Katerina I. Papantoniou was born in Athens, where she lives and works as a lawyer. She studied at the Law School of the Democritus University of Thrace and at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Since 2010, her short stories have been published in newspapers and magazines. She is the author of the novellas Dark Elevator (Topos, 2016) and You Won’t Be There (Topos, 2019), and has contributed to the collective volumes Her Voice (Kastaniotis Editions, 2023), Murder (a Polish anthology of Greek crime fiction, 2022), Foreign Body (2021), Athens Tomorrow (2018), Everything Is Chaos (2014), and Bonsai Stories (2011). She is a founding member of the Women Writers’ Network against Gender-Based Violence and Femicides, “Her Voice.”
Your latest writing venture Συνθετική ορμόνη [Synthetic hormone] was recently published by Kastaniotis. Tell us a few things about the book.
Synthetic Hormone is an existential novel in twenty-two episodes with the mindful body as protagonist. An eight-year-old touches her body, she’s told “you are a girl,” she grows up, the adolescent chest carries within it the woman she will become, the mother but also the grandmother, she grows up more and narrate old-fashioned stories under a walnut tree, fall in love in supermarkets, shores, bars and fakir baskets. Even though movement is forbidden, she jumps from the balcony in the night to take walks and then writes diaries of confinement, mourning and dreams, flooded with waters and lovers.
The heroine is not one, nor is she static; she is an identity in constant transition, a body that desires, survives, records, erases, remembers and sometimes tries to forget. On the eve of Soul Saturday she kneads koliva (memorial food) and fights with her mother’s ghost about the selling prices of her furniture. Finally, with a red light in hand, she plunges into the body, into time, into the city and into language.
The book renegotiates the politics of embodied experience, lived gender-based violence, and trauma, and, by extension, the politics of female desire and memory, of expression and of writing itself. Which are the main themes your writings delve into? Are there recurrent points of reference in your literary work?
I was writing Synthetic Hormone with the sole thought of having the narrator speak as a whole, as a mindful body, when gets scraped while playing, when one day you’re told “you are a girl,” when the genderless body develops breasts, how you feel when your body, that is you, your entire existence is threatened by the other or by an illness, how much you remember your grandmother’s caresses, a lover’s, an orgasm. I was writing consciously about the liberation of expression and of writing itself.
I wasn’t writing with awareness of gender-based violence, and trauma, and, by extension, the politics of female desire and memory. But writing has multiple levels, obviously it plunges autonomously and digs not only into the subconscious but also the unconscious. So, it appears that “Synthetic Hormone” delves into our body which constitutes an archive of memory and feelings of the war that is waged daily upon the female and feminine body.
In all three of my books, Synthetic Hormone, You Won’t Be There (Δεν θα είσαι εκεί), Dark Elevator (Σκοτεινό ασανσέρ), the embodied experience of violence within/in all relationships—political, social, familial—are my recurrent points of reference.
What about language? What role does language play in your writings?
I write for language. I am in love with language. The more it betrays me, the more it turns its back on me, the more I desire it. I am satisfied with its mismatched and countless possible pairings. I write to “play” with language, to test how far words can reach, punctuation marks, pauses, gaps, things that are not said. With all this I build a house to host the characters and let them improvise without forgetting that all characters are one, fragmented into many pieces.
How does literature converse with its surrounding reality? Could literature be used to imagine what could be radically different realities?
Literature, like every form of art, does not avert its gaze but listens to reality, society, the environment, justice and ultimately humanity in the post-human era and beyond humanity. We live in a given historical moment, in a world, in a country, in a specific economic and social system bearing witness to endless wars or merciless femicides.
Literature cannot change the world but may shift, expand the consciousness of both the writer and the reader with the hope of questioning the cannibalistic political system, liberating you and envisioning a utopian country, a just world, in which everything will be well with justice and equality, in which we will all be good.
You are a founding member of the network of women writers against gender-based violence and femicides, ‘Her Voice.’ Tell us a few things about the scope and initiatives pursued by the network.
“Her Voice” was created on the street, at protest gatherings in January 2022 for femicides, then for the Topalidou trial, with the purpose of opposing gender-based violence and femicides. We formed “Her Voice” to publicly proclaim our rage and our solidarity with girls, women, females who are abused, raped or even killed within the framework of patriarchy and we demand that the state recognize femicide as a particular crime and create institutions and structures of protection.
We are a self-organized group that tracks and denounces sexism in literature and in all relationships, personal, social, political. We participate in gatherings and protests in support of victims, we participate in the anti-racist festival, and in every event against war, sexism and discrimination. In May 2024 we published the collective volume “Her Voice” with stories by 53 of our members on the theme of gender-based violence. The book travelled throughout the country with events that gave us the opportunity to publicly discuss the horror of gender-based violence and femicides. Soon a second collective volume will be published titled “One Hundred and Twenty Voices,” with poems and short prose/flash-fiction by 120 of our members on the theme of gendered condition.
Would you say that women’s writing constitutes a form of resistance to silencing? What about the political potential of gender in literature?
How can you separate the personal from the political taking into account that gender and social order are constructed, defined, used in every way to support and reproduce the given unjust economic and social system that permeates all of society through patriarchy? Women’s writing overturns the certainties of the patriarchal world and challenges the authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist movements that are rising globally, abolishing public goods, fundamental rights, identity and gender policies, even withdrawing “disturbing” books.
*Interview by Athina Rossoglou
INTRO PHOTO © Olga Bacopoulou
TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE
