Australian sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis’s latest book, ‘John Berger and Me’, revolves around the author—then a PhD student in Cambridge—spending time with his lodestar, the late John Berger in the 1990s. Berger was a globally renowned English thinker, novelist, academic, and art critic. His most influential book Ways of Seeing transformed how people interpret art, society, and power structures.

However, this is not an academic book, but it might be Papastergiadis’s most important book, and he has written many scholarly books.

“Each of those books was a torture; each chapter has probably been drafted 15 to 20 times and rehearsed in various conferences or lectures.”

Papastergiadis says it is the “easiest book” he’s ever written in his life.

“It is also the book that was waiting to be written longer than any other book, so there’s a backstory there.”

Writing for a new life

The book spans a decade of summers in the 1990s when Papastergiadis stayed at Berger’s family home in Alpine France, helping with the harvest, and embracing village life. Papastergiadis in the 1990s rode his motorbike into the remote French Alpine village of Haute-Savoie, in Quincy where Berger had ensconced himself. The young Papastergiadis worked with Berger on his farm evoking the peasant memories of his own parents.

Papastergiadis’s father and mother left a blood-soaked rural Greece – German occupation and then Greek Civil War – like hundreds of thousands of others, to work in Australia’s factories. Unlike Berger, they did not seek adventure, or enact “rugged individualism,” which Papastergiadis anoints him with. They left for survival and hope.

The Berger book began after Papastergiadis was invited to lecture at the Greek Community of Melbourne on Berger. COVID-19 hit, and he had no access to his university’s library,

“My materials were in my office in Carlton [University of Melbourne], and that was outside my five-kilometre radius.”

“I had lots of memories, and stories that I told at dinner parties about John [Berger], and I thought, ‘Why don’t I just try and write a little lecture based on memory and given that it’s COVID times, I’ll probably get away with a little bit of slack.'”

He set out every morning on his “day bed” in his home office and, for “15 or 20 minutes,” would note down whatever came to his head “with just pen and paper.”

“It was calm and surprising, because just as I was writing something about John and recalling a particular memory or heightened experience, associations would arise of my father or my mother, or my childhood, and I just let them out.”

These “associations” of his mother and father are Papastergiadis’s most significant narratives. However important the validation was from Berger, or intellectual engagement, it is Papastergiadis’s parents, family, clan, and peers—his life as the child of migrants—that resonates most in the book.

He evokes memories we all share like when he writes about his uncles dancing ‘with a cigarette dangling from their lips.’

This is deft long-form journalism, possibly equal to the work of Helen Garner or Kate Jennings. Papastergiadis inadvertently also captures the conflict between academia and journalism in the book when he talks about writing for a newspaper and the awareness of the fact that “you have so many inches.”

‘The elegance that you talk about, if there is any elegance, comes from the need to seize that space and arrange it exactly like you arrange furniture in a room,’ Papastergiadis writes.

The parallels to our collective stories, as children of post-immigrants in Australia, are haunting, poetic, funny, heart-wrenching, and at times, acerbic.

Migrant struggles shape paths

Berger’s ‘sight of the migrant struggling in the city and the hope of renewal’ was ‘tinged with the pathos of the loss of traditional life, writes Papastergiadis, then immediately cuts away at that fantasy by saying ‘Greeks found the road to freedom through the countryside’ in 1821, not through the only the romanticised ideals of European Enlightenment.

Berger’s disdain for the ‘New World’—for America and Australia—sits in sharp contrast to a young Papastergiadis, who embodied the ‘success’ of the migrant story. Success is not easily found among the Gastarbeiters, the guest workers of Europe, in Berger’s book The Seventh Man. Yet, a success was found in the suburb of Queens in New York City, or Oakleigh in Melbourne.

But when reading the ‘Seventh Man’ in Greek, Papastergiadis’s mother noted how close her life was to that of those guest workers. ‘How did he know our lives?’ his mother asked. The book is so close to her experience, ‘It was like he was riding on my shoulder and lived in my head!’

Papastergiadis’s father—like many migrant parents—worked in a “factory and drove a taxi for 20 years”.

One day a passenger, “a professor,” asked him, “What do your children do? and his father replied, “One is a lawyer and the other one is a professor.”

The passenger, disbelieving, asked, “How did you do that?” to which Papastergiadis’s father said, “What do you mean? What’s wrong with me?”

Papastergiadis says when his father told him that story, he felt “enormous pity for the compressed intellectual lives these factory workers had.”

“The fact that here was someone who had left a village with an incredibly complex knowledge system—when to plant, how to look after animals, how to mend clothes, how to fix a roof—skills that were often dismissed.”

Berger’s relationship began to drift when Papastergiadis decided to go back home, to Australia.

“John found Australia incomprehensible, he saw it as a British colony, he was very Eurocentric, so when I decided to move back to Australia, he couldn’t get his head around it.

“He didn’t cut me out, it wasn’t melodramatic, but there was a sense of confusion, so, while I would see him in either in Paris or in the village, there wasn’t, always things to do, like bring in the hay or you know or help around the house, when your friendship and your time is connected with some kind of activity, there’s a sort of deeper bonding that occurs,” he says.

Philosophy, politics, and dividing identities

Papastergiadis the deconstructionist and postmodernist has rediscovered classical philosophy, and it is laced in the book. He says he wants to be distinguish between the “attitude and values systems” that are embedded in Foucault and Derrida and the “poor interpretation of their work and the way it was transmitted.”

“The attitude that Greek philosophy is that of ‘dead white men’ had a scarring effect on our generation, it has mutilated, and stunted intellectual growth.

The thinker is not suggesting “we need to go back to this reverential the Greek side, nor did they get it perfect”.

“Greek philosophers did express things clearly, and what they did say, or what is left of what they’ve said, is profound, and worthy of close study,” he adds.

Papastergiadis is now more cynical about institutions, as was his mentor Berger, particularly those of Anglosphere academia – where he first sought power or influence.

“The reality is that institutional life, be it the universities, bureaucracy, or church here, have an Anglo hierarchy, and now, they’re not even proud of that.

“They are sneakily reinforcing that Anglo hierarchy indirectly by stripping other minorities of any cultural authority, by extolling the virtue of Indigenous culture, which they are happy to talk about as symbolic gratitude, yet when it comes to material and substantive transformation, I see very little of that.”

He says what is occurring now a “tragedy” and rather than seeing a “broader alliance of differences”, there is an active division of differences.

“It’s not just Indigenous and settler colonial society here, that’s an obscene distortion of history that feeds into polarization.

“A great spectrum of differences has been pushed out so that the Anglo privileged deflect away, and cut out intermediaries, thus they preserve their authority by highlighting a symbolic value that they are directing to Indigenous culture, without feeling any risk.

“They are cleaving out the Jews, the Italians, or Greeks, who are sizable and have been successful and have organised themselves, with a foot in the door, so just at that point when there is a risk that there will be a different voice in the room, and new allies, those voices have been shunted out of the equation,” Papastergiadis says.

Lonely eternal peasants

In some ways, Papastergiadis is that ‘different voice’, everywhere, in academia, and in the French Alpine village of Haute-Savoie where Berger was paying penance for his privilege, by living like a French peasant. That difference becomes more marked when Papastergiadis pays homage to Louis, the village bachelor.

There is something deep, the author almost says, but doesn’t; that Louis is the real peasant, and he regardless of success, Papastergiadis is also a peasant, or closer to peasants than Berger.

The gentle treatment of Louis in the book, Louis the stoic peasant bachelor is a foil to the rugged bourgeoise individualism of Berger.

“We exchanged few words between each other Louis didn’t speak English, and my French was very limited, but he didn’t speak very much anyway, nor did John speak much to him – he would give three-word answers. But when he looked into my eyes always with incredible compassion and love.”

At first glance, what appears to be a dual biography and a homage to John Berger, a pivotal cultural thinker of the 20th century, is a deep mnemonic reflection of Papastergiadis’s life and his parents past, from his grandmother’s expulsion in the bloody ethnic cleansing by the Ottomans in Asia Minor, to his parents’ back-breaking work as migrants and how migration almost is a Sisyphean bolder for Papastergiadis’s shoulders to be rolled up and down– for all migrants and forever.

This masterfully written work, about a young intellectual, infused with passion, admiration, and, in the end, love might herald the evolution of one of our most important public intellectuals into a great writer, or longform journalist.

Here is video by Tilda Swinton on John Berger The Seasons in Quincy: