Topologies – Contes d’Athènes
Meeting with Joanna Dunis

Topologies – Contes d’Athènes, is a three-hour read, the duration of a flight from Paris to Athens. Meeting with Joanna Dunis, the author of this delicate, sensitive, and emotionally charged collection where emotion meets strength. A story that resonates with our own. Athens as a revelation, a certainty. Athens seduces, Athens charms, Athens enchants.

Poems brought to life visually by Joseph Paris and in sound by Alejandro Van Zandt-Escobar, shot in Athens: https://vimeo.com/826648851

P/A. Tell us about Athens, simply and freely.

Athens is a city I stumbled upon almost by chance less than 10 years ago. I had no ties there: no family roots, no friends, no job, no love, no holiday habits, no fantasies – and it had never called out to me before I spent a handful of hours there on a layover. Sometimes, places speak to us, they resonate without us knowing exactly why. After 5 hours of wandering aimlessly in the city center, I knew this city was mine, and I returned for a few weeks to explore further. When I finally settled there, I still had no roots in the area, and I discovered the inner workings of the city – its backstreets, dead ends, complexities, scars, along with all the beauty, solidarity, goodness, and warmth that I had sensed, without fully grasping. I spent the following months and years listening, observing, and trying to understand this city emerging from crisis, fragile – mirroring my own reconstruction. For me, Athens will remain the city that shouldn’t have been, but the one that offered me a new topography and the space-time of poetic writing. In that sense, it became necessary to me, and I often return to it as a refuge since I came back to live in Paris. I have learned to love everything about it, even what I hate: I have chosen Athens in writing, it has become one of my core cities. My collection TOPOLOGIES – Contes d’Athènes pays tribute to its streets and evocations on every page and weaves connections with my other places, my other lives.

P/A. What is your story, and why this collection?

I have almost always lived as a Frenchwoman abroad, in large cosmopolitan cities (London, Paris, Moscow). I dislike rigid or monolithic identities and affiliations: my life journey isn’t very linear either. Let’s say that real-life writing and the notion of elsewhere quickly became two essential references around which I revolved, in various forms. Among these, documentary writing – between films and travel guides – allows me to grasp reality, delve into other places, and make a living.

In 2015, a travel publisher tasked me with updating a guidebook on the Dodecanese Islands: I initially declined due to disinterest before accepting due to their insistence. During a layover at Athens airport, I decided to leave my luggage in storage and explore the city – I knew I wanted to settle there afterward. But when the time came to take the plunge and move to Athens without knowing anyone there – and without speaking the language, something I had never done before – I experienced a dual upheaval, both intimate and geographical.

A week after my arrival in the city, I left again to bury my father, whose end we had long known was near. I had postponed my departure several times, and then I decided to live, rather than wait for death: he waited for my departure to finally let go.

The upheaval also played out in terms of territory because during the early days of my settling in Athens, I spent barely a few days in the city, my work as a guidebook author sending me on the road even more often than usual that year. I think that to grasp this sense of suspension, to anchor something in the reality of that first year, I had to write, to jot down impressions.

The upheaval was also linguistic: my default approach is to collect the stories of others to transmit and translate them. Not speaking Greek, I was forced to turn to my own narrative, my own language. And I wrote by creating a new language, one that I had been hiding until then – that of poetry. Over the years, disorientation gave way to new pillars of life, carried by “Elles” – mythical literary or friendly female figures who populate these pages and gradually gain significance as the narrative progresses. This is how my first collection of poems, “TOPOLOGIES – Contes d’Athènes” was born and was able to flourish.

P/A. What are your favorite neighborhoods? Your restaurants? Your cafes? Your habits?

When I first arrived in Athens, I landed in a dreary ground-floor apartment in Kolonaki: I hated that apartment and the life the neighborhood offered me at the beginning. Apart from the café and Dexameni Square, which always provided me with a sanctuary and which I love to return to every time I’m in town, I felt trapped in the area. Quickly, I had to find more permanent housing and I wanted to live in Kypseli, which was not yet the trendy neighborhood it has become since. I was made to understand that no one would come to see me there and that it was better to stay more in the center. I complied with this doctrine, knowing full well that Kypseli would soon be a sought-after neighborhood: today, I love going there to sit on the uninteresting terraces of Fokionos Negri, to watch the world go by.

But my favorite neighborhood is and will always be Pangrati. That’s where I unpacked my bags and lived all these years. One of the reasons that guided my choice: the proximity to everything and the laid-back atmosphere of the neighborhood. Despite the rapid gentrification that has taken place over the years, I have all my habits there: the Holy Trinity of Proskopon, Varnava, and Mesologgiou squares concentrate some of my favorite addresses including Materia Prima for a good glass of wine or Mavros Gatos for tasty lamb chops. My office is behind the glass windows of Rizzari café, which welcomed me for entire days during the writing of my guides; I would be nothing without the freddos from my friend barista Christos Branis at Rule of 4m. I love buying second-hand clothes at the market on Archimidous; Athens would be different without the friendly bookstore Lexikopoleio and the retro Oasis cinema. I enjoy having an aperitif under the plane tree of the aptly named Apéritif, and rejuvenating myself on the heights of the Panathenaic Stadium or in the quiet alleys of the Mets cemetery… The list is long – in Pangrati but also elsewhere, in the neighborhoods of Petralona or on the hills of Philopappou and Lycabettus…

Joanna Dunis will present her poetry collection published by Le Castor Astral and will give a reading at Free Thinking Zone bookstore. Greek poet Maria Patakia will also be present. The discussion between them will be in French, with translation provided.

Where: Free Thinking Zone Bookstore, Skoufa 64 str & Grivaion

When: Saturday, March 2nd, 12:30-2:30 PM

To learn more about Joanna Dunis, click here: Joanna Dunis Website

Credits Jonna Dunis

---

Vous aimerez sûrement ces articles