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)