A World Bent Toward Degradation

Ricardo Jaramillo reviews Phoebe Giannisi’s collection “Chimera,” translated by Brian Sneeden.

By Ricardo Frasso JaramilloNovember 13, 2024

• Poetry

“POETRY IS NOT made of words,” wrote the American poet Linda Gregg some 18 years ago. It is the first line of “The Presence in Absence,” a short poem marred by loss and fantasy, wherein a speaker longs to be someplace she is not, and in company she can—perhaps—no longer keep. In the aftermath of Gregg’s provocation (her words), one’s sense of poetry itself is wont to tilt. The poetic, corralled in language, begins elsewhere, is composed by other materials. As I read celebrated Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi’s new collection, Chimera, I was reminded of Gregg’s totalizing and paradoxical assertion. Chimera is a book made of so much else besides words: goatskin, myth, pasture, time, dream, stone, history, to name a few; rumination, transit, touch, captivity, to name some others. And, perhaps most essentially, as Giannisi herself puts it, “the cursive of animals and humans.” With this in mind, Giannisi’s most relentless subject, it should come as no surprise, really, that her text is not made of words. We employ language to decipher the nonhuman, but almost never to regard the nonhuman. If we dare to set foot on the border between our species and another, we do so in a wordless and symbol-less dark.

Giannisi’s Chimera—her third book to arrive to English readers, each via Brian Sneeden’s translation—is a book-length account of the Vlach people, a pastoralist, nomadic, stateless ethnic minority who reside in Northern Greece and the Balkan states. It is, in a sense, a “documentary” book, scaffolded by three years of fieldwork and rigorous archival research. It is a lyric book, a book that wills to stray from itself, driven by music over sense. Most of all, it is a polyphonic book, a compilation of 53 disparate “voices” who collaboratively meditate on the Vlachs’ goat-herding practices across time. While Giannisi introduces us to these voices sporadically in her pages, they are all listed alphabetically at the back of the collection, in a notes section: philosophers, biologists, grandmothers, mythic figures, art historians, nameless train passengers, and the “voice” of the general state archive, among several others. It is not a chorus, really, or even a set of characters. It is an amalgamation: Homer and Donna Haraway, a Cyclops, a Cretan folklorist, and a figure called the “Goatself,” one of our most frequent interlocutors, which in the author’s view “signifies a multitude of beings that live in this place and share the speaker’s voice.” Not to mention the final credited voice, the only one lacking any accompanying context or definition in the ordered list: you.

There is no better title for this book, no more fitting name, than Chimera. Before beginning her poems, Giannisi supplies us with a few of the term’s many definitions, including “young female goat”; “legendary fire-breathing creature with the body of a she-goat, the head of a lion, and the tail of a dragon”; and “a metonym for a fantastical creature, a vain daydream, an unfulfilled desire, a utopia, a self-deception.” Giannisi’s book is, as the title suggests, itself chimeric, a body of poetry assembled from various texts and epistemic forums, a strange collaboration of rhetorics, a many-limbed beast. It is as much a work of curation as creation; much of the language is scavenged, rather than molded by the poet herself. I will admit, at times this made the book unsatisfying to read. I wanted a speaker. I wanted a voice, a color of language, one discernible aesthetic sense. But I questioned myself: is this readerly desire—the source of my discontent—an American one, or perhaps even a “Western” one, some offshoot of a more oblique valorization of the individual self?

It’s hard to say. In any case, I moved through many pages of Giannisi’s text without loving them. I also feel that the book is valiant, and valiantly itself, and severely brilliant at its best. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” Haraway writes in the 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which Giannisi and Sneeden quote in a translated variation at the book’s outset. Haraway’s observation assuages my misgivings about my own bifurcated feelings on the text. It is only inevitable that a chimeric book, read by a chimeric reader, would provoke a chimeric response.

Self and other. Self and world. These are the very designations that decompose in the glare of Giannisi’s lines. A speaker—the Goatself—transports a shepherding dog from its rural home to her life in the city. Delirium ensues. The dog, severed from his terrain and its accompanying subject positions, stirs up incongruous emotions in the speaker—affection and aggression in tandem. The speaker understands: “I am both / the shepherd that feeds it / and the goat / it must guard.” Such misreadings between selves abound—relations rife with a confounding blend of care and captivity. The Cyclops fondly strokes the back of its human prisoner. A mother holds her son in a bath of immortality, never knowing that “the place of the mother’s grip / is the mark of death.” Goats destroy open fields with their hunger—in many cases, a necessary and useful clearing away. But while power shadows all these encounters, it never eclipses their essential relationality: “[W]hat the goat inflicts on the holly shrub will be told on the goat’s skin.” In the calamity of contact, no figure—once pristine—leaves without markings.

At the Mexican university where I taught last year, I forced my students to make presentations about a beautiful English word, any word of their choosing. One student selected “wanderlust,” meticulously sketching the word on a melting heart, which he presented to the class. The opposite of wanderlust, he told us, is homesickness. I was surprised to learn the opposite of wanderlust, but after just a moment, it made sense: the longing for new terrains and the sickness provoked by the lack of familiar ones stand in opposition. My student’s characterization aided me in reading Chimera, which is—by many accounts—a book about motion. “[W]e Vlachs are like birds,” one shepherd tells us: “come March and April and we’re gone / mountainward.” A Vlach proverb says: “Bag on the shoulder and go.” Movement is not only this text’s subject but also its ethic; the poems never stop long enough to rest, propelled by an intellectual wanderlust. One can hear the murmurs of Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s chimeric novel Flights (2007) in the background: “[A] thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest.”

It is notable, then, that the speaker stands at a distance from the chronic wanderlust she documents in the Vlach people. “[I]t takes time to uproot from one’s place,” our ostensible speaker tells us, in a poem that serves as a brief personal departure from the collection’s broader anthropological aims. “[I]t takes time,” she clarifies, “to leave a life’s worth of wrappers.” This is a rare moment in the book where the author lets us glimpse the chasm between her own life (an Athens-born professor of architecture) and the lives of the community she strives to document. Perhaps to the book’s detriment, Giannisi wishes to be our tour guide—a machine of observation, a personal and lyric one, but one who herself remains at a safe remove from the designating terms of culture, geography, and power.

“A human life: if someone kept a diary from the day they’re born till the last day, it would say, I lived. How could you argue with that? You couldn’t say oh they lived like this, or had this specific life. No. It’s bigger than that.” These are the words of Uncle Yannis, one of the 53 voices in the book, a 70-year-old goat herder from the town of Aetomilitsa. Perhaps it is his aphorism that—from among the book’s several gorgeous moments—I’ll keep with me the most: we live unspecific lives. Lives that, with their movements, their violences, their harvests, fall in line, not requiring, in the end, any real characterization. “It’s bigger than that,” Yannis reminds us. He speaks, I think, about a life whose furthest purpose is to be lived, a life that absconds qualitative record. A life not made of words.

If the book expresses a morality of any kind, it is certainly the fraught sense of dominion we possess over the animals in our lives:

the division of everything as it corresponds to human needs.
the division of time as it corresponds.
the division of space time work utility
as it corresponds to their needs.
factory or labor camp.

It is a worthy moral examination, performed by Giannisi to great effect and with great care. In the center of Giannisi’s poetic frame, one encounters a serious and glimmering inquiry into the human-animal relationship. And yet I’m moved most of all by the stray moments of this book, the happenings at the frame’s margin, the book’s momentary lapses into confession, philosophy, and phantasmagoria. By all of Giannisi’s lyric shrapnel. “What do you carry on you when you leave?” one nameless speaker poses to another, in a scene without much context or orientation. “My dark. My own piece of dark,” the second voice returns. At the close of another poem: “[Y]ou can only follow a dream so far.” It is by the grace of these departures, I think, that the book achieves its true figure, its true state of chimera. This book, at its best: a many-mouthed poetic speaker with a wild imaginative sense. And, behind her, always looming: the world, which is an agent, never simply backdrop or canvas. A world bent toward degradation, a world that will always—no matter how large or various the herd of speakers—have the last say: “[T]imeweather tears apart what humans animals weave.”