Between Skylla and Charybdis: Greek American Persephones in Helen Papanikolas's The Time of the Little Black Bird

Abstract

Ethnic-American literature has become a major focus in scholarly research in recent decades, 1 but by comparison to other ethnic literatures, the Greek-American branch has been fairly inconspicuous. 2 Groundbreaking in creating a corpus of Greek-American literature has been Yiorgos Kalogeras in his scholarly work; 3 he also underscores the difficulties inherent in such an endeavour. 4 With Helen Papanikolas's first novel entitled The Time of the Little Black Bird, Greek-American literature has finally found an ethnic voice par excellence that manages a first successful attempt at spanning more than one generation of immigrants and as such takes on epic proportions. This novel portrays a continuum of the immigrant experience that goes beyond the initial shock of displacement and uprooting—a common theme in ethnic writing. With its particular emphasis on the experiences of the first generation—the offspring of early twentieth-century immigrants—Papanikolas's novel brings to light the problematic position and the resulting conflicts for those caught in the middle, who literally find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis. This position is even more poignant for women as it will be shown later.