Vassilis Alexakis’s Mother Tongue: regarding the Identity of a Greek-French/French-Greek writer?

Abstract

Vassilis Alexakis is an artist (novelist, filmmaker, cartoonist, journalist...) born in Greece in 1943. In 1961 he went to France for the first time when he got a grant to study Journalism in Lille. Having finished theses studies, he returned to Greece in 1964 to do his military service. Three years later, the coup d'état in Greece and the installation of the military regime (Colonels’ regime, 1967-1974) forced him into exile. He returned to France, this time to Paris, where he settled till nowadays that he is travelling constantly between France and Greece, living a life divided between two countries and two languages. His works, drawn from two cultures, and written in Greek and French, explore the relationship between identity and language, are complete with multicultural themes, and references to the memory and the self, and exile, loss, and gain. Due to his languages, the reception of his books in his homeland and his country of adoption is quite curious: Alexakis is considered as a foreign writer (French author) in Greece and as “the most Greek of the French writers” in France.