A Gift of Community, Serendipity, and Reading

Elena Georgiou reminds us that books can save us

Elena Georgiou and her books

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Happy holidays, Everyone!

I hope you’re enjoying a peaceful respite this week, among people you love, celebrating all that we have to be grateful for, which is almost always—even now— more than we think!

Before I turn to the star of this post, I must share with you the poem that just landed in my inbox, a gift via the marvelous daily practice of poet and Goddard MFA alum Thomas A Thomas—someone I’m very grateful for:

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life --

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~ William Stafford, from You Reading This, Be Ready

This arrival today is a magical example of the serendipity that the essay below highlights. You see, as I tried to imagine what I might offer you for these holidays, my mind traveled to the people I’ve come to love as a result of my MFA life, and I decided that one of the sweetest gifts I could give anyone would be an introduction to Elena Georgiou.

Elena directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College, where Thomas studied and I taught. She is a brilliant poet and short story writer. Her latest collection is The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, which was selected as a finalist for the Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award. And Elena is a writer’s writer in the best sense, one of the wisest and most generous souls I know. She also has a fascinating life history, which she included in a deeply moving keynote address to our community in 2006. We later published this address in the anthology Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, which I co-edited. Elena has kindly granted me permission to share it with you here.

There’s so much to savor in this essay, including a host of authors and books that you may want to add to your reading list. But the greatest gift Elena’s words have to offer us this season is the reminder that reading is a source of solace in the darkest times, community in the loneliest times, and serendipitous inspiration when we are most adrift.

I hope you will take heart from Elena and read on. No matter what, read on!

Sweetness and light to you all,

Aimee

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WHY I READ

By Elena Georgiou

At twenty-eight, in my second semester as an undergraduate in New York, in a class called The Nineteenth Century Novel, the professor began by asking us to write down our response to the following question: Why do you read?

My answer was: To find community.

This was a question to which I’d never before given any conscious thought; mine was a gut response I wouldn’t have predicted. I knew the path I’d taken to arrive at this answer, however, and I knew how to retrace this path to find its origins.

As a young adult—from about fourteen to nineteen—I read and I read and I read. I came out of school with my ‘A’ levels, which, in England, means I opted to stay on for an extra two years to take the exams that would get me into university. By eighteen, I’d studied a handful of plays by Shakespeare, a couple of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens novels, Yeats’ collected works, and a good number of other canonized texts. I loved them—they transported me to new and different worlds.

When I left school and opted to train as a dancer instead of pursuing English Literature at university, I kept reading. My reading list, though my own, was still heavily influenced by my education. I plowed my way through everything Thomas Hardy had written, and everything Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, and D.H. Lawrence had written. My last memory of reading was lying on a beach in Cyprus, lapping up Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

But soon after that, I stopped reading. At twenty, my love affair with books seemed to be over. This was not a conscious decision; the desire to read simply faded out of my life.

I did not pick up a book again for five years. I remember, because when I did pick one up again, my life changed. I was twenty-five and lost, and someone who might have seen in me what I was missing gave me three books to read, books by people I’d never heard of, books by three American writers—Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde. I read until I fell asleep, and when I woke up I continued reading until I fell asleep again. In two days, I read these books and wept throughout the entire process. This was the first time I’d read about the lives of characters that in a significant way reflected my own experience. I’d had no idea that writing like this existed. Until reading these writers, I thought that everything I’d been feeling and thinking about the world was specific only to me. But here were the experiences of not one, but three writers who were creating characters and documenting lives with which I could identify. And they were still alive. And still writing. I couldn’t believe it. How was it that we had so much in common?

Why did this matter to me? I was raised in an immigrant community that made it clear that even though London was where I was born, Cyprus—a place I’d visited a couple of times—was my home. I found this message impossible to live with. How could London not be home when it was the place where I was born, went to school, and was given my first library card? Then, my community’s message was reinforced by a number of outspoken politicians who began movements that called for “repatriation;” that is, sending immigrants back to where they came from. But that didn’t make sense to me either—London was where I came from.

And then the National Front began marching through the streets, and putting human excrement through non-English peoples’ mailboxes, and setting fire to one or two non-English peoples’ homes. All in the name of keeping “England for the English.”

Then there were the words that I had to contend with on the way home from school: Fuck off, Paki. Why don’t you go back to your own country? The first time this one was hurled in my direction, I was seven, and the full-grown man hurling the insult was up a ladder painting a house. I stood there for a minute staring at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying. I was not a Pakistani. And this was my home. Go on, he said. Fuck off. Get out of here. This, however, was not the incident that made the biggest impression.

That incident did not contain words: It was Easter morning and I was with my sister and my mother and my grandmother and we were going to church. As we walked by a small house a few yards from the church, there was an old lady standing in her window, with the lace curtain pulled to one side. She had shaped her fingers into the back-to-front peace sign that in England means, “Fuck off.” She kept waving her hand up and down in this menacing V, her face full of hatred. It was so incongruous—the lace curtain, the quaint house, the old lady, the contempt on her face, and the reversed peace sign telling me, once again, to: Fuck off back to my own country.

“Back to my own country.” This was the phrase that linked me to the experiences that Lorde, Morrison, and Walker were documenting. These three writers were writing about people who were living in their own countries, when their own countries did not want them—they were writing about colonized people, dispossessed people, people who were not valued by the dominant society that told them that no matter what they looked like or how they acted, they would never belong.

Reading about this unbelonging helped me to try to make sense of my own unbelonging. For the first time in my life, in the characters in novels, in poems, and in essays, I felt as if I saw versions of myself. It changed my relationship to reading; whereas previously I was reading to escape into different worlds, now I was reading to learn about my own world via characters that made me feel as if I had a right to exist. This was partly what I meant when I answered the way that I did to the question: Why do you read?

But there was more to my answer. Reading these three books also prompted me into an awakening—it introduced me to the idea of what it meant to be a colonized person. Being a colonized person within an immigrant community is a lose-lose situation. You are damned if you are invisible and you are damned if you are visible. Because I did not look like the proverbial English Rose, I was invisible to much that could have had a positive impact on my life. And again, because I did not look like the proverbial English Rose, I was a target to much that was negative. It was a relatively schizophrenic existence: how would I be perceived today? Invisible or visible?

The process of my decolonization began with an attempt to deconstruct the person that I was told I was and continued in a search for how I wanted to be perceived. Instead of others—family, community, politicians, random hostile strangers—supplying me with a ready-made label, I wanted to create my own personhood, one that made sense to my experience of the world.

I was born in 1961, the year after Cyprus gained its independence from Britain. But even though the place of my ancestors was no longer colonized, and even though I spent no more than two weeks on the island every few years, I had inherited the legacy of a country that had been colonized a couple of times by the Greeks, a couple of times by the Turks, and a couple of times by the British. (In fact, if you trace the country’s history, it has been colonized eleven times, and has only known fourteen years of complete independence). The Greek dialect that Greek-Cypriot people speak is considered to be the lowest form of the language. If you couple this information with the fact that all mother-tongues stagnate whenever a group of people immigrate to another country, you should imagine me standing on the lowest rung of a linguistic ladder. And then, just when I thought I couldn’t get any lower, my English was not the Queen’s English; it was the English of Pearly royalty—my accent belonged to the House of Cockney, not the House of Windsor. In England, identifying class by accents is learned at birth; therefore, I knew from an early age that all my ways of speaking were stigmatized.

But in 1987, after the work of Lorde, Walker, and Morrison had opened my mind, I began to read writers who were challenging the ideas of class and race that up until that time had formed my way of thinking. The following year, I left England and enrolled at the Hunter College of City University of New York. (An institution, that unbeknownst to me at the time of enrollment, had Audre Lorde as a professor in the English department).

As an undergraduate, one of the first books I studied at college was Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Decolonizing the Mind. Once again, here was another writer from another country, and another continent, talking about experiences that were almost identical to my own. Next came books like The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire, This Bridge Called My Back by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, and Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha.

I kept reading, I kept studying, I kept working at decolonizing my mind. Eventually, I graduated with a degree that focused heavily on the post-colonial experience. I also graduated with a community of friends who had read similar books and wrestled with similar ideas. Once again, through reading, I’d found community.

Today, almost twenty years later, this is no longer the only reason I read. At this stage in my life, I’ve found not only community, but also communities. Plus, I am actively engaged in and even earning a living from a passion that directly relates to reading—writing. And so, if you asked me right now why I read, I would probably answer: To be inspired.

As a writer, I think of my body as a well that is mostly filled through reading. I read books to collect images. I read books to collect specifics. I vary what I read to make sure that my well is not filled with one type of text; for example, I choose to read about science, about anthropology, and about art forms other than writing.

For the past ten years, to keep my life as a teacher and as a writer in balance, there are certain times of the year when I sequester myself to write. I go away from home and I make sure my bag is packed with a selection of varied reading material. I take novels, poetry books, sometimes a memoir, and always some books that fall under the enormous category of non-fiction. And because I am writing away from home, most often this means I also have access to a selection of books that I would not have chosen for myself. I love this exposure, this randomness, the surprise of being engaged in unplanned reading.

As I write this essay, I am staying in a house owned by a couple of visual artists and some of the books I have access to are The Art and Craft of Stonework, Dogs Behaving Badly, The Mushroom Trailguide, The Shape of Time, and The Artist as Outsider. Some of the books I brought with me are Walden, The Body, Uses of the Brain, and Life is Elsewhere. I’m hoping that by the time I’ve read through these books I will not only have digested some of what they have to tell me, but I will also have stolen a few of their images, some of their phrases, and perhaps even learned a new word or two. I’m also hoping that by the end of this trip I will come away with at least one or two moments of inspiration to keep me writing.

At this point in my life, reading is less about escape, less about finding community, and mostly about what is being said, how it is being said, and what new information I can garner and use. Reading has become a place of work, a place to study craft, to think about voice, to search for my own vision. But fortunately, there are also many moments when reading is still a way to leave the world I am familiar with and enter into another world that is inspiring and new.

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Elena Georgiou is the author of the short-story collection The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018), and the poetry collections Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press) and mercy mercy me (University of Wisconsin), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. She is also co-editor (with Michael Lassell) of the poetry anthology, The World In Us (St. Martin’s Press).

Georgiou has won an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and served as the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College until 2021.

This essay was delivered as a keynote address for Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, Winter, 2006, Plainfield, Vermont. It was originally published in the anthology Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing.

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Here’s another essay from Alchemy of the Word, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, posted here this fall, after the election:

Writing Through Darkness

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