Homebound

i am from Greece.

i didn't grow up there, but i'm from there, i want to go back.

to be more specific, i want to go back, and soon.

it is not just to escape Project 2025 as a queer person, although there is individual survival to contend with, but my individual survival has to mean something....

if i thought about my separation from that place as a political process of assimilated as combined with a series of people & their stories instead of a passage of time, i would be two people away from the islands, and that's not very many people at all.

not in comparison to the many, many more feet just like mine that have walked that ground.

my grandmother's maiden name, it means little gem, it means that there was one lineage of people from one part of one island in all the world that were said to be very short and very beautiful. yes, i think that's hilarious. but it also verifies we have history there. the island knows our body; and yes, i say our; the older i get the more my body resembles that of everyone i am related to, especially that lineage. and i am short. (and beautiful!) i dislike Christianity for what it took away from my people. emotionally, and i acknowledge it is a culture-destroyer. our relationship with nature did used to be stronger, we used to have differentiated houses of worship for different aspects of life. real reverence. but perhaps, if real reverence can adapt the way i have seen it adapt, there is still something there. something practical, to work with. i would like to have it be found as relatively true that i do not see this work - art, liberation - through the lens of family, but instead, family, my family, through the lens of this work. if i do not try, my friend, i cannot say i have tried. much of Greece has 'poor,' rocky soil, and people have thrived there for thousands of years. if there is anything worth learning there, if there is anything worth salvaging, if there is anything salvaged, it is my responsibility to find out. if i were to imagine my family standing in a circle facing each other, i do think we would all know who we were looking at, and i do think that i am not too far away from the others. i have cousins who still live there. but i don't think i'm entitled to anything, i know that if the land welcomes me back there, i would be reconnecting, de-assimilating, and that is work that would continue. that is not the finish line. it is a portal.  

it is time you know who my great-grandfather was. he was not just a journalist, he was not just a journalist that wrote for & about the common folk, he was, i believe, an anarchist and/or communist. while the labels he would've used do matter, how he operated and how those in power responded to him matter more; he was killed. by Nazis, yes. and no, i do not mean he was picked off in an alley somewhere, although that would've been harm enough. no, my great-grandfather, the journalist, was dragged to a concentration camp where he was presumably tortured and starved and he died there. it just took a year. he 'survived,' and a year after release, he was gone. this response to his actions tells me something about the man he was. they were scared of him. they were scared of a writer. and a father, and a neighbor.

i hope those same people become scared of me. i am not saying i have a death wish, but i am saying that if i am to be killed, i hope it is because i made the same kind of impact he would be proud of.

i think my grandmother, his daughter, misses him. she talks a lot about the cruises she goes on, as an elder woman manipulated first by an Amerikkkan soldier and then, after that man's disappearance, by an average civilian who loves her for her money and treats her to things so sensorily pleasurable she forgets herself, literally, but i think she misses her father. deeply. the pain of his death caused her to fold inwards upon herself, individualize herself, leave her home. she ran away so hard and so fast she could not conceive of where the opportunity of Amerikkka, the famed land that's so fucking full of it, came from. (read: colonization, genocide.) i think i miss him, too, not because i ever met him, but because i wish i could've, i wish he could've lived for longer, and all emotion aside, honestly, i know he had more work to do before they dragged him away and killed him.

this is why i say - although going back on such short notice would mean leaving behind a traditional career path, and a traditional education - i am not running away from responsibility, but instead i wish to be slowly walking towards it in multiple directions.

this is not about obeying my great-grandfather, what i think his opinion, his orders, would be, but about honoring the man he showed up as. Nazis wanted him dead. that's enough for me to have faith in his filotomo. going home is a path i hold in me, and i would appreciate if you would consider this, and i would appreciate if you would consider why.

it is not because i have a whim to return. it's because i have faith that we never should've left.

i have visited, you know, around a decade ago.

i was not immediately enamored, taken in by it, i will not pronounce to you that i somehow falsely knew i had a spiritual connection to the place as soon as i landed. or, at least, that's not when i knew.

i thought the graffiti was cool, but it was uncomfortably hot, at times, even at night. we were there during summer, and one of the only reprieves - especially in Athens - was being in water.

i love being in water, and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea was not entirely romantic either. the salt water got in my eyes, and that hurt. 

when you look up Greece online and see the images that the algorithms & corporations push, you see the misconception, the romanticization, of Greece is that it is something like an earthly Eden, because they want Western tourists to become immediately enamored, taken in by it, so that they will come spend money there. the Greek government, to attempt to save the economy; because they feel it will save their people, after the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, made Greece enmeshed with, dependent, on them; they are pushing their nation as a vacation. meanwhile, their people, those with the privilege, means, need to do so, leave, as the economy slowly collapses. the tourists are coming, those endemic to the islands are leaving. when i visited when i was younger, i thought it was convenient that almost every sign was in English. now? i wish to inconvenience myself in places where Western European hegemony is challenged. those that stay have threads of nationalism tangled up in them. it is not an Eden, not at all.

i'd never use the word paradise, but it was like nothing i'd experienced before. like another planet. but it was also intimately familiar to me. i'd apparently missed that water even before i was in it, and the water missed me. i am remembering, the more i dwell with it, that i have quite literally dreamt of those islands since i was born. when i went there, yes, it wasn't paradise, but i swam in the Mediterranean, looking across the waters to the tallest, greenest hills i'd ever seen, and it was like something else entirely. beautiful, and many other things i don't think i could properly express in English. not romantic, but powerful. there was a feeling of belonging.

when my grandmother left Greece, it was because she 'fell in love' with an Amerikkkan solider (who later abandoned the family, my mother still hasn't told me what happened), within the span of one week, and they did not come straight to Turtle Island. they stayed in Libya, first, taking advantage of the Italian colonies there, which themselves exist from "the 'pacification' (read: genocide) of" Libya. i don't know if she knew what that ground really was; i don't think awareness matters with a thing like that; although it is funny, tragically, frustratingly so, my grandma knew what concentration camps were, she knew what empires were, and how they were used and somehow failed to see where she was for what it was to Libyans. regardless, there were some folk who were moving to attack her - and perhaps rightfully so, in the context of colonialism, and this young boy saved her life. and so saved my life. somewhere in Libya, alive or with their ancestors, there is a person - a young boy, when my grandma knew him - who saved us. my family, all of us; my grandma, directly, and so my mother, and so me, and so all the children i might ever be the ancestor of. i don't feel like i owe him, or his family, anything either. i do not feel guilty for being alive, i am not a dog, not like i was raised. i do not need permission to be what i really am when i sit with this; which is grateful. my gratitude is immense and as deep as i have capacity to hold or feel anything right now. are you aware that my feelings towards this man - if alive & if not - and his family - if he had or has one - have the weight of all of our lives behind them? when i go back to Greece, i'll be on the same seas. if i'm able to find him & if not, that gratitude changed me and it will inform the way i do the work i do.

as an artist, i know the value of freedom. and community. and yes, belonging too. a friend and i, who met by chance although they are also Greek, we were talking, and i said, "it feels like everything i do would become clearer there...there’s probably a good amount of 'balance' to be found in doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing." to be fair, i don't know exactly what i'm meant to be doing, i am not one of the Fates. but if my intuition bears any truth to it at all, i know where i'm meant to be. if you know me, you know that not only am i an artist - a painter, spray-painter, clothesmaker, etc. - but i also want to provide a space for people to share in the home i've built. a sort of waystation or inn, where you could work or provide tools, materials, seeds, if you didn't have enough to pay for a room with money. this is my purpose. speaking broadly, of course. there is so much i don't know.

this is just how i get there.

🌊 all i have to do is get there. 🌊

once i do, i have plans to live as simply & cheaply as possible, never seeking needless profit, only doing what i need to do to survive, to be an artist, and to give back to that which has kept me alive, back to the lands i grew up with; the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, while working directly with the land below my short, beautiful feet. where to go from there, i have no idea, and i am so excited to find out. clarity calls. perhaps i'll find it in a delightfully shitty, small apartment in Exarchia. or at the Cretan food festival. or at a skate park. or in the Mediterranean. or in other people, refugees, travelers, and those whose bodies are also known by the land in the same way as mine.