This Way Back

West Virginia University Press, 2020

35.00 €

Kalamos Books

(STREETSVILLE, Canada)

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Details

Year of publication

2020

ISBN

9781949199666

Place of printing

Morgantown WV

Author

Eleftheriou, Joanna

Publishers

West Virginia University Press

Keyword

CYPRUS MEMOIRS CYPRIOT AMERICAN WRITER

Binding description

Inscription description

Signed by Author(s)

Dust jacket

State of preservation

As New

Binding

Softcover

Inscribed

Yes

First edition

Description

This Way Back dramatizes a childhood split between Queens, New York, and Cyprus, an island nation with a long colonial history and a culture to which Joanna Eleftheriou could never quite adjust. The book avows a Greek-Cypriot-American lesbian's existence by documenting its scenes: reenacting an 1829 mass suicide by jumping off a school stage onto gym mats at St. Nicholas, harvesting carobs on ancestral land, purchasing UNESCO-protected lace, marching in the island's first gay pride parade, visiting Cyprus's occupied north against a dying father's wish, and pruning geraniums, cypress trees, and jasmine after her father grew too weak to lift the shears. While the author's life binds the essays into what reads like a memoir, the book questions memoir's conventional boundaries between the individual and her community, and between political and personal loss, the human and the environment, and the living and the dead.