Writing Gifted Baby Cyprus: Anticolonial Ethnic Motherland Nationalist Literatures

Abstract

This essay assigns the literary as the preferred means to write Cyprus because it exposes the power of place and space in postcolonial partitioned cases; it shows that spatial production determines the formation and agency of identity in Cyprus, which serves to sharpen and to blur the dominant binary legacy of historical–political deadlock discourse, so as to generate conflict and solidarity between the deeply divided people in postcolonial partitioned Cyprus. The focus is on the Greek-cypriot and Turkish-cypriot nationalist identification that dominated throughout the last decades of British colonial and into postcolonial Cyprus. This is an examination of ethnic motherland nationalist literatures, with emphasis on capturing the ways writers actively write, read and construct the dominant production of Cyprus. Even though nationalists’ writings are based on deeply competing narratives, they have used the same processes and practices to produce a Cyprus for their ethnic selves. This spatial competition and solidarity will be examined through various empirical–theoretical spatial approaches, with emphasis on illuminating the postcolonial and partitioned inventions of gendered nationalism, through making use of Yi-Fu Tuan's healthy balance between experiencing place and space and Henri Lefebvre's spatiology. The essay demonstrates the shared ways in which nationalist writers attempt to produce an ethnically homogeneous mental place through two gendered processes – a maternal principle and ancestral journeys operating with fetish spectacles, objects and substances – that manipulate social, historical and spatial practices to make the abstract nation appear concrete. This place is thus depicted as a gift from the mothers to the children of Cyprus and as Baby Cyprus.

• Anticolonialism
• Cyprus
• Gendered Nationalism
• Literature
• Place/Space

Notes

1 Pioneers include Yashin (1999, 2000) Nese Yashin, Memhet Ali (1990), Stephanides (2007) and Karayanni (2005–), in literary magazines, movements, anthologies and translations in Cyprus, the UK and beyond.

2 See Collett (2012) and Connery and Seth (2006). See Karayanni et al. (2004), Karayanni (2006, 2012) and Stephanides (2012). On postcolonial anthropology, see Papadakis, Peristianis, and Welz (2006). See also Calotychos (1998).

3 I use Gilroy (2004) and Hall’s (1994) approach to identity as identification, which makes a nonsense of the fixed term “identity”; it is a process that is never complete, always in operation within and through the names we give to different ways we position ourselves. I address this operation through Williams’ (1977) model of cultural analysis proposed in “Dominant, Residual and Emergent” and “Structure of Feeling”.

4 Montis and Angelides wrote in Greek, but the texts analysed here were read in English translation. Yasin and Ulucamgil wrote in Turkish; I read them in Turkish and translated them into English.

5 Pioneers include the Yashins alongside renowned leftist socialists writers George Moleskis, Fikret Demirag, Ivy Meleagrou and Elli Peonidou. This turn developed further by the post-Cypriotist writers Niki Marangou, Gur Genc and Jenan Selcuk.

6 Pioneers include Anglophone writers Alev Adil, Taner Baybars, Mehmet Ali, Stephanides. The writers Andriana Ierodiaconou, Miranda Hoplaros and Nora Nadjarian also contributed to this turn.

7 Some may claim TMT is not an anticolonial movement because it was not founded to remove British rule; Turkish-cypriots preferred British colonialism over EOKA’s enosis, considered Greek colonialism; British and Turkish-cypriots, as claimed by Greek-cypriot nationalists, collaborated. Though the anti-Greek sentiment dominated over the anti-British one, TMT’s plan was always to remove the British because they prevented Turkey’s involvement, leaving Turkish-cypriots without taksim and at the mercy of the British, who treated them like second-class citizens (Tansu 2007, 19).

8 On dominant narratives, see Papadakis (2008); Gazioglu (2000); Tansu (2007); and Vanezis (1971)

9 A modus operandi proposed by Marx (1993), which informed Lefebvre’s work, who argued it should be used by all researchers; it informs my work and provides an understanding of the nationalist production of Cyprus. The approach comprises a movement starting from the present to the past, then retracing its steps to the yet-to-be, acting retroactively upon the past, making it appear in a different light. The past becomes the present, which also takes on another aspect (Lefebvre 1991, 65–67).

10 “Open zone” is a term I use for the colonial and postcolonial inventions of place, or in Tuan’s terms open “space”. This includes, for example, Fanon’s “zone of occult instability” (2001, 183); Huggan’s “rhizomatic (open)” (1989, 126); Carter’s “spatial history” (1987); Bhabha’s “hybridity and difference” (1994); Appadurai’s “disjuncture” and “number games” (1996); and Pandey’s multiple partitions (2002).

11 EOKA officially mobilized on 1 April 1955; Montis is acknowledging the date EOKA was founded.

12 The Bayraktar is the only soldier who is not named; however, the specificities of his conquest, life and tomb in Nicosia are always known.

13 Places in Cyprus are subject to a name game between Turkish, Greek and English names. The capital is “Lefkos[h]a” in Turkish, “Lefkosia” in Greek, and “Nicosia” in English. I have not translated the capital to the English equivalent because such remapping would defeat the writer’s objective.

14 “Gazi-Magusa” in Turkish, “Ammohostos” in Greek, and “Famagusta” in English.