It’s amazing how you learn to walk as a woman on this island: face downcast. Not in central Mytilini, a city which, if anthropormorphized, would be barefoot and wearing a hemp anklet – not there, but in the villages, where the kafeneia are still the exclusive preserve of old men on the hot afternoons. It would be rude to look them in the eye. The general Lesbian attitude to these men is one of reverence; they are the ones who went away to war, and during peacetime, slipped out of the houses before dawn and came back late at night, bringing with them the smell of salt and kelp. There is much to admire in them. There is a kind of exaggerated – but, I have no doubt, heartfelt – chivalry here: a woman will find it hard to step off a sidewalk in the villages without help. The concept of filoxenia is vital here, a concept pulled straight from the Iliad to sprawl across the landscape of modern Greek life: literally ‘hospitality’, it is taken much further than northern European hospitality. The very worst insult you can ever levy at a Greek person is that they are afilotimos/e: they are ‘inhospitable’ or ‘dishonorable.’
Greek culture in general seems to be more gender-segregated than English culture. People sharing motorbikes zip recklessly across lanes of traffic in Mytilini, but it’s unusual to see a mixed-gender pair on the same bike: usually teenaged boys, or a pair of girls, or a grandfather with a grandson. This isn’t Saudi Arabia – there are the usual straight couples or mixed-sex groups of friends you’d see everywhere in Europe – but single-sex groups, usually of men, are slightly more common. I always twist my mouth wryly at the assumed heterosexuality in gender-divided societies - especially so in Greece, where the physical expression of friendship is much more accepted than in England or the States (kissing twice on the cheeks in greeting, rubbing people’s back or shoulders with your palm, linking arms). Fantastic for queer people: in close and very touchy-feely quarters with the people you’re really attracted to, saved from having to display any interest in the other gender, yet punished strictly if you’re caught.
I was going to say that I can’t imagine living like that, but I did go to a girls’ school...
This is in my thoughts because a lot of our ‘cultural activities’ – and general conversation – have touched on courtship or dating in some way, from the wedding crowns at the Museum of the Refugees to the traditional dances we learned (‘This one is danced at weddings’, my tutor said, ‘and this one we dance opposite each other’, hips swinging towards each other, clearly one of the few old sanctioned opportunities for young people on the island to flirt. Catch your husband during the dances at your sister’s wedding.) ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ was one of the basic-conversation phrases we practiced in Modern Greek. ‘Are you looking so pretty for a Greek boyfriend? You must be hiding a nice Greek boy in Mytilini, you’re dressed up all nice!’ one of the women told me. I certainly appreciated the compliment – she was a lovely and well-meaning lady – but I couldn’t exactly say ‘No, I’ve put on lipstick for A. at the kafeneio’...
(Is it so unthinkable that when Atthis danced, her neat ankles flashing beneath her skirt as she backed and advanced, she was trying to catch the eye of Anaktoria instead of Alcmaeus?)
No comments:
Post a Comment