Kythera 3 September 2021
I just got back from the Diakofiti, where I had gone with my partner to leave some supplies for the Kurds from Iraq that were wrecked on the island six days ago. Long-life milk (which I couldn't find), petit-butter cookies, croissants (with cocoa) and a creamy soap. That's all they asked for, and I didn't want to go for less or more...because I thought I shouldn't arrive like Santa Claus, as usual Greek excesses to embarrass them to keep saying thank you, on the other hand, nor should I be stingy... «as much as» applies in Chirigo, so that's what I adhered to...
A weight has been weighing on me lately. It's as if something has taken away my carefree spirit. As if something has clouded my dream, since I found my little paradise, since I decided to leave the problems of this whole complicated world behind and find my refuge on an island that smells of Greece in the 50s. Until the Kurdish castaways of Lykodimou, my local beach, came to remind me that there is no paradise, and that the problems of this world follow us everywhere....wherever we are, in the city or on the island, in the West or in the East, we are part of the problem, because we humans have made our planet. I thank them for bringing me back to reality.
Here I'll make a convention, I'll name them Kurdish castaways, because that is what I know for sure that they are, I will not rush to call them refugees, because others, more expert and more bureaucratic than me, will judge for that. Nor will I call them migrants, because the word brings to mind black and white retro photographs of people getting into huge ships, with their visas and papers in their hands, waving goodbye to their families with cries of separation, to go to countries far away and unknown, because their land was poor and could not hold them any longer. Nor is this word worthy of the circumstances, however much we may try to adapt it to the cases of shipwrecked people.
I turn back the clock 23 years ago. September 1998.
I'm in the London, to study postgraduate and settle down. I didn't leave because of poverty, but the place didn't fit me either. I was fed up with us. So much Greekness was suffocating for my young existence. We were always «the best» and at the same time «the worst». I was confused. I had to see the world through a different prism, I had to become a stranger. It's a different experience of life when you become a stranger, when you lose your power, and a stranger among strangers and natives you have no other way but to understand others - because you have to understand them, because that's the only way to understand yourself.
There I met many people from all over the world, made good and long-lasting friends, strangers became my new family. Among them Shereen, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq in London. I met her in Notting hill, we were neighbours and for months she told me her story incessantly, as if she wanted me to capture it and make a film. She was a double refugee. Saddam Hussein was after her to kill her because she was from the Kurdish rebel families and he was dropping chemicals to kill them. That's how she ended up in the Netherlands. Then in Holland her (Kurdish) husband was after her to kill her because he was violent and jealous, so she found herself alone with her two young children in London, in the legendary Notting Hill.
Shereen was not a poor woman crying her fate, but a woman who loved life, something like a female Zorba of Kurdistan. With her I went to Kurdish restaurants, danced with her fellow Kurdish friends holding hands in their dances which were not so different from the Pontian and the pedozali. I drank cardamom tea with her in endless conversations about how much she dislikes the Arabs for forcing them to become Muslims and ruining their culture. From her I learned that «the enemies of their enemies are their friends,» a phrase she often used about the Turks, and ostentatiously reinforced our Greek-Kurdish friendship.
Shereen made her life in London. She acquired devoted girlfriends, lovers she kept hidden from the Kurdish community, saw her children graduate from English school, managed to prevent her youngest son from being recruited by Islamic propagandists, got a degree in psychology at an old age, and acquired her first clients. Until one day she proudly announced to me that she was leaving London, it was time to return to Iraq, because the Americans would help her people get their first lost homeland. In horror I asked her if she knew what she was going to do, and I saw that spark in her eyes.
23 years later, Diakofti, in Kythera.
I am surrounded by beautiful and smiling people, those who 6 days ago were the castaways of Lykodimou. I see in their eyes the same spark for life that I remember in my friend Shereen. I think they could all be her family. I know what a proud and brave people her people are, because I have danced with them and I know. I am not in a position to know exactly what has gone wrong with the Americans and Turks in Iraq since my friend Shereen settled in her newfound homeland, but I look at the beautiful faces of the wreckers of Lycodemus and I am sure they will erase their own future because, like my friend, they have proven that they do not accept their fate.
And that honours them.
By Peggy Vassiliou
