 Mother Land
Dmetri Kakmi Pages: 288
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978 1 906011 39 0
Area of interest: Greece
Genre: Biography Date of first publication: 2009
Eland publication date: October 15, 2009
Price: £16.99
Mother Land is a minutely remembered description of a childhood on an Aegean island, marked by the furious opposition of hostile yet neighbouring cultures. It is an account of how a Greek boy born on a Turkish island tries to make sense of the escalating tension between Greek and Turk, Muslim and Christian, mother and father. It shows with chilling clarity how violence begets violence, in even the most unexpected of people.
It is also about the pains of exile and the discovery of long buried secrets which have inflamed the passionate hatred that exists between
the two communities. Dmetri Kakmi has written a
compulsive page-turner, something that is distinctive, original, humane and uplifting.
biography of Dmetri Kakmi
‘I am utterly entranced … so clear, so truthful, so heart-breaking.'
Maureen Freely
Kakmi has captured not only the brutality of a childhood that shaped his actions, but also dwells on the nostalgic memories that eventually lure him back to his Mother Land. In a superbly crafted ending, Kakmi endeavours to make peace with himself and comes to realise that his childhood has blurred the lines between Greek and Turk, he is not either, but a combination of both.'
Media Culture, Australia
Life on an Aegean island tends to get glamorised, but not in Dmetri Kakmi's autobiographical novel. Mother Land may take us back to the innocence of summery days in the early 1960s,with wine-dark seas, dusty lanes and big feasts, but the idyll is riven by tensions between Greeks and Turks, and between a sophisticated mother and fisherman father. Beautifully told, sensitively observed and painfully poignant, this is a gorgeous memoir of an island life that is now lost to us.'
Year's Best Travel Books, The Sunday Times
Dmetri Kakmi's Mother Land is a disturbing but redemptive memoir of growing up as a Greek on a Turkish island in the 1960s. The violence between fisherman father and cosmopolitan mother is echoed in the rivalry between Muslim and Christian, Greek and Turk, yet we are ultimately offered redemption, not revenge.'
The Best Books of 2009, Country Life
‘A beautiful, evocative and carefully crafted reconstruction of a past life generically familiar to many migrants, Mother Land outshines the plethora of similar memoirs.'
The Age, Melbourne
‘Destined to become a classic…it will also surely be required reading for everyone wanting original anthropological insights into the daily life and tensions of minorities in the Levant a generation ago… Mother Land is an achievement that will survive.'
Cornucopia
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