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Category: You’ve got issues

St Dymphna: Patroness of the Mentally Ill and Victims…

October 10, 2022October 10, 2022
by irene Archos

a shrine in Caldavnet, Tydavnet, Monaghan County Ireland

Although she is much more well knowns in Catholic circles, St. Dympha is commemorated in the Orthodox Church on May 15th. Much like Agia Markella, she is venerated for victims of incest, sexual abuse, but she is also a great wonder-worker for those suffering from mental illness. Her story is that she was born in 7th century Ireland to a pagan king and his pious Christian wife. Upon turning 14, she consecrated herself to Christ taking on a secret vow of chastity. Her martyrdom began shortly after her mother died. Her father fell into a deep, dark depression after the death of his wife. His kingdom suffering due to the deterioration of his mental state, his advisors urged him to remarry. He sent them his whole kingdom over to find a replacement for his queen. The one who came closest to her beauty and grace was her teen daughter who bore her an uncanny resemblance. The King out of his mind made plans to wed his own daughter. When Dympha learned of her father’s intentions, she swore to uphold her vows and fled his court in the deep of night with her trusted father confessor Father Gerebenus, two servants and the court jester.

They sailed toward the continent and eventually landed in Belgium where they took refuge in the town of Gheel. Oral tradition states that once settled in Gheel, St. Dymphna built a hospice for the poor and sick. This was her downfall, as the King’s snoops followed the money, the coins she took from the royal court, to found the hospice. Once the king’s agents ascertained her whereabouts, he followed to retrieve her. The King Damon ordered his soldiers to kill Father Gerebernus and tried to force her to return to Ireland with him. When she resisted, he drew his sword and decapitated her. She was only 15 when she died. After their martyrdom, Gerebernus and Dymphna were buried in a nearby cave.

However, with time and a strong oral tradition in Europe, Dymphna’s story was woven into numerous folk tales such as “The King Who Wanted To Marry His Daughter,” and “Donkeyskin.” In 1349 during the height of the Middle Ages, a church was dedicated to her memory in Gheel. The town became a pilgrimage for all those who suffered from mental illness, possession, and other emotional distress. “By 1480, so many pilgrims were coming from all over Europe, seeking treatment for the mentally ill, that the church housing for them was expanded” (Wikipedia, “Saint Dymphna”). When the church could no longer contain the numbers of mentally ill, the local townspeople began a tradition of hosting them in their houses. This started a tradition for the ongoing care of the mentally ill that has endured for over 700 years. Gheel still stands as an exemplar for the care of the mentally ill and as a bastion of Christian charity. “Never called patients, they are called boarders, and are treated as ordinary and useful members of the town and as members of the host family. They work, most often in menial labor, and in return, they become part of the community. Some stay a few months, some decades, some for their entire lives. At its peak in the 1930s, over 4000 ‘boarders’ were housed with the town’s inhabitants.

The Cathedral dedicated to St Dymphna in Geel, Belgium modern day

While the Medieval Church erected in her honor, burned down, a more magnificent church consecrated in 1532 still stands on the site her body was buried. St. Dymphna’s legacy demonstrates how mental illness, especially those depressed, can lead productive lives based on humane treatment. Imagine a Gheel experiment could be replicated even for a short period of time in a Christ-loving village? Like Agia Markella, she is a patroness of the victims of sexual abuse and incest, an unfortunate but real cross for many young women.

St Dymphna is also the patron of runaways.

Saint Dymphna pray for us.

Culture Connection

Kalliroi Siganou-Parren: Women’s Rights Champion from Crete

March 17, 2022March 17, 2022
by irene Archos

As the cloud of the coronavirus has darkened most media outlets, it has eclipsed the coverage for #International Womens’ Month. This is a repost of the champion of Hellenic women’s rights: Kalliroi Siganou-Parren.

Lets face it, if you had been born in a backwards village in the backwaters of Greece in the 19th century, you would have faced marriage in your teens to a man you had never met or met for a brief coffee that was twice your age. You would have been beaten if you did not follow his dictates. Your destiny for marriage partner, the decisive factor for your life, would depend on your dowry. Think about it– a big pine chest with a few linens and silver cups–would determine your future. You would live “kept in line” by the tyranny of the honor code: you could not walk outside the boundaries of your rigid gender role, not be seen walking by yourself or speaking to outside your immediate kin by fear that you would be spoiling your family’s reputation. You would probably be illiterate or have an elementary education, because women could not attend university like their brothers. You would be relegated to a life of raising children, shackled to the sink and stove. If this state of affairs resembles too closely a “Nightmare in Saudi Arabia” documentary, take a deep breath of relief that you as a Greek woman living in the Diaspora has more freedom than some of your counterparts back in the Old Country.

What you might not realize is that the freedoms Greek women enjoy only recently came about. The dowry system was banned in 1983, that’s in your lifetime. Greek women earned the right to vote in 1952, almost 40 years after the women in the US. Arranged marriage still happens in Greece and Cyprus, and even in the US (Callinicos’ classic text of growing up female in America American Aphrodite documented the practice in late 1970’s New Jersey).

In patriarchy oppressed Crete, where the “extreme” men have taboos of engaging in “female” domestic work such as cleaning up after their meal for fear of losing their masculinity, a forward-thinking woman rose up to champion the rights of women. You have never heard of her, Kalliroi Parren, but this is her story.

Kalliroi Paren as a young woman at the cusp of launching her literary career

sql_image — The Famous “Journal of the Ladies”–the first such publication dedicated to women’s issues with the photo of its founder, Kalliroi Siganou-Parren

Kalliroi Siganou Parren (1859–1940) is remarkable as the founder of the Greek women’s rights movement, the first Greek female journalist with an international following, publisher of the first journal dedicated to women’s rights, political reformer and philanthropist.

Kalliroi Siganou-Parren was born in 1859 in Platanias, a village in the Amari Valley near Rethymnon, Crete. She was the first to introduce feminism to Greece, mainly through her weekly ‘Ladies Journal’ (Εφημερίδα των Κυριών) and therefore she can also be regarded as the first female journalist in Greece.

During the last half of the nineteenth century the Greek nation was trying to define itself as a modern European state but also as the bearer of ancient Greek customs, traditions and lore. The question of women’s rights and the role of women in society influenced this cultural process and was reflected in the arts and the cultural life of the time.

An old photo of Kalliroi Siganou-Parren that appeared in the press when she was undergoing a letter war defending a woman's right to work and education — An old photo of Kalliroi Siganou-Parren that appeared in the press when she was undergoing a letter war defending a woman’s right to work and education

Kallirroi Siganou-Parren advanced her feminist ideas through her writing and her political work on this background of a state trying to find its cultural identity. At first her family lived in Rethymnon but due to events during one of the many Cretan uprisings against the Turkish occupation of Crete (1866-1869) the family was forced to flee Crete and settle in Athens. Here, in 1879 she graduated from ‘Arsakeion’ – a private institution that trained female teachers run by nuns.

For a while she worked as the headmistress of a girls school in Odessa until she met her husband, the Anglo-French journalist Jean Parren. The couple moved back to Athens and the journalistic milieu she met here inspired what she called her ‘mania for writing’. She was foremost occupied with women’s emancipation through education and work.

Greek women casting their ballots for the first time in the 1950s.

The ‘Ladies Journal’ that were soon to become an intellectual forum for scholarly women she founded in 1887. It became one of the most successful periodicals of the time and until 1917. In her articles Parren brought forward the first coherent ideas about a women’s liberation programme in Greece redefining traditional gender roles within the framework of the Greek nationalist ideology of the time. Moderate, as it may seem today, it provoked an outcry in those days.

Apart from journalism, Parren also wrote translations, interviews, travel journals, biographies, novels and plays. In one of her most well-known works, the trilogy ‘The Book of Dawn’ (1899-1903) she described the emancipation of women as a process of self-discovery gradually releasing women from the restraints of social conventions leading towards equal relations between male and female roles in society. She describes her vision of women as educated and independent but also maternal-capable and the nationalist sentiments of the time is reflected in the idea that women should raise citizens that are willing to sacrifice everything for the security and social progress of their nation.

In 1896 she also founded the ‘Union for the Emancipation of Women’ and the ‘Union of Greek Women’. She educated women in reading and writing, founded hospitals and homes for widows and orphans. It was through her influence that women were permitted to study at the Universities in Greece and women doctors were appointed to women’s prisons. She also campaigned for a legislation to protect women in paid employment.

Because she was opposed to Greece participating in World War I she was exiled to the island of Hydra in 1917 and therefore had to close down her newspaper. But on her return the following year she immediately took up her work again. In between the two world wars she presided over the ‘Lykeion ton Ellidon’ (Lyceum of Greek Women) but other women’s organisations had been formed and gradually she became a representative of the more conservative position among the women’s liberation movements in Greece. Her organisation mainly engaged in philanthropic work.

She was awarded the Silver medal of the Athens Academy, the Silver Medal of the Red Cross and the Medal of the Municipality of Athens. Kalliroi Siganou-Parren never had any children. She lived with Jean Parren until her death in 1940. She is buried at the First Cemetery in Athens.

Commemorative bust of Kalliroi Siganou-Parren that stands in her memory near her home time outside of Rethymnion, Crete

If it was not for her foresight, you and your sisters would not be the doctors, lawyers, corporate professionals that you are allowed to be today in addition to the mothers and grandmothers you have always taken as a given. A new wave of reformers must come up through the ranks especially in the wake of the Eurocrisis where women’s work has been devalued (I heard of a neighbor, a single mom, working for 12-hour shifts in a bakery in Athens for 400 euros a month) and many of the social services allocated to women and children have been cut.

Now more than ever we need to support women and the institutions that help them gain economic independence, counseling, professional networking, and the ability to live fulfilled lives.

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Rosalia de Castro: Day 1 of Women’s History Month

March 1, 2022
by irene Archos

As today is the beginning of Women’s History month, and since I have spent many days walking through rural Galicia, I was would like to start by praising a Gallega writer named Rosalia de Castro. He face was plastered on posters all over shop windows, traffic posts, and announcement boards in Padron, one of the stops on the Camino. The tapas bar, Pulperia Real, even had banners with flags with her face decorating the main square. I was lucky enough to be in the town she lived and wrote in for most of her life, Padron, right around her birthday the 23^rd of February. Her poems and excerpts from her essays were gloriously displayed in the town hall along with banners of her face. She is Galicia’s golden girl. So intrigued was I by this face that kept appearing over and over in the bus, in the supermarket, on bags, that I went to the municipal library and asked to read a few of her books. They were mostly written in Gallego but some had Castillano translations.

What characterizes her poetry is an emotional tone termed saudade, a mix of melancholy, longing, and nostalgia. I read an excerpt from one of her poems that is about a man who needs to emigrate to America as he has no way to support himself in his rural Galicia. The poem is basically his saying goodbye to the rivers, the fields, the birds, the countryside in a lyrical heart-wrenching exposition that reminded me of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology.

All of her works stand out, however, in their realistic depiction of the sufferings of women. She was a champion of women’s rights and her longer works focus on the plight of women and the lower classes.

I think Rosalia had that sad sensibility that comprehends that underneath the veneer of happiness lies the foundation of pain. She was born to unknown parents as she was dropped in the buzon for foundlings at one of the convents in Santiago. Most probably she was the product of an illicit union between two unequal social partners. She spent her childhood roaming the countryside around Padron due to ill health. She missed many days of school due to illness. This accounts for her romantic imagination and her love of nature.

Here is what Wiki has to say:

Rosalia de Castro was born on February 23^rd Writing in Galician and Spanish, after the period known as the Séculos Escuros (lit. Dark Centuries), she became an important figure of the Galician Romantic movement, known today as the Rexurdimento (“Renaissance”), along with Manuel Curros Enríquez and Eduardo Pondal.

She married Manuel Murguía, a member of the important literary group known as the Royal Galician Academy, historian, journalist and editor of Rosalía’s books. The couple had seven children: Alexandra (1859–1937), Aura (1868–1942), twins Gala (1871–1964) and Ovidio (1871–1900), Amara (1873–1921), Adriano (1875–1876) and Valentina (stillborn, 1877). Only two of Rosalía’s children married, Aura in 1897 and Gala in 1922; neither they nor their siblings left any children, and thus, today there are no living descendants of Rosalía de Castro and her husband. Their son Ovidio was a promising painter, his career cut short by early death.

Rosalía published her first collection of poetry in Galician, Cantares gallegos [gl] (“Galician Songs”), on 17 May 1863. This date, 17 May, is now known as the Día das Letras Galegas (“Galician Literature Day”), and commemorates Rosalía’s achievement by dedicating, every year, this special day to a different writer, who must also write in the Galician language, since 1963. Día das Letras Galegas is an official holiday in the Autonomous Community of Galicia.

Relative poverty and sadness marked Rosalía’s life, in spite of this, she had a strong sense of commitment to the poor and to the defenseless. She was a strong opponent of abuse of authority and an ardent defender of women’s rights. Rosalía suffered from uterine cancer and died in Padrón, province of A Coruña, Spain, on 15 July 1885.

She is buried in the Panteón de Galegos Ilustres, a pantheon (mausoleum) in the Convent of San Domingos de Bonaval in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Here is a short cartoon bio (if you can understand Spanish):

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My Mother and the American Dream

February 4, 2022
by irene Archos

My mother in her senility that digs up anecdotes retrieved from her long term memory repeats that she has always wanted to come to America from when she was 11. She had decided at 9 to drop out of 4th grade because she really didn’t like school. My grandmother indulged her because she could at least bring home 22 drachmas a week from her illegal factory labor cutting stray string off textiles.

After the war, Greece was so destitute that the urban poor encouraged children to work even under the table much like farm families generated laborers for the land by giving birth to them. Visions of burlap sacks with long grain rice from the Carolinas and logs of yellow cheese floated through her mind fomented to the idea of America as a land of plenty. From her deprived childhood, America became associated with sustenance, the land of plenty. Back in the 50s and 60s when America peaked with economic success, it was every street urchin’s dream to travel to America. “I want to be americano.” The promise of honey in your milk a chicken in every pot. The American Dream was hot and kicking.

What solidified the dream and made it even more real was the appearance every now and then of those who returned flaunting their wealth in three piece suits gold rings cigars and a fat paunch around the middle. “Look at him,” the housewives would point, “that’s a Brooklis.” That term referred to someone who lived in Brooklyn and had made it. These tended to be older middle aged men who had acquired enough wealth to come back to the old country to find a young bride. This narrative played into the hopes and heads of the working girls in the factories as well. Kali tichi their aunts would greet them. The one good piece of luck a poor girl needed was to be chosen by a Brooklis and skirted off to America, that great land of endless possibilities. This meant she wouldn’t have to work in squalid conditions for pittance; she would be the mistress of her own house with furniture so new its plastic cover was still intact. No matter that the groom was 45 50 or even 60 and the girl a mere teenager. Families willingly gave their daughters away their conscience clean as they had saved their girls after all. She was lucky to have made it out of Greece and into America. My mother’s childhood was seasoned with the sweetest of America dreams. That was one thing she wanted to do in her life. I wanna be Americana.

As fate would have it, her dream came true. She made it to America. She still worked illegally as a garment worker for pennies an hour. The struggle to raise three children in a foreign country without a stitch of English while also serving as the sounding board whipping post for the anger and anxiety of a mentally ill husband did not make for happily ever after. But nevertheless, in her mind, she had achieved her goal. She had come to America.

When I think about it my dream of returning to the mythical Greece the land of my idyllic childhood is the flip side of my mother’s. What America was to her, Greece is for me. Except that she looks at what she stood to gain from the land of the bird’s milk, tou pouliou to gala, a Greek idiomatic expression that connotes great sustenance and plenty that does not run out. I looked at what I had lost. I had lost family bonds, the sense of strength that comes from being the majority, a sense of belonging and collective history.

For what they are worth, dreams are but life preservers for the hungry: those who hunger for opportunities, those who hunger for memory. They help us stay alive during tempestuous seasons. But they also beguile us. They brew a world within our heads that disassociates us to from the ground under our feet. Ultimately however, our dreams are part of our identity. Funny but true: my immigrant mother might be more American than I and conversely I might be more Greek than she. Or else we are both dreamers who connect happiness to a place that is radically different on the ground than what it appears in our heads.

This is the theme behind my poem Ameriki, that was granted Editor’s Choice Award by Arkana literary journal. Here’s the link: https://arkanamag.org/2021/05/03/poem-3/

How do your dreams of Greece compare with your parents’ or grandparents’? Or do they even exist?

Culture Connection

Greece the omphalos of love

September 9, 2021
by irene Archos

This is why I return again and again to Greece. I return because it holds the magic aura of “home” of belonging. It holds for me the memories of my idyllic childhood. I was the first born for my parents who had tried unsuccessfully to have children, I was more importantly, the first grandchild within physical proximity for my grandparents who doted on my every move. What most draws me is the awareness of love. Greece was the first place I felt genuinely loved. Those moments paint my memories in a hazy pinkish glow—beach holiday, hard boiled eggs on the verandah, olive trees swaying, chocolate bars hidden in Pappou’s lapel jacket. For me to return to Greece is to return to the omphalos, the amorphous womblike stage, half rocked in the amniotic ooze of sweet oblivion. And love, I was bathed in love. It is to dip into the warm waters of primordiality—a way to be born again by returning to the place where I was most wanted. I physically recreate the circumstances of childhood bliss—the brief heaven on earth I tasted before the fall before the American dream sucked us like a tornado into it. The love of those times still is palpable for me—even if the gritty reality of Greece of paradox and even utter chaos as a tourist trap registers more forcibly. for me Greece is the eden I lost and still yearn for.

This year after returning six or seven years to it, the veil of dream-like reality has started to lift. It cannot protect me from the truth—that my loving family is vying for its own interests; that the cloak of hospitality is a ploy for the tourist dollar that my fellow “generous” compatriots are nothing but superficial double crossers, in so much competition they would rather drown the ship rather than see the next guy succeed. Greece is made up of those who sell out the holy ground still wet from the blood, sweat, and tears of their ancestors who fought to defend it from their former enemies to the highest bidder. Greece is a place where the majority live hand to mouth with salaries of 500 to 700 euro per month yet living as if they could blow a month’s salary on a wild weekend in Mykonos.

Greece has always relied on its golden past to provide it with its daily bread. But I am tired of inhabiting ghostly narratives, memories and dreamy visions of how things used to be. I want to see things realistically. Without the trance that my own feelings would smudge on me. I want to walk on the ground as it is—a city with deteriorating infrastructure, reality the sidewalks cracked, single eyed cats, refugees scavenging for scrap metal in garbage dumps. I have realized that I have become strong enough to remove the blue-tinted glasses that idealize a place in order to make it livable for us to survive its ugliness. I have emerged from the dream haze and can say that this is a place of extremes, of armies clashing in the night, of drama, the authentic filotimo that was the distinguishing value for the ethnos has been replaced by ego and self-absorption. It is a dog-eat-dog world. The soul of the people has grown cold.

It is a place you come to wrestle with gods and angels and sleep with nymphs. And then, you find a quiet cave to write the long, long epic of your journeying.

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The Cautionary Tale of Caroline Crouch

June 22, 2021
by irene Archos

The recent case of the murder of Caroline Crouch, barely 20 with a newborn by her side at the hands of her husband, 13 years her senior, at a well-to-do leafy suburb outside of Athens has made the international headlines. After several days of investigating the so-called “break in and murder by a Georgian gang” as the husband claimed, the chief of police gathered enough evidence to incriminate the husband: he turned off the security system hours before the murder, his hands were tied in the front of his body, his cell phone was left within reach as he claimed which is why he was able to dial ‘100” with the tip of his nose, the infant of 11 months was left on top of his mother’s lifeless body, and the floor was mopped of all tracks with bleach. The pet of the family was found dangling from the balustrade of the interior staircase. The latch of the back window, normally shut tight, by which the killer thieves escaped, was miraculously left open on the day they decided to break in. The husband confessed after an 8 hour interrogation.

The details of this case have kept the Greek public talking for days in the bus, in the coffee shops, on the phone. The snippets of the story unfold like a grisly tale of terror told to scare young ones around a fire. It will be one of those news stories that make TV movies docu-dramas. The public is gripped because it is a story that sounds like a fairy tale gone horror. A young beautiful girl living on the famed island of Skopelos, finds her knight in shining armor. How in love the couple was. How they married and lived in a large expansive villa in the suburbs happily ever after, and don’t forget the birth of a beautiful baby to make their life complete. On the surface it has all the ingredients of a happily-ever-fairy tale. But underneath the happy verneer, the seething snippets of the truth rear their ugly head.

First, he was older and more dominant, 13 years her senior. While she was an only child with an intact family, her parents left her for periods of time alone on Skopelos. She was a young and easy prey for a domineering man. She was living alone in Skopelos. He had been very controlling, separating her from friends and family. In fact their wedding was an elopement; no family members were present, just they two. He kept her from continuing her studies in university. She was barred from pursuing tia kwon do. He treated her like his property not his equal. She was not allowed to exist as a separate entity. He was to be her controller. Babis seems to be a sociopathic narcissist.

This modern Greek tragedy brings me to pause. Here is yet again another young woman dead in the prime of her life. How do these things happen? What could have been done to prevent this? Didn’t anyone see the tell-tale signs? This individual had the classic signs of an abuser: -control and manipulation, isolation from friends and family, threats of violence, love bombing.

While Caroline’s case is extreme as it ended in homicide, it led me on a crumb trail for answers to the dark questions in the deep wood: why do men abuse women? Do other species violate and kill intimate partners and mates?

The statistics are chilling: 1 in ever 3 women will suffer some form of abuse from her romantic partner, either physical or psychological in her lifetime in the US. For some countries like India, 70% of women are expected to suffer domestic violence. In Nigeria, 50% of women will be battered. Western Europe has the least incidence of domestic violence.

These statistics belie the complacency that involves intimate partner abuse. For as much education and easy access to information in the digital age, partner abuse has remained steady. The stresses of COVID have exacerbated domestic violence. A WHO report states:

Over a quarter of women aged15-49 years who have been in a relationship have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner at least once in their lifetime (since age 15). The prevalence estimates of lifetime intimate partner violence range from 20% in the Western Pacific, 22% in high-income countries and Europe and 25% in the WHO Regions of the Americas to 33% in the WHO African region, 31% in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean region, and 33% in the WHO South-East Asia region. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women

Perhaps it is right that we should tell our daughters the fairy tales that warn them of this situation; Blue Beard is one. A young girl naively marries a husky man and told not to open a hidden chamber while he is away on a business trip. As long as she stays obedient to his commands, she is safe. But once she explores the dark violent chamber of his psyche, symbolized by the magic key stained with blood, where he keeps the dead dangling bodies of his former brides, she learns of the truth of the arrangement. Blue Beard tells women that there will be charming, rich, sought-after men with lots of bravado and ego who will entrap her in marriage as a way to control her and finally to destroy her. Be careful! These are the types to watch out for. Why was there no one in Caroline’s life to tell her this fairy tale? Why was this young girl allowed to become prey for a psychopathic killer disguised as a loving husband? Where was the older mother/guide/mentor to look after her choices? Why did she not listen to her internal qualms, her intuition? Clues that Caroline Crouch had started to become disenchanted with Babi were made manifest with the publishing of her diary. Could it be that her slowly unfolding sense of independence was something he could not permit and thus, like Blue Beard, punished her for her disobedience by requiring her life?

In order for less dead bodies of young women to wind up sensationalizing the international press, we need to educate vulnerable young women about the traits of abusers. We need to increase the self-esteem of women all over the world so they do not accept the social structures that humiliate them into thinking they deserve abuse. We need to give girls an education and means by which they can become self-sufficient to carve their own paths in the world. When the statistics are so stark, one in every 3 women will be abused in her lifetime, why do we go on feeding young girls the myth of the prince who will make her happy ever after? We should be reading her tales of Blue Beard. Here’s a link: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault03.html

It's your Saint's Day

The Lenten Fast and Cheese Doodles

April 4, 2021April 3, 2021
by irene Archos

We have started the Lenten fast (again!) In Orthodoxy if you calculate it, the year gets broken down the middle: 180 days of fast and 180 days of feast. “Oh you are a member of that fasting religion,” a co-worker at the corporate lunch buffet mutters when he sees me pile the plastic plate with all thinly sliced meager lettuce leaves, tomatoes, and green pepper rings and scrutinize the ingredient label on the “Classic Italian” salad dressing for any traces of Pecorino Romano cheese or any smidgen of butter. What can we do? My Catholic friends can get into heaven comfortably eating fried cod and tilapia on Fridays while we are mortified if we pinky pick into a dollop of sour cream or take a crumb of Feta. For 40 days we are to subdue the flesh by not indulging in any meat, dairy, wine or olive oil, except for a few stray feast days when the calendar allows it. It’s supposed to be a sacrifice, a purification, a way to get back to God by trying to subdue one of the greatest passions of all—eating. Eating, however innocent it sounds, is the reason why we got kicked out of Eden in the first place. “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Eating got us into big big trouble. It led to death. So, as church logic has it, by not eating certain things we will try to gain back our favor with God. By curbing our appetites, we will get back into Eden, albeit a few pounds lighter. It’s not so much eating as it is obeying. Hey, the church’s thinking goes, if Jesus could fast (i.e. starve) without food or water for a fortnight, the least we can do is survive without meat and dairy for 40 days and nights.

Now, I’ll be honest out of all the passions that lead to the deadly sins, give or take a few, not eating, or controlling the stomach is one of the most challenging for me. You can lead me to walk through a football stadium full of naked buff Chippendale dancers, even throw in a couple of Kevin Costner, Brad Pitt look-alikes, and even the ultimate challenge—Robert Plant in his heyday with the Botticelli blonde curls pulsating his groin out to the riffs of the “Lemon Song”—and I swear, I would not touch a single body. I might shield my eyes now and then to avoid the sweaty, glistening six-pack of Vin Diesel or the Rock (what’s his name) but a subtle thought would not waft through my brain; an evil chord would not pulsate through my body. No sir, no unclean thought, no below-the-belt titillation, no um-um-um desire would move me.

BUT, put me in a room full of thousands and thousands of unopened packets of cheese puffs and I’m done. Ooooohhhhh! That processed cheesy aroma would emerge like in some Woody Woodpecker cartoon where you see the smell of the roast transform into the long-nailed hand of some seductress and float into the nostrils of Woody, putting him in a trance and slowly elevating him through dells and hills to the source of his pleasure—cheese doodles! The puffy, slightly stale kind. Irresistible! Tantalizing! Impossible for me to keep away.

Ever since I was a toddler, I was transfixed by the crispy cheesy texture, the whole edible experience of biting into their air-filled creamy saltiness, leaving the processed cheese pasty residue on my thumb and forefingers that I would relish licking and scraping off with my front teeth. Yum! Maybe it was my Aunt Dafne who got me hooked. When she would come and visit us as kids, she would bring a plastic bag filled with shiny orange sachets of cheese doodles, the ones that carried a toy wrapped in cellophane in every pouch. I would pounce on her like white on rice. Oh, that cheesy pleasure of hearing the crunch of each puffy doodle, the slow savor of the cheddar creamy consistency in my gums, the methodical division of each doodle into three bite-sized chunks. I especially like the doodles that were a day or two old; they had just that right combination of texture and staleness that made them ripe for chewing. Never liked the crunchy doodles, just the puffy ones. So help me god against the temptation of the Cheese Doodle.

Every day when I see first graders with Dora the Explorer backpacks munching on their packets of Wise or Utz, my mouth waters; my nose overwhelmed by that fresh cheesy fragrance. I look at the tiny cheese particles, the morsels that fall off the husks as they fly to the ground in grief. “Please, God, just a morsel; just a speck of the doodle detritus! It can’t be that sinful, just a nibble, OK?”

I have dreams of devouring entire rooms of cheese doodles. I see a slow motion clip of my falling into a pit (like the bright ball pit the toddlers jump into at the McDonald’s indoor playpit) of oversized extra-cheesy, extra-orangey cheese doodles and drowning in their heavenly richness. I can give up sex, money, even sleep, but God, please don’t, don’t take away my cheese doodles!

Yet this is what we are called to do. To give up the stuff that most keeps you pinioned to the earth. The fast is excruciatingly difficult because of my penchant for cheese puffs. It is supposed to make you hold fast. Stick fast to the rules. I suppose it is supposed to make you strap the reins on your chariot of passions and not let them drive you into the abyss of your drives. It is paradoxically supposed to set you free by siphoning you into a very rigid scuba suit of rules. Only when you are able to follow the rules to a “T” will you finally be able to be free of them. It forces you to turn your insides out. And even though not impossible, it seems a fairly do-able endeavor—“stay away from meat, things of the flesh, vain entertainments, sex for 40 days so that you can realign your focus on the things that really count, the things that are eternal, heavenly, spiritual. Fat chance! It is incredibly difficult. There is something in the world, in your inner self (some call it resistance, gravity, the “devil”) that keeps you from changing, that keeps you from obeying a simple rule. “A little chunk from the chocolate bar, OK? Not a chunk, OK, then how about just a lick?”—your conscience’s excuse generator kicks into overdrive. “If I only have the potatoes around the baking dish, but not the chicken itself, it’s not like I’m eating the chicken. I’m still fasting, right?” “Oh Jeez, it’s been such a hard day. I’m allowed a bit of milk in my morning coffee.” Father says,”It’s your ‘but’ that’s gonna park you into hell.”

The smallest of sacrifices is a Sisyphian task during Lent. The winter get-away all-you-can-eat cruise, your best friend’s wedding, NYC Restaurant Week, all seem to get scheduled just around the fast period. It’s during the fast, dabnabit, that I quite unexpectedly bump into that long-lost friend who invites me for dinner and offers my favorite Indian dish, saag paneer, cooked to creamy perfection, only to have to decline because I cannot break the fast. Then quickly my “make-excuses-with-excuse generator” fills my mouth with, “Oh well now, can I really offend this very good, good friend? How can I not eat her homemade cheese with spinach in a cream sauce so lovingly sautéed with just the right amount of spices?”

I don’t know why it is so hard to change habits except that humans are habitual animals. The same way it is so hard to keep a fixed rule of prayer—I am supposed to pray morning and evening with a 15-minute Akathist here and there squeezed in. But I find as soon as I make a rule to keep an extra practice of prayer during the day, the sooner I break it. It’s like I go from walking on a flat plain surface to climbing up a steep sand cliff, losing footing with each step of the way, the minute I resort to follow the fast and true way of the fast. To stay still, to stay fixed and resolved on what I set out to do needs the resignation of a saint. It requires heavenly help.

You have to deal with the enemy from within. Instead of relinquishing power of food and flesh, I find obsessing more about it. “What am I going to have for lunch? Veggie burgers, creative salads? A juice shake? What am I going to have for dinner? Shrimp with pasta? Sorbet?” When will I stop by GNC or Trader Joe’s to stock up on the smoked tofu, capers, and soy ice cream?” I find myself flipping through arcane webpages listing vegan recipes, scouring the exotic spice racks at the gourmet shops for unheard of foodstuffs such as sharkfin dust, moonfruit olive relish. I am driven to devour things I would not have before had it not been for the fast: the ugly fruit like a face with a mean case of acne, smelt bread, quionoa spaghetti, crab crackers. I even attempt squid-flavored puff sticks—a far, wanna-be cry for a cheese puff. I eat artificial foods that harken to the taste of the real thing—fake bologna, fake milk, fake butter, fake chicken; things whose ingredient label sounds like the toxic inventory list of a nuclear reactor plant on Shelter Island.

It’s the same resistance when it comes to giving alms, something else we are supposed to do during Lent. I have been deliberately for two weeks already whether to deliver a sympathy card to the family of the local sanitation worker who was killed in a hit-and-run. “Oh I have to give that card to the secretary collecting donations,” I keep prodding myself. The will is there but walking that flesh to the corner is weak. I want to give, really I do, but time, logistics, bills get in the way. It is so easy to spend $40 on boots but so hard to write a check for that much knowing full well it will go to feeding orphans or inoculating infants against malaria. A better bargain than gracing your toes with sheepskin or at least buffing them with pumice stone (better yet having someone else buff them). It seems such an easy choice, yet there is something that makes it so hard to make. The sneaky splash of frothy milk into the Cappuccino (it wouldn’t be cappuccino without it). Is it the selfishness bastion at the center of human essence? The “me-me-me” mantra unconsciously underlying everything, even the good things you do. “Let not the left hand know what the right hand is doing.” I have to trick myself into doing something good for goodness’ sakes!

And those damning cheese curls! They beckon with the bend of their puffy little orange arms—“Come, eat us! Let us take you to that cinnabar land of lusciousness lubricated in just the right amount of processed cheddary-cheese bliss!” Just one puff, just one puff—PUFF! And you are there! Cheese puff heaven where you float on a giant cheese puff cloud with an orangey-rosy complexion and eat puffs from an ever-replenishing bag of cheese puffs to your heart’s content.

But in an instant you fall into the 3/4^th ring of hell. You float in a giant Utz foil bag with all the other cheese-puff damned souls, your belly bloated, your fingertips and lips cracked in that tell-tale color of shame forced to gorge on buckets and buckets of cheese curls for eternity. “Be wary, my son,” the poet-parent will caution. “Be wary of the dangers of the flesh.” All your forebears will say, “She traded her God for a cheap, air-filled puff of processed cheddar.”

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Greek Women Profiles

Tribute to Constance Callinicos: American Aphrodite

March 31, 2021
by irene Archos

On this last day of Women’s History month, it is with deep feeling that I mark the passing of a legend: Constance Callinicos. She was the author of a ground-breaking book, American Aphrodite, who put Greek American women on the American map. She was the first to document interviews with women of bicultural identity in America and relate the complexities of what it is like to grow up female in America. This is an interview I published about her more than a decade ago, but many of her insights still hold. Unfortunately, her passing happened more than two years ago without much fanfare. But

What is it like to be a Greek woman assimilating to American culture? Think your experience is unique? Then read Constance Callinicos’ classic text American Aphrodite and you will see your experience, your concerns, your struggle echoed in the lives of thousands of Greek American women all over the States. The book serves as an invaluable tool for understanding the Greek American woman’s experience from more than one angle: the personal, the sociological, the psychological and the historical. It is a must-read for anyone interested in “white minorities” in the US as well as the evolution of feminism from within a minority culture adapting and adopting to a dominant one. It is an honor for us at greekamericangirl.com to have had an interview with the renowned author, feminist and historian of the book.

In case you are not familiar with her, Constance Callinicos, a longtime feminist and activist for women’s rights, has in American Aphrodite concentrated her activism and writing on the subject of becoming female among Greeks in America. She is currently researching a companion volume on Greek-American men (working title Hermes In Ameriki ), with an emphasis on assimilation into mainstream American culture, the process of becoming white in an alien culture, among many transformations the changing of one’s family name, a key component of one’s identity.

Ms Callinicos is also a musician trained in opera and concert presentation. She sings in seven languages. From her teen years she has served as Music Director of various Greek Orthodox churches in the United States, most recently a ten-year Byzantine musical journey at St Sophia Cathedral of Los Angeles, California.

Here is a snipet of what she shared with our readers:

What prompted you to write the book? What is the book about?

American Aphrodite is an overview of the private lives of Greek-American women of the first three generations, from the mail-order “picture brides” to their granddaughters, the third generation.

Documenting their lives in 111 taped interviews and over 300 conversations with women from Greek-American communities throughout the United States, the book describes life as lived in an oppressive patriarchal culture.

The author weaves into the fabric of these stories her own life story and her impressions of Greek-American culture as she lived it, a struggle for independence and control over her own life.

Why did you write this book?

The book started out as research for a novel. I had been involved in the women’s movement for years and had done extensive reading on the lives and histories of women of other cultures and from other places and experiences, had been profoundly influenced and changed by getting in touch with “our” history. But I had seen very little – in fact almost nothing – depicting the experience I had lived and known in Greek America.

I spent many hours in libraries and book shops, expecting to find titles about Greek women, at least one title, for heaven’s sake, in the light of the mass of new writing spawned by the women’s movement. I found nothing. I read plenty about Greek men, books authored by men, in which “history” was defined as Greek men’s history. Theodore Saloutos, archon of Greek American historians, included a passing reference to having to accompany his mother who spoke no English to buy shoes and other household needs like groceries. Otherwise, nothing about the lives of Greek American women.

So I decided I had to do the work myself. I hit the road and started interviewing women from Greek communities all over the U.S., north, south, southwest, northwest, northeast. Very soon I realized that truth was better than fiction, and so was born the format of American Aphrodite, a story told in the women’s own words, interwoven with my own.

How has the Greek-American Women’s Experience changed/stayed the same since you wrote your book?

I can only judge by the experiences of my daughters and their cousins, and from what I read and experience as I travel the country to visit friends and relatives. Of course the 3rd and 4th generation has advanced light years beyond the struggles of the 1st and 2nd generations, a college degree and a professional degree and a profession of any kind being not just a possibility, but an expectation of the younger generation of women. Freedom to choose a life, to choose a mate, to establish a family of your own no matter what or how is definitely a reality for the young Greek-American woman.

What I’m seeing in the response to this book by younger women (not just Greek American) is that it has moved into the realm of “classic” and has become important as a teaching tool, a valuable historical document, rather than the painful first reading of so many who shed tears at the exposure of their own lives. Women’s studies programs are an ideal milieu for the book. I am currently pursuing inclusion of the book in these departments.

What advice would you give to the next generation of Greek American women?

I would give the same advice to them as I gave to my daughters when they were growing up: ask yourself the question “What do I want?” and the answer should not be what you think your parents want or your friends want, or your boyfriend wants or your brothers. “What do I want?” is the only question any young woman should ask herself. Then when she has given serious thought to her wishes and dreams and decided what it is she wants, she should pursue it. Make a plan, execute the plan. Ask for your parents’ blessing. But not for their approval, if they will not approve of you as you really are and see yourself. Is it a hard road for some? Yes. For others, not so hard. But you don’t want to wake up on the morning of your 60th birthday and realize that you had dreams and ambitions when you were 20, but decided not to pursue them and have regrets.

And don’t forget hard work. Realizing your ambitions doesn’t always come easy. Ask your grandfathers and grandmothers about hard work in the pursuit of a goal and a better life. They’ll tell you all about it — and so will my book.

Get a copy of the classic to read and share with your friends at Amazon. Mention you heard about it through our site and you can get a signed autographed copy. Better yet, let’s have an online book discussion!

How has your experience of being Greek changed from your mother’s and grandmother’s time. Do you identify with your “Greekness” anymore? Have you been embarrassed to be an ethnic minority? Have you been proud?

For more reflection on this topic, read “Giagia and Me: An Ice Age of Difference”

Category: You’ve got issues

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Kalliroi Siganou Parren (1859–1940) is remarkable as the founder of the Greek women’s rights movement, the first Greek female journalist with an international following, publisher of the first journal dedicated to women’s rights, political reformer and philanthropist.

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What prompted you to write the book? What is the book about?

Why did you write this book?

How has the Greek-American Women’s Experience changed/stayed the same since you wrote your book?

What advice would you give to the next generation of Greek American women?

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