Kefalá, Antigone
KEFALÁ, Antigone
Nationality: Australian. Born: Braila, Romania, 28 May 1935. Education: Primary school in Braila, high schools in Pireus and Lavrion, Greece, and New Zealand; Victoria University, Wellington, B.A. 1958, M.A. 1960. Family: Married 1) Robert Kerr in 1959 (divorced 1963); 2) Usher Weinrauch in 1964 (divorced 1976). Career: Teacher of English, New South Wales Department of Education, Sydney, 1961–68; administrative assistant, University of New South Wales, 1968–69; arts administrator, Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney, 1971–87. Address: 12 Rose Street, Annandale, New South Wales 2038, Australia.
Publications
Poetry
The Alien. Brisbane, Makar Press, 1973.
Thirsty Weather. Melbourne, Outback Press, 1978.
European Notebook. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1988.
Absence: New and Selected Poems. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1992.
Novels
The First Journey. Sydney, Wild and Woolley, 1975.
The Island. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1984.
Other
Alexia: A Tale of Two Cultures, illustrated by Warwick Hatton (for children). Sydney, John Ferguson, 1984.
*Bibliography: In Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers by Gunew and Mahyuddin, Melbourne, Deakin University, 1992; in Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Wilde, Hooton and Andrews, 1994.
Critical Studies: "Migrant Women Writers," in Meanjin (Melbourne), 1983, and Framing Marginality, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994, both by Sneja Gunew; "The Process of Becoming" by Judith Brett, in Meanjin (Melbourne), 1985; Coming Out from Under by Pam Gilbert, Sydney, Pandora Press, 1988; "The Politics of Nostalgia" by Efi Hatzimanolis, in Hecate (Brisbane) 6(1/2), 1990; The Journeys Within—Striking Chords by Nikos Papastergiadis, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1992; Migrant Daughters: The Female Voice in Greek-Australian Prose Fiction by Helen Nickas, Melbourne, Owl, 1992; "Memory and Absence" by Michelle Tsokos, in Westerly (Perth), 39(4), 1994; "Antigone Kefala" by Geoff Page, in his A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, St. Lucia, U.Q.P., 1995; "Antigone Kefala: Translating the Migratory Self" by Saadi Nikro, in Southerly (Southerly, Australia), 58(1), autumn 1998.
* * *In an interview published in Poetry and Gender, Antigone Kefalá refers to her childhood writing in Romania, her learning Greek (but not writing) in Greece, and her finally starting to write in English in her last year at an Australian university. She quotes Derek Walcott: "To change your language you must change your life." Her initially musical concept of poetry has slowly "acquired more architectural form, became a tool through which some perceived truth could come alive."
Despite the success of the children of non-English-speaking migrants in school and their increasing success in business and science, writers for whom English was a second language rarely had serious books published in Australia in the mid-1970s. The Alien and then Thirsty Weather were pioneers, and readers found that they had to acquire a new taste. The bitterness was not hostile, but readers hesitated to call the mordant accuracy funny, even if it was sometimes about faceless migration authorities or New Zealanders. An example is found in "The Place":
The ships, we had heard, had sunk
weighted with the charity of the new world
that kept on feeding us with toys …
The same quality can be seen in "The Promised Land":
I
The roads were of candy
the houses of ice cream
the cattle of liquorice.
Pretty, we said,
drinking the green air,
as in a fairy tale, we said,
eating the green water, brackish,
breathing the smoke that rose
from the greenstone hills …
II
The people carved in wood
the mark of the knife still on them
a nordic dream whittled to knick-knacks
with glass beads in their sockets
which they washed every night
in detergents …
Taking in images as light as skeletal leaves and yet invested with symbolic weight, readers in fact learn a new language for themselves and their places: "the girl with the cropped hair, /nervous lips, tortured fingers …" ("The Lunch"); or "… soot raining on warehouses, railyards, the hotel /where we were waiting for the fixer… /The gutters full of onions, /blue dusted porcelain the sky, /above the railway clock /the new translucent moon was flying" ("Ultimo Bridge").
Kefalá's European Notebook maintains her bleak and brooding outlook: "The hero came quite late /sniffing the air /his face like a skinned animal /eaten by maggots with ice heads /a musty smell about him /as he danced /his hollow eyes turned inward, /bleak tunnels with no end" ("The Party"). Greek tradition, local social occasions, memory, return—indeed the poet finds "fatality at the heart of each thing" ("The Wanderer"). "Suicide" is a poem of great beauty:
This timelessness
that rises out of the earth …
This silence,
the ease that fills the trees,
a promise of such bliss
of self forgetfulness.
"The core of the experience I am trying to express," says Kefalá, "is essentially a fatalistic one, my Greekness, I assume." This aspect shows in her scrupulous language and pacing and in a brevity that has nothing to do with "having nothing to say."
Kefalá writes sparingly, and selections of earlier work fill out later books. Her prose works also are slim, refined narratives, distillations of intense experience. In Absence, the title sequence of her 1992 volume of new and selected poems, "Growing Old" is "gathering this knowledge one /does not want, one can not use, /a useless knowledge that /repeats itself." Nights are menacing experiences of absence and degradation, spoken in a soft, even voice.
"What I am searching for now, is for a balance that will allow meaning and language to hold each other in a unity in which the weight of each is not visible." Kefalá's limpid language somehow carries nuanced meanings, but apathy and despair lurk behind the lines, even those positively titled "Freedom Fighter" and "Thanksgiving." No reader experiences Kefalá's poems as simple delight; equally, no reader can miss their stripped-back power.
—Judith Rodriguez