Solid Objects: Elisávet Makridis
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Elisávet Makridis.
When my great-grandmother, Χριστίνα, died on August 16th, 2002 at the age of 106, my grandmother—in the throes of irreconcilable grief—donated whatever was left of her very few belongings.
A Pontic Greek refugee exiled from her homeland in northeastern Anatolia and survivor of genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, my great-grandmother was among 1.2 million Greek Orthodox people from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps, and Caucasus along with 400,000 mainly ethnically Turkish Muslims from Greece mutually deported in a compulsory exchange of minority populations under the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty.
In light of massacre and forced displacement there are no family heirlooms from any of my great-grandparents, no articles of clothing or salvaged wedding bands, no hand-made embroidery, no quilt box. Not one solid object.
My fullest possession is memory. I spent the first eight years of my life beside my great-grandmother across consecutive summer visits to Greece where all my mother’s family resides. What I most hold of her: Yiayiá sitting in her white cotton dress on a floral-patterned armchair in the July heat, calling me over to kill the flies biting her skin.
I keep a simple altar on the upper left-hand side of my writing desk in Ithaca, New York. It consists of a large block of selenite in front of which sits a framed photograph of one-year-old me in a red and white jumpsuit, standing on my great-grandmother’s black-clad lap taken one summer in Potidea, Halkidiki. Around the photo: a white feather and piece of clear quartz on a flat rock, a forest green bronze owl, a beautiful card sent to me by a tender spirit, and frequently, a glass of flowers.
The altar on my desk is a portal from which impossible frequencies between myself and an infinite matri-elliptical fugitive beloved signal and seed into new crossings. Whenever I write poetry, I speak to and write from the altar space of X: my great-grandmother’s signature—X for Χριστίνα (Hristína)—the only letter she ever learned to write at the age of 83 (and this exclusively under the guidance of my Aunt Kikí).
How do I learn to listen to and speak with my ancestors’ (endangered) tongue/s? How do I dream for a wail that extends before and beyond me?
To engage these questions, I return to a life-altering interview passage—a textual object I mentally carry and touch—published in the Los Angeles Review of Books blog titled, “A Home In My Ears: Talking to Divya Victor” by Andy Fitch, where Victor speaks to how she “situates” herself across multiple diasporic axes through co-generated echolocation in her book, KITH (2017, Fence Books).
She responds, “I write to emit sound, and the environment of the poem returns this sound to my ear, triangulating my location within an imagined community I belong to (“kith”)…I am the sonic register of delayed messages that are returning to a home in my ears, from where I write.”
I feel a molecular resonance with the remarkable intricacies of Victor’s process and believe I move similarly when I write beside my altar. For me, the altar provides an echo-chamber to materialize home as an ever-pend(ulat)ing frequency, a communion I invent with and for the women who have preceded me and will exceed my existence.
This frequency, in the nominal signature of X, is a sound (re)made between descendant and ancestral bodies, populated by the real and imagined objects of my ancestors’ stolen home/land.
X: femurs intersecting, a mouth, a cow’s hoof, train tracks, a key, a moth, a window, a doorknob, a sparrow, a net, two oars, a table, a petal, an anchor, a bat, a raft, a tail, clock wands, a bow, nostrils, wind chimes, a pair of silverware, a canopy, a stool, a star, a tear, two braids, a chromosome.
In my second lectureship year, upon returning to Ithaca from Greece to begin teaching at Cornell, grief hit at a preternatural speed. Everything was nauseating: my hedge-lined window view, my tea, but especially the wound of voices reverberating back in shreds on WhatsApp calls with parted-from loved ones.
The first night back, I sat by my altar and pleaded for Yiayiá to enter my dreams. You have my full consent, please just this once appear for me. The next morning, a black fly blossomed out of thin air, hanging like a Christmas angel on the cork ceiling directly above the altar.
In How To Wash A Heart (2020, Liverpool University Press), Bhanu Kapil asks: “What receives the blood?” I want to give blood back to the irretrievable, back to my dead whose tongues surpass the metaphors of dreams; who are still of salt, earth, water but also of the invented materialities that sound out in perpetuity from X, (re)sound in and through me.
Elisávet Makridis is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated poet-educator raised between Astoria, New York and Greece. She is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College where she received the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize and Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry. In 2022, she was the winner of Ruminate Magazine’s Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax’s Sublingua Prize for Poetry, second place winner of Canthius’s Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Liz Howard, as well as a finalist for Indiana Review’s 1/2K Prize for Poetry, Reed Magazine’s Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, and The Sewanee Review’s fifth annual Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Canthius, Indiana Review, Reed Magazine, Grist, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Elisávet holds an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she teaches as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English and was recently selected as the 2023 recipient of the Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award.