The Other Life single work   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 The Other Life
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'For many years after we arrived in Australia, the most important connection to our former home in Cyprus was my mother's photo album. as one would expect, most of the images in the album are of my mother's family: her parents, siblings, aunts and uncles. Every now and then, a page is devoted to my father's relatives. There is nothing wrong in admitting that these figures are supporting players; their role is to fill in the background, rather than to play a determining part in the story. Guided by my mother's prompts, I used these images to draw together some of the threads that made up our family history, at a time when my knowledge of this history had been foreshortened by the dislocation of starting over. Here is a photo of a handsome uncle who went to London to study chemistry but married too young and did not finish his degree. Next to him is his serious looking older brother, who was both a high-ranking officer in the colonial police force and a clandestine member of EOKA during the time of the troubles. Nearby is a portrait of my mother's cousin dressed in her neatly ironed high school uniform. She is standing next to a side-table on which rests a vase filled with freshly picked cyclamens. The photograph was taken just before the operation intended to correct a vision problem that left her partially blind. Looking directly at the camera with a mixture of pride and youthful embarrassment, her eyes betray no hint of this fate.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Southerly The Lives of Others vol. 78 no. 2 2018 16854409 2018 periodical issue “Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? in the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? ... if so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth” (Benjamin 390). What does it mean to be in secret agreement with people and places that came before? To recognise that coming after is a matter not just of influence, but also the taking on of certain obligations—for example, to return, to pay tribute, to make amends, to put to rest? for Walter Benjamin the challenge in writing about the past is not to achieve a faithful reconstruction of an earlier period. it is to grasp moments of correspondence between the past and the present that otherwise would fall prey to the ever-present forces of amnesia. nowhere is the call of  Southerly this precarious correspondence more acutely registered than in writings and forms of creative practice that are located in the movement between one generation and the next. it is here that remembrance comes face to face with the unfinished business of people, places and events that demand some-thing of us. 2018 pg. 60-68
Last amended 25 Jun 2019 16:35:55
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