Our stories bring us together, as Aciman knows well. It was an event that would produce a lifetime of aftershocks still rippling within his works – from his memoir Out of Egypt and beyond – and a fact of the writer’s life that would cause me to traverse his archives in search of shared history. The writer André Aciman, best known as the author of cult novel Call Me by Your Name, lost an Alexandria, too.
But it seems that a part of her – the journalist who thrived on the new and swam freely in those Mediterranean waters – remained in the Egypt she had lost. It was more than 60 years ago that my grandparents, both considered European thanks to their Greek heritage, left Alexandria for Australia in the face of increasingly nationalist policies in their North African home city. Ahead of her time and with an appreciation for controversy, she was the first woman in her city to be seen in a bikini. After she published her first and only novel – a romance entitled Lost Dreams – she was head-hunted by the city’s Greek newspaper. Educated in French, she received the top leaving mark in Egypt in the year she completed her Baccalauréat Français. Its status as a cosmopolitan city on the Egyptian coastline had rendered her fluent in five languages and a master of the double entendre.
When my grandmother told stories about her life, before her failing memory required us to begin telling them for her, she spoke of Alexandria. That fortuity came in the form of a safe passage for her, her mother and her sister to the port of Alexandria where her uncle – a man she long believed to be her father – was waiting. It was there, too, that she was christened Mary, in the hope that “Mother Mary would save them”. Her earliest moments were spent as a refugee on the Greek island of Lesbos, territory of the poet Sappho, exiled from Smyrna on the nearby Turkish mainland in the wake of the Greco-Turkish War. Alexandria, the capital of memory!” – Lawrence DurrellĪlexandria is my grandmother’s city. A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me. “At last the long-awaited message … had come, like a summons back to the Underworld.
Tracing memory and desire with André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name.
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