Diana Georgiou interviewed by Bridget Penney.
Diana Georgiou’s Other Reflexes, published by Book Works in 2023, offers an unprecedented depiction of Cyprus that captures the difficulties of queer female experience in a deeply conservative and patriarchal society. Fleshed out on the porous boundaries between memoir and fiction, each of the five interrelated tales — ʻSonic Memories’, ʻGood Taste’, ʻFinal Touches’, ʻVisual Pleasures’ and ʻHeavenly Smells’ — is dedicated to one of the senses. From developing strategies to shut out the sounds of domestic abuse happening in the next room (ʻSonic Memories’) to unpicking the implications of creativity and class in the conservative society of the 1990s, which was determined to ignore or criminalise queer experience (ʻFinal Touches’), Georgiou recounts what it means for domestic, interpersonal, and systemic violence to be the primary component of one’s world. ʻGood Taste’ explores the politics of nationalism and migration through the long, disputed tale of a dessert recipe within the complex history of the oft-colonised and contested island. ‘Visual Pleasures’ and ‘Heavenly Smells’ cast an unflinching look on the effects of closeted relationships counterbalanced by a remarkable meditation on friendship, time and human fragility.
Other Reflexes was commissioned from an open call put out by Book Works in the spring of 2020 and published in June 2023. As guest editor of the Interstices series I worked closely with Diana throughout the period of development. These are some of the questions that were part of a conversation between Diana and myself, that was moderated by Lizzie Homersham and which took place during the book’s launch at Burley Fisher Books in June 2023. We would like to thank all those present that evening who asked questions which stimulated further thoughts. Book Works have recently commissioned five responses to Other Reflexes. These excellent pieces from Juliet Jacques, Rebecca May Johnson, Saskia Vogel, lisa luxx and Joelle Taylor can be read here.
– Bridget Penney
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3:AM: Diana, it’s been a great experience for me to work with you on Other Reflexes. But how was your experience of the commissioning and development process? In September 2020, when Book Works announced that you had been commissioned, the UK had not long emerged from its first Covid lockdown, and over the following eight months, two more lockdowns were to follow…
Diana Georgiou: I was so fortunate to have you as an interlocutor Bridget, especially during the isolation that came with the pandemic. It allowed me to throw ideas back and forth and to polish them with your critical input. You were so generous with your time, and I felt that you had my back as you understood what I was trying to say even when it wasn’t being said as best as I could say it. This is the most precious gift a writer can have. And perhaps this is the most helpful and pleasurable thing that I didn’t even know I needed.
While that period of our lives is one that most would like to forget, for me it was quite the contrary. I had been working since the age of 14, often juggling more than one job, and with the furlough scheme it was the first time in my life that I could finally take a break from work and not worry about money. This is all I needed for a couple of months, just a slice of time to make space for something new and creative to manifest. With the ongoing crisis plaguing the humanities in England, and with the lack of financial or long-term structural support for artists and writers, only specific people can (re)produce culture. For those who do not have a degree in creative writing or English literature, who do not have personal wealth or a substantial network of support, the pathway to becoming a writer is quite restricted. And so open calls, such as this one by Book Works, are immensely important. Like many of us, I was already doing this thing called writing much before the novel. But the open call gave me a framework, a timeline, and guided me from beginning through to the end.
3:AM: Other Reflexes has been the book’s title ever since your original proposal but I have never asked you exactly what it signified. Also, why did you decide to dedicate a chapter to each of the senses? Of other art works which pattern themselves in this way, the tapestry series La Dame et La Licorne in the Musée de Cluny in Paris springs to mind. There the senses are presented allegorically and their meaning is open to considerable interpretation.
DG: During my research when writing the book, I hadn’t come across ‘La Dame et La Licorne’, which you introduced me to and which I find fascinating! That’s because my research was principally scientific rather than cultural, even though you probably wouldn’t be able to detect most of it in the novel. I started to formulate the book based on some writing that I already had and when an outline of three or four of the stories emerged it became clearer to me that embodiment figures prominently throughout them. I decided that I wanted to structure the novel as five stories that could be read autonomously but also as sequential chapters that tell a broader narrative about the senses. I then turned to more in-depth research, looking into chemical responses brought about by hormones, the convergence between hormones and olfaction, the strange and wonderful world of optics and how (the lack of) vision transforms the rest of the senses. I was interested in this physical exploration as I was looking for a particular entry point into how our bodies fail to react in certain situations and how they become, through repetition, responsive to specific stimuli. More drastically, when our bodies take us entirely by surprise and revolt against what we are consciously willing them to do. I wanted to demonstrate how most of our reactions, after repetitive exposure to violence, eventually become so scripted and automated that they are like knee-jerk reflexes to specific acts. If I could provide an overarching description to this novel, then it would be: What happens to our senses when they undergo experiences that are so horrific and for which there is no right response? The title, Other Reflexes, speaks to this conundrum.
3:AM: When I read the proposal you sent in for the Interstices open call, something about the way you used language really intrigued me. In an early version of the first story, ‘Sonic Memories’, there is an image of a snake hissing: I didn’t particularly like it, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was left with the impression that you were determined to shape language to your thoughts, starting from the ground up.
DG: How can we communicate intensely physical experiences in language? I think this is a question that drives many aspects of my work and I have often found that poetry can deliver such intensity with much more nuance due to its prosodic and oratorical vigour. I had originally written ‘Sonic Memories’ as an epistolary response to a dear friend whose artistic research at the time explored the maternal and its relation to sound. The piece started as an attempt to capture the rhythm of experience in words and it became both the springboard and cornerstone for the rest of the chapters. Throughout the book I tried to maintain a sense of that acoustic expression. I turned to writers who express this sonorous interplay between embodiment and language in ways that I admire and who continue to influence my work: Gloria Anzaldúa, Hélène Cixous, Yve Lomax, Audre Lorde, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Mary Cappello, Grada Kilomba and recently Eva Baltasar.
‘Sonic Memories’ is very much a story about domestic violence, but it is also a story about the relationship between creativity and trauma, which I wanted to narrate from the perspective of a child. What is a child doing in the duration of such abuse? Where does a child gather strength or positivity from? What does it mean to endure the repetition of violence, to become the witness of someone else’s abuse and, eventually, the one who carries the victim’s story? Woven throughout the book there is the idea that the experience of such a brutal event returns in adult life and has profound effects on the body. That sense of helplessness, the inability to stop a situation that is bringing about the helplessness, requires a radical reorientation for survival. When it is impossible to transform the world around you, you start to look for that transformation elsewhere or internally. Creativity becomes both possibility and escape.
These difficult experiences are largely drawn from my personal history, which I speak about quite openly, yet I find it interesting that when it came to their narration, they followed this form of testimony. The literary critic and theorist Shoshana Felman claims that no woman has an autobiography, that women are always estranged even to themselves as they are conventionally the objects rather than the subjects of the story. Her proposition is echoed across the work of many feminist writers and theorists but for Felman, the premise of this contention has to do with the prevalence of violence in women’s lives. It is often the case that traumatic experiences are difficult to recollect, so that when the time comes to piece such experiences together, to tell the story of those incidents, we realise that we do not yet have the language – what happened is not exactly fully known to us. An autobiography then becomes reconstructed through its narration, specifically through the act of testimony. Unlike the act of writing a story, testimony requires both a listener and the one telling the story. It is no surprise then that ‘Sonic Memories’ started as an epistolary exchange, reproducing this idea of a listener and a speaker. I remember that when I presented you with the first draft, Lizzie Homersham, then editor at Book Works, aptly pointed out that there seems to be an invisible interlocutor running through the chapters. If you had a sense that I was working from the ground up and grappling with language, it was because, even upon producing the first draft, it was still not clear to me that what I had written was a book that tried to reassemble a life fractured by everyday violence.
3:AM: I’m interested that you have described English as your language of theory when equally significant bodies of theory around gender have been penned in, for example, French and Italian. Why did you choose to write Other Reflexes in English?
DG: I was raised by a Polish mother who spoke to me in a medley of English, Polish and Cypriot Greek, and already from nursery school I was surrounded by children from around the world, tended to by Franciscan nuns who were also from many different countries. Throughout elementary and high school we were instructed in four languages – English, Greek, French and Italian – while our main mode of communication with each other was a Greeklish (Cypriot Greek and English) fusion.
I am fully aware that I wrote a book set mainly in Cyprus in English and I did so unapologetically as English has become my primary language, not so much out of choice but as a means of survival. I grew up in this confusing environment where on the one hand I would be on the fringes of society surrounded by people from disenfranchised backgrounds and on the other I was in this private school where the majority of kids were from regular families that were very comfortable financially. English was the shared language that allowed us to communicate with each other across our social hierarchies and because it was the main language that I was schooled in, it quickly became the one I adopted. It became the language by which I came to theory while the theorists that enabled me to discuss our collective oppression were indeed French and Italian feminist writers and philosophers who have been, since my mid-twenties, the backbone to all my creative and theoretical endeavours.
I also need to mention that the south of Cyprus is a diglossic society, and I use this term specifically to indicate that it is not simply bilingual, but composed of two languages where typically one is considered the ‘high’ language while the other is the ‘low’ language. The primary language is the ‘low’ Cypriot Greek dialect, the one that people communicate in daily, while Modern Greek is the language of instruction and of formal and written communication across all national media. Cypriot Greek is unintelligible to people from Greece, and I think it should be of acute interest to Cypriots to understand how Modern Greek came to denote one’s class. Starting with independence from British rule in the 1960s, the Cypriot Greek dialect, the vernacular in which people had communicated throughout all these centuries and through different periods of colonisation, begins to be considered vulgar. It is as if an emancipated Cypriot identity, one which has been perennially missing due to centuries of colonisation, had to renounce any of its pre-independence characteristics, for fear that they would serve as a reminder of the subordination that people endured. Ironically, if there has ever been a common denominator with which we could define one’s Cypriotness, then it probably is this dialect which, despite the more sustained academic attention it is receiving, remains an oral language with no definitive written form.
Through writing this book I came to realise that this extraordinary dialect, which is in fact my first language, has significantly informed and fuelled my interest in how words and sentences become carriers of emotions, meanings and rhythms that transcend the linguistic in its written form. I know that in the first draft of the novel there were phrases that would strike a native English speaker with a peculiar rhythm, even if after all the editorial work little of that rhythm remains. This is because the way I think (in) English is through an amalgamation of the other languages I communicate with.
3:AM: We all think we know what patriarchy means but perhaps, if you don’t mind, you could unpick why precisely you found this word so useful and quite how it helped you understand the experiences of the protagonist and her friends in the context of 1990s Cyprus.
DG: Patriarchy was the word that I needed to explain the social system that made it acceptable for men to subordinate women, the system that relies on this subordination to function. Even if patriarchy produces differentiated practices and discourses in each territory, the ideology remains the same: women are inferior and at the service of men.
Understanding how patriarchy plays out on the social and political sphere is absolutely necessary. One way to address or combat the inequalities and injustices that it produces is through the framework of legislation. When Cyprus achieved its independence from Britain in 1960, it inherited the British colonial legal code, already fraught with so many patriarchal and other contradictions which continue to be severely problematic. For instance, under this law, male homosexuality was considered a criminal offence until it was repealed in the late 90s. Another contemporary example, one that follows Greece’s civil law system this time, is that in the legal context of Cyprus you cannot disinherit your offspring, and neither can the offspring disinherit their parents, so a compulsory infantilisation and nuclear family structure prevails. Then you have specific laws that make it permissible for foreign nationals to be exploited for their labour through working contracts that do not allow them to earn more than a third of the minimum wage. Can you imagine this?
For these and many more reasons, going down the legal route is absolutely necessary, but it also has its limitations. I have always been vigilant about how we call for our rights especially when they often bind us into frameworks that are not of our own devising, and which often lead to the exclusion of people who do not want to conform or simply cannot conform to prescriptive and heteronormative frameworks. Feminist political theory and philosophy enabled me to explore possibilities for a radical cultural shift, one that had to begin from a reorientation of how we think and not just describe the relationship between the sexes as legal entities. Moreover, to do so without losing the wonderful complexity and potential that comes with gender as a multiplicity. One that frames subjectivity as non-dialectical, in a continual process of transformation and plurality, and not just a fixed category of oppression that we are born with or into. And for those of us in the pursuit of feminist living, it allows us to look beyond our present condition and call for the unimaginable, even if it might seem pragmatically counterintuitive or even impossible.
3:AM: One of the ways Other Reflexes could be described is as a ‘queer’ book. Is this the time to point out that you don’t actually use the word ‘queer’ anywhere in the book? Could you go into the reasons why you didn’t think it would have been appropriate to do so and perhaps share any thoughts on the particular challenges faced by those, such as your young characters, who do not have a verbal toolkit with which to articulate either their identities, or their predicament?
DG: Other Reflexes is a queer book, that’s undeniable. Even though the book mainly centres on the lives of queer people, I wanted to make clear that sexuality is secondary to the effects of gender. It is one’s gender, and the expression or perception of gender, which comes first in patriarchal contexts. It is this visible marker which turns you into a target of oppression. Being a lesbian doesn’t really affect the patriarchal system because most lesbians are not visible in the ways that men apprehend them. In fact, lesbianism, unlike male homosexuality, where the law was concerned, was not considered a criminal offence. This doesn’t mean that lesbianism was acceptable, it means that lesbianism was considered inconsequential, a non-sexuality.
It would be unrealistic to have any of the characters refer to themselves as ‘queer’, in a context where that term didn’t exist. I do think we need other words to capture what was going on at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, when it was not exactly a conscious political identity, nor one that we could be proud of. In Cyprus, there was no queer resistance as was defined in the US in the 70s, but there were gender outlaws, different groups of dykes who would never use the word dyke and closeted homosexuals cruising at the beaches, parking lots and gay bars. Today I would use the word queer as an umbrella term for all these identities as we would use the more normative framework of LGBTQIA+. However, as someone who became politicised through foundational texts that proposed queer theory as an analytic framework with which we can dissect (and destroy) hetero- and homonormativity, I am more invested in how the word queer delivers its political rather than identitarian force.
3:AM: How has the context that you describe in the book changed today? Do you consider any meaningful progress been made when it comes to gender and sexuality?
DG: That would depend on how we define progress. The context that I am describing in the novel is the mid 1990s which was somewhat the beginning of Cyprus’ journey towards accession to the European Union in 2004 and which saw the island move from the agricultural and industrial to the service sector for the largest part of its economy. This period is crucial in how it has shaped queer and other political agendas. Cyprus’ subjection to the then European Economic Community was like a repetition of colonial trauma where, once again, a foreign authority comes along to define not only the administration of the island but also the unconscious collective psyche.
With the race for membership, Cyprus hastily adopted all the neoliberal economic mandates which led to a succession of swift and often poor decisions that I don’t have the space to go into further here. For what concerns human rights, it is interesting to see on which issues Cyprus will concede in its zeal for Europeanization. There were a number of tokenistic moves that were considered “progressive” such as the gentrification of the red-light districts which did nothing to benefit sex workers, nor did it curtail the exploitation of women for sexual labour. Male homosexuality was decriminalised thanks to the concerted efforts of a single individual Alexandros Modinos in the mid-90s and only after he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and not because the Cypriot government considered it an important part of the agenda. In 2015 same-sex civil unions were legalized after years of mobilisation from the LGBT association Accept in the south of Cyprus. Recently conversion therapy has also been banned, but to this day, adoption rights for same-sex relationships are still a very distant goal because this would really threaten patriarchal foundations that rely on the heterosexual Orthodox family unit to function. At the same time, we know that both queer and women’s rights have always been used as leverage in national and political agendas worldwide and so the phenomenon of pink-washing has started taking its hold. On the one hand it is as if politicians in Cyprus thought that the queer demographic is so small, and outside the heterosexual matrix, that granting us some rights would be trivial. On the other hand, the progress that has been made on the level of legislation is so selective that it does not really upset the status quo.
We need an extreme reorganisation of the social to even come close to what can be considered a significant transformation on the level of gender and sexuality. In my opinion, only an intersectional feminist politicisation can truly revolutionise the island. And it is clear that it is women’s liberation that has been stalled, if not strategically quashed. It was as late as 2018 that abortion became decriminalised for terminations up to 12 weeks, yet abortions are not part of the national health care system, which unfairly affects women who are already financially deprived. You still have Orthodox religious education every week at school for the whole of primary and secondary education. So any claims that Cyprus is a secular country don’t really stand in light of this blatant religious indoctrination. This is a feminist issue because religious morality disproportionately affects women and queer people. I won’t even start a discussion on rape, sexual assault and harassment as these are such underreported crimes with appalling data collection (which has only begun in the last few years) and negligible sentencing of perpetrators. Then you have maddening paradoxes such as the fact that Cyprus was one of the first European countries to have adopted hate speech legislation around 2014 but no one has been sentenced on these grounds even when there have been national TV shows with people, priests included, openly using hate speech. It is a brilliant case for how legislation comes in to appease Eurocratic administration on the surface but does very little to transform the dominant ideology.
3:AM: To return to the book, I’d like to ask you about the role of photography, particularly in the story ‘Final Touches’. Could you speak a little about how you feel photography intersects with the experiences of violence – but also agency and freedom?
DG: The title ‘Final Touches’ alludes to photography as we often say that we put the final touches to a print when we are working in a darkroom. By bringing in the element of photography I wanted to raise questions of entitlement, class, creativity and perception in a male-dominated field, and I was able to do so in a way that allows the reader to “look through” the camera with the protagonist. ‘Final Touches’ is the third and longest of the five stories and brings to the fore this crucial differentiation between three things (that are sometimes happening at the same time): firstly, the performance of femininity; secondly, how the former could work with, parallel to or in complete opposition to the expression of one’s sexuality or desire, and thirdly, how that is perceived (rather simplistically) in the minds of straight men.
We see glimpses of this in some passages where there is a negotiation of the visual, visuality and being visible. The story relays how queer people were almost invisible at the time, and it was only in spaces like the few dodgy gay bars that you would see them behaving quite differently than they would in all other public spaces. And as there was a complete absence of visual representations of queer lives, photography seemed like a way to document their reality. How this happens in the story is quite haphazard. Mariza, a transgender character, has this altercation with the protagonist and they organise a photoshoot even though the protagonist has never taken a single photo in her whole life. With Mariza, I was able to script a typical exchange between herself as the model (what would normally be considered the passive subject) and the protagonist who is an inexperienced but overconfident photographer (the active subject). Through their relationship, I could dramatize an unconventional interplay, where the dynamics of gender are no longer the stereotype of “old white male photographer” shooting a “young female model”. This allowed me not only to subvert that paradigm but to raise much more interesting questions about the performance of femininity that can speak to the current complexity of queer life, while maintaining the intricacies of gender and sexuality as both a site of oppression as well as agency.
3:AM: Being seen as who you truly are on your own terms – for instance, in ‘Visual Pleasures’ the protagonist longs to be able to walk hand-in-hand with whoever she likes under the sun – is this the ultimate rejection of the male gaze and the patriarchal system?
DG: This is a brilliant question. In a sense yes. But as we know by now, the male gaze consumes you regardless of whether you are brave enough to walk hand-in-hand with whoever you like. While this is a courageous act, in some circumstances it can backfire as it can make you the target for violence or fetishization. Perhaps we need something different to bring about an absolute rejection, one that would really make it impossible to be consumed. And I can’t say that I have the answer to that. I think queer people have fought very hard to enter fields that were otherwise foreclosed to us: from healthcare to politics to mainstream television. But this strategy of inclusion has historically, and inevitably, led to our identities being co-opted by capitalism and then resold back to us at a higher price, while also evacuating our identities of any political intent. Not all queer lives benefit from the politics of representation, and neither will their social conditions ameliorate on the basis of glossy TV entertainment. I have always been far more aligned with the politics of refusal, indetermination and abolition, rather than the idea that equal participation and representation will transform the unjust systems that have excluded us in the first place. Perhaps there is room somewhere between those polarising ideas to create something new, but I am not very optimistic as far as middle ground solutions are concerned.
Read 3:AM Magazine’s interview with Bridget Penney here.
