Sherry Chandler

Here a while back, I talked about the way the film of Zorba the Greek leaves out a lot of detail that makes the novel so rich. One of the things that the film version omits is references to the political situation in the region at the time. I quoted one such passage earlier this month—Zorba’s musings on the Greek war for independence from the Ottoman Empire. The break up of that empire had other repercussions in the area, including the Armenian genocide. This genocide is also addressed in Zorba in a letter the narrator receives from a friend:

Half a million Greeks are in danger in the south of Russia and the Caucasus. Many of them speak only Turkish or Russian, but their hearts speak Greek fanatically. They are of our race. Just to look at them—the way their eyes flash, rapacious, ferrety, the cunning and sensuality of their lips when they smile, the way the have managed to become bosses and have moujiks working for them in this immense territory of Russia—it’s quite enough to convince you that they are descendants of your beloved Odysseus. So one comes to love them and cannot let them perish.

For they are in danger of perishing. They have lost all they had, are hungry and naked. From one side they are harried by the Bolsheviks; from the other by the Kurds.

…On the day of my arrival the Kurds had seized a Greek teacher and priest in the district and nailed horse-shoes to their feet. The notables were horrified and took refuge in the house where I am staying. We can hear the Kurds’ guns coming closer all the time.

—from Zorba the Greek (Simon and Schuster, 1953), pp 140-141

Bolsheviks? Kurds? I thought Kurds were the innocents in all this, victims of Saddam, the only successful and peaceful part of Iraq, a threat to the Turks. But when it came to Armenia, the Kurds and the Turks made a devilish bargain:

Turkish gendarmes escorted individual caravans consisting of thousands of deported Armenians. These guards allowed roving government units of hardened criminals known as the “Special Organization” to attack the defenseless people, killing anyone they pleased. They also encouraged Kurdish bandits to raid the caravans and steal anything they wanted. In addition, an extraordinary amount of sexual abuse and rape of girls and young women occurred at the hands of the Special Organization and Kurdish bandits. Most of the attractive young females were kidnapped for a life of involuntary servitude.

Later, the Kurds themselves had a bloody confrontation with the Turks. And, of course, tension between the Kurds and the Turks is one of the destabilizers in Iraq today.

For ways in which this confusion continues today, read this hair-raising post from Hullabaloo.

I don’t have a point to make with all this. I certainly don’t mean to vilify the Kurds. Though I was struck by a certain absurdity in the Kurds’ outrage that Saddam was executed before he was tried for crimes against them. Now, they said (according to NPR) they will never have justice.

It just all makes my head swim, the enmities and counter-enmities. The more I learn, the more I feel like Mrs. Dalloway:

It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable, divine simplicity, which no one had to the same extent; which made him go and do the thing while she and Peter frittered their time away bickering. He was already halfway to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)—no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she could bear to see cut.

Though I have read Mrs. Dalloway, it was Chris Hedges who drew my attention to this passage in War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Update Feb 18, 2008: A profile of Kazantzakis and his relationship to Zorba.