An Unorthodox Portrayal

An Unorthodox Portrayal

Review: God Forgets About the Poor, Peter Polites, Ultimo Press

In society at large, the stories of older women, while appreciated by families, tend to be overlooked in favour of those of the young or male, unless there is some extraordinary element to them. Peter Polites bucks that trend, and the trend of his own fiction (even if his other fiction has biographical elements), with his fictionalised account of the life of his mother, a Greek migrant whose life story may align with hundreds of others but proves to be a worthy subject. The book is proof that, rather than real life aspiring to the excitement of fiction, fiction should aspire to the richness of real life.

In an amusing first chapter (possibly the best in the book and possibly taken from real life) Polites takes on the voice of his mother as she argues for the worth of her own story, to his own self-deprecation. ‘You can’t keep writing your gay things’, she says bluntly. She chides him for, especially as a gay man, not being more sympathetic to women’s suffering and for not being more interested in the life he knows little about. ‘What do you mean it’s not interesting?’ she snaps. ‘People will love my suffering.’

In the novel, Polites translates Greek names into English, so his mother’s name becomes ‘Honoured’, which seems appropriate for someone whose life story is enshrined in a novel. The book charts Honoured’s journey from a small village on the island of Lefkada in Greece to Athens to Sydney. Beyond the idyllic picture of Greek villages is the hardship and privation of war, the ignorance and misogyny, but also the wisdom and sense of community and place. Polites paints in simple strokes, but without cliché, village life – the butchering of a goat, the birth of a child, sweeping house, pilgrimage and baptism.

As well as understanding the migrant experience, and making loving fun of their aspirations – at one point Honoured comments unironically that all Greeks want arches inside their houses as a sign of affluence – Polites also shows an understanding of why older women do certain things, their feelings connected to womanhood and the past, their attitudes to family and spirituality, what might lie behind the facades of domesticity they cultivate.

At one point Honoured muses that priests must have a different idea of God, because she can’t understand why God would be interested in banning women wearing pants in church. She plays the role of Greek matriarch but is quietly (and occasionally not so quietly) subversive. This is less to say that she’s unorthodox, and more to say that she is portrayed as more than a caricature, a character with her own thoughts, ambitions and history.

In writing his mother’s story, Polites also portrays the family’s experience, as children of immigrants, of cousins and special occasions, and his sister’s experience of going to an elite school but from the wrong side of the tracks (or wrong side of the city, at least), her determination a contrast to the privileged nonchalance of the regatta boys she studies with.

Honoured’s story is inextricable from the story of her family, yet it is still her story, and it is to Polites’ credit that he succeeds so at doing it justice, at giving her honour, while never slackening into sentimentality, especially when the subject is so close to him and even if she might not be flattered by every facet of her portrayal.

Nick Mattiske blogs on books at coburgreviewofbooks.wordpress.com and is the illustrator of Thoughts That Feel So Big

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