Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus

Transportal Literatures of Empire, Nationalism, and Sectarianism

Daniele Nunziata

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030582357
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030582364
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

This book analyses colonial and postcolonial writing about Cyprus, before and after its independence from the British Empire in 1960. These works are understood as 'transportal literatures' in that they navigate the liminal and layered forms of colonialism which impede the freedom of the island, including the residues of British imperialism, the impact of Greek and Turkish nationalisms, and the ethnolinguistic border between north and south. This study puts pressure on the postcolonial discipline by evaluating the unique hegemonic relationship Cyprus has with three metropolitan centres, not one. The print languages associated with each centre (English, Greek, and Turkish) are complicit in neo-colonial activity. Contemporary Cypriot writers address this in order to resist sectarian division and grapple with their deferred postcoloniality.

© The Author(s) 2020

D. NunziataColonial and Postcolonial Cyprushttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58236-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. ‘The Key of Western Asia’: An Introduction to Transportal Literatures

Daniele Nunziata¹

(1)

St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Daniele Nunziata

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In January 2016, the American magazine Foreign Affairs published an article titled, ‘Cyprus in the Middle: Nicosia Holds the Keys to Syria, the Migrant Crisis, and Gas in the Eastern Mediterranean’.¹ For centuries, most depictions of this island in the English-speaking media have emphasised its position in an important yet volatile geopolitical region, poised ‘in the middle’ of opposing ideological forces. In recent years, coverage has spanned from Britain’s use of its Cypriot bases to send warplanes to Syria in December 2016 and April 2018, to renewed antagonism with Turkey over hydrocarbon treaties with Egypt, Greece, and Israel. Jonathan Gorvett in the aforementioned article paints the scene of an unstable and unpredictable locus in which competing governments parade their military power as the lingering residues, not only of the Cold War, but the Great Game before it: ‘British warplanes… headed for Syria, just 100 miles away’, ‘Israeli warplanes’, ‘Russian warships’, and a ‘seismic research vessel, chartered by a U.S. company… shadowed by a Turkish frigate’.² All in one short paragraph, the vivid imagery suggests the inception of a third world war on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean with Cyprus stranded, and fought over, ‘in the middle’. Housing numerous foreign military powers, this ‘far-flung Levantine outpost, is once again a Gordian knot of regional conflicts and conundrums’.³

If one were to trace the representation of the island across the preceding century, it would be evident that little has changed in the discourse that frames it.⁴ Even following the same magazine’s depiction of Cyprus during the most important years of its modern history is revealing of the discursive parallelism within which it is trapped. In July 1975, a little under a year after partition, ‘The Mediterranean Crisis’ was published, stressing that the Eastern ‘Mediterranean today is the scene of serious local conflicts, of which those over Cyprus and over Palestine are the most intractable and the most dangerous […] Add to this the continuing competition between the United States and Russia… and the uncertainty on all sides as to how far détente will be applied, if at all, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East’.⁵ It is clear from the still enduring tension between American and Russian fleets, forty years later, that détente is far from being realised. While Gorvett speaks of ‘gas trouble’ in 2016, his forebear details the ‘oil crisis’ of 1975.

If we look back further to the year of Cyprus’ independence from the British Empire, Foreign Affairs published one of the earliest commentaries on the twentieth century’s most controversial neologism: ‘Where is the Middle East?’. Writing in 1960, Roderic H. Davidson, one-time president of the Middle East Studies Association, argues that ‘[i]nternational crisis is one of the best teachers of geography. Among centers [sic] of crisis that have burst onto the American public’s map in recent years are Suez, Cyprus, Baghdad, Algeria, the Lebanon and others commonly lumped together under the general label “Middle East”’.⁶ Framing these events within ‘the context of the cold war’, he also stresses that ‘no one knows where the Middle East is’.⁷ In all three articles, the same textual figures recur. Paramount among them are the alliterative ‘crisis’, ‘conflict’, and ‘cold war’. Importantly, Davidson indicates a tripartite relationship between politics, ‘geography’, and epistemology—a revision of Foucault’s knowledge and power dialectic—rendered threatening when knowledge is found lacking. Perhaps the Middle East is deemed dangerous precisely because it is difficult to define—including the translingual and religiously-mixed Cyprus metonymic of this Mediterranean mediality.

Looking further back still, almost 140 years before the Foreign Affairs subtitle, ‘Nicosia Holds the Keys to Syria’, the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli famously declared Cyprus ‘the key of Western Asia’ in his correspondence with Queen Victoria, in which he promises that the island will secure imperial hegemony across the continent and that her ‘Majesty’s Indian Empire [will be] immediately strengthened’.⁸ The idiom has been repeated frequently by political commentators, travel writers, and novelists throughout the succeeding century. Imbricating political and literary discourses, the years succeeding the acquisition of the island, 1878, saw a sudden rise in published travelogues promoting the ‘strategic’ benefits of Cyprus to the colonial project. In 1879, the established travel writers Sir Samuel White Baker and William Hepworth Dixon both released their accounts: Cyprus, As I Saw It in 1879 and British Cyprus, respectively. For the former, ‘Cyprus is the key of a great position’ as ‘the missing link in the chain of our communications with… the Suez Canal and the subsequent route to India’.⁹ For the latter, the island is ‘the key of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor’.¹⁰ Nearing the end of this generation of nineteenth-century travelogues, the polyglot and biblical scholar, Agnes Smith, who travelled twice to Cyprus with her sister, repeats this jingoistic imagery to herald the moment which ‘induced the British lion to place his foot upon Cyprus, an island which, from its position, might easily be made the key to the Levant’.¹¹ These motifs echo into the twentieth century. The acclaimed novelist, Angela Carter, writing for New Society one year before the 1974 partition, reiterates aphoristically: ‘He who holds Cyprus holds the key to the eastern Mediterranean’.¹²

For all, the image of keys positions Cyprus as a strategic gateway or portal through which military and cultural paradigms are exchanged. It is the limen between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, West and East, America and Russia, Greece and Turkey, and the symbolic self and Other of the colonial imagination. Politically, holding these keys allows one to control the portal and extend one’s hegemony over the other side. Controlling Cyprus has, for most of its history, allowed vast empires to cross continents and consolidate valuable resources. The portal becomes a dehumanised port in which the tools of imperialism have been, and continue to be, stationed north of Suez and east of Jerusalem. Colonisers, crusaders, and caliphs have fought for those keys since prehistory. In the words of Churchill, securing Cyprus in the Second World War meant ‘the Levant thus came into a far more satisfactory condition. Our naval and air control over the Eastern end of the Mediterranean became effective, and we obtained… control of the pipe line and other resources’.¹³ Even from these few examples, the intertextual repetition of discourse used to represent Cyprus from the late nineteenth century to the present is clear to see, as is the dependence of politics on literature to disseminate these claims.

The purpose of this book is to interrogate this diachronic literary tradition, particularly within the genre of travel writing. Investigating how cultural practitioners interpellate political landscapes into the textual imagining of space has long been an important facet of postcolonial studies, ever since Edward Said’s influential theory of the Orientalist discourse used to construct ideological juxtapositions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ through ‘imaginative geography’.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the modern history and literatures of Cyprus have been infrequently featured within established postcolonial oeuvres. It is important, not only to bring the complex Cypriot context into the postcolonial field, but also to observe how Cyprus complicates established classifications of ‘postcolonial’ and ‘world’ literatures. How does its recent experiences of nationalist movements, partition, and enduring British military bases alter our understanding of the temporal colonial-postcolonial dichotomy? How does the island’s position between multiple spheres of cultural influence challenge notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘the world’? By asking these questions, I aim to showcase the centrality of travel writing for this overlooked region of the post/colonial planet and reveal how the travelogue form employed in the writing of Cyprus opens up a mode of transportal literatures and literary reading practices.

Historical, Linguistic, and Literary Background

For the majority of its history, the island of Cyprus has never not been under the administration of a foreign empire. Its earliest settlers sailed from the Neolithic Levantine mainland following the development of agriculture, beginning a long history of trade and transport between island and mainland. Thousands of years later, successive colonisations by regional powers took place, from Hittites, Egyptians, and Persians, to Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, and Neo-Assyrians. According to Herodotus, Cyprus belonged t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. ‘The Key of Western Asia’: An Introduction to Transportal Literatures
• 2. ‘A Business of Some Heat’: Sexuality, Disease, and Gendered Orientalism on Venus’ Island, 1878–1973
• 3. Re-imagining the Cypriot Nation: Writing-Back to the Colonial Travelogue, 1964–1974
• 4. Travelling Across the Buffer Zone: Intersections in Language, Genre, and Identity, 2000–2013
• 5. Re-gendering Borders: Partitions in Contemporary Cypriot Women’s Writing
• 6. Conclusions
• Back Matter