Why Did I Write About the Minotaur Myth?

For the special issue of Skull & Laurel Magazine 002, I wrote about the myth of Daedalus and the labyrinth. At its centre lay the mythical beast, the Minotaur, half of a man and half of a bull. The Minotaur itself is imbued with skills of secrecy, stealth, brute strength, and horrible intelligence.

I was attracted to the myth, due to my family background. I am mixed (English, Scottish, Greek, and Ibaloi), but I wanted to write about my entire family through the lens of my Greek heritage. My mother's father, my papou, is from Smyrna in Anatolia. This city experienced a genocide during the rise of Kemalism and the Turkish nation-state. I wrote a story called "Meander," which is featured as a sample story (shown below), because I wanted to write about a sense of disrepair, damage, lost connections, and frayed ends. This is what it is like to be a refugee or victim of an ethnic conflict. My dynastic lines, my family history, is an intersection rather than a linear road.

A sample of "Meander" in Skull & Laurel Magazine. I view it as an allegory for the meandering nature of genealogy and the twisting paths our families take before and after bringing us into the world.

I used the story as a safe space, or sandpit, to explore my mixed identity and to shed light on the trauma that was a backdrop for my family. It is an indirect critique, not a criticism (because critique means to better understand something), of the world at large. Why do we love to wage war, and wage war for love? Why do we kill and birth more killers? The story features figures of mythology, like the Minotaur, Persephone (or Kore), and Adonais. These are analogues, not quite neat ones, for the ways my family may use remembrance to deal with death, violence, war, and love.

The special issue was supposed to feature work from people of Southern European heritage; the shared, myriad mythology of the Minotaur features heavily in the culture of not only the Greeks, but Italians, Yugoslavians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Cretans, Cypriots, and even people from modern-day Turkey.

The special issue was open to any Southern European peoples, including Greek diaspora, which I belong to as a descendent of people from Smyrna (now Izmir) in Anatolia.

But why the myth of the Minotaur? The Minotaur is, directly or indirectly, linked with the creation of the written word. As research for this story, I looked into the creation of Minoan civilisation and the cracking of the Minoan code from the time of Linear A to Linear B. The languages making up Minoan or Mycenean, as with most origins of language, were not understood for a very long time. I researched how Michael Ventris "cracked the code" by questioning his assumptions. He asked himself, "Is this Minoan script, or set of pictures, not another language just like Greek, rather than ideograms and hieroglyphs?" — or something to that effect.

Minoan scripts and language were too perplexing, even for most 20th century linguists. I used the deciphering of Minoan, or Linear B, as an allegory for the complex nature of deciphering cultural heritage and genetic backgrounds.

Another reason why I wanted to write about mythology and my own background was to make better sense of the story-telling nature of how I came to be, or how my ancestors understood their self-conception. I wanted to draw parallels between self-concept, the 'I', with the decryption of signs, pictograms, ideograms, and ideas themselves.

This may not make much sense here, but that is why you should read the story to find out! But I will give some clues here, which may help to unlock the story. Let this be my miniature version of literary tropes, some sort of roman a clef. And I realized an answer to unlock the question, What am I?

By the end of the story, this key, this answer, is crafted. An answer might to my existence might be "the meeting of two flames." And my flames are of two different colours, which is why I feature Kore and Adonais as different colours, or two flame. They mix to bring about the 'I'. I agree this sounds confusing, but the meeting of two flames is confusing, the very idea of the self is confusing, the very question of origin is confusing.

I used the research on Linear A and B to question my assumptions on the question, "What am I?"

We often use mythology as a narrative base or story to create our own self-conception. We must think about the dynastic roots, the ancestral veins, and the genealogical tree that sprouts and twists in ways we cannot come to understand fully.

For me, I feel that ancestry is complicated and almost incognisable, an enigma and a puzzle that affects our life in varied ways. So many ways, indeed, that we cannot begin to fathom all the implications. It is our history, our myth, and haunts us to this day.

A maze can be seen as a sort of game, with twisting tunnels and corridors that disappear and reappear in variegated ways. That is what our ancestry is like!