Teachings of my grandmothers
March 20, 2010 , Sydney Morning Herald
A young Christos Tsiolkas learnt more than he realised from a shared family meal.

I never really knew my grandparents. Both my grandfathers died in Greece before I ever visited there, and I met my grandmothers only twice in my life, once when I visited as a boy in 1975, and then again as a young adult in 1990. For many of us, migration and distance has shaped the nature of our families and the cultures we believe we belong to. The stories I have of my grandparents' lives are second-hand, filtered through the memories, longings and secrets of my parents.

I am grateful that I did have an opportunity to meet my grandmothers. They both shared the same name, Spiridoula. But even those encounters were made difficult by the limitations of my Greek and the overwhelming chasm of experience that separated myself, a privileged child of the First World, and those two women, each born on the eve of the 20th century, in a peasant Eastern Mediterranean world that was to be torn apart by two Balkan wars, two world wars, an occupation, two dictatorships, a civil war. I remember sitting in a kitchen in Athens with my maternal grandmother, and she crying, wanting to know why her daughter had only visited her once in all the time she had been a migrant in Australia. I tried to explain the distances involved, the expense. My uncle Mitso, who was sitting with us, took me aside and explained that once in the early '70s he was driving his mother from the village to Athens when they came to a fork in the road. My giagia asked, ''Mitso, if we turn left instead of right, can we go and visit Georgia in Australia?'' You have to remember, Christo, my Uncle said to me, this is a woman born in a time when women were doomed to illiteracy and the shadows. Your giagia can't even read a map. And look at you, you are now a university student, you want to be a writer. You don't know how proud that makes us. But if you ever forget where you come from, fa se sfaxo, I will slaughter you.

I want to share with you a moment with this grandmother. Not anything she said but something she showed me. I was a 10-year-old in the village, visiting from Melbourne, and my grandmother took me to the chicken coop to get a bird to prepare for dinner. She pointed to the one of the chooks and said, Go, catch it and kill it. Now I was an inner-city Australian child and poultry and meat was something I believed just magically appeared on butcher's slabs and supermarket shelves. My giagia pointed to the bird and I shook my head. No, I insisted, I can't do it. She was appalled. What do you mean, she said, you are nearly a man and you don't know how to kill a chicken? What has your mother been teaching you? She adjusted her headscarf, hitched up her heavy black mourning skirt, chased after the chicken and brought it to me. Now, she ordered, wring its neck. I started to weep.
The full story at SMH.