Alien Nation

I.

It is winter in Berlin, and I am homesick. The sky is grey; the ground is grey; the faces of the strangers all around are grey. When I look in the mirror, my own face is grey. I have been suffering these winters since I left Sydney many years ago – Sydney, that lit-up harbour city, the place that born-and-raised me, the source of all my long non-rhotic vowels and deep-down memories. When I think about it now, from here, it seems unreal.

My routines of wintry longing are now well established: I look at my Margaret Preston prints, I listen to You Am I’s #4 Record, I stream A-League games, I bake banana bread. I call my family more often. (I try not to keep checking the weather.) And I read Antigone Kefala: her Sydney Journals, her poems, and especially the collection Absence, which I picked up by chance when a Sydney literary NGO I was interning at held a mass sell-off of unwanted books. Her name dimly rang a bell – plus I was an amateur Hellenist anyway, a Stanmore Hawks FC veteran, and an annoying anglo-skippy multiculturalism ally, the kind that read Looking for Alibrandi and thought, hey, this Marcus Sandford bloke sounds cool. I liked the stringency of her haircut in the photo. I checked out a few of the poems: they were weird, unsettling, moreish. How had I not heard of this person? I took a flutter, dipped into the weekly travel budget my unpaid internship allowed me. Kefala’s Absence, an original Hale & Iremonger edition from 1992, signed: two Australian dollars. A bargain! Somebody else’s trash my treasure. Within weeks I became an evangelist – still am, pushing her work on the various writers and readers that inhabit my corner of Berlin, hoping, in the process, to show them something about Australia, something about Australian literature, or perhaps just to share an incomparable oeuvre that has seduced and disturbed me for over a decade.

I have always liked authors with an urge to repeat: those who return to their materials again and again, trying out new angles and new casts of light, tracing their passage in time against the same old motif. Lutz Seiler likes to quote a line by Paul Bowles: everyone has only one song. (Georgia O’Keefe, who painted a certain mountain near her New Mexico ranch twenty-nine times, said she hoped that if she painted it often enough, God would just give it to her.) Kefala is one of these authors, a fact that comes through clearly when one surveys her work from start to finish – as in the collections Fiction and Poetry, published in 2025 by Giramondo in the wake of her death in 2022. Fiction’s stories and novellas, originally appearing in four different books across twenty-seven years, and Poetry’s decades’ worth of verse return continuously to certain images, settings, words, and situations; some of these also run through her life-writing experiments in Sydney Journals and Late Journals.

Kefala loves the figure of the young artistic migrant with a storytelling family; she loves voices echoing in houses. Light bounces off the sea a lot. She uses darkness and baggage and glass and beast. She points to time and to material; she likes the word measure. Her poetry speaks intimately to a roving unclear you on behalf of an embattled mythic we, often with reference to a cold indifferent they. She likes to write in jagged numbered sequences. This is an author for whom iteration is both topic and device – the past, and the materials we inherit from it, are already always there. So she rearranges them in time. Both the poems and the stories take place within a shared poetic landscape – Kefalaland – the setting for different kinds of lyrical metamorphoses, frustrated life trajectories, bursts of fury, deep laments. Reading Fiction and Poetry today, one is struck by how consistent that poetic and personal landscape really is.

Kefala was born in 1931 in a small city of what is now Romania. Her family, ethnically Greek, was middle-class, cosmopolitan, and cultured. During the Second World War, they were forced to flee. After being processed as refugees in Athens, they resettled in New Zealand, where Kefala studied literature at university. The pain, indignity, and disorientation of this experience are major elements of Kefala’s prose works, most explicitly in the novella pair published as The First Journey and in her autobiographical quasi-fairytale Alexia. She did not like New Zealand, a place whose pleasant verdure and wilful positivity disturbed her. When she continued on to Australia in 1959, however, something seemed different. Australia, she felt, was beginning to ask questions about itself in public. Kefala would never romanticise this country, critiquing its narrow-minded conservatism and prejudice and historical amnesia all her life. Still, it seemed to her like something was possible here – and that Sydney, where she ended up living until her death, making an Annandale house all her own, was a place where she could get some work done.

‘[T]he landscape was more at ease with itself, more generous in its attitude’, she reflected in an essay: ‘Indifferent maybe, but on a large scale, the very scale allowed for more imaginative potential.’ Her literary visions might be vast or even universal – Kefalaland is everywhere and nowhere at once – but they most often spatialise themselves in Sydney: its sunlight, its humidity, its downtown neon, its space. Sydney Harbour is one of the scenes that Kefala keeps painting: perhaps the gods should give it to her too. Even the Harbour Bridge, that tired emblem of world-class-city-dom, is estranged to vivid life. Consider the poem ‘Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair’, from the collection Thirsty Weather:

What moves in this poem, what commands the scene, is not people, but rather night – the darkness that repeats, the agent of unseenness, the counterpart of the days by which our lives are all measured – as well as the distant rattle, perhaps of a train crossing the bridge. The figurative potency of nightfall and metallic percussiveness call to mind another, more canonised, harbour poem and Sydney elegy, Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’. There ‘Night and water / pour to one rip of darkness’ – a dangerous liquid impulse that for Kefala, too, evoked the workings of time. In both poems, the setting is marked by temporal estrangement and elegiac distance; the energy does not come from where one might expect.

Kefala’s poetry and prose are rich in such visions where the city itself is momentarily reanimated, transformed, by some interplay of dark and light (as with Slessor’s ‘dissolving verticals of light’), by echoed sound, by bursts of emotional urgency and loss. In many of them, the mute indifferent southern light encounters a darkened world of memory. These visions are haunted not just by people or events from the past, but by the actions of time itself: ‘the element’, as Kefala calls it in Sydney Journals, ’that we cannot keep still, that we cannot recapture, the image of this passing forever chilling’. Her speakers, meanwhile, are ‘[h]eavy with time / time now made of lead / time now made of silence / voracious’. Or – as one hears later in that same poem sequence, ‘Absence’ – ‘time now a chill / a fever that invades the air / ignited liquid’ drunk down greedily. The presence of time is disturbing here; it is also, for better or worse, where vitality comes from. But nobody is ever quite in control of it. Whenever time appears, so too does absence. The world, as the speaker in ‘The Wanderer’ declares, is ‘made of a matter that never / forgets, a symmetry so exact, / fatality at the heart / of each thing.’ The deathliness that Kefala finds imminent everywhere – that essential fatality – will penetrate walls, crack into voices, or rise up from underground, a chthonic intrusion on the smug harbour city.

Kefala’s city views suggest a kind of literary post-Impressionism, each view composed of light and death. Cézanne – who painted his own local mountain some thirty-something times, starting always with the shadows – had this to say about materials and time:

II.

At one point in Sydney Journals, Kefala runs into an old friend in Martin Place. This friend seems pale and thin in the wake of a heart attack; he is playing the charmer as of old, but keeps stopping for breath. ‘He was overwhelmed at seeing me, kissed my hands, kissed me on both cheeks, went into his usual little performance, how well I looked. “Unchanged, unchanged,” he kept saying, “like the Acropolis.” “I agree, I agree,” I said, laughing, “a ruin.”’

Kefala’s literature, too, is one of ruination: ruined landscapes, ruined people, ruined language. Characters in her fiction appear as timeworn marble statues or merge into gnarled bits of wood. Her poems tell of ‘broken walls’, of ‘white marble pillaged by the war’, of ‘grounds wasted’ and desolate historical sites. There are statues missing limbs or context – or both. One encounters unbodied voices, muteness and blindness. Only part of the whole is ever graspable at once. The past – history, time, trauma, but later also the death of loved ones, especially Kefala’s mother – persists as a kind of unwanted baggage that cannot be cleared away, cannot be ignored, but must simply be addressed, or come to terms with somehow. Her poems are archaeological sites, taking place against a stage set of stelae. Fittingly, her penultimate collection was called Fragments.

Sometimes Kefala’s short, minimalist lines are grammatically whole; at other times they simply break off, unpunctuated, only a jagged shift of thought. The idiosyncrasies of Kefala’s grammar – her tendency to deictic indication (‘Something of us must remain / in this light’); her postpositive adjectives (‘The marble tobacco stained’); her diaristic use of present-continuous verbs and participles (‘the fountains playing’) – converts people and their actions into broken-off chunks of verbal matter. A sudden shift in perspective – some grammatical lurch – a brief parenthetical (‘you said’) – the addition of new elements to a sequence – or the revelation that what we have just seen is a dreamscape: all these transform the meaning of each fragment. It is easy to fall out of the meaning you know. And this happens, in turn, to people: throughout Kefala’s work, older migrant family members find themselves phasing out as their faces sag, their gestures turn strange, and their cultured European references grow obsolete. In the story ‘Sunday Lunch’, for instance, an old man appears ‘already turning to stone’ as ‘he stretched towards us the familiar gestures, shadows of his old affections’.

Both the speakers of Kefala’s poems and the narrators of her stories suffer from a state of fundamental dislocation: they are on foreign soil, speaking foreign languages, being treated as foreigners. But they are also internally out of sync, their private sense of history – vague memories, family stories, childhood trauma – disconnected from the glossy presentism of the societies they find themselves in. The poem sequence ‘Memory’ from Kefala’s first poetry collection The Alien, which opens with the Sophoclean epigraph, ‘I please those whom I most should please’, jags abruptly into its first lines: ‘Were that enough in these strange lands. / Not even our offerings can rest / aimless in unknown cities.’ In the sequence’s first section, the speaker has a dream of ‘foreign’ streets with menacing blue-uniformed figures. Its second section tells of silence filled with moonlight, waves of sound on dead sand, and a ‘foreign’ laugh echoing through the stillness. Then the speaker turns and, with no clear addressee, explicitly diagnoses a condition of fundamental disorientation:

The regular paths through memory are gone, leaving the addressee (and speaker) to wander through a landscape marked by brokenness and estrangement. That maverick stray sunray, however, catalyses a whole new rearrangement – a quickening the phrase enacts at the level of the letter, where ‘stray’ morphs into ‘sunray’. In another doubling, Kefala uses ‘some’ twice in quick succession: ‘sometime’ and ‘some meaning’. Each ‘time’ or ‘meaning’ is one of many; each lacks clear delineation. What appears in this poem is not the past itself but rather a provisional intimation of it, a moment’s constellation of iterative fragments, offering the kind of wholeness that we, like Tiresias, can perceive only at the cost of our actual sight and capacity for action – but at least it gets things moving. As for Walter Benjamin, a fellow fragment-artist, the past may not be just consumed. It can only be met, in ruptured pieces, as it falls into the present.

That stray sunray might appear to be torn straight from the Romantics’ playbook as an instance of pathetic fallacy. But in Kefala’s poetics, weather is not simply used to mirror her speakers’ or characters’ own internal states; instead, it has a life of its own, desires of its own, a hunger and a thirst that human beings can only tune into, or out of, without ever really being in control (hence the title of her second collection, Thirsty Weather). These elemental forces whoosh across her scenery, animating the ruins and transforming the once-known world. In such scenes, the agency is often displaced, and elusive: is it light that shines, or the dark water that reflects it in ‘Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair’? Are the living at work here, or the dead? The city might seem still, unyielding, glassy – until at night it shivers and stirs like some kind of giant dark creature. In the poem ‘Airport’, runway lights appear as ‘glowing purple flowers’ while the girl working the duty-free store is associated with the unliving and the ‘eternal’. Timber floors turn into glass, somebody’s eyes become agate, fields change to diamonds, bones to gravel, people moths, skin electricity.

Above all it is light that holds the key to Kefala’s lyrical landscapes. Sometimes it is glossy, still, indifferent or anemic. On other occasions it remakes everything into a reality-bending impression: it bursts into flame, it turns into liquid on the footpath, it steams and blooms and sizzles, falls like seeds. In ‘Nameless’, an early poem sequence, Kefala’s speaker addresses some lost familiar ‘you’ as being ‘the resonance / in the fanatic colour / of the sky’ and as ‘intoxicating light / that fans over the sea / a heavy cloth of shimmering / white gems on the horizon’. The addressees know about terror, and about ‘fire rivers’ in the blood of the speaker; they might even hold the means to move past grief. But how can they be reached?

To reconcile this we with this you – the present speaker with the absent addressee, the wanter of knowledge with the haver of knowledge – involves some dangerous alchemy. The we must surrender their ostensible solidity, leaving behind the linear grammar of the poem’s first two lines so as to enter into the elemental and grammatical flux of the subsequent line-bits: that flame, this liquid, night folded; who’s singing? Such magic is not possible if the speaker stays aloof. Whoever wants the light in shining shafts must also face the light in hot white fire. (Think Cézanne, not Pissarro.) For the us to be reconstituted, we would need to first dissolve. Kefala’s selves are made of world – so if the world shifts, they face jeopardy too.

III.

For many decades, Kefala was more or less neglected by the critical establishment, a fact that irked her. She was sensitive to the dynamics of prejudice, and cheered by the cultural opening-up that accompanied Whitlam-era multiculturalism; she even took part in the latter as a public arts administrator. But she never shook the impression that the Australian literary mainstream believed her work to be essentially other. For one thing, she knew it found her overly morbid: ‘Everyone here is trying to escape the issue,’ she once said of death. ‘Oh, they must see me coming and think: “Er, her again! Oh no! What about some jolly business this time, please Antigone!”’ It is tempting to read her in these terms – to consider her, as with her Sophoclean namesake, a figure whose loyalty is to the dead over the living. Yet the presence of death is requisite material. Without dissolving into it, one cannot begin to see the magic of the earth.

What drives Kefala’s writing is not the dead themselves but rather how their traces move among the living: the ways that the present finds itself haunted, thwarted, changed, possessed, or even reanimated by people and things that were supposed gone. One could call this a cosmic state of belatedness – a world where everything is afterwards. Even visits back to the ‘Old World’, as Kefala stages them in poetry and prose, offer no pristine point of origin. (Perhaps tellingly, Kefala’s family had lived in diaspora long before fleeing the continent.) It is tempting to think of Cavafy’s curse in ‘The City’:

Kefala’s Europe books – Summer Visit and European Notebook, plus parts of the journals – are drawn to the apparent continuity with the past over there. But they also show us the neediness of tourists, monuments in pieces, artefacts locked behind glass, old men aged beyond sense. In the poem ‘The Old Palace’, which reimagines a scene in Summer Visit, the speaker feels an alien in Europe as well, its ‘empty grounds’ an ‘accursed landscape’, before the thin voices of children come through the air, asking ‘…lady…lady / who are you looking for?’ Another poem conjures attendants of a church service in a state of tired resignation, ‘as if they too were peeling with time / the stucco falling off their faces’. Those who remained in Europe, even in countries spared the atrocities of Greece, have also been exiled by the catastrophic twentieth century. When in her journals she goes to Paris, she quotes Baudelaire: Ô ruines, ma famille!

In this, Kefala’s work might be considered alongside that of George Seferis, Paul Celan, Durs Grünbein, and Maria Stepanova: cast-out children of a disastered Europe, post-historical authors who take caesura seriously in language. Like them, she probes the immanence of pastness – and of deathness – on the present. The short late poem ‘Day by Day’ booms into a diagnosis of lateness:

There is a bitter self-irony, here, but also something lively: a manifesto, even, for late style. Edward Said described late style, after Theodor Adorno, as the sort of exiled, displaced, death-haunted work that certain great artists produced towards the ends of their lives. ‘Lateness’, he wrote, ‘is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present’. The artist, fluent in their medium, now ‘abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it’. This wilful non-coalescence, this will-to-fragmentation, suits well the work of Kefala – not just her old-age works like Fragments and Late Journals, but the entirety of her oeuvre, in which the condition of lateness is unavoidable from the start. ‘We were born tired,’ she wrote in the poem ‘Epilogue’, ‘already knowing the lassitude of the end’.

IV.

One poem in Thirsty Weather starts out with a challenge, or an aspiration, for her tired generation: ‘To find our measure, exactly, / not the echo of other voices.’ This is easier said than done. Having fled Europe as a child during the Second World War, she might have a special (sixth?) sense for the death and historical pain in all things, but it is the generation before hers that appears throughout her work as timeworn, ruined, and traumatised. Indeed, Kefala’s writings – and her characters, too – are not dutiful servants to historical witness. Refugee camps, occupying soldiers, and military torturers: these are only ever partial apparitions. We never quite hear a refugee narrative in full, only in snatches. The tellers of such stories are portrayed as being lost in memory, incoherent, ossified as timeworn marble, gnarled wood, or stony fragments.

Her younger figures, meanwhile, often attempt to shrug off the burden of these inherited pasts: ‘Why have you left me / this unwanted luggage?’ one asks, gazing out the window. The protagonist of Kefala’s novella The Island, seeking her place as a young woman in exile, feels weighed down by the constant discussions of the past in family homes: she suffers, too, from the sense that everything important has already occurred. These figures are doubly alienated, caught between their inherited familial-historical baggage and the lure (or necessity) of newfound autonomy. The speaker of ‘Coming Home’ asks:

Certainly, there is a fear of forgetting, of silence, and of losing the thread that connects the displaced present to the ancestral past. But the ‘what if’ that begins the poem also points to the power of the poet, relishing the thrill of liberation in authorial self-enunciation. In a way, the speaker is saying: I could abandon you if I wanted, so don’t go pushing it deados.

At times, these younger figures’ disobedience is openly anti-confessional – and post-heroic, too. In the poem ‘Freedom Fighter’, Kefala’s speaker goes as far as to leave out the actual narrative being retold by a survivor:

The poem ends with the survivor telling the speaker to ‘come again’ while looking ‘indifferently’ onto the street, and then intoning once again to ‘come again’. As a literature of hauntedness rather than of witness, it is an essentially subjective project: to Kefala, historicity is in the eye of the beholder. The eruptions of time-consciousness in Kefala’s work are sometimes gorgeously lyrical, sometimes darkly melancholic. At other moments, they seem hostile, as if the workings of a death-haunted observer who wants the world to feel the weight of mortality (and perhaps a grim political history) as well. In the poem ‘The Party’, for instance, a much-awaited ‘hero’ arrives with ‘his face like a skinned animal / eaten by maggots with ice heads / a musty smell about him’. The deathliness – of past, future, or both – is made to coincide in the present by the speaker’s prophetic vision.

Her speakers and narrators explode unmasterable deathliness onto a world that would deny it. That denial is often attributed to the impersonal ‘they’ of Kefala’s poetry, as at the end of the sequence ‘Thirsty Weather’, where a you who ‘had always known our superfluity’ is juxtaposed with some they who are ‘unaware of the terror of trees’ and of the constantly blooming mirrors that remain ’unable to contain the unimagined’. In particular, it is the glibly wealthy anglophone world of her two trans-Tasman homes that gets assaulted with morbidity. New Zealand’s code of silence enables a code of hatred, we learn in the novella Alexia, while in an interview she describes Australia as ‘a place full of terrible things that no one wants to confess to’. Countless scenes in her fiction are peopled by arrogant, indifferent, usually anglo men who will not or cannot perceive the nightmarish omnipresence of mortality and history in the way that Kefala’s speakers can – too weak, naive, or privileged to acknowledge all the forces beyond their measure.

V.

At the centre of Kefala’s fictions are alienated young people with artistic inclinations – usually, but not always, migrant women – trying to find some kind of autonomy and some kind of orientation in places like Sydney, places that insist on their ‘glaze of material well-being’ while being nonetheless stalked by ruination. Love plots, times of grief, academic and artistic adventures, trips to Europe, and experiences of xenophobia and misogyny all appear in more or less fragmentary fashion against the backdrop of Kefala’s lyrical outer and inner landscapes. Intimacy and Conversations with Mother are focused respectively on a marriage breakdown and the loss of a mother. The other books have the atmosphere of roaming Bildungsnovelle, where the Bildung does not come in the form of life lessons but arrives in the development of a certain sense – and sensibility – towards the world, especially through language. 

Take the pair of early novellas published as The First Journey. One features a protagonist who registers ‘[s]ome initial foreignness in [himself] from the beginning’ and ‘a continuous sense of being out of touch with things’, while the other follows a young, recently divorced migrant woman in a Sydney-like city who feels cut off from other people by ‘curtains of time’. The past clings to these characters, but each also makes space for the otherworldly: dreamscapes, time-bending visions, half-surreal explosions of primal energies across otherwise familiar settings. Melina, the second novella’s narrator, lives in a boarding house, and is haunted by memories of music and home. In one scene, she is called to the morgue to identify a body that could be that of the boarding-house owner. ‘Everything is over now,’ she thinks. ‘Only the tired street stretching full of lassitude and I looking for the number.’ But then the narrator reaches the harbour, its ‘gigantic steel abdomen […] dwarfing everything, the sea, the tall buildings’, its ‘tons of steel transformed into black muscular tendons that groan as the train passes’ and underneath it, ‘the water, a black, polished mirror.’ Scenes like these recur throughout her fiction, recalling the interplay of elements in poems like ‘Absence’ and ‘Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair’ – sometimes to such a degree of specificity that it’s as if Kefala is lending her narrators something of her own poetic vision, inaugurating them piecemeal into Kefalaland, even if their biographies do not fully line up with her own.

Under the aspect of this metamorphosis (which, not coincidentally, occurs when the story is concerned with death), the city, for a moment, belongs to the narrator as well. Something shifts in the story from this moment onwards. The narrator takes on more and more of the transformative lyrical magic of Kefala’s poetry. She remembers her grandmother’s funeral, remembers the solidity and indifference of the world that just marched on. The boarding-house woman – who did not actually die – calls Melina to breakfast. ‘I must get up. Start doing something’, she thinks. ‘If I were to die today what would I have to show for my life?’ The novella then ends not with a decisive action, but with a scene of elemental conjuring. As Melina walks alone through city streets, it starts to rain:

The transformation here might feel personal, partial, merely subjective – especially when triggered by specific experiences or memories – but it is never quite explicable, its violence never reassuring. Kefala’s young narrators learn to see the primal energies in everything; their hallucinatory visions turn the hard world liquid – hard tableaux of stony past reshaped by light, wind, rain, and night. They grow attentive to the flickerings of time, to the possibility and risk that comes with the new.

In all this, the experience of alienation is not necessarily a liability. An alien has a different vision. They can understand the distance in things, the difficulty. If the world is essentially strange – if living in time is essentially strange – then a certain degree of estrangement might be a requisite for coming to terms with it, including the fact that forces unmasterable are everywhere at work.

This includes language. Viktor Shklovsky said that ‘what we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things.’ Language, to Kefala, is a material to be worked: and ideally from a distance. In the fable-novella Alexia, her young protagonist moves to the Antipodes with her family. Words don’t quite make sense to her, although a strange poetry is discernible within them. Her brother – a musician, like Kefala’s – is forced into hard labour, exchanging the soulful bowing of his cello for the constant reverberations of a machine, and finds himself unable to play: ‘This new country was not full of “lotus eaters”, as everyone said, but of “resonance eaters”.’ Music, he concludes, is a miracle belonging to the old country. The locals are surly, silent, and hateful; the immigrant family seems drained. And so Alexia turns to language in a moment of insight that Kefala describes in terms of material effort:

Yet just as history is a site of ruination and estrangement, so is language. The writer’s work on the edifice of language is one that leads them out of their philological comfort zone: if you are working properly, you start to perceive it truly for the first time, which means also perceiving the alterity within it. Thus, to encounter those ‘successive generations’ in the language is to experience both refamiliarisation and defamiliarisation at once.

‘As with any type of material,’ Kefala once said in interview, ‘you realise that the material itself has its own laws, its own definitions, its own forms […] that have been shaped by life, environment or culture. You are constantly forced into a combination that you might not like or agree with, or which does not actually express what you want to put across.’ This is especially, but not exclusively, the case for people who have moved between countries and languages. For Alexia, language – in all its non-familiarity – attracts not as the locus for happy continuous unity within the family but rather as something thrillingly individual, something ‘more potent, inventive and durable than people imagined’, something that is capable of producing ‘daily miracles that no one noticed any longer and everyone took for granted’. Facing the alienation in the language means tapping into literature’s power source. Alexia has been noticing that words, throughout that story, are gaining distance from the world. A sound only echoes when it has space to reverberate in; you can’t chisel marble without some space to swing your arm.

Kefala does seem to prize a certain distance from Australian English. When asked in an interview about the influence of Seferis, she made sure to insist on her differences from the older poet – he could do anything he wanted, she argued, because he was working in the language he was born and raised in, whereas she had to come to English anew and develop a whole poetics from scratch. One should never believe authors who say they make things up all on their own, but in utterances like these Kefala shows herself committed to an only-half-at-home-ness in English, perhaps a kind of linguistic Unheimlichkeit. She sometimes spoke in interview of her sense that coming to the language from outside meant bringing ‘baggage’ – and how one realises one is ‘dealing with a construct, something that was created by a group of people with a certain historical base and a certain physical location’. Working at the edifice of Australian English was thus a collective or even cooperative act, with a sense of the common weal: Sydney Journals frets about the intrusion of advertising talk into daily life and mocks Australian poetry that has been written the way men talk in pubs, ‘with no sense of [language’s] fragility, the beautiful energy, the dynamics that can be released when well used’. She fights for an English that has room to fit time – the singularity of death, to be sure, but also the plurality of pasts that people have brought to the material. And so her writing leaves space for repetition, transformation, variation, reverberation (sometimes literally so, as in the late poem ‘After the Reading’ where ‘the cage’ of the poet’s body is ‘the resonating chamber / of an instrument / still vibrating / with the last chords’). Her tendency to fragments, her broken lines, her unstable symbolic matrix: these leave space for onward resonances, even if the language and the landscape are disastered.

The Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada has written of seeking out not necessarily a multiplicity of languages, but rather the ‘ravine between languages’ as a space for creativity. Kefala is, perhaps, most interested in the ravine within the language – or perhaps the ravine between different baggages. She shows herself dedicated to building an Australian English with many linguistic imprints on it, and an Australia with many kinds of baggage inside. Her journals, in particular, show how committed she was to active intellectual friendship with a wide range of Australian authors and artists; they also show how much she loved Australian birds and landscapes. In the poem ‘Friends’, Kefala conjures these milieux with an understated affection: ‘All of us wounded people / stubbornly / analysing the condition.’ The poet Anna Couani has described the symbolic value of these journals, documents that pull in Kefala’s haut cosmopolitan touchstones alongside local milieux of cultural production: ‘Gertrude Stein, Goethe, Genet, Cavafy, Xenakis, Angelopoulos, Gogol, Berlioz, Brancusi, Byron, Klimov, Akhmatova and about 500 more. All mixed in together with “us”.’

Much has been written about that us, about the more or less explicit mechanisms by which Australia’s literary mainstream has excluded female authors with migration in their background – especially, perhaps, those who like Kefala refuse to simply do confession or witness or experience-chronicling in an easily consumable way. And much of Kefala’s critical reception has had to do with questions around the extent to which she is a Greek author, an Australian author, a woman author, a diasporic author. Kefala once wrote in an essay that, when asked whether she considered herself an Australian author or a migrant author, she would reply that of course she was both. These questions are not just a matter of semantics; they certainly were not during her career. Vrasidas Karalis and Efi Hatzimanolis, among others, have described how influentially Kefala’s work enabled and inspired the Greek- and otherwise hyphenated Australian authors who came after her.

But with the posthumous release of these two volumes – Fiction and Poetry – there seems an opportunity to insist on a broad canonisation of her as a literary author as well. This is not an unpolitical way to read her work. Every piece of literature is an intervention in the present; every bit of poesis an intervention in the language. For Kefala, this present was an Australian one – more specifically a Sydney one – and this language was in her case Australian English. Yet more often than not interior conditions are played out over local landscapes in terms of universal elements. In Sydney Journals, she notes something Patrick White says on the radio: that Australian literature ‘can only be developed from inner experiences, that is, when there are people making inner discoveries in this landscape, and having the courage to write about them’. Kefala’s visions are forceful, but never definitive, their essential lability meaning that every fragment’s meaning might be different any instant, fractally rearranged by the passage of time or the viewer’s baggage. Even her Sydney is one of many potential Sydneys: in the harbour’s ‘rip of darkness’ (to return to Slessor’s poem), there is space for countless pasts and countless ‘inner discoveries’, too – none elbowed out or delegitimised by another. Nothing only has one meaning. Kefala’s work penetrates the glossy anglophone Antipodean mainstream with inconvenient selfhood – and creates a present in which many deaths, many pasts, many linguistic histories can coexist. If that is not political, I don’t know what is.

Kefala has also now arrived on the global anglophone literary market, with the US publisher Transit releasing The Island last year and Sydney Journals this year – alas, no poetry yet. It helps nobody to be a persnickety provincial gatekeeper, but certain small factual errors in The Island’s American reception do stand out. One or two pieces seem to think that novella is set in Australia rather than New Zealand, while a listicle at Lithub seemed to think the book had been translated into English – presumably on account of its author not having a name like Helen or Gerald. The hard commercial facts notwithstanding, the absence of Kefala’s poetry in shaping her US reception is regrettable, and not just for the poems’ sake; without this context, readers might miss the extent that her young prose narrators are shown to be thinking as poets, or proto-poets at least. Reading her – in the US style – as an autobiographical fictioneer also risks missing the distance she holds from the figures in her work, many of whom are not simply Kefala stand-ins, her interest being more in states and conditions rather than individual trajectories. It might sound strange to say, especially of a diarist, but Kefala strikes me as an unusually un-confessional author. The act of saying, explaining, reviving might get done – but it has no special status in her work. And there is no real juicy beef in her journals, which are better read anyway as nonfiction prose experiments that make use of ‘lived experience’ than as author’s diaries in the generic sense.

Is something coming through in all this handwringing: a fear of Kefala’s being pigeonholed and limited in her global reception to a fearless chronicler of marginalised experience, to being the voice of her generation, or at least a voice for a generation? I’ve certainly done this when recommending her work around Berlin: here is the great poet of the multiculturalism era, the bard of those postwar migrants who remade Australia into the place I kind of love, that generation who gave the nation (say) Addison Road Community Centre, Tina Arena, and the Postecoglous. But every time I do that, it feels wrong. Her corpus is inflected by marginalisation, but that does not make it an essentially marginal one. It is instead a minor universalism, one that aims at the metamorphosis – the alienation – of the entire shared world. She makes all her readers into aliens too; in exchange, we get to see the stone as stony again. She is the national poet for an alien nation. In this, I think it suits my city well: beautiful and cruel and diverse, stolen by settlers and remade by migrants, and surreal-seeming from where I am currently writing, a snowy greyed-in city in the disastered heart of Europe, some 16,000 kilometres distant, a place from which the time-filled Sydney Harbour – all that land, and all that water – is visible only by moving the yellow Google Maps man around.

VI.

‘Was this our home? We kept asking,’ Kefala writes in the early poem, ‘Wayfarers’. In her sixty-two years in Sydney, she watched over surges of openness, surges of provincialism. Having been excluded from the mainstream, she fought to widen its apertures, not least through literary friendships. Always she worked at our edifice of language. And she painted the city, its harbour, in her poetry and prose. At the end of Sydney Journals, Kefala is returning from a trip to Europe when her plane flies over the Opera House and Bridge. ‘I am very pleased,’ she thinks, looking down on her alien homeland. ‘I am pleased with the blueness of the sky. I am pleased’, she concludes, ‘as if I had had a hand in making the place.’