"What is an award?" Reflections of a Recipient

AIM Athens, July 26, 2000

In spring sometime I walked in a well-known gay publishing house in Athens with a text on women, exile, silencing. The publisher looked at me and began to berate me asking to "pay him in silver" - not a Judas kiss - so as to publish my text when and if he wanted. To my remark that if that was my first effort to publish my work he could have very easily ruined it for me, he responded with great sarcasm.

Silencing practices are common in Greece. Where is the literature of the refugees? Of the immigrants? Of the young? Of women aware of their gender?

Kadal is a young boy who makes his living in the streets. He is proud and full of courage. I met him during a workshop in the Centre for the support of gypsy kids and their families founded by Myrto Lemou in Metaxourgio. Kadal is illiterate. This is the borderland of his non-assimilation. (I think of the literacy of the Inkas. Complex systems of knots and ropes constituted a vast communication system - not letters). Kadal, Yiokan and the rest of the boys I worked with wrote letters for the first time. Inside these shapes were their bodies, their decision to live, their determination to be heard. Their letters were not smart. Lines and distances constructed an alphabet of writing "the invisible". Each word a borderland between seen and unseen.

The rest of us do not recognize borderlands between our words or the alphabet we have taught to consider our own. We do not even see distances or gorges between what we know and what we are expected to know. We write and read "effortlessly." We have no use for the intricate between our lives and ourselves. We have no use for the streets that are spelling alphabets of their own not seen to the naked eye. But then what is naked? What is eye? Is eye I? Is I the way to watch the "unwatchable"? Is the unwatchable the unspeakable of "effortlessly" known letters? How do the letters change when the immigrant and the refugee relocate inside them? Are these the parameters for assimilation? Is this the platform of our "discontent"? Assimilation?

What is assimilation? Is an award assimilation?

In 1998 Athens was not ready for the invisible come visible. Women's sexuality can be trashed in magazines, can be discombobulated on the radio, but cannot be seen on its own terms. A play of alliances between straight and gay society focused on women's lives was not expected or condoned. Silence is a very powerful foe used effectively. A dark blurry "iron curtain" that cannot be broken through the demolition of a public wall. Lengthy conversations of ghetto extinction are nurtured and kept close as they provide the only comfort in claiming difference.

Sexuality is an alphabet of violence and comfort. We are not versed in either violence nor comfort. We use both, we extrapolate both from our common knowledge of self, but we do not know how to speak them, how to create them, how to construct our lives in accordance with their possibilities.

In summer sometime "(W)RIGHTFUL" was founded. A non-profit organization that promotes, supports and acts to broaden the right to write. The disadvantaged, the mulatto, the different, the unseen, are both are aim and our force. Believing that Greece is a crossroad of unused geopolitical proportions between the West the East the European the African the Middle Eastern and the Asian, between the accepted visible and the unaccepted invisible, we undertake projects that reconstruct society through (w)righting.

Christiana Lambrinidis

Entrefilet

28 WRITERS FROM 22 COUNTRIES RECEIVE HELLMAN/HAMMETT GRANTS

Persecuted Writers Honored with Prestigious Awards

(New York, June 30, 2000) - Human Rights Watch today announced a diverse group of writers from 22 countries to receive grants recognizing their courage in the face of political persecution.

The Hellman/Hammett grants are given annually by Human Rights Watch to writers around the world who have been targets of political persecution. The grant program began in 1989 when the estates of American authors Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett asked Human Rights Watch to design a program for writers in financial need as a result of expressing their views. This year's grants totaled $170,000.

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Christiana Lambrinidis (Greece) writes experimental conflict-resolution plays based on testimony of women living in areas of ethnic or political conflict. Following production of one play in Athens in 1998 ["Lesbian Blues"], she received death threats, there was a bomb scare at the theater ["Technohoros"], her women's literature seminar was canceled, government funding [from the Ministry of Culture] that had been promised was withheld, and book stores refused to stock her book.

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