There are few things worse than being the token Greek at a Lebanese wedding, especially one where the guests, having visited the Melbourne barakia in the nineties with their Greek friends, have developed a particular aesthetic when it comes to Greek music. After establishing some sort of mahala-cred upon executing an unelaborate but eminently passable dabke and feigning complete ease at the fact that the Lebanese dances revolve around themselves clockwise, rather than the proper Greek anti-clockwise direction, the whole thing comes unstuck when the sounds of a zeimbekiko begin to blast through the decibel defying speakers.
“You are Greek. Get up and dance,” the groom (and my erstwhile friend) crows.
“Come on Greece!” the best man begins to gyrate, improvising his own moves while pushing me onto the dance floor. “Show us how it’s done uleh!”
I am trying to express the conviction that Mitropanos’ song “Roza,” is a homage to German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg who was sadly cut down in her prime and thus possibly not the best choice for a song at a wedding. To the Master of Ceremonies who is waving a microphone directly in front of my mouth and demanding that I sing the lyrics, I attempt to explain Rosa’s belief that socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism, but all he does is bring the microphone closer and closer like a demented ice-cream.
Thankfully my ordeal is over when Fadi my Mitropano-loving friend from Zahle grabs the microphone from the MC’s hand, pushes me off the dance floor and begins to croon:
– Ταχίνι μου στεγανά και ντιπ σασμένα…
“What kind of a Greek are you?” one of the bridesmaids look at me scornfully. “Even Greek we Lebos do better!” her partner exclaims jubilantly.
Pasiphae, aunt of Medea and queen of Crete, punished King Minos for his infidelity, considered the ultimate insult, by causing him via a curse to ejaculate serpents, scorpions, and centipedes, thus killing any unlawful concubine. I find myself thinking of Paisphae, not because I am minded to wish such an excruciating fate upon my interlocutors but rather because like her, I consider them at that moment to be full of bull.
The revellers have quite forgotten me by now. Instead their attention has been captured by a Maltese work-friends who, having imbibed significant amounts of the Johnnie Walker Greek label ostentatiously placed upon the table, is on the dance floor, having a lovely time. Sensing her heightened amounts of jubilation and the fact she is unaccompanied by a partner, sundry male guests move in, as a pack, with the alpha among their number, dancing suggestively in her immediate vicinity and miming movements that hint at him guiding her into various attitudes. She being fulsome in stature, one of the guests sidles up to me and laughs, “It’s like steering a ship into harbour.”
I comment that the word govern, comes via the Latin gubernare, from the Greek κυβερνᾶν, that is to steer. Aeschylus for example describes a ruler as «ἐν πρύμνηι πόλεως οἴακα νωνῶν» that is, plying the tiller at the ship’s stern. Just how good a helmsman our chief steerer is, however, is a matter for the Parliamentary Steering Committee. There are a number of entendres there of a single or duplicate nature but I am too tired to count and all I receive in response is a quote I instantaneously identity as belonging to Sir Mixalot: “Baby got back.”
Encouraged, I proceed to tell him about Sophia of Montferrat, imported to Byzantium by the Emperor Manuel II to be the wife of his son John. According to the chronicler Doukas: “The young woman was extremely well-proportioned in body. Her neck was shapely, her hair blondish with braids flowing down to her ankles like glimmering golden streams. Her shoulders were broad and her arms, bosom, and hands well proportioned. Her fingers were transparent. She was tall in stature and stood very straight — but her face and lips and the malformation of her nose and eyes and eyebrows presented a most revolting composition. In general, she may be described in the words of the vulgar adage: “Lent from the front and Easter from behind.”
“I’m actually Muslim,” he reveals, prompted by the punchline.
Oblivious to his lack of engagement, I regale him with the tale of the time that Greek revolutionary Andreas Lontos fell head over heels in love with Italian prima donna, Rita Basso. The Father of the Revolution Theodoros Kolokotronis among others was scandalised by the revealing, figure-hugging nature of her clothing, prompting him to exclaim in wonderment:
“I saw something I had never seen in all my years. Up until now I knew that women bulge at the front, in Athens I learned that they bulge at the rear.”
The Maltese work-friend has managed to extricate herself from the clutches of a bawdy dance partner and appears tired and emotional. I cast my eye arοund for a drink. There is no wine on the table, the beverages on offer all being of a spirit nature. Considering the coupling of Scotch and Bourbon as an uncouth pleonasm, the only other choice is vodka, a particularly virulent concoction, that manifestly has been brewed during the Russian Potato Blight of 1846. The weather is unseasonably hot and as I am thirsty, I begin to chortle quietly to myself as I devise a hitherto Greek hero who, while on a pub crawl in Russia has too much vodka and stumbles across the border into Moldavia, inadvertently sparking off the 1821 Greek Revolution: Tipsylantis.
There is much banging of drum now and a good deal of jiggling of various body parts. I part through the testosterone-filled dance floor as a veritable Moses (sotto voce as he is not too popular at the moment among the revellers) parting the Red Sea, telling myself that all I have to do is to put one foot after the other in order to make a bee-line for the conveniences. After all, the Greek word for sheep «πρόβατο» literally means “that which walks forwards.” Upon reaching my destination, I gaze up at the harsh, unrelenting glow of the light fixture and apply myself to the task at hand with all the powers of concentration I can summon, channelling the archaic bard Hesiod: «μηδ’ ἄντ’ ἠελίου τετραμμένος ὄρθὸς ὀμείχειν». “And do not urinate upright facing the sun.”
“I love you man,” my Muslim friend from earlier gushes and enfolds me in an embrace that I would have appreciated slightly more had he first placed his hands under the Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer.
“Straight talk now. Let’s call a spade a spade. Who is more better, more sexier than the Lebos and the Greeks?” he whoops, grabbing my posterior by way of punctuating his point.
The poet Yiannis Ritsos was wont to seek to call a fig, a fig and a kneading trough, a kneading trough (έτσι, να λέμε πια τα σύκα-σύκα και τη σκάφη-σκάφη) but did not the great philhellene Oscar Wilde confess: “I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”?
My mind is too stepped in bad alcohol to be in a position to appreciate the full parameters of the question. If I was compelled to describe my psychological disposition, it would be mantipolar, «μαντιπόλος» ie. frenzied or inspired, this being the term used in the epic of Saint Cyprian to describe his mental state during his sojourn in Phrygia. I determine then to resort to «Ὁμηρίζειν» that is to Homerize, which in ancient Greek, meant to lie. Apparently, Aristotle made the extraordinary claim that Homer “taught other poets the proper way to lie.”
“Brother, there are three types of people in this world,” I slur finally. “Those who are Lebos, those who thank God… hang, how does it go? Those who are, those who aren’t and…
“What’s the third type bro?” he asks, his eyes wide with anticipation as my hands unconsciously create a protective cocoon around my parts privy.
“I don’t know,” I finally shrug. “I never think these things through.”
Feeling my way outside by clasping the wall, I make valiant attempts to make my way to my car. There is a shopping centre car park nearby, and some of the guests have obtained shopping trolleys in which they are entrenched and engaged upon an environmentally friendly form of drag race. In between dodging the speeding projectiles and attempting to find my own, I finally make it home, unable to explain why my head feels as if it has had a shisha bar land on it. The last thing I remember is launching into an exposition about Greco-Lebanese brotherhood with a tattoed trolley-dolly and trying to explain to him that the ancient Greeks placed a coin in their dead loved one’s mouths, in order to enable them to obtain a shopping trolley in the afterlife. Haron, if not Haroun, is always waiting.
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