly speaks, sings, dances, paints, sculpts and films global and trans-ethnic themes that evoke responses from a widening range of people, recalling other times, other places and other realities that interrelate ethno-national narratives to the most personal. Even when creative work is framed within specific ethnicities, it can transcend the limits of ethnopolitics, time and place, partly because, as Bourdieu has noted, the logic of practice is “polythetic”, located in many places, hence capable of sustaining a multiplicity of meanings that are sometimes contradictory (1990). Ethnicities, of course, are also polythetic, always developed in interactions across time and space, and as “boundaries of consciousness” (Cohen, 1996). In countries of immigration such as Australia, a large proportion of the population is literally in a condition of metaphor, “carried across” from a homeland, having lost a sense of place, language and social conventions, caught in a process of reconstruction, as Rushdie describes it (1987 : 63). Migration is a difficult, disruptive, even traumatic experience, especially for refugees and forced migrants. Many people are unable to return “home”, for economic, political or intergenerational reasons. So those who migrate may live with a sense of irreparable loss that is often borne with great courage. Greeks describe the condition of living outside the homeland as xenitia , literally “exile”. But, as the large and energetic Greek diaspora demonstrates, this is not simply an experience of nostalgia (the pain of memory). According to Nikos Papastergiadis : “Exile does not connote the space outside society, but the process of crossing borders. If there is a productive and incisive side to this experience, it emerges from the attention to the consequences of shuttling from one position to another and results in an awareness of the unstable equilibrium that regulates both detachment and attachment” (1993 : 14). There is, therefore, a cultural dynamic between exile and identity that includes narrative knowledges and the presence of alterity. In countries of immigration, however, the category “ethnic” carries a pejorative connotation and ethnic groups are sociopolitical minorities, in a kind of negative recognition. Combined with the struggle to live in a foreign language and context, often with limited economic or social resources, the process of resettlement is arduous. Under those circumstances, music, dance and narratives can speak, sing or play what cannot be easily articulated. They may exist as another form of “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu, 1990), tracing some of the contradictions and tensions that arise from the experience of migration and loss, linking people to other places, other times and a more profound sense of location within narratives that span time and space. At the same time, these forms of communication are inevitably transformed in a different context, in a process of re-translation that opens up “areas of conversation” between people whose experience may differ, but who may nevertheless share an understanding. The tendency of official multiculturalism to define separate identities as parallel homogeneities fails to recognise the realities of contrapuntal histories, transnational identification, and shared experiences across ethnocultural and other dimensions such as age, class, gender and locality. The consequences of living across difference is that categories are potentially open to the recognition of the limits of difference. This is where Turner’s notion of communitas is useful, denoting a process of recognition across difference. Some of this recognition takes place below the level of consciousness, in rhythm, sound, images and gestures. The arbitrariness of cultural forms, including language, inevitably entails degrees of fuzziness, within which people negotiate webs of meaning. With or without the blessing of policy makers and politicians, communication of this kind is pervasive in multicultural societies, along with, sometimes in opposition to, other forms of communication that generate mis-understanding and divisiveness. At the same time, the process of identification is constantly under construction, reformulating social codes that relate to past, present and future as well as perceived difference. Identification is closely tied to practical activity, especially language, gesture and bodily signification. Music and dance are important aspects of this process, but literature and film also expand imaginary capacities and pathways of recognition. The rigidities of ethnonationalism “freeze frame” specific aspects of identification, but the multiple referents within cultural practices can readily evoke cross-cultural communication. I propose to analyse here some of these forms of recognition and identification with reference to the polythetic aspects of creative work presented by Greek-Australians to heterogeneous audiences. The term “Greek-Australian” loosely describes a population of more than half a million, distributed throughout Australia mainly in urban centres. The category “Greek” encompasses a wide variety of people from Egypt, Asia Minor, Cyprus and elsewhere, as well as from the mainland and islands of Greece. Greek Orthodoxy, Hellenism and the Greek language have been major cultural foci, together with the need to establish an economic and social base with minimal material support. Immigration from Greece has been negligible over the last two decades, and the majority of Greek Australians are now Australian-born. Despite these demographic and socio-economic facts, Greek Australians have a high profile in the arts, in education, in the professions, even in politics, which still remains heavily Anglo – (and male –) dominated. Their energetic presence in Australian society is partly the consequence of a commitment to education, strong familial support systems and a sense of communality as well as a pride in Greekness which has been stimulated over the last two decades by the policy of multiculturalism, despite its limitations (Tsounis, 1988 ; Bottomley, 1992). Within the limits of this paper, I can merely offer some reflections on specific and abbreviated examples of aspects of Greek-Australian creativity. One of the most interesting forms of modern Greek music, rebetika, has been described by the ethnomusicologist Gail Holst-Warhaft as “the double-descended deep songs of Greece” (1998 : 111). In her account, rebetika music combines a `grieving Oriental mother with the tough, streetwise fathers’ of the vast refugee population of Greek speakers from Asia Minor, who were mostly economically destitute urbanites. What is known as the Greco-Turkish war, 1919-22, added approximately 1 million refugees to a population of about 5 millions within Greece. The refugees were generally marginalised in Greece, and the large increase in the population of Athens and Piraeus created, for the first time, a sizeable proletarian audience for songs that dealt with themes of poverty, nostalgia, hashish smoking and “low life”. The expulsion of Asia Minor Christians also became enshrined in Greek popular culture as a metaphor for loss and grief (Holst-Warhaft 1998 : 115). Prominent among the rebetika songs were amanethes, whose poetic format was usually a single four line stanza with interjections and repeats of the exclamation “Aman !” (woe is me). The amanes is a stylized form of lament, linked in the Greek folk tradition to a predominantly female form of expression. Other songs were more light hearted and oppositional, with themes of prison, drug-taking or the underworld, but bouzouki-based songs became increasingly more macho, accompanying male solo dances such as the zebekiko or the male-bonding hasapiko (“Zorba’s dance”). Since the late 1940s, rebetika gained in popularity, championed by Mikos Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis and other composers who linked folk and ecclesiastical music to the intrinsic Greekness of rebetika. However, as Gail Holst Warhaft describes it, the oriental pain of the amanes still lingers, along with other polysemic aspects of Greek culture, despite the guardians of Hellenism. Rebetika developed as a music of marginality, migrating from Asia Minor to Greece, thence to a range of emigrant destinations, including Australia, Canada, the USA and several European countries. In 1920s Greece, it was first performed in nightclubs and taverns, and was perceived by the guardians of morality and pure ethnicity as degenerate and oriental. Rebetika embodies transcultural experience and polythesis. Like the tango and the blues, it is the music of urban immigrants, sung, played and danced by mixed populations who also challenged the notion of identity as sameness (1998 : 112). Dr Demeter Tsounis, a longterm participant observer of Greek music-making and dancing, both in Australia and in Greece, and an expert on diaspora musical style, describes rebetika as “a dance-orientated and vocal music with songs about everyday life, love, joy and pain” (1995 : 152). Over the last three decades, rebetika has become increasingly popular in Greece and in the diaspora. According to Tsounis, at multicultural and international festivals, it has become “a significant icon of Greek, Australian and even global identity” (1995 : 152). She suggests that `ambiguities in the status of rebetika function to empower this “living tradition” as a fluid yet meaningful cultural form for diaspora Greeks’ (1995 : 153). The success of the film Zorba the Greek, with its splendid music written by Mikis Theodorakis, and its iconic images of Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates dancing together on a Cretan beach, boosted worldwide interest in bouzouki style music during the 1960s, including rebetika. But in the 1980s, rebetika became a special genre in its own right, appreciated by a wide range of listeners and participants. Tsounis identifies three general types of rebetika presentation in Australia. The first of these she names `soul music’, ‘a special vehicle for the spontaneous empassioned participation, expression and catharsis of the individual’, notably including dancing after eating, drinking and socialising (1995 : 158). Local audiences call this the “Greek blues”, a designation that includes aspects of marginality, orientalism, sensuality and see it as the embodiment of Greekness. The second type of presentation is as `roots music’, performed at concerts with an educational agenda that emphasises authenticity and legitimation, and falls within the rubric of official multiculturalism. Musicians may explain to the audience the Byzantine or Hellenic origins of the music, and link it to the soul (and the Istoria) of the Greek nation, avoiding any reference to its “underworld and oriental associations”, the istories (1995 : 162). Tsounis quotes an ironic comment by one of these musicians, who described this version of rebetika as “a genuinely Greek product ... like olives” (1995 : 163). The third category discussed by Tsounis is that of rebetika as `world music’ ; here rebetika also concerned with authenticity and tradition, but is constructed as `an aesthetic object of interest to Greek and non-Greek musicians and patrons alike’ (1995 : 166), this on the basis of its musical form rather than historical or ethnocultural referents. This process encourages jamming with non-Greek musicians, including an Aboriginal didjeridu player, among others. Dancing is also an integral part of world music events, and the musicians encourage non-Greeks to enjoy the “Zorba dance” (the hasaposerviko) or to “shake the belly” in the tsifteteli. As Tsounis notes, these cross-cultural concerts preceded the formal policy of multiculturalism, accompanying (generally leftwing) polyethnic solidarity events for several decades, creating another form of communitas, based on political and moral commitments and shared experiences that link people across divisions of ethnicity, gender and status. “The arts, especially music and dance with their potential for recreational inclusivity, have featured significantly as the symbolic capital of a united Australian multicultural nation” (1995 : 167). Although rebetika is readily classified as “ethnic music”, it contains its own polysemic forms, that reflect some of the ambivalences, contradictions and “impurities” in Greekness, as I suggested earlier. According to Tsounis, when rebetika is performed as dance music, its as “Greek blues”, mainly by young people, carries the connotation of a heightened emotional state both expressed and released in dance. In what she calls “the world music trope” (1995 : 166), people of non-Greek origin are encouraged to dance, thereby sharing the pleasure of a collective intensity of emotion, but also physical contact with others and the pervasive and sensual effects of the music. In my own (much less participatory) studies of Greek dance and music, interviewees have described dance in particular as a powerful embodiment of memory, clearly evoking other experiences and places as well as the sense of sharing the dance (Bottomley 1992 : 41-43). Dancers have remarked that they could smell the pine trees or hear the sound of the sea near their childhood homes. Others remembered people whom they had not seen for decades. One of my dance teachers spoke of his need to dance as a counterbalance to his everday work life. As he expressed it.. “otherwise, I would lose myself ; I would forget who I am”. He also believed that it was important for Australian-born young people to share some of the experiences of their parental generation, through the media of music and dance. Several members of a dance class have talked to me about the songs that their mothers sang and the bodily gestures of family and friends, which they perceived and remembered as forms of language, even though they might not understand the accompanying words. The corporeal and sensory aspects of memory can be tapped and at least partly shared through sound and movement. What Julia Kristeva describes as the “semiotic” – the material, drive component of language – is manifest in music and rhythm, drawing on forms of memory that underscore experience. Over the last three decades or so, I have also heard dancers speak of the pleasure of “expressing another side” of themselves, a sense of freedom and passion, a celebration of Greekness , sensuality, masculinity, femininity and extasis that literally moves them beyond their everyday reality. For example, the young women who dance with energy and agility the traditionally male dances , such as the zebekiko (“the eagle’s dance”) and the masculinist hasapiko (which originated from the butchers’ guilds in Constantinople), move into forms of “gender blending” that are widespread among the younger generation of Australians, but mark significant differences from the expectations of their parents. They are, therefore, crossing borders of gender as well as ethnicity. At the same time, young male dancers enjoy both the personal display of dancing and the possibility of expressing passions that are not easily spoken. As one dancer told me, “I dance what I feel, and the music sings to me”. It is also significant that this personal expression takes place in a public space, yet links the private aspects of minority status (of ethnicity, adolescence, sexuality, familial relations). This ability of music and dance to lift people beyond the confines of the everyday is enhanced by the polysemic qualities of the music, already connecting routes with roots, but also more general themes of sexuality, sensuality, even forms of self-transformation. Some of the force of music and dance is that they cannot be readily contained within authorized forms of knowledge. They are, in part, communicated below the level of consciousness. For the second generation, some of that consciousness consists of mediating between their parents’ sense of loss and ambivalence and their own need to locate themselves as hyphenated Australians. But ethnicity is only one among many variables in cultural exchanges, and the identification of ethnicity with the folkloric aspects of an ethnoculture is particularly problematic in the case of a hybrid musical form such as rebetika. In dance venues throughout cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, young people of various ethnic backgrounds are dancing to a range of music that includes rebetika as well as other Greek music, along with circle dances. Numerous Greek-run restaurants allow space for solo, duo and round dances. Women and men may dance a composite solo dance that includes the zebekiko, dipping and circling slowly with a sense of deep concentration. Others dance the tsifteteli with an athletic abandon that I have not seen in Greece, and couples often dance the tsifteli as an erotic duet. Circle dances are more often danced at Community-run celebrations, or at weddings and gatherings held in halls. In these venues, non-Greek participants are sometimes catered for in something called a “round dance” that usually includes energetic hopping movements and has nothing to do with rebetika. The occasional non-Greek who makes an attempt to follow and learn from skilled dancers may also be complimented. In the case of rebetika – based dance, young Greek-Australians have explicitly mentioned the need to resolve some of the ambiguities and tensions in their lives, often arising from the need to negotiate their sense of being “in between”. Greek dance and music can be experienced as a considerable advantage over their non-Greek peers and a source of self worth. More generally, music and dance are increasingly pervasive throughout major cities, where dance venues range from huge open air spaces to dance halls, night clubs and restaurants. There are organised dance parties in every suburb, and streets are often closed for local festivities. In this expansively ludic atmosphere, the slightly exotic but popular quality of rebetika has its own appeal, as do the widely recognised forms of Greek dance. Circle dancing enhances the sense of sharing, and in these contexts, the circle can be joined by anyone. Over three decades of watching, listening and dancing, I have spoken with dozens of people who have been transformed by music and dance. Literally, this is a process of extasis, lifting people beyond predefinitions and enabling forms of communality. Greeks describe this experience as “finding the spirit (to kefi)”. Music and dance therapists have documented the experience of ecstasy as one that “melts the boundaries of our being, reveals our bonds to the external world, engulfs us in feelings that are oceanic”. (Jourdain : 327) There are physical explanations for these experiences, but their consequences can lead to an expansion of the world, an ordered experience of connectedness that transcends pre-defined and separated identities. This connectedness can also underscore the “imagined communities” of ethno-nationalism, as Benedict Anderson demonstrated so brilliantly (1990). But my argument here is that there are other forms of identification cross-cutting and interweaving those more formally defined versions of “sameness”. Within this process of interweaving, the istories of personal experience can reveal the polyphony, the many voices that tend to be submerged in the History that emphasizes ethno-nationalisms. A brilliant example of contrapuntal histories and the interweaving of times, places and memories is George Alexander’s prizewinning novel Mortal Divide : the autobiography of Yiorgos Alexandroglou. George Alexander was one of the most popular performers at this gathering, and his book is a particularly apt example of what I have described as “cross-hatching” or “interweaving”, blending psychoanalysis with surrealism and brilliant imagery. The author is a curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with special expertise in surrealist art and an enviable ability to disrupt the taken-for-granted by unlikely juxtapositions, dream sequences and Freudian sub-plots. Suffering from “incremental reality slippage”, the author/narrator tracks through a labyrinth of memory and reflection, accompanied by his alter ego, Yiorgos Alexandroglou, “a ghost flickering on and off”, whose clothes and general demeanour exaggerate and celebrate the worst stereotypes of “wogginess”, offering a funny but acute re-examination of forms of masculinity and sexuality, as well as ethnicities. As an employee of SBS TV, the multicultural broadcasting service, George’s task was to translate and sub-title, to “order Babel and digitalise diversity” (Alexander : 11) But, as I argued earlier, languages and identities are analogic rather than digital, inextricably implicated in the myriad istories of family, places and border crossings. During excursions into the lives of George’s mother and father (especially the latter, as this crisis blends masculinity, parenthood, love, sexuality and ethnicity), the reader encounters brilliant descriptions of his father’s hybrid versions of cooking and gambling, and the multilingual melange of his Greek / Italian / Egyptian background. George was born in Australia, but travelled widely, hence his memories are often comparative and screened through those of his parents and other “significant others”. For example, in attempting to imagine his father’s imagination, he notes the “rhymes” between Australia and Egypt – the deserts, the frangipani flowers and flame trees, the boats on the rivers, “the fellaheen and the blackfella” (Alexander : 38). Some of the more personal experiences traced through this book are also widely shared. The absent father, for example, is a major motif in Australian culture, where the dominant theme of “mateship” accentuates male bonding. In George’s case, his father `became a mythic figure like Dionysos or the Crucified, but done up as Flash Harry, lovable hustler’ (Alexander : 53). However, the author also interweaves strong narratives around his relations with his daughter, wife and erstwhile lover, returning to all of these after his genuinely polythetic trek to the key places that marked out his father’s life – Kastellorizo, where he was born ; Cairo, where he married ; Cottesloe, where he lived and Karrakatta, where he is buried . In the terms that I discussed earlier, this trajectory exemplifies the rhizomatic process, a combination of routes and roots that connects territorialization and reterritorialization and moves beyond nation-states and ethnicities at a number of levels. The digital notion of identity as sameness also dissolves here into the agonistic, partial and tentative psychic process of identification, described by Freud as including the uncanny and the unhomely. In Mortal Divide, home and the unhomely perform a kind of dance linking language and imagery in an exploration of memory and place. The sound and rhythm of language underscores meaning, there are constant references to waterways, especially the sea, and images and thoughts flow into each other. The musicality and motion within this text help to achieve the author’s aim to transcend digitality, to establish imaginative connections rather than boundaries. The forms of creative work alluded to in this paper require more detailed analyses, including more attention to their audiences. Nevertheless, they clearly challenge bounded constructs of “identity” and enable a sharing of experience, understanding and ambivalences. In this process of interweaving and re-translation, places, time and History can be relativised and reformulated through narratives, sounds and rhythms that evoke and embody past, present and future as well as individuality and communality. |