The Past, Present, Future: Voicing Greek Australian Dreaming

by Yiorgos Anagnostou

Review essay of Helen Vatsikopoulos ed. Hellenic Dreaming. The Greek Orthodox Community of New South Wales, 2024.

“Perhaps it is now time for us to decide whether we allow our stories to be consigned to oblivion or whether we start talking and attempt to learn from them.

Academic and writer Eva Hoffman beckons us to seek out the silences and explore contested narratives. ‘The second generation is the hinge generation in which transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history or myth.’ In this publication, we attempt to take on the challenge.” ~Helen Vatsikopoulos

As an immigrant in the United States for forty long years, I regularly reflect on the significance of living between two cultures. As a person who makes a living teaching and writing about diaspora, I join “fellow diaspora travelers” in striving to understand how living between two cultures shapes lives. Also, how individuals and institutions negotiate their affiliations with two worlds. How are memories transmitted—or not—intergenerationally? I ask who represents this experience, how, and to what end.

As the editor of Hellenic Dreaming, Helen Vatsikopoulos curates diverse writings and artwork, to advance this conversation by taking the challenge to probe unspoken experiences, diverse perspectives, cultural taboos. She does so via memoir, oral history, fiction, poetry, travelogue, photography, essays, academic writing. The voices of multigenerational Greek Australians beckon us to enter the terrain of diaspora lives from a variety of vantage points, factual and fictional, the visual, the imaginative, and the reflective. The book seeks to reach multiple audiences through a plurality of perspectives. This is a polyvocal work featuring a wide range of Greek Australian voices.

The introduction explains the reasons for and the importance of drawing out those voices. She notes how the traumatic experiences of immigrant Greek Australians led to the “double wall of silence” (citing academic Joy Damousi) “where parents do not tell” to protect their children, who in turn “do not ask”; a “conspiracy of silence” disrupting intergenerational understanding, leaving “a gap in the historical narrative,” turning into “a loss to history and to us all.” A whole range of immigrant voices self-silenced, volumes of words “remain[ing] unspoken.”

Storytelling, personal recollection, collective memory

The anthology aims to recover, to the extent possible, memories, histories, deep-seated feelings, and suppressed situations. It invests in the power of voice as a vehicle for learning, producing empathy, ultimately changing the world:

Storytelling is powerful. When we tell our stories to others: “Experience sharing,” or “perspective taking” happens, and this elicits empathy. Neuroscientists found that compelling narratives cause oxytocin release, and this can change attitudes and beliefs. So, storytelling can change the world. It can certainly show the world what multigenerational Greek-Australians are made of.

To find a voice, particularly when subjected to habits of silence, requires labor and a desire to achieve it. The notion of dreaming, as the book title indicates, offers a framing angle. Hellenic Dreaming takes us along multiple venues of dreaming. One common pathway is dreaming as desire to attain something lacking in one’s life, as imagining the possibility of creating something new. Or, dreaming as yearning for social change and the actions that this entails. Dreaming in some circumstances may also refer to a dreamlike situation where reality feels surreal and disorienting, challenging our boundaries between the real and the imaginary.

What dreams drove immigrant parents? What was the cost—social, psychological, and human—for realizing their aspirations? What were the gains? What routes of dreaming did the next generation tread in the past, and what paths does it pursue in the present? Is there a dreaming landscape about the future? Dreaming as yearning and imagining drives our lives, focuses and harnesses our energies, and gives purpose to our actions. A great deal is at stake in reflecting on Greek Australians voicing their dreaming.

Hellenic Dreaming affected me deeply, it inspired my own diaspora dreaming and presented a major challenge in my writing about it. In the 37 contributions, Vatsikopoulos notes, the “vocations, occupations—and most importantly—passions” of the authors are “extraordinarily varied.” How I do justice to the tapestry of viewpoints in the anthology? It was challenging. I opted to focus on the significance of those Greek Australian dreams that most powerfully moved me, steering the direction and scope of this reflection.

Navigating the present: Second generation identity, belonging, and expression

The anthology documents and evokes many Greek Australian dreamscapes, longing for mobility, dignity, and acceptance; craving greater freedoms, finding balances in cultural betweenness, escaping constraining situations, pursuing aspirations, acting on resentment or appreciation, breaking from some pasts, cultivating intergenerational continuities, seeking to mend family disruptions, struggling to keep alive or sane, and imagining futures for Greek Australia. “Returning” to Greece and ancestral villages, including those connected with the Greek Cypriot refugee situation.

Weighing what the second and third generations owe to the immigrant generation—telling the family’s story, investing in understanding it—while dreaming beyond its old-world dictates to configure their identities is a theme running throughout the narratives.

The volume could be seen as an example of fulfilling a generational dream. I refer to the quintessential immigrant dream for mobility, social respectability, and success for the children. Largely crafted by the writings of accomplished professionals connected with the post-immigrant generation—educators, photographers, authors, writers, poets, artists, architects, actors, academics, individuals in the media and food industry—Hellenic Dreaming materializes this immigrant desire in the most resounding manner.

The “second generation” then is the major protagonist in the book. It searched for and achieved a voice, acquiring the skills enabling their compelling telling of family stories and histories of dislocations, the striving of parents to nurture a sense of continuity—gardening, for example—in their dramatic transition from rural Greece to suburban Australia. The second generation articulates their challenges navigating cultural betweenness—its “inhabit[ing] at least two identities,” “two cultural languages,” and its hybridity.

The focus on the early formative experiences of the second generation—as children and teenagers—offers another mode of a Greek Australian dreamlike situation. Speaking about the significance of photography for her mother in connection to her biography, Olympia Nelson captures the experience of many children of immigrants. She recalls the following challenge her mother faced: “growing up in two distinct worlds, each characterized by its unique language and symbolic order” generated the perception of living in two “parallel universes;” they “coexisted and she had to navigate through it.”

Her mother “describes how each [universe] had an imaginary experience of the other because very little could be shared or transferred between them. And when it came to making art, she was already primed to reconcile dreams and reality.”

Coping with two irreconcilable cultural worlds blurs the boundaries between dream and reality, childhood and adulthood, Greek and English. It is a dreamlike experience involving situations lacking logical coherence, shifting unpredictably and randomly. Parallel to that, it involves a stern reality that subjects the children to the demands of adulthood: crossing the two universes, translating for the parents, often working in their shops, running demanding errands, and having to make sense of unfamiliar settings.

Negotiating identities among the second generation

Negotiating this dreamlike reality—differently negotiated along sexuality and class lines—viscerally defined the second generation. It deeply textured its dreaming to fashion—invent if you will—“an identity of their own.”

Stories in Hellenic Dreaming are driven and given direction by this cross-cultural negotiation. Memoirs, oral histories, and art open for us worlds that are heartwarming and heart-wrenching. In Vatsikopoulos’s anthology the adult children, now professionals, labor to understand their parents, their merits, their limitations: incessant, immeasurable toil for the sake of the children; the catastrophic experiences of wars, depriving them of an education; all-consuming poverty, forced displacement, neglect by the state, discrimination, their immersion often in old world values. The second generation appreciatively acknowledges parental sacrifices.

But a dark side casts a long shadow in immigrant parenthood too—one hears deep-seated resentment in the voicing of stories about growing up Greek Australian. Especially by those who were subjected to the dilapidating power of patriarchy interfering with their dreams for the freedoms Australia promised. When imposed on teenagers, Old World cultural dictates—norms about sexuality, traditional gender roles, seen as destiny, of “good Greek girls,” inflexibility in what is morally right—oppressed and traumatized young people wanted to fulfill their alternative desires. In some cases, the impositions led to fleeing the parental home, and family fragmentation—sometimes, eventually, longing for reconciliation. Ambivalence, inner struggles, and the desire to over-achieve and balance contractions were intimate companions for many in this generation, exacting immense psychosocial energies.

The distribution of the burden has been disproportionate for daughters and those feeling alternative sexualities. For women who were subjected to “the stifling strictness … growing up in conservative families,” the “depths of intergenerational trauma … are hard to erase.” For Greek Queer identities, such as Kat Zam, coming out on social media generated a deluge of “homophobic messages,” denigrating, insulting, rejecting.

Second-generation narratives about self and family—such as returning to ancestral villages in Greece or the occupied part of Cyprus—capture nuances, commitments to parents, ambivalences, successes, and failures. They reveal loving care and resentments, meaningful yet difficult experiences, and a nexus of complex feelings that official identity narratives fail to acknowledge.

Self-determination of Greek Australians

Vatsikopoulos’s Hellenic Dreaming invites readers to meander along the dreaming of the voices it features. An experience that will most likely generate our own personal paths of dreaming.

It also calls us to ask a broader set of questions such as, how does its material matter? How and why does acknowledging the plurality of perspectives, positions, peoples, and experiences that transverse Greek Australia matter? What kind of dreaming does Hellenic Dreaming possibly set in motion regarding our immediate present and future? Is it possible that it could serve as a springboard for dreaming cultural policy for the diaspora?

The anthology directs my thinking along several pathways of contemplating and practicing a diaspora. The first obvious route is to make a multiplicity of perspectives from the point of view of Greek Australians. In rendering their stories in public, contributors assert their realities—their own existence—while calling readers to acknowledge the existence of those worlds, ensuing greater Greek Australian self-understanding.

In this capacity, Hellenic Dreaming cultivates a broader dream for self-determination, one shared by many in the diaspora: the desire to tell their own stories as they were felt, lived, and made sense to them. This voicing, warts and all, stands as a public record countering the simplifications and idealizations of diaspora identity as construed by institutions and centers of power. Sanitizing the immigrant and diaspora experience, a common tendency in some diasporas, means silencing, a form of unspeakable symbolic violence. The determination to speak for oneself, not being spoken about for the benefit of external interests, involves a political act answering back to power.

The anthology recognizes Greek Australia’s polyphony, some voices have been historically undervalued, sidelined, or silenced. Upon reading the anthology, I longed for additional testimonies from the children of activists in the labor movement, interracial marriages, civil rights activists, maverick public figures, intellectuals, working-class second generation, and others. Hellenic Dreaming sparks interest in additional life story projects.

A second pathway related to the previous one: when Greek Australians speak about taboo issues (abuse, shaming, punishment), they do not merely alert the public about injustices. They take a huge leap—away from the “culture of the village” toward acting as a self-reflective “diaspora group” and simultaneously as confident Australians. Don’t all societies have their issues and flaws? Why be reticent to acknowledge them unless to convey ingrained insecurity after more of a century’s presence in the continent? Why act as lesser, as an intimidated “minority”?

A polyphonic anthology of stories and ways

Speaking out openly then asserts full Australianness and confronts the cardinal cultural rules of Greek rural society, which include keeping silent about socially embarrassing situations and ostracizing non-conformists—a mechanism of maintaining the status quo and resisting change. The infamous “what would people say” in the village, which also operates in some domains in the diaspora—including popular narratives designed to project a sugarcoated positive image for the sake of reputation—functions as a mechanism of self-censorship at the expense of historical self-understanding. Greek Australians’ counter-voices are liberating. They function in a political, “post-ethnic” manner, enacting civic dreaming to resist structures of oppression while striving for democratic, that is inclusive, self-representation.

The third route of the Hellenic Dreaming underscores the value of historical inquiry for self-understanding. Second-generation authors and some professional historians document the specificities of historical events, historicize the journeys of their immigrant families, note internal Greek Australian variations, and contrast and compare regional differences. Not all Greek immigrant demographics shared the same background, possessed similar skills, or enjoyed comparable access to resources.

Social, cultural, and class backgrounds positioned immigrant dreaming differently. Some were farmers in Greece, and others were experienced traders. Accounts in the volume illustrate how one’s family history and the circumstances of upbringing—class and sexuality, traumas and privileges, the particularities of life trajectories, political ideologies, beliefs, the nature of ambitions, and the contexts in which Greek Australian lives unfolded—all configured to the making of a heterogeneous diaspora. Placing family trajectories and community dynamics in the realm of history counters cliches and cultural mythologies.

Fourth, Dreaming Hellenic expands the landscape of Greek Australian dreaming toward diasporic citizenship in the Australian home, even globally. Stories in the anthology appreciate heritage, advocate self-understanding, pay homage to the historical homeland, and dream about threads of cultural continuity and Greek presence in Australia. But notably, the diaspora dreaming of some moves to encompass the wider world, displaying a cosmopolitan outlook and opening paths of civic dreaming.

Immigration and diaspora involve encounters with other cultures and histories, as well as everyday interaction with and learning about and from others. How does Greek Australian dreaming connect with imagining Australia and the dreaming of others? In his reflection on the Greek revolution, Tom Alegounarias, an educator, articulates a particular dreaming linking a foundational Greek historical event—the Greek War of Independence—with Greek Australian diasporic citizenship.

He notes that the revolution did not end with the establishment of the Greek state, but it extends today to the work that Greeks everywhere do about the dream of a polity defined by inclusion, freedom, and justice. Addressing fellow Greek Australians, the author writes, “there is revolutionary work to do for Indigenous Australians, for poor and low socio-economic students, refugees and recent arrivals and more, and especially in schooling. We can, if we like, simply see the spirit of the Greek revolution as a universal struggle for freedom and fairness. As such, the revolution is present and continuous.” This mode of diasporic citizenship adds a vital dimension to the multitude of affiliations and commitments we call diaspora.¹ As Dan Georgakas (2005) asks regarding the immigrant dream, "what are the responsibilities of that which is dreamed about and that of the dreamer?"

An evolving and heterogenous reality of Greek Australia

If Greek Australia—and for that matter, any diaspora—comprises a heterogeneous terrain crisscrossed with linguistic, social, and ideological differentiation, how are we to live in difference meaningfully as a group? Hellenic Dreaming empowers a dream that some scholars have already expressed in public: invest in cultivating a robust diasporic public sphere—in the media, the arts, the academy, the literary world, think tanks, cultural institutions, the university, community educational programs—which promote Greek Australian historical, literary, and cultural learning, critical reflection. Create spaces for substantive dialogue, informed debate, learned commentaries and essays. In this manner, the threads of cohesion are realized via civic participation in deliberating issues of concern and interest.² This is what brings the polis together, resulting in civic and cultural vitality (and plurality), creating the conditions to energize Greek Australia with new pathways of cultural dreaming.

Dreaming does not simply involve retaining the cultural same—traditions, music, folk costumes, recipes, and inheritance. As the second generation knows all too well, it consists in imagining cultural and civic becoming—and the labor and determination this dreaming demands.

We have come full circle to the preface of this essay. It “is now time,” Vatsikopoulos pleads, to “decide whether we allow our stories to be consigned to oblivion or whether we start talking and attempt to learn from them.” One might add that it is also the time to create the conditions for continuing the cultural project of producing and deliberating on our dreams.

April 05, 2025

Coda: The accounts in Hellenic Dreaming demonstrate the power of the arts, the social sciences, history, and the humanities to enhance our self-understanding, extend and expand our boundaries, heighten the valence of our conversations, articulate participatory modes of citizenship, and move us to new frontiers of dreaming. If we find value in this proposition, the next step is a cultural policy³ supporting the next generation of students and up-and-coming young people in media, including film and documentary making, the arts, the art of storytelling, the humanities, anthropology, and sociology to also engage with Greek Australian learning and incorporate it in the carving of their own personal and professional dreaming in the country and beyond. Offer, in other words, the conditions for new pathways of Greek Australian dreaming to animate our imagination and continue the exciting conversation.

Yiorgos Anagnostou is a professor of modern Greek transnational studies at Ohio State University.

Acknowledgment: This essay was originally printed in a slightly different form in the Greek Australian Neos Kosmos (03/28/2025), which I thank for the hospitality. My appreciation to Fotis Kapetopoulos for the conversation and editing.

Notes

1. About the “identifiable similarity between Greek oppression under Ottoman imperial rule and the ongoing repression of Indigenous peoples and cultures by settler colonial systems of power” see Andonis Piperoglou’s “Bicentennial Celebration[s] of Nation[s], Revisited” (2021).

2. About the power of storytelling (in realist fiction) to create belonging around reflection on a community’s ruptures, differences, and sources of contention see Artemis Leontis (2008) [“‘What Will We Have to Remember?’ Helen Papanikolas’s Art of Telling.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 29 (2): 15–26].

3. See Yiorgos Anagnostou (2022) [“Greek America’s Diversity, After the Fact: What Comes Next?” Erγon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters. August 29].

Work Cited

Georgakas, Dan. 2005. "The Anatolian Smile of Elia Kazan." The Charioteer: An Annual Review of Modern Greek Culture. Special Issue, The Greek American Experience. No. 43: 11–19.