Oregano and olive trees
I’ve been re-reading Tessa Kiros’ cookbook Falling Cloudberries this past week (yes, I read cookbooks like novels, front to end…) and I’ve been struck over and over by the lovely way she strings together words, then phrases, then sentences, finally paragraphs. Elegantly, sparsely, evocatively.
Kiros is half Greek-Cypriot, so her recipes and prose are steeped in nostalgia for my second homeland – of oregano and oranges and olive trees … In particular, a passage about my beloved Greece sticks out, I’ve all but committed it to memory:
I love the orange trees lining winter Athenian avenues. And the people who open their doors and their hearts to you. I love the Greek markets with baskets of gorgeous red just-flowered pistachios, piles of figs and very wild hilltop greens sitting next to indifferent mountains of underwear. Everywhere, amongst the pervasive smell of fresh oregano, there is an atmosphere of people doing their own thing, each stepping in tune to their own internal guide. Greece is magnetic, they say. Once you have stepped on Greek ground it’s hard to shake yourself free. Myth has it that it’s because your feet become stuck in the rich honey coating this country. It’s the only place where people have always wished me a good week, month, day, summer, winter, life, work… and a birthday wish to grow old with white hair.
Kiros, Falling Cloudberries (73)
I think all children of immigrants have a certain attachment to their adopted homeland. Indeed, I call myself an Athenian at heart, carry a near-innate nationalistic pride for my roots, my father’s roots. I spent much of my academic life thinking about nationalism, so it comes as no surprise on an intellectual level that I hold such deep-seated attachments.
And yet, it’s still puzzling, that as a child of a child of Greece, I call the country i patrida mas (my homeland) with fierce pride and that 25 Martiou means anything to me at all. It comes as a surprise that my heart can be so heavy for my vacation home, that I am able to smell the thyme and salt-water midnight air waiting for the ferry – that I conjure up the welcome death-dry Athenian heat in my bones.
I sit here gathering the collective stories of goats and mountain-tops with old stone mills and wild greens gathered roadside and beachside caves … recipes for a life well-lived under Cycladic sun. There are so many vignettes floating in my mind, that speak to the certainty of Greece’s glorious magnetic soil, so much to share.
Reading this post reminded me of the “hole” in my ancestral identity. Strictly speaking it’s not truly a hole, as I come from a very mixed family, but perhaps a dilution. In fact, the dilution already occured at the level of my parents, who came to Canada from a country lining the mediteranean, from a city that was, in particular at the time, as much a melting pot as Canada is today. Perhaps, then, I should feel some link to that fateful place, but I don’t.
When I was very young, my cultural identity was shaped primarily by being the only person I knew who spoke french with his parents at home (I grew up in Ontario). I took it for granted that french was “my” language, never realising that it was just a de-facto universal language in a family where 3 out of 4 of my grandparents had other mother tongues. I obviously realise now the tenous link of french to my ancestral identity, yet this language, my own first language, has always had a special place in my heart. When I would hear it in the streets of Toronto, it would make my head turn and smile. Being a news addict, I would sometimes switch to watching the news on CBC’s french nework, but never quite found what I was yearning for — it was entertaining, dare I say “cute”, to hear the news being discussed in a québécois or franco-ontarian accent, but these were not “my” people; no one in my family spoke with an accent like that. Even now, a couple months post my move to Paris, where the french here sounds a little closer to the one I grew up hearing, but not quite, I don’t recognise myself in the others here; I still don’t feel that I’m surrounded by “mon peuple”…
It’s obvious, though, I don’t have a “people” I belong to; I have no homeland… except for Canada. I suppose, in this regard, I break the mould of the “typical” child of an immigrant. Not that I can necessarily see myself in others when I am in Canada (and, in fact, I’m sure it goes both ways; it was often commented at how different I was compared to “other Canadian guys”), but at least I have a sense of solidarity with them. Perhaps that’s enough. I have certainly become a bit more patriotic now that I am out of the country — but that’s my mind realising that Canada is truly special place, it’s not something from the heart.
Your heart paints pictures of orange and olive trees and your mind replays fond memories the smell of thyme, the sea, and panoramas of childhood vacations. In contrast, and in part because there is no direct family left in any of the geographical “spokes” of my ancestry, I don’t daydream of vacations anywhere in particular. I do, however, have an emotional attachment to food… but the end results, not their source; I think of olives and thyme as well, but I’ve never seen them in the wild. I think of feta cheese and watermelon (even better if together), I think of lasagna and baked ziti with a creamy béchamel sauce, I think of falafels and kofta, I have fond memories of stuffed tomatos and green peppers, of mousaka, of couscous and garlic pasta, I think of soupes a l’onion, of roasts in the oven, of baklava, baba-au-rhum, or loukoum, I often crave labenah and tadziki, baba ghanouj and humus with zatar; I can smell cinnamon, nutmeg, garlic, roasting onions, oregano, rosemary and thyme… Come to think of it, it’s quite simple really. My cultural identity is rooted in my mother’s kitchen!
[...] Oregano and olive trees (March) It comes as a surprise that my heart can be so heavy for my vacation home, that I am able to smell the thyme and salt-water midnight air waiting for the ferry – that I conjure up the welcome death-dry Athenian heat in my bones. [...]
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the brush. Do it little by little and cautiously because the bleach might get accidentally on your clothing or nearly anything that is bordering you.
I have a friend, Barry, who spends time pondering questions that wouldn’t even occur to normal folks.