Border Poetics: Becoming Cypriot in the Dead Zone

Abstract

The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, an autoethnographic account of Cypriot poetics considers the extent to which language, literature and translation have played a crucial, often destructive and sometimes transformative part in the formation of post-colonial Cypriot identities and poetics; secondly, the article examines how contemporary Anglophone writers in/of Cyprus redefine Cypriot literary canons, languages and territories. This redefinition enables a new transformative poetics to occur, or, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, a process of ‘becoming-minor’ as an act of radical deterritorialisation can be initiated. To speak of politics and poetry at the border between the Republic of Cyprus and the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is to write from the border between languages, between myth and memory, as well as between politically defined territories; moving through rather than only thinking about the politics of poetics. If Cypriotness is to travel beyond a memory or fantasy of Cyprus before its division, the first step is to refuse to accept the authority of chronological and hierarchical national narratives of official canons in favour of the diverse deterritorialised compendium as an anti-canon. This means making an attempt to disrupt oppressive dominant narratives, not by replacing or erasing them (the repressed returns), but by weaving new routes through the old ruins and living in the spaces between these routes.

Keywords:

• autoethnography
• memory
• borders
• Dead Zone
• no man’s land
• deterritorialisation
• Cypriot literature

Notes

1. Freud defines the unheimlich, or the uncanny, as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar. The unheimlich is not an opposition to the heimlich, the homely, private and intimate. Rather than a fear of the unknown, or of intellectual indeterminacy, the unheimlich marks the return of the repressed, of fear of the familiar (Freud, 1919: 219).

2. See Hatay (2008) for a discussion of the statue’s pigeon problem and Turkish Cypriot identity.

3. The 11 tonne, 10 metre-high statue by Nikos Kotziamanis was sculpted in 1987 and erected in 1993. In 2008, the new Archbishop Chryostomos II stated that the statue was out of proportion with its surroundings and ordered its removal from outside the Archbishop’s Palace in the centre of Nicosia to Archbishop Makarios’s burial place near Kykkos Monastery in the mountains. The statue was replaced by a life-size white marble statue of Archbishop Makarios (Cyprus Mail, 2008).

4. The Cypriot National Guard and EOKA B led by the Greek Junta launched a coup to overthrow the democratically elected President, Archbishop Makarios III, on 15 July 1974. On 22 July the Turkish invasion began with warships landing on the northern coast of the island.

5. After the 1974 conflict the Turkish Cypriot territory, which included Greek Cypriot land taken in the 1974 Turkish invasion, came under the jurisdiction of a democratic but legally unrecognised entity called the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus. In November 1983 the Parliament of the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). In November 1983 the Security Council of the UN adopted Resolution 541, which described the attempt to create the TRNC as ‘legally invalid’, called for the withdrawal of the Declaration of Independence and asked all countries not to recognise the new republic. The Republic of Cyprus considers that it alone has legal jurisdiction over the whole island and regards the TRNC as an illegal entity; the Turkish Cypriot sector is viewed then as occupied territory.

6. Greek expansionism in Asia Minor was entitled the ‘Great Idea’ by the Prime Minister of Greece in 1922. It was a cultural, political and ultimately military project of integrating these regions into the Greek state in accordance with the triptych of religion, culture and language. The ‘Great Idea’, as Triandafyllidou and Veikou (2002) indicate, was instrumental for the transformation and unification of a traditionally divided society into a nation-state. Consequently, the Greek nation-state projected itself as the national and cultural epicentre of Greek people living in the Balkans, the Near and the Middle East.

7. An example of such a publication would be Kibris Siirleri Antolojisi (The Cypriot Poetry Anthology), which features a soldier and an outline of Cyprus and a Turkish flag on the cover (Ersavas, 1954).

8. Ottoman literatures produced many hybrid and now defunct conjunctions of alphabets and languages, including Karamanlis, Turkish written using the Greek alphabet, which was used principally by the Christian Orthodox Turkish-speaking peoples of Cappadocia. By contrast, Greek-speaking Muslims of the Ottoman era often wrote Greek in Ottoman script. The first Turkish-language novel of the Ottoman era, Akabi (1851) by Vartan Pasha, was written in Turkish using Armenian script.

9. See Stephanides (2011: 44–47) for a discussion of Seferis and Durrell and their place in the Greek Cypriot literary canon.

10. Taner Baybars (1936–2010), a Turkish Cypriot poet, left Cyprus at the age of 20 never to return, settling first in London and then in the south of France. He wrote principally in English and French.

11. Lysandros Pitharas (1960–1992) was a London poet of Greek Cypriot extraction. Cypriot identity and homosexual desire are central themes in his poetry.

12. See my autoethnographic essay on Pitharas’s poetry, and about our friendship as Cypriot poets writing in English (Adil, 2009).