“Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.” ― Hannah ArendtI never thought it would be so difficult to write about my grand father. I did not know him. In my family pantheon, he was not so interesting. A little boring maybe? I did not pay so much attention. To be honest, I was too busy with the Great -Beautiful - Powerful - Women in my family. The Mothers. The Monsters. Also, I was fed with quite a few banalities about my grand father. It was a little confusing. If I would ask questions about him, there would be no avoidance, annoyance and anything like that. But looking back at them, the responses were as clear as they were muddy - clear and muddy at the same time.
This piece took me more than three years to write, more than three years of incubation - of corrections - of hesitation and still I don’t feel good about it. A timeless forced labor of self becoming. As I write this story - this elliptic, emotional, weird, blurred, nonsensical patched story with a lot of inconsistencies and holes in it, I implore you to dispute, interrogate, question, smear everything. All what is said, can be unsaid. That´s the only healthy way to survive.
monsters and smaller animals
In the last two decades, I have wrestled with the monsters of my dysfunctional family. The incestuous monster was a ferocious animal, I thought, it had big teeth, a gluey consistence, and it could attack anytime. This is at least what I thought, until I rediscovered a text I have written some years ago, while I was doing my transgenerational studies in Paris. I had focused so much on one wound on one side, that I almost did not see that I was missing a leg on the other side! We work hard to heal one thing and then, another thing pops up. The truth is, the deeper you dig, the more things will come up. I often speak of healing as a spiral that goes downwards. You are never finished with it. As you dig further down, eventually, you will flush out the smaller animals - the ones I will call purposefully here, the insects….Unlike monsters, insects are complex; you see, they are microscopic, they escape your gaze. They are also subtle. They do their job anyhow. They are always busy. They work in the cracks. They decompose dead material and recycle nutrients. So you don’t pay so much attention to them. You could live an entire life without even noticing them. But they do live and crawl around you. Sometimes even on you… Unless they do the fatal mistake to infest your bed, you will never start itching…
secrets
I have become an expert in hunting down secrets. I have developped a real nose for them. But of course, as usual, it is always easier to track them down on the family trees of others. I know them all: the sticky ones, the vicious ones, the infectious ones, the ones ticking and not exploding, the ones not ticking and exploding at your face, the remorseless ones, the slanderous ones. And so many others. But the ones resisting me, always, are the muddy ones. These are just boasting around. They should not even be called secrets : they go out in broad day light. Those are the worst! They go hand in hand with a well constructed one-size-fits-all narrative, a dystopic reality, an Orwellian tyranny using an over simplified and purified language that at the end of a conversation makes you lose clarity and meaning. Facing the story of my grand father, I feel denied of my sensory capacities. I feel the trouble.
«My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey. I must wait for the memories to come of their own accord, following their own logic» Umberto Ecocloset
There was a special space in my father’s childhood apartment. It was called the skoteino (a Greek word meaning “dark”) where my father and his sister would be sent to, as children, to be punished and humiliated. It was a small -dark -damp closet under the stairs. I often imagine and almost smell that terrible space. It seems to defy me through time. Like some of the secrets of its temporary inhabitants, I am still fighting with it, after all these years. Undisclosed. I am often holding my breath when thinking of that room; it makes it further shrink around the body of its small occupants - and mine.
death
My paternal grand father died on March 1, 1947, 44 rue Taitbout in Paris, 9th arrondissement. He was only 53 years old; he did not have any (known) disease. He passed at 9.00 in the morning. He was shaving when he collapsed on the bathroom floor, razor blade still in his hand. His son, my father was at school. That morning, he probably experienced one of his first major traumatic event. He was only 11. When he arrived back home, his father was dead. Cleopatra, my grand mother was on her knees washing the floor. Her husband had bled profusely. Where did all the blood come from? A cheek laceration by the razor? A broken nose by the fall over the sink? The death scene is a mess. A real bloodbath.
poetic diagnosis
Anastase left his body on that morning. Cause of death : Arterial Embolism1. In Biological Decoding of Diseases, Pr Christian Flèche2 explains that “a disease is a feeling that has become unconscious, this is when it enters into biology”. Trying to make sense of this sudden and unexpected death, I read that “embolism represents a conflict of territory. The thrombus is an agglutinated mass of blood - the embolus represents all the blood ties. When there is an accumulation of platelets, in other words, when there is a lot of blood, it is the whole family who is there. But since it is in the arteries, it has migrated.” I find this quite cryptic but also so poetic. It mixes organs, biology, concepts, family, events, emotions. I love that. I realise that all these words really resonate within me. I feel inspired to connect them with the bits and pieces of what I was told about my grand father.
conflict of territory
Around the years 1914-15, Anastase and his two older brothers leave their homeland. They live in Magnesia, Greece, but they maybe also come from Manisa, in Turkey. Some papers say Magnesia, some others Manisa…So, I don’t really know where they come from. I think I heard that the initial dream was a common one : they dreamt of Amerika, the land of opportunities and promises. My father says they embarked on a ship, from Piraeus, destination Ellis Island. As I am trying to find information online about the names of ships that were sailing off from the Piraeus port at that time, I start to doubt, there are none. It is World War I. The Balkan wars just ended. OK that does not matter so much; they found a way and left. For unclear reasons, their journey to the US will be interrupted. They disembark in the port of Marseille. Did this crush their dreams on an ideal somewhere else? Anyhow, somewhere else will be there, in France.
mass of blood
From Marseille, their journey leads directly to Saint Etienne. There, the three brothers get a first employment at MAS - Manufacture d´Armes de Saint Etienne - a weapon factory! How long did they stay there? What job did they do exactly? How many pistols and guns and machines of war did their fabricate with their poor six hands ? As I am trying to find the figure of my grand father on this photo, I have a heavy heart. I understand also that all along this text, through time and events, I am “judging” a man. I do not like that about me. Would I have done less, better, something else…?
all the blood ties
Fast forward, the Canellis´ brothers now live in Paris. Anastase has established himself as a tailor, like many other Greek immigrants at that time. He marries Cleopatra in 1929, also from Greek-Turkish decent. Family legend sets their meeting in Greece in 1928. But how is this even possible? The dates do not pile up. Did he go back home? If not, how did they meet ? I understand it is an arranged marriage (like my parents) but I don’t know much more. They will soon become parents of two children, the first is a girl she is born in July 1931 and then a boy, my father, born in January 1936. I heard also that they will also lose a child. My father says his mother loved the name Jean-Pierre. But she lost a baby… did she reach to baptise him? I have a photo of my grand parents with three children. Is this Jean-Pierre the baby in white on the photo? I don’t know. My father mixes everything up….
accumulation
In 1944, my grand father acquires a huge apartment in Paris. They are not rich. For sure, they did not have the means to buy that place. So, how did they “acquire” it? One day, my father mentions the Souris Grises often visiting. -They were so nice! -Grey Mouse? I remember asking. -Yes, you know, they were called like this, because they had grey uniforms - grey skirts, grey blazers. One day, not long ago, I thought of searching up the term on wikipedia. I found this: Nicknamed Grey Mouse in French, the Wehrmachthelferin are the female auxiliary of the defence forces, young women serving in the German armed forces during the Second World War.
Bomb.
it has migrated
What follows is even worse. I am not sure why my father did not even tried to hide this information from me. I feel ashamed. So, here it goes: their apartment is situated at 44 rue Taitbout (he was repeating the address again and again as if it itself there is something I should understand) and it has more than 10 rooms. Enough for 4 or 5 families. Again, the story goes really coy for me. My father adds : -The owner was a very rich Jew, Mr Haas. He left his apartment to go to the US. He had family there. So Mr Haas, a Jew, migrated? We are in 1944.
Tailor or Traitor?
It is almost impossible to move on; I am holding my breath. This is the only information available. This is the only possible information. I have to accept it and integrate it into my family history, even if holding my breath to all what that means. I am no stranger to holding my breath.
it is the whole family who is there
Silenced stories, guilt stories, heavy ones, the stories you need to listen to with your special ears, the ears of your stomach. And, as you try to make your way into them, it seems you really need to alchemise your thoughts and to weave the lack of matter into a more sustainable - even if fragile - thread, something that helps you dive deeper into the real material of your existence.
All my life, I tried to perform good daughterhood, protecting myself from the ugly, closing my ears to the heavy silences and to the cracks in the voices, swallowing my inner light and wisdom in order to belong.
I will not mute myself for the sake of any fake glory.
As I refuse to be silent about anything anymore, I let go of the anxiety and the pressure and the monsters. And the insects now in the bed.
I got you.
it is in the arteries
I have been contemplating for long the reasons of the sudden passing of my grand father. I tried to see beyond it. In his heart and in his arteries, Anastase brought with him a lot of traumas - traumas of the individual but also of the collective. The deportation of his ancestors expropriated, deported, and massacred. From Turkey and from Greece. The deportation of the Jews expropriated, deported, and massacred in France and elsewhere in the world.
This, if anything, reminds us that we are not the masters of our own destiny. Ultimately, doing this or that can be fatal; and then of course, our deeds, our acts, the way we lived and the way we die can be interpreted, judged, redefined. Sometimes into brutal terms. But what is the alternative? Terror keeps you in a shrinking closet of secrets, like the skoteino where my father was locked up.
In the body, the heart is a central organ - the arteries and the veins are the return to the heart, to the territory, the hearth, to our home. When we cannot go home… we die.
“Home is always bleeding, losing its way. Everything embarks. Everything besides itself.” Bayo AkomolafeDefinition: Arterial embolism refers to a clot (embolus) that has come from another part of the body and causes a sudden interruption of blood flow to an organ or body part.
Christian Flèche has developed a form of listening to the symptom: biological, cyclical, transgenerational. He has been inspired by Erickson, and borrowed few elements borrowed from Hamer. He created new protocols, making Biological Decoding ™ an original emotional diagnostic method.
Thank you for writing and sharing your deep experience, Sage. It's like all of it is in all of us, and to judge is to fail to understand.