Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Olympia Karayiorgia: A beautiful danger A Greek of Egypt, a poet. She returns to her country of birth Profile by Yasmine El-Rashidi

To the untrained eye, the room was in perfect harmony that day: the chairs, sofas and coffee table perfectly aligned; the silver ornaments, little candles and miniature picture frames masterfully arranged; and a soft evening glow falling in perfect shades across the walls and floor.

It would have been the ideal setting for a peaceful evening with a book, a movie, or a friend.

To Olympia Karayiorgia, though, there is something wrong. Something very wrong.

"There is something missing," she says, striding in, her black robes flowing behind her.

"You have roses?" she continues, walking straight to the slim white vase in the adjoining room. "Ah, this will do."

A single red rose flung on the sitting-room coffee table does the trick.

"That's better," she sighs in relief. "Now we may begin."

That is the poet's voice -- the voice of one who writes by feeling, lives by feeling and, apparently, even speaks by feeling. It is about aura and surroundings; the lights, shadows, scents and colours.

"You must be in touch with your surroundings," she whispers. "But now, let us begin."

For her, it began in Alexandria, just a few streets away from the home of fellow poet and compatriot Constantinos Cavafis. But while Cavafis's roots did not budge, for Olympia, things shifted soon after to Mansoura, and a seven-room apartment close to Cinema Rex.

The year was 1934. Olympia was born into a family whose three members belonged to the 150,000-strong Greek community of Alexandria.

"My mother was born in Alexandria," she says. "From her side, I was third-generation Greek of Egypt. My father was uprooted from Arkavia, in Greece, when he was 16, and he came to work in the cotton industry."

But -- like her, as she was later to discover -- he couldn't bear the thought of submitting to a rich person's arrogant ways, and so he abandoned the initial plan of working for his uncle in his cotton business, opting instead to open his own odds-and-ends store.

Even when Olympia went off to Cairo -- where she did her BA in sociology at the American University in Cairo -- her parents stayed put, their roots reaching ever deeper into their adoptive society. But then, she didn't realise her own attachment to the country of her birth. So at 22 she flew off to Stanford, and at 23 happily helped her parents pack up and move back to Greece.

"It was only later," she says, "much later, that I realised that I carried Egypt in myself all the way through."

It was 26 years later, to be exact, 26 years after she first left for America, and at Cairo International Airport, that Olympia came to this realisation.

"I felt that I had been frozen, and that I was melting again -- when I heard the language, saw people holding hands, embracing being warm. It was then that I really realised," she says, her hands flowing through the air. "Greece has a warm heart also, but it is closer to the West. Greece's fate is a painful fate because it stands between the West and the East, so it never sees absolutely of one piece. Both ethical systems work on it. Egypt, on the other hand, is special."

Special enough to have stayed with her all those years, manifesting itself in her thoughts, actions, and the words she put down on the page.

"There is a piece of Egypt in all my poems and short stories," she says matter-of-factly. "Like this," she continues, opening her latest collection.

"Only the River Knew," she begins:

"Only the river knew
The miles of desert I had walked
in cold conceited cities
Trying to grasp their locked up
fake wisdom

And now it smiled a liquid smile
as it passed
the boat of light
the boat of joy
that held us in its arms
high up between the moon and sky

For I was back
Where life, my life had started
And now I knew
And now I saw:
The sand, the pyramids unveiled, the eyes of this ancient land
Was all I ever wanted
Was all I ever needed
As now, I need your hand."

"There is Egypt all over my poetry, directly or indirectly," she quickly continues, clicking out of her slow, deep recital mode. "And definitely the soul, the atmosphere that envelopes Egypt is always with me. As the poem describes, I feel a cold air in every country I go to that doesn't look, doesn't feel like the aura of Egypt. But there is something very dangerous, in a way, about the whole of Egypt. It is like a beautiful danger, a charming cobra that wants to suck you in, to take you and you can't go against it. It attracts you and you know you may die in it, but you go. It is a combination of sadness, fate, sweetness, eroticism, eternity, despair. Like quicksand absorbing you and making you disappear."

In her case, a part of her managed to escape. For in Olympia Karayiorgia, there is a heart and a soul comprised of Egyptian feelings and emotions -- the aura, as she calls it. But while others have been fully taken away in the whirlwind of its charm; taking root and dying in that sole soil, she managed to uproot herself before it was too late.

"I went back to Greece because my parents moved back. It was very difficult in many ways. We went from a seven-bedroom flat to two rooms in the basement," she says. "It was hard."

Hard for a young person, but much harder for her 75-year-old mother and 85-year-old father.

For the mother, the difficulties came upon their settling down, when her Cairo soul reminded her again and again "how good the Egyptian people were."

For the father, they began from day one.

"Father enters [the two-room basement flat] and says 'where is the rest of the house?" she recalls. "I say, 'this is the house,' and he asks 'where shall we eat?', and I tell him at the kitchen table," she continues. "But I'm not used to it, at the kitchen table,' he says."

She looks down at the floor and pauses long enough to fill the room with a sad silence.

"It was very difficult for him. For both of them," she says. "And later," she sighs, "for me."

Later, meant upon her father's death -- at which time she wrote a short story that changed her life.

"The basement was small compared to our huge Mansoura flat," she says. "But it was never empty, cold or soulless. Until father died, that is."

"The night before you died," she writes in "You See Father," "this house was beginning to be a home. I had finally managed to drag all those dusty sacks and old suitcases into the store-room and out of your bedroom, and the air was fresh and pleasant again... Mother, also, had found the yellow hand-made blankets that used to mark the beginning of the warmth of winter back in Egypt. Yes, this house was becoming a home."

But the father she idolised died, the mother she called unloving took her own course, and Olympia was left with her countrymen, and the desire and temptation to flee back to Egypt.

"Some years ago, over 15 years ago, actually, I went to a wonderful teacher we had at the Greek school in Mansoura, and I said 'I can't bear it anymore. I can't have people push me, I can't have people not smile around me, I want to leave. I want to leave Greece.'"

Her teacher knew where she was coming from -- she herself was one of the 40,000 Greeks of Egypt who had pulled out their foundations and moved back to Athens -- and so she told her to sit down. She would be her teacher again.

"She said, 'don't forget that we Greeks of Egypt did not go through the war in Albania; Greece against Italy. We didn't go through the terrible German occupation, when people died of famine, when people were shot against the wall, where children grew beards as if they had completed the cycle of life and grown old, because of lack of food. We didn't live that. We were having a good time while Greece was dying. And worst of all was the civil war, between Greek Communists and Rightists.' And she said that because we hadn't gone through it, we are responsible toward the people of Greece -- we have to remind them of the gentleness they possess."

So since then, she has put up a fight, as she says; smiling and joking and saying kind words to strangers.

"I have a very good time in the street," she laughs. "And the response is extraordinary. At the beginning they're a bit fearful, but then they see that I want nothing from them -- I don't ask for anything -- so they respond and smile and laugh. And this, I must say, is something I inherited from Egypt. From the Egyptian people."

People, she says, who though poor in pocket, are rich in soul.

"One thing people don't realise is that there is no loneliness in Egypt. No Egyptian can say he's lonely. People live together, people enjoy each other's presence. And this makes up for the lack of money, lack of conveniences, facilities. There is another wealth that the West is losing. And it is for this reason that I stay in Greece. To help, through my poetry, show this to the Greek people."

And through this poetry, which, like that of Greek Egyptian greats such as Cavafis and Siteris, is now being translated into Arabic in celebration of the cultural link between Greece and Egypt, she hopes to send messages back to Egypt too.

"All social classes must realise that there is a wealth," she says, "I remember we went on an excursion to Mexico when I was at Stanford, and I was lying on the sand admiring the strange square mountains and I felt somebody falling on the sand next to me. It was a professor, and he said, 'Olympia, what is the most important thing in the world?' And I said, 'Love'! And he said, 'Oh my God, I came to ask you for the money you hadn't paid'! Among Egyptians you wouldn't find this because of the basic humanity, the acceptance of the difficulty of life, of the common human love that I call the common human faith that we live and then we die -- that the West forgets. But of course, of course I see changes here."

Changes such as the demolition of the house off Tahrir Square. Olympia and her friends used to lie on the lawns of the small Islamic palace listening to classical and Arabic music. Changes such as the dusty buildings, which look sad in themselves, and of course in the young people, who are trying hard to be like their counterparts in the West.

"But even if they try, even if they would like to be that way, what wins over is the Egyptian way," she concludes. "Their listening to the call to prayer five times a day permeates and fights the Western influence. Of course we should be open to everything that's good in every culture, but in the end, we must be our true selves. In Greece we criticise Americans. But why not imitate their punctuality, their sense of responsibility, their need to do their job as well as possible? Why not imitate these instead of just drinking Coca Cola and wearing blue jeans?"

Her poetry, she feels, steers Egyptians and Greeks toward these aspirations. But it is about Egypt and its compassion that Olympia speaks to the world.

photos: Sherif Sonbol

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