Representations of the familiar and the other: The Innocent and the Guilty

At the beginning of 2002, a BBC correspondent, Arif Kaour, arrives in Chania from London tasked with documenting the remaining Muslim monuments of the city. He stays for a little over a year and during that time he mostly sets out on a personal quest to learn more about his family. His parents were Muslims of Chania who were forced to relocate in Turkey as part of the population exchange in 1923. The compass guiding him in this journey through the city and its people is his grandfather’s diary, annotated by his father.

During his stay in Chania, the city is shocked by the murder of a woman. Initially, it is believed that the murder victim is the daughter of a prominent local family. When it is revealed that the victim was a Ukrainian migrant, the uproar quickly dies down and normalcy is restored.

This time period, the beginning of the 21^st century, is one of the two timelines along which the story of Maro Douka’s novel The Innocent and the Guilty, published in 2004, unfolds. The second timeline is the beginning of the 20^th century, when Arif’s family was forced to leave Chania. Arif’s father’s sister, Aishe, gets lost in the chaos of displacement and soon finds herself in the house of a Christian family as a possible bride for one of their sons, Armodios Foumis. In the midst of the violent turmoil of the population exchange and the relentless countdown to displacement, Aishe says goodbye to her family who paid her dowry. She gets baptised and stays in Chania. A few years later, she is murdered by her husband, Armodios.

These are the main events of the plot which Maro Douka uses to structure a novel with an expansive cast of characters. Its main theme is the people who live, arrive in, and depart from a city; the locals and the migrants, the familiar and the other. Arif discovers the descendants of the Foumis family, Panaris and Eleonora, grandchildren of Armodios and Aishe, of the murderer and the murdered. Each character is surrounded by a network of relatives and friends who compose a representative sample of the provincial society of Chania. In the end, the murdered Ukrainian migrant is revealed to also be part of this network. The secondary characters of the policeman and the correspondent are also very important because not only do they advance the plot, but also allow the reader to see the story from a different perspective, understand the social mores, and have a well-rounded emotional response to the story.

Hence, Arif is a representation of the other, the ethnic other in Chania of 2002. Ever since his family was exchanged and forcibly relocated to Turkey, the memory that Muslims and Christians used to co-exist has faded. Arif is treated with suspicion even by the characters presented by the writer as ‘progressive’. This otherness also has a historical dimension: Arif’s father and grandfather, the two previous generations, were also treated as others by the Christians in Chania at the beginning of the 20^th century. However, being a Cretan Muslim in 1900 was different to being a Turk in 2003. What divided (and united) Christians and Muslims back then is not what divides (and unites) Greeks and Turks now. It is also alluded that Arif’s son, who is called Heinrich and lives in Frankfurt estranged from his father, also has an entirely different experience of otherness.

The murdered Ukrainian migrant, Olya, is also an ethnic other. Douka highlights the fact that population movements continue into the 21^st century, turning migration into a leitmotif. By delaying the identification of the dead body, the writer shows how the local community treats the other: for as long as the body is not identified but suspected to be Eleonora’s daughter, the local community is up in arms. When the body is identified as a Jane Doe, probably a migrant, ‘the case was immediately downgraded to a single column in the second-to-last page’.

It’s not just Arif and Olya who were others in Chania of 2003. Even the Greeks who are not from Chania feel alienated, according to Douka. Many characters in the book confess in various ways the distrust they feel towards anyone they don’t know. Via Eleonora’s closest friend, the writer observes that ‘if by any chance an outsider wants to stand among us as an equal, we will reject him like a foreign body. It happened to a friend of hers from Athens…’.

In the end, the other is not defined exclusively by geography. On the contrary, Douka enriches the reader’s understanding of what constitutes the other in a society by endowing a major character, Panaris, with unfamiliar characteristics. Intelligent, but without any academic, professional or personal achievements, all Panaris has to show for himself are stories of grandiose plans that were abandoned: expectations that he would study medicine which he did not fulfil, a career in dentistry that he gave up, a desire to study political science that he never pursued, an escape to America where he had a tumultuous relationship which didn’t last. And finally his return to Europe, where he ended up in a psychiatric ward.

Upon his return to Chania, he delves into a treasure trove of family manuscripts found in the basement, but the more he studies them, the more he derides them. He wants to make a documentary on the history of Crete, but is discouraged by every obstacle. Panaris’ life is unfamiliar to the society of Chania and the writer explains why. When Panaris wants to enter politics, his father, also a politician, reminds him: ‘Don’t you understand? To get nominated you need to have lived a seamless life’. The restrained policeman who knows both the family and the local society calls him ‘crazy’. Panaris is a representation of the familiar other, the compatriot whose otherness lies in his actions and life choices.

Douka chooses to round out her novel’s cast of characters by bringing them all together. Arif, a Turk who is a descendant of Cretan Muslims, Olya, the murdered Ukrainian migrant in Chania, Panaris, the failed scion of the well-known local family, and Eleonora, his twin sister who projects an impeccable professional and personal image, are all descendants of the same people three generations back. The familiar and the otherwere born from the same womb, but followed different life paths. With a plot inspired by the history of Chania, a history rich in population movements, Douka sheds light on both. ‘I was thinking that, century after century, the city was built and rebuilt using the same building materials from the crumbling houses and the burnt-down temples. In my opinion, there is no holier moment than when layers of civilization meet, one on top of and inside the other’.