This particular interview was conducted in English. Alexandros grew up in Athens, where he went to school and then studied medicine at the University of Athens. After graduate work in the United States, he is currently on the faculty of a major teaching hospital there.
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I could not understand why I had been sent out of the room, and I tried to get an answer from her in the summer of 2006. “Why did you not want me to listen to the news then?” I asked.
“It was dangerous,” she said. “Had anyone asked you in the street if we listened to foreign news, what would you have done?”
I pointed out that I already knew that they were listening to foreign news, the only thing I didn't know was what the news said.
“It was too dangerous,” my mother said again, even more emphatically.
“It was one of the three times in my life when I saw my father carry his gun,” my friend Alexandros said when I asked him what he remembered from this day. “Are you interviewing me?” he asked. I said that I was. “Good,” he said, laughingly. “Can I have my picture in the book, too?” I said that if he had one from then I would use it. “Yes, I will give you a picture from then. So, it was Sunday morning…”
“It was Friday morning,” I interrupted him.
“Do you want my story or not?” he said.
I nodded. Of course I wanted his story, even though I knew that the beginning of it was wrong. This is the nature of fieldwork. How could I get the story if I kept interrupting him? But how could I go on pretending that I did not know that what he was saying was wrong, since I myself “had been there,” I had seen it, I, too, had cheered at not having school that day? I had to be the ethnographer, but my “nativeness” kept tripping me up. As Renato Rosaldo has put it, “I didn't know if I had to put on my loin cloth or pick up my pencil and paper.” I decided to err on the side of my discipline, but not before one last attempt. “It was not Sunday morning,” I said, “because it was a school day and every other account that we have from that day of people our age mentions exactly the same thing: cheers at not having school.”
“We didn't have school that day,” Alexandros said. “It was not a school day. It was Sunday, because my grandmother had gone to church,” he continued.“Your grandmother could have gone to church because she was, obviously, a very religious person,” I said.
“My grandmother had gone to church because it was Sunday,” he said again, “and my mother would know.”
I gave him my cell phone. “Call your mother,” I said.
“Let me tell you my story, and then we'll call her, but you are wrong,” he continued.
I gave in for the moment. “Go on,” I said, “tell me what happened.”
“We were sitting down at breakfast; it was 8:15 in the morning. I remember this very well—my father was there with a glass of milk in front of him.”
“What did your father do for a living?” I asked.
Renato Rosaldo has commented convincingly on the nuances and perplexities of maintaining a secure and fixed position in anthropological accounting, particularly in the context of the complications and complicities always inherent in the act of conceptualizing, recording, transmitting, translating, mediating, inhabiting, and living in the position of the ethnographer (Rosaldo 1989: 45).