By Jocelyn Heath and Joanna Eleftheriou
This essay alternates between Jocelyn’s voice and Joanna’s, beginning with Jocelyn’s and changing after each section break.
I first heard Sappho as an undergrad when Rosanna Warren, our visiting writer, recited a few lines in Ancient Greek for our workshop. I didn’t need to match word with sound to love the insistent, rhythmic press of syllables rising and falling. The fluidity of a waltz with the intensity of a tango. Lines that spoke what I could not yet understand.
Like the odd-numbered beat of the sapphic stanza, 11-11-11-5, I felt at odds with an even-beat, rise-and-fall meter of the world I lived and wrote in. Something felt incomplete, rather like the fragments I would later learn made up our record of Sappho. But something in these ancient rhythms stirred a familiar step, and like Sappho, I knew “I would rather see her lovely step/and the motion of light on her face” than so much else.
***
I first heard the Greek dance syrtós at someone’s wedding, holding hands with other children at the messy edge of a semicircular dance. It’s cute, a toddler trundling along behind the dancing adults. Later, I’d line up for a dance lessons in the gymnasium. Mrs. Volikas or Mrs. Capous would clap out the steps and yell right foot! left foot! in Greek.
Translating my teachers’ directions in my head kept me behind, chronically off beat. Misstep after missed step, I failed to perform my Greekness with my feet.
Syrtós, a dance as old as Jesus, has a 4/4 rhythm while a newer one, the kalamatianós, is 7/8. As an adult, I learned to count the 12 steps of both dances in my head, going 8 steps forward, rocking back on 9 and forward again until 12.
Gymnasium comes from gymnós, which means naked in Greek, but unlike the athletes who performed nude, Greek dance demands elaborate costuming. At my last performance, in Texas, I slipped into an elastic-waisted skirt made of a cheap red imitation silk, trimmed with fake gold. My skirt reached the floor to hide mistakes.
This summer, I said I couldn’t remember the dance but a neighbor grabbed my arm, pulled me into the circle and said stop worrying!
Your body will remember.
***
“]You will remember/]for we in our youth/did these things,” I read. But what things, we can’t know. The brackets denote a fragmented line, a place where papyrus wore away or the script could not be read. We can only wonder about what Sappho felt would be remembered.
I was a rare kid who didn’t go wild in college. Daring meant a late-night walk under the combined starlight and streetlight, or a car trip to a part of Baltimore I’d never seen before. And once in a long while, it meant a journey down into the heart of the city for a night out dancing.
Where I’d felt uncomfortable and awkward in high school, in college, the music inhabited my body and inhibition fell away—though not entirely. Once, when I went swing dancing with a friend and her boyfriend, I caught the interest of a guy named Sean, who not only spun me across the floor that night, but who also drove up to campus to see me. When it became real, the possibility of intimate contact, my body and mind locked back up, unable to yet let go control. Things stopped before they began.
Still, the cravings for attention, affection, touch. I hoped for all those things—those “many and beautiful things” of our younger years.
***
In college, I danced. On Saturday nights, a grad student from Greece would call the landline in my dorm room, roll by in a beat up car and escort me along with a six pack or bottle of wine. We’d start with music on CDs until Aristotle had drunk enough to take out his guitar.
We were the real Greeks, the Greek speakers, and Greek Americans who switched to English three words in didn’t get invited to these parties. But we real Greeks attended theirs, their big dinner dances, and giggled as the Americans danced a Syrtós to every song, even pop. They’re just pretending, we laughed as we twirled.
At our small, boozy parties, we danced on fitted carpets of grad student rentals, mostly the Greek belly dance called tsifteteli. Most scholars believe it arrived from Anatolia, but others find roots in Sappho’s time, in the Cordax, which the ancients found salacious and obscene.
I never became a couple. Most of my time at college was spent threading the needle of participating in those nights of hip-swinging and responding appropriately to how the men looked at my body, so that I got rides to parties, while also evading the sweaty, hairy arms as they sought touch. When offered alcohol, I’d tip my solo cup for them to see it still mostly full of wine.
According to folkdancefootnotes.org, originally tisfteteli required “a mournful combination suited to the suffering of Greeks displaced from their Anatolian homeland,” but as years passed, “tsifteteli music became less mournful, now it’s almost happy.” I spent most of those years almost happy and once, just once, I danced with a girl. I felt like I was wearing a dress of flames.
***
What happens when the rhythm breaks? When the footwork falters as you find you can’t keep up, can’t match step with the masses around you? You fight to regain the beat and to force your wayward body back into the patterns it should know to inhabit. Yet something keeps pulling you off, and getting it back feels impossible.
“I don’t know what to do,” writes Sappho. “Two states of mind in me.” Yes, though I finally knew the truth, I kept it secret. I put on the persona of the sweetly aloof, highly selective girl who wouldn’t “give it up” to just anyone, when in the dark of night, I thought of just with whom and how I would let my body move in freedom. But by daylight, even that felt too great a chance. Even on a good day, I felt as exposed as Salomé with at least three veils missing, trying in vain to cover up what showed through. To bare everything, to be so seen? It was not an option.
I ignored the syncopation of queer desire. I thought of women but flirted with men. I stepped twice as hard to the downbeat of the campus around me.
In the end, I found, like Sappho, that for my “beautiful ones,” too, “my thought is not changeable.”
***
I thought of women but flirted with men, too, my persona prim, pure. Did I long for another world? Sure. A world where hips swung and beautiful women danced and I did not look away. I didn’t veil my desire. I danced free like. Sappho, born on the coast of those blue waters between Turkey and Greece where the migrants drowned, sang her poems into the air. Pieces of papyrus keep broken lines of words. Like the layers of dirt that buried Sappho’s lines, like the haze of time that obscures the first dance, for years my fear concealed what I really wanted. What we long to be, we scholars, we lovers, we dancers, we selves, is what we have always been.
***
There’s a sacred femininity in Sappho’s verse that refuses to box itself into a single sort of desire. Or into a single set of steps. I think of the image that first fixed into my mind when reading If Not, Winter: the “bride with violets in her lap.” I pictured white garments, loosely pinned up hair, and a clutch of purple blooming from hands clasped over slim thighs. I wrote a poem in tribute to her, in free verse, as restricting myself to meter felt too likely to omit a crucial part of her beauty.
Looking back at the line, I see it even more clearly: “girls/all night long/might sing of the love between you and the bride/with violets in her lap.” Women celebrating and loving women. Nearly perfect Sapphics, those final two lines, coming in at 11 syllables and 6. But here’s the catch: like the classical dances, this verse comes to us in translation–an attempt at recreating in contemporary English what Sappho sang in ancient Greek centuries ago. Carson leans into the poetic as a translator; others run more towards the literal. For all that we press toward authenticity and prize the “pure,” we can only determine what’s truthful for us, in the now.
Like Sappho, we write our own verse. We dance our own dance.
References:
Carson, Anne. If Not, Winter.
Folkdancefootnotes.org/Tsifteteli
Jocelyn Heath an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022 from Kelsay Books. Other creative writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway,and Fourth River. Her book reviews have appeared at Lambda Literary, Entropy, The Lit Pub,and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.
Joanna Eleftheriou is the author of the essay collection This Way Back. Her poems, essays, and translations appear in Bellingham Review, Arts and Letters, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. A contributing editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Joanna teaches at Christopher Newport University and the Writing Workshops in Greece.
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