A Polity in Poetry? Notes on the Edge(s) of Memory in Stephanos Stephanides’s The Wind Under My Lips

What is it about?

Reading through Stephanos Stephanides’s The Wind Under my Lips (Tò Rodakiò, 2019), the chapter examines it in light of memory writing, of its activity “at the edges” of received forms of memorial narration, and its performing of political memory from the contingent and vision-imbued edge of Europe’s politics today. The article invokes a certain affinity between acts of memory, responsibility and the question of postcolonial agency. Within this relation, memory writing exploits its representational arc of maneuvre to take upon itself the proportions and stature of a praxis and a labour: one that shifts the dynamics of moral idealism towards a constellation of memorial worlds that unfold in subjective space and a politics of listening and of living elsewhere that is dynamised in and by a writing of active recall.

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This book chapter offers important insights into the memory fiction of Stephanos Stephanides -- one of the foremost Mediterranean voices of our times.