In my personal dictionary, HERITAGE is not a word. In my family of origin, possessions are lost, mixed, stuck, blurred, complicated. Not much is transmitted, especially not during our lifetime. And then, when we die, we have a mission : we haunt the living for everything we lost. Specially for all what we could have inherited, transmitted or possessed.
I was never much interested in heritage before. I don’t remember thinking so much about it, at least not in my younger years. As nobody seemed to have acquired much in the 2 last generations (no house, no land, no money), I guess it was not an issue and I got used to it. It was never such a big question. Coming from a nomadic family, I understood down deep in my bones, that some people like my people cannot keep or carry too many things around; they would be hindered from walking further. Some years ago, I was asked at a workhop1 to bring something I had inherited. I got embarrassed. I could not think of anything. Not a single spoon? A vase? A napkin? Objects have either been lost, sold or destroyed. If anyone got anything, in the end, no-one really knows where it is.
At that workshop, we worked with concepts such as incestuous transactions, vampire energies, heavy secrets, ill-defined and ambiguous lines of conduct, and their effects on a family system and its psyche. Through several generations, they can act like ghosts, who after being buried in deep crypts, burst out, manifesting in many different forms - mental and physical disease, pain, dysphoria, accidents, alienation, and so many other consequences on one’s life. That day was very special for me; I understood so much about what lies beneath. But when someone pronounced these words “We take because they took from us”, I felt shivers passing through my whole body, as if stagnated memory was liberated. That sentence was incredible; in truth and in resonance. This is what was happening for generations in my family. The absence of law and a constant hubbub. Violence and an imposed silence upon women, men, children, and not only.
This is the story of a Monster. A Monster that was fed by my people and grew out of greed. This is the story of a Monster, that is still very alive after it has been killed.2
At the end of the 60s, in the midst of the Greek dictatorship, the so-called Junta, my grand-mother, Ioanna, then a nurse, surprised the family by acquiring a small 2-rooms apartment in the centre of Athens. It was situated in a quite seedy and poor district near the train station. It was nothing exceptional but nevertheless it was an acquisition. It carried the hope of placing a seed in the barren ground of in-transmissibility of former generations. But little did my grand-mother know that she was just blindly following the loud and ancient voices of the sirens3 shaking and dooming our bones for generations.
The life of my ancestor is still today a great mystery to me. Much of the information around her is very strange. It feels fake, elusive, truncated, and sometimes it does not even make sense. Many of the stories are expressed in strong images, short sentences, repeated again and again like a hypnotic mantra. As if they had the power to influence our subconscious minds. Specially, I thought, they were made so you would stop asking questions. After all those years, I can still hear them in my mother’s mouth :
She abandoned me in an orphanage. She lost a child. She was a refugee. She was beautiful. One night, she threatened me with a knife if I would not go out with her man. She was an actress. She terminated many pregnancies, you know, alone, with a metal hanger. She was battered. She was doing weird stuff. She had a horrible relationship with a violent police officer. She was poor. She had no luck with men. She was a witch. She was so desirable that men would fight to get her.
As I am desperately trying to reconnect with my mother’s lineage and to reconstruct a family puzzle, I understand that asking the living is not going to help much. I need to operate a real katabasis4, I need to go under, deep into the ground and listen beyond the human. Meet the Ancestors. Meet the Ruins. Meet the Dead.
I always knew how to listen to the rumour of the Monster, especially the slimy tentacled Monster that maintains and nourishes the corrupt and nauseating system of incestuous and alienating bonds of families with vampiric relationships. A sinister machine for reproducing oppression, dissonance and injustice; the land will first be exploited like a woman, then abused like a child, finally to be squandered like a heritage.
In 1974, when we arrived in Greece after the brutal separation of my parents, it was there (in the small apartment of my grand mother) that my sister, my mother and I, found refuge for a few weeks. We would live "on top of each other" as they say, just the time for us to find a proper roof over our heads. My grandmother was at that time still relatively active but at the start of her cruel descent, her doomed collapse into disease; she would soon be heavily medicated, bedridden, with debilitating pain. She would die 9 years later and in a lot of pain.
Favierou5 was always open, people could enter at any time of the day or the night, they could leave without notice; there were always cousins, uncles, drama, brothers, noise, laughter, smoke, smells, cries, neighbours. People would eat there, people would sleep there, people would even take long naps there, naked, glued to one another and sometimes to small little girls.
The walls of the apartment were not very thick but they seemed watertight; you could whisper all the secrets in the world to them, nothing would leak out. But altogether porous, olfactory, membranous, they seemed exposed and open. This is how Monsters are born.
I will always remember the terror when some nights, the neighbour woman would scream to death from the other side of the wall. She was beaten up by her husband, coming back home, drunk. The screaming would last some minutes, and after fighting and crying, they would fall asleep, together, on a tiny foldable bed, on the balcony, growling. This is how Monsters are born.
My mother's relationship with her own mother has always been very complicated. She would never forgive her for putting her (and not her sister) in an orphanage. She was 8. She would be separated from her family for many years, only able to see them on Sundays. When Ioanna died in 1983, though she did not go to her funeral, my mum fought tooth and nail to get her apartment. The conditions of this acquisition are not so clear: I hear some rumours of discussions, and arguing but in the end ….she did not share with her sister…
She takes because they took from her.
This apartment plays a special role in my maternal lineage. It has moulded my grandmother's body - her illness, her invalidity, her suffering. It has impacted my mother´s life – her divorce, her accidents, her depression, her autoimmune diseases, and of course the pain of her cruel and lonely childhood. It has violated my childhood and innocence. It has also splashed dirt onto my daughter’s tender years.
They take because they took from them.
Over the years, my mother would eventually make some profit out if it by renting it out to some unscrupulous people who either didn't pay her or left the apartment with serious damage. Worn out by failures, lies and dereliction, it was my sister's turn to get her hands on the cursed place; she would also try to extract its essential marrow. She rented it out for more than 15 years, making some kind of a living out of it, to finally sell it in 2018 to urgently repay huge debts and a personal bank loan. The whole sum was immediately squandered. The inheritance devoured. And again, she did not share with her sister….
She takes because they took from her.
In my practice6, when working with people on their family tree, we often talk about houses, lands and objects. They carry sense, meaning, and life. They often also accumulate toxicity, loss, negative and pathogenic energies, not allowing the flow or the transmission through the lineages. They can be catalysts for abuse, violence, injustice, and usurpation. Energy is then hampered, torn away, tainted. This is why we need to intervene, to work (hard), to become the seekers of truth and restore justice so as to allow fluidity to run back in our veins.
The workshop was part of my Transgenerational Psycho-Analysis Education/Training with Christine Ulivucci.
Extract from my journal. (all what is in italics comes from my diary)
Ancient Greek: singular: Σειρήν, Seirḗn; plural: Σειρῆνες, Seirênes - the creatures who lured sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.
Greek katabasis descent, from katabainein to go down, from kata- cata- + bainein to go.
Name of the street where the apartment was situated. So all ended up calling it “Favierou”.
Transgenerational Therapy is a powerful therapeutic “tool” using mainly our family tree to explore our family history. By working on the restoration of the connection between you and your lineages, Transgenerational Therapy engages the body, the psychic world and the language. Please visit my website here.