Koraly Dimitriadis. The Mother Must Die. Puncher and Wattmann. 2024.
by Dean Kalymniou
From first page to last, Koraly Dimitriadis’ The Mother Must Die refuses comfort. This short-story collection locates itself in the aftermath of migration’s myth: the romanticized hearths, the nostalgic refrains of “home” whispered across generations. It dismantles the notion that cultural continuity is necessarily kind, or that the migrant mother is automatically heroic. Instead, the author enters the shrine, touches the glass, compelling us to examine what is inside. She demands we see what that sanctified maternal figure has cost, what it has demanded in silence, submission, memory, and debt.
Dimitriadis understands that for many Greek Australian and Cypriot Australian families, the mother came to serve as the living archive; the vessel of loss, labor and survival. In these stories, her monologues will often shift fluidly across decades and geography, from a dusty village, through working-class suburbia, into the fluorescent corridors of Australian hospitals and supermarkets. That chronological and temporal drift does not blur meaning, instead it clarifies it: the pain does not fade with generations. The homeland does not remain behind because memory persists. Maternal labor is recorded as ledger rather than as anecdote. When a mother confesses that she “killed herself” for her children and then counts the meals cooked, the hips that bore children, the nights spent awake, she does not simply speak of hardship, revealing instead a moral economy in which love becomes indebtedness, sacrifice becomes entitlement, and devotion writes permanent contracts. In migration theory that model is known: displacement produces “guilt economies” through which parents expect generational repayment. Here, Dimitriadis shows that the repayment is less financial than existential. Daughters are born in arrears.
Within this architecture of obligation, shame becomes the instrument of control. In the opening story, a mother declares that her children have made her “a rezili,” turning her unhappiness into a public humiliation. She imagines relatives, neighbors and church acquaintances whispering about her, transforming private disappointment into communal disgrace. The surveillance she fears is not institutional but social, and she enforces its rules inside the home. Respectability becomes her currency and maintaining it becomes her daughter's burden. In this way, the domestic space becomes the first frontier: the mother stands at its threshold, policing conduct and feeling, and the daughter learns that protection and acceptance are possible only through compliance.
What makes The Mother Must Die especially unsettling is its dismantling of the very category of “Greekness.” Dimitriadis refuses a monolithic interpretation. She allows the cracks in the façade to show. Some characters whose heritage claims “mainland Greece” speak with Cypriot inflections. Others who are Cypriot occupy a liminal space: neither wholly integrated into the mythic “Greekness” that the mother guards, nor comfortable in assimilation. That displacement reveals that “being Greek” is not an essence but a contested construction. Language shifts, dialects merge, identity becomes layered. In the diaspora, Greekness becomes something inherited conditional on compliance, cultural performance and silence. That conditionality is often forgotten in public mythology. Dimitriadis refuses the forgetting. She inserts confusion, friction and hybridity, allowing identity to fold in on itself, to fracture, to reassemble. In doing so she manifests a sense of belonging can be claimed, declined, modified, or rejected. It becomes unstable and alive.
This subversion dismantles maternal moral authority because the mother asserts ownership over a heritage that is no longer stable, uniform or uncontested. That heritage appears in fragments: differing accents, contradictory memories, rival claims over whose experience constitutes “real” suffering or “proper” tradition. The mother’s certainty loosens as the daughter recognizes that Greekness in diaspora is performed, rehearsed and selectively applied. In that recognition lies a shift in orientation, an acceptance that belonging may depend on stepping away from inherited scripts, and that estrangement can operate as a form of survival.
From a feminist perspective, the book exposes how patriarchal expectations do not disappear in migration but sediment within nostalgia. The mother, shaped by that earlier formation, becomes its most vigilant custodian. She demands silence, endurance and unpaid labor from her daughters, presenting these as proof of moral worth. Domestic continuity becomes an ethical ideal; marriage is upheld as evidence of stability; sexual restraint signals virtue. When a daughter seeks divorce, refuses inherited gender scripts or asserts autonomy, the maternal response is reproach that draws authority from communal memory, honor and reputational fear. Rebellion becomes coded as disloyalty rather than growth. Dimitriadis shows how endurance, once a strategy for survival, ossifies into emotional captivity. Liberation emerges only when that inherited structure is relinquished. The mother as archetype must die because her authority safeguards suffocation, and its dismantling becomes the condition of self-possession.
What this book also makes strikingly clear is that men occupy a symbolic position rather than a psychological one. They appear less as complex agents and more as conduits through which patriarchal expectations are reproduced. Across stories such as “Conquest” and “Blood-red Numbers,” men become the bearers of sovereignty, possession and entitlement, embodying what Raewyn Connell identifies as hegemonic masculinity, where status is affirmed through accumulation, sexual conquest and emotional withholding. Their masculinity functions as an infrastructure that underwrites the moral economy binding women into obligation. That economy operates through men’s capacity to decide, to abandon, to withhold and to remain unaccountable. These qualities are vividly staged in Louie’s transactional view of intimacy and the corporate protagonist’s imploding sense of entitlement. Even when men remain peripheral, their absence structures harm, their silence produces anxiety, and their failures generate labor that is absorbed by daughters and wives. Dimitriadis reframes masculinity as a site of emotional vacancy that others must continually fill, positioning men as embodiments of a structure that privileges their comfort, mobility and desire. The mother’s severity acquires historical intelligibility in that context as a compensatory response to male abandonment and irresponsibility that remain largely unexamined within the domestic sphere. Masculinity becomes an inheritance that daughters must navigate and ultimately survive.
Time in the book remains deliberately unsettled. Rather than moving through clear progression, scenes drift across decades and geographies, sliding from ancestral villages into Australian suburbs, from early caregiving spaces into psychiatric wards. The effect is not fragmentation for its own sake but a loosening of chronological authority, so that inheritance cannot stabilize into a single lineage of meaning. Nostalgia, once treated as assurance, is revealed as a fragile reconstruction. Memory does not arrive as a coherent legacy; it circles back, disturbs, and refuses closure. In one story, a woman continues to encounter her mother as though alive, seeing her walk through the city and beckon to her. Only when her child gently reminds her: “Your mum died when you were twenty-five,” does the illusion fall away. The moment folds past and present into one space. The mother remains ongoing, lodged within voice, within longing, within the unfinished labor of grief. Mourning never completes, moving beside the living, shaping their interior life rather than receding into history.
The author aligns that psychic persistence with psychoanalytic theory. Freud wrote that ego formation requires withdrawal of libidinal investment from the lost object. Mourning achieves that through acceptance. When mourning is incomplete, melancholia becomes the afterlife of loss. In Dimitriadis’ world the mother, even in death, commands. The daughter remains tethered. Only symbolic matricide, the dismantling of the maternal myth, can permit separation. The book stages that matricide through refusal, through writing, through silence, through departure. The daughter’s sense of self comes into being only when the mother’s symbolic presence recedes. If that presence remains intact, identity remains accounted for inside another person’s ledger.
Dimitriadis enacts this death in a variety of ways. In one story the daughter retreats: she stops calling, stops visiting, stops reporting her movements. No confrontation. The omission becomes severance. In another, the daughter rejects the domestic scripts: she discards cooking, refuses the apron, chooses work, desire, union, sex, divorce, actions that are treated as sacrilege within the mother’s moral code. The result is an existential rupture, carried most powerfully through writing. Dimitriadis enters the story herself and inscribes material that once circulated only in kitchens, in back rooms, in the hush of obligation. What had remained sealed by fear becomes visible on the page. Writing turns into refusal, a deliberate refusal of silence, and a dismantling of the maternal hold. The formerly unspoken becomes sayable, then recordable, then part of shared narrative rather than private burden. Secrets lose their force when articulated, and the sacred archive dissolves into open terrain where its claims no longer hold authority over anyone’s life.
The book also dismantles the comforting caricatures of the Greek migrant mother that populate wider Australian culture. In TV, film, popular comedy, that figure is often rendered as comedic, loud, overbearing but ultimately lovable. The mother who yells at the kids, sweeps the porch, gossips incessantly. Dimitriadis refuses that gentleness. Her mothers are real: tender but also savage in their emotional withholding. They are elemental, almost titanic beings. They can feed and clothe, yet count every hour and every sacrifice, judging sons with indulgence and daughters with suspicion. That complexity is stripped of comedic softening. Consequently, the book demands that readers recognize the emotional price of survival within diaspora culture. Such a cost is not always borne by the immigrant generation only. It is transferred, encoded, inherited. Dimitriadis forces us to look at the psychic residues, the fractures, the silent losses.
Dimitriadis’ language destabilizes familiar stereotypes in both Greek and English. She keeps the hybrid syntax intact: the accent, the inflected rhythms, the abrupt shifts between registers. Mothers speak in English that carries residue from another grammar, sometimes fractured, always unfiltered. The daughter’s interior voice moves with urgency, pared back and sharp. This juxtaposition disrupts ease of entry and draws the reader into uncomfortable proximity. Language becomes a structure that confines, echoes and fractures, carrying the weight of difference within the home. Keeping that linguistic impurity intact is deliberate. Literary smoothness is refused. Sanitized representation is withheld. What others have labelled broken English is treated as meaning-bearing, historically charged speech. Through that syntax the diaspora remains present, imperfect and still sounding.
Ultimately what emerges from The Mother Must Die is neither hatred nor punishment, but an appeal to release the mother from the impossible elevation that once immobilized daughters. The book seeks restoration rather than censure. The mother’s losses are acknowledged, her grief articulated and her ruptures held in view. The myth that formed around her through silence, duty and unquestioned reverence is gradually dismantled, revealing an ordinary and wounded human figure rather than a sanctified emblem. From that recognition, the daughter gains room to exist beyond inherited obligation, to speak without fear and to inhabit a self not defined by maternal expectation. Yet the central dilemma remains unresolved. If freedom requires the symbolic ending of the maternal figure, how does life continue when the source of life is conceptually erased? The work suggests that the daughter’s future is shaped inside that question, where love, loss and autonomy coexist without resolution.
Reading The Mother Must Die is tantamount to participating in a ritual of release, save that the final page does not so much close a story as open an interval. The mother remains. The daughter remains. Their history remains. The authority that arrested identity possibly remains but is contested. The daughter may turn toward the future, if not absolved of debts, at least able to author her own. Koraly Dimitriadis’ unique form of iconoclasm speaks across the generations to all of those who would worship or fetishize myths. In dismantling myth, she offers space for humanity.
December 07, 2025
Dean Kalymniou is an intellectual, a writer, a poet, a playwright, a lawyer. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.