Apostolos Doxiadis as an ‘Amateur Revolutionary’ | Interview with Athens Voice.

Apostolos Doxiadis, to mark the publication of his new book *Amateur Revolutionary: A Personal Novel*, gave an extremely interesting interview to Dimitris Fyssas for *Athens Voice*. You can read it below: Can 1,062 pages of a youthful political autobiography be a breeze to read? They can, when it comes to the self-deprecating, witty writing of Apostolos Doxiadis, which has just been published.The book has a title and a subtitle, each consisting of two words. How are they justified? I shall leave it to the reader to discover the meaning of the title for themselves: to explain a title of this kind, which is ambiguous, seems to me to betray the book, to reduce it to a formula, a simplification. I do not wish to do that, at least not now, so soon after writing it.I can, however, speak about the subtitle, ‘personal history’. The book is personal; that is to say, it speaks mainly of me but always from my own perspective, even if it recounts events that form part of a broader historical context. But that doesn’t make my narrative historical. To tell a life story without sticking to dry facts, to a mere chronology, you have to breathe life into it. And that endeavour in itself leads you to the tools of the storyteller. You need narrative vitality, which you achieve by choosing what to say and what not to say, how and where to place emphasis, how to describe the action and ideas, as well as the relationships between your characters – yourself and others. I used these tools freely in the book. I abandoned the purpose of the storyteller, or if you like, the novelist, in only one respect: I did not invent events. I never consciously tell lies – as for the unconscious, I make no promises. But by filling in the details of memory, I inevitably piece things together, somewhat like witnesses at a crime scene who then work with a police sketch artist to create a likeness of the perpetrator’s face. Inevitably, such a portrait, like my book, is an approach to the truth, consciously subjective. I would say that the defining feature of my narrative freedom—and, if you like, of ‘fiction’—is that in the book I construct normal conversations, as if I were recalling them word for word. Although I have a very good memory, like everyone else I have a brain in my head, not a tape recorder. So I am necessarily inventing, in the dialogues—the main part of the narrative—my involvement and actions during the junta. I am always guided by something that Thucydides also does in his ‘History’: he endeavours to record the dialogues and speeches of his protagonists in words that do not stray from the spirit of what was actually said, yet are almost never verbatim.What period of your life does the book cover? From as far back as I can remember myself until a few months after I turned twenty-one, in the summer of 1974. You leave out, explicitly and from the outset, a number of aspects of your life at that time. Why? I didn’t start by saying what I would leave out, but rather what I would say. My focus – and this is one of the many meanings of the title you asked me about – is on politics. In *The Amateur Revolutionary*, I mainly want to recount my development as a political being, right up to the beginning of my youth. So, from the outset, even though I am talking about a young child, my focus is on how politics entered my life, initially as little stories, then as questions, and later as knowledge and ultimately as action. For this reason, I speak far less about other aspects of my life—aspects that were far more central to me during certain periods I recount—than I would in a narrative intended as a comprehensive autobiography. It is not that I neglect them: it is simply that they are not my main focus in the book. So, for example, I say far less about my intellectual interests as I grew up, as well as about my existential anxieties or my relationships with friends or mentors. I touch on all these things only briefly, just enough to make the development of the central theme—politics—clear. What had no part in it, and which I therefore do not recount at all, is the romantic aspect. Apart from the fact that I would consider it a gross indiscretion towards other people, it is also completely irrelevant to the subject. I knew friends in my early youth whose romantic relationships were part of, or sometimes a continuation of, their political lives. Some changed partners according to ideology or party, or party and ideology according to the partner. For me, for better or worse, this never happened. Politics and romance were separate. Nothing I did or didn’t do in politics bore even a trace of ‘sersé la fam’, as Tsitsanis so beautifully sings.What role do the visual material / poems / references to prose / songs / news items / films etc. inserted into the book play? All the things you mention—poems, songs, news items, films, music – are all part of the fabric of our lives; and so, when I speak of my life, I speak of these things too. Art, in particular, played a decisive role in my story – both in political matters and, given my age and character. But of course, this was also due to the times. How can one speak of a teenager or a very young person in the 1960s and early 1970s without rock music? How can one refer to the passion of militant young people for the myths of the Greek Left without the guerrilla songs? How can one ignore the influence of films and novels on how we shaped and gave form to our thoughts, and sometimes even our arguments? Beyond that, you know, the junta’s censorship, by banning open political dialogue, inevitably gave art—with its metaphors and ellipses—great weight in political expression. Finally, regarding the many illustrations in the book, I should add that my time working on the graphic novel *Logicomix* spoiled me a little: I often found myself thinking of something that I could better convey through an image rather than describe in words.Is the humour in your book a sign of the current Apostolos Doxiadis’s indulgence towards his pre-teen self?I would say that the humour is an expression of Apostolos Doxiadis’s indulgence towards Apostolos Doxiadis: generally speaking, I don’t think it’s very healthy to take ourselves entirely seriously. If we ourselves do not question our own infallibility, it is usually others who pay the price, through no fault of their own, and of course we end up living a deficient life, a life of illusions. Beyond that, it is natural that when someone sees a younger version of themselves – in *The Amateur Revolutionary*, several decades younger – their perspective is unwittingly influenced by the greater self-awareness they have acquired in the meantime. This allows for a greater scope for self-criticism, which is indeed often expressed in the book as humour. What role did your father play in your politicisation? A huge one. Both in terms of principles—belief in freedom and democracy—and, initially, before the dictatorship, in terms of the political sphere, namely the Centre Union. Let’s not forget, however, that a centrist of that era was defined by his distance from both the Right – especially in Greece, and the monarchy – but also the communist Left. This, during the years of the junta, got me into trouble.Did the junta’s arrest of your sister, Kalli Doxiadi, play a significant role in shaping your views? The view that the dictatorship was something evil, an enemy of democracy, existed from the moment of the coup, right from the start. But when, a few months after the coup, they arrested Kalli – then twenty-three years old – and a few months later, when she was released from the General Security Directorate, she described to me what they had done to her, those views were imbued with intense emotion: specifically, hatred. How do you explain that, despite the constant wavering, doubts and concerns, you ultimately joined the Left? Aware that I am doing a disservice to the complexity of the thoughts I describe in *The Amateur Revolutionary*, I will say here that I initially joined the Left through a combination of my passion to do something against the junta and the chance factor that my cousin and close friend, Aristos Doxiadis, was already active there. Everything else, from that point onwards, during the time I remained there, is complex, involving many phases and fluctuations, and again I prefer not to do it an injustice by cutting it short for the sake of an interview. After all, it was partly to make sense of all this that I wrote the book.Aristos, Axel, Achilles, Hercules, Stavros, dominate your narrative. It’s only natural. Unless you’re a hermit, relationships with others play a leading role in any human story. And for me, in a story that aims to focus on politics during the years of the junta, the leading roles are played by my closest comrades from that time. The ones you mentioned. How did you view Greece under the junta when you visited as a student, and how did you act?Most of the time I was forced to mentally align myself with how the overwhelming majority of Greeks saw it, who did not react to the junta except in private, with jokes and sighs. This was clearly a defence mechanism, because if I had given in to my dominant emotion, which was the fear of arrest, I would have been paralysed. This fear became a useful tool when it was consciously transformed into precautions, when I was carrying out illegal activities in Greece, such as meetings or the transport of materials. But unfortunately, sometimes it would visit me uninvited, mainly at night, whether I was asleep or awake, where at every sound on the street, outside my bedroom window, especially around dawn, I thought I could hear the Security Police or the ESA coming to arrest me. How did the Ministry of the Interior react to the Polytechnic occupation? You’re asking for trouble now, let’s get into the difficult stuff! And you’re right to do so, but I too must protect the way I narrate and analyse the occupation, and its consequences, in the book. Today, for better or worse, the Polytechnic is regarded as the defining event of the dictatorship years; indeed, in schools they teach the kids that it was thanks to this that the junta fell. Precisely for this reason, I have devoted a great deal of time and attention to recounting as accurately as possible what happened back then, and the stance taken by the Ministry of the Interior. For more, see ‘The Amateur Revolutionary’… Which figures from the Left that you knew do you still regard positively even now? During the junta, I only knew my comrades, all of them young. Don’t forget that I was the youngest in the organisation, and although I had serious responsibilities, I didn’t make political decisions, nor did I discuss matters with the Party leadership. This was done on behalf of the youth mainly by Valden and Tsakyrakis, and probably others whom I did not know at the time.More generally, however, the faction to which I belonged during the internal disputes within the KKE (Internal) under the junta – the others called us ‘right-wingers’ – was the one later represented by Leonidas Kyrkos. And I would say that I considered his line to be the most serious in the development of the Left after the dictatorship, as expressed by him, Babis Drakopoulos, Kostas Filinis, Angelos Diamantopoulos, and others. I met all of them after the dictatorship, though not in a political context, as I did not remain on the Left. They were, I believe, generally serious people who, as they matured, came to realise that democracy and communism do not go together. But, of course, I now think that everyone else—politicians outside the Left—knew this simple truth anyway. So, I view the figures I mentioned positively today only for reasons similar to those that highlight the prodigal son or the repentant prostitute in the Gospel. In other words, I appreciate the courage of their repentance, which in this context means the change in their views over time. For people politically moulded in the Stalinist mould that had taken shape during the Occupation and the Civil War within the KKE, this is no small matter. But I do not admire anyone in this sphere as a great political figure. I prefer to attribute this quality—rare in any case—to people who have shown greater consistency in their course, in this instance in the struggle for freedom and democracy—principles in which I still believe today.The book ends with the events of the summer of 1974 and with many of your reflections, both past and present. Will there be an autobiographical sequel? I’m not planning one, because my aim in writing the book was not primarily to describe my life for others – except perhaps for my children, initially – but rather to understand a dark part of it, for myself. I wanted to study myself more closely, particularly in relation to politics and especially those years about which I remained full of great questions. From that point onwards, I have a clearer understanding of what happened to me in my life and where I was heading at every stage, for better or for worse. But the years up to my twenty-first, up to 1974, required a great deal of digging. This is expressed mainly in *The Amateur Revolutionary*, with reasoned narration as the primary tool of inquiry.