(Poem) Originally created in 1997.

Discussed also in the book SENSING THE EVERYDAY  (2019)

Excerpt from chapter 12 “Ethnopoetic Dialogues: Performing Local History” :

Reading hastily my mail in a taxi cab one morning, my eye stopped at an invitation by the University of Athens and the then Municipality of Areopolis (Mani) to address an international paleo-anthropological and historical-folkloric conference. It was to be organized  on the occasion of the discovery of Paleolithic skulls in Mani (Apidhima) and the subsequent opening of a Museum in Areopolis (locally known as Tzimova), in 1997. The program and abstracts revealed that the speakers, all male and most of them academics, were apparently ignorant of the local history and everyday cultural practices of the people. Trapped by disciplinary and areal boundaries, they had missed both the local on-going tradition of exhumations historically practiced by women, and all related ethnographic evidence in the area—including my own ethnography on the subject published in both English and Greek at the time. I got angry.

The form and content of my public Greeting to the Conference sprang up spontaneously that moment. It was an improvised lament, the traditional style of women’s poetry in Mani, claiming our silenced history back. Great poetic inspiration, some said later. Poetry and inspiration alike are usually understood as “a good idea,” something that comes from a working mind. I say my inspiration was an involuntary gesture of the body, something like a jolt that occurred unexpectedly when affect met the mind head on. A submerged sensory-affective body of knowledge was unconsciously translated into a present creative act.

My spontaneous composition was (electro)shocking to me, as much as it was later to the rest of the speakers. A conversion of the self had occurred; I had become my own ethnographic informant. I had never composed or written a lament before. This involuntary gesture brought to my consciousness, and theirs, the degree to which I had internalized the local technique of antiphonic or dialogical performance of women as a vehicle for the production and dissemination of knowledge and history. That was an ethnopoetic moment, a dialogue with an absent yet internalized Other in its own terms.