Singh, Athina Bakirtzidis (2021) Mnemography and the Greek Civil War Postmemory, Symbology and Migration Trauma explored through Creative Oral History, The Bells Will Toll. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

During and immediately after the Greek Civil War, bias, propaganda, fear and stigma led to the silencing of leftist voices. This created an imbalance and compromised perceptions of the truth, facts and historical events. This silencing further led to misconceptions so that rumour and propaganda could proliferate without opposition. Through a creative oral history of my family stories, I aim to redress this imbalance. Using the ancient Greek theory of the four humours as a structure for the creative work, I have written an ancestor tribute which I have termed mnemography. Oral history interviews with my relatives and auto-ethnography form the basis of my research. Silenced voices of departed relatives are heard through the narrating of the difficulties my relatives faced as leftist guerrillas or politically neutral farmers in Northern Greece from 1942 to 1950. The research is motivated by my commitment to honour my relatives’ memories and my belief that the telling of these stories will encourage further reconciliation within any community where there are political, cultural or racial differences. Through Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, I explore the hold the past has on my own notions of self and identity and discuss how my relatives’ stories have better enabled me to understand my own place in our shared history. The haunting of the past through intergenerational transmission is explored in the mnemography and exegesis. The ouroboros is a Greek symbol of renewal and regeneration and I have used it to signify the regenerative process of family stories through postmemory. In the mnemography I use oral history transcriptions which incorporate elements of creative writing practice. The exegesis clarifies how the writing practice I used differs from existing memoirs of the Greek Civil War and how it adds to our knowledge of that conflict. The fine-grained ethnographic detail that emerges from the oral histories reveals how my relatives lived, depicting a way of life now passed. Using inconsistencies in the narrative, I explore how there can be more than one version of the events, and the importance of the multivocality of stories from the Greek Civil War so that there is not only one narrative. This leads to a fairer, more nuanced reading of the past, and, in engaging with the roles played by bias, rumour and propaganda in establishing official histories, allows for more informed judgements to be made about these crucial events.

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