“You have no idea what Cavafy meant to me when I was 11 years old”

I BELIEVE IN STRAIGHT LINES, in moving in all directions simultaneously, as John Coltrane once professed. I wish to share a story about a cork and a ribbon from my personal archive.

Once, I fell in love. It was a profound, all-consuming love, the most divine and vulnerable experience I’ve ever had. The cork and ribbon in my collection are from a bottle of wine shared with this love on a singular night. We had been in love for many years before that night, and the ribbon was woven into her hair.

There is no note in my record, for she was not destined to be my lover, nor I hers. I have never revealed who this woman was, and I never will. Yet, for me, this story is intertwined with T.S. Eliot and the discourse about how seemingly ordinary objects can be imbued with profound meaning.

I admire T.S. Eliot. He was a difficult man, and that’s acceptable. I believe that’s true for all of us. I don’t subscribe to the us/them dichotomy. I believe we are all deeply flawed, but also possess a profound capacity to touch the divine. This is what I try to convey to my students when they question my decision to teach E.M. Forster. My response is always: “Can you write like that?” I firmly believe in the importance of learning from the masters. We admire these individuals because they were the first to borrow from us, and now we reclaim what they took.

For a long time, I attended four funerals a week. I was working with AIDS patients in San Francisco. I can’t express how vital it was to witness the bravery of these individuals, inspired by poets like Cavafy…

I was deeply moved by this when we were invited by the Onassis Foundation to visit Greece. As I toured the museums, observing the archives and reflecting on the cultural artifacts I’ve seen that originated in Athens but now reside elsewhere, I felt a strong urge to “steal from thieves”. It’s crucial to repatriate these objects and stories to their rightful homes.

One of the many facets of Cavafy’s biography is his remarkable political and aesthetic courage, a fact we all acknowledge. How ahead of his time he was! I understand that Greeks may not perceive it in the same way, given that homoerotic poetry has been a part of your literary tradition for millennia. However, for us Americans, a relatively young nation, the significance of Cavafy to the queer community is immeasurable.

When I began posting about the Cavafy Festival on Instagram, the number of personal messages I received from black gay men was overwhelming. Black gay men, those who somehow survived… We shouldn’t be here. We survived AIDS.

Most of our generation has passed on, many with Cavafy’s books lining their shelves.

I firmly believe that one of the most significant tragedies of our nation is the suppression of intellectualism and the anti-intellectualist tradition we find ourselves steeped in. We have suppressed almost everything. We inhabit a country where oppression is as common as the wind, making it impossible to even fathom the existence of a man like Cavafy.

Not long ago, I had a conversation with a friend’s daughter, a young woman in her twenties. We were chatting one evening in Los Angeles, standing beside a car. One of us was on her period, another was nursing a stomach ache, and someone remarked, “Remember when there were no tampons?” My friend’s daughter responded with, “What do you mean? Haven’t there always been tampons?” We stared at her in disbelief, and she returned our looks with equal perplexity. We explained, “They believed you’d lose your virginity and become unmarriageable if you used tampons.” She stared back at us in utter astonishment.

This is a snapshot of the world I am attempting to paint for you. Visualize us reading Cavafy in this setting: as queer and black individuals, with people dying around us every day. There was a time when I attended four funerals every week. I worked with AIDS patients in San Francisco. The courage of these individuals, inspired by poets like Cavafy, was invaluable. Books like Cavafy’s were unheard of before 1960 – they were queer, can you believe it?

Such literature was absent from our educational curricula. I regret that my interpretation of Cavafy is so narrow. I agreed to participate in this festival primarily because it is taking place in the US. I wanted Americans, as much as possible, to witness this truly extraordinary, sublime archive and observe how it was digitized and made accessible to the world! If you haven’t yet explored the online archive, do yourself a favor. Nothing we discuss can compare to the archive itself.

Participating in this festival was crucial for me due to the narrative I’ve shared. I received numerous letters from black gay men and non-white queer individuals: ‘You cannot comprehend the significance of Cavafy in my life when I was 11 years old in 1968’, or ‘I was contemplating suicide, and then I discovered his poems’, or ‘I had run away from home… and then I found his poems’. It was profoundly moving.

However, who could have anticipated, when we agreed to this festival, that a year later our nation would still be burning books in a fit of rage and targeting trans and queer children? The atmosphere has drastically changed since we gave our consent to this project. Now there’s a heightened sense of urgency. Cavafy’s work has regained its relevance. It continues to grow in significance, time and again, and I hope it never ceases to be relevant.

I doubt it will.

I penned a lengthy poem for the festival, titled “The Archive of Desire,” as a reaction to Cavafy’s archive. One aspect of Cavafy that intrigues me, which we seldom discuss when reading Cavafy in America, is the palpable sense of diaspora his poems evoke. Here, we rarely perceive Greeks as diasporic, regrettably.

Many Americans don’t even know where Greece is on the map, let alone the existence of a Greek diaspora. Yet, you are dispersed worldwide, experiencing colonialism and immigration – a fact we remain oblivious to because our education about Greece, if any, was limited to Homer for the advanced classes, and a brief mention of a god named Zeus. This is because, then and now, in our country, there’s room for only one god, one religion.

Another aspect of the archive that profoundly impacted me was the recurring theme of diaspora and diasporic gestures in Cavafy’s archive and poetry. This is to say, Cavafy’s work instills in me a profound sense of blackness. When I was in Athens, I constantly thought, “Greece is so black.” By “black,” I mean diasporic, a sentiment that permeates Cavafy’s work.

So, I began to contemplate the relationship between diaspora and desire. I believe the two are inextricably linked. I can’t articulate their connection, except through desire. We yearn for a country as we yearn for a yellow vase.

We crave each other as we crave our home. Sometimes, the only home we have is another person’s body, a sentiment Cavafy captured eloquently. What intrigues me as a writer and a poet, what I strive to encapsulate when I write about desire – a topic I seldom delve into because it’s an enigma to me – is how, particularly in the US, we’ve been conditioned to suppress ourselves.

There’s a fascinating note in Cavafy’s archive that reads something like, “This poem can remain here in the archive, it can’t be published, but it doesn’t deserve to be suppressed.” This implies, “don’t publish it, but don’t discard it either.” It’s remarkable. When we encountered it in the archive, we were captivated by it for a long time.

But in the US, I feel that many of us do this to ourselves daily, especially with our desires. We don’t need the state to incinerate our books. We’re constantly burning books within ourselves. We burn our words. We burn our desires. Why do we need law enforcement when we police each other in bed?

This article was published in the print edition of LiFO.

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