It’s All Greek to Me
LEARNING a new language as an adult is like describing a color you have never really seen before— nearly impossible. You try, you stumble over your words in order to explain what you mean, but by the time you’re done talking you don’t even know what you were trying to articulate in the first place. So growing up hearing two languages, one dominant with the other fighting to be heard, is similar to trying to describe two colors that look almost exactly the same— confusing as hell.
My professor for Modern Greek has explained the frustration of both learning a second language in a classroom and actually knowing it partially from childhood with the term code switching. This is when a diasporic being finds themselves speaking a mixture of both English and, in this case, Greek, using the English learned from American schooling thrown together with some Greek words the way my mother much too easily throws oregano all over her food. Code switching is the art of knowing two languages, but knowing one significantly less due to the failure or dislike of learning it in a classroom setting. And when one does try and speak that second language, they use their English crutch much too heavily.
Before college, I knew only the Greek that I heard my mother and her familial side repeat throughout the years, and even then I merely existed in a Greek-American limbo where I never made an effort to know more. Learning Greek in a formal school setting, and trying to master it well enough for me to peruse the Peloponnese alone one day, is a great feat. It is no easier than the overarching attempt at inhabiting two cultures simultaneously, a challenge not only for a Greek-American such as myself, but for other Something-Americans who exist in this (and I hate to use this term) “melting pot” of a country. Randolph Bourne wrote in his “Trans-National America” that describing the United States as a melting pot was like saying it was boiling down cultural differences, stripping the very identities away from immigrants, and merging them into an ideal American image. Not until recently have I realized the importance of holding close the heritage and roots you hail from, because America has a funny way of helping your forget those idiosyncratic ancestral origins of your family’s existence. As I usually simply put it: most of America is pretty white bread, or at least that is what I've hautily assumed as a child growing up in New York City. For me to then move to a Midwest college town only made me more judgemental. In a diaspora, people move out of their homeland, and this in turn changes the structure of how the dispersed people see themselves in relation to their new country, how they determine their own cultural identities in America and how they see others. When coming to the new land of college, I had to rethink my position in society and rethink my own culutral identity.
During the lesson on code switching, Professor Margomenou further explained how heritage speakers tend to know a multitude of random Greek words and phrases, but are pretty lousy when it comes to the grammar. So, even for those in my class whom were Greek such as myself, it felt damn near impossible to start this language from scratch. I thought I knew stuff, you know, and I thought that Nouno meant Godfather when apparently it formally is Nonos, and all my years of knowing something so concrete in my mind melted away in that moment. Imagine what that can do to one’s self-esteem when you walk into a language class freshman year of college thinking you’ll be at the top of the class, that it’ll be that one easy course in your schedule. If asked to, Americans can’t tell you very much about the rules of English grammar. Similarly, I was unable to intelligibly say a thing about Greek grammar. Now I know what the tense is called that my mom commands me to do things in. I know how to properly address elders, when as a child I would mostly sit silently when asked something in my aunt’s kitchen. When I first started this course, I wondered if I knew anything at all about the half of me that was Greek. It made me revert back to how I felt right before I dropped out of Greek school— sweaty-palmed and more than willing to give up. I remember crying violently before my Greek school graduation, because I knew that with one year completed I would just have to return to that Godforsaken church basement for the next level of hell. That’s what it was at that age, pure torture, and not a nostalgic familial connection. I was more concerned about my social identity as it related to my friends at “real” school, with no devotion to the Greek language as it pertained to my other social identity— my heritage and identity as a first generation Greek-American. It took going to college and evolving within my own individual identity to see how my cultural identity fit into the entire schema.
The night of Greek school graduation, we were in a taxi driving up a packed FDR Drive in rain that was coming down in thick sheets. We hadn’t moved for thirty minutes, and were already so ridiculously late (even by Greek standards) that 9-year-old me knew to seize the moment. I’m looking back on that moment now as if I strategically planned the traffic and knew I could play up the tantrum, but in reality my heart was in my ass and the images of me speaking Greek on stage actually made me naseous. Although I was clenching my father’s arm I remember spinning and crying until, before my poor mother could say anything, we were turning around to head back downtown. When I say I dropped out of Greek school, I dropped hard, and I only wanted to experience my Greekiness through the social aspects I was comfortable with. I wanted a big, warm batch of melomoukarouna and a glass of milk with my mother and her mother, my yiayia, who I somehow always was able to communicate with regardless of the fact that she knew less English than I knew Greek. That’s what I wanted— minimal effort for the maximum cultural experience. I could not fathom feeling that inner turmoil again at the thought of practicing Greek in front of judging onlookers, even my fellow family members. I didn’t want any anxiety over whether my accent was decent or how I pronounced long words. I was determined to avoid the humiliation even before I had ever actually experienced a moment of it.
Language is a huge connecting element for people within a diasporic culture, and it’s the one thing next to food that probably makes most kids of immigrant families feel closer to their heritage and ancestors. I definitely took it for granted as a child and only regretted ditching Greek school when I entered college and realized how little I really knew about the structure of the language. In total, I knew about twenty words that could get me by in my yiayia’s kitchen, and that remarkably wasn’t enough. At that point, all I felt I had in connection to my Greek lineage was knowledge of the food and my family history. If I wanted to communicate on a different level with that side of my family, I was going to have to formally learn my mother’s language. And so I am. A quick side note on code switching: there is a dimension of guilt that comes with not knowing your second language as fully as possible. I think that was a small part that pushed me to see how Greek I, as a Greek-American, could really get. Guilt is also a huge criterion for functioning in Greek-American family systems. You guilt your children into entering one of the four highest ranked professions in our culture: medicine, dentistry, law, or owning a diner. My mother practices law and her brother is a dentist in Chicago. Their parents owned a restaurant. Go figure. And as My Big Fat Greek Wedding goes, my mother met a nice tall American boy and they converted him faster than you can say opa! He didn’t get baptized in a miniature blow-up pool, nor is he vegetarian, but he did convert to be Greek Orthodox for my mother, which is always a sweet sentiment I will always admire.
To me, my father is just a good ol' American boy. Like the white bread folks I have been acquainted with here in college, his side doesn’t do much for me. I realize that’s harsh, but it’s the truth. That’s just how I see it and that’s why I value my Greek heritage as heavily as I do now. It seems to me a logical byproduct of valuing one thing over another: a battle between Greek culture over American culture, or even visa versa. I welcome the possibility that a Midwesterner could experience one night at dinner with my extended family and categorize us as crazy or loud, while to me, the plain visitors would be categorically vanilla. And that’s okay. Just like it’s okay that there are two pretty distinct parts to my cultural identity. My dad and his German roots, which in my eyes are so buried that they are almost irrelevant, and then my mother who adds texture to my identity. It’s quite alright for me to favor that aspect over the other now. As a youth, the disinterest was a product of my fear of being different. Was I identifying with my father’s plain American side then? No. I strongly identified my self as a rough and rowdy New York City kid, which is how I formed my social and not-so-religious ideals. My city kid mentatlity and identity being so multi-layered and colorful leads me to believe that is why I am so attracted to my Greek culture, why I favor it over what I consider the bland, Midwestern, Catholic lifestyle. It merely is more colorful to me. I’m so prideful of being Greek that if someone says the baklava from a Turkish restaurant is the best they’ve ever had, I make sure to remind them that baklava is Greek. And if I’m feeling extra feisty, I mention that on top of it all, the Turks enslaved Greeks for 400 years. So, no wonder that poor person was confused about the baklava-- they don't know our history. The Turks stole every great thing we’ve created and branded it as their own. They were stealing and inpregnating our women too, so what was stopping them with our desserts as well? But let me not digress, because the baklava point is actually an important one. Food is important here. Europe and the west recognize Greece as the ancient backbone to civilization, the cradle if you will. They are overvalued in that sense, but undervalued due to the fact that this produces an image of rusticity. While Greece is one of the lowest ranking countries in the EU economically, I definitely believe it is one of the highest ranking in terms of culture and food. And interestingly enough, Greece has never had a renaissance. Even with all the current political turmoil, much of the old country and old ways are still quite heavily engrained in the culture because there was never a cultural rebirth.
Their image as an archaic civilization definitely rests in the food, which is why it is such a source of pride. When people connect a country to its food, they are presenting it as rustic and pre-modern. With Italy, yes there is a heavy food culture, but they also have Rome and Milan, home to fashion week each year. They had a renaissance! In an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos, Nia Vardalos reminisces about the baptism of her daughter, the traumatic momentary drowning of a child that “always involves olive oil” for Greeks. She humorously recounts the equally traumatizing experience for her actor husband, Ian Gomez, who “with his beautifully bald head and the hair on the sides… looked like mouskema.” And of course, Nia ends with, there’s all the olive oil “‘cause everything ties into the Greek salad.” Greece with its food, and as the cradle of civilization, is maybe why my fellow Greek-Americans and I are so dedicated to continuing its traditions, to keeping it relevant in our lives and our family’s lives. My mother has held onto my yiayia’s book of traditional recipes, written entirely in Greek chicken scratch, and will probably pass it along to me when the time comes. It's a longing for the rich history of one's country, holding on to what defines you so fully. It's not just a longing, but it is pride as well. Now, I may be overgeneralizing, but there’s truth in this. Greek-Americans love to show that they are Greek. We just do.
The religious gesture my father made in order to marry my mother, for instance, is a sentiment that Greek-Americans hold dearer to their hearts than Greeks from the homeland may nowadays. Greeks from Greece are interestingly enough not that religious. They hardly go to church for Good Friday, or even care to attend mass for Greek Easter (which, yes, is different from “regular” Catholic Easter). They hardly seem to have the same sort of intense Greek pride I experience with my family in America. Greeky Greeks undoubtedly love their country, the history, the food and the art, but I have seen that they are not as concerned with showcasing it and I have even found they are more cynical about being Greek since the crisis.
A Greek student I met through a social survey project shed light on this phenomenon during our Skype talks, which is probably in part why I wanted to write about these connections within my culture. I had never hazard to think about the Greek diaspora, but it’s fascinating in that Greek-Americans love to be Greek, more so than Greeky Greeks tend to (warning: I am going to continue using this term to distinguish between Greek-Americans and native Greeks). The Greek Orthodox Church, for example, is prime for Greek-American socializing. It is where the youngsters meet their future husbands and wives, and where the older folks can sit around talking about the lack of respect these days and the Greek crisis affecting their vacation plans. Baptisms and traditional Greek weddings are not all that happen within those blessed walls; boys and girls go to Sunday school and learn the Lord’s Prayer in both English and Greek, they make friends, and grow up together. They grow to have kids, sending them to the same Greek schools they went to, and never moving more than a few miles from their family home. This is what all my cousins have experienced in Chicago, while lonesome me grew up with my Americanized mother and super artsy father in New York City. So, I admit this is all coming from a very observational point of view. My isolation from my Greek family by and large may be why I was such a brat, and refused any Greek schooling. Like I said, I wanted to experience the Greek food and Greek love that I was given, but didn’t want any part in the religion or language. That was too much work. But most Greek-Americans I know and am related to do put in this work. I, on the other hand, did not want to put any effort into being Greek when I was younger. My parents allowed it too, never thinking to tell me that I may regret it some day. Maybe they knew that I would and enjoy seeing me try now. I admit, it has made me closer with my mother, but it has also made aware to me the interesting disparities between my Greek family here and my Greek family abroad. Just two summers ago my thea Kiki and theo Nikos hosted us at their second home in my mother’s original village of alepoxori. It is a rustic place in the backwoods of the Peloponnese. It was their first time visiting the village in nearly three years, almost as long as it had been since the last time we traveled to Greece ourselves. They were just working, fighting the affects of the impending crisis, and living life in Athens, never caring to visit the village. My mother, on the other hand, makes it a duty of our family’s to spend at least a few nights in that dead town whenever we set foot in the homeland. My great aunt of ninety-years and her grandson are two of the most prominent citizens in alepoxori. Her grandson declared himself the mayor of the poor dying village some years ago, funding a soccer field in the middle of town. It is a little funny, but it just shows how little my aunt and uncle cared to come back to their own family home themselves. And my mother cares so much. If I were nine years old again in Greek school, I would not think to care about returning to our family’s home or boast about the fact that it even exists. Now as I write this, all I can think of is how I’m going to make sure my mother’s olive tree farm is going to be maintained when all of that land is mine someday.
I’m getting a little sentimental now, but that’s just how I process it all. On the other hand, David Sedaris satirizes his Greek upbringing and homosexuality simultaneously in pretty much every novel of his, recounting how being on the Times bestseller list was not even enough for his stern Greek father, who is featured multiple times as a “buffoon… sitting around in his underpants and hitting people over the head with spoons” (Sedaris 39). This giant wooden spoon, otherwise known as the koutala, is much too familiar for me. I love hearing the voice of another Greek-American poke fun at all that shit; it’s also like a history lesson that is directly connected to my heritage (and in my mind, directly connected to myself). Sedaris loves history too, with its grandiosity and civility, but his mother felt the opposite, leaving her past as an immigrant behind: “Boxed in by neighbors, having to walk through my parents’ bedroom in order to reach the kitchen. If you think that was fun, you never saw your grandfather with his teeth out” (Sedaris 35). Sedaris’s novels are artifacts I live by, references to my everyday life. I laugh with no restraint on planes or on my deck every time I read Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls for the millionth time.
While Sedaris injects humor into the Greek-American condition, my Skype friend, Dimitra, also laughs at the nuances within the cultural differences. When Dimitra was translating and teaching me new words, I asked her to spell them out in the Skype message box and she said she had started to forget how to spell things with Greek letters and has become more accustomed to writing them phonetically in English. Similarly, her peers in Greece do not care as much about Greek pride, the language, or other traditions as much as my aunts and uncles in America do. Instead, my thea Dimitrula emphasizes the importance of bringing my baby cousins to church to crawl under the epitafio on Greek Easter. Dimitra needed a reminder of what the epitafio even was and laughed at how strange it was that so many Greek-Americans attend church each Sunday and for what? For the actual religious aspect, or just to exercise their Greekiness. Priorities, Dimitra said to me, make no sense in America.
There is a strange cultural reversal emerging. Greek-Americans are exercising their cultural pride the way wealthy people showcase their status by walking down the street with a new Prada bag—it’s about showing the world how Greek you are. When talking to Dimitra, it seemed that she was comfortably content in being Greek, knowing English, living in Athens, but traveling to other cities every few weeks. She didn’t need to prove anything and was more excited to embrace multiple different cultures. Maybe Greek-Americans are promoting their own Greekhood in fear of losing it, while Greeky Greeks want to move away from the archaic presentation of their country in order to be more apart of the rest of the world, learning English, French, and German so they can work and learn abroad. Maybe there is nothing going on at all, and I am just making this all up. Regardless though, it's what makes sense to me in this moment in time. It's what I can piece together when I think of these nuances.
The Greek founder and businesswoman behind the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, who has become an incredible success in America has shown her great love for her heritage as well. Arianna emphasized in an interview about her book Thrive that “Greece will always be home. I’ve always felt Greek, not just because of my accent but because the depth of my connection to the country.” In that interview, it was like I was watching one of my aunts, her mannerisms and accent triggered something in me, some Greek signal that I could pick up on. Although from Greece herself, being a prominent American citizen for so long probably produced her overt and outward love for her Greek heritage, which is why she isn’t leaving the Greek traditions behind like Dimitra and other Grecian millennials are today. Being an important role model of my mother’s, Arianna has always seemed like a huge icon to me as well. She is became a massive America success story, yet remains proud and vocal about her origins, which were small and unimpressive like my mother’s own village beginnings.
I am becoming one of those preservers of the Greek culture. I am already thinking about teaching my children Greek and making sure that they eat tons of Greek food, which I now am realizing I need to learn how to cook. The general notion is that there is a danger when coming to America of your culture becoming invisible or melting into nothingness, but in fact I have seen the opposite occur. My Italian childhood friend from New York has started to visit Italy every year, he wears an Italian cross, and identifies with the importance of knowing the language more now than ever. All my Irish friends voluntarily chose to attend Catholic school because they knew they would learn about both their religion and Irish heritage more there than at a public school. Many of them have Irish flags or clovers tattooed somewhere on their body and I think that I have joined the bandwagon. I want to connect more with being Greek and maybe that stems from my guilt of rejecting it as a young girl, or maybe it’s because I am following some blind cultural movement. Either way, I admit, I love being Greek too. Yes, Dimitra laughed at how dedicated my extended family is to going to church and yes, this cultural emphasis is an interesting one, but that does not mean there isn’t a great significance in knowing all parts to your heritage. It has been instilled in the children of diasporic movements that you can never forget where you come from, which is by no means a bad thing.
Culture is a funny thing. It sticks with you, and even if it’s not all you center your life around it’s still a point of reference. In an interview about his novel Lets Explore Diabetes With Owls, David Sedaris asked his Greek interviewer if he played the red egg game on Greek Easter. That is something you can ask virtually any Greek-American, and it will render a full-blown conversation about strategies on how to crack your opponents egg like a pro. My own recent emphasis on being Greek is also not a full-blown obsession—it’s not how I define my whole very existence—but it is a point of reference and a layer to my identity. Something that I am curious in explaining more fully to understand my self in reference to my surroundings. The traditions, the food, and the memories are always going to be apart of me. Although I didn’t care as much for being Greek years ago, I am all of a sudden determined to be apart of it and catch up with what I missed out on. And there’s no going back.
Being Greek is a funny thing too. Why do Greeks in Greece place less importance on some aspects of the culture? They surely have not written everything off, but possibly it is that there is less emphasis on their Greekiness because they are confident in that fact. Maybe Greek-Americans feel so displaced in the generic, fast food, artificial modern world of America that they would rather be categorized with something more colorful, textured with history, and greater than themselves. When someone sees me they may just see a blonde, blue-eyed Caucasian college student, but when I say I’m Greek it’s all of a sudden a new layer of interest, a new part of my identity I can share with people. My quirky family stories and traditions add to my social identity and my individual identity. Children of diasporic heritages probably experience similar complex identity dilemmas— or rather journeys— to finally come to some resolution within themselves, where they can appreciate their family’s origins and who they themselves have become in America. For right now, I feel resolved and accept that I did have an intense past hatred for the very language I am today studying in school. Though I have tried to make some conclusions about my Greek heritage and how it is affecting my self-discovery, I also think that since this condition is a process that will encompass my entire life, there is no need to be too conclusive with what being Greek means to me right now. It could mean something different when I enter the workforce or when I get married. I will see the world differently at those moments in time as well, so why not see myself and my cultural identity differently then too? I think my identity is ever-shifting, temporal in that I will add a new layer to my Greekiness and New Yorker side to me one day. Whatever it may be it will be, and knowing me I will probably try and write about it.