Student Writer Inspired by Ancestral Corfu


This year, Noah Buhayer ’05 won the Ida May Haskell Prize for Creative Writing. His contribution was a work-in-progress entitled “Corfu.” Here, we have reprinted the first part of “Corfu” to accompany a Q & A with the writer.

CORFU

in Corfu, humidity quickens. my legs stick to the vinyl back-seat seating of my grandfather’s third hand Fiat, re-built. we drive. past marinas full of anchored, showpiece yachts, my great-grandmother’s cottage. i pretend to drink ouzo in her taverna, the smell of anise tickling the back of my throat. pausing, we spread lunch on the hood of the car and picnic by the sea.

i muse on my great-grandmother’s cottage, now dwarfed by a hotel. i guess, history never could keep up with the present, but neither could engineers—venetian architecture crumbling at my ankles, sometimes glued back together by pragmatic artists: when the sea festers, fishermen have to find work. decay and refurbishment and decay.

I wonder who owns the cracked stucco walls, who waters the oleander in the heat of summer. maybe in photographs, the long-since-deceased sit vibrantly on their patios remarking how sturdily their walls stand, how large the oleander will someday grow. i slip into their conversation, meditating in the latent afternoon warmth.

Back across the ocean, i sit expectantly on the floor of my grandfather’s Philadelphia apartment [philos – friend, to love (like a friend); adelphos – brother]. photographs litter the carpet. a shoebox full of slides redeems irredeemable places on a spartan, white projecting wall. so now, regardless of physical distance, i can curl up in the past and fall asleep between the waves.

TSL: Tell me about Greece.

Noah: I’m technically a first-generation American on my dad’s side. My grandparents are both Greek and from Greece. My grandfather grew up in England. When my father was five, his family moved to Greece, then England and Canada. They moved to the States when he was ten. When my grandparents retired, they moved to a Peleponese village. I grew up going to Greece during the summer, about every three years, so I have strong ties to my heritage.

TSL: How does Corfu figure in?

Noah: Corfu is my grandfather’s birthplace, and his mother died there in the 1980s, three years after I was born. At that point, a fifteen-year inheritance battle began between my grandfather and his first cousin. Since he did not have the money to pay a lawyer, my grandfather basically became an archivist for his family history, preparing documents and abstracts. During this time he sent letters to my father about the status of the case, so it was something I was always aware of.

When I was about twelve or thirteen I started to understand the significance of the case, and I began to read the letters to my father. When I was 17, during my most recent trip to Greece, my grandfather took me on a week-long trip to Corfu upon my request. I saw all the places associated with the case.

TSL: Was your interest in Corfu already an idea for a subject?

Noah: At first, going to Corfu was just to fulfill basic curiosity. At the very least, it was important to see it to recognize its importance in the past and in my heritage.

It also became a way to understand how my father and grandfather interacted. I already knew from an early age that the case was a very important matter in my grandfather’s life.

TSL: How did this become a subject for your writing?

Noah: At this point, I began to frame the events as a literary work-in-progress. I was most interested in the people, places and personalities involved in the whole situation, especially in the relationship between my grandfather and his mother. I also wanted to find information about her that was not mediated by his feelings. My interest in finding out more about who he is, though, was my point of departure. Ultimately, I hoped it would boil down to some notion of who I am.

TSL: What were some of the most interesting things you discovered?

Aside from what was most readily accessible, two finds blew me away. First, I found a gelatin print of my great-grandmother with her grandfather. It was the only photograph in my grandparents’ house of my great-grandmother as a child. it helped me to interpret the feelings my grandfather had for his mother. Without going into specifics, it was a tenuous relationship and always hard to figure out as it was colored by emotion.

Second, I found a box of keys that I’m assuming were to my great-grandmother’s cottage and its furniture. I was interested in this mostly because of the places it let my imagination go as far as what the keys could have locked up — things that have been emptied out by now but that at one time she may have hidden or kept from people. The fact that there were so many suggested some level of mystery to her personality.

TSL: Where do you see this work going creatively?

Noah: I haven’t yet focused on a particular genre. This work is narrative poetry, fiction, hisory, and archival work. I’m trying to put together in a lot of new ways the things I have discovered. I’m not 100 percent sure where the project is going. I’m still playing with modes of representation to accommodate the balance between accurately representing my family members and fairly representing my own feeling toward them and toward the situation. The final form will depend on whether I find a mode that is comfortable. It’s safe to say that this is a long-term project, as it is something I keep coming back to in my writing. I still have a lot of unanswered questions.

TSL: When did you write the poem?

Noah: I wrote it in the fall of last year. The first draft felt like shit because it still felt very uncertain. It was the first time I tried to express aspects of this history in creative writing. A month later, I found the voice that runs through it now.