Amelia Zhou on Antigone Kefala
Little by little, names no longer fit things.
Yannis Ritsos, ‘Seconds’ (tr. Antigone Kefala)
I. The photograph
In the photograph, the woman’s head tilts right. Her face registers a slight smile, but it’s hard to make out the expression behind her eyes, though I’m leaning into the page to look closer. What am I looking for? To put into language what the photograph purports to capture, some quality of the real beyond its paper, this fiction. Here’s my descriptive attempt. She is alone, not if you count the pigeons milling about her sandaled feet, or the tourists idling in the background. I think it’s summer or spring. Her sandals give it away. The woman is standing in Piazza San Marco. I’m guessing this from the caption beneath the photograph which reads: in Venice.
Taking pictures is one way to engage in and record our experiences as they are happening. But most things don’t appear in photographs, they escape. Therein presents the difficulty of translating a photographic image into words. Still we keep photographs as a tangible token of remembrance—a souvenir—an object that preserves a trace of an instant caught in time. ① Another way we might score time is to write in a journal. A private souvenir of one’s lived time. The photograph of the woman I’m looking at is pressed in the centrefold of the journal I’m reading. Antigone Kefala is the writer of this not-so-private journal; she’s also the woman in the photograph I’m trying to describe. It’s one photograph amongst several in Kefala’s Sydney Journals (2008). There she is with her friends Jolanta and Jurgis, on a road trip passing through Tibooburra. There she is walking arm and arm with her brother Homer, in Athens. Or she’s not in the photographs at all. In a refugee camp in Lavrion, her father and Homer play the strings. A two-storey house in Annandale, Sydney—where Kefala lived from 1960 until her passing—shadowed by a towering gum. Here is a small sampling of moments and places that shape a life, these photographs suggest. To accurately tell the story of a life, instant to instant, is after all, an impossible task.
Chasing time, grasping at its impossibility, arranging the gathered ephemera on the page—(from the Greek ephemeros, meaning ‘daily, for the day’)—time is both the journal’s constant constraint and foremost preoccupation. It is ‘the element that we cannot keep still, that we cannot recapture, the image of this passing forever chilling,’Kefala notes in Sydney Journals.Together with Late Journals (2022), the two volumes span half a century of her life—from 1970, predating her first poetry chapbook The Alien (1973), and ending in 2020, after the publication of Fragments (2016), her last collection.
And what is the ephemera Kefala gathers, records, and keeps? It’s past midnight, and the moon hangs ‘like half a slice of orange, sharply cut’ (Late Journals). Or it’s time to go to the grocers, where, Kefala writes, ‘they kept telling me that the WAR had started.’ (Late Journals) And despite the stark observation of a friend’s recent death, still, she insists, ‘On Monday […] we will go back to the everyday.’ (Sydney Journals) These textual ephemera accrue, in Kefala’s case, not to a self-evidential portrait of how one spends the ordained hours of the day as such, as the monthly entries of her journals might first indicate. If any kind of portrait of Kefala arises, it’s of a self in intimate witness to the real, actively attenuating to one’s scalar relationship to history and landscape. ‘Events always surpass our imagination,’ she writes (Late Journals). For Kefala, events that exceed the imagination include those events that are otherwise unremarked on and looked over, because of their ordinary beauty, or perhaps their unexceptional violence. Kefala’s acts of witnessing, then, is a call to be them directly, to attest to how such events meet with her quotidian. What exceeds imagination can be more surmountable when expressing it with the language of most direct and plainest means, of taking it on through the measure and scale of our everyday.
To write this everyday is as much a practice of duration, of staying in a temporality of perpetual waiting: ‘Waiting for this living to happen to discover inwardly one’s writing’ (Late Journals). Yes, life is always beginning and its living is well underway. Yet the delay between life and writing can be a long distance, and the transformation of one to the other a ‘slow development,’ Kefala notes, ‘coloured by events, experiences.’ (Late Journals). To wait as Kefala does suggests a waiting for memory to catch up to the present, the writing of events and experiences always mediated by one’s memory of them. Or rather, are we waiting for the present to recede into memory?
Time, as if no longer continuous, as if it had totally stopped…
[…]
Suddenly realising that one can feel outside time…
(Late Journals)
Perhaps, in waiting, Kefala points towards a general feeling of being ‘outside time’ altogether. Waiting, time stopped, time no longer continuous, yet one must go on living in the present, even if that present is set against a ‘shrinking of the future’ (Sydney Journals) and a background of ‘material unease’ (Late Journals). Such examples demonstrate the ambivalent temporal drift underlining Kefala’s journals: to be both outside time—an affective, imaginative space—and in its actual flow. ‘Time had passed over our faces leaving a fine print’ (Late Journals) she writes. And while the body always outwardly bears the trace of time passing, what remains relentlessly outside time, resistant to its encroachment, Kefala implies, are the objects in which time—as it is lived—is recorded and kept. Objects akin to the journal, the family album, letters, papers; these make their own ‘periphery of existence’, which, ‘when we go […] will remain in the house, still here, unaware of our passing.’ (Sydney Journals).
Now the time of the scene has changed: Kefala’s journals are laid in front of me on my desk, and it is not Kefala’s experience of writing, but my encounter with the object of her writing that is made bare. Just as Kefala realises one can feel ‘outside time,’ this same feeling is also mapped onto my own encounter with her journals, enlarged by the knowledge of their capture of moments already passed. In this way, to read a journal is not unlike looking at a photograph: in reading one or looking at the other, there is a similar kind of dissonance and temporal arrhythmia through the confrontation with stilled life, with that which has been. A person’s emanation of ‘vitality […] an explosiveness of silent energy […] can only be hinted at in a photo,’ Kefala says (Late Journals). Reading her journals, I cannot help but fall into a similar reverie.
Any kind of translation from experience to textual or visual language alike mediates absence, a loss in its process. ‘Writing – constantly trying to recapture the living element at the beginning of the experience, an elusive element’ (Sydney Journals). Kefala reminds us that it is with, and in spite of, the undergird of loss that we turn to language, for—to paraphrase her invocation of Paul Celan—it is the one thing that remains reachable, close, and secure amidst all that escapes. In my own looking at Kefala’s photographs and my reading of her journals, I recognise a mourning for the fantasy of ‘vitality’, the temptation to hunt for what cannot be translated, a language in bind to an aperture of loss. Kefala fathoms the crossings from one moment in time in relation to another, the disjunctures that occur in language between those moments and their recaptures, all the while bridging those jumps and bringing us with her. The evergreen secret of what has been transformed and lost in those crossings of language and time—(she’s hinting; I’m hunting)—this is what I contemplate on the page as it lands on my particular side.
II. The quote unquoted
I’ll hint on my own jump now into the middle—as in, what is meddling in the space between the quote and the unquote? What spills over? The self is contained and spilling over. The quote likes to spill over its punctuation too. I watch Agnès Varda’sdocumentary The Gleaners and I one evening, because Kefala watches it on page eight of Late Journals, and I want to see what she’s seeing. (‘To glean is to gather after the harvest. A gleaner is one who gleans. In times past only women gleaned.’ These lines open the film.) Watching it, one discovers that gleaning is not only what is documented on screen but what Varda also performs as a filmmaker, stitching together a moving tapestry of images, ideas, and words from painting, cinema, and her life, mirroring the gleaner’s picking up of, say, oranges or potatoes. Gleaning animates Kefala’s journals too. What is gleaned are tiny accidents chanced upon in the ‘everyday miraculous’ (Sydney Journals) as much as they are deliberate exercises of gathering and accumulation. We encounter voices of writers, artists, composers, friends; words from films, documentaries, interviews, books; things heard on the radio; once, a scribble on a bus seat (‘I love Irfan’); among numerous other things. If the page, like memory, starts as an empty theatre, these things fill its seats, indicative of the real and imagined company Kefala keeps. In parsing our eye down the journal’s page, we are invited to meander through her social milieu, as if overhearing snippets of someone speaking, until another juts in. The page, by this logic, becomes a dramaturgical space organised by travel and connection. What is at work is a sense of relational call-and-response, insofar as such voices, when interspersed with fragments of Kefala’s observations and commentaries, can be prismatic in what they relay. We are solicited to follow the relays between various voices not only within the page at hand but their outwards oscillations beyond the text, to the glimpsed traces of Kefala’s social world. What Kefala ultimately puts on the page then veers from any sense of arrival at closure, preferencing the possibilities of ambiguous relation, giving much work for us, as readers, to follow such possibilities.
Read the full piece here.
Works cited
✷ 1. I take the idea of the ‘souvenir’ from Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1993).
✷ 2. Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 45.
✷ 3. Philippe Lejeune, ‘How Do Diaries End?’, trans. by Victoria A. Lodewick, Biography, 24.1 (2001), 99–112 (p. 100).