A Melancholy Visit.

Nick Nicholas has been reporting at Facebook on his latest visit to his ancestral haunts in Crete (he lives in Australia and has been featured at LH many times, first in 2005), and this post expresses a particular form of linguistic distress I don’t recall seeing mentioned before:

There’s a melancholy in this visit, that wasn’t there the last couple of times. I had bits of it in Athens, and it’s been crystallised with a different trigger here in Sitia.

Through my thirties and forties, I’d come here and try to fit in, and be saddened when I realised that I wasn’t embraced as fully as I’d expect, that I didn’t fit in. People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora. But there was always that recognition, five or ten minutes into a chat, that I wasn’t from these parts; or people that already knew me from online, addressing me as Nick and not Nikos. That hurt, the hurt of being left outside.

A couple of years ago, I made the decision not to try and fit it in. That turned out to work in my favour, because this country in the meantime has globalised enough, that I had more points of contact with Zoomer Greeks if I did not try so had to be Greek the way I recalled and constructed, from Boomer Greeks.

It’s worked all too well. This time around in Athens, I didn’t feel reassured by all the English code-switching and American trends: I felt alienated. My construct of Greekness was itself now out of place in my environment. I had that feeling I increasingly have back home, to my persistent surprise, of being a fossil.

And that got worse in Sitia the one way that’s going to hit home for a trained dialectologist. I speak dialect when I come here. It comes unbidden, and it’s been a delight to realise it happening in the past. Not that my dialect was ever solid, and not that the dialect was doing that well even when I was a child, for me to have learned it: Leonidas Embirikos has reported to me that when he first visited this area in 1983—just before I’d left it for Australia—he found it remarkable how little-spoken the dialect was here already. And my aunts and uncles never did encourage what dialect I did speak—they thought it unseemly, of an educated man.

But that has only accelerated since. My Cretan, what little of it there is, has to be translated to my Gen Alpha relatives. I’m finding my impulse for ever more authentic morphology mostly met by a wall of Standard Greek, with only the occasional concession. Just two decent dialect speakers in my stay, the cab driver from Ag Nik, and a worker at the Post Office (not the one that served me). And God help me, I caught myself having the same “unseemly” reaction to their speech.

Hearing Cretan accents around me flicks the switch on in me to speak in dialect, but that switch doesn’t just flick on to activate antiquarianism and erudition, essential though those are to who I am. It flicks on to draw out a common identity: in a time when the dialect is dying fast, that’s what speaking in dialect means. And if my dialect is heavier than those I’m speaking to, it’s no longer working to that end. It’s working to isolate me instead of binding me to the community.

It’s making me a relic, the kind of person that I would myself be seeking out in another life, for information of what I recollect of the dialect. Which makes me feel not just isolated, but a fraud. I’m not from here, I’m not of this place: I should not be a last guardian of its legacy.

I still do it (μπορώ να τα στείλω τουτα-νέ; έναν καφέ θα πάρω, etc.), it comes out of me here like that, and it still feels at some level right to do so to me. The cabbie applauded it. But it feels hollow.

I cannot reconcile to the past I’ve inhabited passing, and to being out of place; and it’s no answer to try and be what I am not, either less Australian than I am, or for that matter less Cretan. I can only be aware of the traps I lay for myself, and try to dodge them.

(I’ve added a few links.) And here’s an interesting tidbit from another post:

One street up from brandy bar alley, Sitia, and there is a lot going on around Vincenzo Kornaros cultural house, named after the local poet. […] And right opposite the cultural house, a laundry goods store owned by someone of the same surname. With the first name Arianthe, and my grandmother had a neighbor with the same name: a vernacular refashioning of the Cretan name Ariadne.

Reminds me of Russian folk versions like Arina for Irina and Alyona for Elena.