BOOK REVIEW
NOT EVEN MY NAME
Quite a few
years back while a high school student in
Tsotyli, in the prefecture of Kozani, Greece, I heard a
Pontic song. Even though I couldn’t speak the dialect of the
Greeks who lived for 3000 years at the Black Sea coastal area of
Turkey, it was not too difficult to understand the lyrics of the
song. The theme was a hurried journey: “…As they were
fleeing in a hurry they saw fields and valleys…And at the
end of the valley stood a huge tree…” The music was
beautiful, but the lyrics were an enigma to me; I couldn’t
understand what the song was all about.
Growing up
in western Macedonia, Greece I knew that most demotic (folk)
songs contain a story. They tell something that was historically
or culturally significant at the time of the song’s creation. It
took me thirty years a move to another continent to fully
understand the meaning of the lyrics and the history that was
connected to this song. After reading Thea
Halo’s Not Even my Name I realized the meaning of
the beautiful Pontic song with its quick, staccato
tempo.
Not
Even my Name
is Sano’s story told by
her daughter Thea. It is a
compelling and unforgettable story of survival, freedom and
promise of a new and better life. It is an account of the
Pontic genocide that took place in the early part of the
century. Halo captivates her readers as she describes
Themia’s (Sano’s) idyllic, pastoral
life with her family set against the Pontic Mountains of
northern Turkey:
“As if drawn by a gossamer
thread, my eyes turned to the east as the sun
peeked its
brilliant face above the mountains. My sister’s hair flamed
before me and golden sunlight drenched the hills. My own hand
bled a golden light that soaked the fur of the calf it was
leading. Even the grass confused its color; first gold then
green then gold once more as it flirted with the sun…”
The three thousand year history of
the Pontic Greeks in Turkey slowly approaches its end. First
strangers begin to appear in the fields and forests of
Themia’s village, hovering and
keeping their distance.
“…They had begun to appear in
our village more and more,” Halo writes “Their language
was new to us and they sat around…away from the village, waiting
and staring like birds of prey. It was eerie how they hung
around all of a sudden, coming from nowhere and occupying our
village…”
Turkish soldiers appear, seizing men
of the village and sending them in slave labor camps. Halo
masterfully builds up all these
events one after the other, conveying the sense of a gathering
catastrophe. The ominous events reach their peak as Turkish
soldiers in the spring of 1922, begin pounding on doors with the
butts of their riffles:
“You
are to leave this place. You are to take with you only what you
can carry”, they shout, delivering the proclamation issued
by General Kemal
Ataturk. The Pontic Greek
population is being forcibly evacuated from their village So the
death march of the exiled people begins. Halo describes the
painful and disturbing path of the banished populace,
accompanied by the Turkish military.
Themia’s loving family and the beautiful pastoral land
are juxtaposed against a succession of brutal events evoking to
the reader a full range of human emotions.
Themia watches her family and other people from her
village die one after the other from starvation, dysentery and
tuberculosis.
The
ten-year-old girl finds herself stripped of everything she had
ever held dear. She is even stripped of her name when her
mother, ailing and unable to take care of her leaves
Themia with an Assyrian woman who
cannot pronounce her Greek name, she is renamed “Sano.” At age
fifteen Sano is sold into marriage to a man much older than she
was. He brings her to America, where Sano lovingly raised ten
children. The innocent village girl becomes a determined woman
of the twentieth century.
Halo’s
painful story, calls to mind
Sophoclean tragedy, in which
Lahesis, Clotho
and Atropos – the ancient
Moirae or “Fates” cast arbitrary,
inescapable doom. Though one might expect such tormenting
experiences to fill anyone with anger and bitterness, Sano
emerges without malice. She is only ten when turmoil engulfs her
village. But the narrative offers glimpse of a young girl who is
mature beyond her age. She is always prompt in her chores,
forever helping her mother and when tragedy strikes and she sees
her family perish she endures terrible pain. She does not
however, blame anyone.
Halo skillfully directs
the reader’s attention toward the close-knit family relations
that characterized life in the small Pontic village.
Themia’s family was extended rather
than mononuclear, providing a loving environment in which each
member had a role. Not only parents and siblings, but also
grandparents, aunts and uncles were important to the family’s
functioning. This concept of the family is one of the defining
qualities of Greek tradition. Sano’s
strength, and her ability to endure great pain without
becoming destructive and hateful, stems from the environment of
her formative years. She is like the ancient Phoenix, which
every thousand years immerses itself into the fire and
regenerates. Sano immerges out of thi
heartbreaking tragedy with her capacity to love intact: she has
the strength to nurture and lovingly raise ten children of her
own!
A
BOOK FOR EVERYONE
Not Even my Name
is a book not just for
the Greek-Americans and the Greeks from Greece. This is a book
for humanity. The world should know about the Pontic death
march. Thea Halo wrote her mother’s
story to make her mother’s tragedy known to everyone. And she
wrote for our children as well, and for our children’s
children. The dreadful events are parts of history. The Pontic
plight just like the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Greek Civil
War from 1944-1947 are periods overlooked by school history
books in Greece and by most Greek schools in the
diaspora. History does not only
include days of glory, but tragedies and defeats as
well, and yes, many errors. All of us
can learn from Sano’s story. One thing we learn is that people
of different ethnicities, can
co-exist in peace if they are left alone by intrusive
governments. The most important lesson however this book
teaches us is that we can’t sweep such anguish and suffering
under the rug and pretend these things never happened. If we do
that we promote genocide to happen again and again.
Nina Gatzoulis
