IOULI TSAKALOU
Coming under her writing microscope, she gave birth to a shocking novel regarding a great struggle, a love and the place that nurtured gods and heroes. The heroes of this story will continue to fight for love and justice from sun to sun, until the memories stop hurting its inhabitants.
-In your new monologue “From sun to sun” Metaichmio publications, you write regarding a period that is not widely known to the reading public “The bloody strike of Serifou”. Why do the memories of that time still hurt its inhabitants?
The mines of Serifos at the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century marked an impressive economic course.
But the workers experienced the ultimate depreciation as people and as workers. Gromans with false promises grabbed their fields, disregarded their lives by reducing security measures, left them unpaid and abused their poverty.
Today the descendants of the Gromans are trying to seize from the Sheriffites the fields that their ancestors had granted exclusively for mining, without the grantee having jurisdiction over the land.
One hundred and twenty years later, history repeats itself…
-What triggered the choice of your new trip?
Serifos itself, its majestic eerie landscape and the mythological references to it. Reading the history of the island, I was moved by the history of the mines and the 1916 strike.
-I liked your description of the working conditions in the mines of Serifos? Did their struggles take place?
After the strike in which there were nine dead, workers and gendarmes, the 8-hour shift was established for those who worked inside the arcades. The rest worked ten hours.
A year later, we have the first worker-employer agreement for raises, travel allowances, hiring exclusively local workers, but also financial aid to the families of the strike victims. No fight is lost.
-Is Greek society still divisive today?
Many things have changed. But as long as there are inequalities in education, care, professional and social rehabilitation, societies will remain divided.
-Penetrate into the most subtle psychological fluctuations of your heroes as much as you bring to light traumatic experiences, the management of which will give the right dimensions to the memories and lead to non-forgetting. What is the point you want the reader to take away?
The dialogue deals with a “small country” and does not take place in the urban fabric as is usual in novels. There are many requests. I refer epigrammatically: the disclosure of the place in the given time and historical period. The presentation of the small, special society, the position of the woman in it, the traditions, the habits, the local culture. The mines and the working conditions in them, the foreigners who exploited the local population, the birth of trade unionism, the strike of ’16 itself, its results, the abandonment of the island following the mines stopped operating. Certainly also the human relationships, family, romantic, professional, collegial, which are the ones that weave the fabric of the novel.
-In your books are some hidden codes that only some persistent readers can “decipher” how much weight you give to it. Is it a test of reading depth, a sort of “quality check” of your readers?
I will say the trite thing that I totally embrace. “A thousand readers, a thousand different readings.”
Whatever codes you put in, not of course to control anyone but like this, out of authorial peculiarity – not to say perversion – there will always be some readers who will tell you other versions that you hadn’t even thought of.
And this is the greatness of literature, a work is “metabolized” differently by everyone and can constantly “give birth” to new versions, depending on the mental and spiritual richness of each person.
-Is the love of reading an internal revolution and how do you see the relationship of the younger generations with the book?
I feel it more for an internal need.
The young people’s relationship with reading seems to be taking another form that has yet to be defined. Unknown where and how it will be formed. I just hope it continues.
And one last observation.
Observing Atlas carrying the firmament on his shoulders in a photograph, I was reminded of all the women of Serifos who fought, supported their men and their country in the face of this huge struggle. After all, we are not the weaker sex, we are the support of the earth. (smile)
-Is writing a lonely road, a way to create new ideas, to get in touch with the knowledge of an entire era to better understand ourselves?
Writing for me has been the ultimate path to self-realization. On a white screen I confess, I collide, I discover feelings, which I did not feel even in the strongest emotions of my life.
-Is there any technique so that a personal experience can become an interesting case for the readers?
For me the only technique was and is the truth, when it comes to telling a personal experience. It needs neither beautification nor heroization. A painless situation for some requires heroism from others. Everyone experiences things differently.
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