This Way Back by Joanna Eleftheriou

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Way Back by Joanna Eleftheriou Bryon Macwilliams (bio) Joanna Eleftheriou, This Way Back. In Place series. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020. Pp. 270. Paper $23.99. At first blush Joanna Eleftheriou's collection of essays, This Way Back, seems an unlikely fit for a book series rooted "in place": much is written from a neither here nor there place. Then again, for Eleftheriou—the child of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Greek-American mother, raised in both the United States and Cyprus—liminal space is her place. "I was born with nostalgia in my blood," she writes (59), reminding readers that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek words nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. Eleftheriou's nostalgia is a burden. After all, how much of a homecoming can there ever be when one has little sense of home? And how much pain must one carry beyond the wounds necessary for personal growth? The pain of duty to a father—his expectations, and his unfulfilled dreams. The pain of disapproval of a mother—and of mother and daughter's shared religion, Orthodox Christianity, with which the writer, a lesbian, is "incompatible" (11). The ache from "centuries-old collective memory" among Greek Cypriots and Greeks, generally—what Eleftheriou calls the "lament" of "our Greek nation's fall from its old glory" (107). Then there is the weight of obligation to dead ancestors—those who worked the land Eleftheriou inherited, and whose newly independent country was partitioned before she was born—and the longing for love that, for many years, Eleftheriou found merely in "the stars . . . the ocean, and words, my work" (139). Throughout the 17 essays in the book, Eleftheriou's first, it is clear that, for a long time, these and other forces conspired to tell the writer that her life—her self—could wait. [End Page 248] The book turns in large part on the family's decision, in the writer's early adolescence, to move from the borough of Queens, New York, to the father's village of Asgata near the Cypriot coastal city of Limassol. As a young adult Eleftheriou returned to the United States, where she is now an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. "It's taken decades to begin winding my Americanness back into my identity," she writes. "I had trouble making peace with the birthplace I'd left" (75). In one essay Eleftheriou—"desperate to make sense of a certain kind of beauty that I had just begun to see"—explores desire and permission through the life of the actor Melina Mercouri, for whom "pleasure was her life's guiding principle" (34). In another she wonders when duty to family ends, telling her father in an unsent letter: "I'm not sure I can find a man and marry quick enough to give you peace" (136). She watches from afar footage of Cyprus's first gay pride parade, concluding that "when teachers and priests and politicians said that the Greeks had suffered and deserved to have their human rights better protected" they meant "only certain Greeks—the Greeks who dated the opposite sex" (185). By the end of the book Eleftheriou hopes that telling her story can "offer liberation from this ghost that lives inside me: a sense of exile, a sense of not belonging, a sense of being trapped and unable to flee" (228). There is a sense, too, of Eleftheriou—a runner—trying literally to outrun her ghosts in the early mornings and moonlit evenings among the hills around Asgata. The publisher promotes the book as an essay collection that "reads like a memoir." But, while the essays tell different parts of the same stories, the book reads more like Eleftheriou's description, in a scholarly essay on nonfiction hybrids, of Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1983): The book is "divided into discreet parts" that revolve around ideas and "[only] loosely follow the chronology" of her life (Eleftheriou 2014, 42). Indeed, there isn't a clear sense of time in the book. The essays are arranged such that Eleftheriou's sexuality—"I am, indeed, the first gay Orthodox woman I know" (198...