Did it really happen? Memory, history and myth in Eugenia Tsoulis´ Between the ceiling and the sky

• Autores: Catalina Ribas Segura
• Localización: Coolabah, ISSN-e 1988-5946, Nº. 3, 2009 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Perspectives: Myth, History and Memory), págs. 10-16
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • World War II, the Nazi occupation and several dictatorships forced many Greek men and women into migration. In 1952 Greece signed an agreement on assisted migration to Australia and more than “250 000 Greek and Cypriot migrants from Greece (1952-74), Rumania (1952-8), Egypt and the Middle East (1952-2) [sic], Cyprus (1974-84) and other politically turbulent countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America” moved to Australia (Tamis, Anastasios M. The Greeks in Australia, 2005: 47). The lives of those migrants changed radically as they left home behind. Some of them, or their children, wrote fictional texts explaining some of their experiences. An example of this is Eugenia Tsoulis´ Behind the Ceiling and the Sky (1998), where the main characters live their lives between present and past and between memories and myths, on the one hand, and facts and the lifeworld that surround them, on the other. This paper will analyse this novel and the sometimes blurred boundaries between memory, history and myth.