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Abstract
This paper deals with the hospitality and hostility of Turkish Cypriot identity in North Cyprus in its various configurations today. It contends that we become who we are by extending hospitality to different and differing representations of who we are like a name or a land, all the while being unable to reduce this differential relationship to a self-identical ipseity. This differential relationship is the origin of identity and not a singularly self-sufficient subjectivity inherited from a past history and culture. Using the alibi of an inheritance cannot hide our complicity in the production of that history and culture anew in the present. This shift in perspective opens “Turkish Cypriot identity” to its future becoming, hopefully to a future beyond ethnocentrism, towards a form of solidarity different from the border politics of a paternal hospitality like that of nation states.
Notes
[1] Raka Shome, “Internationalizing Critical Race Communication Studies: Transnationality, Space, and Affect,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 150.
[2] Dreama G. Moon, “Critical Reflections on Culture and Critical Intercultural Communication,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 41.
[3] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in The Feminist Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur,” in Europe and Its Others, Vol. 1 (Colchester, UK: University of Essex, 1985).
[4] Kent A. Ono, “Reflections on Problematizing ‘Nation’ in Critical Intercultural Communication,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 88.
[5] Individual identity, selfhood, from Latin ipse meaning self.
[6] I borrow the phrase from Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
[7] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 76.
[8] Shome, “Internationalizing Critical Race Communication Studies,” 160–61.
[9] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.
[10] Mehmet Yashin, ed., Step-Mothertongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000).
[11] Mehmet Yashin, ed., Step-Mothertongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000), 1.
[12] Mehmet Yashin, ed., Step-Mothertongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000), 1.
[13] In his chapter on “Ethics,” Jonathan Roffe writes: “self is nothing without an other, or others, to which it has a fundamental and fundamentally constituting relationship.” Jonathan Roffe, “Ethics,” in Understanding Derrida, ed. Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe (New York: Continuum, 2004), 38.
[14] Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43.
[15] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1.
[16] Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2.
[17] Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, Gisela Welz, “Introduction,” in Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 10.
[18] Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, Gisela Welz, “Introduction,” in Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 10.
[19] Spyros Spyrou, “Children Constructing Ethnic Identities in Cyprus,” in Divided Cyprus, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 129.
[20] Moon, “Critical Reflections,” 39.
[21] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279. Here, Derrida argues, “The concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself … —is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire,” seeking a “reassuring certitude” to overcome the “anxiety” created by being “implicated in the game.”
[22] Moon, “Critical Reflections,” 38.
[23] Moon, “Critical Reflections,” 41.
[24] Tuğrul İlter and Sevda Alankuş, “The Changing Configurations of Self-(M)other Dialogue in North Cyprus,” Social Identities 16, issue 2 (2010): 263.
[25] Tuğrul İlter and Sevda Alankuş, “The Changing Configurations of Self-(M)other Dialogue in North Cyprus,” Social Identities 16, issue 2 (2010): 263.
[26] In discussing the UN Security Council Resolution 186 which established a UN peacekeeping force with the consent of “the Cyprus government” in 1964, to prevent further intercommunal fighting between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Makarios Drousiotis refers to “the greatest success [of the Greek Cypriot President Makarios]” consisting in “the Security Council's reference to the government of Cyprus, in which the Turkish Cypriots were no longer participating, having broken away,” and adds that “It is on this reference that international recognition of the purely Greek Cypriot government as the legal government of Cyprus is based to this day.” Makarios Drousiotis, The First Partition: Cyprus 1963–1964, trans. Xenia Andreou (Nicosia: Alfadi Publications, 2008), 173.
[27] “Ghetto” is perhaps a more familiar term for readers who are not familiar with the local term “enclave.”
[28] Drousiotis, The First Partition.
[29] To ensure the survival of the bi-communal constitution of the Republic of Cyprus, Britain, Greece, and Turkey were assigned as guarantors of the Republic at its foundation. See Nicholas D. Macris, ed., The 1960 Treaties on Cyprus and Selected Subsequent Acts (Mannheim and Möhnesee: Bibliopolis, 2003).
[30] Rebecca Bryant, “An Ironic Result in Cyprus,” Middle East Information and Research Project, May 12, 2004, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero051204 (accessed June 20, 2014).
[31] Avrupa, April 20, 2001.
[32] Mete Hatay, Is the Turkish Cypriot Population Shrinking?: An Overview of the Ethno-Demography of Cyprus in the Light of the Preliminary Results of the 2006 Turkish-Cypriot Census (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute [PRIO], 2007), 2–3.
[33] Mete Hatay, Is the Turkish Cypriot Population Shrinking?: An Overview of the Ethno-Demography of Cyprus in the Light of the Preliminary Results of the 2006 Turkish-Cypriot Census (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute [PRIO], 2007), ix.
[34] Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 18.
[35] This also seems to be the case among some established immigrants. In an interview published in Yenidüzen newspaper, a Bulgarian-Turkish immigrant says, “My feelings for Cyprus have grown cold, it has received too many immigrants” (September 2, 2009).
[36] Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53.
[37] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 156.
[38] Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 37.
[39] Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 45.
[40] Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 42.
[41] Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 37.
[42] Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 149.
[43] Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 149.
[44] Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 305.
[45] Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 11.
[46] Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 6.
[47] Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 7.
[48] Ono, “Reflections on Problematizing ‘Nation’,” 95.
[49] This intrication of hostility with hospitality has led Derrida to coin the new term hostipitality. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, No. 3 (December 2000). It is spelled as hostpitality in Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 45.
[50] Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 55.
[51] Mehmet Ali Talat, the second president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus relates that when a visiting minister from Turkey said to him, “You have everything,” he responded by saying, “yes, but we don't have a future,” quoted in Hatice Kurtuluş and Semra Purkıs, Kuzey Kıbrıs'ta Türkiyeli Göçmenler (İstanbul: Türkiye Iş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2012), 284.
[52] European Network Against Racism's Shadow Report 2011–2012, covering both the South and the North, refers to “the mainstreaming of a most negative, xenophobic and many times outright racist narrative around migrants and refugees”; Leandros Savvides, Fezile Osum, and Faika Deniz Pasha, Racism and Related Discriminatory Practices in Cyprus (Brussels: European Network Against Racism), 5. Yenidüzen had reported earlier that in a Europe-wide poll conducted in 2008 in the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots had come out as the most xenophobic in Europe (November 10, 2009).
[53] The word “barbarian,” a word traceable to Greek, was used by Ancient Greeks pejoratively as an antonym of “citizen” (belonging to a civilized city-state), and referred to those whose languages were incomprehensible to them, or those who spoke Greek badly. See also Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy, and Merryl Wyn Davies, Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism (London: Pluto Press, 1993).
[54] Niyazi Kızılyürek, Milliyetçilik Kıskacında Kıbrıs (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002); Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004b); Tuğrul İlter and Sevda Alankuş, “The Changing Configurations of Self-(M)other Dialogue in North Cyprus,” Social Identities 16, issue 2 (2010): 261–84.
[55] İlter and Alankuş, “The Changing Configurations,” 261.
[56] Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 55.
[57] Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 137.
[58] Reported by Ali Kişmir in his column “Bağımsız Köşe,” in Afrika, December 14, 2012.
[59] In one cartoon, Ömer Dayı says, “Cypriot is both my essence and adjective.”
[60] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity and Difference: Culture, Media and Identities, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 51.
[61] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity and Difference: Culture, Media and Identities, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 52.
[62] This is why Benedict Anderson refers to the “nation” as an “imagined community” and why Salman Rushdie writes of “imaginary homelands.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), 10.
[63] Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 52.
[64] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 54.
[65] Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 17.
[66] Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 27.
[67] Yenidüzen reports how a couple of migrants who were granted citizenship on November 29, 2012 were employed at Akçiçek Hospital in Kyrenia, beginning on January 2, 2013, as an example of such patronage and clientelism (January 4, 2013). UBP has a well-deserved reputation in this regard, and many unions and NGOs have often complained about this.
[68] Because these granting of citizenships serve self-serving goals, they too betray unconditional hospitality.
[69] Yenidüzen, February 25, 2013.
[70] Afrika, April 21, 2008.
[71] Yenidüzen, January 8, 2013.
[72] Yeni Kıbrıs Partisi (YKP), Kıbrıs'ın Kuzeyindeki Nüfus Yapısı. DVD (Lefkoşa: Yeni Kıbrıs Partisi Lefkoşa Bölge Örgütü, 2008).
[73] Serkan Soyalan and Mahmut Anayasa, “Mahmut Anayasa ile İsyanım İşgale,” Adres Kıbrıs (May 4, 2013), 33.
[74] Afrika, September 11, 2009.
[75] Yenidüzen, January 10, 13, 15, 2013.
[76] Yenidüzen, January 3, 2011.
[77] Kurtuluş and Purkıs, Kuzey Kıbrıs'ta Türkiyeli Göçmenler.
[78] Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, vii.
[79] Kurtuluş and Purkıs, Kuzey Kıbrıs'ta Türkiyeli Göçmenler, 30, 288–308.
[80] Kurtuluş and Purkıs, Kuzey Kıbrıs'ta Türkiyeli Göçmenler, 30, 49–119.
[81] Fatma Güven-Lisaniler, Sevin Uğural, and Leopoldo Rodriguez, “Human Rights of Migrant Women Workers in Janitorial Services and Night Clubs: A Case of North Cyprus,” International Journal of Social Economics 35, issue 6 (2008): 435–48.
[82] Fatma Güven-Lisaniler, Sevin Uğural, and Leopoldo Rodriguez, “Human Rights of Migrant Women Workers in Janitorial Services and Night Clubs: A Case of North Cyprus,” International Journal of Social Economics 35, issue 6 (2008): 435–48.
[83] Kurtuluş and Purkıs, Kuzey Kıbrıs'ta Türkiyeli Göçmenler, 121–47.
[84] Yenidüzen, January 3, 2011.
[85] Derrida, Negotiations, 12.
[86] Ono, “Reflections on Problematizing ‘Nation,’” 89.