MARIA A. JOANNU
Intermediates
ed.. Nepheli, page 176

A fully open mouth in the form of a beautiful scream screams “help” in the first sentence of the book. Mouths that break, that break, that grow and fill, lurk in several stories in the collection. A nursing home resident languishes in a chair, and brainless jumpers are lost around him. “Flies dive into snoring mouths, tiny insect wings stick to tonsils like mint leaves.” The old man’s mouth, wide open and mute with incurable grief, let out a “cellophane-wrapped cry.” Elsewhere, the head of an elderly schizophrenic woman mutates into an irregularly flashing orb as she whispers “with stinky lips stuck together, ‘you’re going crazy, you’re going crazy after all those volts.'”

In the story “Longing”, a woman who may have dreamed of a fish is disgusted by what happens when a marriage rots. “Like one day your whole mouth will be full of algae. How are you going to start spitting fish.” The allegory of fishing is also drowned out by another story, where the girl feels herself being erased by cuttlefish ink, spreading like a gloomy stain on the family table. As the cuttlefish gurgled “its dark juices,” a muffled screech caressed the mother’s throat. “Don’t spit on me!” asks a woman for the mouth of her lover, in which she has put her life. Maria Ioannou (Limesos, 1982) is an interesting prose writer who tries to take an innovative look at the familiar. Standing apart is her collection Cauldron (2015), where she explores the horse through depersonalization. The anti-realism of language presupposes the inability to rationally depict the repressed existential trauma. In the latest short stories, we see a rapid break in reality with strong collisions. Ioannou observes the wounded world on the border of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Sometimes this border and its crossing take on a heartbreaking meaning, like the man in the story “The Cut” who asked all kinds of victims “did you cross the green line?”. In addition to the explicit reference to the 1974 Turkish invasion, which is repeated in prose, the man’s question indicates that he lives in a fragmented reality mined by fragments.

The bloody mutilation marks the end of married life. A man takes his wife’s hand as a prey, so that he has something to hold on to. She tightly squeezed her severed hand and, looking at “that strong double fist”, uttered a monologue: “she will repent, she will soften, her hard fingers will finally wriggle, they will squeeze me too.” The best story in the collection again deals with family troubles. After the loss of his daughter, a man turns into a gaping, bulimic mouth while his wife struggles to hold onto her sunken belly the memory of the missing body between them.

Ioannou has an undeniable skill as a writer, accompanied by the originality of her gaze, despite all the fact that she does not always manage to contain the revelry of unbridled parasthetic visions. In one prose, the absurd is limited to the absurd (e.g., the indescribable monologues of the toaster and photocopier), and in other places the imposition of realism by imaginary extremes acts as an accelerator of holoforms. Poems in the Cypriot dialect testify to the lyrical orientation of the writing. The memorial poetic writing, which is not helped at all by the Cypriot timbre, is a foreign body in the book, especially because of the political overtones, and seriously harms the author’s hyper-realistic attempt to turn pain into a slurred scream.