Theodor Kallifatides: "Emigration is a form of suicide"

Theodor Kallifatides (Molaoi, Greece, 85 years old) recounts that his mother told him from a very young age: "All tragedies end well."

He, even today, does not fully understand the phrase.

That statement may have led him to finally become a writer due to the need to unravel the brutal and enigmatic paradox that he contains.

But, in addition to that, there are other powerful reasons, also contradictory, when it comes to explaining why he chose his literary career, such as the fact that he began to write in Swedish, a language that had nothing to do with his origins and ended up adopting after landing in the sixties in that Scandinavian country, so opposite to his own.

The author of the masterful and exciting

(Galaxia Gutenberg) says that he repudiated his language for various reasons.

Political, intimate, heartbreaking.

And that resentment and even hatred influenced it, even though that book tells the story of a reconciliation: that of the author with his own language.

That is, the closest thing to a parable of the prodigal son located in the depths of the bowels.

Kallifatides burst into the Spanish literary scene with that book not long ago, in 2019. Since then it has not stopped growing and gaining readers.

Joan Tarrida, his editor, decided to recover his work because it had not been translated into Spanish, as well as doing so in Catalan.

Until now we have been getting to know an author who advocates simplicity to delve deeply into the big issues and who weaves the threads of time from the philosophy of ancient Greece to the present, truffing his narratives with that wisdom that provides the memory well digested, although not without pain.

From

to

From

or

to

and now

, Kallifatides touches us with a delicate skepticism and a profound truth, sophisticated in its simplicity, precise in its formulations, direct and amazed at the clumsiness and misery that could be arranged. , according to him, if people flocked to the recipe book provided by universal literature.

What is that new country, that Sweden, that he claims to see from his window at home?

I wrote the book that now appears in Spain in 2002. And I'm sorry I was so prophetic.

I began to glimpse a country that indulged in extreme nationalism.

What kind of place would it be if only the Swedes fit in?

In a way, I saw this wave of intolerance with emigration coming.

The book opens with you, practically covered up to your forehead, and a stranger berating you: “You fucking Turk!”

Yes, I had covered myself to go out in a way that I don't think even my wife would have recognized me.

And suddenly, that individual realizes that I was an immigrant.

That is the most disturbing thing, that he detected it as if it were an animal, instinctively.

With this anecdote, he began to denote a drift that today affects not only migrants, who are more isolated and have had to adopt other tactics, such as not showing themselves to be perpetual victims in order to survive.

But also at the beginning of the century other problems began, classism in education, isolation...

Let's trust your mother.

She once told him that all written tragedies end well.

She didn't understand it then and still, she says, she still hasn't explained it to him.

What do you think she meant?

Greek tragedies rarely end well.

In

for example, nothing is saved from burning.

But what is certain is that time heals everything.

If we take those same characters 20 years later, their luck may have changed.

In other words, the endings are provisional.

A convention that ends at a precise point, but not definitive.

Exact.

Exact.

If we turn it around and think about those who at the end of the 20th century had declared the end of the Cold War, what would they say now about what is happening in Ukraine?

That is a good example.

And we've done everything we can to resurrect her.

All.

World War II was fought to defend democracy against Hitler.

They won it.

What happened next?

Greece fell into a dictatorship that was controlled by the Americans.

The surrounding countries were subjected to Stalinism.

The French, the British, the Belgians and the Dutch mistreated the inhabitants of their colonies: where was the democracy?

It was a fiction.

An excuse to win the war.

And now we find ourselves with a new war on European soil, not long after what happened in the Balkans.

The war continues.

It does not have an end.

From Troy, non-stop.

It implies the struggle for power and dominance, without more.

Who can believe that the Nazis would be reborn today under other names in the same countries where they wreaked havoc?

I believe that most people don't learn, not because they are stupid, but because there is something in man's own destiny that pushes him to make the same mistakes.

I guess his father was a great man.

But genetically, you couldn't inherit his kindness, his upbringing, his sense of humor.

He must learn that later, by himself.

Therefore, each of us begins again and again.

That is our challenge in life.

build us.

But the lessons we should have learned we are not able to take with us.

The only thing that can save us from disaster is culture.

(c) GIANFRANCO TRIPODO

Because?

Because it makes us share common experiences.

Shakespeare or Tolstoy are museums of human experiences.

In the

it is expressly said that war is the source of all tears.

And we have to study that and incorporate it into our being.

If the Bible is the book of God, universal literature, the great classics, must be that of the human being.

Starting with Greek mythology.

The entire catalog of behavior is there: sleeping with your mother, killing your children... Any virtue and any outrage.

You describe emigration as suicide.

Strong…

Yes. And I don't mean that metaphorically.

I left my country at the age of 25, not very old, but old enough to get going.

I had to face many experiences alone: ​​I lost people, I gained other people, I was unhappy in love, I suffered from illness, poverty... Except enjoying my time, a great experience that I discovered later, but that I had not enjoyed then.

When I arrived in Sweden I felt like a skinned rabbit because my skin was all I left behind.

Already.

On top of all that, you lose your ability to express yourself.

Or you do it in a very poor and even stupid way.

You don't know the language and you must make yourself understood.

In that situation you think and propose: I should be a better person.

That implies that maybe you are not who you would like to be.

The fact of trying I think it is a very natural human aspiration.

But if you find yourself alone, without your surroundings, without those you love around you, outside your city, your town, it is harder.

You must start anew to try to form yourself around the environment and the experiences or the familiarity that you have lost.

You insist on getting the life you should have had in your own country.

And you may not get it.

Then you deny and do without a large part of yourself.

So it is a kind of suicide.

To begin with, he denied his own language.

Yes. And I did it because I considered it contaminated by the ideas of that time.

The influence of fascism was very strong and determining in my case.

The poverty that all that brought, too.

We were forced to beg.

All that misery, unnecessary for me, the result of the war, dragged us down.

That catastrophe leads to ruin;

for those who have not suffered it, it is good to remember it.

So he put land in the middle.

Learning Swedish, did she save you?

helped me.

I needed to recompose myself as a human being.

In Greece, not only I wanted to get rid of all that.

They also wanted to get rid of me.

Who is it?

The system, the authorities, wanted me out of the country.

And that made you angry, frustrated?

Did he cause you hatred despite the fact that in his intentions as a person he has always sought to be better?

Yes. But imagine... My father was a man of the left and that condemned my brothers and I to not progress, to not be able to study.

I went to the police station to get the papers proving that I was a patriot and a good Christian without ideas that represented a threat to the Government and they didn't give them to me.

The policeman on duty looked at me, laughed, and said, "Well, if my mother ever becomes Pope of Rome, then you can go to university."

I didn't leave there with high hopes.

But all that, as his mother said, ended well.

Over the years she wrote a masterpiece and reconciled with his language.

Yes, although in my country, the wounds of the war and the dictatorship have not yet healed.

Something similar has happened in Spain.

The living shadow of war still covers us.

But it is you who has also written in your novel

To tell you the truth, I suppose I was referring to the aura that each of us has.

I call it shadow to avoid the religious connotation it implies.

In some cases, we feel things that may happen a little before they are triggered.

Danger, anguish, insecurity... Without anything leading rationally to it.

But suddenly something happens that proves you right.

The writer Theodor Kallifatides, photographed in Madrid.Gianfranco Tripodo

Timandra

Yes, I have signed peace.

Things change, evolve.

Although right now I'm not in a great rush or anxiety to write, if I do, it will be in Swedish.

Because it has finally become the language of my life.

Has the Swede, then, definitely won the battle within you?

I like it a lot.

It is true that I don't cry when I listen to songs in Swedish, but I shed tears like a pig when they are played in Greek.

Why will it be?

My heart.

He is the boss in that sense.

Is your heart Greek and your brain Swedish?

That is.

And nothing happens.

You can work with your brain, but you can't change your heart.

It is so.

I would like to feel one hundred percent Swedish.

But I'am not.

And if I tried to convince you that I am, you would realize that I lie to you.

European feel?

Yes, although it is a concept that has its tricks.

The Greeks, for example, use it as it suits them.

If they want to justify their lack of capacity for the organization, they make sure that they do not feel as such.

But if they do well in football, they say: "See, we are at a European level."

In

In a very short period of time, a philosophical euphoria occurred in ancient Greece and the basic ideas of our civilization were created.

New concepts, creation, arts, science... It was an explosion that did not occur by chance or capriciously, but by direct and very rich contact with other cultures.

But that of the Greeks remained because it was written in its day.

Democracy became a word in force today.

But also misanthropy and hatred of opposing positions.

Also, in some passage of the play, a character doubts what it means to have a right to something.

That question is tough.

It exposes it perhaps because we waste or mispractice our rights when we exercise them.

Especially when this means stepping on the rights of others.

It's confusing.

When you express an opinion, you should check whether it does not hurt other people too much.

And above all, express them without seriously contradicting the coherence of our actions.

Or also when they attack others.

We should not allow someone to say that all Jews should be exterminated without consequences for the supporter.

Some opinions should not only cause alarm at the moment they are pronounced, but should also carry consequences if they attempt or threaten the lives of others.

Hitler had the success of him when pronouncing certain atrocities.

The lie builds monsters.

It happened with Hitler, it happens with Putin.

Yes, it also does so under the cover of freedom of expression.

It should not be like that.

The fact is that the old problems continue unresolved and we are not capable of illuminating fruitful solutions to look for alternatives.

Look Ukraine.

Nothing new.

The writer Theodor Kallifatides, photographed in Madrid.Gianfranco Tripodo

Well, let's use some Socratic notions.

For example, as you remember, that beauty is the only virtue that can be seen.

Nice, isn't it?

I've been fascinated since I read it.

It is a simple and very clear concept.

It does not even admit of discussion or explanation.

But huge.

Like his literature.

Could we say that you use yourself in a continuous search for simplicity to formulate everything that is complex?

Aristotle in his

tries to search for the errors of each one.

There is no idea of ​​social justice.

It has been forgotten.

Should it be based on equal opportunity only?

At least in part.

On a minimal basis, as a starting point.

My son is an economist and sometimes he teaches me a few things.

He maintains that in the history of humanity there had not been a concentration of capital similar to the present one.

Never.

So what kind of democracy have we built for ourselves?

One to drag us towards the wildest capitalism and monopolies with hardly any control?

This leads us to another concept related to the previous Socratic idea but formulated by Plato: that what is beautiful is difficult.

Of course, because not even beauty has been a guarantee to lead a good life.

This has its counterparts and carries its own condemnations.

Is kindness hard too?

Sometimes you have to propose.

Although the purest in that sense occurs naturally.

We should make progress on that, but it counts more when something is at stake among many interests.

You tend not to give up what you think belongs to you.

That is why it is difficult for us to delve into the path of goodness.

For this reason, too, I strive to emphasize certain things.

Or everything that touches on justice and equitable distribution.

Besides, I trust in the virtue of doing good just for the sake of doing it, not because of any interest that pushes you to do it.

Many times, what stands between good and evil is impulse or even stupidity.

And if we refer to love, more.

We fell in love, very good.

It is unavoidable.

But love does not give us so many rights, but rather obligations.

The problem jumps when before that you interpose feelings that you consider superior.

Who makes you believe that?

Again, in that aspect, you have to learn from scratch.

And resort to culture to explain things to you.

Federico García Lorca, in that universe, has taught us a lot, for example.

You have also dealt with homosexuality in your work, did Lorca influence you in that?

It is an issue that is still not well accepted in countries like Greece, where homosexuals sometimes suffer heinous and violent crimes.

As has happened with some writers.

Brutal.

And the Church has a responsibility in this.

To begin with, because they show a systematic intolerance towards the matter and, secondly, because they have perpetrated non-stop abuses within it.

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