Elena Georgiou

Writer, editor, and professor Elena Georgiou: author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants and mercy mercy me; co-editor of The World in Us...

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The Magical Mystery Tour of the Imagination

By e g

Goddard’s The Writer in the World has posted an adaptation of my Spring 2016 commencement address for the Vermont graduates.

Here’s an excerpt:

As the child of immigrants, my parents decided that they needed to send me to an after school program to learn my ancestral language. So every Wednesday, a little grey van picked me up after my schoolday was over, and took me and about a dozen other English-Cypriot children to our weekly two-hour Greek Language classes. The teacher was Greek—as in Greek from Greece, and not from the recently-liberated-from-the-British, eleven-times-colonized, tiny island called Cyprus from where my parents and the parents of all the other children in the van hailed—so she spoke in an elevated dialect, using a vocabulary that I never heard used in the homes of the immigrant community in which I was raised. In fact, a lot of the time when she spoke, my classmates and I just stared at her blankly, unable to decipher her sentences. And she stared back at us—half in pity, half in disgust.

I was nine when these lessons began and I formed an instant hatred for them—for many reasons, most of them having to do with the shame associated with a colonized upbringing, but that would be a completely different blogpost. For today, I’m focusing on just one of the reasons: at my regular school I was an excellent student—English felt like home, but Greek, especially the elevated dialect I was being taught, made me feel less than. Later that same year, at school, I won my first national writing competition—the prize was an ink pen and the choice of a book that I could pick for myself from a cardboard box full of remaindered hardbacks.

After browsing, I chose a poetry collection—poems written for an adult audience, dealing with adult themes. Until that moment, I had never read a poetry collection. At school, we only dealt with stories. I had no idea who the poet was; I simply picked the book with the words in it that spoke to me, and when I say spoke to me what I mean is—I read some words on a page and they made my nine-year-old body feel something in a place deep beneath my skin. When I read the poems at night, I felt something. When I read the poems in the morning, I felt something. Whether I was sad or happy, when I read these words I felt something.

Read the rest at The Writer in the World.

NEW BOOK FOR 2018!

The Immigrant's Refrigerator
Fiction. Short Stories.
GenPop Books, 2018

If luck is on an author’s side, a book reaches its audience at the right time. Elena Georgiou’s The Immigrant’s Refrigerator can confidently make this claim. Populated with a cast of characters that shine the light on what it means to be an outsider in the early part of the 21st century, this story collection takes its reader into the private lives of those who have entered a country legally, others who were forced to enter illegally, and the rest who call a country home as a result of birth; characters searching for what they need to sustain them on their journeys towards a future that will not only be a place of refuge, but also one of hope.

Read more about The Immigrant's Refrigerator

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