Valia Tsirigoti was born ten days before Chernobyl, on the cat-island of Saint Helena, but she grew up in Athens. She studied Social and Human Sciences, which she continues to pursue and loves, specializing in Psychotherapy, as well as in Art and Culture. She has written for poetry magazines, documentaries, a little for the theater (though she hopes to do more in the future), for collective volumes, on the internet, and on napkins. She misses Helsinki a lot, as well as some people who died but fortunately continue to live. Atlas of Healing is her first book.

Atlas of Healing, recently published by Tri.ena Politismou, has been described as a hybrid chronicle. Tell us a few things about the book.

Atlas of Healing is a collection of small texts – fragments, almost – that eventually form a vast map. It is a chronicle, for each time it is everyday life that provides the spark. A daily life that passes through like a procession, striving to find others. It is hybrid, because it weaves together a kind of heavy realism with another realm. Some would call that realm magical, others fantastical; I call it metamorphosis. The idea of metamorphosis haunts me in many ways. It is also hybrid because it weds different languages, at times approaching the tone of an essay, at others seeking to converse with poetry; sometimes speaking in a voice I think wholly childlike, and sometimes in one entirely aged. The notion of hybridity preoccupies me both in life and in art. I am fascinated by how genetically disparate materials can ultimately form a whole.

The title – Atlas – evokes a kind of mapping, a certain orientation. What kinds of landscapes – emotional, collective, symbolic – are you mapping in the book?

When the idea of mapping first began to take shape within me, that is of using the texts as places, or landscapes, as you might say, I think it had to do with a new universe I longed to create. It was as if, in some way, each text possessed a place of origin. And that place marked the depths from which each story was born. That is why the first text of the book is Big Bang – the explosion that gives birth to a new universe. The first section is The Aleph Gate, inspired by Borges, and it gathers together texts connected by an invisible axis that revolves around chance. A subversive kind of chance, which ultimately becomes the very force that propels you forward; the gate through which you enter this world.

All the landscapes – valleys, mountains, hills, rivers – that have found their own names, I would say they seek to chart a collective emotion, or perhaps to become a place truly lived in. The Mountain “I Miss You Deeply, Down to the Bone” maps the corporeality of absence; The Park of Sorrow’s Reversal becomes the place where grief is undone; while The Valley of the Love That Never Arrived hums softly for all that we never managed to reach. My connection with theatre often leads me toward this strange coexistence of spatialities: imagined locations and paths that give body to words. Perhaps it also recalls the way I survived what we all call childhood; through a game where naming something means it exists, and that existence becomes a kind of solace. Whatever exists, keeps you company.

The book moves through intimate, everyday spaces—a bathroom, a kitchen, a prison cell—elevating them into places of memory and healing. How did you choose these settings, and what role do they play in your narrative?

I don’t know if I would have thought of it, had you not asked. The everyday spaces that slip between my emotional landscapes emerged organically. They were like pauses along an intensely charged journey; the chair you seek for a moment, so that the mythical doesn’t sweep you away entirely. I write, in a way, with my body, and I saw myself walking, and somewhere ahead, humanity would appear, like a light on a vast highway, the kind of light that tells you: there is home, there are people there. They are all familiar, habitable spaces. I would say easily habitable, in the sense of daily use, and at the same time unbearably habitable, bearing the weight of what they hold. A kitchen, a bathroom, a waiting room, a cell; life unfolding in endless parallel versions.

At the same time, I think these places also mark, quite strongly, the urban – the solitude of the city. It is, without doubt, a book that carries within it my own city, Athens. Athens is always there, both my refuge and my torment. I love the city deeply, even as I recognize the toxic fragments of our relationship. Within these everyday spaces, I felt the need to create rituals; like frames within a paradoxical pilgrimage.

You describe your work as part of a “literature of care”. What does care mean to you—not just as a theme, but as an ethos of writing?

I find it beautiful that, in our conversation, you place care and ethos within the same sentence. In Homeric times, the word ēthos meant dwelling, in a sense, a familiar place. For me, care is that familiar place. Familiarity itself is a co-creation. I do not believe in an ethos of writing as moral instruction, didacticism, or a prescribed ideological stance. What concerns me is a language that does not retraumatize or stigmatize its subjects. For me, that is also a political position. I am drawn to a language of liberation; one that is born through care.

How do you approach language as a tool for both rupture and repair? Do you think literature can truly heal—or does it simply name the wound?

Language as rupture and language as restoration presuppose one another. There is no language of restoration without first having a language of rupture. It resembles that old familiar slogan: “there can be no peace without justice.” To write in the age of neoliberalism is, perhaps, already a first act of rupture. I do not believe that literature can change the world or human beings, but I do believe that literature can become the place of the visible. And visibility changes the world. Literature does not heal; it names trauma, as you say. When trauma is named, it enters a trajectory toward healing.

Language is always the one that describes phenomena. What it describes, how it does so, from which perspective it stands, which story it tells – all of this can subvert the phenomena themselves. Thus, even if literature cannot change the planet or heal our wounds, it can become a refuge where we can pause, tend to them, behold them, and embrace the wronged and the suffering. That alone, even if it does not fully heal us, becomes healing in itself;
a rupture and a restoration.

With your background in sociology, mental health, and therapeutic writing, how do theory and practice converge in your literary process?

I may disappoint you with my answer, but I feel that our era has become so saturated with psychological discourse that I would prefer it not to dominate my literature. Yet, both the social and what pertains to the psyche are absolutely part of the themes I choose. The field of mental health has been, for me, a spiritual catalyst. It has forged me in a way, and it is present in my process, though under different terms. It has shaped who I am. I would say, then, that the aspects of therapy and mental health do not concern my practice directly, but they profoundly shape the way I think, through another path. From very early on, I have had both the fortune and the burden, through my work, to walk alongside human suffering. Stories have reached me that made me understand, from an early age, that pain and death are common destinies; nothing can shield us from them.

Writing is a way for me to process what surrounds me; and the stories that reach me. I certainly draw constantly from this coexistence with my work, but in an experiential way. I believe wholeheartedly in the transformative power of writing. I believe that writing changes us; the psychological richness that emerges when people are able to connect is astonishing. For me, literature is survival. If several days pass without writing, I feel imprisoned. Sociology, however, is indeed present in my writing process, but in a more methodological way. I often approach my work with a sociological methodology – almost sadistically. I consider it absolutely necessary. It is not always visible in the final result, but sometimes, to write a single sentence, I may have worked exactly as I would in a social research project, or read extensively to substantiate and understand a social theory.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE