Trauma & Art

Pascha

Today is Easter Sunday here in Greece.

‘Easter is called Pascha in Greek, which derives from the Greek  πάσχα (πάσχω means suffer), the Latin pascha, the Aramaic פסחא (paskha) and the Hebrew פסח (pesakh). It is the most revered and celebrated time of the Greek Orthodox Calendar. Easter eggs are an especially beloved tradition. Baskets filled with dyed eggs are offered to family and guests to select and partake in the ritual called tsougrisma, where people engage in cracking each others’ eggs until only one lucky egg has remained intact. For my mother this custom was an essential part of the Easter preparations and she often made two different batches of eggs. One group of eggs was dyed the customary red colour and decorated with Easter theme stickers. Once these were ready she would send me to the garden to pick parsley, dill or rosemary leaves and small flower petals to stencil the second batch of eggs. She kept the petals in place by encasing the egg in a piece of elastic stocking, which she then tied firmly. Some of these eggs were dyed in the customary red dye and some in natural onion dye. We then polished the eggs with olive oil. As a child I found these eggs with the delicate stencil designs too beautiful to crack so my mother let me keep some until they became hollow and the yolk had transformed into a small marble……Tonya Alexandri’

An Easter inspired poem by Yiannis Ritsos, a much loved Greek poet

 «Εαρινή Συμφωνία» Γιάννης Ρίτσος

(Spring Symphony by Yiannis Ritsos

More about Yiannis Ritsos at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yannis-ritsos)

«Άκου τα σήμαντρα   / των εξοχικών εκκλησιών.

Φτάνουν από πολύ μακριά   /   από πολύ βαθιά.

Απ’ τα χείλη των παιδιών

απ’ την άγνοια των χελιδονιών

απ’ τις άσπρες αυλές της Κυριακής

απ’ τ’ αγιοκλήματα και τους περιστεριώνες   /    των ταπεινών σπιτιών.

Άκου τα σήμαντρα   /   των εαρινών εκκλησιών.

Είναι οι εκκλησίες  /    που δε γνώρισαν τη σταύρωση    /    και την ανάσταση.

Γνώρισαν μόνο τις εικόνες    /    του Δωδεκαετούς

που ‘χε μια μάνα τρυφερή   /    που τον περίμενε τα βράδια στο κατώφλι

έναν πατέρα ειρηνικό που ευωδίαζε χωράφι

που ‘χε στα μάτια του το μήνυμα  /  της επερχόμενης Μαγδαληνής.

Χριστέ μου   /   τι θα ‘τανε η πορεία σου

δίχως τη σμύρνα και το νάρδο   /    στα σκονισμένα πόδια σου;»

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way… things I had no words for” Georgia O’Keeffe

“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.”  Toni Morrison

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of my favourite artists. Over the last few days I’ve been looking at her art and photos again, and also, reading about her. In one quote she says:  “I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.” It is so true that when we interact with others’ art much of our own meaning making and associations are imposed on the image or object that we see, which is natural and the way it is meant to work, as long as, we don’t insist that our own interpretations and reactions are necessarily the same of those of another. Art is multilayered and one simple image can become a metaphor of something else or tell a hundred stories or come to represent so many things both for the creator and the observer.

Georgia O’Keeffe came from a family of known and unknown artists. Some of her sisters and two grandmothers engaged with art and painting. One of her sisters also became known as an artist. Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe started off as a printmaker, studied art, worked as a nurse and arts teacher, and painted around seventy canvases, according to Wikipedia, during her lifetime. In 1974 she was featured in a solo exhibition entitled: “Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow”. She seems to have had similar artistic capacities to her older sister and yet unlike her, she did not achieve wide reclamation or manage to find the time and resources to dedicate herself to art. What were the complex dynamics and contributory factors that resulted in such different destinies for the sisters? Through reading we get a glimpse of some of the variables, but there is so much that cannot be known about another’s life or relationships.

In his book, The Pecking |Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become (2005), sociologist, Dalton Conley, explores the reasons of financial, educational and social inequity among adult siblings, the inequity within the family, and a family’s ‘pecking order’ reality that contributes to disparities between adult siblings. We all like to think of the family as a haven where all the children start on equal footing, but reality is often messier. Dalton Conley supports that the family is not a haven in a harsh world, but it is part of the world, and competition and inequality (or not) start at home. It is natural since families are embedded in sociopolitical contexts and are open to societal influences and survival pressures. He suggests that genes and nurturance do not always adequately explain socioeconomic success and that the issue is way more complex. The pecking order within the family unit is further influenced by the family’s sociocultural context and particular events of trauma, illness, divorce, death of a parent and other difficulties that may arise over different periods, and which may not be the same for all siblings. Then there is birth order, nature and nurture. So, there is always a combination of variables to consider.