Diaries of Exile

INTRODUCTION

Just days after the last entry in Diary of Exile II, Yannis Ritsos — future recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, a few months shy of his fortieth birthday and already the author of several of the dozens of volumes of poetry, drama and prose he would eventually produce — wrote this letter:

February 3, 1949 — My dear sweet little Kaitoula — three letters from you all at once (from January 13, 14 and 15) — what joy, what joy — what celebrations — that’s how you should write to me — my loneliness fills — I’m close to you — we chat. Today there’s cold and wind — what wind — you can’t take even a single step outside — an endless hum — the snow swirls — it doesn’t stop — an awful vitality and power — you’re in the heart of “eternal nature,” and your own heart calls out in response — hum meeting hum — we have to create something big — very big — I’m sure, my life, that you feel it too — “we must silence the lightning — speak our name there where the roads listen to no other words” — I wrote that somewhere. Your first poem came, too. There are good elements — but it doesn’t begin and it doesn’t end. The beginning is the most important. Listen, Kaitoula — the image is always a means and not an end in itself — we’ve said this before — you know it — you should avoid mere decoration — Don’t cover up your heart — when there’s no heart, there’s nothing at all — of course heart alone isn’t enough — but it shouldn’t be missing, either. Guard against the allure of the word, which always leads to verbosity — but don’t ever neglect that allure in the name of an emotion or of spontaneity. Palamas wrote to me in a letter: “art doesn’t divide — it unites.” Yes, yes. Art and technique, then — heart and mind — and something more — how can I put it? — I need time and space — and where are they? Words measured with an eyedropper. I expect more poems from you, I want to see them, correct them, send them back. Write, don’t stop. For all your mistakes — there’s no disguising talent. And you have it, yes. My golden Kaitoula — if I were by your side how much I would have to say to you. And those big lovely eyes of yours with their childlike expression would chase my words thirstily in the air. I can picture you. I received Tasoulis’s three letters, too. I wrote back. His worry preoccupies me so. Why did you tell him I’d lost weight? Mirandoula heard and is out of her mind with worry. She thinks I’m sick. But I’m just fine. A thousand thousand kisses

Yannis*

Ritsos was writing from a detention center for political prisoners in the village of Kontopouli on the island of Limnos. The Kontopouli camp, where Ritsos had been held since the fall of 1948, was small, just a few buildings which the Germans had used as warehouses during the Axis occupation of Greece. Those buildings now housed about 150 men, many of whom, including Ritsos, would later be transferred to larger camps such as Makronisos and Yaros, where life for the exiles was far harsher.

The letter’s recipient was the young Kaiti Drosou, a poet herself, married at the time to the “Tasoulis” to whom Ritsos refers, but later to the writer Aris Alexandrou, another close friend of Ritsos’s. At the time of this letter’s writing, Alexandrou was also incarcerated on Limnos, at the detention center in the village of Moudros to which the poet refers near the end of Diary of Exile I. Nearly twenty years later, in 1967, when a coup plunged Greece into the seven- year darkness of a military dictatorship, Alexandrou and Drosou would flee to Paris, while Ritsos would be arrested almost immediately and sent to the prison camps of Yaros and then Leros; after 1970 he was confined to house arrest on Samos. During both periods of Ritsos’s imprisonment, Drosou was one of his most frequent correspondents.

The letters Ritsos sent from his island exile often resemble the one above: thoughts piled on thoughts, strings of sentence fragments linked (or divided) by dashes, a text that might seem slapdash were it not for the beauty of Ritsos’s famous calligraphic hand. Certain themes and motifs recur, too: his concern less for his own cruel fate than for his loved ones and their anxieties; his earnest desire for more letters, more words; his constant use of diminutives — Kaitoula, Tasoulis, Mirandoula; and above all his commitment to the grand project of poetry itself, a project ultimately as collaborative as the correspondence he struggled to maintain with family and friends during those trying years. Even in the darkest times, with the wind and cold and solitude, Ritsos keeps his thoughts trained on the “something big” that an emphatically plural “we” must create, on the joint venture of literature and art as activities capable — as the great literary figure Kostis Palamas had written to Ritsos — of bringing people together across distance and time.

In his letters from exile, Ritsos rarely succumbs to despair. Unlike the increasingly terse, clipped tone of the Diaries, the letters are painfully upbeat and encouraging, with a feverish emphasis on the need to write, to work, to produce — an indication, it would seem, of the emotional and intellectual isolation that characterized his life as a political prisoner. Ritsos’s repeated invocation of the work of words as perhaps the only saving grace in his present circumstances becomes, in fact, almost a mantra. As Ritsos would write under house arrest in Samos in 1971 to Alexandrou in his Parisian exile, urging his friend to plow ahead with his novel Mission: Box, “The only thing I always urged upon myself and my friends was (and is) as much a principle as a method, a form of therapy or salvation: work.”

These three Diaries of Exile are fruits of that unremitting labor. They are not the only poems Ritsos wrote while in exile: even under the harshest conditions on Makronisos, Ritsos was constantly writing, on whatever scraps of paper he could find, including the linings of cigarette packs, which he hid or buried in bottles in the ground. The Diaries of Exile, though, are something different, situated in a space between genres: part poem, part diary, part letter to the world. Actual letters from the camps, even if written by a singular I to a singular you, were never wholly private correspondences, since they inevitably passed through the censor’s hands. In contrast, Ritsos could write these poetic diaries as freely as he pleased, but couldn’t be sure whether they would ever make it off the island. And while a diary usually records the daily experiences of a single individual, these long poetic sequences often address a you who is elsewhere; they are written, too, in a first person that shifts between singular and plural, the poet’s identity often subsumed within the collective identity of the exiles at large.

Not only do Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile straddle generic boundaries, but material itself sometimes migrates from one (kind of) text to another. The phrase “WRITE ONLY TEN LINES” in the November 8 entry of Diary of Exile I, for instance, is a direct quotation of the instruction censors stamped on prisoners’ outgoing, government-issued postcards. Drosou also quoted the closing line from Ritsos’s New Year’s letter of 1950 in a poem she dedicated to him and included in her first volume of poetry, which reached Ritsos on Makronisos just four months after he first wrote the line: “I kiss the top of your head in the sun.” Shortly after receiving the volume, Ritsos engaged in a reciprocal gesture. Another letter to Drosou, dated May 6, 1950, begins, “Kaitoula — my Kaitoula — your letter brought our garden to me — so many roses and yellow daisies — and here I was afraid they’d withered” — and a May 31 entry in Diary of Exile III incorporates part of Drosou’s letter, responding with a promise that seems as much to himself as to her:

Kaiti writes:

in your garden the roses have run riot

yellow and white daisies

tall as you are

we washed the windows and the chandelier

your room smells of soap

I caressed your clothes and your books.

Ah Kaiti

we here

at the edge of our handkerchief

tied tight as a knot our vow to the world.

Kontopouli, where Ritsos wrote the first two of these diaries, was a makeshift detainment center with only a handful of prisoners. There were two cement buildings and a square yard 50 meters on a side, hemmed in by barbed wire. The prisoners ranged in age from 16 to 75, and in occupation from shepherds to university professors. “We had the good luck of having Yannis Ritsos with us,” writes painter Yannis Stefanidis in a memoir of his incarceration. “We enjoyed a cultural life with him at the epicenter. Workers and men from villages heard poetry for the first time. At night a bouzouki would play folk tunes, or the mandolin in Ritsos’s hands would give melodies of Mozart, Chopin, Schumann. Everyone became interested in drawing, and waited each day to see what new drawing we would create (Ritsos drew, too). And then there were the conversations about art, about poetry, about painting.”*

At Kontopouli Ritsos did in fact play his mandolin and paint stones and driftwood, while on Makronisos he became involved in the prisoners’ theatrical productions, part of the re-education project that was the camp’s supposed raison d’être. But if Stefanidis’s description, written at a distance of six decades, doesn’t sound half bad, the letters and poems Ritsos wrote while in exile belie this. Already in Diary of Exile I, written during Ritsos’s first year at Kontopouli, we have descriptions of harsh labor, beatings, and meager rations, not to mention the feeling of entrapment caused both by the inescapable fact of imprisonment and by the daily repetition of the same routine:

faces change as you look at them

and perhaps you’re changing too — because looking at your hands

you realize they’ve gotten used to these tasks

to these days, these sheets

they know the wood of the table they know the lamp

they move in the same way with greater certainty

they are never surprised.

By the time he begins Diary of Exile II, over a year into his incarceration, the proper nouns that earlier identified specific individuals — Panousos, Panayiotis, Mitsos, Barba Drosos — have all but disappeared. Ritsos’s stanzas and lines grow shorter, more terse and focused on the relentless sameness of the prisoners’ days:

We take walks on the strip of road

that they designated ours

the old men play with their worry beads

up and down, up and down in the same place

we don’t move our hands

we move our heads

nodding to someone who never appears.

or

Each morning flocks of wild geese

head south.

We watch them, unmoving.

You get tired of looking up.

Soon enough we lower our heads.

The last Diary was written on the desert island of Makronisos, to which Ritsos was transferred in 1949. In contrast to the small, relatively intimate Kontopouli camp, which was located on the outskirts of a village, Makronisos, though only five kilometers from the port of Lavrio, was entirely cut off from life on the mainland, inhabited only by prisoners and guards; the camp there was huge, home at its height in 1949 and 1950 to upwards of 20,000 men, women, and even children. And Makronisos wasn’t just a detention center: it was a re-education facility intended to transform leftist political prisoners into loyal citizens; exiles were pressured to sign the “declarations of repentance” to which Ritsos refers obliquely more than once during his last Diary.

On Makronisos prisoners were executed, tortured, driven mad. The labor was more onerous than on Limnos, the climate harsher, the punishments more cruel. Prisoners lived in overcrowded tents, carried stones from one spot to another and back again, senselessly, for hours on end, in winter, in summer, without water or shoes. Prisoners’ letters were fewer and shorter in length, limited to “censored postcards” now pre-lined to ensure that they would hold “only ten lines.” Ritsos’s infrequent letters to Drosou from this period are filled with a despair intensified by these more severe restrictions on communication with the outside world: “My sweet Kaitoula. How long it’s been since I wrote to you. . Don’t misunderstand me, my little girl. I can write only four letters a month. . Oh, Kaitoula, my lines are up. I still haven’t said anything yet.” The obstruction of self-expression becomes, too, an inner condition. Stefanidis, who was transferred to Makronisos around the same time as Ritsos, writes, “I didn’t draw a single line there, and I can’t say a word about it. Makronisos can’t be described, can’t be drawn.” Surely this helps to explain why Diary of Exile III, filled with an impersonal you and a collective we, is almost entirely devoid of I.

And yet despite the narrowed horizon of experience and the radical circumscription of language — eventually the prisoners forget even the “proper pronunciation” of their own names — Ritsos never allows the poetry to become wholly pessimistic. Indeed, the closing stanzas of the final Diary emphasize the tenacity with which the prisoners cling to hope, and to writing:

At night those killed

gather together under the stones

with some notes in their cigarette packs

with some densely scribbled scraps of paper in their shoes

with some illicit stars in their eyes.

Above them the sky grows larger

grows larger and deeper

never tires.

In an upside-down, inside-out world, it is hard to know precisely what is meant here, how to read these images, whether the sky is a threatening or comforting presence. Or perhaps a better way to read is to suspend the desire for any kind of clear allegory. It is enough to step forward with Ritsos and his we, on the small strip of land designated as theirs, and for a time as ours. We cannot, thankfully, enter this world via reading — but walking alongside its inhabitants for the space of these pages may perhaps teach us a small, borrowed lesson.

Karen Emmerich

*This and all subsequent quotations from Ritsos’s letters are excerpted, in my translation, from Trohies se diastavrosi: epistolika deltaria tis exorias kai grammata stin Kaiti Drosou kai ton Ari Alexandrou [Intersecting orbits: epistolary postcards from exile and letters to Kaiti Drosou and Aris Alexandrou], edited and introduced by Lizi Tsirimokou (Athens: Agra, 2008)

*This and one subsequent passage are quoted, in my translation, from Stefanidis’s introduction to a collection of sketches from his time in exile, Zografiki stin exoria [Painting in exile] (Athens: Sighroni Epohi, 1988).